Thatcher: There WAS an alternative

The first thing I need to say about Margaret Thatcher is that when it comes to the former Prime Minister, I can scarcely be regarded as a disinterested or objective observer.

I spent most of my early adulthood wishing she was no longer in Number Ten, and much of my later journalistic career was spent in areas such as South Wales and the North-East where the impact of her policies had been most adversely felt.

As Journal political editor from 1997-2004, much of my work revolved around the question of how the region should tackle the North-South divide which, if not created by her, was certainly sharply exacerbated during her long premiership.

So in the unlikely event that anyone has come here expecting to read another syrupy paean of praise to the Iron Lady following her death this week, it’s probably best to look away now.

Many millions of words have already been written and spoken about the woman who led Britain for 11 tumultuous years, but ultimately the debate seems to come down to the question of whether she saved the nation, or destroyed it.

Probably the answer is a bit of both.  Looked at in the round, the Thatcher legacy suggests a strange ambivalent power for good and bad which seems to run through most of the policies with which she is most closely associated.

Take the iconic right to buy scheme, for instance.  Yes, it enabled council tenants to buy their own homes, and the dramatic increase in social mobility it fostered helped break down the class barriers which held Britain back in the post-war years.

But the downside was that housing policy ceased to be a debate about who could build the most homes, and became instead a question of who could do most to artificially inflate the value of the increasingly limited number of homes available.

Then there were the employment laws.  It is beyond question that prior to 1979 the power of the union barons had got out of hand and that Mrs Thatcher’s changes helped restore a measure of democracy to a nation in danger of becoming ungovernable.

Yet in smashing the unions, she also ushered in an era of job insecurity which has had a baleful effect on the national psyche.

I could go on.   Deregulation of the City of London made it a world financial centre that spawned untold riches for Britain’s financial services industry, but led directly to the banking crisis that caused the 2008 crash and the subsequent recession.

Even the Falklands War, by rolling back the post-Suez defeatism in which British foreign policy had been enmeshed since 1956, paved the way for Tony Blair’s disastrous intervention in Iraq twenty years later.

When assessing the Thatcher legacy, therefore, the key question becomes could we actually have had the good without the bad?  Was there, despite what the Iron Lady herself said, an alternative?

I would like to think so.   While the challenges of globalisation would eventually have forced British industry to become more competitive, the impact of this would have been slower and less brutal than the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing base in the early 1980s.

It has to be remembered that, far from being an historical inevitability, Mrs Thatcher was in fact a very lucky Prime Minister. 

Labour in 1980 put itself out of serious contention for power by choosing the wrong leader and then splitting, while a couple of Exocet missiles in the wrong place in 1982 might have sunk not just the Falklands task force, but her premiership with it.

For me, the most interesting counterfactual question about Mrs Thatcher is what would the country have been like had she never become Prime Minister or, alternatively, been ousted in 1982-83.

Had a Tory wet like Jim Prior or a Labour moderate like Denis Healey run Britain in the 1980s, and invested the proceeds of North Sea Oil in social reconstruction rather than tax cuts, would we have ended up with Swedish-style social democracy rather than US-style neo-liberalism?

Since those days, we seem to have become a politically more united country, but a much more economically and socially divided one.

And if forced to make a judgement, I think I like the Britain she created rather less than the one which she destroyed.

Council leaders should pay heed to Kinnock's warning

 Earlier this week I tuned in to an interesting radio discussion about whether, in the era of instant communication via text messaging, email and Twitter, set-piece political speeches still retained any relevance.

The discussion had been precipitated by perhaps the most long-awaited and over-hyped set-piece political speech of recent times – Prime Minister David Cameron’s planned address on Britain’s relationship with Europe.

The consensus was that, while such speeches still had their place, it helped if the politician concerned had something new and original to say – as for instance Margaret Thatcher did in her famous Bruges speech of 1988 when she set her face against a federal Europe.

In that respect, perhaps it was a good thing that Mr Cameron’s proposed speech ended up being postponed, given the expectation among commentators that it would say little to appease his increasingly Eurosceptic backbenchers.

But if Bruges was, for those on the right of politics, the setting for the seminal political speech of modern times, those of a Labour disposition tend to look to another town beginning with B – namely Bournemouth.

For that was where, in 1985, Neil Kinnock delivered the Labour conference address subsequently credited with launching the party on the long road to recovery after the wilderness years of the early 1980s.

