The man is obscuring the message

My take on a less than satisfactory week for Labour's Ed Miliband.  From today's Journal.

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While on a personal level I was relieved at the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum, there can be no doubt what the more interesting result from a journalistic point of view would have been.

The counterfactual question ‘What would have happened if the Scots had voted Yes?’ will, I suspect, become as moot a debating point in years to come as ‘What would have happened if JFK had lived?’ or ‘What would have happened if Thatcher had lost the Falklands?’

My guess, for what it’s worth is that David Cameron would by now be an ex-Prime Minister, his status as the man who lost the Union having finally provided his backbenchers with the longed-for excuse to send him packing.

His replacement at No 10 would have been William Hague, one of the few Tories to command respect across the spectrum and a convenient stopgap for those seeking to block the claims of Chancellor George Osborne while keeping the seat warm for Boris Johnson.

And Ed Miliband?  Well, I suspect he might soon have been on his way too.  After all, had the Scottish vote gone the other way, it would have been primarily down to his failure to connect with Labour’s traditional supporters north of the border.

It took an eleventh-hour intervention by Gordon Brown to deliver Labour’s voters into the no camp, though the former Prime Minister remains such an unperson in senior party circles that Mr Miliband did not even see fit to thank him in his conference speech this week.

But of course the Scots voted no, and both Mr Cameron and his Labour opposite number lived to fight another day, albeit with their reputations badly scarred.

And with the general election now less than eight months away, it is clear that both men face an uphill battle to convince the public of their Prime Ministerial credentials.

Mr Cameron, of course, has the advantage in this regard in that he is already doing the job, but he seems to be held in growing contempt by an increasing number of otherwise natural Tory voters.

His casual failure this week to observe the first rule of Prime Ministerial conduct – that you don’t drag the Monarch into politics – was seen by some as indicative not just of a lack of gravitas, but a lack of basic intelligence.

As for poor Mr Miliband, everyone I speak to who is unconnected with politics seems to regard him as quite simply the dullest man in Britain.

His keynote conference speech this week was perhaps his last big chance before the election to shift that perception – but sadly for him, it appears to have further cemented it in the public mind.

Perhaps he wasn’t actually trying.   Mr Miliband is smart enough to realise that the he is never going to win on the personality stakes and, rather than attempt to sell himself to the electorate in Tuesday’s speech, he set about trying to sell an idea.

This, encapsulated in a single word, was the idea of togetherness – a refinement of his ‘One Nation’ pitch of two years ago which aimed to build on the success of the ‘Better Together’ campaign in Scotland.

Of itself, it’s a strong message, if one that – like his £2.5bn pledge on funding the NHS - seems aimed more at shoring up Labour’s core vote than reaching out to those of a more rightward-leaning disposition.

But it all got rather lost in Mr Miliband’s torpid manner of delivery, while his failure to mention Labour’s plans for tackling the deficit handed further plentiful ammunition to his opponents.

If renewed faith in the concept of ‘togetherness’ was one upshot of the referendum, another was of course the revival of interest in English devolution.

Mr Cameron’s plans for an English parliament within a parliament met with a predictably dusty response this week from North-East MPs and council leaders this week who realise it will do nothing to devolve power and funding to the Northern regions.

The Labour leader, by contrast, spoke of the need for a wholesale decentralisation of power throughout the country in what in may yet become a major theme of his party’s election campaign.

In this, too, Mr Miliband’s instincts are entirely correct.   But sadly for Labour, the man is currently obscuring the message.

The English Question: Let battle commence

Today's Journal column on the aftermath of the Scottish referendum vote.

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AND so….as one of the big arguments in British politics is settled – perhaps for a generation or more – another, potentially even more fractious one begins.

Scotland may have voted no to independence on Thursday by what, in the end, was a bigger-than-expected margin, but the debate over what to do about the ‘English Question’ is only just getting going.

David Cameron will no doubt have been mightily relieved as he appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street shortly after 7am yesterday to express his delight at the Scots’ decision to stay.

Had the vote gone the other way, the Prime Minister could just as easily have been announcing his resignation, such were the catalogue of tactical blunders which almost led to the break-up of the 307-year-old Union.

But it was not what Mr Cameron said about Scotland yesterday morning than what he said about England that was chiefly of interest in this part of the world - or, more precisely, what he didn’t say.

The morning after the referendum, in an impressive show of unity, The Journal joined together with its traditional rival on the news-stands to demand increased powers and funding for the North of England

Significantly, those now making the case for this also include the Tory MP for Hexham, Guy Opperman, who said on Wednesday that the region must be “first in line” for devolution following the Scottish vote.

But it is far from clear from Mr Cameron’s comments yesterday whether, at this stage, the option of additional powers for England’s cities and regions is even on his radar.

For all his talk of wide-ranging constitutional change, Mr Cameron appears instead to favour a rather minimalist answer to the English Question, namely ‘English votes for English laws.’

This idea, which would essentially bar Scottish MPs from voting on English-only matters at Westminster, was part of the last Tory election manifesto but vetoed by the Lib Dems from inclusion in the Coalition Agreement.

But while this may be the solution favoured by most Tory MPs, it is unlikely to find favour with the Labour Party and will emphatically not address the “democratic deficit” within the English regions.

Indeed, without some corresponding measure of regional devolution, it would leave the North even more at the mercy of domination by London than has hitherto been the case.

The other big point at issue in the fallout from Thursday’s vote will be the future of the Barnett Formula, which still hands Scotland an extra £1,623 in public spending per head than the UK average.

The three main party leaders’ absurd last-minute pledge to continue it in perpetuity will surely - and rightly – be blocked by English backbench MPs.

The formula – as its creator Lord Barnett has long realised – has been out of sync with relative need for many years and is long overdue for abolition.

In any case, a genuine ‘devo max’ settlement for the Scots, with full control over levels of income tax, would surely render the formula unnecessary in the longer run.

But while this vexed issue will doubtless fill many more columns before it has run its course, it would be wrong to conclude this one without some mention of Gordon Brown.

If Mr Cameron, through his initial complacency and inattention to vital details such as the wording of the question, came close to the being the man who lost the union, then his predecessor at No 10 was the one who saved it.

In the closing days of the campaign, the former Prime Minister managed to do what nobody else had managed up to that point – to make a compelling emotional case for Scots to stick with the UK together.

