Politics, a long-deceased British statesman once said, is the art of the possible. For Gordon Brown, who takes over as the U.K.'s prime minister on June 27, politics is going to be the art of the impossible.

Imminently, Mr. Brown will be faced with an intractable dilemma. Call it a treaty, call it a constitution, call it a series of amendments to existing treaties, but something is going to emerge from this week's European Union summit. And how Mr. Brown reacts to that document will decide his political future. But whatever he does will be the wrong decision.

Those behind the revival of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's 2004 EU constitution do not, of course, want to allow pesky voters to reject their renewed instructions. The French and the Dutch electorate behaved intolerably once before in rebuffing the wisdom of their political masters and cannot be allowed to interfere again. French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he will not put the treaty to a referendum. Fellow European leaders will pressure Mr. Brown to nod through whatever Tony Blair agrees to this week in Brussels.

There is no constitutional requirement in Britain for a referendum. Mr. Blair's promise of one on the earlier treaty was unprecedented, and Mr. Brown could argue that this year's version is not as extensive and thus doesn't require a popular vote.

He could do that. If he did, however, he would confirm at the very outset of his premiership all the electorate's worst images of him as a Stalinist control freak, as a man contemptuous of opposing views, and as a politician unworthy of the country's highest office.

Worse, while there was no constitutional requirement for Mr. Blair to put the previous treaty to a referendum, his decision set just that precedent. And going by precedent is the legal nostrum at the heart of Britain's unwritten constitution.

Denying a referendum would also unleash the mother and father of all attacks from the media and the public. Not a single newspaper would be likely to support such a decision, and the most powerful papers -- the Daily Mail and the Sun -- would rip Mr. Brown to shreds. The Sun's support for Labour has been the bedrock of the party's media strategy. Mr. Brown has invested countless hours in courting the editor of the anti-Labour Mail; successfully so, given the paper's recent praise for his sagacity and probity. Ruining that relationship would be monumentally self-defeating.

Not calling for a referendum would also, quite possibly, be like conceding the next election to the Tories. For the first time since he was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, David Cameron is facing real hostility from his members over his renunciation of academically selective "grammar" schools, a favorite cause of traditional Tory activists. There is, however, one topic on which his party remains overwhelmingly united: its opposition to any further weakening of British sovereignty and any moves toward a European state. Were Mr. Brown to deny the British public a vote, all of Mr. Cameron's Christmases would have come at once. Not only would the Conservative leader have an issue with which to enthuse and unite a party still wary of his leadership, he would also have an issue on which he could (rightly) claim to speak for the nation.

That is the nub of Mr. Brown's impossible choice. And if he did do right by the voters and put the treaty to a vote, he would also be signing its death warrant. Voters would certainly reject the treaty -- any treaty. As the EU's own Eurobarometer research shows, only 34% of Brits agree that EU membership is "a good thing" -- the lowest figure of any EU member. The idea that Britain would support a further integration is a nonstarter.

So from the moment Mr. Brown announced a referendum, the treaty would be finished. And what a start that would be for his relationship with fellow EU leaders. Never mind that he would be doing the EU a favor -- rescuing it from taking yet another step away from voters and legitimacy. The U.K. leader would be treated like poison by Mr. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They would know that Mr. Brown had not been hijacked by a surprise result, as befell former French President Jacques Chirac. Rather, the new U.K. prime minister would have deliberately chosen a course of action leading only to defeat.

Anyone who has witnessed Mr. Brown's forays into EU meetings will know that he has almost no interest in the EU. His view is that Europe's leaders can do what they want; he has nothing to learn from them and will carry on doing what he knows is right for Britain. Caring little for grandiose visions of a European dream, he presumably will put domestic U.K. politics ahead of any wish not to rock the EU boat and thus call a referendum.

Except for one thing. A referendum defeat -- the certain outcome -- is, after all, a defeat. Even if his support for the treaty is lukewarm, Mr. Brown will not want to begin his time in office with a humiliating loss at the polls. He could not, after all, call a referendum seeking support for a treaty and then distance himself from it. If his support were anything other than wholehearted he would look vacillating and weak. And the opposition would run rings around him, accusing him of foisting on the country a treaty which he did not back.

That is Mr. Brown's impossible dilemma. There are only two choices open to him. Either will be disastrous.

The following piece of mine appears in The Spectator's supplement, 'Blair: A Modern Tragedy':

New Labour had its limits, even in 1997. Those limits were made flesh by the appointment of Frank Dobson as Tony Blair’s first Health Secretary. For all the changes which the NHS has seen since then, there has been an underlying Old Labour consistency to Labour’s approach to the NHS over the past decade: spend as much money as possible, fiddle with the management structures, and all will be well with the wonderful NHS.

But if that was the answer, then one has to wonder what on earth was the question. Tony Blair’s legacy, after a decade in charge of the NHS, is a false dawn on reform and waste on an unprecedented scale.

Much attention has focused recently on the chaotic £12 billion NHS IT project (projected by the Public Accounts Committee to end up costing £20 billion). But that is a pinprick compared with the overall sums thrown at the NHS’s fiscal black hole. By the end of this financial year, NHS spending will be £92 billion - a rise of over £50 billion a year since 1999. But to what end? Even the King’s Fund, one of the NHS’ stalwart defenders, has conceded that three-quarters of the increased spending disappears each year in costs rather than “activity” (the jargon for treating people).

One unglamorous branch of the NHS’s activity is typical of the failure to solve the fundamental problems. The latest survey into waiting times for hearing aids found that the average wait in England for someone needing their first had risen for the third year in a row, to between 45 and 48 weeks. There are wide variations across the country; patients in the South East wait between 73 and 74 weeks.

So much for more money being the answer.

When Labour took office, its belief in the NHS as the only moral method of healthcare delivery was exemplified by one of Mr Dobson’s first acts – ordering local health authorities not to talk to the independent sector, let alone deal with it, unless in the most dire of emergencies. His instruction was based on nothing other than a visceral loathing of the idea of non-state involvement in healthcare.

Mr Dobson’s successor, Alan Milburn, had a more grown up approach and by October 2000 had signed the ‘Concordat’, which contracted NHS work out to the independent sector. This was by far the most significant development of Mr Blair’s period in office. Even Baroness Thatcher had run scared of such an idea, fearing it would confirm fears that she wanted to privatise the NHS. But the plain fact was that the NHS’ capacity could not meet the demands of patients; why on earth would the NHS (ital)not(ital) want to utlilise the independent sector’s spare capacity?

There was, of course, more to it than that. At the launch of Labour’s 2001 manifesto, Tony Blair spoke of there being “no ideological bar” to expansion of the role of independent provision in the NHS. What this should have meant was that the NHS would become simply a purchaser of services - the logical extension of the Tories’ original purchaser-provider split, but with real, open competition for the provision of services, rather than the pretend competition between different branches of the public sector.