The historical significance of the speech was that it marked the start of a fightback by Labour modernisers against a hard left faction which had rendered the party unelectable.

This process of internal renewal would eventually lead to the creation of New Labour and, electorally speaking at any rate, the most successful period in the party’s history.

But in an era in which a Conservative-led government is once again imposing spending cutbacks on Labour-run councils, could Mr Kinnock’s great speech have a new relevance for today?

What he was railing against in Bournemouth was the kind of gesture politics typified, not just by Militant-controlled Liverpool City Council, but by a host of other Labour authorities of the era who used budget cuts as a means of ratcheting up political pressure on the government.

The key sentence in the speech was Mr Kinnock’s warning – delivered in the face of a heckling Derek Hatton – that “you can’t play politics with people’s jobs, or with people’s homes, or with people’s services.”

And more than a quarter of a century on, it’s people’s services that are once again at stake in Newcastle, as the city council decides how to implement what it claims are the £90m worth of savings demanded by the Con-Lib coalition at Westminster.

Council leader Nick Forbes’ decision to target some of the cutbacks at libraries and the arts has caused deep and bitter controversy in the region, but is actually nothing new in the annals of Labour local authorities.

Whether consciously or otherwise, he has taken a leaf out of the book of David Bookbinder, the left-wing firebrand who led Derbyshire County Council at the same time as Mr Hatton was running Liverpool.

Faced with a similar set of cutbacks in the 1980s, Mr Bookbinder decided to take the axe to a series of libraries in Tory-voting middle-class areas as well as scrapping school music tuition.

But just as Derbyshire’s voters saw through his attempts to blame the government for the sorry situation, so Newcastle’s are increasingly beginning to question who is really to blame for the present-day cutbacks.

Save Newcastle Libraries campaigner Lee Hall has made clear his own view on the matter, accusing Councillor Forbes in a speech last week of wanting to “make a name for himself” and wanting “a platform to rail at the Coalition.”

“Instead of trying to protect our libraries, our enormously successful arts organisations, Forbes, for his own political aggrandisement, is trying to cut as much as possible,” he said.

David Bookbinder’s unique brand of showmanship made Derbyshire a great place to be a local government reporter in the 1980s, but ultimately his attempts to play politics with people’s services did Labour no favours in the county.

Perhaps Councillor Forbes, too, should now take heed of Mr Kinnock’s wise words of warning.

The Coalition will not last five years

In last week's column, I suggested that the key strategic task facing the Liberal Democrats as they gather for their spring conference in Gateshead was to find a way of winning back the support that has deserted them since they joined the Coalition in 2010.

And doubtless there will be plenty of ideas floating back and forth at The Sage this weekend as to exactly how they should go about it.

They could, as some argue, stop the Health and Social Care Bill in its tracks. The Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee is among those warning this week that if they don’t take what may be their last opportunity to do this, it will seal their fate as a party.

Or they could, as Business Secretary Vince Cable has suggested, use their influence to help shape next month’s Budget, taking everyone earning less than £10,000 a year out of tax and introducing a ‘mansion tax’ for the super-rich.

Their leader, Nick Clegg, certainly wants to see the party getting on the front foot and proclaiming its successes in the Coalition rather than apologising for being part of it.

“Now it is time to move on. To stop justifying being in government and start advertising being in government. To stop lamenting what might have been and start celebrating what is. To stop defending our decisions and start shouting our achievements from the rooftops,” he said yesterday.

But whichever way they turn, will it make the slightest difference to the party’s electoral prospects?

Well, if history is any guide, no. The plain facts of the matter are that involvement in a Coalition is almost always disastrous for the smaller party, whatever political achievements it manages to extract from it.

The most recent example was the Lib-Lab pact in 1977/78. This was perhaps the most enlightened and humane period of government in my lifetime, but it still ended up doing the then Liberal Party terrible damage.

Far from emerging strengthened, their vote went down at the subsequent general election in 1979 and several of their most high-profile MPs, including the deputy leader John Pardoe, lost their seats.

Further back, the 'National Liberals' who joined the Tory-dominated National Government in the 1930s ended up simply becoming absorbed by the larger party.

And David Lloyd George’s 1916-22 Coalition, in which the Tories also held a numerical majority, likewise ended disastrously for the Liberals and their leader despite victory in the First World War.

