A welcome report - but why is Heseltine having to reinvent the wheel?

OF all leading Conservative politicians of the past half century, the former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine is perhaps the one who has enjoyed the most complex relationship with his own party.

To some, he will be remembered as a spellbinding orator and party conference crowd-pleaser par excellence – or as the late former MP Julian Critchley memorably put it, the man who “always knew where the find the clitoris of the Tory Party.”

To others, he will forever be the dark villain at the centre of what they would see as the most shameful episode in the party’s recent history – the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher after 11 years as Prime Minister in 1990.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy to the party, though, will be to have kept the flag flying for what became some distinctly unfashionable causes in Conservative circles – Europe, state intervention, and above all, regionalism.

Lord Heseltine’s long advocacy of regional policy as a way of promoting both economic growth and social cohesion dates back to his time as the ‘Minister for Merseyside’ in the wake of the Toxteth riots in the early 1980s.

But is a concept that fell so far out of favour among his colleagues that practically the first thing the Tory-led Coalition did on coming to power in 2010 was to abolish the regional development agencies.

In the light of this, perhaps the most surprising thing about Lord Heseltine’s report on industrial strategy published this week under the title ‘No Stone Unturned’ is that he was asked to write it at all.

Is it a sign of a new open-mindedness on the part of Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne - or merely a sign of desperation in the face of the country’s continuing economic plight?

Either way, it was inevitable that Labour would seize on Lord Heseltine’s headline statement that the UK currently “does not have a strategy for growth and wealth creation.”

This is, after all, exactly what Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has been saying all along – that the government needs an economic ‘Plan B’ that puts more emphasis on generating growth and slightly less on cutting the deficit.

Labour leader Ed Miliband is also understandably keen to appropriate the ideas of a One Nation Tory like Heseltine in order to bolster his own attempts to seize the ‘One Nation’ mantle from the Conservatives.

Indeed, it is a measure of how far politics has shifted on its axis since the early 1980s that talk of measures to promote economic growth and wealth creation is now regarded in some circles as “left-wing.”

Some of Lord Heseltine’s proposals have a familiar ring to them.  Since the early 1990s he has viewed elected mayors as a general panacea for everything wrong with local government, and it was no surprise to see him giving this another airing.

The idea of conurbation-wide or even region-wide mayors have also been batted around before, and has some attractions as a halfway house between an elected regional assembly which might be too big to care and local authorities which are too small to cope.

A Mayor of Tyneside, for instance, would have the requisite critical mass of political and financial clout to make a difference while still retaining an element of local accountability.

As I have noted before in this column, it isn’t regional government as we once knew it, but it may be the best, or indeed only, form of regional government that’s ever likely to be on offer.

Lord Heseltine has also advocated handing over responsibility for billions of pounds of central government expenditure to the Local Enterprise Partnerships set up last year following the demise of the RDAs.

But this nothing terribly new either.   Moving power and budgets out of Whitehall was exactly the idea behind the creation of the Government Offices for the Regions in 1994 by the Major administration in which Lord Heseltine served, and also New Labour’s establishment of the RDAs in 1999.

The GORs were wound up by the Coalition in March 2011, exactly a year before the RDAs closed for business, but now Lord Heseltine proposes to turn the LEPs into something that looks suspiciously like a recreation of the two.

While it will be welcomed by those who bemoaned the loss of this institutions, it surely also begs the question why it has been necessary for him to reinvent the wheel.

Deeply disingenuous, but Cameron has the final say

Seven years ago, the Conservative Party faithful gathered in Blackpool for what most observers expected would be a leadership stand-off between right-wing former council house boy David Davis and veteran Europhile Ken Clarke.

That was, of course, before a young MP by the name of David Cameron came along and tore up the script, delivering a speech without notes that electrified the party and made them believe that, with him in charge, they could finally put an end to their losing streak.

That all seems a long time ago now.  Although he did become Prime Minister, Mr Cameron did not turn out to be quite the winner his party had hoped for, and this week’s conference in Birmingham had an element of seven-year-itch about it.