But it was the familiar New Labour story – much promise, little reality. Take foundation hospitals. In theory a fine idea with the power to transform the NHS, foundation hospitals would have been tax funded but free-standing, independent hospitals competing with traditional NHS hospitals on the only worthwhile basis: quality and price. After a mauling from the Treasury, they were then subjected to an even more mortal foe – Labour backbenchers wedded to the existing NHS dogma. When the first foundation hospitals arrived in April 2004, they were barely worth bothering with.

Eventually, both Mr Blair and Mr Milburn came to realise that competition was key. Last year, all patients were promised a choice for elective treatment between four providers, one of which had to be independent. The aim was that by 2008 patients should have an entirely free choice between any NHS, charitable or independent provider that met the required standard at a national tariff price. The 2008 target will certainly be missed, and there is no confidence among reformers that 2009 will be any better.

But even this mess comes only after a catastrophic error. The notion has somehow taken hold that a radical Tony Blair was, as in education and welfare, stifled by his Chancellor from making the necessary bold reforms to healthcare provision. But it was not Gordon Brown who, in January 2001, sat on Sir David Frost’s BBC1 sofa and announced that NHS spending would rise to the EU average. It was Mr Blair. In reality, the Prime Minister was the prime mover behind the idea that money was the real problem and bounced a horrified Chancellor into a spending commitment for which the word profligate does not even come close.

Between 1999/2000 and 2007/08, spending on the NHS will have almost doubled in real terms. In 1999/2000 spending was £40.2billion; in 2007/8 it will be £92.6 billion. But the result, far from curing the NHS’s ills, has been paltry. So where did the money go? In its 2005 review of the UK, the OECD found that although the NHS budget increased by half between 1999 and 2004, the number of doctors increased by only a quarter. And Department of Health statistics show that although there has been an increase in the number of operations, it is much slower than the increase in the number of doctors or spending. Productivity, in other words, has fallen. So it should come as no surprise to discover that 56 per cent of the £5.5 billion extra spending that went into the NHS in 2005 last year went on pay.

The think tank Reform has led the way in unearthing statistics which put the past ten years’ performance in perspective. As its latest survey puts it: “The current behaviour pattern of the NHS now resembles that of the British economy in the era of stagflation. An inflationary increase in costs and rise in money expenditure – go - leads to a drastic stop which threatens investment and innovation for several years. The sheer size of the increase – a three fold increase in cash funding and a twofold increase in real terms – has made it impossible to use the funding effectively and swamped the management capacity of a system which had become adapted to working on much smaller increments.”

Labour’s 1997 campaign song, Things Can Only Get Better, has an especially hollow ring with regard to the NHS. After years of madcap spending increases, the brakes will soon be applied. Having squandered the money and done little to reform the fundamentals, the next few years promise a return to the same ferocious headlines of waiting lists and rationing on which Labour capitalised so effectively in 1997. The biter, bit.

Peter Briffa speaks for me:

"Tories are promising tax and spending cuts up and down the country if they win. Rightwing ideologues took over Hammersmith and Fulham a year ago from a well-run Labour group, cutting council tax by 3p, cutting £14.4m from children's services, housing, care for the frail and charity grants and closing a mental health centre. Tory Walsall is cutting vulnerable children's services, so is Swindon, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire. The list of cuts elsewhere is long, but for those with short memories, that's what Conservatives usually do".

Interesting. Maybe they're worth voting for after all.

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The following piece of mine appears in today's Dail Mail:

Has there been a more embarrassing, depressing and, indeed, shaming spectacle in recent memory than the sight of Margaret Beckett representing our nation in response to the abduction by Iran of 15 British sailors?

There will not be many people who seriously challenge the claim that Mrs Beckett is the most hopeless Foreign Secretary of the modern political era. Not only is she incompetent, but she is almost entirely unprincipled. And it is that combination which makes her the ultimate, shameless symbol of politics today.

Indeed, the only principle that Mrs Beckett has unswervingly championed in her 30-year career in frontline politics has been her own desire for high office.

To that end, she has let nothing come between her and the advancement of her career within the Labour Party, both in government and opposition. Yet if she had an ounce of personal insight, she would no longer be in the Cabinet, let alone Foreign Secretary at a time of grave crisis.

Yesterday, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee delivered its withering verdict on the chaotic way, in her prvious cabinet post, she handled the payment to farmers of £1.5 billion of EU ‘green’ subsidies. Failures in a new computer system led to a fiasco that could ultimately cost Defra and British farmers up to half a billion pounds.

Select committees are usually judicious in their language, especially when commenting on a member of their own party. But so appalling was Mrs Beckett’s behaviour that the Labour-dominated committee could not contain its anger, which it directed personally at her.

In an unflinching attack, it accused her of being prepared to accept 'the glories' of high office without any commensurate acceptance of personal responsibility. Unanimously, the members found that saying 'sorry' was not enough and that, far from being promoted to Foreign Secretary, she should have resigned over her 'embarrassing failure'.

Typically, Mrs Beckett did no such thing; nor will she now. Because, as her career shows, the notion of any guiding principle other than the advancement of her own career is entirely alien to her.

Mrs Beckett – Margaret Jackson, as she then was – entered Parliament in 1974. A committed left-winger – her reputation was borne out by her initial behaviour as a member of the hard-left Campaign Group. She was a vociferous supporter of Arthur Scargill in the miners’ strike; she opposed expulsion of the Militant Tendency; she was a full-on nuclear unilateralist.

Mrs Beckett embraced the full package of left-wing principles. Or rather, she professed to embrace them when it suited her career.

But when an opportunity arose for promotion, she ditched both her principles and her comrades.

She had been in the Commons for less than two years when, in 1976, she exploited a left-wing colleague's resignation as a minister over spending cuts and jumped at the chance to replace her. This blatant U-turn in the pursuit of personal glory was soon followed by others.

She lost her seat in the Conservative landslide of 1979. Looking for a new seat at a time when only the purest of left-wingers could win selection, she conveniently regained her old principles. In 1981, she attacked left-wing MPs such as Neil Kinnock for failing to vote for the radical Tony Benn as Labour’s deputy leader - leaving the more moderate Denis Healey to win the post. Beckett told Kinnock that he should contribute 'thirty pieces of silver' to the Tribune Group of left-wing MPs for his treachery.

So what happened when Kinnock later became party leader? Surprise, surprise, Mrs Beckett performed yet another about-turn, accepting a series of Shadow Cabinet jobs. Most outrageously, she later resigned from the Campaign Group when it backed a leadership challenge by Tony Benn. Once again, Mrs Beckett’s supposed principles were swiftly despatched when they stood in the way of her career.

I experienced Mrs Beckett’s double standards for myself when I worked for a principled Labour MP, Peter Shore. He was heavily involved in an organisation comprising Labour members who had opposed British membership of the then European Common Market.

Mrs Beckett was a supporter of the group and even placed a personal ad in some campaign literature offering warm wishes.

Yet at the very same time, she was also an unwavering backer of the Kinnock line on European federalism, and later of his successor John Smith’s embrace of the European Monetary Union.

The sheer hypocrisy of her behaviour did not appear to bother her in the least. She showed similar hypocrisy in 1993, sensing that the trades unions were likely to beat off the party leadership's refoming bid to introduce One Member, One Vote into Labour party conference votes, in place of the union block vote.

