Whatever became of the August Silly Season?

In my last Saturday column three weeks ago, I highlighted the absence this year of what has hitherto been an almost annual feature of the summer political scene – the July Cabinet Reshuffle.

But as it turned out, that has not been the only thing missing from this strangest of summers. What on earth, I ask you, has happened to that other great British political tradition - the August Silly Season?

Gone, it seems, are those lazy, hazy days when all we political pundits had to write about at this time of the year was John Prescott finding a baby crab in the River Thames and naming it after Peter Mandelson.

No, this year's political close season has seen the worst rioting in English cities since 1981, the recall of Parliament, the fall of Tripoli to the anti-Gadaffi rebels and all the while the phone-hacking affair still simmering away in the background.

Prime Minister David Cameron must be wondering whether he is ever going to get a "normal" summer break again.

Last year, his August reveries were interrupted by the unexpectedly swift arrival of baby daughter Florence Rose Endellion during the family's holiday in, er, Endellion, Cornwall.

But if that was doubtless an unequivocally joyful experience for the Prime Minister, this year's riots represented an altogether grimmer intrusion into his family time.

For a day or two, indeed, it had looked as if the UK was sliding into anarchy, before Mr Cameron and the rest of the political establishment belatedly woke up to the danger and headed home to Westminster.

There was a brief hiccup for the Prime Minister when he came under fire for appearing to blame the police for not having responded quickly enough to the developing situation.

The evident anger felt by the boys in blue over this slur was understandable in the light of the ongoing cuts to police numbers which, though they may be intended to reduce police 'bureaucracy,' almost always seem to end up hitting frontline policing more.

This aside, though, the general consensus of opinion over the past fortnight has been that Mr Cameron has performed well in the aftermath of the troubles that briefly turned our city centres into no-go areas.

It has been an easier wicket for the Old Etonian premier than might ordinarily be supposed. It was, after all, he who bemoaned the 'broken society' when Labour under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown denied any such fracture existed.

Mr Blair probably would have done well to keep out of the debate, but predictably the temptation to pontificate proved irresistible for the increasingly ubiquitous former PM.

His argument that the riots were more the result of a disaffected underclass rather than a wider social breakdown or 'moral decline' begged more questions than it answered.

For starters, as Mr Blair himself was good enough to acknowledge, it contradicted his own assertions at the time of the James Bulger murder in 1993 that society was becoming "unworthy of the name."

Mr Blair now describes this intervention as "good politics but bad policy" – a telling admission that New Labour was always more about political positioning – or to give it another word, spin - than it was about policy substance.

As for the so-called underclass, they are hardly a new phenomenon, having been with us at least as long as the original English riots of Margaret Thatcher's day, and probably longer.

Alas Mr Blair had little time for them during his ten years as Prime Minister, preferring to focus his energies instead on more electorally important swing voters of Middle England.

Perhaps sensibly, the current Labour leader Ed Miliband has largely eschewed sociological analysis and spent most of the past three weeks agreeing with the government.

But this is always a difficult gig for an opposition leader, as Iain Duncan Smith found in 2001 when up against Mr Blair in the wake of 9/11.

Mr Cameron's wider difficulties with the economy, phone-hacking and above all the relationship with the Lib Dems have certainly not gone away, and will doubtless continue to loom large when politics resumes in earnest next month.

But as is almost always the case at times of national emergency, the overall political impact of the riots thus far has been to strengthen the government's position.

What was missing about the political summer of 2011?

As anyone who has ever worked at Westminster for any length of time will know, there are certain fixed points in the parliamentary calendar which do much to shape the narrative of the political year.

Some of these are pretty well immovable feasts: the Budget, for instance, is almost always in March, the local elections in May, the party conferences in the autumn and the Queen's Speech in November.

But 2011 will go down as different from most other years in one significant respect: there was no summer Cabinet reshuffle.

Perhaps it was just the fact that everybody was too busy talking about phone-hacking, but the usual crescendo of summer speculation about who's heading up and down the greasy pole never even got going.

