Who's running Britain: the annual non-story

Okay, so it's a great story, all the more so at a time of year when good political stories are in very short supply. Fat old working-class fool who can't speak the language properly and mispronounces the names of foreign leaders is left to run the country for a fortnight, opening up the prospect of a whole series of disasters along the way.

Or, at least, it would be a great story, if there was any truth in it. Because the truth is that, whether he is a fat old fool or not, John Prescott has never actually been left in charge of anything in Tony Blair's absense.

There seems to be an assumption on the part of the people writing this stuff that Mr Blair somehow ceases to be Prime Minister when he is on holiday. That might have been the case had we still been living in the era of carrier-pigeons, or when ocean liners were the only form of foreign travel, but not in an era of modern communications and transport.

Doutbless it won't stop the stories being written though, even if Mr Blair's decision to postpone his holiday means they have to be shelved for a few days.

Walter Wolfgang joins Labour's NEC

Possibly the greatest victory against NuLab control freakery since Peter Mandelson failed to be elected to the NEC in 1997! Read the full story HERE.

I was however genuinely surprised by this result as, from her Loughborough Uni days onwards, Lorna Fitzsimons has always been good at getting elected to things, occasionally employing some innovative techniques in order to do so.

So what was it all about, Dave?

He doesn't want to make a big song and dance about it, apparently, but fellow blogger Iain Dale is today quietly celebrating his elevation to the Tories' "A-list" of Parliamentary candidates.

Whether or not you agree with him, Iain is clearly a highly effective advocate for the Conservative Party and I'm sure will go on to play a significant role in national politics in years to come.

But now that this glaring injustice has been righted, it is perhaps timely to ask what on earth was achieved by leaving Dale off the list in the first place, other than to make the debate over the introduction of the A-list much more rancourous than it otherwise would have been?

All it did was foster a doubtless wrong impression among grassroots Tories that supporters of David Davis, or outspoken bloggers, or middle-aged men - or possibly even all three - were being victimised.

Now Marina socks it to Lampard

Latest to feel the razor sharp pen of Guardian writer Marina "Snide" Hyde is England footballer Frank Lampard, who is publishing a new autobiography entitled "Totally Frank."

And though Chelsea and West Ham fans will doubtless disagree, I have to say that never was a target more deserving.

"Having failed to deliver in Germany, the honourable thing for any of these three fabulously rich gentlemen might have been to return their advance to the publishers, and to have been self-aware enough to realise that a period of silence from them would be most welcome" writes Marina, referring also to the recent autobiog from Wayne Rooney and a forthcoming one from Ashley Cole.

The full article can be read HERE.

Kennedy could still be a contender, says White

I am not sure whether this piece by Mike White is entirely helpful to Charles Kennedy, but it does show there are other, more respectable commentators than me who think he could plausibly lead the Lib Dems again one day.

Is political cross-dressing really here to stay?

"The era of tribal political leadership is over," said Tony Blair in his keynote speech to the Murdoch Corporation on Sunday. Not surprisingly it has already provoked some lively debate, not least on Labour Home.

I can see three very good reasons why he would say such a thing. First, because he believes it, though he is wrong about that. Second, because he would like to be able to claim that ridding the British Left of ideology is part of his precious legacy, though he is wrong about that too.

But the main reason he said it was simply an attempt to guarantee Labour's future relationship with Murdoch, reassuring him that socialism really isn't going to make a comeback under his successors and that the Labour Party is now just as apt to end up to the right of the Tories as to the left.

In his analysis of the Tories, and David Cameron at least, he is correct, as I have previously discussed. Where Blair falls down - not for the first time in his career - is in his understanding of the Labour Party.

For of course, the two beasts are not the same. There are plenty of people out there - as any brief visit to Iain Dale will confirm - who think that David Cameron is destroying the ideological base of the Conservative Party in much the way Blair destroyed Labour's.

They are wrong as it happens, because although belief in a right-wing ideology (low taxation, small government etc) is undoubtedly one of Conservatism's distinguishing characteristics, it has not, historically speaking, been the party's underlying raison d'etre.

At different times in its history, the "clothes" that most would nowadays associate with the Tory Party have regularly been worn by others, notably Gladstone's liberals in the 19th century and Joe Chamberlain's imperialists in the early 20th.

What the Conservative Party is really about - and this is why the Hague-IDS-Howard years were such a surprising aberration - is the pursuit and retention of power, allied to an underlying belief that, in a small-c conservative country, it is invariably the party best qualified to exercise it.

This has never been true of the Labour Party, in that the pursuit of power for its own sake has never been its underlying raison d'etre. As Harold Wilson said: "The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing."

Let's face it, even Tony Blair has had to pay lip service to that, although his pre-1997 talk of governing in the interests of "the many not the few" now sound increasingly hollow.

Either way, such is the degree of anger felt by many Labour members at Mr Blair's abandonment of its historic principles that it is inconceivable that, under its next leader, the party will not seek to reconnect with those roots.

Whatever the Tories do, it is my belief that the Labour Party will remain the party of fairness, justice, tolerance, internationalism and all those old ideals - owing much more to Jesus than Marx - with which it has always been associated.

Update: Just spotted an excellent post by Shaphan - one of the most underrated political bloggers around - which highlights another aspect of Mr Blair's attitude to ideology, namely the way he pronounces the word.

In my view, his pronunciation of it to rhyme with idiocy as opposed to idealism has always been quite deliberate.