Redwood and the Reverse Midas Touch

One of the very best books ever published about the decline and fall of the Tories between 1992 and 1997 was Guilty Men, written by Hywel Williams who was John Redwood's special adviser at the Welsh Office between 1993 and his resignation to challlenge for the Tory leadership in 1995.

Despite that previous working relationship, or perhaps even because of it, the book is not written from an especially pro- or anti-Redwood perspective. But what it does demonstrate is that most of the political enterprises with which the Wokingham MP has been associated have ended in failure.

I have met Redwood a few times, notably when I was doing the Lobby job for the South Wales Echo in the mid-90s, and while he is clearly an intensely intellectual person who finds it hard to descend to the level of ordinary mortals, the overall impression one comes away with is of a fairly decent human being.

But for all his decency and for all the genuineness of his convictions, Redwood has throughout his political career demonstrated the Reverse Midas Touch, ie everything he touches turns to shit.

Redwood's public reputation has never really recovered from that period in the early 1990s when he became the Tony Benn figure to John Major's Harold Wilson - an ideological maverick who behaved as if collective Cabinet responsibility did not apply to him, used left-leaning Wales as a test-bed for loony-right policies, and finally launched an opportunistic challenge for the leadership.

Call it being wise after the event, but I knew instinctively that Ken Clarke's 1997 leadership bid was doomed the minute he teamed up with Redwood in an attempt to block William Hague. Most Tory MPs thought it was more important to stop Redwood becoming Shadow Chancellor than to stop an untried and untested 36-year-old being handed the poisoned chalice of the Tory leadership at a time when Tony Blair was carrying all before him.

Hague, to his credit, realised that Redwood reminded the voters of the worst aspects of the Major years and sacked him from the Shadow Cabinet after a year, although his decision to replace him as Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary with the business guru turned failed politician Archie Norman was scarcely one of his most inspired appointments.

So, at a time when David Cameron as leader is trying to undo all the damage of that baleful period and reposition the Conservatives on the political centre ground, his decision to hand Redwoood the task of presiding over a policy review on business taxation and regulation policy has to go down as yet another strategic blunder.

There may be merit in some of his proposals. Much health and safety legislation, for instance, is as burdensome and annoying to the customer as it undoubtedly is for the businesses themselves.

On the other hand, making it easier for firms to make people redundant is absolutely the last thing we need in a country riven by job insecurity - the biggest single reason, in my view, why in spite of our increased prosperity, we are generally much less happy than we were 30 years ago when the British economy was regarded as a basket-case.

But that is not really the point. The point is that someone who is seen by the electorate as emblematic of Toryism's darkest hour and who was presumed politically dead and buried, has popped up wraith-like to remind them of exactly why they rejected the party in the first place.

The Tories will not like the comparison - but it is as if Neil Kinnock, at the start of his crusade to modernise the Labour Party in the mid-80s and wrest control from the loony left, had asked Benn to chair a review of party policy. The idea is as laughable as it is preposterous.

But the controversy over Redwood's tax cutting plans is symptomatic of a wider problem for Mr Cameron, in that, in contrast to New Labour during the 1994-97 period, the policy review process he has initiated is not under the control of the leadership.

This is the second one in succession, following Iain Duncan Smith's report on social policy which recommended restoring marriage to the heart of the tax system, which has presented the Tories as retreating into a right-wing comfort zone at a time when Gordon Brown is determined to drive them off the centre-ground.

Bizarrely, Cameron seems to view the job of chairing policy reviews as some sort of long-service reward for party grandees and figures from the past such as Redwood, IDS and Clarke rather than acting as central drivers of the party's modernisation programme.

He now needs to do two things. Firstly, ensure that all future such reviews come under the direct control of his office, and secondly, ensure that John Redwood and all other vestiges of the failed Major era are finally put out to grass.

Choose a Bright Morning, Clara

Yesterday dawned brilliantly bright and sunny up here in Derbyshire, a suitably auspicious day for the arrival of Clara Eloise Linford at 9.23am. She weighed 6lb 9oz - a little smaller than her brother George - and of course she is beautiful.

"Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart." Psalm 37, v4

The great election conundrum

I've left a few comments here and there on other people's blogs with regard to the ongoing debate over whether Gordon Brown will call a snap autumn election, but not so far specifically blogged on it myself.

So what's my view? Well, at the risk of making an almighty arse of myself if El Gordo announces he's going to the country tomorrow, I don't think an election this year is in any way likely, for two main reasons.

First, Labour has a healthy majority of 66. Given that the polls are still reasonably close and the fact that boundary changes at the next election are likely to benefit the Tories by 20-30 seats, I cannot see why Gordon would want to hold an election which might cut that majority before one needed to held.

Even if he did achieve a mandate of his own, it would hardly look like a great victory if he was returned with a smaller majority than Tony Blair - or even worse, forced into a coalition deal with his pal Ming Campbell.

Secondly, and more fundamentally though, I believe that to succumb to the temptation to hold an election at this time could do irreparable damage to the "Brown brand."

In my view, his whole political appeal rests on him being seen by the public as a man of strong principle and serious purpose - not one who is merely looking to capitalise on what is almost certainly a temporary period of turmoil for David Cameron's Tories.

A snap election would also demonstrate a complete lack of faith in his own ability to sustain the "Brown bounce" - or at least the confidence and trust of the electorate - beyond some vaguely defined honeymoon period.

By next June, Brown will have had a year in which to demonstrate his seriousness of purpose, with hopefully some solid achievements behind him. That will be the time, in my view, to start putting his party in election mode.

I'm truly humbled...

Mike Smithson is in my view the best and most influential political blogger in the land (see previous post.) So I was hugely honoured to receive this nomination for Mr Dale's poll.

It's particularly gratifying in view of the fact that I've found it hard to post as often as I would like over recent months due to other commitments. But like Paddy McAloon* I have tried to maintain some "quality control" and I'm genuinely humbled that someone of Mike's stature should recognise this.

Meanwhile...two narrow near-misses in the Witanagemot Club Political Blogging Awards voted for by bloggers who support the establishment of an English Parliament.

In an encouraging sign that this blog has so far managed to avoid pigeonholing, it was voted both the 2nd best Labour-supporting blog behind Kerron Cross, and the 2nd best centre-ground blog, behind (somewhat bizarrely) Iain Dale.

* The guy out of Prefab Sprout who wrote about four double-albums' worth of material in the 1990s and didn't release any of it because he thought it wasn't up to the standard of their previous work.