By appealing to traditional Labour values of solidarity and sharing, he managed to stem the haemorrhaging of support to the Yes campaign that had briefly threatened to become an avalanche.

As others have pointed out, it is time for some historical reappraisal of Mr Brown, who as ITN’s Tom Bradby said yesterday, can now credibly claim to have saved both the financial system and the Union.

Tories may deride him as a “failed Prime Minister,” but he was not, he was merely an electorally unsuccessfully one.

It was his great misfortune to get the job in an era where presentational skills had become increasingly important, and sandwiched between two showmen like Tony Blair and Mr Cameron, those were skills he self-evidently lacked.

One thing he has never lacked, though, was passion.  And he certainly put it to very good use in the cause of keeping our country together.

The man who saved the union....and the one who nearly lost it

"Gordon Brown emerged as the only genuine statesman in this whole sorry business. He embodies the very qualities that makes the rest of the world admire the Scots: integrity, decency and an unshakeable belief in the ability of public service to bring about a better society,"

Paul Routledge in the Daily Mirror.

"I think history is going to be pretty kind to Gordon Brown, a man who can credibly claim to have saved the financial system and the Union."

ITN political editor Tom Bradby on Twitter

"Even when rumours began flying that it might be a firmer no, you could still find Tory MPs wholly unable to forgive a leader who many feel did too little for too long, before panicking and doing too much too late.

"Cameron has resembled nothing so much as the husband who only remembers his wife’s birthday with minutes to spare, and then chucks a bucketload of cash at the problem while praying she never sees the credit card bill."

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian.

Barnett Formula pledge is undeliverable and wrong

I was dismayed to read that the party leaders - and Gordon Brown - have pledged to continue the Barnett Formula as part of their three-point 'guarantee' to Scottish voters ahead of Thursday's referendum.

The formula, which gaurantees Scotland a higher level of public spending per head than anywhere else on the British mainland, has been out of sync for many years and, as the former Welsh Secretary John Redwood points out, is particularly unfair to Wales and the Northern English regions which have similar levels of need.

It won't alter my support for the Better Together campaign, but the future funding arrangements for the different parts of the UK need to be based on a new assessment of relative need, not a short-term political fix.

My suspicion is that the pledge will actually be undeliverable.  I can't imagine for a moment that
English MPs will stand for it in the long run, even if they are keeping their mouths firmly shut at the moment for fear of playing into the hands of the Yes campaign.

The politician who should be most ashamed of himself for allowing this absurd pledge to form part of the last-ditch appeal to wavering Scottish voters is Nick Clegg, whose party has previously called for the replacement of Barnett with a needs-based formula.   Given Clegg's track record of U-turning on previous agreed party policy, however, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by this.

In any case, the new powers envisaged for the Scottish Parliament, including the ability to raise their own taxes, ought to enable Scotland to move closer towards financial self-sufficiency rather than continuing to rely on block grants from Westminster.  In this sense, maintaining the Barnett Formula in perpetuity would fly in the face of the moves towards federalism that Gordon and others are now belatedly advocating.

3pm Update:  It seems they are not keeping their mouths shut after all.   I very much fear that the pro-Union campaign is going to fall apart over the next 24 hours as a result of this stupid and unnecessary attempt to bribe the Scots.

Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron...All are to blame

Today's column in The Journal, tying together some of the independence referendum threads I have blogged about this week.

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SOON it will all be over.  By the next time this column appears, the debate that has dominated British politics for the past six months will finally have been settled, and Scotland will have voted yea or nay to independence.

It has been, without doubt, the hardest vote to call in living memory.   For a long time the ‘Better Together’ campaign appeared to hold an unassailable lead, but as was always likely, the gap began to close as the emotional case for independence began to sway the hearts of voters.

Belatedly, the No campaign has this week tried to come up with some emotion of its own, temporarily setting aside all the dry arguments about currency with a series of impassioned ‘Please Don’t Go’ type appeals.

Prime Minister David Cameron has even joined the fray, despite having previously concluded that such direct personal involvement would simply play into the hands of the Yes campaign with its adroit portrayal of him as the representative of an out-of-touch, English Westminster elite.

Writing as a committed unionist, these have been worrying days indeed.   Many of a similar persuasion have asked the question how on earth we got into this mess, and specifically, how Mr Cameron allowed us to get to a point where the break-up of the UK is now a very real prospect.

To my mind, the answer is clear.  What we are now seeing is the inevitable outworking of the Conservative Party’s decision, after 1979, to eschew One Nation politics in favour of a free market ideology that found little favour with the Scots – or, for that matter, the Northern English.

It is easy to blame Margaret Thatcher for the country’s ills, but it was her government’s abandonment of the post-war political consensus that began the progressive estrangement between Scotland and Westminster that could now lead to outright separation.

It may have won her three elections, but it was done with no regard for how it would affect the social fabric and essential political unity of the UK, and no thought for whether the Scots would still want to be part of the country she was creating.

Three and half decades on, the differences over the future of the National Health Service provide perhaps the clearest illustration of the growing disconnect.

Mr Cameron’s decision to enact the 2012 Health and Social Care Bill, which potentially paves the way for the future privatisation of the NHS, has been exploited to the full by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond.

It matters little, as Gordon Brown pointed out this week, that health is already a devolved matter for the Scottish Parliament and that a Westminster government would therefore find it hard if not impossible to privatise health services in Scotland.

The fact that the legislation was passed at all is tells Scots all they need to know about the gulf in values that now exists.

There was a brief, evanescent moment, in May 1997, when I thought that Tony Blair was going to restore that lost sense of shared values, to stitch the country’s frayed political bonds back together and forge a new consensus.

Asked to describe the new Prime Minister’s mood following his landslide victory the night before, Alastair Campbell responded:  “He realises he has been given a remarkable opportunity to unite the country.”

Alas, he chose instead to triangulate Labour’s own values out of existence to the point where even a relatively left-leaning leader such as Ed Miliband is now no longer trusted by the party’s traditional voters - in Scotland most of all.

It is too late to put Humpty together again now.   The only thing that will now save the union is rather by recognising the distinctive political cultures that exist within different parts of the UK and allow them to go their own ways, within the overall UK umbrella.

