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 Social Democrats by just 2 per cent.

“Just” 2 per cent is not really a fair description of the scale of the achievement. Four years ago, the Moderates were written off as a political force. In the 2002 election, the party won just 15 per cent of the vote — its worst performance for three decades. I remember sitting in a café in Brussels with a defeated Moderate MP, who told me that he had decided to leave Sweden for good. The country, he said, was beyond help. The Social Democrats were tired and wrong. By pandering to the fool’s paradise of the electorate — that it was possible to prosper with an ageing workforce, high taxes and lavish welfare — they had won 40 per cent of the vote, a big share in a political system such as Sweden’s. The Moderates were regarded as extremists for proposing tax cuts and changes to the welfare culture.

And yet within months of that conversation, the Moderates were ahead in the polls and their leader regarded as the most likely next prime minister.The reason? The election in October 2003 of Fredrik Reinfeldt to the party leadership, and a change in the tone and presentation of policies.

Most political or historical parallels are stretched in order to make a point and ignore so many other factors that they become misleading. But in this instance, there are two obvious and instructive parallels with Britain. Their names are Tony Blair and David Cameron. Both have been bright, new, young leaders who took charge of a party viewed as unelectable and transformed its poll ratings. The difference, of course, is that Mr Blair has won power. So far, Mr Cameron has merely looked like doing so.

But the comparison with the two British leaders points to the most interesting aspect of the Reinfeldt parallel: whether the Moderate leader has won power on the basis of a genuinely changed outlook, or whether he has skilfully changed his party’s image in order to win power and implement his party’s long-standing principles.

Mr Blair famously remarked after winning power in 1997 that “we were elected as new Labour and we will govern as new Labour”. If by that he meant that he would not revert to the more glaringly unpopular elements of Labour’s traditional desires — such as nationalisation — then he has indeed governed as new Labour. But he has also been happy to use conventional social democrat taxing and spending as his most basic tool, so to that extent he has used a changed image to facilitate a traditional Labour government, using traditional Labour methods.

The big question being asked of Mr Reinfeldt is the same question that Mr Cameron’s strikingly “new Conservative” statements give rise to: whether, having been elected as a new Moderate, he will govern as a new Moderate.

Mr Cameron has adopted hook, line and sinker the tactics of Mr Reinfeldt. The Swedish conservative started talking about his passion for improving schools and hospitals, rather than adopting the usual centre-right tactic of keeping as quiet as possible about them, in fear that any mention would be a vote loser. And he ditched his party’s broad-brush tax cuts approach in favour of targeted reductions focused on the poor and business to help to boost job creation. George Osborne may not yet have announced the Tory tax plans, but there’s no need to wait to find out the basic idea. Just look at the Moderates’ manifesto.

It’s not just policies that have been borrowed. Mr Reinfeldt first created a stir by going tie-less when he took over his party. Mr Cameron has even used Mr Reinfeldt’s themes: “[Göran Persson,] the outgoing Prime Minister has introduced many times the question that he is soon to be leaving . . . I think the perception is that I have the future ahead of me and he has his future behind him.” Or as Mr Cameron put it, rather more catchily, of Mr Blair: “He was the future once.”

Mr Cameron is trying the same Blairite trick that Mr Reinfeldt has just pulled off. He is luring new supporters by sounding very different from any previous leader of his party and emphasising that he is centre-right rather than right-of-centre. And he is holding on to existing supporters and party members who, after a succession of election defeats, are so desperate for power that they will back a winner whatever he says.

It worked a treat for Mr Reinfeldt. As Prime Minister, however, we have no idea if he will govern as centre-right or right-of-centre. And we have no idea even if Mr Cameron will win, let alone how he will govern.

But what we do know is that the man who first pulled the trick off, Tony Blair, soon found out that while it is brilliant for winning elections, in power it is a recipe for little more than the occupation of office.

(1)

Labour has got Bill Clinton speaking at its conference. The Tories have got John McCain. And the LibDems?

Today's agenda

10.50am speech on foreign affairs by Michael Moore

Oo er.

(Mind you, since Ming Campbell is just as ridiculous a figure on foreign affairs, it would come as little surprise if it was indeed that Michael Moore, rather than, rather disappointingly, Michael Moore MP, the LibDems's foreign affairs spokesman.)

(1)

To answer Clive's question: no. I voted Labour.

As I liked to tell people at the time, I voted Labour because of the war. There was usually a pause while they realised I had said 'because of' rather than 'despite'.

With Blair going, I'm at a loss to know for which party to vote. I can't imagine the circumstances in which I would vote for a party led by Gordon Brown. My inclination is to vote for the Conservatives, but on the rare occasions I hear a concrete policy from Dave - such as his commitment to an everlasting exclusively tax funded NHS - I wince. Add to that the level of cynicism in his conduct of politics, such as using the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to pander to Bushophobia, and I take a further step away from voting Conservative.

What I would give for a party which doesn't really want to do very much - whether it's taxing us, running things or telling us how to behave - except protect us from terrorists and other criminals.

(8)

There's a tree. And it's green. Like the party! Geddit? How very clever!

According to the Telegraph:

The Tory image was created by Perfect Day, a small, London-based design agency, for £40,000.

Blimey. I'm in the wrong business. Looks like something one of my nephews (aged 10 and 7) does when they're asked to draw a tree.

If there's one thing likely to stop me voting Conservative at the next election it's the obsessive knee-jerk greenery coming out of Mr Cameron's mouth which is now, it seems from the logo, the sole selling point of his party.

Oh, that and sticking the knife into the alliance with the US - oh-so-tastefully timed for the 5th anniversary of 9/11.

(8)

This series of articles shows a big difference between US and UK politics at the moment.

In the US, Bush’s internal GOP opponents would rarher their party lost the next elections than that its leader emerged victorious. Here, on the other hand, it’s the Blairites themselves who would rather their party lost the next election than that its new leader emerge victorious.

(2)

How about ungrateful, traitorous, self-indulgent, untrustworthy sh**?

(2)

Do read this piece by Robert Harris on the past week's events. When he wrote full-time on politics I always thought Harris was peerless. This piece shows just how good he is. I won't extract it - it's too full of good things.

To paraphrase Mrs Merton, I wonder what attracted him to the idea of switching from jobbing hackery to writing best-selling novels.

That said, I've read two of his books and thought at the end of both 'what was the point of that?'. Hours of my life wasted, never to be regained.

I will no doubt be shouted down for saying this but with a few exceptions - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Robertson Davies, for instance - I usually find fiction a complete waste of time. I don't see the point of most of it. Not when real life is so much more complex than any novel can ever be.

(There - that'll no doubt prompt a flood of dismissive emails.)

UPDATE: Some people who look at this blog appear to be unable to read (to whit, the first two comments). Where above does it say that I despise people who read fiction, or that I think that other people shouldn't read it? I am merely pointing out that I don't usually derive much pleasure or utility from it. Similarly, I do not enjoy eating squid or see the point of it. That does not mean that I despise people who do.

It is a particularly silly non sequitur to conclude that when I point out my personal preferences I am condemning others who wish to indulge their own, legal, pleasures, which I do not happen to share. If I despise someone or something - comfortable, complacent, middle class drug takers, for instance, whose actions are inextricably bound up with the blighted lives of drug addicts on sink estates - then I say so.

The commenters have clearly been reading too much fiction!

(5)

This piece of mine appears in today's Wall Street Journal Europe:

What do Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair have in common? One of them may still be prime minister, but none of them now exercises real power.

From the moment Mr. Blair announced before the 2005 general election that, if he was put back in at 10 Downing Street, he would not contest another vote, he became a lame duck. When Mr. Blair confirmed yesterday that he plans to leave office next summer, it was in one sense nothing new. Anyone you care to ask on the street has assumed all along that is when he will go.

But in political terms it’s as big as it gets. Simply by saying he will be gone for sure within a year, Mr. Blair has also confirmed that he is now impotent and at the mercy of his party. There has barely been a day since his re-election last year when Mr. Blair has not been asked the same question: When exactly are you going? And every time he has been asked, the prime minister has said the same thing in response: That he has pledged not to fight another election and that is all he is prepared to say. Only last Friday, in an interview with The Times, he repeated the formula: “I have said I am not fighting the next election and I will leave ample time for my successor.” Of timing there was, as always, nothing.

That interview turned out to be one obfuscation too far. Instead of dampening down the departure issue, as the prime minister no doubt intended, it forced him to talk about it and, almost certainly, will bring about an earlier departure.

You can tell when a political party in chaos becomes one in crisis. Up pop the nonentity MPs on the rolling news channels, sharing their views on the future of their leader. And in the past few days it’s been impossible to escape them, as they have lined up to attack or—in a very few cases—defend Mr. Blair.

There is no doubt that it will be Gordon Brown who takes over from Mr. Blair. But with every passing day, the inheritance left to him is getting steadily worse as the party rips apart the last vestiges of its reputation for discipline and order in front of our eyes.

Instead of stating straight away this week that he stood behind Mr. Blair, and stamping on the indiscipline, Mr. Brown waited until yesterday — after days of public infighting — to say that he stood behind him and that “this cannot and should not be about private arrangements but what is in the best interests of our party, and most of all the best interests of our country — and I will support him in doing exactly that.” Hardly a ringing endorsement. Yet of all the lessons Labour learned from the Conservatives under John Major, it was that the electorate has contempt for a party which cannot behave itself. The legacy of Conservative division in the 1990s has been its three election defeats. Once voters get the impression of division, it can take years to shake off.

Despite Mr. Blair’s attempts yesterday to end the crisis, he is attempting to put out a forest fire with a bottle of water. The prime minister may have quieted things for a while, but he has done nothing to alter the bigger picture of open and accelerating hostility to him.

Mr. Blair has spent his entire time as Labour leader as an outsider in his own party, loathed by most of its faithful. As a record-breaking election winner, however, they had no choice but to put up with him, if for no other reason than self-interest. He might not have believed what they believed — Mr. Blair thought, heavens above, that profit was a good thing! — but he could deliver power. So they entered into a Faustian pact, to back him as leader if he could taken them into government. Now the terms of that deal have come back to haunt Mr Blair. He cannot, having pledged to go, win another victory. So, at a stroke, the reason for tolerating him has gone, and a largely unreconstructed Labour, absent the New adjective, is baying for his departure.

Worse still, from the MPs’ point of view, Labour’s 31% poll ratings are at their lowest level for 19 years, and the Conservatives’ are soaring. Defeat stares MPs in the face, especially those in constituencies with the smallest majorities who are, having been elected by the Blair Effect, Blairites. Previously loyal Blairites fear for their careers, and have started turning on him. They want a new face at the head.

It is typical of Mr. Blair’s innate political skills that, even at his most politically damaged, he demonstrated with his first sentence yesterday that he is more in touch in with the public than any of his backstabbing MPs. By starting off with an apology to the British public “for the past week,” he distanced himself from their immaturity and showed at a stroke that in their rampage to remove him, they will lose Labour’s greatest asset. They will sow what they reap.

(5)

Daniel Finkelstein has a terrific fisking of Brown's statement today.

(My WSJ piece on all this will be up here later tonight.)

(1)

Melanie Phillips hits the nail on the head:

Yet that still doesn’t explain the exit frenzy gripping the party just over a year after Blair led it to a historic third election victory. Such a triumph has been vitiated by the real poison in British politics, the war in Iraq and Blair’s support for American foreign policy, President Bush and Israel. This is what’s really driving the comrades demented. It’s impossible to exaggerate the climate of virulent anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel which, extending way beyond the left into the centrist heartlands of Middle Britain, has so distorted British politics — and indeed, all but destroyed British rationality.

...The crucial question at this point in world history is whether the British government post-Blair will be as staunchly Atlanticist as he has been. The Tories have become alarmingly flaky in this regard, although a fight to resolve this within the party has yet to take place. Gordon Brown is known to have stars and stripes in his eyes, although ominously he has also let it be known that he would ditch support for certain aspects of US policy. For all his faults, Blair has displayed astounding courage and clear-mindedness in never wavering from his support for American foreign policy, despite the fury this has engendered among the voters and the consequent damage this has done to his whole political career. The key issue now in British politics is whether his successor — whoever it will be — will do the same.

(4)

Samizdata has a nice little satire on Stephen Byers' call for the abolition of inheritance tax:

The Conservative Party has launched a fierce attack on cabinet minister Stephen Byers following the latter's call for the abolition of Inheritance Tax.

According to the Party's Shadow Treasury Spokesman:

"This is neo-liberalism gone mad, a selfish Thatcherite appeal to naked greed and self-interest".

He added:

"This ludicrous idea of handing out tax cuts to the rich is outmoded and has no place in 21st Century Britain. We in the Conservative Party are committed to increasing the rates of Inheritance Tax in order to build a fairer society based on inclusion and social justice".

Party Leader, David Cameron has confirmed that his party will "fight tooth and nail" to save Inheritance Tax and "conserve the post-war walfare state settlement".

I agree with the arguments put forward in favour of abolition, and see the irony that whilst a senior New Labour figure argues for the abolition of a £3 billion tax, the Conservatives dismiss the idea of tax cuts as inappropriate.

But inheritance tax is not an open and shut case. There is a strong argument that a properly working tax would ensure a level playinf field for capitalism to operate in, giving meritocracy the chance to flourish - and, of course, promoting a proper work ethic amongst the young.

(16)

Th headline on Tim Worstall's post says pretty much all that needs to be said:

Neal Lawson: Idiot

My eyes were slightly glazed when I first read this and I thought it said 'Nigel Lawson: Idiot'. Hmmm, I thought, it'll be a stretch for him to prove that about possibly the most intelligent Cabinet minister of the past 30 years.

Which prompts a thought: who do you think is the most intelligent Cabinet minister of that period? Not 'who do you most agree with?' but who was (is?) simply the most intellectually gifted?

(4)

Oh dear. David Cameron has joined William Hague in arguing that Israel should restrict its response to Hezbollah to firing random rockets on as many civilian targets as possible:

Elements of the Israeli response were disproportionate and I think the Prime Minister should have said that. I do not think it should be seen as an unfair criticism of Israel — it is just a statement of fact.

How can a mainstream poltiician be allowed to get away with advocating that Israel should repond to the random killing of its civilians with the random killing of Lebanese civilians?

If this is the sort of thing we will have to get used to under a Cameron adminstration, the appeal wears off.

(9)

The image of Tony Blair and David Cameron exchanging frilly skirts and pearls is certainly arresting, but the Prime Minister’s reference in California last weekend to rampant cross-dressing was, disappointingly, political. But for all the comment that his remarks have engendered, we have been here before. When the Economist coined the term Butskellism in 1954, it was simply observing that, as Gaitskell wrote after being succeeded by Butler as Chancellor, the Conservatives “have really done exactly what we would have done, and have followed the same lines on controls, economic planning, etc…” Both parties were effectively interchangeable, working within the same framework of a mixed economy and government responsibility for full employment.

Today’s fixed points may have changed but the story is essentially the same. There is almost nothing to choose between Blair-ism and Dave-ism. But just as Butskellism was, despite its apparent solidity and safety, fundamentally dangerous – the Keynesian consensus, the soggy centre and the muddled middle which it represented led Britain into potentially terminal decline in the 1960s and 1970s – so today there is another perilous cross-party consensus. This time, however, it is not domestic cross-dressing which poses the threat; capitalism won, and stifling as today’s puny debates over the levels of taxation and public spending may be, they take place within a sensible framework. The worrying consensus today is, rather, about the very future of Western civilisation.

In the 1970s the inevitability of British decline was challenged by a small group of thinkers who championed such supposedly nutty ideas as privatisation and low taxes. They were dismissed as lunatics. Today there is a similar reaction against those who articulate the threat posed to Western civilisation by militant Islam and push for resistance to it. The great mass of the political class deride those who believe this to be the defining issue of the twentyfirst century as – to quote Matthew Parris about Michael Gove - “stark, staring, bonkers”.

But there is a big difference from the 1970s. In the domestic disputes of old, the consensus challengers were all nascent Thatcherites, on the right. Today, they are as likely to define themselves as being on the left as on the right. The signatories of the Euston Manifesto, an explicitly left-wing statement of the incompatibility of militant Islam with liberal, democratic values, stand alongside the supporters of the Henry Jackson Society, a cross-party alliance in support of a foreign policy governed by the defence of those democratic values. So one finds as supporters of the Henry Jackson Society charter a former Labour Europe Minister, Denis MacShane, a leading Conservative thinker, David Willetts, and David Trimble.

The man who ‘gets it’ – in the phrase used by those who understand the threat from militant Islam - more than most is, of course, the Prime Minister. And, quelle surprise, Mr Blair is at odds with most of his Cabinet over his refusal to condemn Israel’s actions in Lebanon. That is because the Prime Minister sees what others have made themselves blind to – that Israel’s defence against militant Islam is a proxy for our own fight.

Mr Blair is perhaps the only man or woman in his Cabinet who says what he really thinks, rather than saying what needs to be said to survive in a job. The most obvious example of this is Jack Straw. The former Foreign Secretary is the master of spotting shifts in the political breeze and bending appropriately. It is impossible to know what he really thought of the Iraq war, not least because, for all his public loyalty, he was adept at letting it be thought that he had reservations, a tactic which has served his Cabinet longevity well. His comments last weekend condemning Israeli action in Lebanon were classic Straw positioning, distancing himself from a departing Prime Minister and readying himself for the new political reality. (Mr Straw’s political skill lies in sniffing out shifts and reacting to them before they have happened. His successor, Margaret Beckett, merely accommodates herself to already changed political ground.)

But what is most striking about politics today is that, alone as Mr Blair may be in his Cabinet, he has ardent and solid backing in foreign policy from the leading lights of the new generation of Conservatives, such as George Osborne, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey.

Nonetheless, those who ‘get it’ remain in a small minority. Mr Blair, for instance, is not merely isolated over Lebanon in Cabinet. He is isolated in the country, too: a recent ICM poll found that only 22% of people support Israeli action – and that was before the death of 54 people in Qana on Sunday.

Most of the mainstream left – which includes not merely the Labour Party, but also the LibDems and the liberal intelligentsia – links the threat posed to Israel and the threat posed to the West only perversely, by arguing that Israel’s defence of its citizens somehow worsens the threat to the West. Indeed, there is at best an ambivalence about the existence of the threat from militant Islam, and at worst an active complicity in it. The spectrum of opinion on this side of the divide runs from the apparently respectable scepticism of the likes of Sir Menzies Campbell and Clare Short, through foreign policy ‘realist’ Conservatives such as Kenneth Clarke and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, to the active alliance of George Galloway’s Respect – the renamed Socialist Worker’s Party – and Ken Livingstone with representatives of the very islamofascism which threatens Western freedom.

If the important divide in British politics is between those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, then for all the apparent moderation and calm sense of Sir Menzies, Mr Clarke and Ms Short, they are separated from Respect and the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood only by degree. Mr Livingstone’s praise, for instance, and welcome to London of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood - which exists to promote the establishment of an Islamic state brought about by Jihad against the infidel – is something close to treachery, given al-Qaradawi’s proselytising for suicide bombing. But shy away as they might from Livingstone and Galloway’s tactics, the likes of Sir Menzies (ital)et al(ital) are on the same side of the fence.

Identifying the divide on security policy as not between but across parties is not the same as saying that a political realignment is under way. A similarly cross-party issue, our relationship with the EU, once led sage pundits to predict a realignment, as the likes of Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine and Roy Jenkins stood shoulder to shoulder. But it never came close to happening, even when the SDP, a party set up specifically to bring about realignment, was a powerful force.

Cross-party common sense is not enough when those who hold the opposite views are in the ascendant on both sides. It would be nice to report a coming realignment on the threat of Islam, given that the very future of the West is at stake. Alas, with each passing day, the consensus of the blind seems to grow stronger.

(4)

Neal Lawson, the self-appointed representative on earth of Gordon Brown, suggests in this paen of praise to the state that the model society is either the Third Reich or the Soviet Union:

We should make it impossible to separate society from state.

At least I assume that's what he means. I can't think of any other fusion of society and the state.

UPDATE: Great minds, and all that.

Charles Clarke’s deft political touch might have deserted him when he was Home Secretary, but as the interviews he has given this week have shown, he has certainly regained it.

His remarks were calculated, clinical and effective. He has achieved both his aims.

First, he has settled his score with his successor, John Reid, for badmouthing Mr Clarke’s performance as Home Secretary. Mr Clarke accused Dr Reid of jumping on media bandwagons and being wrong to criticise his own civil servants.

Both men are past masters at political street fighting, and the former Home Secretary has made it clear that he will give back as good as he gets.

But the real interest in Mr Clarke’s words lie in what he said about the Prime Minister: “What we are lacking at the moment is a sense of leadership and direction”.

The importance of those words lies not so much in what they say, as who has said them.

The likes of Frank Dobson, Clare Short and the other usual suspects call for Tony Blair to go morning, noon and night. It would be more noteworthy if any of them one day uttered a word of praise for the Prime Minister. Mr Clarke is very different. Loyalty to the leadership runs through his very core. That is why his words are so explosive.

They show the extent of Mr Blair’s weakness, because they show that even the moderate, centre of the Labour Party now regards the Prime Minister as politically a dead man walking.

Some have compared Mr Clarke’s words with Lord Howe’s torpedoing of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. They are wrong. When Lord Howe called on “others [by which he meant Michael Heseltine] to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long", he was signalling the beginning of the end for Baroness Thatcher.

She might have been unpopular, and her party might have wanted rid of her, but she remained a political colossus, and the dominant figure in the government. It was only when Lord Howe opened his mouth that the end became nigh.

The circumstances today are very different. Mr Blair was finished long before Mr Clarke opened his mouth. It has been a matter of when, not if, he departs ever since he announced that the 2005 election would be his last.

The fact that Mr Blair won a third election is now little more than a technical curiosity, since he has been utterly impotent as a political leader since that victory, unable to legislate as he would wish and unable even to direct the Government as he would wish.

But none of that makes Mr Clarke’s remarks any less damaging. The fact that it is Charles Clarke speaking out makes his words far more potent than if they had come from other lips.

Until May, when Tony Blair sacked Mr Clarke in the wake of the foreign prisoners fiasco, he was one of the Prime Minister’s strongest supporters.

There is now no rational reason why Tony Blair remains in office. Powerless to implement reforms, he is reduced to traipsing across the country making speeches about what his Government ought to have done.

Equally, however, events can develop a momentum of their own, and words can have an impact beyond their immediate meaning.

Stripped of all context, Charles Clarke has merely stated the obvious. But the context matters. This statement of the obvious, because it is made by Mr Clarke, might well hasten Mr Blair’s demise.

(10)

We can all sleep more easily now. John Prescott is back on the job. Double entendres aside, the Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday that he has given up Dorneywood because the controversy generated by his hanging on to it “gets in the way of the job”.

Phew. Since Mr Prescott has more talent in his fist than in the rest of his body put together, it is a relief to know that he is now able to concentrate full time on doing what he is best able to do: nothing much.

Criticism of Mr Prescott’s non-job misses the point. Mr Prescott is deputy leader of the Labour Party. Under the party’s rules, that entitles him to a place in the Cabinet. So we are stuck with him until he deigns to resign or the Labour Party conference votes to replace him.

No one — not Tony Blair, not Gordon Brown, not the assembled ranks of the commentariat or Uncle Tom Cobley — can sack him as deputy leader. It might have taken the Prime Minister nine years to realise, but paying Mr Prescott £133,997 a year not to run a department is, in such circumstances, money well spent.

Mr Prescott has long been seen as a sort of warped variation on Bagehot’s notion of the “dignified” part of our constitution — a symbolic figure albeit entirely undignified and, until last month, wielding real power disastrously. That is a misunderstanding. The Deputy Prime Minister may be a thug, he may lack any detectable talent and he may lack a sufficient code of personal morality, but he is not an aberration. He is not a boil on the otherwise smooth skin of Labour’s backside. He is, rather, the epitome of Labour in government. At the head of a department he was at best incompetent, at worst dangerous. And he now does nothing except occupy office for the sake of occupying office. Mr Prescott’s story is that of the Government writ small.

Take any one of the past month’s cock-ups, from letting foreign criminals roam the streets to handing over £1.8 billion of tax credit overpayments. Add to that the almost daily examples of further ineptitude and the legion of other mistakes over the past nine years and a pattern emerges.

New Labour’s selling point was that it was Not The Tories. Above all, that meant being competent. In the years after the 1992 election, I co-authored a series of pamphlets based on the theme “Southern Discomfort”, which used focus groups to explore the reasons for Labour’s ingrained unpopularity and the resilience of the Conservatives in the South. One of the initial key findings was that voters’ memories of the 1976 IMF crisis and the 1978-79 Winter of Discontent were long, and they regarded Labour as incompetent. They didn’t much like the Conservatives, but put up with them as they knew how to run things.

