Local elections are make-or-break for Brown

My weekly column in today's Newcastle Journal will be the last for a couple of weeks, so with the local elections coming up it seemed a good opportunity for a general overview of the current political situation.

Just before Christmas, Skipper said that Gordon Brown had at best six months "to prevent burnt out incompetence and drift becoming the default perception of his government." I have seen no better description of the Prime Minister's current predicament and I acknowledge my debt to him in helping me formulate this week's piece.

Of course, those six months are now nearly up, and the local election campaign really provides Gordon with his last opportunity to launch a fightback before that "default perception" becomes fixed in the public's mind.

Here's the column in full.

***

There was a time, shortly after Gordon Brown took over as Prime Minister last July, when Thursday May 1 2008 could have seemed a plausible date for the next General Election.

Mr Brown will by then have been in power for nearly a year – a milestone which at one time might have looked like a logical point at which to try for a fresh mandate.

Of course, the Prime Minister famously decided against an early election last autumn and in so doing effectively ruled out this spring as an option too.

If he harboured any lingering doubts as to whether he should perhaps have left the door slightly ajar, what has happened to the economy since will surely have dispelled them.

But we are, nevertheless, still going to have a significant electoral contest next month, namely the local elections in England and Wales.

In the North-East, it will mean contests in all the big metropolitan councils as well as in the counties of Durham and Northumberland which become unitary authorities next May.

The London Mayoralty is also up for grabs, with Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone facing a determined challenge from Tory Boris Johnson.

Taken together, it will constitute the first big national test of public opinion since Mr Brown took over – and the omens for the government currently look pretty depressing.

After last year’s Awful Autumn in which Mr Brown’s administration staggered from disaster to disaster, the political situation appeared to have stabilised in the early months of this year.

The Prime Minister recruited a new team of advisers at No 10, and it began to look as though they had started to turn things around.

But all that seemed to change with last month’s Budget which, while it may well come to be viewed in a better light, is clearly failing to impress the public at the present time.

The result is that opinion polls over recent weeks have shown David Cameron’s Conservatives with leads of up to 13 points, putting him for the first time in potential landslide territory.

Inevitably given the characters involved, the most national media attention in the run up to next month’s polls will be focused on the Livingstone-Johnson prizefight in the capital.

The Tory challenger currently appears poised for a sensational victory and, not for the first time, Mr Brown finds himself faced with a difficulty of his predecessor’s making.

Tony Blair was desperate to get Ken back in the Labour tent in 2004 to give the party a morale-boosting success in the run-up to the 2005 General Election.

Mr Brown was opposed to it then, and with Mr Livingstone now seemingly facing what would be a morale-shattering defeat for Labour, he must be wishing he had got his way

But while there is no doubt that the loss of London would constitute a major blow to the government, that would not be the worst of it if Labour also suffers a rout across the rest of the country.

Until recently, Labour has been able to point to the fact that while its own ratings were in the doldrums, there had been no corresponding outpouring of enthusiasm for the Tories. I have made the same point myself in this column

But once the Tories start winning actual votes, actual seats and actual councils, it will become much harder to make this claim.

The big danger for Mr Brown from these elections is that he ends up looking like a certain loser while Mr Cameron starts to take on the aura of a surefire winner – just as Mr Blair did in the mid-1990s.

Already, the Labour troops are growing restless. This week saw the remarkable spectacle of the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, criticising a key aspect of the Budget – the rise in alcohol duties.

Another minister, Ivan Lewis, laid into Mr Brown last weekend, arguing that the government is out of touch with ordinary Labour voters.

Meanwhile several former ministers and one-time loyalists have signed a Commons motion opposing the forthcoming abolition of the 10p starting rate of tax, announced by Mr Brown himself in last year’s Budget.

And if that were not enough, former Home Secretary Charles Clarke has helpfully produced a “doomsday list” of Labour-held southern seats he says are at risk unless the Prime Minister can stop the rot.

The respected commentator Peter Riddell said this week: “The malaise is real and it is widespread. The Brown Government is in deep trouble.

“The sense that something is seriously wrong has spread, ominously, to Labour MPs, not just disgruntled ex-ministers but normal loyalists.”

The worry for Mr Brown is that a heavy series of Labour defeats on May 1 could cause these rumblings of discontent to escalate into a full-scale civil war.