Mr Brown, belatedly, has come to realise this, although his intervention in the debate this week rather begs the question why he did not do more to decentralise the UK while in office.

Devolution could have been his Big Idea.  But though we waited and waited and waited for him to “set out his vision,” his government had become so politically enfeebled by then that it seemed in a permanent state of intellectual stasis.

So he, too, is culpable along with Thatcher, Blair and Cameron for what has been a collective failure of leadership over many, many years. 

One thing is certain whatever the result on Thursday.  The country over which they presided will never be the same again.

Blair is back, and Miliband will have to deal with it

If being Prime Minister is inevitably the toughest job in British politics, then being a former Prime Minister is surely not that far behind.

Of the three surviving bearers of the title, the only one who has made anything approaching a decent fist of it over the course of recent years is that much under-rated figure, Sir John Major.

I will never forget his quiet dignity in defeat on that bright May morning in 1997 when he spoke of curtains falling and actors leaving the stage before going off to watch some cricket at The Oval.

And he has continued to be dignity personified throughout the ensuing years, never once succumbing to the temptation to criticise any of his many successors as Tory leader and only ever intervening in a way helpful to his own party.

In this, Sir John was determined not to follow the example of his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who made clear her own intentions shortly after he succeeded her by declaring her skill at back-seat driving.

The Iron Lady, who was finally laid to rest this week, clearly found being an ex-Prime Minister rather harder to come to terms with than the actual job itself.

So, it seems, has Gordon Brown.  When he lost the premiership in 2010, those of us who still counted ourselves among his admirers hoped he would rebuild his reputation by becoming a good constituency MP and backbench elder statesman.

Unfortunately, he has veered off into the biggest political sulk since Edward Heath’s, barely ever turning up at the Commons and, save for a rather self-justificatory attack on Rupert Murdoch, saying almost nothing of any value since leaving Number Ten.

But the former Prime Minister whose post-Downing Street career provides the greatest fascination, for me at any rate, is surely Tony Blair.

Aged just 54 when he left office in 2007, it was never remotely likely that the former Sedgefield MP would go gently into that good night as Sir John had done ten years earlier, and some sort of comeback was always on the cards.

For a time, this looked likely to be at European level, with the presidency of the European Council of Ministers the most obvious potential destination.

But thwarted in that ambition by the surprise elevation of Herman van Rompuy, his attentions have turned back to domestic politics and, specifically, the future of the Labour Party.

Mr Blair took to the pages of Labour house journal The New Statesman to warn party leader Ed Miliband that his opposition to welfare reform and spending cuts risked reducing Labour to a party of protest.

In another recent intervention, he declared that the result of the last election would have been closer had he still been leader, thereby implying that the party’s chances of winning in 2015 depend on the extent to which it stays true to his legacy.

This, incidentally, is poppycock.  Whatever Mr Brown’s failings, had Mr Blair gone on and on and attempted to win a fourth consecutive term in the teeth of a recession,  and with the baggage of Iraq still hung around his shoulders, he would have gone down to a landslide of 1997 proportions.

But no matter.  Blair is back, and it is clear that the younger Miliband had better get used to the fact.

For now, the party leader’s stock response has been to turn Mr Blair’s own revisionist methodology against him, saying:  “Tony Blair taught us the world changes. The world does change and we will learn our lessons."

But while this is undoubtedly true, he will eventually have to explain in much more detail how the Labour Party under his leadership has responded to those changes.

Over the past couple of weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron has had to suffer the inevitable unhelpful comparisons with an illustrious predecessor who won three straight election victories where he could only manage a hung Parliament.

Mr Miliband’s chances of going one better may well depend on how far, if at all, he can escape from Mr Blair’s long shadow.

Seldon is right: Balls should fall on his sword

At the end of last week’s column, on the back of an opinion poll showing the party 11 points clear of the Tories, I suggested that the next general election in 2015 was beginning to look like it might be Labour’s to lose.

Premature? Well probably. But there seems to be a growing view in political circles – not least on the Tory backbenches - that Labour is on course to become, at worst, the largest single party in another hung Parliament.

At the same time, however, there remains a strong awareness that despite favourable poll ratings and the growing unpopularity of the Coalition, the party still has one huge Achilles Heel: the economic record of the last Labour government.

And the man who, more than any other, personifies this is the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls – Gordon Brown’s chief economic adviser for most of his time at the Treasury and his closest political ally once he got to Number 10.

In my political preview of 2013, published on the last Saturday of 2012, I predicted that Labour leader Ed Miliband might eventually be obliged to resolve this difficulty by relieving Mr Balls of his responsibilities.

So it came as no huge surprise, to me at any rate, to see this view being repeated by no less a figure than Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College and the pre-eminent historian of the Blair-Brown years.

“As somebody who has written about you for many years it falls to me to say this: the time has come for you to fall on your sword,” he told Mr Balls in a New Statesman article this week.

“Ed Miliband would be a much stronger leader without you. Forgive me, but you stop Ed breathing fresh air. With you close to him, his breath will always be stale and smell of a toxic brand… Without you, Labour could present itself as a clean party, free of the factionalism and brutalism that so tarnished it when Brown was boss and you were his consigliere. “

If the Godfather allusion seems unnecessarily brutal, Seldon at least went on to hold out the prospect that Mr Balls could one day return to the front bench as a “redeemed and respected figure.”

He even went so far as to say that he might yet succeed to the party leadership one day, predicting that the public will eventually tire of the trend towards young leaders.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for Tories to start leaping to the defence of the man they believe is their greatest electoral asset.

One prominent Conservative blogger praised his “good political brain” and grasp of economics, and suggested that, far from being a drain on Ed Miliband’s leadership, he acts as a useful lightning conductor for him.

The irony of all this is that Mr Balls has, broadly speaking, been proved right in his attack on the government’s economic policy since 2010, namely that it has cut too far, too fast and in so doing snuffed out an incipient recovery.

With growth still sluggish, it is hard to gainsay the central thrust of his argument that the Coalition needs a ‘Plan B’ in order to get the economy moving again.

But whereas people may agree with Mr Balls’ analysis of the problem, this does not mean they necessarily agree with his solutions.

And Mr Balls’ real difficulty is that, rightly or wrongly, many voters assume his much-vaunted Plan B would be no more than a return to the policies that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

One of the most successful and oft-used Tory slogans of all time is the one originally coined by Harold Macmillan’s government at the 1959 election: “Life’s better with the Conservatives – don’t let Labour ruin it.”