So notwithstanding the fact that his speaking-without-notes routine has since been successfully imitated by other political leaders, it was perhaps no surprise that Mr Cameron eschewed it this week in favour of a traditional, scripted address.

It was, by some distance, the most serious speech of the conference season and indeed of Mr Cameron’s political career to date.

His talk of an “hour of reckoning” for the British economy was a far cry from the David Cameron of a few years back who exhorted us in a previous conference speech to “let sunshine win the day.”  

If that was possibly the worst Cameron soundbite ever coined, someone had clearly been working on them in the run-up to Wednesday’s address.

“The party of one notion:  borrowing” and “I’m not here to defend privilege, but to spread it” may not be in quite the same league as “the Lady’s not for turning”  but they are likely to stick longer in the memory than anything either of the other two party leaders have come up with in the past three weeks.

But for all its statesmanlike qualities and oratorical panache, it was, however, a deeply disingenuous speech by the Prime Minister.

Nowhere was this more so than when Mr Cameron sought to claim that only the Conservatives had ‘protected’ the NHS from spending cuts, saying:  “Be in no doubt:  this is the party of the NHS and that’s the way it’s going to stay,”

Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that the government’s Health and Social Care Act has actually turned the NHS into no more than a brand, the situation on the ground is very different.

The reality, in my own local health trust at any rate, is that a fifth of the workforce is to be sacrificed over the next four years to meet the government’s spending squeeze.

In terms of political positioning, the core message of Mr Cameron’s speech was in its appeal to the aspirational voters who previously helped deliver election success to both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

“They call us the party of the better-off.  No, we are the party of the want to be better off,” he said in another of those catchy soundbites.

But the truth of the matter is that, in the public sector at any rate, there are tens of thousands of “want to be better offs” who have simply had the rug cut from under them - a disproportionate number of those being in the North-East.

If the unspoken assumption behind this is that no-one with any genuine aspiration actually goes into the public sector in the first place, then that betrays how little Mr Cameron knows about the way most of us live.

The conference season ends with the battle line starting to be drawn for an election which, on the evidence of the past few weeks, is shaping up to be much more of a two-way fight than the last one.

Ed Miliband’s speech, with his audacious bid to grab the One Nation mantle of the old-style Tory moderates was, once again, the boldest of the three, while Nick Clegg’s, at a time when he needed to put clear yellow water between himself and the Tories, was sadly forgettable.

Mr Cameron’s was the most sombre, but perhaps more importantly in terms of shaping the political agenda going forward, also the last.

It’s purely an accident of history that always lets the Tory leader have the final say in this three-week battle for political supremacy, but this year, at least, it was one he took full advantage of.

Can 'Red Ed' really command the centre ground?

Twelve months ago, Ed Miliband delivered what I described at the time as probably the most courageous party conference speech by any major political leader over the course of the last two decades.

The Liverpool address, in which he admitted that New Labour had not done enough to change the “values” of the British economy, amounted to no less than an attempt to overturn the political consensus that has been maintained by successive governments of right and left since the 1980s.

This year’ s speech, delivered 30 miles down the road in Manchester, was no less audacious - but whereas then Mr Miliband appeared to be adopting a distinctly leftish analysis of the country’s problems, this year saw him resorting to one of Tony Blair’s favourite pastimes – stealing the Tories’ clothes.

And it is perhaps in that apparent contradiction – between the leftward-lurching ‘Red Ed’ of 12 months ago and the ‘One Nation’ Labourite of this week – that Mr Miliband’s problem lies.

You cannot fault the Labour leader’s instincts in seeking to place himself and his party firmly in the centre ground of British politics. That is, after all, where elections are invariably won and lost.

And Prime Minister David Cameron can surely only blame himself for giving his opponent the opportunity to indulge in a spot of political cross-dressing.

By instinct a One Nation, compassionate Conservative himself, he has allowed himself since entering Downing Street to be blown off course by an angry right-wing rump who cannot forgive him for failing to win the election outright and thereby forcing them into a Coalition with those ghastly Lib Dems.

