Saturday, August 15, 2009

Toxic Tories rain on Cameron's parade

David Cameron and George Osborne want us to think the Tories are the "new progressives" of British politics - but they can't stop reminders of the party's 'nasty' past from reappearing. Here's today's final Journal column before my summer break.



A few years ago, I posed the question as to whether voters of a leftish inclination would be better off with a Conservative party that sought to appeal to them, than with a Labour party seemingly only interested in pleasing those of a right-wing persuasion.

The conundrum arose as a direct consequence of David Cameron’s mission to “detoxify” the Tory brand following his election as Tory leader in autumn 2005.

For Mr Cameron, it meant focusing his energies on winning over left-of-centre voters concerned about public services and the environment, at a time when Labour’s Tony Blair continued to be more anxious about keeping traditional Conservative supporters on side.

Since Mr Blair moved on, Labour has thankfully stopped defining itself in opposition to its core voters, but as Shadow Chancellor George Osborne showed this week, the Tories remain as keen as ever to try on their opponent’s clothes.

The point was certainly not lost on stand-in premier Lord Mandelson, who in a masterly performance on Radio Four’s Today Programme on Wednesday, managed to dodge questions about his own prime ministerial ambitions by putting the boot into Ms Osborne at every opportunity.

“I think my old friend George Osborne is involved in a bit of political cross-dressing and I don’t think it’s going to fool anyone,” he said.

That “my old friend” was a reference to the fact these two have previous form. Nearly a year ago, each was accusing the other of trying to procure a donation to their respective party’s funds from the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

After briefly looking like he may have to resign from the Cabinet for a third time over a sleaze-related issue, Lord Mandelson decisively won that battle with a counter-attack that came close to ending Mr Osborne’s own frontbench career.

But putting personal rivalries to one side, what was really interesting about Mr Osborne’s audacious “we are the progressives” speech this week was what it told us about the underlying political consensus in the country.

And this, in turn, is perhaps the one thing that can still give Labour grounds for hope as it approaches the coming election battle.

Throughout all the troubles and travails of Mr Brown’s premiership over the past two years, the Prime Minister and his supporters have continued to clutch at a single straw – the fact that even though his government is wildly unpopular, there has been no fundamental shift in the climate of public opinion towards the Tories.

Mr Osborne’s speech this week proves the point. Rather than make the case for “conservative” values as Mrs Thatcher might have done, the Tories still feel the need to fight on what is essentially Labour ground.

As it is, Mr Osborne’s speech on Tuesday demonstrated the extent to which the word “progressive” has lost virtually all meaning in contemporary political debate.

It used to denote a form of taxation which sought to redistribute resources from the better-off to the worst-off, but since all parties subscribe to this to a greater or lesser extent, this definition does not help us much.

The central claim of Mr Osborne’s speech was that Labour’s “opposition to meaningful public service reform” meant it had “abandoned the field of progressive politics.”

While the Shadow Chancellor seems to be using “progressive” here to mean “reforming,” most Labour supporters would argue that a reform is only “progressive” if it actually helps the worst-off.

But this is more than just an arid debate about labels. The nature of Lord Mandelson’s response to Mr Osborne would suggest that Labour too believes “progressive” is a word worth fighting over.

And of course, Lord M. is quite right to point out that, in terms of its effect on the worst-off, the Tories plans for £5bn of public spending cuts would hardly be “progressive” in their human consequences.

The difficulty for Labour, as I pointed out a few weeks back, is that no-one now seriously believes that they won’t also be forced to make cuts of similar magnitude.

Maybe the argument, in the end, will come down to which of the two parties can convince the public they are wielding the axe with the greater reluctance.

Part of Mr Cameron’s problem, though, as he continues to try to persuade the public that the Tories have changed, is that old reminders keep popping up of their ‘nasty party’ past.

We already knew what Shadow Commons Leader Alan Duncan really thought about MPs’ expenses from his performance on Have I Got News For You a few weeks before this summer’s scandal broke.

“It’s a great system, isn’t it?” the one-time property millionaire told Ian Hislop as he struggled to contain the smug grin spreading across his face.

Mr Duncan claimed at the time that he had been joking – but the fact that he was later captured on film whingeing about MPs having to live on “rations” does rather give the game away.

Potentially even more damaging for Mr Cameron, though, were the comments by the prominent Tory MEP Daniel Hannan about the National Health Service.

Interviewed on US television, Mr Hannan backed Republican critics of President Obama’s plan for universal healthcare by saying he "wouldn't wish the NHS on anyone."

As Labour’s big hitters queued up to twist the knife yesterday, Mr Cameron was himself forced to take to the airwaves in a frantic bid to reassure the public once again that the NHS is safe in Tory hands.

Some are already seeing a Tory victory next year as a done deal - but episodes such as this show that Mr Cameron’s big rebranding exercise still has a way to run.