Black Wednesday transformed the political landscape. At a stroke the Conservatives’ reputation was shattered. John Smith reacted as if all he had to do was look like a dependable bank manager and Labour could sleepwalk to victory. Tony Blair’s critical insight was to see that winning necessitated a wholesale change in the image of the party, relentlessly emphasising the sheer competence that Labour would demonstrate in office, in contrast with the discredited Government. Labour’s 1997 pledge card was not simply about delivering on promises — it was intended as a symbol that Labour would get things done.

Sex scandals, financial scandals and ministers caught out lying have all destabilised Labour. But none has had as much power to wound Labour as demonstrations of incompetence. Not even “sleaze”, which is now regarded almost as par for the course. If Labour can’t even run a competent government, what else is it for?

Almost every negative issue can be linked with incompetence. Shovelling record sums into the NHS, only to see the money frittered away into a financial black hole, is as much about incompetence as it is about ideology. Neutering the Education Bill in order to secure the support of Labour backbenchers, then failing even to manage that and being dependent on Conservative MPs’ votes (which would have supported the original, bold Bill) is again at root about incompetence.

No wonder David Cameron is flying so high. Those of us who supported Mr Blair in the hope — no, the expectation — that new Labour would indeed “do” things, such as reforming health, education and welfare, are now left staring at a Prime Minister who has spent nine years promising to be bold next year. Now it is next year and Mr Blair cannot even reform his Cabinet properly. Norman Lamont’s “in office, not in power” gibe against John Major fits the Prime Minister like a glove.

Mr Blair himself may well have been the real deal, but we will never know. Even had his Government not been brought to near-collapse by serial incompetence, he has been stymied by his party from his first day in government. Yet the reform ideas, which many of us once looked to Tony Blair to implement, are more important than ever. So we have to turn instead to the only other possible champion: David Cameron. Call him the centre, call him the radical centre, call him right of centre; call him whatever you want. All that matters is that we must have a government both committed to and capable of implementing reforms.

The difference this time would be that the champion of reform leads a party that instinctively backs change, rather than viewing reform as the work of the devil. It was Mr Cameron who championed the education White Paper, while Mr Blair ran for cover with his tail between his legs.

The only thing that now separates Blairites from the Conservative Party is a label.

(3)

There can be no greater proof that the writing is now on the wall for Tony Blair than the events of Thursday night and yesterday morning. Electorally bloodied, politically bankrupt and morally corrupted, his New Labour government is now clearly in its death throes.

Yesterday’s Cabinet reshuffle may have been huge in its sweep, but its impact on the fortunes of the Government will be paltry. Cynically intended by the Prime Minister to distract attention from Labour’s local elections debacle and to give the impression of action and decisiveness, all it shows is that Mr Blair is now in panic mode.

The truth is that the government he presides over is now in meltdown. Mired by incompetence and sleaze, it is hard to see what is the point of it continuing in office.

Labour's attitude towards the electorate has become almost contemptuous: a Deputy Prime Minister who has admitted to a demeaning affair with his secretary; a Home Secretary who disgorges foreign murderers onto our streets; the cash for peerages scandal; a Health Secretary who boasts that the NHS has enjoyed its best ever year; and Tessa Jowell's mind-boggling personal finances.

Watching from the sidelines, David Cameron would not be human if the thought did not cross his mind that Number Ten now looks a realistic possibility.

The local elections were always going to be a huge test of his popularity, and the Tory leader passed with colours, if not flying, then at least hoist proudly in the air.

The Cabinet reshuffle is simply huge. Other than after a general election, Mr Blair has not moved any of the occupants of the three big offices of state - the Treasury, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office - unless forced to by a ministerial resignation. And when he has reshuffled the rest of the Cabinet posts, he has always considered Gordon Brown’s reaction. For him to sack one top minister, to demote another and to ignore the third - all seemingly without Brown's knowledge - is unprecedented.

Of course, Charles Clarke’s sacking as Home Secretary was inevitable, if overdue. The Prime Minister's initial defence - that the only person qualified to sort out a crisis is the one who created it - was asinine; Mr Clarke no longer had the confidence of the Labour Party, let alone of the public.

But his sacking for the foreign prisoner fiasco was not as straightforward as it should have been. A previous Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, used to summon an incompetent minister and, barely looking up from his papers, would utter the words: 'Simply not up to the job.'

The truth is that Mr Blair should have similarly dispensed with Mr Clarke’s services. Instead, he wanted to move the man who presided over the release of foreign murderers, paedophile and rapists to another job. So it was only Mr Clarke’s refusal to accept a demotion which ensured his departure from government, not firm action by Mr Blair or any sense of propriety on Mr Clarke’s part.

Indeed, it is a measure of how out of touch Charles Clarke remains from reality that he still does not think there was any good reason for him to leave. He even took the unusual and undignified step of recording a statement in which he said that he didn't think he should been asked to leave the Home Office.

Most intriguingly, Mr Clarke’s departure removes from the fray the most likely leader of the campaign to stop Gordon Brown from becoming prime minister - making him but the latest Labour figure donning the anti-Chancellor mantle to have fallen.

Some years ago, Jack Straw carried the flame as likely challenger to Gordon Brown for the succession, but he is thought to have done a deal with the Chancellor to ensure his survival if Brown does get the top job.

Next, David Blunkett was seen as a possible ‘stop Brown’ candidate, but he destroyed his chances by his improper behaviour over his son’s nanny’s visa application. The next figure touted was former Health Secretary Alan Milburn, whose credibility was ruined by running a poor 2005 general election campaign.

Now the latest, Charles Clarke, has humiliatingly bitten the dust. Perhaps the last man to stand up to the Chancellor's inexorable passage to Number Ten is John Reid, the new Home Secretary. Poor chap.

If anything, all this just underlines the inevitability of Gordon Brown’s succession after the end of Mr Blair's lame duck administration.

As for Jack Straw, he has some reason to feel hard done by after his demotion yesterday. As Foreign Secretary, he has loyally done Mr Blair’s bidding on Iraq and in his dealings with the Americans. His reward has been the same humiliation as befell his predecessors, Robin Cook, and Sir Geoffrey Howe under Baroness Thatcher - being kicked downstairs to become Leader of the House.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the reshuffle is the way Mr Blair treated Gordon Brown.

Although he must have been tempted over the years to move his brooding Chancellor, it was never an option. Had he even threatened it, Mr Blair would have been signing his immediate death warrant.

But it seems that the Prime Minister has done the next best thing - refusing to consult the man who will succeed him about the reshuffle.
Traditionally, Mr Blair is not used to reconstructing his Cabinet without a great deal of compromise. In the past, he has had to negotiate with both Mr Brown and the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott.

Indeed, Gordon Brown feels that it is his right to be consulted. So, after yesterday's snub, the word in Westminster is that he is particularly unhappy.

As for Prescott, he has long been regarded, even by his own fellow Cabinet ministers, as dangerously incompetent. Quite rightly, he has been stripped of all departmental responsibility.

But the fact that he retains the honorific title of Deputy Prime Minister, a seat in the Cabinet and a £134,000 salary is almost worse. At least when he had his own department, there could be the pretence that he had a job.

Now, all he has left is the honour of his title and his country house, Dorneywood.

Yet the one thing which Mr Prescott’s dishonourable and tawdry affair with a junior civil servant does not deserve is a privilege of any sort.

What kind of punishment is it to be allowed to remain Deputy Prime Minister, without having to do any departmental work?

The reason for his survival, of course, is that Mr Blair is afraid to sack him. John Prescott is a nasty piece of work. As a backbencher with a grudge against the Prime Minister, he could be lethal. And so he is allowed to remain in office.

The knock-on effect of this is that Mr Prescott’s allies, such as Ian McCartney, the former Labour Party chairman, have been booted out, and Gordon Brown has not been able to effect promotion for his own supporters.

As everyone knows, the relationship between the Chancellor and Prime Minister was already at one of its lowest points. It will now be even worse.

Today, Mr Blair has, for the first time, a Cabinet of his own choice. Once, that might have signified his strength. In truth, it signifies his weakness. The Prime Minister is not merely a lame duck; he is terminally crippled.

Thursday night’s local election results were perhaps the worst of all worlds for Labour. If they had lost more council seats – something around 400 councillors - the clamour for Tony Blair to quit would have been overwhelming.

But while losing 250 Labour councillors, from an already low base, is a terrible result, it is not sufficiently damaging to force him to leave Downing Street immediately.

So an impotent Blair is able to cling on, desperately reshuffling his Cabinet to prove to the world that he is 'in charge'.

The tragedy is that there are no new ideas for the new Cabinet to implement. And even if there were, Mr Blair would be unable to put them into effect. His supposed great legacy, the Education Bill, was hacked away at so badly to get it through the Labour backbenches that it is barely worth bothering with - and it was still only able to pass thanks to the Conservatives’ support.

At the time of the Commons vote on the bill, David Cameron was criticised for his tactics and was forced to watch the Conservatives’ opinion poll ratings beginning to stagnate. There were mild rumblings of discontent within his party at his strategy of seeming more Blairite than Blair.

But Thursday's elections represented votes of real people - and by gaining a series of councils and 40 per cent of the poll, the Tories performed at the top end of their expectations.

They still have a long way to go - the North remains a Conservative wasteland - but the Cameron strategy now looks secure. It is no longer entirely fanciful for Conservatives to contemplate a return to power.

That is doubly true with Mr Blair remaining in office. The last thing Mr Cameron wanted was Tony Blair to be forced out. A commander who is despised by his troops is a far easier target to attack than a newly installed leader, buoyed by his troops’ support.

This means that, in the short term, the real loser from both the elections and the Cabinet reshuffle is Gordon Brown. The longer his succession is delayed, the more damaged will be his inheritance and the more damaged will be Labour’s morale.

If Labour is to pull itself round, the Chancellor needs to take over soon.

With every passing day, Labour’s internal wounds grow deeper, and the Conservatives grow stronger. The electorate know that Tony Blair now stands for little bar the lame and morally bankrupt occupation of office.

(18)

It is tempting to think that it doesn’t matter that John “Two Jags” Prescott can now also be dubbed “Two Shags”. We did not, after all, need to know about the failings in his private life to know about the failings in his political life. That he is a political buffoon, albeit one who wields immense power as Deputy Prime Minister, with an enormous department and the consequent ability to wreak havoc, is there for everyone to see.

But even if one leaves aside issues of his personal morality and concentrates instead on politics, the affair does matter, for two key reasons.

Like politicians, bureaucrats too are entitled to a private life. So, the fact that we pay the salary of Mr Prescott’s former mistress, a civil servant in his office, is not, of itself, damning. Workplace affairs are commonplace.

What turns it, however, from a private to a public matter is that the affair was conducted, according to the reports, almost entirely in Mr Prescott’s Admiralty House flat — a flat paid for and maintained by the taxpayer. We have, in other words, handed over our taxes to facilitate Mr Prescott’s sex life. That does not strike me as the most efficient use of taxpayers’ money.

But there is a further problem with his behaviour. The Deputy Prime Minister has only ever had one real function. He is there to keep the Prime Minister’s relations with the Labour Party on track. Mr Prescott is the man who smooths its ruffled feathers.

But just as Mr Blair relies on Mr Prescott to keep the Labour Party off his back, so the Labour Party has been relying on Mr Prescott to do the decent thing when, as now seems inevitable, the party is confronted with disastrous local election results next month.

Mr Prescott is Labour’s version of the Conservatives’ men in grey suits, the man on whom many in the party have been relying to confront the Prime Minister with the awkward truth that it is time to go.

The Deputy Prime Minister long ago lost any credibility he might once have had with the public. The problem for Labour is that he has now lost any credibility he might once have had with the Prime Minister. A word from John Prescott in Mr Blair’s ear will now provoke little more than the giggles.

If Mr Blair is a busted flush, Mr Prescott has become a total waste of space.

(6)

The story I am being told is that, even as the PM prepared to back his Home Secretary at PMQs this morning, the feeling in Number 10 was that today will be Charles Clarke's last day in office and that a reshuffle was already being pepared for.

Alan Johnson will be Home Secretary.

You read it here first.

(12)

I don't have anything very original to say on Charles Clarke's latest debacle. But heh, that's no reason not to opine.

When I first saw the news yesterday (I was in Brussels) I thought it was a huge cock-up, but that the days of Crichel Down responsibility had long passed, for good or ill. Huge political problem, yes, but not a result of any direct wrongdoing by Mr Clarke. He really did not need to resign.

But that has clearly changed, with last night's revealtion that even after he knew what had been going on - or, rather, I suppose, what had not been going on - in the Home Office, still no action was taken and some 200 foreign prisoners were being released in this government's unique interpretation of care in the community.

Charles Clarke no longer has a leg to stand on, and I cannot see how he can make a credible case that this is not now his own, direct, fault. He did not take chage of his department and clear up a mistake which he knew was being made. He can no longer plead ignorance.

It's not even a question of honour, as some have put it. It's about the most frightening form of incompetence. Other than opening the prison gates himself before their sentences were served (and on that note, I'd love to know how many of them were out on license or parole) you really couldn't get much worse than this.

Charles Clarke simply has to go.

(4)

Last week, Tony Blair’s holiday host, Silvio Berlusconi, was kicked out of office in Italy. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Mr Berlusconi’s probity is – to put it charitably – in doubt, it was not his alleged corruption which did for him.

He is leaving office for political reasons. Italian voters have had enough of him.

When Mr Blair leaves Number Ten, the opposite may turn out to be true. The Prime Minister long ago lost the support of Labour MPs. If it was up to them, he would by now be history.

But if Mr Blair does leave office much before the end of the current parliament, it may have nothing to do with the loss of political support. It is no longer fanciful to suggest that when he goes, it may because of what emerges when -and if he has to help Scotland Yard with their enquiries.

When a Scottish Nationalist MP, Angus MacNeil, made a complaint to the police about alleged infringements of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act of 1925, it was dismissed by most commentators – and certainly by the government – as a publicity stunt.

But it is now clear that the police are taking their duty to investigate extremely seriously. A fact demonstrated by last Thursday’s arrest of Des Smith, a former adviser to the government on city academies, who was caught on tape by an undercover reporter promising honours and peerages in return for cash donations to support academies.

As the Watergate scandal showed, seemingly trivial or obscure events can unravel with unimaginable consequences. A small break-in at the Democratic Party office in the Watergate building was a minor story which was barely noticed at the time. But when two reporters started to investigate the events, they uncovered a scandal which led to the resignation of the President.

The event which triggered the current police investigation into Labour’s alleged corruption was equally trivial. Speaking in the Commons one day, Geoff Hoon, the Leader of the House, laughed off with disdain the ‘coincidence’ of big donors to the Labour Party also being awarded peerages.

Despite his title, Mr Hoon is a minor political figure of no real importance. However, his arrogant dismissal of the blatant corruption which lies behind Labour’s award of honours so enraged Mr MacNeil that he made his pivotal complaint to the police.

Even without that, the newspapers would still be full of what have become almost daily revelations. But this government is well versed at brushing aside exposes of its members’ behaviour.

News reports and investigations are one thing. A police enquiry, however, is of an altogether different order of importance, with consequences out of the government’s hands.

The police have not – yet – been entirely nobbled by the government. And tumbleweed-like, the complaint of an obscure Scottish Nationalist MP has unleashed an inquiry which could expose the very heart of Labour’s darkness.

Police have apparently seized Cabinet Office papers and emails. It is clear that they are determined to get to the bottom of the issue. They are intent on interviewing Lord Levy, the Prime Minister’s chief fundraiser (nicknamed Lord Cashpoint), and it is clear that they are determined to get to the bottom of the issue.

So what might Lord Levy tell them?

It is no longer possible to say with weary cynicism that the police’s investigation will lead to prosecutions. There is, however, a growing sense of anticipation within the Westminster village that the police could be on the point of uncovering hard evidence of Labour’s corruption.

If that is indeed so, the smug British view that our system is superior to corrupt continental politics will be seen for the delusion that it is. The likes of Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi may – rightly - be condemned for their venality, and for clinging to office to avoid prosecution, but we have a government which has introduced its own form of corruption into the fabric of politics.
What is most damning about the tape recorded words of Des Smith is that he makes explicit what has long been regarded as implicit in the honours system: that there is a menu with prices.
In his conversation with the undercover reporter, he said that a donor who gave to “one or two” academies might be given an OBE or a knighthood, and one who supported five would be “a certainty” for a peerage.
When the reporter feigned surprise - “Really? Just for getting involved with the academies?” – Smith replied: “Just for, yes, they call them ‘services to education’”.
He went on: “Oh yeah, yeah . . . it’s a nomination and then the prime minister would write to somebody and say we’re thinking of nominating you, but we’ll choose the honour.
It will either be an OBE, a CBE or a knighthood . . . But also what would be great is, you could go to the House of Lords and . . . become a lord.”
The Government says, in effect, that Mr Smith was hallucinating and that his claims are nonsense. The proof of the pudding, however, is in the eating, and the nominations for peerages and other honours bear out what Mr Smith said.
Only this weekend, the Government was forced to admit that two donors – Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley - were nominated because of their support for academies.
Some will say, with good reason, that it is entirely appropriate that philanthropists who give money to fund education are put forward for honours.
Indeed. But where does that leave the realms of desirable public acknowledgment for charitable behaviour, and enter the realms of corruption of the political process?
The words of a senior Downing Street source, quoted yesterday are particularly revealing: “What we wanted was people with expertise in academies as working peers, taking the Labour whip, who could actively contribute with a massive amount of knowledge to the debate on education in the House of Lords.”
In other words, the Government was appointing as peers the donors who made the existence of academies possible, with a vested interest in their success, specifically in order to influence votes in the upper chamber.

If that is not corruption of the political process, what is?

I have used the word ‘Government’ here somewhat coyly. In this context, by ‘Government’ one really means just one person: Tony Blair.

Academies are one of the Prime Minister’s flagship policies. And the funding of academies is simply one aspect of the corruption at the heart of Mr Blair’s abuse of the honours system. Perhaps still more shady is the funding of the Labour Party itself

You do not have to take my word to pin this at Mr Blair’s door. Yesterday, sources close to Lord Levy suggested to one Sunday newspaper that he was against the large secret loans which funded Labour, but that he was urged by Mr Blair to accept them.

The Prime Minister appears to hold the rest of the country in contempt, expecting us to believe that the fact that large donors to Labour and Labour projects end up in the House of Lords is entirely coincidental.

Well, Mr Blair, we were not all born yesterday. When something appears blindingly obvious, it is more often than not because it is true.

If the police unearth hard evidence of Labour’s corruption of politics, we will soon be in the midst of the greatest political scandal of modern times.

But even if the police are unable to find enough evidence to prosecute anyone, it will not mean the stench of corruption has disappeared. There does not need to have been criminal wrongdoing for there to have been political wrongdoing.

And we already have more than enough evidence to show that the Prime Minister is up to his neck in that.

It is almost impossible to overstate the chaos which has engulfed the Labour Party in the past week. The Blairites are openly attacking the Chancellor. The Brownites are ranting against the Prime Minister. The Labour Party itself, caught in the middle, is being spun around from pillar to post without an anchor.

The rest of us can only stand back and gawp, like rubber neckers at the scene of a car crash, at the extent to which a party, whose electoral success has been built on awesome internal discipline, has been reduced to chaos.

The supposed substance of the latest rows - the contents of the Budget, the party's local election plan, the future of the state pension and poisonous remarks from ministers to journalists - are not the real point. They are merely spurious pretexts for the rows.

The real point is that Mr Brown wants Mr Blair out, as soon as possible - and Mr Blair does not want to go. The rest is flannel.

The spat between Mr Blair and Mr Brown has developed in a 12-year long crescendo of intensity. However, matters have now reached such a level of passion, on both sides, that the Government itself is near to being out of control.

The pattern has been the same ever since Mr Blair became leader of Labour Party, a position which Mr Brown has always felt was rightfully his.

Stories of rows and plots - almost always true - are then followed by reports that the two men have stared at the precipice and decided to co-operate for their own good. And then the row kicks off again, with ever greater force and ever greater venom. And so on.

The difference now is that the glue which has held New Labour together has finally come unstuck.

That glue, of course, is the recognition by both Mr Blair and Mr Brown that a fight to the death means just that - political death for both. So long as they were willing to bite their tongues after one of these regular bust-ups, at least, a working relationship of some sort could be maintained.

That is no longer the case. Mr Blair led the way, telling an Australian interviewer that he might have made a mistake in announcing his intention not to fight for a fourth term. That comment can only have been a deliberate act of provocation, given that Mr Brown was already near breaking point in his desperation to see Mr Blair depart.

With the Chancellor having made it clear, using every means - bar actually saying it - that he wants the Prime Minister gone, pronto, the two men’s courtiers have been given licence to step up the fight. In the past, they would only be let off a part of their leashes, and then reigned in. Now, these attack dogs are going full pelt at each others’ throats.

During the last seven days, there have been a string of stories emanating from the Blairites in response to the Chancellor’s agitation. One minister close to the Prime Minister (alleged by the Mail on Sunday yesterday to be James Purnell) told one journalist over lunch that Mr Brown was plotting to oust Mr Blair. As if that was not demonstration enough of how incendiary things have become, whispers then surfaced from the Blairites that the Chancellor had deliberately sabotaged his own Budget by withdrawing the £200 pensioners’ council tax discount so that Labour would do badly in next month’s local elections, thus forcing Mr Blair to quit.

This weekend the febrile atmosphere was played out in the papers, with all sorts of wild speculation being put forward, from a suggestion by the former Labour spin doctor Derek Draper that Mr Blair will resign as Labour leader, but stay on as PM, to suggestions that he will soon name a date for his departure – but one much further away than Mr Brown would accept. Truly, the rumour mill is now in full swing.

The latest arena for vituperation is over pensions. The Chancellor has resisted the recommendation made by Lord Adair Turner and the Pensions Commission that the state pension should once again be linked to the level of earnings, which would entail a huge increase in public money.

Restoring the link would be hugely popular with Labour MPs, since it was first broken under Mrs Thatcher and its restoration has been a left-wing demand ever since.

The Prime Minister has let it be known that he favours restoration.

Suddenly, a new battlefront has emerged which reveals that the fight between the Blairites and the Brownites is about far more than personalities. The truth is that it not only undermines the future of the Labour Party - which matters only to those who are part of the gravy train - but the good governance of the country itself.

Above all, Britain's future prosperity is at stake, and it is deeply worrying that critical decisions are being made in the context of a poisonous political fight - not on their intrinsic merits for the good of voters.

In the case of pensions, for instance, Mr Brown’s stance is entirely right
- restoring the link with earnings would be economically foolhardy and would destroy at a stroke any notion of good housekeeping. But because the Prime Minister is now searching for weapons to use against his Chancellor, he is throwing economic sense to the winds.

That is why this festering feud must now be resolved. Mr Blair is a busted flush, unable to pass the legislation he claims he is in office to secure.

The time has come for him to step aside and let Mr Brown get on with things his way - for good or ill.

Alice Miles has a brilliant column in The Times tomorrow, which links Tessa Jowell and Patricia Hewitt, the political culture in which we now live and the management of the NHS. I won't extract any of it because it has to be read in full.

Rachel Sylvester hits the nail on the head:

The whole thing fuels the impression that New Labour has become semi-detached from the real world. Last week, a former Downing Street aide brushed away the criticisms of the Jowell-Mills finances on the grounds that "everyone out there deals with hedge funds". Actually, they don't. Like Tony and Cherie's freebie holidays, Peter Mandelson's home loan and David Blunkett's share-dealing, the "Jowellgate" saga adds to the perception that New Labour has been dazzled by money.

Ministers who go to expense account dinners at the Wolseley with millionaire businessmen find it difficult to get by on their cabinet salaries. Now even the apparently cleanest member of the Cabinet has been tarred with the "sleaze" brush.

I am genuinely mystified by the fuss surrounding Blair's Parky interview. Even sober, sensible people such as Paul Linford (whose blog is rather good) are at it.

Here's what the PM said:

In the end, there is a judgement that, I think if you have faith about these things, you realise that judgement is made by other people... and if you believe in God, it's made by God as well.

How on earth can that be construed as saying that God told him to invade Iraq or that he believes that God gave approval for the action, to paraphrase most of the criticisms?

All Blair said was that, as a Christian - the same would apply to any religiously observant person - he is answerable to God in the end for his actions. That is about as bland a statement of the obvious as it is possible to get, beyond the 'admission' that Blair believes in God, which we all knew anyway.

It doesn't mean God told him what to do. It doesn't even mean God appoved of what he did. It means, come the day he meets his maker, he will have to answer for his actions.

In fact he even prefaces the mention of God by talking about how his actions are and will be judged by 'other people' - in the here and now, in other words.

It's one thing - and perfectly legitimate - to criticise Blair for his actions. It's quite another - and totally illegitimate - to put upon his words a construction which they simply cannot bear, and then lay into him for that.

When the historians look back, it may well be that yesterday, 28th February 2006, is seen as the day that the political pendulum swung forever away from Tony Blair, and firmly in David Cameron’s direction.