The past 18 months have seen a grisly procession of rightward shifts, from his backbenchers’ piece-by-piece demolition of Nick Clegg’s plans for political reform, to a reshuffle that saw a climate change sceptic put in charge of environment policy.

So the time was surely ripe this week for Mr Miliband to make a play for the centrist-minded voters that Mr Cameron appears to have all-but-abandoned in his desperation to keep the Boris Johnson fan club at bay.

And there was much about the labour leader’s ‘One Nation’ pitch that rang true, in particular his desire to focus attention and resources on the ‘forgotten 50pc’ who don’t go to university and his determination to speak up as much for the ‘squeezed middle’ as those living in poverty.

I was also impressed by the evident passion with which he spoke up, not for the unions, but for the Union – under threat as never before as a result of Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s independence referendum plans.

Mr Miliband is right that only the Labour Party can save it. The Tories and Lib Dems are a busted flush north of the border, and only the Labour Party will ever have the strength in Scotland to defeat Mr Salmond’s nationalists.

Above all, the speech demonstrated that Mr Miliband has the potential to give the Labour Party the clear sense of direction it has lacked since Mr Blair left office in 2007.

Gordon Brown should have done this, and had the opportunity to do so, but for all his talk about restoring the party’s cherished ‘var-lues’, his much-vaunted Real Labour – or was it True Labour? – never really achieved lift-off.

Now we have One Nation Labour, which, if rather short on specifics at this stage, at least sounds as if it might finally resolve the vexed question of what follows New Labour.

If Mr Miliband is to ensure it is more than a slogan, he now needs to spend the 12 months between this and the next party conference putting some policy flesh on the bones.

There was widespread agreement, even among Tory commentators, that Tuesday’s speech was a bravura performance by the Labour leader, a brilliantly-crafted and passionate address that has the potential to be a political game-changer.

But the nub of Ed Miliband’s problem, as the former Tory MP turned political blogger Jerry Hayes put it rather crudely this week, is that he genuinely is the most left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot.

The really big question is whether, the light of this, Mr Miliband can come to be seen by the voters as a credible occupant of the political centre-ground in the way that both Mr Blair and Mr Cameron were before him.

And on that score, the jury is still out.

Clegg's apology will not ultimately save his leadership

Broken promises are nothing new in politics.  From the Labour Party’s 110-year-old pledge to introduce an elected House of Lords to George H.W. Bush’s infamous one-liner ‘Read my lips, No new taxes,’ history is full of instances of parties and politicians failing to keep their word.

But there seems to be something about the subject of university tuition fees which brings out the worst in politicians where keeping promises is concerned.

Back in 2001, New Labour went into the general election with the cast-iron manifesto pledge:  “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them.”

Less than two years later Tony Blair’s government duly introduced them, in the teeth of a backbench parliamentary revolt in which several leading North-East Labour MPs were to the fore.

If Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had been more of a student of history, perhaps he would have reflected on this before issuing his similarly unequivocal pledge not to raise tuition fees in the run-up to the 2010 election.

Then again, had he done so he might have concluded that breaking promises is not necessarily politically fatal.   After all, Mr Blair’s original broken pledge on tuition fees did not prevent him winning a third general election in 2005.

By the same token, keeping your election promises is no guarantee of political success.

Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s determination to stick to a promise to reform the system of domestic rates that led to the disastrous implementation of the poll tax in 1988 and indirectly to her fall from power two years later.

But for the Liberal Democrats, there was something about breaking the tuition fee pledge that seemed to strike at the heart of what the party is and what it stands for.

Partly because of its strong activist base in the education sector, and perhaps also because of its level of support among students, the question of tuition fees had become something of a touchstone issue for the party.

It was certainly one of the biggest reasons why, in the North East, the Liberal Democrats had become credible challengers in seats with large concentrations of students such as Newcastle Central and Durham City.