A spate of Tory victories in the South and Midlands will inevitably cause some Labour MPs in marginal seats to question whether it’s their necks on the block – or the Prime Minister’s.

After the serial catastrophes of last autumn, it was always the case that the first six months of this year would be make-or-break for Mr Brown’s premiership.

We waited for Mr Brown to set out his “vision,” but it never happened. We waited for him to demonstrate that his government had some higher purpose than simply staying in power, but that never really happened either.

As a result, the default perception of his administration has become one of burnt-out incompetence and drift leading inevitably towards terminal decline and defeat.

If that perception is not to become permanently fixed in the public’s mind, the fightback really must start here.

The politics of blog envy

I am not going to take sides in the current willy waving contest serious and important debate about blog stats over at Devil's Kitchen - basically because I am not enough of an expert in these things to know whose definition of unique visitors is actually correct.

But one thing I would like to say on the matter - and I have already said it on his blog - is that I am glad Tim Ireland has taken this opportunity to refute the oft-made accusation that his campaigns against Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes are driven by envy of their "success." They are not.

I have had some dealings with Tim down the years and I am as convinced as I can be that, whether or not you agree with him, his motivation is the greater good of the British blogosphere rather than the greater glory of Tim Ireland.

Mat Bowles, who himself ran one of the best medium-sized blogs before opting out of the stats race, has put it rather well on the DK thread and I can't improve on his summary.

I have said before that the blogosphere owes Iain and Guido a great deal for "popularising" the medium and forcing not just the MSM but also the government to sit up and take notice of us. But it also owes Tim a great deal for demonstrating its potential power as a campaigning tool - witness this example from only last week.

Oh, and for the record, my own willy is currently about a fifth of the size of Iain's (by Tim's conservative assessment) and around half the size of Tim's - but I'm not bothered about that any more than he is.

Openness, but only up to a point

Yesterday I ran a rather light-hearted post on the "Nick Clegg Superstud" revelations and other true stories that should have been April Fools. Judging by the lack of comments this attempt at sardonic humour obviously completely bombed, so it's back to serious today.

As the sage of Shropshire Jonathan Calder has already pointed out, releasing Clegg's GQ interview yesterday was a fiendishly clever piece of news management by the Lib Dems. The fact that it came out on April 1 would have led many people who read the story to assume it was a spoof, thereby lessening its impact.

But spoof it isn't and those Lib Dems of a sensitive disposition now have to get used to the fact that they now have a reformed serial shagger and teenage arsonist for a leader.

In what looks like something of a damage-limitation exercise, some of Clegg's colleagues have today praised his openness in being prepared to talk about such things, but they are missing one very vital point.

For me, the really interesting thing about Clegg is that while he is happy for us to know he was rather promiscuous in his younger days, happy for us to know he was an arsonist, happy for us to know he was a binge-drinker, even happy for us to know that he doesn't believe in God, he is still not prepared to say whether or not he has ever taken illegal drugs.

Once again, it begs the question just what is it about the drugs question that puts the willies up our political leaders, that causes the likes of Clegg to switch instantly from heart-on-the-sleeve mode to we're-entitled-to-a-private-life mode?

David Cameron famously refused to answer the same question after he became his party's leader, but even he owned up in the end, although the revelation that he had enjoyed a few spliffs at uni was a bit of a let-down to those who assumed his initial reticence must have meant the entire family fortune had disappeared up his nose.

If Clegg really does believe in "openness," he should bury this last taboo.

The Top 10 April Fools That Weren't

We learn courtesy of this morning's Guardian that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has not only shagged up to 30 women but that he once set fire to a greenhouse full of cacti while pissed out of his brain. Unfortunately for Lib Dem supporters, it wasn't an April Fool, and neither was John "greed is good" Hutton being named the best-performing Labour minister in March, albeit on a Tory-supporting blog.

Here's ten other true stories from the past year or so that really should have been April Fools...Feel free to add your own nominations in the comments.

Northern Rock boss gets £760,000 pay-off

Health inequality widens under Labour

Gordon Brown invites Thatcher to tea

Anglican archbishop calls for Sharia Law

Catherine Tate becomes Dr Who's assistant

Balshaw returns as England full-back

Harriet Harman elected deputy Labour leader

Andrew Porter appointed Telegraph Political Editor

China awarded the 2008 Olympics

Mugabe wins the Zimbabwean election

The bleeding obvious

Duke "did not order Diana death" reads the headline on the BBC's superdooper new website. And in other hot news, Gordon Brown "did not think much of Tony Blair," Rupert Murdoch "makes exceedingly large amounts of money," and Pope Benedict XVI "is Catholic."