It is partly for this reason that I have argued from the outset of the Coalition that, while the Lib Dems probably had no choice but to join it, they also needed to find a way of getting out of it alive – preferably well before the next election is due.

The Health and Social Care Bill, on which the Lib Dem rebels are more in tune with public opinion than the government is, would have given them a plausible pretext, although the party activists’ last-ditch bid to halt the Bill now looks unlikely to succeed.

Europe, by contrast, would not be a good reason for the Lib Dems to try to collapse the Coalition, for the simple reason that on this issue, it is the Tories who are much closer to the mainstream public view.

One less widely-canvassed possibility is House of Lords reform – not the sexiest of issues, for sure, but one on which the Tory ‘backwoodsmen’ seem almost certain to thwart Mr Clegg’s well-meaning attempts to drag the British Constitution into the 21st century.

The last time I discussed the possibility of the Coalition ending before its due-date of 2015, a commenter on my blog reminded me that the government has already passed legislation to bring in five-year fixed-term Parliaments.

My view, however, is that this could turn out to be no more than a quaint constitutional notion, given that the legislation also allows for a two-thirds majority of MPs to dissolve Parliament ahead of its term.

Let’s just suppose that David Cameron decides he wants an election. Would Labour MPs, in such circumstances, really vote to keep him in office until 2015?

It stands to reason that the Coalition will not last five years. It will, rather, last just as long as both of its partners want it to.

Too late for Ed to change the public's minds

So was it a political masterstroke as some pundits argued, or was it the beginning of the end of his leadership of the Labour Party – as two of the union barons who originally backed him for the job have claimed?

Opinions were certainly divided this week about Ed Miliband’s decision to come out in support of the coalition government’s pay freeze.

For Len McCluskey of Unite and Paul Kenny of the GMB, the move marked the end of Mr Miliband’s “bold attempt to move on from Blairism” and would lead to “certain electoral defeat.”

Others, though, saw the decision to accept the cutbacks – and take on the public sector unions in the process - as a vital first step towards restoring the economic credibility so crucial to Labour’s prospects.

Mr Miliband was of course following what is a well-worn strategy for Labour leaders – seeking to gain traction with the electorate by attacking their own side.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not started by Neil Kinnock at Bournemouth in 1985, but by Jim Callaghan almost a decade earlier in a speech to the Labour conference which later became paraphrased as “The Party’s Over.”

“We used to think we could spend our way out of a recession. I tell you in all candour that option no longer exists,” he told the comrades, burying decades of Keynesian economics and inadvertently paving the way for the Thatcherite consensus.

Mr Kinnock took it a stage further with his attack on the grotesque chaos of Militant-run Liverpool, before the tactic was perfected by Tony Blair, who seemed at times to want to define his entire leadership in opposition to his own party.

As Mr McCluskey was not slow to point out, Mr Miliband had initially attempted a very different approach following his surprise elevation to the job in the autumn of 2010.

His own conference address last autumn, which I described at the time as one of the bravest and most ambitious political speeches of modern times, represented no less than an attempt to refashion the political consensus on his own terms.

Fans of Yes, Minister will of course recall that, in civil service speak, ‘brave’ means ‘potentially littered with banana-skins,’ while ‘ambitious’ means ‘foolhardy,’ and so, alas, it has proved.

The largely negative response to that speech and Mr Miliband’s subsequent inexorable slide in the opinion polls seems to have persuaded him that a new approach is now needed, with the public sector pay announcement constituting at least a partial recognition that the argument over spending cuts has been lost.

But will it succeed in restoring his political fortunes? Well, on this score, it is perhaps instructive to look back at how those previous Labour leaders fared when they decided to take on their own parties.

Jim Callaghan, as conservative a leader as Labour has ever had in some respects, was simply not believable as a party reformer because of his previous track record in blocking Harold Wilson’s attempts to curb union power in the 1960s.

Likewise Neil Kinnock, who before dazzling us all at Bournemouth in 1985 had spent most of his leadership prevaricating over whether to support or condemn Arthur Scargill’s conduct of the 1984-85 miners’ strike.

And so despite its near-mythical status among politics-watchers, the Bournemouth speech had less impact on Kinnock’s popularity with the wider electorate, as was shown when he was soundly defeated by Margaret Thatcher in the general election 18 months later.

Tony Blair, however, was different. Within months of becoming leader, he had made his direction of travel clear, venturing where all his immediate predecessors had feared to tread by abolishing Clause Four of the party’s constitution.