So in this sense, for the party leadership to change its mind over the issue was always likely to be viewed as a betrayal on a par with a Labour leader calling for the privatisation of the NHS or a Tory leader announcing we should join the euro.

But this is not all.    There was also something about the idea of breaking election promises at all that ran counter to the Lib Dems’ self-image as a party.

This is why the broken promise on tuition fees was such a watershed for the party – the moment it gave up – possibly for all time – any claim to be representative of a “new” or different kind of politics.

It is for all those reasons that Mr Clegg issued his videoed apology to party supporters this week ahead of what is certain to be a difficult party conference for him.

Whether it will do him any good however remains very much to be seen.  Many of the party’s supporters are likely to take a fairly dim view of the fact that he appeared to be apologising not for breaking the ‘solemn’ promise, but for having made it in the first place.

Mr Clegg finds himself in a strange kind of political limbo.  Despite the comments by Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott last month that any business that had lost so much market share would now be under new management, the coming conference week will not see any overt challenge to his leadership.

Yet at the same time, it is hard to find many Liberal Democrats who seriously believe Mr Clegg will actually lead them into the next general election in 2015.

The remorseless logic of their plight is that if they are to present themselves to the electorate as a viable alternative to the Tories as well as to Labour, it will have to be without the man who took them into a Tory-led coalition.

But that is next year’s Lib Dem conference story.  For now, Mr Clegg continues to inhabit the ranks of the political living dead.

Hillsborough: The apology still missing

After more than 25 years in journalism, much of it spent covering the political arena, there is little that surprises me any more about the lengths to which some people will go in order to preserve their power, position or reputation.

But in the week that the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was finally and dramatically laid bare, even an ageing cynic like me has to confess to being shocked by the sheer scale of deception and disinformation involved.

Of course bad apples can crop up in any organisations, and sometimes, as in the case of the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s or, dare I say it, News International in the past decade, this can extend into institutional corruption.

But the fact that so many pillars of the establishment, from the police, to the ambulance service, the coroners’ service, the judiciary, the government and, yes, the media could somehow collude to deny justice for so long almost – but not quite - beggars belief.

Looking back at that old footage of the disaster, it seems in many ways to have happened in another country, a Britain where football was still a working-class game and where the North-South divide was as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.

As Labour MP Andy Burnham put it: “There was an 'us and them' culture in the 1980s where people seen as being troublemakers could just be treated as second class citizens - football supporters, people taking industrial action. That was very evident in the North of England when I grew up."

Some believe it couldn’t happen again, that in the age of email, mobile phones and Twitter a cover-up on this scale would be impossible to carry out even if it were to be attempted.

Yet the battle to get at the truth of what happened in more recent tragedies such as the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson suggest that perhaps the country has not changed quite as much as might first appear.

If Hillsborough has been a saga that has showed the best and worst of humanity – and there are many heroes to stand alongside the obvious villains - then it has certainly also demonstrated the best and worst of British journalism.

South Yorkshire Police’s deliberate campaign of misinformation found a ready outlet in The Sun, whose then editor was this week forced, to use his own immortal phrase, to empty a bucket of something very nasty over his own head.

Not surprisingly, it was the regional press which demonstrated that journalism can be a potent force for good as well as harm.

It was The Journal’s sister title the Liverpool Echo which, as Labour leader Ed Miliband acknowledged on Wednesday, was primarily responsible for keeping the issue on the political agenda during the long 23-year fight.

But amid all the relief of the campaigners at having finally prevailed, there is, however, one aspect of the truth that is still to come out – the role of Margaret Thatcher.

The documents released this week by the independent inquiry panel make clear that the then Prime Minister was briefed by her aides over the level of deceit by South Yorkshire Police - yet she chose to do nothing.

Is it possible she may have felt she owed them one for helping her win the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 – a decisive encounter in the year-long conflict which ultimately led to the rout of Arthur Scargill’s miners?

She certainly cannot have been expected to show any instinctive sympathy for the victims, having previously been on record as linking football fans to the IRA and the miners as ‘the enemy within.’