Yesterday saw two apparently unrelated events: first, the publication of the government's Education Bill; and secondly, the Conservative Party’s statement consigning Margaret Thatcher to history and 'applying our values to new challenges'.

The documents are very different. The Conservative statement is entirely about spin. The Education Bill, on the other hand, is all about substance.

But so much in politics today is about timing and symbolism. And, taken together, the two events are perhaps the most striking indication so far of how power has been drained from the Prime Minister - and looks increasingly like ending up in Mr Cameron’s hands.

For the fact is that the Education Bill, which is designed to give schools more freedom from government - and which the Prime Minister has insisted is the 'crux' of his reforming agenda – is almost certain to cause Tony Blair the largest back-bench rebellion over a domestic issue in his nine years as leader, even though the bill has already been emasculated to woo Labour rebels.

At the same time, David Cameron's statement - with its pat phrases about a dynamic economy, wealth and opportunity, a strong society built on strong foundations, and a sustainable environment - is his boldest demonstration yet that he is determined to shake off the image of the Tories that has made them so unpopular for so long.

Let us first deal with Mr Blair and his Education Bill and explain why its publication has convinced me that the Prime Minister is finally up the creek, without a paddle.

I do not say this lightly - such is the Prime Minister's political genius that it has always been a mistake in the past to write him off.

But no bill in his time as Prime Minister has been the focus of such open hostility from his own backbenchers.

This crisis has been boiling up since Mr Blair’s third election victory last June. Immediately afterwards, he declared that he wanted his legacy to be the long-promised radical reshaping of the schools system.

At Labour’s annual conference last September, he lamented that 'Every time I’ve ever introduced a reform in government, I wish in retrospect I had gone further'. This time around, things would be different.

A few days later - the week before the White Paper was published – Mr Blair trumpeted it: 'By the end of the third term I want every school that wants to be, to be able to be an independent non-fee paying state school with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents at the school want.'

When the White Paper was finally published in October, it was plain to see that Mr Blair was, once again, promising much and delivering little. Instead of a series of bold, radical propoals, the White Paper was a compromise, stepping back from Mr Blair’s rhetoric to make sure that its proposals were acceptable to Labour MPs.

But even a White Paper which pulled its punches was anathema to the antediluvian Labour backbenches. More than 50 Labour MPs immediately made clear their objections to the modest proposals to give schools greater autonomy.

Yesterday’s publication of the bill itself is yet another attempt to compromise with the rebels. But the tactic will not save Mr Blair’s position, because their opposition is a toxic mix of principled - albeit misguided - hostility to the very idea of school autonomy, and hostility to Mr Blair himself.

The debate around the Education Bill is not merely about education policy; it is also a smokescreen which those who are fed up with Mr Blair as Prime Minister are using to give their hostility a seemingly honourable focus.

Assuming that David Cameron does indeed give the bill his support, there are now only two possible outcomes, both of which are disastrous for Mr Blair.

One is that the Prime Minister somehow persuades enough of his own party to vote in favour of the bill, and he manages to get it passed. But so what if he does? It is not remotely the bill he originally wanted. Even if the Education Bill is passed, it will make only a modest difference to schools. The bill is, after all, a concession based on a compromise.

And if that is the best Mr Blair can manage to get past the Labour benches, what on earth is the point of him staying?

But there is another possible outcome - one which is far more likely and far more dangerous for the Prime Minister.

That is that he cannot get enough support from Labour MPs to pass the bill and has to rely instead on Conservative votes. Even the direst predictions of the consequences of such a turn of events do not come close to appreciating how catastrophic this would be for Mr Blair.

It would unleash a firestorm of pent up hatred and rancour. His position would be untenable.

Accusations would fly that he was the new Ramsay Macdonald, who formed a Nation al Government in coalition with the Conservatives and whose name is a by-word within Labour for treachery.

For 12 years, Labour MPs have had to grin and bear having a leader who brought them power but who most cannot stand. If the bill which has become the focal point for that hatred was passed only because of Conservative support, it would be like forcing the lid off a pressure cooker.

The hostility of many Labour MPs to the Iraq war would be as nothing compared with the reaction. The atmosphere leading to Baroness Thatcher’s dumping and the hostility which did for IDS would be walks in the park in comparison.

My prediction is that, if the education bill was passed only because of Conservative votes, Mr Blair would be gone by the summer. He is already weak. Such a vote would destroy him for good.

Which leads us to David Cameron. The Conservative Party leader’s every step has been designed to show that his party has changed.

Attacks from the likes of Norman Tebbit are grist to that mill, making Mr Cameron’s point for him, just as accusations of ‘flip flopping’ from Labour confirm the idea that the Conservatives are indeed different now.

Mr Cameron’s aim is to pull off the same trick which Tony Blair managed in 1994 - persuading non-political people who for years dismissed his party as not really their cup of tea, to regard him and it as decent and the embodiment of commonsense.

When I talk to my friends, it is striking how many who voted against the Conservatives in recent elections, not on specific policies but because of a general feeling that the party was somehow not really for them, now look at David Cameronand think ‘I like him’.

Yesterday’s statement of the party’s values, proclaiming that 'We must be a modern, compassionate Conservative Party. We must be a voice for change, optimism and hope', was part of that process.

Accusations that it is vacuous, that it doesn’t spell out a single policy and that it is not as bold as Mr Blair’s renunciationof Labour’s Clause IV commitment to nationalisation, all miss the point.

It is designed with one sole purpose - to be part of the process of showing that Conservatives are not aliens from the planet Zarg but normal people, like you and me.

It is deliberately consensual and deliberately mainstream. It deliberately says nothing much beyond ‘we’re normal’.

On the face of things, 28th February was memorable only as Pancake Day. Beneath the surface, however, the very foundations of politics were being transformed.

I read Built To Last, Dave's new mission statement, this morning. All day a thought has been knawing away at me. I knew it reminded me of something, but for the life of me I couldn't place it.

And then, bingo. The upside of one's life being in chaos as a result of moving is that things one hasn't looked at for years suddenly rise to the top of a pile. And there it was:

Everybody has the right to the basic necessities such as housing, education and healthcare in the form of public services and a minimum income sufficient to maintain a decent standard of living.

...The Xxxx Xx Xxxxxx recognsies the dangers of damaging the ecological balance of the world. Xxx xxxxx will advocate the conservation of natural resources, habitats and species.

Any ideas?

It's the Editorial Charter from the loony-left News On Sunday, one of the great newspaper fiascos of all time. New Conservatives, eh? More like Old Revolutionary Socialists, it seems.

Dunfermline is a bit 'last week's story', but it shouldn't be. It matters. By far the best commentary I've read is at Arthur's Seat, which adds all sorts of insights a Sassenach such as myself doesn't normally get.

The Liberal Democrats are, with good reason, cock-a-hoop after Thursday night’s stunning by-election victory in Dunfermline. In one of Labour’s safest seats, they turned a Labour majority of 11,500 into a LibDem majority of 1,800 - a 16 per cent swing.

Even for a party which specialises in overturning the odds and winning unlikely by-elections, the Dunfermline result stands out.

Given the result, after the weeks of unsavoury publicity which the party has endured this year, it might seem to prove that all publicity really is good publicity.

But before the LibDems go too over the top with their celebrations, two salutary facts need to be born in mind. First, for all the astonishing by-election victories the party has celebrated, the electorate has a habit of reverting to normal service at the following general elections and turfing out the by-election winner.
The party has never come close to replicating individual by-election victories across the country.

Second – and this is what really matters - the vote was not a vote for the LibDems. It was a classic protest vote, using the LibDems as a vehicle through which to give the governing party a good kicking.

There were a variety of local issues which need not detain us long; most notably the unpopularity of proposals to quadruple toll charges on the Forth road bridge and the closure of a local printer manufacturer with the loss of 700 jobs.

More generally, however, the voters of Dunfermline were expressing their dissatisfaction with Labour in government, both at Westminster and Holyrood. And, especially, their anger at being taken for granted by Labour.

In England, Labour has eclipsed all other parties since 1997. But in Scotland there is a very different atmosphere. Labour does not just win general elections there; Labour is the Scottish establishment. The party dominates Scottish politics and society. Its supporters run the arts, the media and the professions.

And who represents the Labour establishment more perfectly today than any other figure? A certain Gordon Brown, who just happens to live in Dunfermline, and who played a close and constant part in Labour’s by-election campaign.

The voters were metaphorically sticking two fingers up to Labour, and thus to Gordon Brown as the embodiment of Labour.

The big question, on which the wider importance of the result hinges, is whether those two fingers will remain raised or whether, having given the party a wake up call, they will return to the fold come the next election.

At the very least, however, the fact that voters want to give Labour a kicking is good news not just for the LibDems but also for the Conservatives, despite a dismal performance in Dunfermline.

However unlikely a LibDem victory seemed, the party is nonetheless part of the governing coalition with Labour in Scotland. It is strong and familiar there. The same is certainly not true for the Conservatives, who have only one of the 72 Scottish MPs, and for whom Scotland is now a wasteland.

So it was more likely that Gordon Brown would announce he was stepping down from government to become manager of the England football team than that the Conservatives would do well, let alone win, on Thursday.

If messages are be gleaned from the Dunfermline result, what matters is not the Conservative performance, or even the LibDems’, but Labour’s. And that was abysmal. If the anti-Labour mood of the by-election voters is part of a wider feeling – which the national opinion polls now putting the Conservatives consistently ahead indicate it is – then the Conservatives can take heart.

They can also take heart from the humiliation of Gordon Brown, Mr Cameron’s near-certain opponent at the next election. Yesterday I put to someone close to Tony Blair the idea that the Prime Minister would, after Dunfermline, face even more trouble from the backbenches. “Are you mad?” he replied. “Tony thinks it’s hilarious. Gordon’s the loser. It was Gordon’s campaign, in Gordon’s territory. And he couldn’t even win there! It means Tony’s safe for another year.”

In truth, both men are losers because Labour itself is in trouble. Mr Blair will certainly feel the pressure from the party after such a loss, but the naïve idea of some Labourites that everything will again be glad, confident morning once Gordon Brown takes over has been give a bracing dose of reality.

The usual rule of general elections is that oppositions do not win them – governments lose them. The Dunfermline result shows that the wheels may at last be coming off the Labour machine, with the public tiring of the government.

That makes all the more sensible David Cameron’s strategy of presenting the Conservatives as a mainstream party of the centre. The electorate had probably tired of Labour last June, but they disliked the Tories even more. If they carry on liking David Cameron come the next election, the game may already be up for Gordon Brown, Prime Minister.

All hail the glory that is Hilary Armstrong! Not for Ms Armstrong the grubby behind-Speaker’s-chair deals that characterise the behaviour of previous chief whips. Not for Ms Armstrong the demeaning scramble for last-minute votes to push through the Government’s legislation. Not for Ms Armstrong the banality of calculating Labour MPs’ support for the executive’s proposals.

No, none of that. The government Chief Whip has a far more rounded appreciation of her place in the British constitution. Walter Bagehot wrote of the “dignified” and the “efficient” parts of the constitution. How he would have relished the challenge that the neither dignified nor efficient Ms Armstrong offers to his analysis. She has, you see, created a much-needed constitutional niche for herself. She has made clear the importance of a third element of the constitution, the “completely useless”.

Though some may accuse her of breathtaking incompetence, wiser observers recognise that she works to a far more important agenda than the Government’s business. She works for the good of the nation.

The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill was, as she clearly knew, no more than a sop to the Muslim Council of Britain — and, as such, not worthy of passage through the House. Ms Armstrong’s cunning plan was, as is surely obvious, to appear to be a total waste of space unable to secure the Government’s business. But in reality she was securing instead the needs of the country.

Masquerading as a buffoon, incapable of basic maths, she is in truth a towering political figure to whom the nation ought to offer regular prayers of thanks. Praise be to Hilary Armstrong!

She demonstrates an equally important appreciation of the needs of her “line manager”, as a woman of her intellect and savvy must surely think of the Prime Minister. She knows how important it is that the nation is governed by a man properly rested, and takes no heed of those small-minded souls who consider that the PM’s presence in the House to vote on his own legislation may be a sensible precaution.

What nonsense! Nothing could be more important for a chief whip than securing the Prime Minister sufficient time for sleep. And yet there are, bizarrely, those who are now calling for her replacement. Do they not realise there is an education Bill coming up?

Ian Dale has been kind enough to include this site in his 'Top 25 Political Blogs' so I should return the favour and point out that his own site is always well worth a look, with regular postings on all sorts of political news.

Congratulations to Rory Bremner for one of the most brilliant spoofs of our time. Yesterday, Downing Street supposedly released a video showing a day in the life of the Prime Minister, with clips of him playing footie with kids, holding a press conference with Vladimir Putin and talking to the camera about the stresses and rewards of his job.

Anyone who has watched Rory Bremner’s TV show, however, will instantly have recognised the satirist’s trademark impression of Mr Blair. The faux-mateyness, the trendy stop-start camerawork and the meaningless verbiage which Mr Bremner pulls off so brilliantly – it was all there.

Somehow the media all fell for it, reporting that the video came from Number Ten and really was of Mr Blair. But, surely, it would have been taking New Labour drivel to extremes to think that, at the beginning of a critical year for the party and the country, all Mr Blair considered worth sharing with us was his thoughts on how many hours he works every week.

What’s that? Eh? It really was Mr Blair? That really is all he wants to tell us?

You have to wonder what purpose the Prime Minister thinks was served by the release of yesterday’s 3 minute video. We know he works long hours. We know he meets world statesmen. We know it’s a big job. We don’t need a special video just so he can make the rather pointless implicit contrast between man of action, man of the world Tony Blair and boyish, inexperienced David Cameron.

It’s a pointless contrast because Mr Blair was himself the ‘victim’ of the same tactic from John Major, and we know how brilliantly successful it was for Mr Major, who led his party to a record-breaking defeat at the hands of ‘Bambi’ Blair.

It’s equally pointless because Mr Blair will be long gone by the time Mr Cameron has to face the electorate.

And it’s worse than pointless because the contrast can work in reverse. When Gordon Brown takes over as Prime Minister, he will look tired, uninspiring and, as Mr Cameron put it this weekend, a “creature of the past” – and the new Conservative leader may come off much better from such a contrast.

When Mr Blair did offer something resembling a clear statement in the video, he seemed to be living in fantasy land. “What is worthwhile is getting things done”, he told us. “When you get things done and see results”.

Does he mean getting things done in transport, when yesterday saw huge fare increased for the same deplorable service?

Does he mean getting things done in welfare reform, when a government has done little more than destroy a pensions system which was the envy of Europe and create chaos with shambolic tax credits?

Does he mean getting things done in healthcare, where record levels of spending are producing productivity falls?

Or does he mean getting things done in education, where Mr Blair’s political position is so weak that he is struggling to implement even an already limp, watered down white paper?

Poor Mr Blair. He offered so much hope and had such promise. But the reality of leading the Labour Party has frustrated his efforts at reform. Now he is reduced, in his last spurt, to soft-focus videos showing how hard he works.

Intriguing answer from Peter Mandelson this morning. Asked by John Humphrys if it was true that Tony Blair thinks of David Cameron rather than Gordon Brown as his best successor, Mandelson did not say, as one might have expected, 'nonsense', 'drivel', 'don't be so stupid', or some such withering dismissal. He came out with this:

I can't imagine in what possible circumstances that might be the case.

Hmmm. Remember Michael Heseltine saying that he could "see no circumstances" under which he would challenge Margaret Thatcher for the Tory leadership?

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, chose yesterday to give the Labour Party rank and file an early Christmas present. In an interview for a Sunday newspaper, he railed against the education reform proposals in the government's controversial White Paper.

The proposals are controversial not because they are especially bold. In reality, they offer only a modest improvement - giving schools a little bit more independence and freedom. But to most of the Labour Party, wedded blindly to the old system of comprehensives, even that is a step too far.

So by revealing that he is against the reforms, Mr Prescott was declaring that he places his loyalty to party ideology far above any loyalty he may still feel towards the Prime Minister, who has thus been made to look as isolated from his own Deputy over education policy as he is from his Chancellor over the managment of the economy.

The fundamental split between Mr Blair's New Labour philosophy and the views of many Labour MPs represented by the Deputy Prime Minister are now glaringly apparent.

In fact, calling it a split is inaccurate. Speaking on the radio, Lord Hattersley - a passionate defender of the educational status quo - said that only two people ever believed in the reforms - Mr Blair and Lord(Andrew) Adonis, the Schools Minister. He is right.

It is not that Labour is split. Rather, it is that the weakness of Mr Blair's position is now exposed. Even when he was riding high as Prime Minister, Mr Blair was unable to get through major school reform. Now that he is 'in office but not in power' (to borrow a phrase once used of John Major's last days at Number 10) his position is hopeless and he is at the mercy of what might be termed 'Real Labour'.

The irony is that in giving his reasons for opposing the reforms, Mr Prescott has made all too clear his own lack of understanding about the matter. In his inevitably convoluted style, Mr Prescott said: 'Middle-class parents are concerned, and rightly so, about the quality of education for their children, which sadly is not the same for working-class parents. If you set up a school and it becomes a good school, the great danger is that's the place they [the middle-classes] want to go to.'

In other words, middle class parents are right to be worried about the education of their children, but if they help improve a local school, they must not be allowed to reap the rewards.

This twisted ideology is, sadly, still alive and kicking right through the Labour party at large.

When Labour took office in 1997, Andrew Adonis and I wrote a book called which argued that the flight of the middle classes from the state system was depriving it of those very people who could make a real difference in helping to lift standards across the board. To help redress this, we argued for reforms which would give parents more control, and schools more independence.

Mr Prescott's - and most of the Labour Party's - response has instead been to attack those parents are able to lift school standards because they are, in his words, middle class.

Turning education policy into the frontline of class war in this way is not only wrong, it is deeply counter-productive.

It is not just the middle classes who are failed by the state system. It is, even more so, the less well off. The difference is that the better off have an escape route - private schools. The poor are stuck with what they are given.

Such understanding, alas, has been swamped beneath a resurgence of class hatred among the Labour benches. It has been fuelled in part by the revival of the Tory party under David Cameron, whose own privileged background has been seized upon as an easy target.

As Mr Prescott went on to say yesterday: 'We [Labour] are always better against class. When it's a class issue - I always feel better fighting class anyway - bring the spirit back into the Labour Party.'

Once again, he could not be more wrong. The great selling point of New Labour was that it rose above such old class-based politics. And while declaring his true prejudices may have earned Mr Prescott the affection of the party faithful, it will only serve to fuel further disenchantment for Labour among the voting public.

The country, as a whole, has moved on from such spiteful ideology. There is no appetite for a new class war among the electorate at large, only an interest in which political party is able to improve life for everyone.

And here, there is another surprise for Mr Prescott.

A poll published yesterday showed that the Tory party, under David Cameron, is now 9 points ahead of Labour. Despite the Labour party machine's best efforts to stoke up resentment of Cameron's 'toff' credentials, it is now clear they matter not a jot to the ordinary public.

What does matters is that we have a party in power that is now so paralysed by internecine rivalries and ancient prejudices that it is incapable of effective Government for the modern age.

I think this is what's known as making mischief.

(Mind you, it shows there's a downside even to Cameron's Conservatives:

My Conservative Party believes passionately in green politics...

Oh well. I thought it was all too good to be true.)

Westminster has been abuzz this week with rumours that Charles Kennedy is on his way out as Liberal Democrat leader, forced from office as a result of a rebellion by members of what his party ludicrously styles its Shadow Cabinet.

But for all Mr Kennedy’s manifest flaws, the identity of the leader is the least of the party’s problems. The Lib Dems are a make-believe party with a make-believe philosophy, a make-believe reputation and make-believe MPs. That its main spokesmen choose to refer to themselves as Shadow Cabinet members is par for the make-believe course.

They are make-believe because their only purpose is protest against the two main parties. In areas where Labour barely exists, such as the South West, they are the anti-Conservative party. Where the Conservatives are effectively absent, such as some inner cities, they are the anti-Labour party. Lib Dem MPs are make-believe MPs because they are elected not for what they represent but for what they do not.

It is not that party members have no philosophical stances; it is that they have too many. Some — the beard and sandals brigade — are as left-wing as most Labour members. Others — the so-called “Orange Book” liberals — are genuine Gladstonian liberals. The rest are an incoherent mixture of the two.

As the ultimate failure of Tony Blair’s attempt to fuse Real Labour’s urge to tax and spend with his own new Labour outlook shows, some divides are simply irreconcilable.

The removal of Mr Kennedy will make not a blind bit of difference. Sir Menzies Campbell, the bookies’ favourite, is a typically British construct: a man respected not because of what he says but how he says it. He might appear to have gravitas, but on every issue of substance he is away with the fairies, such as his passion for ceding power to the EU and his denial of a militant Islam threat.

Simon Hughes’s incoherent brand of populist community politics managed to get only 14.8 per cent of the vote in the London mayoral election. And Mark Oaten, who does at least have a genuinely liberal philosophy, is disliked by most of the party precisely because of that philosophy — as is true of any other Orange Book liberal who might stand.

Charles Kennedy might well be a waste of space. But his party’s main problem is that it is the Lib Dem party that he leads.

There is a useful little mental test to determine a politician’s worth. If they did not exist, would it be necessary to invent them?

If you want to know why the knives are now being sharpened for Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, it is because there is absolutely no-one - least of all his fellow LibDem MPs - who knows what he stands for.

The truth is that the whole point of his leadership has become a mystery and if he did not exist, no-one would notice.

Of course, the LibDems' current crisis is much more deep-seated. Kennedy’s troubles are profound, but they have suddenly been highlighted by the emergence of another front rank politician.

David Cameron's election last week as Conservative Party leader has, at a stroke, changed the dynamics of British politics and signed Mr Kennedy’s political death warrant.

For, until now, most of 'Chat Show Charlie's' time as party leader (having taken over from Paddy Ashdown in August 1999) has been spent facing a moribund Conservative Party and an increasingly distrusted Labour government.

The Conservatives have been purposeless - and, in reality, leaderless - since 1990, when they removed Baroness Thatcher. Meanwhile, New Labour may have won a second election landslide in 2001, but that was only achieved because there was no credible opposition and because voters thought Tony Blair should be given a further opportunity to bring about the changes he promised in 1997.

By default, sections of the electorate turned to the LibDems as the lesser of three evils. This new-found support was enough to give the party 22 per cent of the vote in this year's General Election and saw 62 LibDem MPs returned to Westminster.

Buoyed by this artificially inflated backing, Kennedy has managed to portray himself as the personification of his party's membersship: a bunch of jolly, sensible, nice people who are above grimy, traditional two-party politics..

But that can never be a lasting strategy. It has only ever been possible in a political world where neither Labour nor the Conservatives have positive appeal. It merely relies on attracting voters on the basis of who the LibDems are not, rather than on the basis of their core values.

In the short term, Kennedy has successfully wooed disaffected Labour voters by positioning his party to the Left of Tony Blair (demanding tax hikes on the well-off and ever-increasing public spending). At the same time, he has wrested the support of former Conservatives who have become increasingly disenchanted with their own seemingly suicidal party.

But the emergence of David Cameron and a reinvigorated Conservative Party means that the game is up for Mr Kennedy’s strategy of being all things to all people.

The truth is now patently clear: many left-wing LibDem MPs are indistinguishable from left-wing Labour MPs, while many others at the tough, freemarketeer wing could easily join the Tories - with their new, more liberal, tone.

This latter group is represented by what are known as ‘Orange Book’
Liberals - nicknamed after a document published last year - who see freedom of the individual, competition and individual responsibility as the essence of liberalism. Like the Conservatives, they believe in markets, not the state.

More pertinently, Charles Kennedy is also about to be hit by another fundamental change in the political landscape.

The Labour Party is preparing to go undergo a major redefinition when Gordon Brown eventually takes over from Tony Blair.

However unpopular Mr Brown may turn out to be as Prime Minister, there will soon be a whole new political game, with Brown and Cameron setting out clear and contrasting agendas.

In the middle, with nothing distinctive to say and with nothing visionary on offer, the LibDems will be left exposed.

Gordon Brown’s appeal to disaffected Labour voters will soak up one side of the party’s voters; David Cameron’s revitalised Conservatives with its more socially liberal attitudes will entice the others.

It is this realisation which has suddenly dawned on those LibDem MPs who have made it clear that Kennedy's time is now up.

His lethargy ever since May's election - with barely nothing to say other than at Prime Ministers’ Questions - is the initial complaint made against him, but the real predicament goes far deeper.

For all Kennedy’s manifold flaws and for all the persistent rumours aout his drinking, his approach mirrors the fundamental problem at the heart of his party.

The LibDems have two irreconcilable wings. There are, as I have said, the Orange Book liberals. But the vast majority of party members are traditional ‘beard and sandals’ types, who are genuinely to the left of Labour. They are Eurofanatics, keen to sign up to the euro and to hand over ever-more power to the EU. They see America as the root of all evil. They want tax rates which would make Gordon Brown blush, and they think the answer to every problem is more spending.