Despite having become Labour Deputy Leader, she deftly stabbed her boss, John Smith, in the back by refusing to pledge her support for the critical reform on which he had staked his whole leadership. In the end, it was John Prescott who had to ride to the rescue and plead with the unions to support the leader. Mrs Beckett, after all, had her career to consider.

Even by the standards of modern politics, such blatant hypocrisy is breathtaking. Tory leader David Cameron is regularly referred to as a careerist. But he is a mere apprentice opportunist compared to the woman who sits opposite him on the government bench in the House of Commons.

Nothing says more about the dismal standard of our political system than the ongoing career success of a talentless, incompetent, unprincipled MPs like Margaret Beckett - who, incidentally, exclaimed: 'Oh, f*ck!' when Blair appointed her as Foreign Secretary.

At a time when we have a captured British servicewoman paraded on television by a foreign power, we need politicians of courage and conviction to make a stand on the global stage. Instead we have empty platitudes and spineless reassurances from a woman whose utter incompetence is now a matter of official record.

Margaret Beckett’s presence in the upper echelons of government is a disgrace and a national scandal.

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Alice Miles' Times column today is spot on. Every word about the Labour leadership non-contest and what it says to the electorate is bang on the money. And,as she writes: "The Budget was a disaster for Mr Brown".

There's an interesting piece by Denis MacShane in today's Telegraph:

In the Commons every Wednesday, Tory MPs rain abuse on the Prime Minister because, in some corner of their constituency, there is a check on spending as ministers try to get some control over mismanaged public finances.

But, far from applauding these efforts to get value for taxpayers' money, Conservative MPs have become welfare-state junkies, demanding ever more taxpayers' money to be spent on their constituents.

No single-issue pressure group, no disgruntled local lobby leaves the surgery of a Tory MP without the promise that the local Member will stand up in the Commons and harass ministers into pledges of more spending to satiate the incessant demand of British citizens for taxpayers' money to flow their way.

I don't agree with everything he writes, and much of it is tendentious, but in that fundamental point he is surely correct. There are few things more depressing at the moment than what seems like the now daily ritual of a Tory spokesman prostrating himself before some public sector money grabber, complaining that something or other is closing or isn't happening.

MacShane has some interesting examples of the Whitehall mindset:

As a new junior minister, I suggested at a meeting that we could save money by using Ryanair or easyJet for European travel.

Senior colleagues looked at me with disdain, as if I had told them to take the No 24 bus up Whitehall for a meeting instead of travelling 200 yards in a ministerial car.

Recently I was told that social-service visits to elderly people in South Yorkshire could cost up to £1,000 a week.

When I pointed out politely that this amounted to £52,000 a year, and for half that cost an elderly person could hire a young person from Poland or Bulgaria as a live-in companion, I was looked at as if a dog had done its business in front of town hall officials.

When I asked what the hourly cost of a social service visit was, I was told £12. The worker only gets £6, so where does the other £6 go? Town hall and NHS flab is waiting to be cut.

On Aer Lingus last Friday, flying to Dublin for Any Questions?, I was charged £1.30 for a cup of tea.

The company is now in the black and competing with Michael O'Leary's Ryanair by being attentive to customers, but also making clear that co-payment for services beyond the basic is now a norm. Is this really unthinkable for some of our public services?

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Some time in 1996, when I was working in a Westminster think tank, proselytising for the New Labour message, a colleague asked me why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I maintained that a New Labour government would be reforming and radical. Didn’t I realise that there was a vacuum at the heart of New Labour? ‘No, no’, I replied. The party couldn’t run the risk of alienating potential supporters by making clear how extensive its reforms would be, but I knew that there would be big, bold changes.

I used the now clichéd argument: just as only Nixon could go to China, so only Labour could really get to grips with the anachronism that was the NHS and the own goal of the welfare state.

‘Yeah, right’, my colleague responded witheringly. ‘You think there’s a safe in Blair’s office with a big sign – IDEAS: NOT TO BE OPENED BEFORE THE NEXT ELECTION.’

As I sat by the TV screen in 2001 watching the election results come in, I thought of that conversation. And I did so again in 2005, as 8 years of New Labour government came and went offering little more than the usual Labour recipe of a massive spending increase and tax rises to pay for it, plus – this was what was new – a modicum of competence.

The convenient explanation for the failure of the Blair governments to effect anything but relatively minor administrative changes to the NHS, welfare and education is that the ideas were indeed locked in the safe. But the code was lost.

The reality, however, appears to be worse. To mix up the metaphors: only Nixon could go to China, but he had first to want to go. Whatever Mr Blair’s words might suggest, his actions show that he had no real desire to be the bold, reforming PM some of us hoped he would be.

With the Labour Party in disarray now, it’s difficult to remember just how fair was the wind behind the government in 1997. Had Mr Blair chosen to start with a bang, he could have done. Had he announced that he would build a health service for the twenty-first century rather than stick with a model devised for the 1950s, he would have had problems with his more antediluvian backbenchers, but the landslide which propelled him into Number Ten would have given him more than enough support. Similarly with welfare.

Instead, he chose to appoint Frank Dobson as Health Secretary and to slam shut the door on reform. Even the appointment of Alan Milburn to the job was more about style than substance. For all that Mr Milburn cam to realise the need for genuine, wholesale reform based on choice and competition, when he took over as Secretary of State he initially remained stuck in the old mindset that the answer was more money.

No one could blame him, for he took his lead from a Prime Minister who on healthcare was – and still is – barely less ideologically attached to the NHS model than the oldest of old Labourites. His NHS policy amounted to spending as much money as it was possible to wrest from taxpayers and then fiddling with the administrative structure to spend it a bit more efficiently.

Even that limited goal was a failure. By the end of this decade the NHS will consume 10 per cent of UK GDP - over £4,500 per household, a sum which international comparisons show is more than sufficient to deliver high quality and immediate access. But as Nick Bosanquet has shown in his series of papers for Reform: “The sheer size of the spending increase has made it impossible to use the funding effectively and swamped the management capacity of a system which had become adapted to working on much smaller increments. These productivity problems have been well discussed and a fair summary would be that while real terms funding has doubled, activity, quality and access have risen by only 20-30 per cent.” (http://www.reform.co.uk/website/health.aspx) Much of the money has effectively been thrown down the drain.

Instead of building for the future, with a health system taking account of modern needs and the opportunities presented by increased individual wealth, the Blair governments have spent ten years fiddling about with gimmicks.

As for education, another wasted opportunity: the apotheosis of that failure was reached at the beginning of March when the school system which many parents have, colloquially, referred to as a lottery formally became one, as Brighton opted to allocate school places by ballot. Can there be a more damning indictment of the past ten wasted years? It is certainly right that all parents and children are given the same opportunity. But the idea that a government which once claimed – oh, the hubris of it! - to be the political arm of the British people should achieve that end not by giving all parents the same choice of school, through a form of voucher, but by putting school applications into a ballot is mind-numbing in its defeatism.