It was used again to good effect in the last week of the 1987 campaign after the Tories’ “wobbly Thursday,” and variants such as “Britain is booming – don’t let Labour blow it” have resurfaced from time to time.

So long as Ed Balls remains in the shadow Treasury brief, the Tories won’t need Saatchi and Saatchi to devise their next election slogan for them.

It will be quite straightforward: “Britain is on the way back. Don’t let Labour Balls it up.”

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.

A tale of three Prime Ministers

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch sacked him as editor of The Times in 1982, the great newspaperman Harold Evans wrote a book about his experiences which he both hoped and believed would devastate the Australian media mogul.

‘Good Times, Bad Times’ remains a classic of its kind and is still pretty much essential reading for anyone wanting to enter our profession, but if the truth be told, its political impact was far more limited than its author had envisaged.

Over the ensuing decades, Murdoch’s continuing accretion of power over the UK media became by and large a subject of interest only to a few left-wing mavericks, with governments of both colours content to indulge the News International chief in the hope of winning his papers’ backing.

Then came the phone hacking affair, propelling the ‘Murdoch question’ to the centre of national debate to the point where it now threatens to eviscerate the entire UK political and media establishment.

This week’s hearings of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards might be termed a tale of three Prime Ministers, each one giving a subtly differing account of his dealings with the Murdoch empire.

Of the three, Sir John Major - who once promised to create a nation at ease with itself - was the only one who looked remotely close to being at ease with himself.

Actually his most intriguing revelation was not about Mr Murdoch at all but the man who defeated him in that 1997 election landslide.

Sir John’s estimation that Tony Blair was “in many ways to the right” of him seems to confirm my long-held suspicion that Tory governments seeking to reach out to the centre-left end up being more progressive than Labour ones which seek to appease the right.

Unlike Sir John, who admitted he cared too much about what the papers wrote about him, Gordon Brown claimed he barely even looked at them during his two and a half years in 10 Downing Street.

This was one of many scarcely believable claims which, taken together, served to undermine the credibility of what otherwise might have constituted a powerful body of evidence.

Mr Brown effectively accused Mr Murdoch of having lied to the inquiry about a 2009 conversation in which the former PM was alleged to have threatened to “declare war” on News International.

Cabinet office records appear to bear out Mr Brown’s version of events, but claiming he had nothing to do with the plot to force Mr Blair out of office might lead some to conclude he is a less than reliable witness.

The contributions from Messrs Major and Brown contained much that will be of interest to future historians, and may yet have a significant bearing on Lord Justice Leveson’s eventual recommendations.

But in terms of the impact on present-day politics, the key session of the week came on Thursday as David Cameron took the stand.

For such a renowned PR man he seemed very ill at ease, perhaps unsurprisingly given the excruciating contents of the text messages which he exchanged with News International boss Rebekah Brooks.

To his credit, though, Mr Cameron did not attempt to shy away from the responsibility for some of his more controversial actions, admitting that he was “haunted” by the decision to make former News of the World editor Andy Coulson his communications chief.

For me, the party leader who emerged with the least credit from the week was not Mr Cameron but Nick Clegg, whose decision to abstain in the vote over Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s future looked like the worst kind of gesture politics.

If they really wanted to see an independent investigation carried out into Mr Hunt’s role in handling the BSKyB bid, they would have voted with Labour, but this was no more than a cynical exercise in political positioning.

In Journal political editor Will Green’s excellent analysis of the state of the Liberal Democrats in the North-East published earlier this week, Gateshead Lib Dem councillor Ron Beadle was quoted as saying that Mr Clegg would not lead his party into the next election.

Party loyalists aside, it is becoming harder and harder to find anyone prepared to dispute that assertion.

Heir to Blair in more ways than one

Shortly after becoming leader of his party in 2005, David Cameron caused consternation among Conservative supporters by claiming that he was the true ‘heir to Blair.’

In one sense, it was a strange move, since the former Prime Minister had by then already begun the long, slow descent from the public adulation that greeted his arrival in No 10 to the public disillusionment that hastened his departure.

But Mr Cameron’s boast had a larger strategic purpose, namely to fix himself in the public mind as a politician of the centre ground and at the same time portray Mr Blair’s putative successor Gordon Brown as one who would abandon that territory.

And since entering Downing Street, he has continued in the same vein, claiming more than once that his health and education reforms are no more than a continuation of the changes initiated by Mr Blair a decade ago and thereby portraying Labour’s opposition to them as indicative as “lurch to the left.”

Mr Cameron has also found himself praised by former Blairite apologists such as John McTernan for his policy of liberal interventionism abroad, most notably in Libya.

But over the past week, much less welcome comparisons have started to be drawn between the two leaders as the government’s political fortunes took a marked turn for the worse.

At some points over the past seven days it has looked as though recent history may be repeating itself, such is the sense of déjà vu surrounding some of the government’s current crises.

Where New Labour has its 45p pension increase, the Coalition has its granny tax. Where New Labour had the fuel protests, the Coalition has the threat of a tanker drivers’ strike. And where New Labour was accused of selling honours for cash, Mr Cameron now finds himself accused of selling access.

No wonder that one of Mr Blair’s former speechwriters, Phil Collins, called it the government’s worst week in office so far, before going on to note wryly that under Mr Blair, each week was portrayed as being a worse one than the last.

Far more scathing was the verdict offered by the Conservative-leaning commentator
Peter Oborne, who saw this week’s events as signs of a shift in the political landscape.

“David Cameron’s claim that the government represents the interests of Britain as a whole now feels baseless and cynical, replaced by the growing perception that he represents nothing more than a coterie of rich and privileged men,” he wrote.

Oborne went onto to accuse Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne of embracing “the worst aspects of Blairism: the obsession with very rich men; the divergence between public statements and private conduct; the preference for policy making through private cabal; and the almost demented Blairite contempt for their own party members."

This is only one example of what appears to be a deepening gulf between the government and its natural supporters, both in the press and in the country.

The Daily Telegraph was never that keen on him anyway, tending to regard him as “not really one of us” in much the same way as The Guardian once saw Mr Blair.