Barnett finally on the way out

There now seems to be fairly compelling evidence that the skids are finally under the Barnett Formula and unsurprisingly this forms the subject of my weekly column in the Newcastle Journal published today.

Donald Dewar and Ron Davies always said that devolution was a "process, not an event" and so it is proving. The growing demands for greater financial autonomy for Scotland are clearly incompatible with the continuance of a funding system which makes the country financially dependent on England and this has created an unexpected window of opportunity for the government to look again at the whole vexed issue.

Well done Beeb

Credit to the BBC for joining in with the rest of us and having a laugh about Charlotte Green's giggling fit on the Today Programme this morning. I have to say I was in stitches myself as I listened to this in my car while driving to work, but it was coupled with a terrible fear, happily unfounded, that poor Charlotte was at that very moment being told to clear her desk by po-faced BBC bosses.

Anyone who has not already heard it can do so HERE.

Top marks also for Ashes to Ashes which ended its run last night with the dramatic revelation of...well, I won't spoil it for the benefit of those who want to watch it on i-player.

Suffice to say that, for me, the best bits of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes have always been the dovetailing of the plot with musical references, and the use of Supertramp's 1979 classic Take the Long Way Home to emphasise that Keeley Hawes' Dr Alex Drake would not be getting back to 2008 in this series at least was inspired.

The egos have landed

Readers of this blog from way back will already be aware of my obsession with The Apprentice which returned to our screens last night.

First to be fired was toffee-nosed barrister Nicholas de Lacy-Brown, who appears to have changed his name from plain Nick Brown, although personally I think he was rather hard done-by.

More deserving candidates for the chop might have included hard-faced Irishwoman Jennifer Maguire, who informed us in complete seriousness that she was "probably the best saleswoman in Europe," baby-faced Kevin, who reckoned that fish have breasts, and whichever pillock it was who tried to cut up a fish-head with the knife the wrong way round.

It promises to be compulsive viewing as ever....

Freedom of conscience is not the real issue

I am of course against the creation of animal-human hybrid embroys and against making it easier for children to grow up without fathers, but I am not kidding myself that yesterday's concession by Gordon Brown allowing Labour MPs a free vote on key sections of the Frankenstein Bill will change anything in the longer-run.

Once again, the Tories have been playing gesture politics here. They have focused on the procedural issue of whether MPs would get a free vote, hoping it would simultaneously embarrass Gordon and portray them as more sympathetic to the views of the Bill's opponents.

But the truth is that David Cameron knows perfectly well that most of his MPs will ultimately back this measure, as will most of Gordon Brown's. The fact that there is now to be a free vote will make no difference whatever to the outcome.

Result: a terrible Bill which further undermines both the sanctity of human life and the role of the family will become law, and the de-Christianisation of Britain will continue apace.

White Easter

This Easter will certainly stick in the memory. I got up at 5.30am on Easter Sunday morning to drive to the Sunrise Service in the middle of a raging blizzard. At 8am my son was out in the garden building a snowman. It was the first White Easter I can remember in my lifetime and not something I really expect to see again.

But although it was memorable in its own way, there will no doubt be plenty of debate in workplaces up and down the land this morning as to whether we really want a four-day Bank Holiday weekend this early in the year. The wintry weather was not exactly conducive either to family days out, gardening or DIY (although I did manage to get a new basement window installed in between snow and rain breaks.)

Some will no doubt advocate decoupling the holiday from the Christian festivals, as the schools have already done. But for me the logical answer would be for the churches to take the initiative and fix Easter on the first Sunday in April - rather than the current formula which puts it on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox (March 20 or 21).

As well as reducing the likelihood of wintry weather, this would mean Easter would always fall within the school holidays. Furthermore because Whitsun (Pentecost) falls seven weeks after Easter, it would mean Whitsunday would always fall on the fourth Sunday in May, thus restoring the lost link between the Christian festival of Whitsun and the Spring Bank Holiday.