If this agenda ever became the LibDems’ election manifesto, the mantle of ‘the longest suicide note in history’ would shift from Michael Foot's catastrophic 1983 Labour manifesto and, instead, it would be handed to the LibDems.

But even if Charles Kennedy is ditched as leader by his colleagues, this will not be the end of the party’s problems. Any new leader will find it completely impossible to lead a party that is split from back to front, from left to right and from side to centre.

Charles Kennedy has tried to be all things to all people - not just to the electorate but also within his own party. In doing so, he has never tried to resolve the fundamental difference of opinion between the opposing wings of his party.

In the past, when one of the two main parties was in decay, he could afford to ignore the split. But now, amid talk that he only has weeks left as leader, he must offer something positive if the LibDems are to keep their existing support, let alone make headway.

But Chatshow Charlie will find this beyond his abilities. Moreover, the longer he remains leader, the more he will look irrelevant alongside David Cameron and Gordon Brown.

The Guardian has clearly decided to switch allegiance to the Conservatives. As I pointed out yesterday, Jonathan Freedland offered a series of reasons why David Cameron should be supported.

Today, in a move which is surely unprecedented, twoserving Labour ministers (one a Cabinet minister!) make clear just why Cameron is the man to support:

[M]odern Conservatives look to Texas, not Islington, for inspiration. If anyone wants to see what a Conservative government would bring to Britain, they should look to the US.

Blimey. It'll be that good under the Conservatives?

I've just read Jonathan Freedland's piece today about David Cameron. I can only assume that the Guardian columist has switched his allegiance to the Conservatives, given the impressive Cameron political agenda he carefully outlines:

...[A] "compassionate conservative", as Cameron styles himself, is not a new creation. We have seen one before - and his name was George Bush...Cameron too is surrounded by ideological neoconservatives, his campaign manager and shadow chancellor George Osborne chief among them. Cameron strongly backed the Iraq war while his allies, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey, last month founded the Henry Jackson Society, named after the late US senator who is the patron saint of neoconservatism.

...[O]ne of Cameron's few specific promises was to pull his MEPs out of the European People's Party grouping in the European parliament...

...In four years in the Commons he has voted against every extra investment in schools, hospitals and the police. He voted against the increase in national insurance that went on the NHS. He wants to abolish the New Deal and undo Britain's adherence to the European social chapter, the document that ensures a variety of rights and protections for British workers.

[I]n 2002 he voted against a battery of measures that would have extended maternity leave to 26 weeks, raised maternity pay and introduced two weeks' paid leave for fathers as well as leave for adoptive parents. Most striking, given his own circumstances, he voted against giving parents of young or disabled children the right to request flexible working.

On schools, he has advocated a voucher system...On health, he has argued for a "patients' passport", which would enable individuals to jump the NHS queue, partly using public money to go private.

Cameron talks of "sharing" the fruits of growth between investment and tax cuts...[T]hat diversion of funds to tax cuts would bite deep into planned spending: losing £12bn this year and £17bn next, according to Gordon Brown.

...Perhaps the new leader will return to the idea he floated three months ago: the flat tax.

Wow. That's pretty much the dream manifesto, n'est ce pas? No wonder Mr Freedland is so keen to list David Cameron's many merits.

Has it really come this? When Tony Blair said yesterday that it was better to do the right thing, and then lose, than not to do the right thing at all, he was in effect signalling the end of his purpose in office, and of the entire New Labour project. The whole point of New Labour was winning. It was the left, and Old Labour, which valued glorious defeat.

Not once since coming to power in 1997 had Mr Blair lost a vote until yesterday's defeat. But with power - and authority - almost visibly draining from him, the question must be asked: what purpose is served, least of all to Mr Blair and his legacy, of his remaining in office?

When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 I celebrated. As a Labour member, I had despaired of the party's policies, which seemed to be the products of minds which had never encountered the real world. Here, at last, was somone who I had feared would always be a figment of my imagination: a Labour leader who did not regard profit as a dirty word but who did regard nationalisation as a dirty word. All things were possible. Just as only Nixon could go to China, so only Labour would have the political cover to undertake the vital and overdue reforms to the welfare state, the NHS and education. But that required a Labour leader unlike all previous Labour leaders.

Tony Blair was that leader.

How different things seem today. Where once there was promise, today there is disappointment. Where once the watchword was boldness, today it is timidity.
The unpleasant truth for someone such as myself, who has long been proud to be called a Blairite, is that the game is up for the project. Mr Blair has failed. It
was a worthy attempt but the truth of the matter is that while you can put the word New in front of Labour, you cannot take the word Labour away. Real Labour will always win out.

The mess over the Terrorism Bill might seem to demonstrate something different: that the Prime Minister is, far from being the prisoner of timidity and his trucculent back benchers, still as determined as ever to do the right thing by the country and to strike out where other Labour politicians fear to tread. He could, after all, have opted to compromise on 28 days to ensure a comfortable passage for the bill. Instead, he decided to stick with the bold option of 90 days,
however great the risk of defeat.

But what the past few days really show is that, for all his admirable bravado, his position is fundamentally weak. This weekend Mr Blair took to the airwaves on - of all programmes - Football Focus and gave newspaper interviews in which he stressed nothing had changed. He was in charge, he insisted.

No he wasn't, as yesterday showed. The very fact that he had to launch a sudden 'everything's fine' campaign showed that. Then, after Charles Clarke had indicated that he would switch to 28 days, Mr Blair did what amounted to a 'back me or sack me' return to 90 days. And back him they did not.

To try to win on 90 days required him to turn an issue of national security into a party political issue, demanding that Labour MPs fall in behind him to expose the Conservative and LibDem opposition to the bill as being out of step with the view of the overwhelming majority of voters.

Gordon Brown's about turn from Israel on Tuesday night was a deeply symbolic moment, redolent of James Callaghan's desperate clinging on to office oin 1978-79 when ministers were forced to do exactly what the Chancellor had to do on Tuesday, and MPs were driven in to the Commons in ambulances from their hospital beds, so threadbare was the government's hold on power.

But there is now a strong whiff of a more recent occupant of No 10. When Michael Howard said last week, following the resignation of David Blunkett, that Mr Blair is now in office but not in power, he was using the killer phrase of Norman Lamont, who used just those words to describe John Major's premiership.

Even as a supporter of the Prime Minister, who knows that he is as good as it is ever going to get for a Labour PM, I can no longer see what point there is in him
remaining in office.

When he won his third election in June, having already announced that it would be his last, the hope was that, freed from the need ever to fight another election, he would, at last, go for broke. He was, we were told, obsessed with his legacy and would set about the bold reforming agenda which he never managed in his first two terms.

Obsessed he might be. But the evidence shows that, even if he wanted to, he could not achieve anything worthwhile. Take the three key areas of health, welfare and schools.

Even in the last term, when the government had a landslide majority, Mr Blair was forced to neuter the original, bold plans for Foundation Hospitals. The Labour benches - and Gordon Brown, the single biggest obstacle to reform - would not stomach even that. And that was before Labour MPs had the smell of Mr Blair's blood in their noses which the reduced majority after the election has now given them.

On Sunday, the Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt - charged by Mr Blair with implementing supposedly radical reforms - was forced into a humiliating climb down. The NHS' Chief Executive, Sir Nigel Crisp, had said that in the near future almost all treatment out of hospital would, effectively, be contracted out, much of it to the private sector. Labour MPs went berserk, and Ms Hewitt had to admit on TV that her plans had changed. Any prospect of genuine reform of the NHS is now dead.

The recent education White Paper is a case in point. Trailed as the biggest shake up for decades, and with a bullish introduction by Mr Blair, the actual proposals are a modest but hardly daring improvement on the status quo. And yet even this has provoked the fury of Labour MPs, who are so antagonised by any questioning of the role of Local Education Authorities and by the very idea of parental choice that it is highly doubtful the Prime Minister will be able to get even his limp White Paper proposals implemented.

As for welfare reform: even when Mr Blair was riding high in 1998, the then minister, Harriet Harman, was holed below the waterline by Labour MPs who considered her relatively modest reforms beyond the pale. The notion that they will today, with the rebellious wind in their sails, be more pliant than they were then is simply preposterous.

There is one man who will have been quietly smiling to himself: Gordon Brown. He has done, this time, everything possible to help Mr Blair win. So his hands are clean - no one can attach any blame to him for the defeat. And that, of course, is the perfect result for him. A weakened Tony Blair, not of his doing.
The time has now come for Mr Blair to look at reality. He was only ever tolerated by the Labour Party for what he could bring it: power. Now they have decided enough is enough, and that they will not let him govern.

New Labour was a valiant idea which has run its course. Labour MPs are now reverting to their real instincts, and with that Mr Blair's ability to do more than occupy office is gone. Health reform, education, welfare: none have the slightest chance of happening now the backbenches have decided they can have their heads.

Rather than clinging to office as a latter-day John Major, Tony Blair should resign with dignity. He has given it his best shot, but after 11 years as leader of the Labour Party, he has done all that can be done.

I have a piece on trust and politics at The First Post.

Brilliant column by Matt d'Ancona:

For almost a decade, Mr Blair's allies have been trying to find a plausible rival to Mr Brown, a prospective prime minister who would continue what they have started. On each occasion, the Chancellor has crushed their expectations: David Blunkett's claim to the top job came and went, as did Charles Clarke's, and Alan Milburn's. Last weekend, as the name of the 40-year-old David Miliband was put forward in The Sun, you could hear the sound of a tartan juggernaut revving up to do its destructive work.

No wonder the Blairite gang is in a state of tetchy confusion. They ready themselves for the Prime Minister's departure. They wonder what their fate will be under Mr Brown. And then, at last and out of nowhere, a plausible inheritor rises to stake his claim to the Blairite legacy.

The trouble is, he's in the Tory party.

From The Times today:

THE deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats says today that he would take more money from a multimillionaire who is wanted in the US for jumping probation in a fraud case.

Sir Menzies Campbell says that the party has no intention of returning a £2.4 million gift from Michael Brown and has already spent the money, in its general election campaign.

Surprise, surprise. The LibDem's website says this:

Unlike the other main parties, the Liberal Democrats do not receive funding from big business or trade unions.

But fraudsters are just fine.

I wasn't around in 1922, so I can’t give a first-hand account of what it would be like to have a Liberal prime minister. I did, however, read history at university, so I know what the historians say. But I have a suspicion that things have changed a bit over the past 83 years and that Lloyd George’s record might not provide the most sensible guide to the likely behaviour of a Charles Kennedy government. (I know, I know. Stop sniggering at the back.)

Since no Liberal has been near to prime ministerial office in living memory, we have no record on which to judge how they would run the country. The only fair means by which we can tell what a Lib Dem government would be like is to look at how they behave when they do get to exercise power. That, of course, means looking at their record in local government. But there is a still better guide to their behaviour: there is one area where they get to exercise untrammelled power, free from any opposition constraints, and behave exactly as they like. We can look at how they run their own party.

The message from that is clear. They are the most glaringly opportunist bunch of hypocrites in politics.

They take money from the most dubious characters. Some of them even use their party position for personal ends. And then, when the fact that they have taken millions from a cheque bouncer is plastered all over the papers, they not only refuse to comment, they hang on to them without the tiniest show of embarrassment.

Let’s rewind the tape. Yesterday The Times revealed that the businessman Michael Brown, who has so far given the Lib Dems £2.4 million — fully two thirds of its income in the first quarter of 2005 — has been arrested three times for fraud, has been accused of bouncing a dozen cheques and is regarded as an absconder in Florida, having skipped probation. He is a wanted man in that state.

Let’s be charitable. Let’s accept that the Lib Dems had absolutely no idea that Mr Brown was anything other than an upright citizen when he offered to give them £2.4 million. (The sheer naivety of a party that is apparently happy to let almost anyone walk in off the street and bankroll its election campaign with hardly a question asked should be enough to disqualify them from being taken seriously.)

Whatever they might or might not have known or been expected to have known about their largest-ever donor, they certainly know about him now. They know that the person behind their biggest ever donation is about as dodgy as you get.

So how have they responded? With total silence. Without the slightest expression of regret. Without any sense, let alone admission, of having done anything wrong. And — more importantly than anything else — by hanging on to the £2.4 million for dear life.

If the Lib Dems were anything other than a bunch of holier than thou, self-righteous hypocrites they would, as soon as the bizarre background of their donor had been revealed, have expressed immediate regret and pledged to return the money promptly.

As for their former treasurer Reg Clark: he took the opportunity presented by the appearance of Mr Brown on the scene to solicit up to £700,000 from the party donor for his own business. That’s a smiley, clean Lib Dem for you.

It gets worse. The first part of Mr Brown’s donation to the party came not, as the law requires, from a British company and a British resident, but from a company with no UK office, via a Swiss bank account, from a man who was not on the British electoral roll.

How was I to know there was anything dodgy, officer?

Not that anyone should be surprised by the Lib Dems’ hypocrisy and shameful behaviour. On screen, their national spokesmen and women smile charmingly and portray themselves as decent people who may be a bit wet but are unlike the other politicians.

Unlike them, indeed; they are far tricksier. A few years ago I worked in Tower Hamlets, where the Lib Dems were the opposition to a dreadful, moribund Labour council. The area has a large Bengali and Somali population. Instead of fighting on their merits, and the real failures of the Labour council, the Lib Dems’ tactic was to campaign for a “sons and daughters” housing policy, with priority on the list to the children of “local” residents. It was thinly veiled racism. But that only made it all the more attractive, as they were able to rail against unjust legislation that discriminated against “local people” in favour of “visitors”. At least you knew where you stood with the BNP.

There are, of course, some good and decent Lib Dems. The younger, authentic liberals who believe in markets and competition could turn the party into a genuine force for good. But the existing leadership lets them down.

Let’s accept the most generous interpretation of the leadership’s response to the funding crisis — weakness and lack of attention to detail. In the first year of his leadership, Mr Kennedy’s “all things to all people” stance might perhaps have had some point. But now it destroys any serious claim that his party of 62 MPs may have on power. Either Mr Kennedy believes in the expansion of public services or he does not. Either he believes in higher taxation or he does not. Either he believes in transparency in politics or — as seems clear — he does not.

Even before this latest crisis, the few Lib Dems who are not frivolous have been muttering that, so long as Mr Kennedy remains leader, the party is going nowhere. Now that we have seen his response to the revelations, it is surely beyond dispute that he is a liability who must be removed forthwith.

Already, some people have responded to yesterday’s revelations by calling for state funding of parties. That misses the point. It is because we can see how they run their own party and how they respond to such crises, that we can see that they are unfit for office. By their behaviour let them be judged.

I'll be on the Today programme tomorrow morning between 8.30 and 9 talking about the contest between the next Conservative leader and Gordon Brown.

UPDATE: No I won't; they've dropped the item. Oh, the topsy turvy world of showbiz!

I was planning to write a lengthy post on how I think I was unfair to David Cameron in my CPS paper on the Conservative Party.

In the paper, I wrote this:

We were...informed in a supposedly seminal speech in June by David Cameron that the distinctive Conservative agenda comprised:

A dynamic economy. A decent society. A strong self-confident nation. These goals are forward-looking, inclusive, and generous.

It is difficult to imagine a sentient being who might disagree with Mr Cameron’s offering. The Conservative Party will have to do more than ape Mr Blair by removing verbs from sentences if it is to return to electability. Nor was Tony Blair elected Labour leader simply because he was young and had a pleasant demeanour...[I]t is notable that David Cameron’s sole public contribution is to have been policy coordinator for a manifesto which secured a third successive electoral drubbing.

I stand by all that. But I think, with hindsight, that the tone was too harsh and that I did not give proper attention to some of the speeches he has been making of late - and I mean speeches well before his party conference triumph.

More to the point perhaps, David Davis' performance was so dire that as far as I can see he has - or rather should have - destroyed any chance of winning the vote-off between the final two. If he couldnt even keep his own party awake, what on earth will the rest of us think of him?

It's become the fashion this past week to say that he wasn't as bad on TV as in the hall, and that it's only the Westminster elites who are saying he was so bad. Nonsense. I watched the speech on TV live, and as he was speaking I said to a friend on the phone that I was watching a political career destroy itself. The speech was a train wreck, pure and simple.

Since Clarke would be a disaster, that leaves only Fox and Cameron as serious possibilities. And, having listened to Cameron in Blackpool and read his speeches it is clear to me that he is the only sensible choice.

Or so I thought. For the life of me, I cannot understand his behaviour in response to the drugs question. I have no idea whether he took illegal substances or not, but let's assume the worst. His response ought to have been straightforward. Instead of playing his current coy games, talking about 'mistakes' he might have made, and then refusing to answer the question, he should simply have said 'yes, I did, I was young and foolish. I have never taken anything illegal since'. End of story. It didn't stop George Bush winning two elections, and it wouldn't stop Cameron.

What might stop him is the idea which cannot but take hold if he continues to refuse to answer the qurestion - that he has something to hide.

It matters because it is not, as Cameron, would have it, an illegitimate quesion. To say that the question is entitely irrelevant is simply wrong. Some of Cameron's supporters have said that it is no more relevant than asking if he once drove at 35 mph in a 30 mph zone when he was 19.

Come off it. To equate a minor infraction of the law, such as speeding, with abuse of illegal drugs is not merely fatuous but downright worrying, since it implies that he has no idea of the consequences of drug abuse.

Taking illegal drugs remains, whatever some people might want, a serious offence. Asking if a man who wants to be PM committed a serious crime is far from irrelevant. It is entirely proper. What is improper - and politically stupid - is Mr Cameron's attempt to brush it off. At the very least, it looks like yet another example of the moneyed middle classes behaving as if there is one law from them and another for the rest of society, such as those whose lives are ruined by drugs. There is a direct link between the decision by the well-off dinner party circuit to take illegal drugs and the destuction of lives elswhere.

But if, assuming he has taken drugs, he had come clean straight away, it is almost certain that the issue would now be dead and buried. As it is, Mr Cameron's refusal to answer the question ensures that it will continue to dog him - and, perhaps, fatally undermine him.

PS I should add that I backed Clarke on the day after the election on Betfair at 78.8/1. I still don't think he'll win, but at that price I had to have a tenner on...

One of Tony Blair’s many political skills is his ability to play to the Labour Party gallery at the same time as he lets the rest of the country know he doesn’t mean it. As he reached the peroration of his speech on Tuesday, out came the tribute to the “great people” from Labour history, such as Jim Callaghan, Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Jack Jones.

Mere mention of those names is enough to send the party into raptures. To most outside observers, however, they send shivers of fearful memories down the spine, as Mr Blair well knows. So his praise for their “brilliance” was countered by the observation that “the seeds of 18 years of opposition were not sown in 1979, but in the 1960s when…we lived out a sad episode of charges of betrayal, questioning integrity and motives.”

That “sad episode” was the battle over In Place Of Strife, Barbara Castle’s doomed attempt to impose a modicum of restraint on the behaviour of the unions, with the opposition led by the “great” Jim Callaghan. The consequence of failure was the miners’ strike, Grunwick, flying pickets, the three day week, shaving by candlelight, rampant inflation and the Winter of Discontent. How great. What brilliance.

Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and Vic Feather are now footnotes of history. Today, few people outside of the labour movement (or, to use that redolent but now forgotten phrase, ‘This Great Movement of Ours’) could even name their successors The likes of Tony Woodley of the TGWU, Paul Kenny of the GMB and Derek Simpson of Amicus have long been an irrelevance.

Diminished their power may be. Ludicrous their pomposity might seem. But the union leaders have certainly not given up. Minutes after Tony Blair’s speech had finished, Mr Woodley demanded that the Prime Minister begin the handover to Gordon Brown – as if, as a union leader, he had the right to determine such matters. They see the drawn out interregnum between a departing Tony Blair and the coronation of Gordon Brown as the time to reassert their power within the labour movement.

Recent events – not least last month’s Gate Gourmet strike, which brought British Airways to a halt - have shown the power which the unions still retain to wreak havoc. When BA ground staff walked out in sympathy with Gate Gourmet strikers, costing the airline over £30 million, Mr Woodley - far from urging his BA members not to break the law by taking secondary action - egged them on.

But the leaders’ plans extend far beyond the odd strike. The unions want, once again, to be at the centre of events and to have a say in how the country is governed. Since that will never be granted to them voluntarily, they have come up with a way to return to their traditional weapon: industrial and political blackmail.

The three biggest unions – the TGWU, the GMB and Amicus - are planning to merge into a giant ‘super union’ of 2.6 million members, which will be formed in January 2007. The super union is the leaders’ response to the collapse in union membership. In times past, individual unions had the numbers to throw their weight around. In 1980, union membership peaked at 12 million. One in two workers was a union member. Today, there are less than 6.5 million members – just one in five workers (less than one in ten in the service sector). Members have spoken with the wallets and have stopped paying their subs. They would rather earn wages than play politics with pointless strikes. The number of working days lost to strike action has fallen from 29.5 million in 1979 to just 30,000 today – less than 2 per cent of the previous figure.

Many unions now offer their members ancillary services, such as health insurance and cheap holiday deals. The few which are actually growing, such as the shop workers’ union, USDAW, see themselves as service providers first and traditional unions second. But the leaders of the biggest unions have responded to the decline in their membership – and thus their power - by reverting to type, and adapting the union mantra of united we stand, divided we fall. As Mr Woodley has put it: “The new union could marshal the resources and the industrial strength to give the playing field a massive tilt back in the direction of the working class”. For ‘working class’, one should, of course, read ‘union leaders’.

Because of the way the votes are structured within the Labour Party, the merger of the three unions would concentrate 26 per cent of voting power at the Labour Party conference in the hands of one man, the new general secretary – expected to be Tony Woodley.

But the real threat is not simply to the Labour Party. Britain has been transformed since the 1970s because the union leaders have been rendered powerless. A super union of 2.6 million members would turn Mr Woodley and his ilk from wounded animals with the power to lash out - but no more - into potent fighters, with the means once again to return to the centre stage.

The union leaders might have been irrelevant for the past two decades as the economy – and thus workers’ prosperity – grew, but they have never accepted the idea that they should fade into the background. Having lost power in the real world in the 1980s, they remained the powerbrokers inside the Labour Party. But in the 1990s they became steadily less important even within Labour. In part, that was because rule changes reduced the power of the block vote. But it was also because Tony Blair was determined never to take orders from the unions. Whatever they said, and however they voted, he happily ignored them.

When Gordon Brown takes over as leader it is possible that he, too, will, ignore them. Possible, but unlikely. The Chancellor has devoted a huge proportion of his time to wooing the unions and their leaders. Indeed, it is in large measure because he has their support sewn up that he is a shoo-in to be elected Labour leader in a system in which the unions have a third of the votes.

So at the very least, the atmosphere inside Ten Downing Street will change. Instead of being regarded as an embarrassing relative, as Mr Blair views his party’s funders, the union leaders will be welcomed by Mr Brown as comrades. The brothers are back.

Just one quickie observation on Blair's speech. Read this, and explain please how it is not the most eloquent and persuasive elaboration of the case for school - and health - vouchers:

There’s a great myth here: which is that we don’t have a market in services now. We do. It’s called private schools and private healthcare. But it’s only open to the well-off.

There is another myth: choice is a New Labour invention.

Wrong. Choice is what wealthy people have exercised for centuries. The Tories have always been comfortable with that. But for Labour choice is too important to be the monopoly of the wealthy.

A final myth: the way to keep universal services universal is to make them uniform.

Again, wrong. The way to keep services universal is to make them of such quality that enough of those who can afford to go private, opt to stay in the public service.

...[I]t isn’t fair when parents have no option but to send their child to a poor local school.

Or a patient can’t get diagnostic tests done in six months when the technology and the capacity exist to deliver it in days.

The wealthy by their wealth can change that in their lives. I want decent hardworking families to have the same power.

Now, a little bit of trumpet blowing. A couple of years ago I gave a paper to the No 10 Policy Unit on choice, and how the government was, to coin a phrase, talking the talk but not walking the walk. This is what I said on vouchers:

Few ideas give more practical effect to the Left’s favourite word, empowerment. By handing real power over to parents, vouchers destroy the influence of the bureaucrats, the teaching unions and others who put their own interests above those of anyone else. We have, of course, a fully functioning voucher system in the UK. It’s called the private sector, and the voucher takes the form of a cheque book.

Indeed, we have a form of voucher in higher education; a voucher, after all, is simply a catchy word for money following the pupil – or patient. In the secondary system there is, of course, an insidious version of this, where the voucher is a mortgage. If you can afford to live in a nice suburb, fine. If you can’t, you must take what you’re given. In the private sector, the voucher takes the form of a cheque book.

As Prof Milton Friedman put it in an interview recently: “What happens now is that those who are well off have the choice to school their children wherever they'd like and they can afford to pay twice—once through taxes and once through tuition. Most of the population is not in that position. The vouchers would allow the lower classes to have nearly the same opportunity as the upper classes. So it would tend to reduce the difference between the rich and the poor. The only reason it has been argued the other way is...well, I don't know. I don't see how it could be argued the other way...What is the argument?”