More worryingly for Mr Cameron, the Daily Mail now appears to have turned on him over the 'granny tax’ while The Sun has him in its sights over both the 'pasty tax' and the failure to do anything about fuel prices.

Some will say it's a good sign, showing that Mr Cameron is still occupying that fabled centre ground. Others will point out that alienating your natural allies is a political dead end, as Mr Blair eventually found to his cost.

Mr Cameron’s problems with the Tory press – and the wider party - really stem from one thing: his failure to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2010.

Had he succeeded in doing that, they would have forgiven him all his attempts to define himself in opposition to his own supporters, forgiven his portrayal of the Old Tories as a “nasty party” which he was determined to detoxify.

But he failed, even when up against an opponent whom they regarded as at best, ineffectual and, at worst, bonkers.

And until, like Mr Blair, he can prove himself a real winner, Mr Cameron will never truly capture his party’s heart.

What next for David Miliband?

It was Clement Attlee who famously told a Labour colleague that a period of silence from him would now be welcome, thereby inadvertently earning himself an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

And it is certainly true that there are times in politics when it is best to keep your head down and your mouth shut.

By and large, the past 15 months have been such a period for David Miliband, the South Shields MP and former Foreign Secretary who, until October 2010, had been widely expected to become leader of his party.

But it wasn't to be and, rather than risk the sort of comparisons that might have undermined his younger brother's leadership, the elder Miliband stood bank from the political frontline and confined his public statements to the occasional supportive message.

Such was ostensibly the nature of his article in the New Statesman a couple of weeks back in which he outlined a seven-point plan for the future of the party and called for “restless thinking” in its bid to recapture power.

He made a point of praising his brother Ed on no fewer than four occasions, highlighting his success in maintaining party unity, and having spoken out "powerfully" over issues such as welfare cutbacks.

But that, of course, did not stop the political commentariat once more portraying David’s intervention as a covert leadership bid.

The resulting furore saw Mr Miliband forced into another round of interviews in which he appeared to rule out any return to the frontbench on the grounds that it would merely perpetuate the “soap opera.”

One rather venomous interpretation of his actions came from the Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in an article headlined: ‘The sniping and self-pity of a truly feeble man.’

Likening Mr Miliband’s political modus operandi to the game of Knock Down Ginger, he accused him of thrice raising the standard of internal revolt before “scuttling away to hide in the bushes.”

“The pattern was set in the summer of 2008, when David wrote a barely coded article in the Guardian lacerating Gordon Brown. The moment it was greeted as the challenge to the PM’s authority that it certainly was, off he scarpered, denying any such intent,” he wrote.

“Within a year, his close friend and Cabinet ally James Purnell resigned, laying the ground for David to oust Mr Brown by doing the same. Again he bottled it, and stayed."

Mr Norman saw the New Statesman article, and the semi-retreat that followed it, as more of the same, going on to suggest a permanent silence from a man he charmingly described as “a mincing paean to metrosexual narcissism.”

It was left to the former Labour North official and Blairite blogger Hopi Sen to leap to Mr Miliband’s defence, pointedly describing Mr Norman as a “food writer” alongside various other less polite terms.

But beneath all this knockabout lies a serious point - namely what is to become of a politician who still has much to say about the future direction of his party – but who is unable to say it without his actions being either over- or mis-interpreted?

As one of those ubiquitous ‘friends’ put it: “This is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the Labour Party. The way the cookie has crumbled, the only way he can do that is through argument and debate.”

Perhaps the real purpose of David’s New Statesman article was to find out whether he can actually now start to contribute to that debate without others seeing it as an attempt to further destabilise his brother’s somewhat faltering leadership.

If that was indeed his intention, the answer seems to be a resounding no.

Sadly, the likely upshot of this is that Mr Miliband may well come to feel that the only way to end the soap opera will be for him to remove himself from the political arena entirely, and leave Parliament at the next general election.

And given his stature in both the country and the region, I, for one, would consider that a shame.

The day Mandy was 'rude' to Rebekah Brooks

I thought this epic clip from the 2009 Labour Party Conference perhaps deserved another outing in the light of current events....

The encounter happened the morning after the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper announced it was switching its support to the Tories on the night of Gordon Brown's pre-election conference speech.

In what was surely one of Cathy Newman's finest TV moments, Mandelson denied using a four-letter word to the News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

I bet he wishes he had now....

Phone-hacking casualties pile up - but spare a thought for Gordon

First it was the News of the World, scrapped by its owner Rupert Murdoch in an attempted damage-limitation exercise amid allegations that it hacked into the voicemail messages of, among others, schoolgirl murder victim Milly Dowler, relatives of the 7/7 victims, the families of soldiers killed in Iraq, and - she had to get dragged in somewhere - Princess Diana's lawyer.

Then it was the turn of the Press Complaints Commission, facing the axe after a rare outbreak of consensus between Prime Minister David Cameron, who branded it "ineffective" and Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose favoured adjective was "toothless."

The casualties of the phone-hacking affair continue to mount up, with those still at risk including News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, and the company's increasingly forlorn hopes of taking over 100pc ownership of BSkyB.

But the big question at Westminster this weekend is whether those casualties will stay confined to the world of journalism and the media - or whether the scandal will eventually claim political scalps.

Phone-hacking has been branded rather too simplistically this week as journalism's equivalent of the MPs' expenses scandal, or even as the politicians' revenge on the trade for having uncovered their duck-island antics two summers ago.

It is nothing of the sort. This is far more than a crisis in British journalism, it is rather a crisis in British public life that goes right to the top of the tree.

No less a commentator than Peter Oborne this week described Mr Cameron as a "profoundly damaged figure" for having hired Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor arrested by police yesterday, and for his friendship with Ms Brooks.

"The series of disgusting revelations concerning his friends and associates from Rupert Murdoch’s News International has permanently and irrevocably damaged his reputation....He has made not one, but a long succession of chronic personal misjudgments," he wrote.

Is this overstating the case? Well, possibly - but if one thing is clear from the past week's events it is that this is a fast-changing story in which assumptions can be very quickly overturned.

Nobody would have predicted a week ago that the country's biggest selling newspaper, an iconic title with 168 years of history behind it, would be abruptly closed. But it has happened.

The most damning aspect of the affair for Mr Cameron is the fact that he was given details about Mr Coulson's possible involvement in phone-hacking before making him Downing Street director of communications after last year's election win.