Five go adventuring again

Yes, they're back....but presumably without the lashings of ginger beer, farmers' wives who rustle up a whole picnic in five seconds' flat without expecting payment, scary black faces staring in at the window, and horrible smelly gipsies who haven't had a bath for weeks.

Haselhurst is our top choice too

Many aeons ago before the world's financial system went into near-meltdown we were all busy obsessing about whether Michael Martin would carry on as Speaker and who his successor might be, which puts the nature of the political news cycle in perspective somewhat.

Nevertheless, I was sufficiently engaged by this fascinating political conundrum to carry out a poll, the results of which can be viewed HERE.

Before launching this poll I noted that Sir Alan Haselhurst had topped a similar poll on Iain Dale's Diary and said it would be interesting if my own poll produced the same result, given this blog's different readership.

Although my sample is much smaller than Iain's, the results as can be seen below are indeed remarkably similar, with Sir Alan topping my poll with almost exactly the same percentage as he achieved on Iain's - surely an indication of the respect in which he is held across the political spectrum.

For the record, I voted for Ken Clarke. With no disrespect to Sir Alan, I think the reputation of Parliament is now suffiently damaged it needs a big figure in every sense to help restore it to its former standing.

Iain's poll

Sir Alan Haselhurst 22.6%
Sir George Young 18.8%
Sir Menzies Campbell 12%
Frank Field 11.3%
Vince Cable 9.5%
Kenneth Clarke 9%
Alan Beith 4.1%
Michael Ancram 3.5%
Sir Patrick Cormack 3.4%
John Bercow 2.5%
Sylvia Heal 2.2%
Sir Michael Lord 1.1%

My poll

Sir Alan Haselhurst 22%
Sir Menzies Campbell 17%
Kenneth Clarke 16%
Sir George Young 15%
Margaret Beckett 8%
Sylvia Heal 6%
Alan Beith 5%
Michael Ancram 3%
Sir Patrick Cormack 1%
None of these 6%

Belper's most famous export?

Actually this was nails, hence the name of the local football club (Belper Nailers) and the occasional use of "nailheads" as a term of abuse for the natives. But in terms of recent political history, the town where I now live is perhaps best known for being the constituency of George Brown, legendary piss artist and Labour Deputy Leader of the 1960s, who dramatically resigned from the job of Foreign Secretary (allegedly while drunk) forty years ago this week.

I always thought it was Tony Crosland who said that "George Brown drunk was a better man than Harold Wilson sober" but apparently this phrase was actually first penned by William Rees Mogg in a Times editorial. What Crosland said, a propos of the 1963 leadership contest between the two men, was that the party faced "a choice between a crook and a drunk."

For my part, I have always regarded Brown as a much-maligned chap. The oft-repeated story about him going up to the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima while under the influence and asking him for a dance is almost certainly an invention, for instance.

Possibly the most fair-minded assessment I have read on Brown's career appears on a Derbyshire wiki project with which I am currently involved called You and Yesterday. You can read it HERE.

At our best when we are boring

My initial verdict on last Wednesday's Budget - written in a hurry between finishing work and picking my wife up from a hospital appointment - was intentionally rather tongue-in-cheek. A more considered verdict appeared on Saturday's Newcastle Journal and can be read in full HERE.

Milburn: Next election up for grabs

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part one
Uploaded by broadbandtvchannel

I am pleased to be able to carry on this blog an interview with the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn conducted by Graham Robb, an old friend from my days as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal.

Together with Labour supporter Nick Wallis, former Tory election candidate Graham hosts a programme called "Northern Decision Makers" which features on his new broadband TV channel.

In the interview, which is in two parts, Mr Milburn says the next general election will be the closest since 1974 and argues that it is currently "up for grabs."

While he concedes that Gordon Brown could lose, he also predicts that so long as Labour gets the over-arching narrative right and presents a message of hope, the party will win an unprecedented fourth term.

The interview also contains some further interesting thoughts from Mr Milburn on the social moblity agenda which he has continued to champion during his time outside government.

It is well worth watching, and provides further proof in my view that a place should be found for the Darlington MP back at Labour's top table.

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part two
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Battle of the bloggers

Tonight's Question Time Extra on News 24 will see Tory blogfather Iain Dale going head to head with Labour Home's Alex Hilton, the man who once claimed that the raison d'etre of the Conservative Party was "lining up the entire British working class and buggering them one by one."