Tony Blair was addicted to reshuffles, although over the course of ten years as Prime Minister he never managed to become very good at them

One of my most abiding memories of my time in the Lobby was the chaotic Number Ten briefing after the 2003 reshuffle which followed the then Darlington MP Alan Milburn's surprise resignation as health secretary.

Initially we were told that the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office had been abolished and become part of the newly-created Department for Constitutional Affairs under Lord Falconer .

Half an hour later, after hasty consultations with shocked officials from the departments in question, we were told, er, no, that was not quite right after all.

Mr Blair didn't like round pegs in round holes. He was one of those leaders - you get them in all walks of life – who feel the need to move people around every couple of years or so lest they get too comfortable in the jobs they are in.

By contrast, David Cameron is said to hate reshuffles, and that certainly seems to be borne out by the relatively stable composition of his frontbench team in both opposition and government.

Unlike Mr Blair, he seems to make a virtue of stability and allowing ministers to get to know their briefs.

Usually this is a good thing – but sometimes, as in the case of health secretary Andrew Lansley and his NHS reforms, they can become so obsessed with their particular field of expertise they become blind to the wider political picture.

Mr Cameron, though, may yet be forced to do the thing he seemingly most hates, even if the traditional time of the year for reshuffles has now passed.

At the end of last month, a file was handed by Essex Police to the Crown Prosecution Service following an investigation into whether the energy secretary, Chris Huhne, persuaded someone else to take speeding penalty points for him.

Downing Street was said to be ready for Mr Huhne to walk, but the one-time Lib Dem leadership contender is not short of chutzpah, and he is still gambling that the investigation will come to nothing.

Everyone, however, privately acknowledges that if he is charged, he will be forced to stand down, at the very least temporarily, while he attempts to clear his name through the courts.

What would happen then? Under the terms of the Coalition agreement, Mr Huhne would have to be replaced in the Cabinet by another Lib Dem, though not necessarily in the same role.

Many in both coalition parties would like to see the former Lib Dem Treasury minister David Laws brought back into the Cabinet fold.

But the consensus is that it is still too soon for the ex-minister forced to resign in disgrace after just 17 days last summer after revelations about his expenses.

Safer but duller choices would be either the foreign affairs minister Ed Davey or Nick Clegg's chief adviser, Norman Lamb.

Mr Cameron could of course take the opportunity for a wider shake-up. Why, for instance, leave the highly-talented Philip Hammond mouldering at transport, or telegenic Jeremy Hunt in the relative backwater of culture, media and sport?

But all the indications, though, are that he will seek to limit the number of changes to the bare minimum.

During the Major-Blair years, the summer reshuffle, and the months of speculation that invariably preceded it, became as much a part of the political year as all those other fixed points in the calendar.

Under Mr Cameron, it looks like becoming no more than a distant memory.

Meanwhile, back in the real world....

Once again, the week concludes with phone-hacking back at the top of the political agenda, as MPs discuss a possible fresh grilling for News International's James Murdoch amid more conflicting tales about who knew what and when.

Sure, it's all very entertaining, especially for those of us who have spent years longing to see the Murdoch Empire cut down to size, and in view of his long-standing links with the NI crowd, it remains a potentially toxic story for Prime Minister David Cameron.

But sometimes the inevitable media firestorm around stories such as these can detract from the really big issues facing the country, the ones that affect peoples' lives on a day-to-day level.

And for most people, not least in the North-East, the really big issue remains the fragile state of the economy and its impact on jobs.

The publication of the three-monthly GDP figures on Tuesday saw a brief, almost evanescent shift in the news agenda away from phone-hacking and onto the bigger economic picture.

The revelation that the economy grew by just 0.2pc in the last quarter will have come as no great surprise to anyone who has been attempting to run a business over the course of that period.

If the previous set of GDP figures in April, showing 0.5pc growth, were seen at the time as disappointing, then this week's were truly dismal.