Still, with hindsight it should always have been obvious that this was a government concerned more with the occupation of office than with actually doing anything worthwhile. When, as a policy wonk in opposition prior to 1997, I suggested various ideas, the response was almost always the same: ‘That’s second term stuff’. So I bided my time and waited for the reforming second term, a la Thatcher. And the response became: ‘That’s for the third term’. I haven’t heard ‘that’s fourth term stuff’, because I gave up asking.

And because the fourth term, if it happens, will be Gordon’s Brown term. And Mr Brown is the element in this which cannot be ignored. It’s striking that the one area in which Mr Blair has been bold and brave has been in his stance in the fight to defend the West against militant Islam, and in his support for the removal of dictatorships and butchers. And that is the one area in which he has not had to take account of the big clunking fist in the house next door.

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Is there a more useless government agency than the Electoral Commission or a more useless bureaucrat than its Chairman, Sam Younger? They spend a fortune on patronisingly stupid adverts informing us that politics is about education, crime, the NHS. But they do next to nothing about the crisis in legitimacy of actual election results (read the important pieces by Michael Pinto-Duschinsky on this, such as this latest) brought about by the electoral fraud machine that is postal voting.

When they do act, it is to threaten to put a legitimate party out of action. Yes, UKIP appears to have broken the electoral rules. And it needs a rap over the knuckles. But has no one at the Electoral Commission got the least idea of the concept of proportionality? So a donor ommitted one year to assert that he should be on the electoral register. He was clearly not trying to hide anything - he was on the register the year before and the year after, at the same address. And because of that one error, the Commission is demanding that UKIP pays back over £300,000.

A rule designed to stop foreign donors is being used to stop UKIP taking money from a British citizen who has created thousands of jobs and paid millions in tax.

Meanwhile, electoral fraud is rife and the useless Sam Younger does nothing of any value. What a pathetic man. What a ridiculous body. What a warped sense of priorities.

(And this post has nothing to do with any support for UKIP. As regular readers will know, I regard UKIP as a bunch of nutters and think their policy of pulling out of the EU dangerous folly. But they are as entitled to fair treatment as any other party.)

But here's a thought. What is to stop UKIP paying back the money to its donor, Alan Brown, and then Mr Brown giving UKIP exactly the same sum of money as an extra donation the next day, assuming he is now properly registered?

UPDATE: One of my commenters points out why my solution is no solution: [T]he money does not go back to Mr Brown the generous retired bookie and retailer of Turkish nightwear, but to Mr Brown the grasping, greedy, destroyer-of-economies, pillager-of-savings and general all-round awful economic fraud and failure. Oh well. Thought it was too obvious. It just makes the Electoral Commission's decision even more outrageous.

FURTHER UPDATE: Here's why I think it's folly to argue for pulling out of the EU (it's a Civitas debate pamphlet I wrote with Lord Pearson).

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Paul Linford has a nice post about Giles Radice, one of the nicest men in politics:

Giles Radice was the kindest and most courteous of the North-East MPs I regularly dealt with in my old job as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal. After I left the Lobby he stayed in touch for a while and sent me a copy of his Diaries which were published towards the end of 2004. Thumbing through them earlier this evening, I came across this remarkable paragraph, written on General Election Day 2001.

Lisanne and I work in Newark for Fiona Jones. It is an uphill task, because despite being a sitting Labour MP, Fiona is the victim of a horrendous whispering campaign. Sad to say, she has been a lame duck MP, ever since she was wrongly convicted of "fiddling" her election expenses. Although she was immediately and totally exonerated on appeal, the mud stuck and the Tories have been conducting a vicious doorstep attack on her personal character. We meet hostility to her as we knock up, including schoolboys who say she is "corrupt." Poor Fiona!

This needs little further comment from me, as it already says so much: about Giles Radice and his dedication to the Labour Party; about the awfulness of Fiona Jones' plight; but also about the Labour Party's desertion of her, that she was left to try to get the vote out on election day with the help, not of the party's "stars," but of only a veteran backbencher on his way, that very day, into retirement.

When I was a lowly Research Officer at the Fabian Society, I was involved in one of the first pieces of focus group research conducted for Labour. Immediately after the 1992 election, C1s and C2 in 5 marginal seats south of a line between the Wash and the Bristol Channel were interviewed, all of whom had considered voting Labour but in the end voted Conservative. These were exactly the people Labour needed to win over. The focus groups explored why they didn't vote Labour. The pamphlets based on the three annual focus groups, Southern Discomfort, More Southern Discomfort and Any Southern Comfort? were, if I say so myself, hugely influential in the making of New Labour as the conclusions of the pamphlets were more or less exactly what became the New Labour agenda.

Part of my job at the time was to ghost pieces and pamphlets for MPs. I did so happily, and I learnt a lot. Only one MP insisted that I receive a full byline credit for my work - Giles. The pamphlets were listed as written by Giles Radice and Stephen Pollard. I owe him a lot, not least because it brought my name to attention of the media, and I started writing pieces on the topic and then on others. It's not often an MP offers to give credit to someone else. But then Giles always has been one of the most decent men in politics.

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Here's something one doesn't often see: principles and politics coming together for the right reasons, for the right cause.

Iain Dale reports that David Davis has written to the Cabinet Secretary:

I am writing to you in relation to the Government's planned roll out of its national identity card scheme, commencing this year. You will be aware that there is a longstanding convention that one Parliament may not bind a subsequent Parliament.As you will also be aware, the Conservative Party has stated publicly that it is our intention to cancel the ID cards project immediately on our being elected to government. You are now formally on notice of our position and fully appraised of the contingent risks and associated liabilities arising from the national identity card scheme.

In light of these risks, I urge you to consider very carefully the government's position, in advance of the roll-out of the scheme later this year. As a matter of financial prudence, it is incumbent upon you to ensure that public money is not wasted, and contractual obligations are not incurred, investing in a scheme with such a high risk of not being implemented. In particular, I would be interested to know what provision, if any has, been made in the relevant contractual arrangements to protect the Government - and public funds - against the costs that would be incurred as a result of early cancellation of the scheme.

So at one and the same time, he has reiterated the Conservative Party's stance in favour of individual liberty versus the state; he has undermined the chances of ID cards being successfully introduced under Labour by indicating that he might, as Home Secretary, overturn contracts with commercial organisations, thus introducing a crucial new element of risk; he has helped the Conservative Party in its key task of drawing in potential LibDem voters; and he has given the Conservative troops a morale boost by sticking to core principles.

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I'm as prone as anyone to analysing the syntax and deep meaning of politicians' words, but I think that there has been a bit too much read into Gordon Brown's statement yesterday:

I believe when people see the full facts then they will be satisfied.

Daniel Finkelstein makes a logical point:

Gordon Brown has always maintained he does not know the full facts, and that the whole thing has got nothing to do with him. So how can he be sure that people will be satisfied when they see the full facts?

There's another, simpler, explanation, though - that Brown simply meant 'I believe' in the sense of 'I trust' - as in 'I'm sure that when people see the full facts then they will be satisfied'. As you'd say if you meant that, although you hadn't seen the details, you were sure everything would be fine.