I follow the US debate closely, and it’s striking how much it has changed over the past decade. Here, vouchers are still regarded as a right-wing idea. In the US today, the most vocal supporters of vouchers are poverty groups - and especially black groups - because it’s the poor who suffer most from the deplorable standards achieved by state schools and who most want an escape route. A recent poll by the Black American's Political Action Committee (BAMPAC) found that sixty-three percent of respondents said that, if given the choice, they would remove their children from traditional public schools and enroll them in charter or private schools. The Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies, an African-American think tank found in a poll in December 2000 that 60 per cent of African-Americans support vouchers, and over 75 per cent of blacks under 35.

They realise that vouchers stimulate parental involvement in a child's schooling, which in turn enhances the achievement of children. Schools are more responsive to the demands of parents if they are vulnerable to their choices – parents need a realistic option of exit to back up their exercise of voice. That competition drives up standards is, surely, one of the most basic lessons we have learned.

Last year Robert Reich wrote in the Wall Street Journal that: “The only way to begin to decouple poor kids from lousy schools is to give poor kids additional resources, along with vouchers enabling them and their parents to choose how to use them”. Even Al Gore has remarked that: “if I were the parent of a child who went to an inner-city school that was failing…I might be for vouchers, too”. But since he was in the pocket of the teaching unions, and isn’t such a parent, he wasn’t.

The Prime Minister, of course, didn't mention the V Word. But genuine choice requires the power of the purse string, and that means vouchers. For his - and my - argument to mean anything, it has to mean vouchers.

I'll believe that this government will deliver real choice when I see it. But now that the Prime Minister is using this same argument we are at least at the beginning of the journey.

UPDATE: Alice Miles in The Times has reached a similar conclusion, albeit based on different evidence:

Now see what Alan Milburn, who has often acted as an outrider for the Prime Minister in the past — and who was specifically thanked by him at the start of his speech yesterday — said in an interview in The Sunday Times last weekend. Mr Milburn wants to see the “choice” agenda expanded, by giving people the money to buy their own services. “I’m talking about universal childcare, choice in health and education and giving citizens control of their own budgets to buy services.” Some might even call it vouchers.

I'm not at Labour Party Conference this year, the first time in 15 years that I've missed it.

Here's why.

On Monday I spoke at a CPS meeting on the future of Conservatism, along with Janet Daley and John Willman. It's being broadcast tonight on BBC Parliament (Sky channel 508) at 22.15.

Malcolm Rifkind is straining every sinew to win the Tory leaderhip.

(via Guido Fawkes.)

I have a piece about Ken Clarke at The First Post.

To judge from some of the coverage given to Ken Clarke's preparations to stand for the Conservative leadership, and David Cameron's travails, one might think that all that mattered for the party to return to power would be the election of either a good bloke or a nice chap - or an alliance between the two in a "dream team".

The Conservative party's problems go much deeper than the name of the leader. But with the Blair experiment coming to an end, those of us who have long shied away from the Conservative party, but who share what should be core Conservative principles of liberty and free markets, are effectively homeless. With a Conservative party that has seemed to want only to recreate the 1950s, we are cut adrift without a liferaft.

Yet the party has it within itself to create a coalition of support which would bring together the bedrock of voters who have stuck with it in the past three defeats, its once natural AB supporters, disaffected Blairites, and Cs and Ds who were Thatcher's Tories but have long since given up on the party.

The key to that coalition is genuine public-sector reform, based on equality of access, and buttressed by individual liberty. Iraq aside, disenchantment with Labour centres on the lack of significant public-service reform. But it is not enough for the Conservatives to respond with the assertion that they would do better. The public needs persuading that the Conservatives are genuinely interested in the public services. The party has failed to offer any context for its proposed reforms, so that across the range of public services it appears interested only in making life a little more bearable for the middle classes.

Yet there is a much bigger dimension which has the power to transform perceptions: that market-based reforms should have at their root the idea of giving equality of access and opportunity to the poor. Take vouchers. School vouchers are now on the mainstream political and educational agenda in the US, are popular in countries such as Holland and Sweden, and are, at last, being debated here. Conservatives should proselytise for vouchers as the very essence of empowerment - the left's favourite word, but one which is honoured by Labour only in the breach. Vouchers empower the poor by handing them the same power of the purse string now enjoyed by the better off.

There is merit in the widely asserted idea that the Conservative party needs its "Clause 4" moment. But in ditching Clause 4, Labour did not make a gesture for the sake of it. It junked a constitutional commitment to nationalisation which infected the public's view of the party. In doing so it gave a striking demonstration of what it really stood for. The statement which the Conservative party should make needs to show that it is genuinely committed to improving the lot of those who do not have the money to escape from public services.

It has been easy to characterise Conservatives as indifferent to public services when ministers in previous governments have gone out of their way to avoid using them, whether it is schools or hospitals. The next leader should pledge that, from day one of taking office as prime minister, where there is a choice between a public and a private service, his ministers will always use the public service.

The tax system is also ripe for reform. A flat tax would benefit both entrepreneurship and the poor. The most advanced analysis so far, by Richard Teather for the Adam Smith Institute, has looked at the impact of a flat rate of 22% (equal to the current basic rate tax) and a personal allowance of £12,000 (between the minimum wage of roughly £8,750 and the average income of around £22,000). Although everyone would benefit from an increase in personal allowances, it would lift 10 million out of income tax altogether. The biggest gains (12% of their income) would be for those on an income just below average. And the poorest third all benefit proportionately more than the richest third.

It is important to remember, however, that a flat tax need not, of itself, be high or low. The Tories should say: "Here's the choice for you: we favour lower spending, but if you tell us you want more, this is what it will cost in tax."

There are other important reforms which the party should embrace, all of which have at their core the same ideas of liberty for the poor. The liberty, for instance, of the individual to decide for him or herself how and where children are educated and how they are treated within the NHS. And, critically, the liberty of the poor to make such choices.

But the fundamental problem which the party needs to address is linking in the public's mind the words Conservative, poor, and public-sector reform. Without that, a fourth defeat is guaranteed.

· From Labour to ...? by Stephen Pollard is published by the Centre for Policy Studies

Peter Oborne, in today's Evening Standard (no link):

For almost a decade the Tories have sought an idea to show they have changed. Now Stephen Pollard, in a pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies, has come up with a Tory ‘Clause 4’, which will show the party is committed to public services.

Pollard suggests “the next leader should pledge that, from day one of taking office as Prime Minister, where there is a choice between a public and a private service, his will ministers will always use the public service”.

Pollard is right. There is something uncomfortable about a Tory spokesman who sends his children to private schools making arrogant pronouncements on the state system. Pollard’s proposal might drive away some potential Tory ministers – but show beyond doubt that the remainder care.

We'll see if it has traction...

I have a paper out today from the Centre for Policy Studies. You can download it here. I've got a few pieces on it in the pipeline, which I'll post, but in the meanwhile this is the press release, which is a pretty accurate summary:

LIBERTY!

How Conservatives can win the support of ex-New Labour voters

As the Blair experiment draws to an end, how can the Conservative Party persuade disillusioned New Labour voters to vote Conservative at the 2009 General Election?, asks Stephen Pollard in From Labour to…?, published today Friday 19 August 2005 by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Pollard, a Labour voter and early supporter of Tony Blair, criticises the Conservative Party 2005 election campaign as being both “unsavoury and stupid”: unsavoury because of its “nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we hate them too stance on immigration”; and stupid because it lost further support from the crucial AB social group.

Yet there is hope. Pollard suggests that:

The Conservative Party has it within itself to create a coalition of support which would bring together the bedrock of voters who have stuck with it in the past three defeats, its once natural AB supporters, disaffected Labour supporters and Blairites, and Cs and Ds who were Thatcher’s Tories but have long since given up on the Party. And the key mechanism which can support that coalition is… genuine public sector reform, based on equality of access, and buttressed by individual liberty.

Conservatives must be bold in advocating reform of the public sector, challenging perceptions that it is the selfish party. It must make the case that vouchers in education and health are intended primarily to help the poor. It must demonstrate that it does not want to “slash and burn” the public sector but to take power from the producers and give it to parents and patients – for the benefit of all, not just the rich. And what more powerful sign of its commitment to the public services than a pledge that, where there is a choice between a public and a private service, Conservative Ministers will always use the public service?

And the Conservatives should reinforce their commitment to helping the poor by proposing the introduction of a flat tax. A flat tax could lift 10 million people out of the income tax system (below average earners would gain most from such a move); its simplicity would be a boost for the economy; and, unlike the present system, it would be easy to grasp.

A single thread runs through Pollard’s recommendations: liberty. The liberty for the individual to decide where and how children are educated and where, when and how patients are treated in the NHS. The liberty to go about his business without fear of assault; the liberty of the individual not to carry ID cards; the liberty of self-government.

Pollard concludes that these policies and approach could persuade those who presently shy away from the Conservative Party, but who nonetheless share the principles of liberty and free markets, that it should be their political home.

Let's get this right. If I siphon off money from someone else's bank account, it's theft. But if it's the government taking the money, it's responsible shepharding of the nation's finances:

Millions of bank customers face having their deposits raided by Gordon Brown this autumn under plans to redirect money from dormant accounts to charity.

An estimated £4 billion held in accounts that have not been used for three years or more could be redistributed, to the dismay of the banks.

They and the Treasury are in talks over the treatment of accounts that customers appear to have forgotten. Mr Brown wants the “forgotten” money to be paid out to charities. The banks believe that accounts should not be treated as dormant until they have been inactive for more than ten years.

Simply brilliant. Click on this link. Now.
(via Arthur's seat.)

Another genius contribution to modern life from Geoff Hoon: compulsory voting.

Where to start?

There are two plausible reasons why voter turnout is down, neither of which would be ‘cured’ by compulsion.

First, it is possible that people simply don't want to vote, either because they just don't care or because they are basically content. I happen to think that would be a good thing - if things are ticking along nicely, terrific.

But I don't think that's the explanation. There are major issues which people feel very strongly about - crime, for instance.

So that leads to the second reason: they are disaffected with the parties. (On crime, for instance, neither party offers a thought-through genuinely tough policy, which would treat criminals - especially young thugs - as they deserve to be treated.)

Compulsion would do nothing to ask why people are disaffected, and would do nothing to resolve the problem. In fact, it makes things worse by papering over the cracks through using the might of the state to enforce voting, when the policies of the parties aren't able to persuade people to vote.

It's saying to voters that it's our fault that parties aren't offering what we want.

Welcome to the world of Labour Britain: ID cards and compulsory voting. They’ll be banning smoking next.

What have the defeated Iranian President Hojatoleslam Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Peter Mandelson, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Nick Griffin, Angela Merkel and David Cameron got in common?

The same goes for Tony Blair, David Lloyd George, Elizabeth I, Joseph Chamberlain and MCC members who voted to admit women to full membership. But you can forget about Marie Antoinette, Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Charles I and Bruce Forsyth.

Oh, come on; you’ve surely got it by now. The first two groups have all been described as “modernisers”. And the final group, never.

This week the Conservative leadership candidate David Cameron made a speech. It might have passed you by, since its content was notably thin of, well, content. But it was clearly an important speech, since Mr Cameron, we are told, is leader of the Tory “modernisers”. And the contest is apparently a battle between the modernisers and David Davis.

Here’s the modernisers’ logic: since modernity is patently a good thing, and Mr Cameron is a moderniser, then it must follow that whoever opposes him is clearly a bad thing. And thus Mr Cameron must assume his rightful place as leader.

So what is this thing, the moderniser? The label has been attached to Mr Cameron so firmly that we can surely work backwards. If we can decipher him, then we can piece together the meaning of the word. The only two aspects of Mr Cameron’s life to have entered public knowledge are that he was educated at Eton and Oxford, and that he is part of the so-called “Notting Hill Set”. He has left no other discernible mark on the planet. However, since he was policy co-ordinator for the last Conservative manifesto, it is surely a reasonable assumption that he supported it.

One can thus deduce that to be a moderniser means being educated at Eton, living in Notting Hill and believing in clean hospitals and school discipline. However, there is a problem. There is nothing in the published biography of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was regularly described as a modernising President of Iran, to suggest that he has ever owned property in W11. And Eton College has no record of ever having acted in loco parentis for him. But he does share one characteristic with Mr Cameron; we know that he also believes in discipline, since Iranian prisoners are beaten and hangings are regular.

Back in the early 1990s, the label was attached to Messrs Blair, Brown and Mandelson. Then it meant something. It signalled that they wanted to drag their party away from union domination, nationalisation and hostility to wealth.

But it has no worthwhile meaning when attached with equal gusto to a Muslim theocrat, a candidate for the German Chancellorship and a Tory politician who has no credentials for high office beyond a pleasant smile.

Mary Ann Sieghart attacks. quite rightly, the tax credit fiasco. And she calls on Dawn Primarolo to resign:

Shockingly, particularly for a Labour minister, she has presided over a system that has condemned hundreds of thousands of our poorest citizens to great anxiety and distress and, in some cases, virtual penury.

...The Chancellor was allowed free rein with his tax credits, even though No 10 always had its doubts about their cost and efficacy. And he has resisted repeated attempts by the Prime Minister to demote Ms Primarolo, who is clearly not up to her job. As well as being incompetent, she has also proved astonishingly complacent in the face of repeated complaints about the system.

If Mr Brown is still shielding her from the sack, he should examine his conscience. Which does he care about most? The plight of the poor? Or the plight of a time-serving, over-promoted, inept ministerial supporter?

No objective reader could disagree with a word of that.

But surely Ms Sieghart is missing the bigger picture. Ms Primarolo was responsible for implementation. The wider - and greater - responsibility lies with Gordon Brown. Tax credits are his 'big idea', and it is Mr Brown who devised the system which Ms Primarolo was charged with implementing. If this is a resignation issue - and it is - then the first to go, surely, ought to be the Chancellor.

Fat chance.

I heard a short speech last night by one of the new Lib Dem MPs, Jeremy Browne, at a meeting of the most important British think tank, Reform. I've rarely heard a more eloquent, thoughtful, self-critical and persuasive argument in favour of public sector reform. I was hugely impressed by Mr Browne. Mark my words: his is a name which we will be hearing frequently over the next few years.

There is a great prize to be had in British politics for the party which can truly grasp the mantle of public sector reform. Labour's credentials lessen by the day. The Tories, if only they could see sense, ought to be the natural home of such ideas. And the Lib Dems, if they could only dump their penchant for statist left wingery and return to being a genuinely liberal party, could reap the benefits of the other two parties' failures. With the likes of Mr Browne, along with Orange Book types such as David Laws, there is a growing coterie of classical liberals. But I am dubious about their ability to triumph over the morass of LibDems.

(I am currently writing a pamphlet on a related theme for the Centre for Policy Studies. It'll be out in August.)

I had that bloke from “Corrie” over for dinner last night. The dodgy businessman with the cockney accent. A few weeks before, I cooked a steak for the woman who does that property programme. You know the one. And I had the cast of Grange Hill (1986 vintage) round for Christmas lunch.

My girlfriend can’t understand why I bother. She doesn’t see the point of any of them. She says I should stop wasting my time entertaining low-rent celebs and should stick to reading improving books.

What do you think? That they’re a bit infra dig? Well, I couldn’t care less. If I want to have them over to my pad, I will. So they’re not Nobel prizewinners. Live with it, snob features.

To those of us who marvel at the infinite capacity of the British Establishment’s capacity for snobbery, the reaction to the revelation that Tony and Cherie Blair have had some pop stars, some soap actors and — ooh, the sheer ghastliness of it — Richard and Judy over to Chequers for dinner has been a treat. Writing yesterday in the Daily Mail, for instance, Sir Roy Strong wailed at the Blairs’ “monument to populism . . .The idea of inviting Harold Pinter or Dame Antonia Byatt . . . would paralyse them”.

Cripes. Sir Roy must really loathe the Prime Minister. I’m not sure it would be fair to inflict Mr Pinter even on Saddam, the man he was wonted to leave in power. The truth behind the criticisms has nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of guests such as Sting, Dawn French and Sir Elton John. What this is really about is that Sir Roy and his ilk simply can’t stand the fact that the Blairs are not content to keep Chequers as the preserve of a charmed few, and clearly believe that they should spread their hospitality beyond a few pompous former museum directors and foreign dignitaries.

Horror of horrors, the Blairs appear to believe that a home given in trust to the nation should be enjoyed by those whom the nation enjoy. When the Blairs invite Cilla Black, Geri Halliwell and Sir Steve Redgrave over for a spot of dinner, they’re not hosting seminars on welfare dependency and disintermediation. They’re not asking their guests to pass on policy advice. They’re asking them to pass the cheeseboard.

Prime Minister and his wife caught . . . entertaining. As scandals go, it’s hardly John Major and Edwina Currie, is it?

If you're so minded, you can hear me on yesterday's Talking Politics, with John Rentoul and Anne McElvoy.

It's the news for which the world has been waiting.

A friend has just summarised it in one word:

Toytown.

Nick Cohen has an excellent piece on the taxpayer rip-off which is the tax break to British film makers:

Between 1997 and 2005, the government piled the plate of the British film industry with billions of pounds of public funds. It was money which came from working-and middle-class taxpayers who didn't hire accountants but paid as they earned. It was money which might have been spent on schools, hospitals, the army or other fripperies.

Instead, a part did indeed go up the noses of Soho. More went down the drain. More still went up the wall. And further portions went to Premier League footballers, partners in City law and accountancy firms, Hollywood and the tax havens of the Cayman and Channel islands. What was left was spent on making movies.

The Treasury and the Inland Revenue are furious and have every right to be, although you would never guess it from the obsequious coverage the film industry has received from the broadsheets and Radio 4.

...How much public money has been frittered away since 1997 is anyone's guess. Michael Kuhn said that tax breaks were worth £5 billion in cash terms between 2003 and 2005, far more than the £323m the Film Council has taken from the lottery to give us such classics as Sex Lives of the Potato Men. But the Treasury and the Inland Revenue say the tax dodging was so ingenious they may never be able to find out how much has been lost.

Quite why anyone should be surprised is beyond me. Let's leave aside the whole issue of whether or not it should be the government's business to prop up the film industry (which, of course, it shouldn't). The real lesson here is a demonstration not so much of the law of unintended consequences - the most important of all laws of public policy - as the law of unforeseen consequences. Even if one grants the idea that the government should indeed take taxpayers' money and hand it over to film makers to subsidise their productions, the lesson of all such attempts is that the money will not do what it is intended to do.

This absurd waste of our money is as clear an example as there could be of the limits of New Labour's understanding the market and the proper use of taxation.

UPDATE: A reader has pointed out to me something equally unsurprising: that the LibDems are fervent in their support of these tax breaks:

Responding to the Government's decision to stamp out the tax relief offered to film investors in the UK, Don Foster MP, Liberal Democrat Spokesman for Culture, Media and Sport said:

"It's ludicrous to bring in tax legislation without a moment's notice. The Government proudly tells us they fully support UK film, and now they've stopped the show mid-reel.

"Last year Estelle Morris gave clear support to the tax break system. Now we're witnessing another Government U-turn on an industry in need of real support."

Who'd have believed it, eh?

I have long considered Robin Cook to be a seriously overrated politician. It takes a great effort for me to cope with hearing Clare Short moaning on. And I can't think of a single former cabinet minister whom I take less seriously than Frank Dobson.

But there is a first time for everything. I am now as one with Mr Cook, Ms Short and Mr Dobson. We all think the game is up for Tony Blair.

I believe that the state has no business running schools or hospitals. I trust competition and the efficacy of markets more than any politician or bureaucrat. But I none the less vote Labour. The reason? Tony Blair.

Today, however, it is clear that Mr Blair is a busted flush. The chance of his being able to implement any of his agenda is close to zero. Mr Blair is no longer primus inter pares . He is no longer first among anyone. The humiliating construction of his cabinet showed that he is now merely tolerated by his ministers, who appear to have decided for themselves whether or not they would move jobs.

The appointment of Andrew Adonis as an education minister is said to be a sign of Mr Blair's determination. It is, rather, a sign of his weakness. Unable to install Lord Adonis as a minister of state because of Ruth Kelly's objections, Mr Blair has "compromised" - for which read "backed down" - by making his former adviser a junior minister. The prime minister is now a prisoner of his own cabinet, unable even to appoint junior ministers without asking teacher for permission.

The wheels had already come off "the project" long before May 5. In the last parliament Mr Blair was unable to secure the legislation he wanted in two pivotal areas: university fees and foundation hospitals.

He needed a huge majority to overcome the objections of the party he supposedly leads and push his legislation through. Even with a majority of 161 he had to make so many concessions that the idea of independently run hospitals within the NHS - the very point of foundation hospitals - was effectively destroyed. The same was true for tuition fees; the fudged system with which we ended up, with regulators and caps on fees, is a far cry from the market mechanism originally planned.

In abstract, a majority of 66 is more than enough for a prime minister to be safe. The political problem for Mr Blair is that he has never really been a Labour prime minister. The party acquiesced in his leadership in return for electoral success, but he has never been able to rely on the support of the bog-standard Labour member. Since he became leader in 1994, he has been in a battle with the rest of the Labour party. He and his fellow Blairites were only ever a tiny fraction of the party.

Mr Blair has, in effect, been on contract to the party, handed the leadership in return for delivering power. But the contract was only ever temporary and always restricted. He was allowed to go only so far; any further and he was reined in - to wit, foundation schools and tuition fees.

The failure to improve public services (in large part, ironically, a result of those very restrictions on his freedom to act) now means that his public support - his most potent weapon against the Labour party at large - has been eroded. And that means that, with a majority of 66, any prospect of genuine reform based on competition and the market is now over. The Labour party is back in charge of the Labour party.

I joined Labour in 1986, when the party was only beginning to move away from its lunatic phase. I was desperate to see Labour embrace wealth creation and competition, but never imagined we'd have a leader so unambiguously in favour of the two as Tony Blair. Under him, I thought, all things were possible. Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Labour could reform health, education and welfare.

The lesson of the Blair years is that these reforms were not possible. Mr Blair's political genius was in persuading voters that it was possible to be rightwing on the left - that they could have the feelgood effect of voting Labour without having to vote for the Labour policies they knew and disliked. New Labour was a valiant attempt to turn Labour into a party in tune with the modern world. But it doesn't work. It has failed. Labour will always, it seems, be Labour.

Where does that leave those of us who believe that, far from being a contradiction, progressive politics necessitate freedom for the individual, a smaller state and lower taxes? Certainly not a Conservative party that, under Michael Howard, seems to want to recreate the 1950s. The Lib Dem Orange Book might have been a start, but the likes of David Laws and Mark Oaten are as unpopular in their party as Tony Blair is in his.

We are, at the moment, cut adrift, without a life raft. I've no idea where we will end up.

A number of lessons can be learnt from the most interesting election result for many years. Perhaps the clearest is that the case for proportional representation can finally be seen to be wholly without merit.

Charles Kennedy argued during the campaign that the election was a referendum on the war. So let us take it as just that. The Lib Dems — the only democratic party that would have preferred Saddam to have remained in power than for him to have been removed by force — managed to secure the support of just over one in five of those who voted (22 per cent). The pro-war parties, on the other hand, were supported by 67.5 per cent of voters.

The people have spoken — nay, shouted — their views, Mr Kennedy. And their message is, on your own argument, that the anti-war party should take a running jump. Yet Mr Kennedy and his fellow PR supporters now have the gall to claim that the result of the election demonstrates the need for PR, because Labour has achieved a parliamentary majority without a majority of the votes cast — a leap of logic so breathtaking as to be self-evidently nonsensical.

Given the low levels of support accorded to the two grown-up parties (35.2 per cent to Labour and 32.3 per cent to the Conservatives), demonstrably there was no enthusiasm for either. There is, however, nothing in these figures to show that a party without a majority of the popular vote is not entitled to a majority of the seats in the House of Commons. That is certainly a case which can be made, although to make it necessitates believing that we have not had a legitimate government since 1935, when the Tories achieved 55 per cent of the vote.

Not only was Attlee thus an illegitimate prime minister; so too the Liberal landslide of 1906 should have been nothing of the sort, since Campbell-Bannerman’s party achieved just 48.9 per cent.

Just as the figures show that there was little enthusiasm for either mainstream party, so they make clear that there is even less enthusiasm for Mr Kennedy’s fringe party. And thus that there is, at most, just 22 per cent support for handing over in perpetuity the determination of the government of the country to the Lib Dems, which would be the outcome of PR. Even in the Alice in Wonderland world of the Lib Dems, 22 per cent of a vote surely does not equate to a majority.