The country may have avoided a double-dip recession – but it has done so only by the skin of its teeth, and there seems no great reason to suggest we are anywhere near being out of the woods yet.

It was tempting to see George Osborne's attempts to pin the blame for the economy's continued sluggish performance on the Royal Wedding as part of a worrying pattern of behaviour on the part of the Chancellor.

After all, this is the man who found himself compared to a rail announcer of yore by blaming April's figures on the winter snows.

But maybe Mr Osborne had a point this time round. The confluence of the late Easter, the wedding, and the May Day Bank Holiday, though no fault of the government's, was scarcely helpful at a time when the economy is struggling to get into gear.

With the two four-day Bank Holiday weekends in succession, the country essentially took a 12-day holiday – helped by a patch of unseasonally warm weather.

For Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, of course, all this is hogwash. The cause of the problem is neither the Royal nuptials nor the weather, but the government's austerity measures which he believes are continuing to choke-off any chance of a recovery.

If Mr Balls is still some way from winning the argument on this, I sense that his calls for a shift of focus from deficit reduction to growth is at least starting to be given a fairer hearing by the public.

And of course, the overall GDP figures serve to disguise the very real regional disparities in growth that exist within the UK – as Institute for Public Policy Research director Nick Pearce pointed out on Tuesday.

"Outside of London, in particular, the recession continues to be felt and the UK economy might as well still be in recession, even if technically it isn't," he said.

But it is not just Mr Balls who is keen to see more measures to stimulate growth. Tory succession-watchers will have been intrigued to see London Mayor Boris Johnson setting out his own alternative economic strategy this week, with tax cuts top of his agenda.

Much as Gordon Brown once did, Mr Osborne is keen to create an air of inevitability around himself as the Prime Minister's eventual successor, but as the man who recommended Andy Coulson, he has been damaged by phone-hacking and his handling of the economy is also coming in for increasing criticism.

Meanwhile Mr Johnson, whose own ambitions to lead the Conservative Party one day remain undimmed, is playing a blinder on both issues, with the countdown to the Olympics only likely to increase his profile still further.

BoJo is on the move. Watch this space.

Why Cameron is not out of the woods yet

Ever since the start of the crisis over phone hacking that has engulfed the worlds of politics, journalism and the police over the past three weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron had appeared to be stuck on the back foot.

Much as he himself once managed to make Gordon Brown seem leaden-footed in his response to the MPs' expenses crisis two years ago, Labour leader Ed Miliband had seemed to be making the political weather as the public backlash against News International intensified.

Fortunately for Mr Cameron, he is far too skilled a politician for it to have lasted forever and sure enough, this week saw him finally come out fighting.

Prime Ministers always have an inbuilt advantage in the game of politics in that, while opposition leaders can just talk, they can actually do – and this week it was an advantage Mr Cameron exploited to the full.

Cutting short his trip to Africa, he postponed the parliamentary recess by 24 hours, enabling an extra session of Prime Minister's Questions and an emergency statement on phone hacking to be squeezed in before the MPs' summer break.

But besides raising the morale of the Tory Party by showing a bit of grit and determination in the face of his Labour tormentors, did it actually do him any good?

Well, his admission that he should not have hired the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his press secretary will go part of the way towards defusing the issue which has dogged him since well before the start of the current media firestorm.

But as Mr Miliband was swift to point out, having regrets about the appointment does not get away from the fact that it was, as he put it "a catastrophic error of judgment."

Mr Cameron has still yet to satisfactorily explain why he chose to ignore so many warnings about the dangers of making Mr Coulson Downing Street communications director.

The suspicion persists that he adopted something of a wise monkey stance in relation to his trusted press adviser - 'see no evil, hear no evil, think no evil.'

The disclosure that his chief of staff Ed Llewellyn had refused a detailed briefing on phone-hacking from the police could be interpreted as wanting to protect the Prime Minister from any suggestion that he could influence the investigation.

But it could equally be the case that aides like Mr Llewellyn simply did not want to tell the Prime Minister what they knew he did not want to hear.