I'm not saying that Daniel is wrong - it may well be that Brown's words do reveal that he is more aware of things than he has so far let on - just that sometimes over-analysis can obscure more than it reveals. That said, there are few things more worthy of over-analysis than the background to possible criminal charges against the staff of the PM.

Paul Linford (whose blog is always worth a look) has an interesting piece on the contest to succeed John Prescott as Deputy Leader:

[M]y third conclusion is that Peter Hain's campaign is in deep trouble. Already, Cruddas appeared to have stolen a lot of his natural support on the left. The fact that Guido has now got hold of a list of his supporters, including several paid Labour Party officials who are supposed to be neutral, has only added to the sense that this is turning into a rather ill-starred enterprise.

Finally, I conclude that while it is Cruddas rather than Hain who appears to be collaring the anti-war, anti-establishment left vote in the party, the pro-Blair, pro-war "establishment" has reached no clear consensus among itself as to the best way of stopping him. It is this that, to my mind, will now become the key question at the heart of the election.

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Michael Howard is on Sky News, as I write, laying into John Reid over the criminal records fiasco. Paraphrasing, he's just said: 'Unless John Reid is so uninterested in this that he says 'leave me alone, this is all officials' business', which if he does would be reprehensible, then...'

Er, wait a minute. Isn't inputting criminal records into a computer what might be termed, Mr Howard, an 'operational matter'? (As Home Secretary, Mr Howard infamously said that prison security was an 'operational matter'.)

The accusation of hypocrisy has been made against Rith Kelly this week. I think it applies elsewhere.

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If someone can point to a single instance of Ruth Kelly criticising the existence of private schools - in public or in private - then I will accept that she has done anything wrong. But she hasn't. As education secretary, she helped further the co-operation between state and independent schools. Not enough, I say, but she in no way condemned anyone for sending their children to private schools or said they are in any way wrong.

So please explain what she has done wrong, in putting the interests of her child first?

UPDATE: Great minds think alike.

PS If parents had vouchers to spend where they wished, this would not be an issue.

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This piece of mine appears in this week's Spectator.

It is clear from the Prime Minister’s new year message (issued somewhat surreally from the Florida home of the Bee Gee Robin Gibb) that he has already entered elder statesman mode. His theme was that Mr Brown must continue along the path which Mr Blair claims to have set: ‘[Labour] is dominating the battle of ideas. It will continue to do so provided it continues to be New Labour. This isn’t just about policy, though it is certainly about taking the tough decisions that prepare Britain for the future. It is also about our instincts, our ability to keep the core coalition together.’

In other words, the Prime Minister was telling Mr Brown to be like him or face the electoral consequences. This is of a piece with his speech at last year’s Labour party conference, which was a warning that the party should not stop being bold and radical. As is the wont of elder statesmen, however, Mr Blair is misremembering his time in office; although, uniquely, the Prime Minister is managing to misremember it while still in office. The bold, radical promise of 1997 has been squandered precisely because he has been neither bold nor radical.

It is traditional for commentators to look ahead at the beginning of every year to the next 12 months and to muse on how the year will be different from the one gone by. It is all nonsense. The passing of 12 solar months has no unifying thread. One might just as well pick any other random date from which to look ahead to the next 365 days. So I suggest that we forget about January through to April, ignore the notion of a 12-month cycle, and focus instead on the 24 months from May to the likely date of the next election in May 2009.

We already know what the political event of 2007 will be. Even if David Cameron is run over by the proverbial bus or Sir Menzies Campbell wakes from his political slumber, nothing else will stand comparison with the departure of the most brilliant politician of the modern age (a description which has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with strategy and tactics) and his replacement by the most overrated politician of the modern age.

As is usually the way with these things, it is only after he is gone that Labour will miss Tony Blair. Even at the height of his political powers, his party would have preferred it if he had stuck to the Bar and the adjective New had never been associated with the word Labour. When Gordon Brown takes over, the astonishing political skills of Tony Blair will come sharply into focus — but with hindsight.

It is one thing to have as Chancellor a man who speaks as if words are merely a formula for conveying policy and who will only answer the question he has been programmed to answer — we are sort of reassured by the idea of the books being looked after by someone with a chip missing. Being Prime Minister, however, requires a very different personality.

The public mood apparently demands a break from spin and from the smoothness of Mr Blair. Yeah, right. Have those who think that not noticed the rise of David Cameron? In any event, Mr Brown is hardly the man to ditch spin. Mr Brown was responsible for the manoeuvre which first gave the government the reputation for spin: passing off modest spending increases in 1998 as a spending bonanza by triple-counting them. As for the supposed contrast with Mr Blair of Mr Brown’s lack of smoothness, if there is one thing more cringe-making than the genuinely smooth Prime Minister, it is the attempts by Mr Brown — such as the rictus grin now attached to his face — to come across as a smoothie.

But it is not just about image. The axis of politics will be different under Mr Brown. That, though, will not be because of Gordon Brown. It will be because of his opponent. If Mr Brown was fighting a Conservative party led by David Davis, the battle lines would be much the same as in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections. Blair versus Major, Blair versus Hague and Blair versus Howard were fought as the centre versus the Right. Not surprisingly, the centre won. It always has. Even Baroness Thatcher won her three elections because she was seen as being closest to the centre, in contrast to an unelectably left-wing Labour party.

When Mr Brown takes over from the pro tem Prime Minister, the axis will shift not because Brown is some Old Labour dinosaur (he isn’t — he is the creator of New Labour) but because David Cameron is making his pitch from the centre. Indeed, in areas such as the environment, he wants to be seen as being to the left of Labour. This shift in the axis would have happened already, had we not been in a political phony war since Mr Cameron’s election as Conservative leader, awaiting Mr Blair’s departure.

As ever, the main battle will be over public services. But it will be an oddly muted battle. Under the old axis, Labour’s scream of ‘cuts’ worked, whatever the Conservatives proposed. Because Tory leaders were right-wing, Labour could get away with a message that it cared and the Conservatives didn’t. No more. Indeed, Mr Cameron’s most daring raid on Labour’s territory is to fight on Labour’s ‘we are nicer and smile a lot more’ ground. Politically, it is brave, but the previous strategy of traditional Conservativism could hardly be described as successful; it led to three landslide election defeats.

But whatever the political merits of Mr Cameron’s strategy, it is a depressing time for those of us who believe in competition in public services. The Conservatives have only one pledge so far: to keep the NHS fully tax-funded. In education, the best they can come up with is a risible list of ‘12 great people’ to be taught in schools, including Aneurin Bevan, which is almost beyond satire.

What would tilt the new political axis even further off its existing kilter is the likely triumph of the Scottish Nationalist party in the May elections to the Scottish Parliament. An SNP administration using an expected referendum in Scotland on the issue to step up the push for independence, in combination with an unpopular Scottish prime minister and growing English resentment at the subsidy paid by taxpayers to finance the bloated Scottish public sector, would produce a cocktail the like of which has not been since the Act of Union.