Michael Portillo is spot on in his analysis of the Blair effect. Despite his unprecedented electoral achievements, commentators and politicians seem to forget the scale of the impact Blair has had on politics. Nothing today is as it was. The normal rules of politics were suspended from the day in July 1994 when Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party and, despite everything which has happened since, they remain suspended. Blair is a politician - in purely tactical terms - of unsurpassed genius. Portillo gets to the heart of it:

Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, wins elections not because of his popularity but because he started by destroying the opposition, leaving the electorate with no alternative. Both he and Thatcher demolished the intellectual self-confidence of their opponents, leaving them rudderless and squabbling among themselves about which way to go.

Blair was able to occupy the middle ground of politics and to appeal to the middle classes in a way that Brown could not have. The Tories have been left having to choose between mimicking Blair and opposing him from the right. No wonder they are in disarray. Even Blair’s war on Iraq, although it carried political risks, had the effect of further marginalising the Conservatives because they had nothing distinctive to say.

When divisions consumed the Labour party in the early 1980s it split in two. Many MPs defected to the new alliance of Social Democrats and Liberals. The disaster of the split coming on top of the catastrophe of Labour’s general election results produced the necessary sense of panic. Labour had to accept huge policy changes. It entered a pact with Blair, a man capable of leading them to victory.

The split in the Labour party was the catalyst for change. The tragedy of the Tory party is that it will not split. The factions will lock horns and stay together.

It is sheer nonsense to suppose, as the more deluded Labourites think - I should say hope - that when Brown becomes PM he will reveal himself to be left in tooth and claw, the prince over the water who comes to the rescue of the left. The main difference will be one of tone, and inaction.

But. And it is a big but. The tone matters. Brown will not be able to place Labour so squarely in the middle, in art because he doesn't want to, and in part because he derives much of his support within the Labour Party from the very fact that he is seen as a Labour man through and through, in contrast to that interloper, Tony Blair. That means that when he takes over, politics will return to something close to normal - Labour versus Conservative, a battle which we have simply not had since 1994.

As things stand, however, Labour will win that battle, albeit by default. The Tories have not yet grasped that, however great the opportunity presented to them by a Brown premiership, they are not remotely in a position to capitalise on it. The Tories are - literally, as last Thursday showed - unelectable as a serious party of government. Worse, they have made amost no progress on 2001. If they think securing 32.3 per cent is progress, they are heading for a fourth defeat.

But if they learn the right lessons from Thursday, and from the likely battlelines of the 2009 election, then we are in for an even more fascinating time ahead.

The chatter has already started about the illegitimacy of a government with such a small share of the vote, and the need for an electoral system which ‘better reflects’ the vote.

Nonsense.

Thank God we don’t have PR – a result like this would have led to chaos. We know what the message of the election is – A Kick in the Ballots, as the Sun puts it. People wanted to give Blair a good kicking, and that's what happened. They did not want the Tories, they did not want the Lib Dems, and they did not want a deal in smoke filled rooms.

Only First Past The Post has enabled the country to get what it asked for – a chastened Blair.

Melanie Phillips:

As for the LibDems, what can one say except that they and Brian Sedgemore deserve each other, and the fact that people voted for them in such great numbers merely demonstrates the extent to which this country may already have reached the point of no return in the infantilism stakes.

Hear hear!

If the Conservatives really think that this election marks their rebirth then they are heading straight for defeat in 2009. They have been unable to break out of their core share of the vote, where they have been stuck since 1992. They have won in some seats, yes, but they have made little worthwhile progress. The reliably dense Michael Ancram argued on the radio this morning that it was a good result because, although their vote has remained solid, Labour's had fallen.

For 'remained solid', of course, read 'stuck where it has been for a decade' - not remotely enough even to threaten Labour. If it had not been for Iraq, and the desertion from Labour, Labour would have lost hardly any seats.

The truth of the matter is that the Tories have made almost no progress since Black Wednesday and the Major collapse.

Already, some Tories are making the case that it will take only one more election to kick Labour out. Hello? Have a look at the figures, my friends. You are living are in la-la land.

We have, of course, been here before. When John Smith took over as Labour leader in 1992, he too believed it would take only ‘one more heave’. His tactics were based on saying nothing and doing nothing, keeping his head down and waiting for victory to fall into his lap. If the Tories want now to replicate that strategy, no one will be happier than Gordon Brown, who will no doubt be PM in 2009.

The lesson the Tories need to start learning from Labour is not that they should become a party of the mushy centre. That is completely to misunderstand what Blair was about in opposition.

Blair realised that no party can win with only the support of its core vote. What he did was to rethink what Labour's core values actually meant in the modern world. The Tories need to be guided by New Labour's slogan in opposition: traditional values in a modern context.

In the Conservatives' case, that means adapting the values people with which voters outside the Tory tribe identify them and for which they respect them: lower taxes, a smaller state and greater individual freedom.

Low taxes in a modern context means the flat tax, an idea whose time has come which is proving its merits in eastern Europe and is now on the agenda in the US. It has intellectual merit, is economically a win-win and is politically sellable, as an idea naturally associated with the Tories. It also has the advantage of being on the side of history.

With Brown as PM, the choice in 2009 should, if the Tories have any sense (which is doubtful, given their behaviour since 1992) be clear between Labour's ever rising tax and spend, to little worthwhile effect, or adopting the pro-growth flat tax and a reduction in government comtrol in areas such as health and education.

With a choice like that, I would vote Conservative.

When the Freedom Party rose to power in Austria, there were widespread calls for Austria to be boycotted. When Colorado voted to pass an amendment revoking existing gay rights legislation and prohibiting the drafting of any new such laws, there were calls for a boycott. When Derek Beackon won Isle of Dogs for the BNP there were similar calls.

George Galloway and his Respect SWP-front party are as odious as any of the above. If it was right to advocate a boycott in the above instances (and I'm not saying it was, merely that there were many who did), could someone explain to me, please, why there will not be any such calls for a boycott of Bethnal Green and Bow?

Can anyone not now agree that Michael Howard's political judgement is lamentable. The near unanimous reaction to the election has been that Labour has 'lost', and the Tories boosted their credibility. So what does Michael Howard do? Short of wearing a t-shirt with word 'loser', he could not have done anything more certain to transform the momentum in Blair's favour than announce today that he is stepping down.

Already, I've noticed, comment on TV has moved to discussing how Blair will soon be on to his fifth Tory leader, having seen off four so far. Within the time of one Howard speech, Blair now looks like a winner again - an invulnerable PM.

Stand down, yes. But not now! Do the job of changing the leadership election rules.Lt Blair's authority drain away. Watch Brown plot. And then, when Labour is on the back foot, step down. Not now!

The capacity of the Conservative Party to act against its own interests never fails to amaze me. Faced with a weakened - possibly fatally so - Blair, what does the Tory leader do? Go out of his way to make the PM look like a winner.

Amazing.

Michael Ancram has just accused the PM of mounting "a very aggressive antiConservative campaign".

It was an election, my dear chap. What else did you expect?

I will. of course, be posting properly about the election, but as I head off to get some sleep, the share of the vote - Labour 36.3%, Conservative 33.2% and LibDem 22.6% - is not far off my prediction of Wednesday: Labour 37%, Conservative 33% and LibDems 24%.

I overestimated the LibDem vote and erestimated the uniqueness of individual constituency results. Where I calculated seats won on a uniform swing, giving Labour 373 seats, the Conservatives 185 and the LibDems 58, the real result (as of this morning) was Labour 353 seats, the Conservatives 195 and the LibDems 59.

Not a bad stab at a prediction, I think.

Just so that I can be humiliated come Friday, here's my prediction:

Lab 37% 373 seats
Lib 24% 58 seats
Con 33 % 185 seats

And 61% turn out.

Daniel Finkelstein in The Times:

I know I should be able to let this go, but can I just point this out to all SDP members who supported the merger with the Liberals: you are now in the same party as Brian Sedgemore.

(Yes, I realise that it is rich of me to flag up his comment, given that I vote for the party which made Frank Dobson Health Secretary.)

I've been away for most of the campaign, although I have been following it from abroad. Nothing, though, has prepared me adequately for the sight of Brian Sedgemore - I am tempted to end this sentence there - waving manically and grinning broadly at a LibDem rally today.

Truly, a marriage made in heaven.

I would, in normal circumstances, be immensely obliged to the Electoral Commission for the newspaper, TV and radio adverts that it has been funding since the election was called.

Without the commission, I would have had no idea that there is an election next week. And thanks, too, for suggesting that I vote. Despite, I only now realise, having been eligible to vote in five previous general elections, it had never once crossed my mind to do so. I had not been aware that — as the adverts so helpfully point out — politics is about education, crime, the NHS and all sorts of other things. I was completely ignorant of the fact that I live in a democracy and am thus entitled to vote. I had never thought that, if I don’t vote, I can’t influence which party is in government.

Unfortunately, however, I will not be able to vote next Thursday after all. I am, you see, dead. I stopped breathing a while ago. No one bothered advertising the fact that, in order to live, I need to keep breathing. Indeed, it’s a wonder I didn’t conk out many years before, since no one had taken out a TV ad to tell me that I need to eat.

Has there ever been a more fatuous, inane or plain stupid advertising campaign than that which the Electoral Commission is now running? I cannot imagine that there is a single sentient being in the country unaware that there is an election next week. It does not need a national advertising campaign to break the news.

As for the idea that anyone not intending to vote would, on noticing the commission’s adverts, suddenly realise that politics matters — pur-lease. The decision by the grandees who comprise the commission to launch such a campaign reveals nothing so much as their breathtaking contempt for the intelligence of the average non-voter.

Of course when I write that the Electoral Commission has been funding these adverts I am not being strictly accurate. The money to pay for the campaign has not come from the pockets of Sam Younger, its chairman, or his fellow commissioners. It has come from you and me, taken from us by the Government so that it can be spent as a group of bureaucrats sees fit — in this instance, telling us how we should behave in a democracy. Whatever next? A taxpayer-funded campaign telling us it is our duty to “Back the (Olympic) Bid”.

Don't you just love those 'who should I vote for' surveys. Here's another, which tells me this:

Compared to the whole population...

99.6% are significantly to your left
0.4% have views about the same as yours
0.0% are significantly to your right

and my favourite finding:

compared to women...

100.0% are significantly to your left
0.0% have views about the same as yours
0.0% are significantly to your right

I love the idea that, according to the survey, there is not a single human being in the country who is more right wing than me. Others might conclude that the methodology is therefore spot on, but since one of my answers was that I strongly agreed that Most immigrants are beneficial to the UK, I think it's back to the drawing board for whoever compiled the test.

UPDATE:
The dangers of blogging when on the move: I failed to spot that I am only the single most right wing person in the country, according to the survey, on public and private involvement in the economy, international trade, redistributive taxation... and Iraq.

Ho hum. Quite what is right wing about believing that murderous dictatorial regimes which pose a threat to global safety should be toppled is beyond me.

And the same goes for believing that public services should be run efficiently.

Still more ludicrously, it advises me to vote for UKIP.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I'm bored rigid reading about the dilemma of former Labour voters who, wanting Saddam to have remained in power, cannot bring themselves to vote for a Prime Minister who helped liberate Iraq.

I have a very different problem. I wish - as regular readers will have noticed - to see Mr Blair reelected, in large measure because of his support for the war. In fact, I wish to support Charles Kennedy's notion of treating the election as a referendum on said war.

I have voted Labour in every election since I have been eligible to vote, local, European and national.

But what am I now to do? I wrote to my Labour candidate to ask him whether he supported the war. I informed him of my Labour voting history and my decision to treat the election as a referendum.

This is his reply:

A decision had to be made on the failure to achieve a second UN resolution - I respect the PM's decision, personally I would (with the information at my disposal) have made a different one. That is also partly in recognition that this may have been the first 'resources' war of the 21st century, perhaps a moment for us to all reflect on the price others have to pay for our affluent lifestyles.

If I am to vote Labour next Thursday, I will have to put an x by the name of a man who would have voted to keep Saddam in power and who clearly has not the slightest notion of the threat faced by Western society. Worse still, he appears to have a bizarre conception of economics and wealth creation - that there is somehow a finite supply of wealth available to the planet and our affluence is maintained at the cost of others.

This is a genuine dilemma. I cannot abstain; I despise those who opt out. I cannot conceive of voting Conservative, and certainly will not reward Mr Howard's despicable campaign tactics over immigration and asylum.

The only way out I can see is to take solace from the fact that I live in a safe Tory seat, and so my vote will not return the Labour candidate to Parliament. I can defend my vote on the basis that it's a vote for Labour - for Blair - and not for the actual candidate. But that's a cop out, isn't it?

(designed by Anthony Cox)

And here's another reason:

Every Labour and Conservative candidate should be held to account by voters over the Iraq war, Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy has argued. Mr Kennedy said Tony Blair had taken the UK into an illegal war and voters could deliver "justice by the ballot box" at the general election.

How about holding you to account, Mr Kennedy, for your consistent attempts in the run-up to the war to keep Saddam in power, and for the logic of your position now - that Saddam should be restored to power?

How about "justice by the ballot box" for Iraqis, Mr Kennedy? Or don't they have any rights to democracy?

I was terribly sad to see the obituaries today for Donald Bruce. I had the pleasure of getting to know Lord Bruce in the 1990s, when I worked for Peter Shore, one of his close colleagues. I listened to his stories from the Attlee government with awe.

I certainly didn't agree with everything he said, but so what? Rarely have I encountered anyone as passionate and determined in his principles as Donald Bruce, a true patriot and a man who led a remarkable life. His obituary is worth reading even by those who have never heard of him, as a wonderful and all too rare example of a man who excelled in so many areas - mentioned in dispatches, PPS to Nye Bevan, hugely succesful businessman, defender of British self-governance and exposer of intellectual and financial corruption.

Interesting that Liam Fox, the Conservative Party Chairman, has clearly never even considered that his party might win on 5th May, whatever he might say in public. He has already organised a lecture to the think tank, Politeia for 10th May.

And would I be entirely cynical in thinking that this means that he has already set in motion his forthcoming leadership campaign?

Never say I'm not prepared to publish unpalatable facts:

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Your actual outcome:

Labour -26
	Conservative 37
Liberal Democrat -68
	UK Independence Party 4
Green -36

The Conservative Party is strongly against joining the Euro and against greater use of taxation to fund public services. The party broadly supported the Iraq war and backs greater policing and ID cards. The Tories are against increasing the minimum wage above the rate of inflation, and have committed to abolishing university tuition fees. They support 'virtual vouchers' for private education.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Oliver Kamm is spot on in his analysis of the election, and the central role of the Iraq war:

Do I trust the Tories on defence? No, I do not. There are individual Conservative candidates - notably Times columnist Michael Gove - whose election would be a good thing for public policy and the quality of British democracy. But overall the politician who merits support in this election is Tony Blair: the man who joined with our American allies to prosecute a just, necessary and noble campaign to overthrow an unspeakable tyranny.

I would add a few other names to the roster of individual Conservative candidates for whom I would happily vote: Greg Clark, Robert Halfon, Nick Herbert and Ed Vaizey. I hope they all win.

In domestic policy terms I can think of only a few reasons to vote Labour. The real story about 5th May is, after all, that if Labour wins Blair is already a lame duck.

Even if Blair won with the same majority as Labour now has, the result would be, at best, treading water for two years until Brown takes over. Blair has been unable with his existing majority to get through his purported real agenda of reform, from Foundation Hospitals to top-up fees, without caving in to the Old Labour backbenches.

It is a reasonable assumption that his majority will be smaller in the next Parliament, and the quirk of the PLP's make up is that the most New Labour-ish MPs have the smallest majorities, so for every loss of a seat, the damage to Blair’s ability to do his own thing gets exponentially worse.

Let’s say Blair wins with a majority of 50. It looks good; but in reality the game is up. Add to the mix a French ‘no’ vote, and what is the point of Blair’s staying? He can’t be ‘unremittingly New Labour’, as we are told he wants to be, because the PLP won’t let him get any real reforms through. And there’s no 'historic' EU decision for which to battle. So what is the point of remaining in office, merely to suffer humiliation at the hands of Brown and the PLP every time he wants to act?

But overall, I too will be treating this election as

a referendum on the veracity, judgement and ethics of the Prime Minister

as Oliver Kamm puts it. And on that basis, I will also be voting Labour. Blair has been courageous in knowingly sacrificing his political capital in order to do what is right. He has been far sighted. He has been a global statesman of immense importance. Most of all, he has been right. And he deserves to win a third term, especially given the shameless opportunism and cynicism of the leader of the opposition.

Terrific news from Arundel, where the Tories have chosen a superb replacement for Howard Flight. How rare it is that a selection meeting chooses the best candidate.

Nick Herbert is just the sort of man the Tories, and the Commons itself, needs: sparky, thoughtful, bright, personable and - above all - right in his policy prescriptions. I must declare an interest; he is a friend, and I sit on the advisory board of his think tank, Reform.

The only downside is that he will be missed by Reform - althogh the now Acting Director, Andrew Haldenby, has been equally instrumental in Reform's success, and will I am sure take it on to new triumphs.

Nick Cohen is one of the main reasons to buy the Observer, and today's column is as incisive as always. I don't always - rarely, in fact, other than on the Iraq war - agree with him, but he is one of the few must-read columnists around at the moment.

He has a typically insightful line:

New Labour, of course, had planned to run a negative campaign against Howard which might have driven away Tory supporters. But Crosby showed his genius by stopping it when he successfully branded New Labour as anti-semitic. We're now in the situation where Howard plays the race card two or three times a week against gypsies, asylum seekers and immigrants from every country except Australia. Yet when you attack him for it, the race card is played back at you and you are accused of being an anti-semite. This is the racial politics of the politically correct age.

David Aaronovitch. Fantastic.

I'm writing this on a train. I got on at Bournemouth and will get off at Waterloo. I’ll then complete my journey by taxi.

I’ve chosen to do this because it is cheaper, quicker and more comfortable than driving. Or, for that matter, flying. If, however, I were returning to London from Scotland, I would fly: that would be the cheapest, quickest and most comfortable option.

Not, however, if we have a Conservative government. The Shadow Transport Secretary has decided that he is better placed than I am to take such decisions about how I travel, and that I am wrong, wrong, wrong to fly. So he wants to increase taxes to make it uneconomic and unprofitable for airlines to offer cheap flights. As he put it yesterday: “If I was in office on May 6 I would want to straight away talk to my colleagues in Europe about how we could make progress towards a fuel tax.”

To be specific, Tim Yeo proposes — although he hasn’t been open enough to spell it out — that the cost of a flight from Glasgow to London should increase by between 12 and 25 per cent. The current cost on easyJet is £27.99, and the proposed EU fuel duty which is now on the table in Brussels is for £3.50 to £7 per flight.

I am confused. I had been under the impression that, as Michael Howard put it, “Britain needs a responsible government — a government that will put a stop to Mr Blair’s next round of stealth taxes, and cut taxes”. Mr Howard clearly forgot the next sentence: “Apart from on successful businesses which my would-be transport secretary doesn’t like.”

Just as Mr Howard must also have left out a line when he said that we need “a government that trusts free enterprise, promotes individual responsibility, rewards hard work; encourages ambition, admires excellence.” He surely meant to add: “Apart, that is, from airlines which have introduced an entirely new market, offer increased choice to the consumer and boost the economy. We’re going to tax them more. Ha!” A party claiming to champion business and to favour limited government and low taxes proposes to clobber one of the most innovative and successful sectors of the economy because its transport spokesman believes that the would-be man in Whitehall knows best.

If Mr Yeo’s neo-Heathite approach to business success is what lies in store under the Conservatives, roll on that third defeat.

Johann Hari asks the critical question:

Think before you vote: do you want Britain to be more like Texas, or more like Sweden?

Hmmm. Which is it to be? One of the wealthiest states in the US? Or the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world?

Oh, I see. The answer is in his conclusion:

Do we want to be a country with a shrivelled, cheap public sector, or a superb expensive one?

I'm surprised that Hari, whom I had always assumed was a leftie, appears to be urging a Conservative vote. It is, after all, the Tories who are pledged to waste even more money than Labour has so far managed on the NHS and other public services.

If you want to know why all the recent talk of some kind of Tory revival is bunkum, have a look at the Times' latest Populus poll. As Peter Riddell writes:

The Conservative label is undermining the party’s ability to sell its policies on immigration to swing or floating voters...

The poll, undertaken last weekend, shows that Conservative policy is more popular than Labour’s but the Tory label results in a big drop in support, the implication being that the Tory brand is not appealing.

...Populus divided the sample into two to see the impact of presenting policies without attributing them to one or other of the main parties. Making the Tory link explicit makes a big difference. Net agreement (agree minus disagree) runs at 55 per cent among all voters when the Tory link is not mentioned. But this drops to 43 per cent when the policy is attributed to the Conservatives.

Net support for the Tory approach among swing or floating voters drops from 57 to 41 per cent when the Tory link is made known. Labour voters also become much less supportive of the Tory approach, with net agreement down from 50 to 29 per cent. This more than offsets the rise in net agreement among Tory voters from 67 to 87 per cent.

From the Press Association today:

HOWARD PLEDGES `CLEAR' STI AWARENESS CAMPAIGN

By Gavin Cordon, PA Whitehall Editor

Tory leader Michael Howard today promised a high profile public awareness campaign to counter the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Speaking at his party's latest campaign launch in London, Mr Howard warned that the country was facing an "epidemic" of sexual infection.

...A Conservative Government would draw on its experience of the successful Aids campaign of the 1980s to run a ``clear, bold and very public'' television campaign highlighting the risks of diseases like chlamydia, he said.

As a friend put it to me, now we know the Tories' campaign themes:

Lower taxes. Controlled immigration. Cleaner willies.

I'm not sure I quite understand this story. Why has John Reid (whose picture seems to be in all the news stories - see picture above) been banned as a Labour candidate because a woman called Christine Wheatley was once a prostitute in Paris?

Good to see our taxes being put to such splendid use.

Given that the political betting market is almost never wrong, the latest spread on Tory seats at the next election is a useful corrective to some of the guff around this morning on the broadcast media, that somehow the latest polls means that the next election is now almost an open contest.

The spread shows Labour 352-359, Conservative 193-200 and LibDem 68-72.

Some contest. On that basis, the Conservatives will do even worse than Labour under Michael Foot in 1983.

I'm in the middle of writing a long piece on the drawn out death of the Conservative Party and the future of British politics. I'll post it as and when it's published (in the US).

They used to joke that if you wanted to have a small fortune, you should start out with a large one and then gamble it on the horses. Times have clearly changed. The way to rake in a small fortune today is to become a Member of Parliament, fail at your job, and then watch the earnings roll in.

This week’s publication of the House of Commons’ Register of Members’ Interests revealed that William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative Party, earned £1 million last year. His fellow Tory MP, Michael Portillo, pulled in more than half a million. Not bad, really, considering that the most apposite word which could be applied to their political careers is ‘failure’.

Neither man has even come close to achieving what they set out to achieve – helping their party recover from its crash towards obliteration. Indeed, far from helping the Conservative Party survive, both have effectively abandoned it in order to pursue riches away from politics.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of British politics, where success is rewarded with a relatively lowly salary, and failure is met with a succession of job offers, inducements and lavish speaking fees.

When Baroness Thatcher left office in 1990, she was 65. She had spent her most productive years in office, devoting herself to public service. As Prime Minister, she transformed, even saved, the country. By any conceivable definition of the word, her career was a success. Had she chosen to step down in the mid 1980s, having already won two elections, she could have capitalised on that success and earned a fortune on the speaker circuit, not least in the United States, where she was – and remains - revered.

Instead, she ploughed on with what she believed was her duty – public service. For that, she earned the Prime Minister’s then salary of £50,000 (in addition to her salary as an MP). Not to be sneezed at, certainly; but in comparison with the money which would have been available to her in business or on the lecture circuit, a relative pittance.

How things have changed. The height of William Hague’s ministerial career was a minor job as Welsh Secretary, at the fag end of the dreadful Major government. Mr Hague was not a disaster, but the job was hardly taxing and the post was not exactly a major office of state.

His period as Leader of the Opposition was, however, absolutely a disaster. Under Mr Hague, the Tories plunged with an eerie regularity from one low to another, their prospects worsening with every passing day. Mr Hague jumped on every bandwagon, adopted every modish publicity tactic, and deserted every shred of consistency in a record breakingly unsuccessful bid to win power in the 2001 election.

And yet today, it is Mr Hague who is pulling in the pounds. It is Mr Hague, not Baroness Thatcher, who is turning his small fortune into a very large one.

Something is very wrong.

What makes the situation still worse is that, despite his disastrous tenure as leader of the Conservative Party, he has not sought in any way to make recompense to his party. Mr Hague is a hugely talented man. He may not be up to leading his party, but his performances in the House of Commons can be brilliant. His wit is legendary. At a time when the Conservative Party is so devoid of talent that it has had to turn to Michael Howard, a political retread from the ever more distant past, Mr Hague has simply abandoned the party which has given him everything.