The public was convinced from the start that he was a new kind of Labour leader, and unlike Kinnock and Callaghan, they duly rewarded him at the ballot box.

It is often said of political leaders that what they do in their first 100 days defines them thereafter, that it is in this period that the public makes up its mind about them.

For good or ill, I think the public has made up its mind about Ed Miliband. And decided he is not going to be their Prime Minister.

Theresa May faces long-drawn-out demise

To kick off this week’s column, here are a couple of questions for political anoraks with long memories or people who were paying attention in school history lessons.

Number One: Who was the last British politician to move directly from the office of Secretary of State for the Home Department to that of First Lord of Treasury and Prime Minister?

Number Two: What do Reginald Maudling, Kenneth Baker, Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith all have in common?

The answer to the first question is Viscount Palmerston in 1855. The answer to the second is that all four found that the job of Home Secretary proved to be their political graveyard, the exit route out of government from once-promising careers.

Before they came to grief, at least three of the above named had previously been mentioned as potential leaders of their parties - as indeed was the current incumbent, Theresa May, when David Cameron got into difficulties over his relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire earlier this summer.

But such is the extent to which the Home Office is subject to sudden
political storms which seemingly blow up out of nowhere that it is scarcely surprising that Lord Palmerston’s 156-year-old record remains intact.

Ms Smith put it well in an article this week which simultaneously expressed sisterly sympathy for Mrs May while also gently managing to twist the knife.

"What is it about the Home Office that means we’re unsurprised to see the headlines explode in a frenzy of finger pointing, accusations, leaks and denials? More than any other British political institution, it has been the mirror that reflects back to people the things they worry about most – crime and punishment, equality and injustice, homegrown terrorists, noisy neighbours."

On the face of it, the similarities between the difficulties now facing Mrs May and those that brought down Mr Clarke in 2006 are striking.

Mr Clarke had to go after the Home Office took its eye off the ball over border checks and ended up letting a small number of individuals into the country who had been convicted of crimes overseas.

Granted, we don’t yet know whether any foreign criminals have been allowed into the UK as a result of the latest relaxation of border controls that occurred on Mrs May’s watch this summer.

But since we have no idea at all who actually was allowed in, this is surely just a matter of time and chance.

The key point at issue appears to be what degree of personal responsibility Mrs May exercised over the decision to relax border checks and whether operational staff went beyond what she actually asked for.

Brodie Clarke has quit as head of the UK Border Force after being accused by the Home Secretary of doing precisely that, although he vigorously denies acting improperly.

The argument has distinct echoes of another past Home Office debacle – the sacking of Derek Lewis as head of the prison service by Michael Howard in the mid-1990s.

On that occasion Mr Howard said Mr Lewis had had full operational responsibility for deciding whether to suspend the governor of Parkhurst Prison. Mr Lewis claimed that Mr Howard had overruled him.

So where does this current story go from here? Well, unlike many Home Office firestorms, this one could prove to be a slow burner.

Mr Clark will put his side of the story in an appearance before the Home Affairs Select Committee next week that is certain to make uncomfortable listening for Mrs May.

Even more ominously for the Home Secretary, he is threatening to lodge a claim for constructive dismissal - a case which Mrs May’s Labour predecessor Alan Johnson believes he stands a good chance of winning.

My own view for what it’s worth is that Mrs May has committed two cardinal political errors which may well ultimately cost her her job.

She has attempted to blame officials rather than accept that as a minister, the buck stops with her, and has thereby admitted that she is not actually in control of her department.

As Ms Smith put it: "In British politics, it has never proven a robust defence to admit that you don’t know the numbers on immigration, or to give any impression other than that you’re in control and becoming more controlling."

The story probably still has a fair way to run, but I suspect this may ultimately prove to be the decisive word on the matter.

The glorious failure of Tony Blair

Over the course of the years in which I reported on political conferences for The Journal, I listened to a fair few party leader’s speeches, some of them good, some of them almost embarrassingly bad.

Of the latter category, the one that most stands out is Iain Duncan Smith’s “The Quiet Man is turning up the volume” fiasco from 2003, closely followed by John Major’s solemn 1995 pledge to increase the number of pee-ing stops on Britain’s motorways.