Mr Brown will seek to govern like Mr Blair because caution and conservatism are his natural instincts, whatever the spin might pretend. The impact of the Scottish elections, however, may focus that caution not on public services but on keeping the Union together.

This piece of mine is in today's Times:

My nephew came to stay with me just before Christmas. His brother didn’t. I doubt that you have much interest in my nephews’ holiday activities. But you should. Because the decision to let Alex stay with me but to leave Harry at home is based on exactly the same thought process as Labour’s approach to public service reform.

When I asked Alex if he’d like to come to London, his brother asked: “Why can’t I?” Harry has a habit of asking awkward questions. This was one of them, because my decision was entirely arbitrary. On any logical grounds, I should have invited Harry to come, too. But I didn’t. So I couldn’t give any rational response as to why it was OK for Alex to come, but not for Harry.

To understand why it matters that Harry stayed at home, you need also to know what it is about the entry into the EU on Monday of Bulgaria and Romania that is problematic. It’s the same problem as when, on January 1, 2004, eight other new member states joined the EU: the people who gained access to the British labour market are too good. They either work too hard, or they are too skilled.

447,000 workers from that first new batch of member states applied to register under the Workers Registration Scheme in the first two years since their accession. Including the self-employed, the total working in Britain has been well over 600,000. And that excludes the illegal workers. Economically, this is good news. Jobs can be done better and cheaper thanks to this new pool of labour. But there is a downside: many British manual workers can’t compete with them.

The mistake that is usually made is to concentrate on the immediate cause of this problem: the rights of those workers to come here. The real cause of the problem, however, is nothing new and has nothing to with the EU. The real cause is our failure to manage the basic task of educating children properly.

After nearly ten years in office, Tony Blair’s pledge to make “education, education and education” his top three priorities is the dog that barked but didn’t bite. There has certainly been some improvement in standards. But when ministers celebrate the improved statistics, it’s akin to a football team that regularly gets a 3-0 hammering taking comfort from losing 3-1. The most recent Department for Education and Skills study, in 2003, found that 16 per cent of the adult population would fail to pass an English GCSE and 29 per cent of adults could not calculate the area of a floor, even with a calculator, pen and paper.

Instead of the necessary wholesale reforms, tackling the fundamental flaws in school structures and teacher training, the Government has introduced a piecemeal variety of initiatives and schemes. Last week we learnt of the latest, a £65 million plan to give 800,000 of the most able pupils an “e-credit”. The pupils will be allocated about £80 in credits, which their schools can use to buy extra lessons from companies, independent schools, universities or other academic bodies. It is a thoroughly sensible idea, which no one committed to excellence could oppose. So, naturally, it has been opposed by a number of Labour MPs and teachers.

But for all the plan’s merit, it is symbolic of the Government’s failure. By proposing such a scheme, the Government shows that it understands the benefits of competition and a variety of teaching options. Instead of acting on that understanding, however, it restricts it to the most gifted. And it refuses even to contemplate any wider extension of the voucher principle.

Why not? For the same reason that I said Alex could come but Harry couldn’t. To use the perennial phrase of parents explaining their illogical decisions: because I say so.

There’s a perfect example of a “because I say so” dismissal of a logical extension in a speech made by Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, in November. Intriguingly, he argued that: “To break the cycle of educational disadvantage we need to give parents in the most disadvantaged areas more than preference. They should have choice...The evidence suggests both that choice programmes (abroad) helped raise standards across all schools and that the most disadvantaged pupils benefited most.”

All good stuff. And to bring about that choice, he proposed a weighted voucher: “I believe that parents with children in those schools where performance has not crossed these thresholds (of success) for two or more years should be given a new right to choose an alternative school. They would be given an education credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150 per cent of the cost of educating the child in their current school. This would give a positive incentive to the alternative school to take them and to expand their intake numbers.”

Even better stuff. Mr Milburn clearly grasps the need for choice, and how the market empowers the most disadvantaged and raises standards. But then he shows how the only word that really counts in the phrase “new Labour” is “Labour”: “The credit...could be used in any state school.” At a stroke, Mr Milburn circumscribes the impact of his proposed voucher by limiting its application to state schools. And he offers no explanation why other schools should not be able to compete for the pupils’ custom.

Even when Labour sees the benefits of competition, it rules it out in any but the most limited form, for no reason beyond ideology. The same holds in health. Patients are to be given a choice of provider for treatment. But the choice will be from a limited list and there will be no wider application of the acknowledged benefits of competition. Why not? Harry may be only 7, but he’ll be able to give you the reason. Because I say so.

UPDATE: Mea culpa. I should have written:

It’s the same problem as when, on May 1, 2004, eight former communist member states joined the EU... Apologies for such a howler.

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So you stop posting for a week, and your country turns into a banana republic.

Admittedly, I haven't been paying close attention to the news the past few days, but I'm struck at how little this story has been covered, at least relative to its importance. Yes, it's been front page news. But only for a day or so. And it seems as if most people have shrugged it off.

But hold on a moment. In my view, it's of a different order of magnitude to cash-for-peerages. I'm not diminishing that (if a crime is indeed proven). But the notion that the government can suspend the rule of law when it sees fit, with no comeback or debate, strikes at the very heart of the notion of a constitutional rather than an absolute monarchy. So we now live, in the strict meaning of the phrase, under a despotic government, with the government acting, in the name of the monarch, above the rule of law as laid down by Parliament.

If ever there was a cause for a million people to take to the streets in protest it is surely this.

But few people seems even to care. 'Oh, it's jobs at stake'. Bizarre.

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Well, I've read David Cameron's remarks in Brussels, and credit where it's due. It's superb stuff - spot on in most respects:

Last year the EU made helping lift Africa out of poverty a priority. But many of the EU's policies are making poverty in developing countries worse. The EU remains committed to a largely unreformed CAP, an economic and humanitarian disaster which pushes up food prices for the poorest people in Europe and helps lock the developing world in poverty. And the EU still has higher trade barriers against poor countries than it does against rich. That's not good enough and it needs to change.

...In 2000 Europe's leaders said they would make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. EU politicians repeated their call for economic reform in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. But since 1998 new EU regulations have cost business £37 billion.

I've said before that every time he opens his mouth I'm a little - sometimes a lot - less likely to vote Conservative. Well, I stand corrected. His remarks are exectly what needed to be said.

And this earlier pledge to pull out of the Social Chapter is in the same mould:

When we talk about regulation, it's impossible to avoid the role of our principal regulator, the European Union. In particular, we need to look at the Social Chapter. No British government will ever build an environment in which enterprise can truly thrive unless it controls the power to legislate in this area. That's why Britain must not stay in the Social Chapter. I know this is controversial. But I will be guided not by dogma - either Europhile or Europhobic - but a hard- headed assessment of what works for Britain. And it is obvious to anyone who knows anything about business that the Social Chapter doesn't work.

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You speak for me, Peter:

Look, the biggest delusion in all this that it's only us reactionaries who despise Cameron. Not so. It's the New Labour supporters who liked him when he first appeared who despise him even more. He's hectoring, righteous, and patronising, and it's so obvious that he's making it up as he's gone along. They're the ones who have abandoned him, not the True Blues.