Wednesday's debate also provided a convenient platform for Labour MPs to raise some additional issues which have further muddied the waters in relation to Mr Coulson.

First, Labour MP Chris Bryant claimed that the Royal Family had raised concerns with Downing Street about Mr Coulson's appointment – which would be hardly surprising since most of them had had their phones hacked.

Then the highly-respected former local government minister Nick Raynsford suggested that Mr Coulson might actually have practised phone-hacking while in the role of Downing Street press secretary, with a senior government official as the victim.

The Cabinet Secretary denied it, but if this allegation were to turn out to be true, the situation would look very grave indeed for Mr Cameron.

But the biggest reason why the Prime Minister is not out of the woods yet on phone hacking is because the question of his longer-term political survival is not really about that.

It is, rather, about his relationship with his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.

Nick Clegg and his party had no option but to go into the coalition in May 2011. The arithmetic of going with Labour didn't stack up, and standing on the sidelines and inflicting another election on the public would not have been forgiven.

But having entered it, they have found over the past 14 months just what a rock and a hard place they were put in as a result of the inconclusive election outcome.

As I wrote at the start of this year, a team is only as strong as its weakest member, and such has been the slump in the Lib Dems' political fortunes since joining the coalition that they currently constitute a pretty broken reed.

It remains my view that, in order to stand a chance of holding onto its Southern power base in which the Tories are its main challengers, the party has to find a way to break up the coalition at a point of maximum advantage to itself and maximum disadvantage to Mr Cameron.

As the political season draws to a close, that essential dynamic that makes this such a potentially unstable alliance between the two partners remains unaltered.

Mr Cameron may think he is safe for now. But as Lloyd George found, in a coalition, you are only ever as safe as your partners allow you to be.

Murdoch's power has been broken. Could Cameron's be next?

For the past thirty years, the British political establishment has been in thrall to Rupert Murdoch - the 24th member of Tony Blair's Cabinet as he was once dubbed.

In the course of that period, his media empire has variously decided the outcome of elections, dictated the membership of Cabinets, shaped policies on a wide range of issues and even influenced whether or not the country went to war.

But this Wednesday, the worm finally turned as the Australian media tycoon's bid to buy 100pc of BSkyB was swept away in the storm that has engulfed him in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal.

It was as if three decades of pent-up resentment had suddenly been unleashed in a torrent , as the politicians who have been forced to kow-tow to Murdoch all that time finally broke free of his yoke.

There is a certain historical irony in the fact that it was the dear old House of Commons which finally delivered the coup-de-grace to Murdoch's dreams of further media expansion.

For those of us with long memories, it seemed a fitting reward for the way in which he conned Parliament into agreeing to his takeover of The Times and the Sunday Times in 1981 by giving 'editorial guarantees' he had no intention of keeping.

These undertakings enabled the then Trade and Industry Secretary John Biffen to sidestep a reference to the then Monopolies Commission.

Within a year, Murdoch had broken every single one of them, including sacking the Times' editor and transferring the two titles into a different part of his business.

I will give two small examples from the recent past of how the influence of his empire has distorted the political life of the nation.

In 2009, the now former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks let it be known that David Cameron's Tories would not get their support at the ensuing general election unless Dominic Grieve was replaced as Shadow Home Secretary. He duly was.

Then, last year, James Murdoch made it clear he wanted the Labour government's plans for regional news consortia scrapped. When the Coalition came in, they duly were.

These, however, are relatively trivial examples compared with, for instance, his papers' routine character assassination of certain party leaders and consultations with Tony Blair in the days prior to the invasion of Iraq.

But if Murdoch was undoubtedly the biggest loser of the week, it's not been a great seven days for Mr Cameron either.

Because it was not the Prime Minister who finally led the fightback against the Murdoch empire, but the man who wants his job - Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Mr Miliband undoubtedly took a gamble by calling a vote on the BSKyB bid – but within 48 hours every other party had followed his lead.