In his article this week, Mr Oborne disclosed that Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, who was in possession of many of the facts long before they could be published, delivered the warning to Mr Cameron's adviser Steve Hilton prior to the election.

It is inconceivable that Mr Hilton would not have passed on these concerns to Mr Cameron, but evidently the Prime Minister chose to ignore them.

Knowing what we now know of the allegations made against Mr Coulson, that does not just call into question the Prime Minister's judgement, it calls into question his commonsense.

Meanwhile, spare a thought this weekend for Gordon Brown, who wanted to hold the same kind of judicial inquiry into phone hacking that Mr Cameron has announced this week, but was blocked from doing so by the cabinet secretary, on the grounds that it would be too sensitive before the election.

Had he got his way, and the grisly facts tumbled out ahead of polling day, it is very likely that Mr Brown would still be Prime Minister today.

Mr Coulson, who was then Mr Cameron's chief spin doctor, would have had to resign, and the public's doubts about the Tory leader would have been dramatically reinforced.

It's been said plenty of times before, but in politics, as in journalism, timing really is everything.

The Archbishop was simply doing his job

Over the course of the last couple of centuries, the Church of England has frequently if rather inaccurately been caricatured as "the Conservative Party at prayer."

If it was ever true, it certainly ceased to be so in the 1980s, when the church's trenchant critique of Margaret Thatcher's policies led to it being dubbed "Marxist" by Norman Tebbit – although perhaps the "SDP at prayer" would have been nearer the mark.

Thirty years on, the church again finds itself again in conflict with a Conservative-led administration, and for much the same sorts of reasons.

Just as Archbishop Robert Runcie in the 1980s took the Iron Lady to task over her government's apparent lack of concern for the poor and for social cohesion, so his present-day successor Rowan Williams is motivated chiefly by the impact of the government's reforms on the worst-off.

It would be tempting to think he had planned his attack to cause maximum discomfort for David Cameron in a week which has seen the Prime Minister forced to defend his handling of health and justice reforms.

Not so. The New Statesman article in which Dr Williams launched his salvo had been long planned, as the archbishop was actually guest-editing the publication.

In one sense, Dr Williams was simply doing his job. What on earth is a national church for, if not to occasionally offer a faith-based perspective on the politics of the day?

But of course his is not the only interpretation of how Christian teaching should impact on present-day political debates, as Roman Catholic archbishop Vincent Nichols reminded us when he praised the "genuine moral agenda" driving the Coalition's reforms.

Dr Williams' intervention may even have helped Mr Cameron this week by diverting attention from his internal difficulties over health and sentencing.

A fortnight ago, in this column, I posed the question whether the government's health reforms, and the career of health secretary Andrew Lansley, were now effectively dead in the water.

The answer on both counts would appear to be yes, with even the Health and Social Care Bill's central proposal for GP consortia to commission local health care now in danger of being watered-down.

And Justice Secretary Ken Clarke was forced to tear up his plan to give sentencing discounts to rapists and other offenders in return for early guilty pleas as Mr Cameron made a belated move in the direction of Prime Ministerial government.

Ordinarily this would all have presented a gift-horse to Labour, but the party is beset by internal difficulties of its own.

Party leader Ed Miliband was generally held to have had the worst of this week's Commons exchanges with Mr Cameron and the muttering over his leadership is increasing in volume.

The revelations about Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls' involvement in a "plot" to oust Tony Blair from power in 2005 will hardly help matters.

Having read some of the leaked documents myself yesterday, I would say a more accurate description of what was going on was a bid to rebrand Gordon Brown rather than oust Mr Blair, but the damage has been done.

Ultimately it is not up to archbishops to assemble a coherent critique of government policies. It is the opposition's job to do that.

And until Mr Miliband and Co can step up to the mark in that regard, Mr Cameron can continue to sleep easily in his bed at night.

That said, Dr Williams' claim that radical policies are being introduced "for which no–one voted" is a very hard one to answer – even if those self-same policies are now being trimmed.

The question of legitimacy that has dogged this Coalition from the start is not, I suspect, one that is going to go away in a hurry.

Steady as she goes Budget leaves dividing lines unchanged

A little late due to stuff I won't bore you with...but here's my take on the Budget as published in Saturday's Journal.

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Over the past 18 months, throughout the 2010 general election campaign and beyond, the main point at issue in British politics has been the question of how far and how fast to the cut the country's budget deficit.

To begin with, the Tories had the better of that argument, which is essentially why they ended up as the largest single party last May and why we now have a Conservative-led Coalition government.

Because the public blamed Gordon Brown for the scale of the problem, and perceived him as having been in denial over it, the Tories were able to win backing for a much deeper package of cuts than Labour had proposed.

But latterly, doubts have crept in. We may not have ended up in the dreaded double-dip recession, but as anyone running a small or medium-sized business will know, the fabled green shoots of recovery have thus far been very slow to appear.

For all the differences of emphasis between the former Chancellor Alistair Darling and the current Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, Labour's position on the deficit remains essentially unchanged.

It is that cutting too far, too fast, will damage growth – a view that is now starting to be borne out by the actual growth figures as well as in the everyday experiences of people up and down the country.

So the political imperative for Chancellor George Osborne as he delivered his second Budget on Wednesday was clear: to demonstrate that the coalition is not just about cuts, but has a growth strategy too.

In this he was only partially successful, his task being made all the more difficult by the need to announce – less than five minutes into his statement - a downgrading of the economic growth forecasts for 2011 from 2.1pc to 1.7pc.

Labour leader Ed Miliband's obvious glee at this announcement – "every time he comes to this House growth is downgraded" he told MPs - is scarcely misplaced, given the thrust of his party's economic message over the past year.

It is also fair to say that as a 'Budget for Growth,' Wednesday's package was somewhat underwhelming.

Sure, the 1p cut in fuel duty, coupled with the cancellation of the planned 4p rise later this year, will provide a fillip for hard-pressed businesses which have seen their profit-margins eroded by ever-escalating fuel costs, as will the additional 1p cut in Corporation Tax.

And the creation of 21 new Enterprise Zones, including the Tees Valley and Tyneside, represents a welcome recognition that some part of the country are being hit far harder by the cuts than others - even it looks suspiciously like a re-run of what Margaret Thatcher's government tried in the 1980s.