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Geoff Hoon is, quite literally, the minister for Ugandan discussions:

Last week Mrs Beckett informed her ministerial colleagues that she would take the lead on questions about Europe, restricting Mr Hoon to the subject of northern Uganda.

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Oliver Kamm has an excellent post up about Clare Short. He evidently holds her in higher regard than I do, but I think his broad premise is correct:

But for all my scepticism about Clare Short's half-baked criticisms of New Labour, I'm surprised to see an unsourced report in a tabloid newspaper today associating her with George Galloway:

LABOUR turncoat Clare Short is tipped to join the anti-war Respect party - alongside its only MP, George Galloway.

Short, 60, quit the Cabinet over No.10's Iraq policy - and switching parties would be a further protest if she's expelled from the party altogether.

But one minister said: "Clare and George deserve each other. What they have in common is that neither are [sic] of any importance whatsoever."

I do not believe Clare Short deserves Galloway. Galloway has been plausibly described as "a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well". Whatever else you can say about Clare Short, she was an effective minister in a government that outside the most senior posts has been short on talent. As international development secretary she did tangible good both in raising the profile of the post and in being prepared to say unpopular things in the cause of third world development. She rightly stressed the importance of trade, and infuriated anti-globalisation campaigners by stating:

Child labour is a development problem, not a trade problem. It exists in all poor countries. Only five per cent of child labourers worldwide work in the export sector. Trade sanctions against countries where child labour is prevalent would simply harm the poorest countries and force children into still worse forms of employment.

This is the event at which he will be opposing Clare Short. I assume Neil Clark wasn't available.

I was about to post something on David Cameron's silly and objectionable campaign against NHS cuts. Silly, because far from cutting the NHS, the government has sent spending soaring out of all control.

But Daniel Finkelstein has just posted what I was about to write. So I won't bother. Read him instead:

Here are three objections:

First, the Labour Party has not cut the NHS. This is a simple, but fairly fundamental, problem with the campaign.

Second, the petition you are asked to sign is not a petition against cuts. This is what it says:

We, the undersigned, call on Gordon Brown to stop his mismanagement of the NHS, which has resulted in deficits approaching £1,277,000,000; 20,000 job losses in NHS hospitals; service cutbacks; and left many of our trainee doctors and nurses out of work. We want NHS money to go where it is needed; local people put in charge of local NHS services; and short-sighted closures replaced with long-term measures that improve care for patients.

So the petition does not actually call for a reversal in so-called cuts. This discrepancy between the campaign slogan and the small print is highly questionable.

Third, people can understand points one and two because they are not idiots.

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Armando Iannucci says it all:

A Cameron convert is the political equivalent of someone who's just got into jazz or decided that short-sleeved shirts look fine on him or who's started asking: 'Have you got any green tea?' at the end of meals in restaurants. Converting to Cameron is a lifestyle choice, like moving to the catchment area of a Church of England school or using a breadmaker or only just starting to watch CSI or buying monthly membership of LA Fitness. Cameron is the new patio of politics.

Banged to rights by Dan the Fink.

His point is entirely valid, and I feel a bit of an idiot for calling David Cameron 'Dave'. I know how much I hate it when I am called Steve or Steven, and that's rarely done to belittle me, just in ignorance. So I'll stop calling him Dave as a means of belittling him. It isn't big, and it isn't clever. It's puerile.

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Anatole Kaletsky has a terrific piece on Dave's speech yesterday:

If Michael Foot’s 1983 election manifesto is now remembered as “the longest suicide note in history”, then Mr Cameron’s speech yesterday could be described as the “longest shopping list in history”. And what would inevitably follow if Mr Cameron became prime minister would be the biggest tax demands in history.

Consider just a few of the spending pledges made yesterday by Mr Cameron in a single speech: to lavish on the National Health Service whatever funding is needed and an absolute moratorium on spending cuts or hospital closures; more border controls and policemen; more support for faith schools; more prison building; more drug rehabilitation services; more defence spending, not just on body armour but also on military salaries, pensions and schools; more subsidies for childcare; more money for social workers and occupational therapists; more special schools. My list of the spending commitments in that one speech could go on and on — and I haven’t even started on the previous day’s promises from Mr Osborne, such as subsidising pensions with even more generous tax relief.

...Nowhere was there any sense of priorities, of the limits to government resources. Never did Mr Cameron hint, for example, that somebody would have to pay for such charming notions as a new childcare subsidy that would be paid not only to professional carers but also to grandparents.

Even more disconcertingly, for what was supposed to be an expression of the new Tory ideals of decentralisation and limited government, there was hardly a single example of government self-restraint to balance the dozens of new state initiatives.

It's a great vote winner, Dave:

Vote Conservative: bankrupt yourself and the country

Now that we've had the past 4 days of Cameroonism on display, we can see the sort of Britain Dave wants:

His speech yesterday was so depressing, with its kowtowing to every left liberal cliche and its utterly misguided wallowing in the supposed virtues of the public sector. Perhaps the most depressing thing of all was the Pavlovian reaction of the audience, applauding every vowel emanating from Dave's mouth, however much they would have jeered had the same sentiments come from Blair or, even more, Brown. Understandable, of course: they are so desperate for power that they'd have applauded, oh, IDS had he been ahead in the polls.

It's the same thing which was at work when Blair took over Labour: a party which would put up with anything if it promised power. But there is a big difference. Blair was forcing his party to rip up lunatic ideas and shift it towards accepting sensible ideas, such as that profit is a good thing and jobs are created by business. Cameron is doing the exact opposite. He is forcing his party to rip up sensible ideas and replace them with SDP manque mush.

I had dinner last night with an American (Democrat) friend. She's been following the conferences. As she asked me: "What's the point of the Conservatives now? They seem to have ditched everything they believe in and are claiming to be more New Labour than New Labour. But why would anyone vote for them and not the real thing?"

Well, there's the Gordie problem, of course. Given that we're not allowed to call him autistic now, let's just leave it at his psychological flaws. And the fact that he is unelectable.

So we are now faced with the wonderful prospect of a new New Labour Prime Minister being beaten at the next election by a new Conservative leader who has pledged to be more of a social democrat than the social democrat he has just beaten.

Anyone know when the last plane leaves Heathrow?

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I've just watched the Conservative conference 'Hot Topic Debate: global companies are a force for good'.

I thought initially that the idea of George Moonbat being given a platform by the Conservative Party was bizarre. But having heard the parade of 'Against' speakers - members of the party, amazingly - I can see now that he has found his natural home. Attacks on the market, attacks on multinationals, attacks on business, attacks on the people involved in business: the audience speakers sounded as if they had come straight from the Green Party.

When Richard North, speaking in favour of business (yes, they actually felt the need to have such a speaker!) put forward some of the facts on generic HIV drugs, the chairman simply swatted him away as if the facts shouldn't be allowed to impede an anti-business rant. The Chairman! At a Conservative Party conference!