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Friday, August 14, 2009

Some Tories more equal than others



Heartfelt thanks to Slob for sending this one over - it echoes my sentiments about Mr Duncan entirely. His contempt for the public ought to have been clear from his infamous HIGNFY appearance and it's a mystery to me why Cameron hasn't fired him.

More in my weekly column tomorrow.

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Saturday, August 08, 2009

Johnson lies low as Hatty and Mandy slug it out

Is the Home Secretary the big winner after two weeks of "grandstanding" by Harman and Mandelson? Here's today's Journal column



Last week, in the course of describing Peter Mandelson’s assumption of the reins of power in Whitehall, I made passing reference to talk of the former Hartlepool MP becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister.

At the time, the spate of “PM4PM” rumours doing the rounds struck me as no more than silly season tittle-tattle, and to be fair, the Business Secretary himself seemed keen to play them down.

But silly season or no, over the past seven days the story has both acquired ‘legs’ – as they say in the trade – and a fresh North-East dimension to boot.

According to at least two Sunday newspapers, a serious plot to install Lord Mandelson as Gordon Brown’s successor is already under way, with former Chief Whip Hilary Armstrong said to be playing a key role.

The plan, or so we are asked to believe, is for a leading Blairite Cabinet minister to stage what is being termed a “nuclear resignation” in the middle of Labour’s conference this autumn which would force Mr Brown out within hours.

Lord Mandelson would then take advantage of a new measure which became law this summer to allow life peers as well as hereditary peers to disclaim their titles.

At this point, Ms Armstrong, who has already announced she is standing down as MP for Durham North-West at the next election, would vacate her safe seat, allowing Mr Mandelson – as he would now be called - to stand in a by-election.

The one-time Prince of Darkness would then be duly returned to the Commons in good time to be installed as Labour leader and Prime Minister by Christmas.

Fanciful? Well, the fact that Peter Mandelson has even managed to get people talking about the idea of him as Prime Minister is surely proof that, in politics, nothing can ever be ruled out.

As the humourist and commentator Matthew Norman put it: “Even by the standards of Bob Monkhouse Syndrome, whereby the most reviled national characters inevitably come into vogue if they hang around long enough, this is some transformation.”

Either way, one politician who will have been looking somewhat askance at all this Mandy-mania is Harriet Harman, Labour’s nominal Number Two and Mr Brown’s official holiday stand-in.

She once again left us in no doubt this week that, if there were to be a vacancy at the top of the Labour Party in the near future, her hat remains very firmly in the ring.

First came her assertion that the party should never again be led by an all-male leadership team, on the grounds that men “cannot be left to run things on their own.”

Allied to this was the suggestion that men were effectively to blame for the recesssion, and that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters we would not be in the mess we are in now.

There followed rumours of a spat with Justice Secretary Jack Straw and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, in which Ms Harman was said to have vetoed a review of rape laws because it did not go far enough.

Solicitor-General and Redcar MP Vera Baird attempted to pour oil on these troubled waters, but Ms Harman hit back again by telling Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour she would not “tippy-toe” around issues she believes in.

For Ms Harman, it’s a dangerous game. While few doubt that playing the ‘women’s card’ has got her a long way in the Labour Party, it has not always endeared her to the wider public.

Some elements of the party have been criticised in recent years for trying to re-launch the class war, but it has seemed at times this week as if Labour’s deputy is trying to start a gender war.

And if her pro-feminist agenda sometimes plays badly with floating voters in ‘Middle England,’ neither is it always overwhelmingly popular with Labour’s own core supporters.

Many Labour activists believe that all-women shortlists, for instance, have actually harmed equal opportunities by making it harder for black and Asian men to become Labour candidates.

What should Mr Brown make of all this “grandstanding?” Maybe he’s enjoying the spectacle of leadership wannabes vying for media attention as he himself takes a much-needed break.

Maybe there’s even an element of Machiavellianism in it, the kind of divide-and-rule strategy that his predecessor sometimes employed to good effect, setting Mr Brown, Robin Cook and John Prescott against eachother.

But while Mr Brown is undoubtedly devious enough to play such a game, he is not secure enough in his own job to be relaxed about such open jockeying for power among his subordinates.

If it carries on into the autumn, it risks the conference turning into a ‘beauty contest’ between the would-be successors, rather than the launch-pad for what would surely be the final Brown comeback bid.

But while Mandy and Harriet have been slugging it out across the airwaves and column inches over the past fortnight, one politician has been carefully staying out of the fray – Mr Johnson.

For all the bigging-up of Lord Mandelson over recent weeks, the Home Secretary is still the one the Tories most fear, the man whose common touch would instantly make David Cameron look like the privileged Old Etonian he is.

Mr Johnson has spent the last few weeks quietly liberalising the Home Office and neutralising ID cards as a potential election issue – both moves which will play well with Labour MPs in any contested leadership race.

Some will see his decision to lie low as evidence that he doesn’t really want the top job. But in so doing, perhaps he is showing the political astuteness which Harriet Harman so often lacks.

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