How his party – even his country - needs him! Yet he has resolutely refused to help out. What a contrast with a predecessor as leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. After losing the 1964 election as Prime Minister, Sir Alec agreed to serve under Edward Heath as Foreign Secretary in 1970. As Shadow Foreign Secretary, Mr Hague would be able to make mincemeat of the government’s case for the European Constitution. Instead, he devotes himself to making money.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with making money. No one is obliged to stick to politics, just as no one is obliged to put public service ahead of all else. But if it was not for the Conservative Party, and his status as an MP and former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Hague would be merely another unknown management consultant, his job before entering Parliament.

Michael Portillo is another case in point. British politics needs men and women of talent. Mr Portillo may – like all politicians - have his faults, but he is undoubtedly a cut above the run of the mill hack politician. Yet Mr Portillo has chosen to leave politics and to turn himself into a media figure. He at least has the excuse that he offered himself to his party as leader, and it responded with a resounding ‘no’. By walking away, he is perhaps doing only what his party has told him to do.

Something is clearly wrong when politicians who have achieved little, but who have the talent to go on to genuine success, see fit only to walk away from public service.

There is now a central paradox at the heart of political life. Financial rewards are no longer available merely to those who have achieved high office, such as John Major, now earning serious money in business, or – when he retires – Tony Blair. Today, money is available even to those who fail at their task.
It is possible now to use a political career not as an end in itself but merely as the stepping stone to a lucrative middle age.

Politicians are now entering the House of Commons at a much younger age than before. No one thinks twice about an MP in his 30s. Yet this is surely the wrong way round. Instead of using politics as a foundation for future activities, we need MPs who have already experienced life and who then opt to enter politics. We need MPs who see public office as a means of giving something back to their country, not a platform on which they can build a subsequent, more financially rewarding, career. Politics should not be a means to an end. It should be the highest form of service.

(12)

If further proof is required that the political marriage between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown is bound to end in divorce, one need only look at the identity of the self-appointed marriage guidance counsellor.

John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, has spent the past two years as the would-be peacemaker between the Prime Minister and Chancellor. Given Mr Prescott’s lamentable track record, it is little wonder that relations between the two most important political figures in the land are now at breaking point.

However inept a minister he may be, the Deputy Prime Minister remains deeply popular within the Labour Party. Were he to pronounce one way or another - for either Brown or Blair - his views would carry enormous weight within the party. That is why both Mr Blair and Mr Brown, who might otherwise dismiss him as a buffoon, have to listen to him when he speaks.

Certainly, ever since his election as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1994, John Prescott has seen his main role as protecting his leader, Tony Blair. The two men could not be more different: Blair with the smooth charm of a privileged upbringing, at ease with the profits of capitalism; Prescott rough and chippy, with a hatred of business and the ‘beautiful people’ (as he sneeringly calls them) brought to the fore under New Labour.

It is precisely because of that difference that Mr Blair was so keen to have Mr Prescott as his deputy - a man steeped in Labour traditions, who could be relied on to give the newcomer leader the backing he would need in an often hostile party. Sometimes that has meant persuading recalcitrant Labour MPs to support the government in Commons votes. More often than not, of late, it has meant dealing with the latest stirring of the ‘Teebeegeebees’, the name given by insiders to the rows between Mr Blair and Mr Brown after their TB/GB initials.

So when, in the autumn of 2003, rumours were circulating across Westminster that the Teebeegeebees were raging once more, it was nothing new for Mr Prescott to try to calm the waves. On 6th November 2003, he hosted a dinner at his Admiralty House residence for the Prime Minister and Chancellor, his aim being to knock sense into both of them and to point out that the more they rowed, the more damage was done to the government and thus, in the long run, to each of them.

That dinner has long been public knowledge. According to an explosive new book, however, the Prime Minister told the Chancellor at the dinner that he would resign before the next election but that he needed Mr Brown's help and support 'to get through the next year'. The book claims that the proposed handover was then discussed at a series of further meetings, including one attended by both Peter Mandelson and Mr Prescott.

My information suggests that, far from committing himself to resigning, Mr Blair demanded that Mr Brown help him regain his public standing after an abysmal year in the aftermath of the Kelly affair and the continuing deterioration in Iraq.
And that if he did salvage his reputation, he said he could then resign honourably and hand over the crown from a position of strength.

Whatever the truth, the thing we know for certain is that there was one ever-present figure in discussions between the two men: John Prescott. Yet just one glance at the Deputy Prime Minister’s political track record reveals that everything Mr Prescott touches turn to dust.

To look at his lack of achievement is to wonder why on earth anyone would imagine John Prescott is capable of Cabinet office, let alone skilful enough to negotiate a settlement between two such powerful figures as the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.

Take his most recent cock-up, the much-vaunted plan for an elected assembly in the North-East. Mr Prescott pushed it onto the government’s agenda, pushed for the referendum and then pushed for a ‘yes’ vote. The result: in the November referendum, 78 per cent of voters told him where he could put his assembly. Every single one of the 23 council areas affected voted against the plan. It was an intensely personal humiliation for Mr Prescott. And at a cost of over £10 million to the taxpayer.

Mr Prescott’s list of failures is quite simply awesome. Any other minister would long ago have been sacked with such a record.

Local government finance - the council tax - has become steadily more unfair and steadily more complicated under his command. Even the Labour dominated Commons select committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions described his performance as 'woeful'.

Housing policy has entered the realms of the absurd, blowing from one contradictory extreme to another - restricting right-to-buy, moving council tenants out of local authority control and reigniting council house building.

As for transport: as anyone who has to travel knows, Two Jags’s record was so appalling that even Mr Blair despaired, and removed transport from his grasp. His sole contribution seemed to be a bus lane on the M4 which brought the motorway to a virtual standstill.

In policy matters, he is simply incompetent.

In regard to Mr Blair and Mr Brown’s squabbles, however, he is dealing with matters in which he is intimately steeped - the Labour Party itself. But that does not make him any more capable of giving out the correct advice.

Mr Prescott’s first public intervention in the affair, in May last year came in a very carefully worded interview with The Times - unusually for a man whose words are usually splayed as if being fired from an out of alignment machine gun - about how the 'plates' were 'shifting' in politics.

He was clearly referring to the Brown/Blair relationship and its possible outcome. And since Mr Prescott knows the Labour Party backwards, and can sense its nuances, his words had a seismic effect.

What few could understand, however, was why he would be so open about the crisis. The answer lies in Mr Prescott’s personality.

In researching my biography of David Blunkett, I came across numerous examples of John Prescott attempting to stir the pot. It is as if he cannot bear the way he is regarded - as a politician whose role is entirely symbolic, a relic of Old Labour. And so, every so often, he cannot resist making a splash, drawing attention to himself and reminding people that he is a major Labour Party player.

Indeed, his lack of judgement revealed itself in his reaction to my book. After a week of wall-to-wall coverage of my revelations, by the following week interest had focussed on Mr Blunkett himself rather than my book. And then Mr Prescott waded in. Speaking on the Today programme in an interview about inner city policy, he responded to a perfectly obvious question about David Blunkett's comments not with a calm, prepared line but with a full-on rant about me, because the whole affair "has come about because of an element of personal arrogance, and a very large measure of personal greed and book sales of the author Stephen Pollard."

Cue intense media interest in an otherwise dormant story: how do you feel about being called greedy by John Prescott? Etc.

If there is one man who should not be given the job of dousing out a fire, it is John Prescott. However one looks at it, Mr Prescott’s influence in the Teebeegeebees, as in so many other areas, has been baleful. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor are at each others' throats as never before. Some peacemaker!

(There was a very embarrassing spelling mistake in an earlier version of this posting.)

(9)

I was delighted to hear that Greg Clark, one of the nicest and most able Conservatives, has been selected for the safe seat of Tunbridge Wells.

He might, however, wish to sue The Times over its suggestion that his loyalty to the Conservative Party is in doubt:

Greg Clark, the Tory director of policy, is seen as a future Cabinet minister...

I cannot understand why Tunbridge Wells Conservative Association would select someone whom they expect to defect to Labour.

(7)

Insightful piece by Michael Portillo:

When I first met Boris Johnson, I marked him down as unserious. He came to interview me as defence secretary and arrived 45 minutes late. Apparently, experienced political journalist that he was, he had thought the ministry was in Victoria Street, not in Whitehall. He had the decency to look flushed and sweaty, but also gave the impression that I should find his shambolic performance endearing. I pretended to do so.

...The Conservatives may sigh at losing one of their few figures who was interesting to the public. But his charisma could not be bottled and sold to boost Tory fortunes. Bumbling Boris is a good television act to set alongside other endearing television creations, such as Dawn French’s vicar and Joanna Lumley’s dipsomaniac, but it is too remote from ordinary voters and could never have translated into anything politically useful.

When Johnson went to Liverpool recently to apologise for an article in The Spectator, many people failed to recognise him. It is remarkable that the Tories’ nearest brush with the cool side of life is represented by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson of Eton and Balliol. His background puts him scarcely closer to real life than the Prince of Wales’s.

...If the party were a business it would instruct headhunters to find leadership material: “Young, charismatic and clear thinking, amusing but not a comedian, media experienced but not celebrity obsessed, family person, reliable, preferably from a humble background, educated in a state school, must believe in sweeping change in the party. Candidates with origins in the southeast need not apply.”

Luckily one person who fits most of the criteria will enter parliament at the next election. Like Johnson he is a journalist, but unlike him he would never be late for a meeting.

His name is Michael Gove, who long ago wrote a kindly biography of me. He survived that lapse of judgment and climbed the ladder. He has given up the prospect of editing The Times to become a humble backbencher in a party whose fortunes are at a low ebb. That is what I call serious.

(19)

Labour are running this poster at the moment, which supposedly portrays Michael Howard as Desperate Dan. Am I the only one who thinks of someone closer to home when I see it?

There's only person it reminds me of: John Prescott. Who must himself be a pretty desperate man at the moment...

(6)

Some of you will notice that a post which was here earlier today about YouGov, the pollsters, has disappeared. I'm afraid that, for reasons which I can't go in to, I have had to pull it.

All I will say is this. I took part in a Radio 4 documentary which went out last night (which you can listen to here - click on part two).

It discussed the phenomenon of internet polling, and I revealed some fun I've had with YouGov's claims to have tight security which prevents people registering on line more than once. To prove that their claim is wrong, I spent a while recently registering as over a dozen different aliases, each of which more shockingly named - my two favourites being Hilary Pacemaker and (in tribute to the twelfth century abbess and composer, Hildegard of Bingen) Hildy Bingen.

Confronted with this evidence of the flaws in the vaunted security of their registration process, Peter Kellner, chairman of YouGov, caved in immediately and admitted how embarrassed he was. Game, set and match.

(7)

This Guardian story reminds me of the old Not The Nine O'Clock News joke about Fiats: Built by robots. Driven by Italians.

(3)

Ok, I was completely wrong. Things are going the Tories' way.

(2)

Apologies for the lack of posts. Things should get back to normal now. I've been away at the 3 party conferences, and what a depressing experience it has been.

I'm in Bournemouth at the moment for the Conservatives. Lordy. The most striking - and most damning - feature is that it's just, well...boring. I mean, really, really boring. It has zilch atmosphere. You would think that, since this is the opposition's last conference in advance of a general election at which a deeply disliked government is to put itself to the electoral test, spirits would be up or, at the very least, there be some spirit. As if.

Still. that is at least a well-merited consequence of the fact that the Tories are going backwards - that they are even less likely to win support than a year ago under the stunning incompetence of IDS.

And yes, it is they who have got themselves into their current state - it's not the result of divine intervention or fate, but the direct result of their own behaviour and decisions in opposition. And of the great white hope of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, who manages to convince further with every passing day that he is not fit to be Leader of the Opposition, let alone PM. I look forward to his speech tomorrow.

What a rabble. I was at an NUT fringe meeting this afternoon, hoping to see some sparks on school choice between Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, and Steve Simnott, the new NUT General Secretary. On the panel was a Tory MP of whom I had never previously heard called Angela Watkinson. Her speech was - quite apart from being read out from a crib sheet - of such stunning inanity that it deserves a wider audience as an example of its type:
drab and pointless, comprised of silly anecdotes about her experience as a school governor and the fact that she has grandchildren. I wouldn't have paid the slightest attention to it or to her - she displayed all the attributes of classic lobby fodder - had she not been introduced as - I can barely believe this as I write it - a member of the front bench education team. In other words, Michael Howard expects support for his proposal to install this woman as a Minister of State at the DfEE. It is so self-evidently preposterous a notion that merely writing it confirms that no one in the party leadership is in the least bit serious about power.

As if that wasn't enough, Tim Collins then smothered the NUT General Secretary - a man who believes the most basic foundation of Tory policy, choice, is immoral - in the rhetorical equivalent of sloppy kisses. Good God, he even began his remarks by saying that the greatest piece of legislation put forward by a Conservative was Butler's 1944 Education Act, specifcally because it was the result of a consensus which included the NUT. He wasn't on the campaign trail; he was at Conservative Party Conference! Are the Tories so entirely devoid of spunk and belief in their own principles that they have to apologise for their own existence at their own conference?

What a shower.

I could go on for much, much longer, but what's the point? If the stuff on display here in Bournemouth is anything to go by, they're not just going to lose the next election big time, they're stuffed for good. Deservedly.

The most notable feature of the LibDems' conference was the number of young, sharp suited clearly careerist types. They flocked to the Tories in the 1980s, to Labour in the 1990s and now, it seems, they are descending on the LibDems. That might be pretty depressing for the rest of us, but for the LibDems it's far more significant than anything else from this year's conference season.

As for Labour, well, I don't really have much to add to what has been written, other than saying that the idea conference would be a blood bath was always misguided. How long will it take commentators to realise that Labour conference has changed beyond just the decor and the platform control. The psyche of the delegates has changed, too. They know that they are on display, and they behave themselves in front of the cameras. They do their fighting off camera.

I can't overstate how pleased I am to be done with conference season this year. They've all been so oddly quiet. And so, so boring. Even for a political anorak such as myself.

(5)

The News of the World has an opinion poll today (I can't find the link, I'm afraid) by Populus which has the Conservatives on 32%, the Liberals on 29% and Labour on 28%. My magic spread sheet calculates that would give Labour 288 seats, the Conservatives 239 and the Liberals 87.

But forget about that. There's a far more important poll released today. Yes, it's the results of my With which LibDem would you least like to be stuck in a lift? poll. And the runaway winner is Dr Jenny Tonge, with 53% of the vote. Charles Kennedy and Simon Hughes are next on 13%, John Cleese on 11% and bringing up the rear, Sir Menzies Campbell on 10%.

Any suggestions for a prize for Dr Tonge?

(4)

I've just discovered a site which hosts polls. So, to begin, here's the most important question of the day:

UPDATE:
Oops. It's been pointed out that I have misspelt Jenny Tonge's name. I'd like to claim that it's deliberate, and I'm making some sort of point.
I'm not. It's a mistake. And do you know what? I couldn't care less.

(13)

Oliver Kamm makes another observation about the Lib Dems, and I can only echo his contempt for their shameless political profligacy.

But.

I must also report what, to me, is a remarkable event. I spoke at a fringe meeting at the Lib Dem conference yesterday, and was shaken by it. I have have spoken at more fringes at Labour and Conservative conferences than I care to remember. They have been on a variety of different subjects, but all have had one thing in common: a very large proportion of the audience has been mad. For every sensible question, there are always at least two which are barking.

So you can imagine what I expected yesterday, especially given that where the Lib Dems are not inconsistent they are plain wrong.

Imagine again. Not only did the audience look normal - not something one can say of Labour and Conservative audiences - but, amazingly, every question was sensible and thoughtful. I don't mean by that that they were right - I doubt if anyone present agreed with me - but their disagreements were cogent and interesting.

I am still in a state of shock.

(6)

Maybe I'm missing something, but I cannot see why banning the hunting of foxes should in any way diminish the pleasure of those who enjoy riding to hounds through the countryside. Why can't they simply switch to drag hunting, when the hounds follow a scent which has been laid down in advance, and which no one - certainly not the new legislation - seeks to ban?

Unless, that is - which the advocates of hunting deny - the pleasure is not in the thrill of galloping and jumping across the countryside, but in the fact of ripping a fox apart.

As I've said below, if it was up to me, there'd be no ban. I couldn't care less about the fate of foxes, and I think there are far more important things for the left to worry about. But it's not up to me, and there will be a ban.

So what? The new legislation does not ban drag hunting. It bans fox hunting. Why the fuss? Just switch to drag hunting.

Please tell me - I mean this - why I'm wrong.

(30)

Harry's Place has a wonderful observation about a letter in the Grauniad today:

I recall going to London for a demonstration with about a million others. There was no trouble whatsoever. Rob Morrish Oldbury, W Mids

Its hilarious- the revolutionaries of the SWP outdone in the militancy stakes by a bunch of farmers and public schoolies. Carry on with the paper mache puppets and your Bliar placards lads.......

(3)

I am heartily sick of the way ‘the countryside’ thinks it has some kind of privileged position which should exempt it from the way the rest of the world works.

The much-trumpeted countryside way of life is in large measure subsidised by the rest of us - the city dwellers about whom the Countryside Alliance speaks so contemptuously. The countryside is generally an economic basket case. Farmers are subsidy junkies, most of whom are only able to conduct their unnecessary businesses on the back of our taxes but who seem to think that we owe them a living. We don't. If any measure of rationality was involved, those who complain so loudly about their low incomes and hard work would have long ago gone bust and transferred to a more economically sensible activity.

Now it's the turn of the foxhunters to plead - demand, I should say - special treatment. Country dwellers seem to think that the democractic process and laws of the land should not apply to them because they are special and a force of more standing and moral worth than the democratically elected government.

The facts are straightforward. Labour has won two landslides with manifesto commitments to a free vote on foxhunting, allowing MPs to do their job and express their views on the sport. As the 2001 manifesto put it:

The House of Commons elected in 1997 made clear its wish to ban fox-hunting. The House of Lords took a different view (and reform has been blocked). Such issues are rightly a matter for a free vote and we will give the new House of Commons an early opportunity to express its view. We will then enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue. If the issue continues to be blocked we will look at how the disagreement can be resolved.

That is precisely what has now happened, and the pro-hunt lobby should live with it. No one has been misled. No one has been deceived. The people have spoken in both 1997 and 2001 and returned landslide Labour majorities and a government pledged to allow a vote. All that has happened is that MPs have now had that vote.

The fox hunting lobby has lost. Sure, they have every right to campaign to have the soon-to-be-law reversed, just as any group can seek to persuade the rest of us of the need for a change in policy. But there is no justification, either moral or legal, for their current behaviour and support for violent tactics.

Throughout the day, spokesmen for the foxhunters have been saying that country dwellers are a law abiding group pushed over the edge by the government. What they mean, of course, is precisely the opposite: they are specifically not law abiding, since the moment a law which they oppose is about to passed, they endorse direct action and criminal activity in protesting against it. The law of the land, in other words, is fine so long as they agree with it.

As it happens, I am against a ban. I think it is fatuous and pointless. That is irrelevant. My side has lost the argument and the vote. Parliament decides the law, not the Countryside Alliance.

(20)

Brilliant column in today's Times by Alice Miles, which outlines the litany of incompetence by the scandalous Child Support Agency:

A quarter of parents, nearly always mothers, who apply for maintenance receive none at all, while another 20 per cent get less than they are entitled to. And these are not huge amounts: the average per child is £16 a week, a small payment which might make an enormous difference.

As well as the £976 million that the CSA has calculated is owed and believes it can recover from absent parents, there is a further £1 billion that it writes off as unrecoverable. Were the Inland Revenue to be owed £2 billion it would damn well go and get it. But because this is owed to the poorest people in the country, nobody does a thing about it.

If the CSA is failing the vulnerable, it is also doing it very expensively. Its operating costs are an astonishing 54p per £1 collected. The Inland Revenue’s, by contrast, are 1.11p per £1.

A new £456 million computer system at the CSA does not work. A simpler maintenance calculation scheme, introduced last year, has somehow ended up even less efficient than the old system. Of 300,000 applications made under the new scheme, around half have not even had calculations done yet. The backlog is building up at the rate of 30,000 new cases every three months. Figures are very hard to come by as the CSA has no accurate records, but a conservative estimate suggests that at least

250,000 families, under the new scheme and the old, are receiving no maintenance at all.

They cannot even get through to talk to anyone about it. Nearly a third of telephone calls to the agency are “abandoned” by staff. The phone system diverts calls to any centre where there is somebody available to answer, so that callers end up speaking to people who know nothing about their case. And this affects a lot of people: the CSA deals with two million parents and 1.5 million children, or one in 17 people in Britain.

...The jargon and managerial garbage in the CSA’s annual report cannot quite smother the misery. The agency may not be able to work out how many parents need help, but it does know that 2.5 per cent of its workforce are registered disabled. It ran a “substantial disability awareness programme” last year. Very useful. Over half of office waste was recycled, and “all of our major sites have developed a green travel plan”. Goodo.

Staff may not have answered calls, but they did sit as school governors, brought their children to work, and helped out in the magistrate service and with the Prince’s Trust. They also took an average of 15.6 days off sick. One in seven resigned.

(8)

Apparently this woman was once in the Cabinet. Can't say her name rings any bells.

(6)

Alan Milburn’s formal title may be Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, but his real duty is quite specific. His job is to take over one of the most important tasks in the Labour Party: countering the influence of Gordon Brown.

Until Peter Mandelson’s appointment over the summer as a European Commissioner, the man who resigned twice from the Cabinet was, as Tony Blair’s closest political soul mate, the man who carried out that job. Barely a day has gone by since Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 without the two men talking. Whether Mr Mandelson was in the Cabinet or not made little difference: he was a key presence in and around Ten Downing Street.

Now, however, he has a job which not only removes him from Westminster; it is also so time-consuming that he will simply not be able, even informally, to advise Tony Blair. So the Prime Minister has been left bereft of a fellow New Labour true believer, and bereft of an adviser who can range across the government’s policies.

To do that, however, is to guarantee the wrath of Gordon Brown. The Chancellor may have been one of the original founders of New Labour with Tony Blair but in government he has fought almost every idea which has emerged from Ten Downing Street. Whenever Mr Blair has sought to reform the public sector, Mr Brown has watered down his ideas to mush. Mr Milburn’s prized idea as Health Secretary, Foundation Hospitals, is a typical example: a bold idea reduced to nothingness.

A debate is now raging over the contents of the manifesto for the next election. Mr Blair knows that he is almost certain not fight a fourth election, and so he is consumed with the idea that he must leave his legacy over the course of the third term. He wants to see a manifesto which promises – even if it does not deliver it – bold reforms to welfare, education, health and transport. Mr Brown wants nothing less. He wants to stick to traditional tax and spend.

The battle is best described as being between ‘transformers’ – Mr Blair - and ‘consolidators’ – Gordon Brown. We are going to have to get used to those terms, not least because they were coined two years ago in an article by Alan Milburn himself. Mr Milburn has now been chosen by the Prime Minister to ensure that the transformers win the battle to secure a bold manifesto.

Forget any other explanations of Alan Milburn’s return to government. There is only one which matters: he is to be Tony Blair’s consiglieri. His job is to provide the Prime Minister with a shoulder to lean on, to be a sounding board to consult and to act out his orders across the government.

Bringing Mr Milburn back had a further bonus for the Prime Minister, however: Mr Blair and Mr Brown are now locked in political mortal combat. If either one of them displays weakness, he risks being fatally wounded. Once the idea of Mr Milburn’s return had been floated – and, crucially, opposed by the Chancellor – then the Prime Minister had no choice but to appoint Mr Milburn. To have backed away in the face of Mr Brown’s opposition would have been to wave the white flag.

It is a sign of the rifts at the heart of the government, however, that, even in victory, Tony Blair guarantees deep, wounding problems ahead. Make no mistake, Gordon Brown will be livid by yesterday’s appointment. The political fun has only just begun.

But it is not just Mr Brown who will be contemptuous. It is a mere fourteen months since Mr Milburn said he was leaving the government to spend more time with his family. He relished the plaudits his resignation brought him, writing and talking about his new work-life balance and recommending it as a model for others.

So much for that, then. At a time when politicians’ words are treated with cynicism, Alan Milburn’s decision to spend less time with his family will merely add to the ill-feeling.

(7)

Never say I'm not prepared to post information which possibly contradicts my own views. Take this, from Political Betting (a tremendous site, btw, which is well worth a daily read):

It’s not been picked up by the pundits or the betting markets but ALL four of the main opinion polls have shown Tory gains in August.

YouGov (Aug 27)
34%(+1) L34%(nc!) LD21% (-2%)

ICM (Aug15)
C33%(+3) L36%(+1) LD22%(-3)

MORI (Aug 16)
C32%(+1) L36%(+4) LD21%(-3)

Populus (Aug 1)
C32%(+3) L32%(-1) LD24% (nc)

With the UKIP effect continuing to unwind there is the potenial for further improvements but all this is being ignored by the betting markets.