Should be compulsive viewing.

Mrs and Mr Balls

I have always maintained that if there was a future Prime Minister in the Balls household, it was Yvette rather than Ed - most recently in this post published on Monday.

Today, with Ed Balls in hot water after apparently saying "So what?" to a claim that UK taxes are now the highest in history, I wonder whether the wider political commentariat might now start to realise this.

While Ed was making a fool of himself in the Chamber, and providing an open goal for David Cameron as he sought to dismantle the Budget, Yvette was doing the rounds of College Green and the TV studios presenting the Government's case in her usual cool, calm, quietly persuasive manner.

Mike Smithson goes so far as to speculate today that Balls' antics might have cost Labour the next election. I would certainly agree that the more the public sees of Balls, the less they will be inclined to vote for the party.

Balls was already deeply implicated in last autumn's election debacle, shooting his mouth off on the radio about whether "the gamble" lay in holding the election or delaying - with the clear implication that the riskier course was delay.

I believe that was the moment when the public began to turn against Brown, the moment it became clear that the decision over whether to hold the election was being very clearly determined not by the national interest but by narrow party advantage.

Gordon should have learned his lesson from that and put Balls firmly back in his box before now, but old loyalties notwithstanding, perhaps it's time he echoed the words of Clem Attlee to Harold Laski - and I use the full quote here advisedly.

"I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

Boring...but not bad

I had thought of doing a blog-boycott of this year's Budget, so narcoleptic was the content, but on reflection...there are some positives to be taken from Mr Darling's package from a progressive/green point of view.

As the driver of a Vauxhall Zafira who likes the odd drop of Scotch, I am probably going to be among the people worst hit by today's announcements, but I'm entirely content that it should be so.

The 55p a bottle increase in whisky duty will in fact cost me the princely sum of around £3.20 a year, which seems a small price to pay to help curb the binge-drinking culture and do my bit towards lifting 250,000 children out of poverty.

And although I only drive a people carrier out of necessity in order for me to be able to take my growing family away for weekends along with all their assorted clobber, I think it's only right that people like me should pay more to alleviate the effects of our environmental pollution.

That said, it was undoubtedly the most politically unexciting Budget since 1997, and some papers may well not even lead on it tomorrow. Maybe that's the government's intention though.

I liked James Forsyth's take on it at Spectator Coffee House. "I suspect that the government will be quite pleased if this Budget is nothing more than a one day story.....Darling must be hoping that by hopping on the Mail’s ban the bag bandwagon, he has guaranteed himself favourable coverage in at least one paper."

I have some sympathy for Mr Darling in that Gordon Brown really "stole" this Budget last year, by pre-announcing the 2p cut in income tax.

That said, had Brown not announced this a year ago, it is a fairly moot point whether it would have happened at all, as it's hardly now the time for big tax reductions amid all the "global financial turbulence."

Short memories

According to a poll carried out on Iain Dales' Diary, Gordon Brown is the worst Labour Chancellor ever, with 44pc of the vote compared to just 13pc for Jim Callaghan, who devalued the pound in 1967. Even allowing for the fact that many readers of Iain's blog wouldn't have been born then, some historical perspective is called for, methinks.

Norman Lamont, meanwhile, rates as the worst Tory holder of the post, with 38pc compared to 23pc for Anthony Barber. It is unclear how many people voted for David Derrick Heathcoat-Amory.

Iain also asked his readers who should be Chancellor in the "next Conservative Government." Without necessarily conceding that this is anything more than a purely hypothetical question, I voted for Vincent Cable, as he is head and shoulders over anyone else David Cameron could choose.

What price loyalty?

Iain Dale reports that the former Lib Dem candidate for Hull East in 2005 has joined the Tories, bringing the total number of such defections since the last election to seven.

People are entitled to change their minds, of course, but what I find hard to believe is that political parties so regularly display such lamentable judgement in selecting parliamentary candidates whose loyalty to their cause is so evidently skin-deep. That the Lib Dems managed to be hoodwinked seven times in this way when selecting its 2005 slate speaks volumes.

There are thousands of loyal footsoldiers out there who support the same party for decades and never even get asked to stand for their local school governing body, yet these shallow, opportunistic shysters manage to get themselves selected to stand for Parliament even though their only loyalty is to their own careers.

Am I the only person who feels this way when I read of these tales of treachery?