In the midst of delivering his “profound apology” to the victims’ families this week on the nation’s behalf, the current Prime Minister David Cameron maintained that the Thatcher government had done nothing wrong.

Well, he had to say that, given the continued emotional hold that the Iron Lady retains over the party which he now rather precariously leads.

But it is nevertheless odd that in the week that has seen everyone from Kelvin Mackenzie to the Football Association to Boris Johnson forced to swallow a large slice of humble pie, there is still one apology missing.

From the woman who sat at the apogee of that complex, interwoven 1980s establishment, there remains an eerie silence.

Was reshuffle the beginning of the end for Cameron?

Much has changed for David Cameron over the course of his seven years in charge of the Conservative Party – but there are two aspects of his leadership that have remained pretty much constant throughout that period.

The first is that he has tried to avoid reshuffles as far as possible. The second is that in his efforts to detoxify the Tory brand he has, by and large, continued to lead the party from the political centre.

Well, it had to end sometime I guess. Two and a half years after taking up residence in Downing Street, he finally summoned the nerve to move some of his more middle-ranking Cabinet members around the political chessboard.

And in so doing, he tilted the balance of power within his government decisively rightwards – and away from that fabled centre ground he has spent so long trying to cultivate.

On the face of it, this looks like pretty poor judgement on the Prime Minister’s part. To win an outright majority at the next election, his party will have to win approximately 2m more votes than it won in May 2010.

Yet history shows that every time the Conservative Party has lurched to the right in recent years – most notably under William Hague in 1999 and Iain Duncan Smith in 2003 - its support has gone down, not up.

Mr Cameron's entire political success, such as it is, has been built on persuading people that he is not like those Tory leaders of old and that his style of politics, like Tony Blair's, is about reaching out to those who are not his natural supporters.

On no issue is the change in Mr Cameron clearer than that of the environment. The man who once rode a bicycle to work to show his party’s new-found commitment to the green cause has now appointed a virtual climate change denier as environment secretary.

Sure, the changes announced on Tuesday may well bring about some superficial advances in terms of both service delivery and presentation.

On the latter score in particular, new health secretary Jeremy Hunt will surely be an improvement on the hapless Andrew Lansley who, in the words of one commentator, “could not sell gin to an alcoholic.”

But these are trifling gains when set against the central strategic error of failing to recognise that parties struggling to hold onto their support rarely solve their problems by retreating into their ideological comfort zone.

Indeed, it is tempting to believe the entire exercise was less a considered piece of political strategizing than an act of petulance designed to put the Liberal Democrats in their place following the spat over Lords reform and the boundary review.

With the forces of the Tory right now ranged even more formidably against him, there is no doubt that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will now find it even more difficult to persuade voters that he and his party are actually making a difference in government.

Meanwhile Labour leader Ed Miliband continues to make mischief by teasingly holding out the prospect of a post-Clegg, post-election Lib-Lab deal with ‘continuity SDP’ leader Vince Cable in the deputy PM role.

But inept as it may have been to drive his Coalition partners further into the hands of the enemy, even more ham-fisted was the Prime Minister’s treatment of his erstwhile transport secretary, Justine Greening.

Mr Cameron’s decision to remove her, apparently for having reaffirmed the government’s policy to rule out a third runway at Heathrow, has handed his real enemy – Boris Johnson – both a key weapon and a key ally in his campaign to replace the Tory leader.

The long-simmering battle between the two men has now moreorless descended into open warfare, with the London Mayor angrily denouncing Ms Greening’s demotion and demanding a statement ruling out a third runway for good.

Ms Greening – a former Treasury minister, take note – must now be odds-on to become Boris’s first Chancellor if he ever makes it into Number Ten – a double case of Blond(e) Ambition.

Hence a reshuffle that was supposed to relaunch Mr Cameron’s premiership has simultaneously risked alienating floating voters, angered his Coalition partners, and handed his main internal rival a big stick with which to beat him over the head.

From that perspective, it is tempting to see it as not so much a new dawn for his government, but the beginning of the end.