But the one truly great conference address of those years was the one delivered by Tony Blair on the afternoon of Tuesday 2 October 2001, a little over three weeks after the 9/11 attacks had thrown the world into a state of turmoil.

Both as a piece of oratory, and as a superbly-judged response to the political demands of the moment, it is up there with all-time conference classics such as Neil Kinnock’s scourging of Militant in 1985 and Margaret Thatcher’s “Lady’s not for turning” from four years’ earlier.

"This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us,” the then Prime Minister told the Brighton gathering.

"Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community can.

"By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone.

"For those people who lost their lives on September 11 and those that mourn them; now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial."

But even though, ten years on, it is impossible not to admire Mr Blair’s passion and idealism, it is also impossible to escape the conclusion that his stated mission to "re-order the world around us" in the wake of the attacks proved to be a glorious failure.

More than that, it begs the question whether, in his subsequent foreign policy decisions – most notably the invasion of Iraq - Mr Blair himself contributed to that failure.

The former Prime Minister was right in his analysis that 9/11 was an opportunity to build a better, right to seek to articulate the hope that, out of this monstrous evil, some good could somehow emerge.

No, what was wrong was not the initial idea, but the subsequent execution of it by Mr Blair and other world leaders over the ensuing decade, which has, if anything, served to deepen rather than heal the world’s divisions.

Within that bigger picture thrown up by the shaken kaleidoscope of 9/11, there were a whole series of little pictures.

It was, for instance, the beginning of the end for Stephen Byers, the former North Tyneside MP who until then had been spoken of as a future Labour leader and Prime Minister.

His career never recovered from the revelation that his press officer, Jo Moore, had spent the afternoon of 9/11 telling colleagues it was now “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.”

And if 9/11 marked the beginning of the end for Mr Byers, it also marked the beginning of the end for his erstwhile leader, as the Blair premiership was blown irretrievably off course by the ensuing global ramifications.

Most fundamentally of all – and ironically in the light of Mr Blair’s soaring vision of a new world order - 9/11 was the moment when politics ceased to be about selling people dreams of a better future and became more about protecting people from nightmares.

Until the economy returned to centre stage in 2008, the political agenda for much of the ensuing decade became dominated by security issues - a trend which only accelerated when Britain experienced its own ‘9/11’ on 7 July 2005.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, it seemed barely imaginable to most of us that such a thing could happen, least of all on American soil.

But such has been its impact that, ten years on, it is now almost impossible to imagine a world in which it had not taken place.

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.

The quiet man finds his niche at last

For good or ill, most Prime Ministers ultimately tend to remembered for a single defining event or achievement that happened on their watch.

For Clement Attlee, it was the creation of the welfare state. For Anthony Eden, it was Suez. For Ted Heath, entry into Europe. For Jim Callaghan, the winter of discontent. For Tony Blair, Iraq.

It's early days for David Cameron. But what he most wants to avoid – apart from losing the next election - is for his government to be remembered solely for the cuts.

He wants it to go down in the history books for something else entirely – for reforming the welfare state that Attlee created and for mending the society that he claims has subsequently been broken.

It is no mean ambition. Welfare reform has proved to be a 'mission impossible' for successive Prime Ministers – even ones who told their welfare reform minsters to "think the unthinkable."

Mr Blair's failure to bring about meaningful change in this area – despite a 179-seat majority and a favourable economic headwind – has become symbolic of the many missed opportunities and thwarted hopes of his long premiership.

By contrast, Mr Cameron must depend for his parliamentary majority on the Liberal Democrats, while the economic environment could hardly be less conducive to his aim of moving people off welfare and into work.

Yet, perhaps by force of circumstances in the shape of the need to reduce the deficit, his government has embarked on a programme of change which, if successful, would amount to the biggest recasting of the welfare state since its inception.

Perhaps even more improbably, the reform programme is being overseen by Iain Duncan Smith, the quiet man who failed to turn up the volume and seemed destined to go down as no more than a footnote in Tory Party history.

Forced into the political wilderness in 2003, he skilfully reinvented himself as a Beveridge de nos jours, and now, as Work and Pensions Secretary, has the chance to put his radical ideas into practice.

At the heart of the changes announced in his White Paper this week are two relatively straightforward principles.

First, the replacement of the labyrinthine system of work-related state support with a single Universal Credit, and second, the idea that it will always pay better to work than remain on benefits.