But those measures apart, this was actually rather a dull Budget – much more a case of "steady as she goes" than the kind of political game-changer which Chancellors usually like to spring on us.

Perhaps the most significant paragraph in Mr Osborne's statement was the one in which he signalled the eventual scrapping of the 50p top rate of tax, drawing a line under the Brown era and pointing to his longer-term ambitions as a tax-cutter in the Nigel Lawson mould.

Meanwhile the key political dividing lines remain unchanged – the Coalition claiming its radical deficit-reduction strategy will ultimately deliver stronger growth, Labour maintaining that it has merely delayed any prospect of real recovery.

At the moment, the economic evidence is favouring Labour. But with another four years for the green shoots to flower before it has to face the electorate again, the Coalition has time on its side.

Dave's useful idiots

Of all the many insults hurled at Gordon Brown during his troubled premiership, perhaps the most wounding was the one delivered by the then Lib Dem acting leader Vince Cable during Prime Minister's Questions in November 2007.

"The House has noticed the Prime Minister’s remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean," he told guffawing MPs.

But three years on, the now former Prime Minister may well have permitted himself a wry smile or two at the transformation in Mr Cable's own political fortunes.

In the space of less than 12 months, he has gone from Saint Vince, the most trusted politician in Britain, to a man now widely regarded as little more than a useful idiot for the Tory-led coalition.

Some of it is purely by virtue of his having swapped the luxuries of opposition for the harsh realities of power, at a time when the government was bound to be unpopular whoever was in it.

Yet even within that context, Mr Cable has demonstrated an unusual ability to shoot himself in the head.

His 'declaration of war' on media baron Rupert Murdoch, after being honeytrapped by a pair of female undercover reporters into speaking too frankly about his government role, has backfired more spectacularly than a turbo-charged boomerang.

The end result was that Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt this week nodded through a deal which will make Murdoch the dominant player in UK print and broadcast media, with even more financial clout than the BBC.

But if Dr Cable's ambitions in the field of media policy have been well and truly thwarted, the same would seem to apply to his conduct of regional policy.

After the election last May, Dr Cable put it about that he was going into bat to ensure that those English regions that wanted to would retain a region-wide political and economic voice.

Such a stance was, after all, in keeping with a Lib Dem election manifesto that promised to "reform" regional development agencies rather than abolish them wholesale as the Tories' did.

At one stage, Dr Cable was privately telling regional political leaders that the RDAs in the North East, North West and Yorkshire would be effectively be preserved, under the new guise of Local Economic Partnerships.

On the face of it, it hardly seemed Dr Cable's fault that this did not end up happening, and that communities secretary Eric Pickles prevailed in his determination to dismantle the entire regional political infrastructure.

Yet a Freedom of Information request by the Newcastle Journal has since revealed that, far from putting up a huge show of resistance, Dr Cable met his Tory counterpart just twice to discuss the issue.

In terms of the bigger picture, the RDA abolition and the Murdoch bid for BskyB point to a wider political reality - the inability of the Lib Dems to influence major policy decisions taken by this government.

And if proof was needed that this is now a widespread perception among the public, the result of Thursday's Barnsley by-election, which saw the party slumping to sixth place, surely provides it.

For some of us, the result brought back memories of those dear, dead days when world-weary Lib Dem activists used to sing a song called 'Losing Deposits' on the last night of their annual conference, to the tune of 'Waltzing Matilda.'

But for Dr Cable and his fellow Lib Dem ministers, there will be no such wallowing in nostalgia for more innocent political times.

Evidence is mounting that membership of this Coalition government is destroying the Lib Dems as a political force – possibly permanently.

How much more of it the party can take before it is obliged to go its own separate way will continue to be the defining question in British politics over the coming months.

The tough task facing Brown's children

As Sir John Chilcott's Inquiry into the war in Iraq continued to chip away at Tony Blair's historical reputation this week, another of the former Prime Minister's closest allies took his leave of frontline politics.

Amid difficulties in his private life that will surely elicit widespread sympathy, Alan Johnson became the latest in a long line of key players from the Blair Years to depart the political stage.

Looked at in terms of Labour kremlinology, the erstwhile Shadow Chancellor's surprise resignation, and his replacement by Ed Balls, means the Brownite takeover of the party is now all but complete.

Mr Balls, Ed Miliband, Yvette Cooper and Douglas Alexander were all denied Cabinet promotion by Mr Blair – but they now occupy the four most senior roles on the Labour frontbench.

But in this lies the nub of Labour's problem as it seeks to come to terms with opposition and put itself back into credible contention for government.

For as time goes on, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the general election result last May was not just a repudiation of Gordon Brown personally, but of much of what he stood for politically.

There are increasing signs that, like 1979, 2010 could come to be seen as a watershed election, a moment in history which saw a paradigm shift away from the top-down, statist brand of politics with which Mr Brown was associated.

That is certainly the way the Coalition would like us to see it, which is why the proposed reforms to the National Health Service announced this week are so central to its overall political strategy.

The reforms are certainly not without risk for Prime Minister David Cameron. With the possible exception of Coronation Street, the NHS remains Britain's best-loved institution and politicians tinker with it at their peril.

Not the least of Mr Cameron's difficulties, as Alastair Campbell pointed out on Question Time on Thursday night, is that he has no electoral mandate for it.

But the voters tend to be rather less worried about private vs public arguments in public service provision than politicians - and political commentators for that matter – tend to be.

And as long as the service improves in time for the next election – as it may well do once the dust has settled – it could even turn into a vote-winner.

The risk for Labour, on this and other issues, is that it finds itself stranded on the wrong side of a political tide – much as it did in the early 1980s as Margaret Thatcher's free-market revolution forged ahead.

Of all the blows that the Coalition has landed on Mr Miliband since he became Labour leader, none was more telling than Mr Cameron's "I'd rather be a child of Thatcher than a son of Brown."

In truth, Ed Miliband was really only ever an adopted son. The true son of Gordon, the one who was by his side in all his most important decisions, was Mr Balls.

Sure, the combative new Shadow Chancellor will give as good as he gets, but it is already clear that the Coalition will exploit his closeness to the former Prime Minister to the limit.

On the surface, Balls for Johnson looks like a good exchange for Labour – a brilliant economist and pugnacious operator for a Mr Nice Guy who seemed out of his depth in the Treasury brief.