It doesn't mean that I'm wrong to think that Michael Howard is incompetent and unfit to be PM, or that I'm wrong to think that, as such, a Labour victory is almost certain. But it's certainly interesting.

(5)

Hmmm. According to yesterday's Sun:

TORY leader Michael Howard has been barred from the White House and told he will never meet President George Bush, it emerged last night. The bombshell ban was slapped on Mr Howard after he called for Tony Blair to quit over the Iraq War. And it was reinforced last month when he said he would have vetoed military action if he had known the full facts about Iraq’s WMD arsenal. ...The wrath of the President was transmitted to Mr Howard’s office in a furious phone call from White House political chief Karl Rove in February. It followed Mr Howard’s call for Mr Blair to step down as PM. What particularly upset the White House was Mr Howard’s comment: “If I were Prime Minister I would seriously be considering my position.” They were also angered when the Tory leader accused the PM of “serious dereliction of duty”. Mr Rove, who speaks with the President’s full authority, said: “You can forget about meeting the President full stop. Don’t bother coming, you are not meeting him.”

...Senior US Right-wingers blame Mr Howard for undermining the coalition in Iraq and say they are privately rooting for a Labour victory in the next election. A Tory source said: “They see Tony Blair as a true ally against terror and the Tories as a bunch of w*****s.”

Now we learn that Mr Howard has responded:

Michael Howard issued a blistering rebuff to George W Bush yesterday after the President barred the Tory leader from the White House as punishment for his attacks on Tony Blair over the Iraq War.

...Yesterday, after the White House ban was disclosed in the strongly pro-Blair Sun, Mr Howard issued a strongly-worded statement: "A Conservative government would work very closely with President Bush or President Kerry but my job as leader of the Opposition is to say things as I see them in the interests of our country and to hold our Government to account.

"If some people in the White House, in their desire to protect Mr Blair, think I am too tough on Mr Blair or too critical of him, they are entitled to their opinion. But I shall continue to do my job as I see fit."

Mr Howard's aides went even further, insisting that he would "have nothing to do with those trying to sustain Tony Blair in office wherever they might be".

A senior aide said: "There had been channels of discussion open as to whether he should go to Washington when Karl Rove telephoned to tell him not to bother. Howard's reaction was very cool. He is not going to be cowed by anybody from criticising the Prime Minister."

The confrontation between Mr Bush and Mr Howard is the deepest split between an American president and a Conservative leader since the row between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher over the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. They rapidly resumed their close alliance after the crisis. However, the bitter and public division between President Bush and Mr Howard appears unbridgeable.

It is distasteful, of course, to kick a man when he's down. And down is surely the most appropriate word to apply to Mr Howard, who with every passing day reveals a level of incompetence which is so great as sometimes to seem almost premedidated.

I saw The Manchurian Candidate last month. It's dire, and not fit to share the same projector as the wonderful John Frankenheimer original. A marvellous premise is wasted: a Haliburton clone company (Manchurian International) takes over the mind (via an implant) of a Vice Presidential candidate and prepares to plant him in the Oval Office by assassinating the newly elected President. But it's worth seeing when it opens here for one, rather important, reason. It explains the current state of British politics.

Since almost everything said and done by Mr Howard has the effect of moving the Tories even further from credibility as a potential government, perhaps the key lies in The Manchurian Candidate.

I find it difficult to reconcile Mr Howard's blunderings as Leader of the Opposition with his outstanding performance as Home Secretary. But there is an explanation. I have come to the conclusion that Mr Howard is not himself. He must, it seems (a la Manchurian Candidate), have been kidnapped at some point by Labour strategists and brainwashed, programmed to make himself and his party look as ludicrous as possible. Thus he both supports and condemns the Iraq War. He claims to favour the market but would nationalise the universities. Etc, etc, etc.

As 'a Tory source' put it in The Sun:

They see Tony Blair as a true ally against terror and the Tories as a bunch of w*****s.

Pretty much spot on.

It still seems bizarre that a Labour Prime Minister hopes for a Republican victory and a Conservative Leader of the Opposition for a Democrat to occupy the Oval Office. But then, you see, these things don't happen by accident.

(6)

...not, of course, that the LibDems have any kind of consistency problem.

(8)

Truly, we have a shameful Prime Minister. And as for his wife: the woman does not know the meaning of the word shocking. They have besmirched the very honour of the nation.

As we learned last week, Mrs Blair is now available for hire through an American speakers' agency. In October, when she had already planned to be in the US, she will consider speaking engagements designed to publicise her forthcoming book, The Goldfish Bowl, about previous prime ministers' spouses.

This is shocking news. The Daily Mail has fulminated over it. Radio phone-in callers have been outraged. The Prime Minister's wife works for a living. And she does so in return for money. Heavens above! She has written a book. Blimey. And - how could she even think of such a thing? - she wants to publicise it. Clearly the woman is venal to the core.

Just as venal, in fact, as her predecessor, Norma Major. Mrs Major wrote and promoted two books while her husband was prime minister, one a biography of Dame Joan Sutherland and the other a history of Chequers.

But the anger directed at Cherie Blair is not about the specifics of her behaviour. It is, rather, political. Attacking Mrs Blair for her entirely proper behaviour - she is doing nothing which is not above board - is simply another means by which her husband can be assailed.

Take the now annual ritual of the Blair holiday attack. I can barely bring myself to write this without turning puce with embarrassment for my country, but Mr and Mrs Blair have gone on holiday. Avert your eyes if you are of a delicate disposition: as if that were not bad enough, they are staying in other people's homes. There is an unfolding disaster in Sudan, Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb, and a European superstate is on the drawing board - but to hell with all that. There is only one story which really gets some commentators' wickers up and that is that the Blairs have chosen to holiday in homes belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, Prince Girolamo Strozzi and Silvio Berlusconi.

Lordy. The Blairs' crimes are even worse than we first thought. Not only does the Prime Minister borrow friends' houses, they are rich friends with lavish houses. The cheek of it! Indeed, the Blairs' holiday arrangements are so grotesque as to unite the Daily Mail and The Guardian in their contempt. As Hywel Williams put it in the latter newspaper: "The emperor Tiberius lounging in his villa at Capri could have taken lessons from these two when it comes to quality time. Time and again Mr and Mrs Blair show a startling disregard for propriety and, sometimes, decency."

Eh? I am clearly missing something here, as I cannot begin to understand what the fuss is all about. I returned earlier this week from a wonderful break in Aspen. I am lucky enough to have well-off friends who live in a town which is close to paradise. Every year, they invite me to stay. And so I pack my bags, buy my flight and disappear for a few days in the Colorado mountains. Maybe I am transgressing some fundamental rule of decency. In which case, I must blame my parents for bringing me up so badly as to not have a clue what is wrong with such behaviour.

I buy my hosts gifts in return for their hospitality. I imagine that the Blairs do the same for theirs. Just as I imagine did Baroness Thatcher for hers when, as prime minister, she regularly holidayed in a wealthy friend's house in Switzerland. So what? The Blairs have done nothing wrong, either legally or morally. But the innuendo, without the slightest moral substance, screams from the page. They're corrupt. They're on the take. They're deceitful. That's the (ill-concealed) allegation.

The Blairs' holiday arrangements are, we are told, part of a pattern of abuse by the Prime Minister and his wife - a "hat-trick of freebie holidays" in the Mail's words. Mrs Blair is, it seems, "notorious at party conferences for touring the exhibition stands and helping herself to soft toys and other freebies". As anyone who has to attend the party conference circuit will attest, it is almost impossible not to come away with a pile of dross, as the exhibitors desperately thrust their wares into your hands. Most of us can make a swift exit through the hall. Poor Mrs Blair has to be led to every stand to have her picture taken with the salesman who has paid thousands of pounds to the party for the privilege and to smile politely as she is handed yet another packet of mints with British Nuclear Fuels or Royal Mail branded across the wrapping.

The idea that one of the country's leading QCs is so desperate as to use the Labour Party conference for an annual grab at soft toys would be hilarious were it not simply risible. None of this, of course, has anything to do with the behaviour of the Blairs. The attacks reveal far more about their authors and their frustrations, than those they seek to condemn. The Blairs should rest happily in the knowledge that even their holiday arrangements serve to demonstrate the ineptness of the opposition.

(20)

British Politics makes a good point about the Hartlepool by-election:

[I[n Hartlepool we will finally see a by-election in a constituency where there is a Tory base. The Tories were a clear second in the last elections. Until recently they ran the council with the Lib-Dems (though it was then a Mayoralty). So, given that, given that there are very few Muslims in Hartlepool and that the predominant issue will likely be crime this should be an opportunity for the Tories. Also, if the good people of Hartlepool will vote for a Monkey to run the council, then the Tories can’t really claim it’s ridiculous to expect them to get votes…

(3)

An amazing (and, I am assured by someone who has seen the letter, completely true) story in the Telegraph's diary section:

Bercow follows which leader?

Reviews of Michael Howard's outing at the Dispatch Box on Tuesday ranged from "faltering" through "fairly dismal" to "desperate".

But his performance was a triumph, compared with the latest offering from Tory international development spokesman John Bercow.

Spy has seen a copy of a letter Bercow wrote to Tony Blair yesterday. His purpose was to raise concerns about British policy on Sudan, but he opened with the following salutation to the PM:

"Congratulations on your superb speech in the Iraq debate on Tuesday. On this subject, as on many other foreign affairs issues, you have provided outstanding statesmanship."

Am I alone in thinking this is far more than a diary story? The Shadow Secretary for International Development writes to the Prime Minister praising him for his 'superb speech' in the very debate in which his own leader, Michael Howard, performed so atrociously that many Conservatives are now openly talking about how they are saddled with an incompetent loser as leader.

The knives are already out for Howard after less than a year. In his worst week as leader, a front bencher has written a paean of praise to the very man who made mincemeat of him and thus prompted the crisis.

If that's not a front page story, what is?

(As a Conservative friend emailed me today:

Would you rather (a) spend your summer holidays in Guantanamo Bay (b) spend a month on a desert island with Polly Toynbee or (c) become leader of the Conservative Party? Answers on a postcard to L Fox, c/o Costa Coffee, Victoria St.

(1)

From today's Guardian:

Blair draws up plans to send troops to Sudan

Let's see if the Stoppers are planning to march against this, too. Unless their arguments about sovereignty are to be exposed as pure sophistry (which, of course, they were) then that's what they should be doing.

A year on, I still cannot get my head around the fact that so many apparently decent people took time out of their schedules to go on a march to do their best to ensure Saddam remained in power. I will never again be able to look a LibDem in the face without seeing 'I wish Saddam was still in power' in the white of their eyes.

(10)

Oliver Kamm (who, quite rightly, feels smug), has a wonderful line from Christopher Hitchens on John Kerry's campaign message, which could - and should - be applied to Michael Howard's latest demonstration of his unfitness to be Leader of the Opposition, let alone Prime Minister:

Vote for me: I'm easily fooled.

(7)

It's an astonishing sight, watching a once respected politician disappear from the first to to the third rank before your very eyes.

I used to regard Michael Howard as a serious figure, a man who as Home Secretary insisted that his task was not to stem the increase in crime but to reduce it, and who had what the Tories used to call 'bottom'.

And yet with each passing day, and each passing issue, he descends lower and lower into the abyss reserved for third raters promoted above their level of competence. The Peter principle - that employees within an organization will advance to their highest level of competence and then be promoted to and remain at a level at which they are incompetent - should be renamed the Howard principle.

Whatever he may be doing for the Conservatives internally - and the evidence on that seems mixed at best - as a potential PM, Michael Howard seems almost wilfully intent on demonstrating that he is not fit to occupy high office.

Today's shameful attempt to reposition himself on Iraq is beyond parody. Howard seems to think that he will gain favour by attempting to have it both ways on Iraq. I don't often agree with Labour's spin, but today they are spot on: he is indeed "plumbing new depths of opportunism". And like most opportunism, it will end up pleasing no one. Those of us who understand that Blair and Bush are leading the fight to save Western values now view Howard with contempt. And the Stoppers too can see straight through his pathetic attempts to curry favour with them.

Leave aside the astonishing cynicism of such an approach. The reliably stupid Amanda Platell remarked on Breakfast With Frost this morning that Howard was performing an adept technical shift which would allow him more effectively to oppose Blair in the Commons debate on Iraq this week. No! No! No! With such an astute tactical brain advising William Hague, it's no wonder he was so stunningly succesful.

All Howard has achieved is to remove any element of doubt that he and the Conservatives are still not remotely close to learning the lessons of two election defeats and are heading for - at least - three. One-off opportunism has its purpose, and can be useful. But consistent opportunism, such that the electorate comes to expect nothing more of you, is deeply damaging. And today's statement is far from a one-off. His earlier attack on Blair for not standing up for Bush would have been hilarious were it not for its wider importance (so much is he in favour of hitting out against the US that Howard spent his years off the front bench setting up an organisation designed to bolster links between the UK and US, and specifically between the Conservatives and the Republicans), just as his response in the Commons to the Hutton report was inept, cheap and lacking in judgement, refusing to back away from his attacks on Blair as lying over Iraq.

His embrace of possible fuel protests and and his opposition to the introduction of the very market-mechanism into higher education to which Conservative principles clearly point were purely opportunistic.

It’s trite to say oppositions are supposed to be opportunistic. It’s also plain wrong. As Blair showed in opposition, when your credibility as a potential Prime Minister is the key battleground, you need to show that you are above opportunism. Howard has managed to achieve the opposite: while Blair was originally Bambi and over time showed he was a figure of substance, Howard started off as leader with credibility as a serious figure, and has set about eroding it. And now he's succeeded.

IDS might have been useless at communicating with the electorate. But he did at least say what he thought, and then stuck to it. Michael Howard says what he thinks people want to hear - and gets even that wrong!

Michael Howard credibility rating: ZERO.

(10)

From today's letters page in The Observer:

If, at his Judgment Seat, God forgives Tony Blair, there will be a group of angels who will, nevertheless, declare that the verdict is a whitewash.
Bob Yule
London E14

(1)

I've been away for a few days. And what a changed world I've returned to:

An independent report into Iraq has cleared Tony Blair of any wrong doing.
Haven't we been here before?

Because it doesn't fit into the received wisdom that Blair is a liar, the report must, therefore, be wrong.
Haven't we been here before?

The bright shiny new Conservative Party leader has, if anything, gone backwards when put to the test in the ballot box.
Haven't we been here before?

A convicted child killer has had the conviction quashed.
Haven't we been here before?

The government has announced it is pouring money into the public services, so if we all hang on just a little bit longer everything will be fine and dandy.
Haven't we been here before?

(5)

Here's a surprise. Douglas Hurd - walking, talking FCO man - who believes that the point of British foreign policy is to stand back and let dictators do what they want - a nice bit of ethnic cleansing here, a smidgeon of butchery there - thinks that Tony Blair should resign.

Well, yes. Mr B has helped remove one of the worst, most dangerous dictators of the lot. And that can't be right, can it?

(5)

Here's a fascinating piece by Peter Oborne in The Spectator on Oliver Letwin and Michael Howard. It's a rare example of an article on British politics which makes you pause to reconsider your impressions (well, it made me do so, anyway).

My view of Letwin's performance since he became Shadow Chancellor has been that it showed what a good Shadow Home Secretary he'd been. It seemed to me that he was, to be blunt, out of his depth, walking into traps laid by Gordon Brown and lacking the same deftness of touch which he'd demonstrated as Blunkett's shadow, where he carved out a distinctive position.

Hmmm. Oborne suggests that

Instead of attending to the grim rituals which pass for modern political activity, Letwin has taken a step back from the contemporary political scene. Though shadow chancellor for barely six months, he has already created a coherent, well-researched and fundamentally Tory critique of Gordon Brown’s management of national finances.

Because of the way that New Labour is constructed, above all Tony Blair’s curious decision to allow domestic policy to be controlled from the Treasury, Letwin has been obliged to undertake a wider analysis of New Labour in government than perhaps he originally envisaged. The results of Letwin’s work have started to emerge over the past few weeks, and they can only be described as dazzling. It is hard to overstate the importance of what he has done: he has at last provided the tools for the long-awaited conservative intellectual fightback.

...At the heart of Letwin’s argument is the proposition that Gordon Brown’s Big Government has created an historic opportunity for the Conservatives. Ten years ago New Labour in opposition put forward the strikingly plausible proposition that it was at once the party of social justice and economic efficiency. Today Oliver Letwin is steadily constructing a Tory party that can realistically claim to have reconciled the two apparently contradictory objectives of a smaller state, as well as improved public services. Hence the proposals, unveiled by shadow spokesmen Andrew Lansley and Tim Collins over the past two weeks, to give massive new freedoms to hospitals and schools, liberating them from the stranglehold of the bureaucrats.

This is interesting. On reflection, I wonder if I've misjudged what he's been doing. Oborne argues that

Michael Howard’s Conservative party has made astonishing progress in a very short space of time. It has already constructed a coherent and serious Tory vision of how a modern economy should be run, while showing that New Labour over the last seven years has adopted the wrong model for health and education, with wretched consequences for pupils and patients. There is no evidence at all that this vision has communicated itself to the electorate at large — last week’s Populus poll in the Times, showing the Conservative party languishing at 29 per cent, four points behind the government, was especially discouraging. But Howard has achieved something that is almost as important, and much more interesting and attractive. For the first time in 20 years the Conservative party is the dominant source of ideas on the national stage.

I think the first sentence is OTT. But what's clearly true is that, as he puts it, the only interesting ideas now emerging are emanating from the right. The left wing (and New Labour) think tanks, for instance, are now lifeless, dull and lacking in ideas. All the fizz - such as it is - comes from the market-based think tanks. Just to cite the word of the hour, look at how choice - a market-based, Conservative idea if ever there has been one - has been adopted by the government.

Therein lies some of the difficulty in looking at this objectively. New Labour's great achievement was to embrace the market. But, as has often been remarked, its fundamental (domestic) flaw has been its inability to follow through on its analysis. To put it another way: New Labour talks the talk but it doesn't walk the walk.

Oborne's most important point is this:

Today Oliver Letwin is steadily constructing a Tory party that can realistically claim to have reconciled the two apparently contradictory objectives of a smaller state, as well as improved public services.

Not yet, is what I'd say. The arguments are out there, the ideas ready to be taken up. The policies are getting there. But both the NHS and schools policies are flawed. I'll post in detail on this soon, but in in short:

The NHS policy amounts to saying the Tories will take - under threat of imprisonment - even more money from us (they say they'll increase spending on the NHS) which the government dictates must be spent on health, and they will then let us have a partial say on where that money is spent. That's not choice - and it's certainly not a smaller state in any worthwhile sense.

As for schools: well, yes, fine. But even though the Tories have bought into the analysis which shows that vouchers are the way to break the logjam and give real power (the power of the purse string) to the poor, they haven't followed through. Again, their existing policy amounts to shuffling the existing pot around with a bit more input from parents. That's good - and it's an improvement on what Charles Clarke announced yesterday (although not much of one) - but real choice it ain't. For that to be the case, the voucher should be available to be spent wherever. And it has to be free to be topped up. That's how you get more money into the system as a result of parental decisions rather than dictating it through tax.

But, as I say, Oborne's piece makes me wonder if I am being too critical of Howard. It's taken 7 years, but maybe the Tories really are beginning the work of putting themselves in a position to win office again. Beginning, mark you.

(8)

Lovely piece of whimsy by Frank Johnson:

His followers will hope that, when the Blairites put him on trial, Gordon Brown will show the same defiance as Saddam Hussein. Saddam, before the court this week, used such stirring phrases as: "I was protecting the Iraqi people from Kuwaiti dogs." Many of us are confident that Mr Brown will be just as scornful of his accusers.

The selected journalists allowed in the courtroom – drawn entirely from Blairite newspapers – will report him as looking "disorientated", or "thinner", or wearing "an ill-fitting suit". But the television film – admittedly selective – will allow us to draw our own conclusions.

The judge: "Are you the former Chancellor of the Exchequer?"

Mr Brown: "I am the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Can you introduce yourself?"

The judge: "I am the Lord Chief Justice."

Mr Brown: "You are a Blairite dog."

The judge: "None the less, I am the Lord Chief Justice."

Mr Brown: "You represent the coalition forces... Everyone here knows this is all theatre. The real criminal is Blair, and it's for his campaign. Blair is an American dog."

The judge: "None the less, I am the Lord Chief Justice."

Mr Brown: "Blair is a stooge of the Americans."

The judge: "None the less, he is also Prime Minister... Now, you are charged with trying to invade Number 10."

Mr Brown: "Everyone knows that Number 10 is a ridiculous little place controlled by the Americans, and is really part of Greater Number 11. My people had a right to the land."

The judge: "You are also charged with committing 5,000 stealth taxes."

Mr Brown: "I knew nothing about that until I read about them in the media. That was all Balls."

The judge: "Obscenities like that are not permitted in court."

Ed Balls – Mr Brown's Tariq Aziz at the Treasury, who this week became a prospective Labour candidate – rises from the dock and shouts: "My lord, I am not an obscenity."

The judge: "Remove that man from the court."

Mr Brown: "This is a travesty of a trial."

The judge: "None the less, I am the Lord Chief Justice."

(The case continues)

(3)

One of the LibDems' problems is that no one really takes them seriously as a party of government.

That will surely change if this man becomes their President.

(2)

My own entirely unscientific poll on the mayoral election yesterday: I asked 17 people for whom they had voted. Every one of them said they had made their decision entirely on the basis of one issue: the congestion charge.

6 said they had voted for Norris to get rid of it, and the rest - like me - voted through gritted teeth for Livingstone to make sure the charge remained.

As I say, entirely unscientific. But that's been my experience throughout the campaign.

Now, perhaps, the Tories will do what they should have done a year ago and drop their opposition to a throroughly sensible, Friedmanite market mechanism. Then they can get on with winning the support of those of us who would oppose Livingstone tooth and nail on almost every other issue. But then again, expecting the Conservatives to learn from their election defeats flies in the face of the past seven years' experience.

(7)

I suggested below that angst-ridden columns on what can be done about the shamefully low turnout in tomorrow's elections would start to appear a few days after the results are known.

I was quite mistaken. Simon Jenkins in today's Times manages to get in before polling day:

Turnouts in British local elections are shocking...I cannot see the case against going another step and making voting in local elections compulsory.

It's such a comfort to be able to rely on Mr Jenkins always to be wrong.

(9)

I suffer from a disease. Every four or five years it spreads throughout the population; the last time that it was researched about three in five people were seen to be affected by it. Even at its least virulent, about one in four of the country has it. On Thursday new figures will show the extent of its current grip. The one thing we know with certainty already is that it is steadily in decline.

My disease is voting - a belief that, however unimportant or impossible the decision might seem, I have to exercise my vote. On Thursday I will be one of at most a quarter of the population who will bother. There is no one I want to vote for in either the Euro elections or the contest for Mayor of London, but because of a non-sequitur, I will none the less pick a party and vote for it. The non-sequitur is that I consider the right to vote to be a precious thing. But having that right and feeling the obligation to exercise it are two very different things. I have the right to stand for the council. I cannot, however, imagine ever submitting myself to such a thing. I am happy to leave it to others.

A mere 24 per cent of the electorate voted in the 1999 Euro elections. This year it may well be an even smaller proportion. You can already forecast the angst-ridden opinion pieces that will come next: what can we do to increase turnout; why are voters so disengaged; are the media to blame?

The truth, however, is taboo: that the lower the turnout, the better democracy is working. I have yet to read a convincing explanation as to why we should be worried about the poor turnout expected next week. If there is a reason to vote, people do. If there isn't, they don't.

In 1979, at a time when the future of the country really was in peril, 76 per cent voted. In 1997, when there was a genuine appetite to kick out the Conservatives, the figure was 71 per cent. In the two elections in 1974, the turnout was 79 per cent and 73 per cent. All four elections mattered, with fundamental issues at stake. Only 59 per cent voted in 2001 because Labour hadn't messed up and the Tories were still unelectable. People were essentially content. On Thursday, once again, they won't see the point of voting, so vote they won't.

In an age when opinion polls record the electorate's views on everything from the putative EU constitution to the winner of Big Brother, there is rarely even the need to use Micky Mouse elections such as this Thursday's for a protest vote. We know full well that this Government, of all governments, pays obsessive attention to daily opinion polls and responds obediently, if belatedly, to them.

Ignore the drivel that will follow polling day about "the political system" being at fault and single-issue politics replacing broad-church parties. There are any number of groups that are fielding candidates, whether they be shaded green, blue or red. The voting figures speak volumes about the allure of such single-issue politicians: pretty much zilch.

Take the Iraq war; Thursday's results will, according to George Galloway's rabble, reveal how the public are driven by contempt for Tony Blair's involvement. The polls suggest that Mr Galloway's party will be lucky to hit 1 per cent of the vote. So much for that theory.

If you want to vote on Thursday, fine. But if you can't see the point, you can be proud to have joined the majority.

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Phew. I have found something on which to differ from Oliver Kamm