Truly amazing. On this evidence, the only feasible choice for a vote in favour of a pro-business party is a vote for Labour. [I should rephrase that. As a friend points out to me, business is a lobby just like any other. What I should have written is: 'the most feasible choice for a vote in favour of a pro-market party is a vote for Labour.' But that seems so self-evidently wrong that I resisted writing it. It has taken the Conservative conference for me to think it might actually be right.]

And if the early spin on this afternoon's Cameron speech is right, the decision is even easier. At the very time when spending as much money as possible on the NHS is being shown not to work, and the polls say the public is now willing to consider alternatives, Dave is making a defence of the NHS the cornerstone of his party's purpose.

Yes, the Tories need to make sure that their brand is no longer tarnished, but turning the party into a social democrat mush – on welfare (ruling out the stick and promising only the carrot), on health (pledging to match Labour’s wasteful spending), on taxes (refusing to talk about cutting the level of taxes, now higher than in Germany) – isn’t the answer.

If Dave's strategy is to look so much like the real thing - Labour - that voters can happily vote for a new set of faces to implement the same old same old social democrat mush - New New Labour - then we all might as well emigrate.

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According to today's Sun headline, Gordon Brown is definitely taking over from Tony Blair.

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My fantasy Cabinet.

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I was going to link to Daniel Finkelstein's comment about the Lib Dems:

We now know that at the last election the Lib Dem campaign to clean up politics was led by an alcoholic and financed by a fraudster.

But, as Oliver Kamm points out:

Were he less fastidious in observing the conventions of polite debate, Daniel might have written that at the last election the Lib Dems were led by a lying alcoholic.

...A debilitating illness, such as Roosevelt's incapacity through polio (which was successfully hidden from the public), need not impair a politician's effectiveness. But Kennedy's alcoholism incontestably did affect how he spoke and behaved in public. The Lib Dems perpetrated a lie, which eventually unravelled only because journalists found documentary evidence of the truth and not because the party discharged what it ought to have regarded as a civic obligation.

Now comes the reality check for Sir Ming. Even if the loan was not illegal (and as The Times reports, it might well be) it is certainly obvious that if the Lib Dems hang on to it, any claim they might make to being clean is shot through at first instance.

As it is, we know the Lib Dems lie if it suits their self-interest. If they refuse to pay back the money they have received from Michael Brown, we know that they are, in any real sense, financially corrupt, too.

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You go away for 24 hours, and what happens? Gordie's oh-so-pedestrian speech is blown out of the water by Cherie saying what everyone knew anyway, followed by a simply superb speech by Our Gorious Leader.

What a load of hypocritical tossers (pardon my language but it's what they are) those Labour members are. They've spent the past decade bitching about Blair, and now that he's off into the sunset they cheer him to the rafters. Well live with it, you idiots. You're the ones who wanted rid of him, forced him to announce his departure, and rendered him impotent. Ha-bloody-ha: now you're going to have to live with the consequence:

Mr Unelectable.

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Harriet Harman on Sky News, asked what will be different about life under Gordon Brown as PM:

There will be change. But it will not be change for change's sake. It will be change because of the changed circumstances of today.

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This piece in the Observer has no special merit, but it's interesting as a sign of how the chatterati are now taking the Conservatives seriously as more than a small sect which wishes to slaughter the first born:

Do I look like a Tory voter?

He's young and married, with a baby and a mortgage - just the kind of person Britain's political parties are fighting over. But The Observer's Rafael Behr has always voted Labour ... so far. Could he be tempted to change sides?

But this bit exemplifies my worry over who on earth I am going to vote for next time round, given that the writer is quite correct to identify them as Cameron themes, but quite wrong to describe them as 'sensible':

And David Cameron says sensible, liberal, moderate things. Some of them are so sensible as to be truisms . For example: we should consider 'general well-being' as well as gross domestic product when measuring national success; big business has responsibilities to society as well as duties to shareholders; public-sector workers deserve respect; sometimes private enterprise might not have all the answers in public-sector reform; globalisation has losers as well as winners; kids in hooded tops aren't all bad.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a check list of what's wrong with the Cameron Conservative Party. Every single one of those sentiments is the exact opposite of reality. And the electoral need for Cameron to mouth them is the perfect demonstration of what's wrong - and getting worse - about Britain. Business owes no duty to anyone beyond making profits (within the law) by servicing its customers' needs. Genuine globalisation (with a world wide free market) would be the greatest possible boon. The concept of 'general well being' is subjective drivel, and dangerously so in the hands of government. The public sector is necessarily worse at provision in the interest of its consumers than private provision. Etc.

As Private Frazer put it: We're doomed. Doomed.

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My friend Andrew Adonis has a fascinating piece in today's FT. The ostensible subject is the election of Frederik Reinfeldt on Sunday. But the subtext is about domestic British - Labour - politics:

...A view of “Swedish exceptionalism” has been potent – and misleading. In fact, Sweden has combined high ­levels of state funding with radical change to promote choice, quality and diversity across the public services to respond better to individual aspiration.

Structural reforms to bring this about were introduced by Carl Bildt’s centre-right government in the early 1990s. Göran Persson’s Social Democrats have since improved on them, seeking to reconcile reform with social equity in a manner similar to Mr Blair’s government. But after 12 years in office, the centre-left’s credibility in leading the next phase of modernisation was a big issue in the recent election, as it will be in the next British election, too.

...As a schools minister, I am struck by how far Sweden has progressed with “social market” reform. Since the Bildt education reforms of 1991, which allowed diversity within Sweden’s state schools system, nearly 600 independently managed schools have been established with state funding, educating more than 7 per cent of all pupils. ­Sweden’s independent state schools are similar to the Blair government’s new independently managed academies and trust schools, including requirements for fair, community-based admissions arrangements.

More than a decade after the reforms took root, Sweden continues to have one of the least ability-segregated school systems in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. There is national regulation, but existing providers and local councils are not allowed to stop the establishment of these schools where parents want them. Large chains of schools are now emerging and this independent sector is now likely to grow stronger.

Visiting Finland last week I had an equally vivid impression of choice-based reform in action...
In Helsinki, parents of about half the children entering secondary schools request a school other than the one allocated. At the upper secondary level, beyond the age of 16, there is wider choice still, with schools and vocational colleges competing strongly on the range and quality of their courses.

...Scandinavia is at the cutting-edge of public sector reform. Competition between its centre-left and centre-right parties focuses on more, not less, change. We should all take note.

This piece of mine appears in today's Times:

I once won a competition for the world’s most boring book title with this: Hospital Purchase Records Containing Grain Price Information in 15th-century Ghent. (It’s real — I own a copy.) So I am aware that an article on the theme “The Swedish Moderate Party — Past and Current Electoral Tactics” might not seem, at first instance, a rip-roaring read.

But trust me. An alternative expression of the theme could instead be: “Can Cameron’s Conservatives Win? Here’s the Answer”. That, I hope, is slightly more enticing.

On Sunday, the Moderate Party (the equivalent of the Conservatives) won the Swedish general election. In alliance with three other centre-right parties, the Moderates beat the incumbent So