But the whole reason Mr Johnson was appointed to the role in the first place was precisely because he had no economic baggage.

The Coalition's key success since the election has been to pin the blame for the cuts on Labour's mismanagement of the economy and to fix this in the public's mind.

Mr Balls, of all people, is going to have his work cut out to reverse that perception.

Review of the Political Year 2010

When future historians come to assess the political events of 2010, two big counterfactual questions are likely to loom large in their minds.

They are: what if Labour had ditched Gordon Brown before the General Election, and what if the Liberal Democrats had refused to go into coalition with David Cameron's Conservatives?

The second question is probably the easier one to answer. Mr Cameron would have formed a minority government, David and not Ed Miliband would have become Labour leader, and both would now be gearing up for a fresh election in the spring.

But the more tantalising question is whether Mr Cameron might never have become Prime Minister at all had Labour gone into the election under a more popular leader.

The political year 2010 began with Mr Brown's survival once again hanging in the balance.

Former Labour ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt attempted to get MPs to demand a leadership contest, but rightly or wrongly, the consensus in the party was that by then it was too late to change horses.

As it was, the election turned into a slow-motion car crash for Labour, dominated by televised debates in which Mr Brown was predictably outshone by his two younger, more charismatic opponents.

Then, in the final week of the campaign, came 'Duffygate' - the kind of incident which could have happened to any of them, but which seemed somehow fated to happen to the luckless Mr Brown.

In terms of issues, the campaign centred mainly on the question of how to deal with the country's biggest budget deficit since the 1930s.

Here Labour was on an equally sticky wicket, with voters clearly concluding that the party was 'in denial' about the extent of the problem and crediting the Tories for being at least partially honest about the scale of the forthcoming cuts.

For all that, though, the public remained largely unconvinced by Mr Cameron and his team, and the eventual result saw the Tories falling some 20 seats short of outright victory.

Days of frantic bargaining followed, but with the parliamentary maths in favour of a Lib-Lab deal failing to stack up, it was always likely that a Lib-Con coalition would be the outcome.

Faced with the task of finding a successor to Mr Brown, Labour managed to saddle itself with the lesser-known of the Miliband brothers, courtesy of a crazy electoral system which gave the unions the decisive say.

For David Miliband, brother Ed's leadership election victory came as a bitter blow and the South Shields MP stood down from his party's frontbench.

Then, in one of his first acts as leader, Ed sacked former Minister for the North-East Nick Brown from his Shadow Cabinet team, leaving the region somewhat leaderless in Whitehall.

Indeed, with the new coalition busily taking the axe to every regional institution in sight, the North-East seemed in danger of losing its political voice altogether.

Initial excitement about the coalition soon faded. The 'new politics' spoken of by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in the TV debates soon regressed into the old politics of broken election promises.

Chancellor George Osborne had expected that the £80bn programme of cuts unveiled in his October comprehensive spending review would swiftly make him the most unpopular man in Britain.

Instead, it was Mr Clegg who became the government's fall-guy, completing his journey from hero to zero by backing the rise in tuition fees against which he had so vehemently campaigned in April and May.

The Lib Dems' decision to trade principle for power has clearly come at a huge political cost. The key question for 2011 is whether the coalition as a whole can survive it.

For PM, it has to be DM

No leadership election occurs in a political vacuum. For good or ill, the current race for the leadership of the Labour Party will invariably be shaped in part by the context in which it is taking place.

Like it or not, it is the Blair-Brown years, and their ultimately shattering denouement in the general election defeat of 6 May, which provide the inescapable backdrop to this contest.

For at least one of the candidates, Ed Balls, that defeat already looks likely to have dealt a terminal blow to his leadership aspirations.

For all his pugnacious qualities - none of the candidates have landed as many blows on the Lib-Con coalition as he has - the party was never going to replace the defeated Gordon Brown with, well, Gordon Brown Mark II.

But if this has been a difficult election in which to be a Brownite - all the candidates have been anxious to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the former Prime Minister - being seen as a Blairite is not much of a recommendation either.

If by publishing his memoirs in the week the leadership ballot papers went out, Tony Blair hoped to influence the contest in favour of his protege David Miliband, it only goes to show how delusional he has become.

Mr Blair's account of his 'Journey' is already a bestseller, but many Labour members will be aghast at his decision to kick Mr Brown when he is down while simultaneously refusing to criticise Prime Minister David Cameron.

Then again, why would he, since he too clearly believes that the coalition is a Blairite continuity administration, doing exactly the things he would have done had he not been thwarted by nasty old Gordon.

So far from boosting the elder Miliband's candidature, the book looks likely to provoke a backlash against Mr Blair which could well harm the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

But in my view, that would be a shame, because, aside from all the factionalism, David Miliband is the best qualified candidate to take Labour back into government.

I have to confess that at the outset of this contest, I was leaning more towards Andy Burnham, which would have been the first time Durham North MP Kevan Jones and I had agreed about anything.

But while Mr Burnham is clearly the candidate most attuned to the needs of the North, his oddly tribal, Old Labour-ish campaign has seemed at odds with the 'new politics' of co-operation and coalition.

Of the other candidates, Ed Balls has already been dealt with, Diane Abbot would clearly take Labour back to irrelevance, while I wonder whether Ed Miliband is really ready for the top job.

I like a lot of what he has had to say about the need for Labour to regain its values before it can think of regaining power, and the 'Red Ed' jibes from the Blairite camp are self-evidently ludicrous.

For me, Ed's problem is not his politics, but the fact that he comes across as rather well-meaning and naive - a nice guy, an original thinker even, but not quite tough enough to be leader - and maybe PM - just yet.

By contrast, the one quality his elder brother possesses above all is that, having already held a major office of state, you can easily imagine him as Prime Minister now.

Mr Blair was at pains in his TV interview with Andrew Marr on Wednesday to stress that the South Shields MP is his own man, and that is one thing he was right about.

As a North-East Blairite, he could easily have got sucked into the silly tribalism that affected some of his former parliamentary colleagues in the region who saw any criticism of their beloved leader as a betrayal, but to his credit he never did.

I have no doubt at all that if he wins, David's first priority will be to unite the party and draw a line under the feuding once and for all.

But will he win? That is the question to which I will turn my attentions in next week's column.