His reading of the public mood in this crisis has been consistently ahead of the curve and, for now at any rate, he has drawn a line under the troubles that had beset his leadership earlier in the summer.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, too, ends the week with his position enhanced, again at Mr Cameron's expense.

It was his threat to vote with Labour on Wednesday that forced the Prime Minister into his U-turn on the BSkyB deal, potentially altering the balance of power within the Coalition in the process.

Mr Clegg has also pointedly disassociated himself with the shadow of Andy Coulson's appointment as Downing Street's director of communications that continues to hang over Mr Cameron.

"It was his appointment and his appointment alone. We did discuss it... it was something that we didn’t see eye to eye on," he said.

This is where the phone-hacking scandal starts to play into the much bigger and wider issue of the Coalition's ultimate survival.

Some Lib Dems have started to speculate that Mr Cameron may emerge from the scandal so badly damaged that they could actually bring him down.

I have argued from the start of this Coalition that the Lib Dems somehow have to find a way of getting out of it alive, and this might just be their best opportunity.

We would then not just be looking at the downfall of a media empire, but the downfall of a government.

Me, this blog, and Dale and Co

I started this blog in 2005 with no great ambitions for it other than to provide an outlet for my political writing which, at that time, was not afforded to me by my 'day job.'

I had left the parliamentary lobby the year before in order to pursue a different line of work and enjoy a better quality of life, and although I did not miss the lobby as such, I did miss being able to sound-off about the political events of the day.

To my surprise, the blog "took off" in a small way and for the first few years of its existence was regularly voted among the top 20 political blogs in the UK in Iain Dale's annual guide.

For a while, I thought it might even fill that much-talked-about left-of-centre "void" in a political blogosphere which, at the time, was dominated by three giant Conservative blogs - Iain Dale's Diary, Guido Fawkes and Conservative Home.

As it turned out, a number of factors militated against that, the biggest of which was that the mainstream media with their hugely superior resources swiftly got in on the blogging phenomenon.

Why bother reading what Paul Linford had to say about the latest Labour leadership crisis when you could read the views of people much closer to the action, such as Benedict Brogan or Paul Waugh?

Like many other 'lone' bloggers at the time, I also found the readers' appetites for constant updates - 'feeding the blog monster' as it became known - impossible to sustain.

And there were internal pressures within my then workplace too, something about which I will say more some day.

I kept the blog going, mainly because it still retained a small core of loyal readers and commenters (thanks, guys), and also to provide an online presence for my weekly column in The Journal, which otherwise only appeared in print.

But I had long since come to the view that the best outlet for my blogging in future would be to join a group blog where the burden of providing a constant stream of entertaining and informative new material could be shared with others.

For a while I contributed to Liberal Conspiracy, but although I am an economic leftist, I have always been a small-c conservative on social issues and it soon became clear to me that my views on such matters as abortion were not appreciated by my fellow group bloggers there.

Fortunately Iain Dale has now offered me another opportunity through his new, non-partisan megablog Dale and Co, and this is where my main political blogging will be done from now on.

My contributions at Dale and Co will be accessible at this page or via this RSS feed

So far I have contributed two pieces on Rupert Murdoch and the phone-hacking scandal - the latest one focusing why yesterday's House of Commons vote to curb his expansion plans was 30 years overdue - and another more reflective historical piece on whether a British Prime Minister will ever again serve two non-consecutive terms.

As for this blog, it will continue, with the strictly limited purposes of providing the following:

An online presence for my Saturday column.

A central reference point for my output across a variety of print and online platforms, including Dale and Co, Total Politics and The Journalism Hub.

An outlet for some occasional personal blogging which will not be of great interest to readers of those other platforms.

A readily accessible archive of my blogging output over the past six years, including my 'Political Top 10s' which continue to get pretty high Google rankings.

A series of links to sites which interest me and which may interest others of a like mind who drop by here.

To those who are interested in that sort of stuff, please continue to visit. To the rest of you, see you over at Dale and Co.