So will it succeed where other attempts have failed? Well, in its favour is the fact that there is an unusual degree of political consensus over the central objectives of the changes.
"If the government gets this right we will support them because we accept the underlying principle of simplifying the benefits system and providing real incentives to work," said Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Douglas Alexander.

New Labour leader Ed Miliband has already made clear he will not oppose the coalition for opposition's sake, and this is a wise strategic move on his part.

He realises there is a public consensus not just that the deficit needs to be cut, but that the dependency culture which has become entrenched in some deprived communities needs to be addressed.

But Labour's caveat, of course, is that the crackdown on benefits must go hand-in-hand with pro-growth policies to ensure the jobs are there for people to move into.

This highlights the biggest obstacle to Mr Duncan Smith's proposals – the fact that the government's cutbacks in other areas are likely to lead over the coming year to rising unemployment.

If there are not the jobs to go round, moving people off welfare into work becomes not just politically impossible but practically impossible.

As with much else, the fate of the government's welfare reform gamble depends on whether its greater economic policy gamble succeeds or fails.

The Tories can reap the 'peace dividend'

While some political arguments never quite go away, recurring down the years in different forms and different contexts, there are others that are very much of their time.

An example is the issue of trade union power, and specifically whether it could legitimately be exercised to thwart the will of the democratically-elected government of the day.

This issue dominated British politics from the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, and was responsible during that time for bringing down at least one Labour government in Jim Callaghan's and one Conservative one in Ted Heath's.

It was eventually resolved by Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1985 strike, resulting not just in the marginalisation of the unions but the end of an entire way of life for many mining communities.

Yet to listen to this week's Trades Union Congress in Manchester, you could almost be forgiven for thinking the nation had undergone some kind of collective Life on Mars-type experience.

We learned that the TUC is planning a series of public sector strikes designed to get the government to think again about its spending cuts programme.

There is certainly an argument to be had about whether the cuts are going faster than they need to. There is a related argument about their legitimacy, given the Tories' failure to win an outright majority in May.

But turning the whole debate into a re-run of the 'Who Governs Britain?' controversies of the 1970s hardly seems the best way for the unions to try to win public sympathy for their cause.

Another ancient political argument that seemed to have been settled long ago was the one about Britain's independent nuclear deterrent.

This, too, was a battle that raged during the early 1980s, helping to split the Labour Party in 1981 when the pro-nuclear SDP broke away in dismay at its drift towards unilateralism.

The issue was seemingly put to bed when Labour then proceeded to lose three elections in a row before Tony Blair came along and wiped out all semblance of the party's pacifist tendency – and how.

But by a supreme historical irony, that bit of Labour which broke away to defend the nuclear deterrent has ultimately morphed into that bit of the Lib-Con coalition which now wants to ditch it.

Of all the many issues on which the two sides of the coalition disagree, this promises to be one of the most toxic, with many backbench Tories seeing the renewal of Trident as an article of faith.

Delaying the decision until after the next election will undoubtedly save a few bob – but it is also sure to re-open the debate over whether we should have a nuclear deterrent at all.

Yet for Prime Minister David Cameron, there is a rare political opportunity here – so long as he can square his backbenchers.

For if any government is going to radically reshape Britain's defence capability – and reap the potential 'peace dividend' in terms of savings - then this one is probably best-placed to do it.

Labour could never have abandoned Trident - for the simple reason that it would have brought back all those fears that the party could not be trusted with the nation's defences.

But the Tories, who have never had that problem, might just be able to.

By the same token, the Tories will find it much harder to reform the welfare state – something Labour really should have done in its first term when Mr Blair was carrying all before him.

For Mr Cameron, cutting Trident, and maybe finding a less costly form of nuclear deterrence, could prove to be the easy bit.

Peter self-destructs for the final time

Asked once how he would know his transformation of the Labour Party would be complete, Tony Blair famously replied: "When it learns to love Peter Mandelson."

Judged purely on that measure, however, it seems from this week's events that the party which Mr Blair led for 13 years still has a way to go.

There was a point, 18 months or so ago, when it looked as though the former Hartlepool MP had finally managed to win his way into the hearts, as well as the minds, of the party faithful.

But all the goodwill engendered by his return from Brussels to stand at Gordon Brown's side during his government's most difficult days has been dissipated at a stroke by his decision to publish a trashy account of the New Labour years.

In the past, many Labour people who found Lord Mandelson's style of politics distasteful have nevertheless forgiven him on the grounds that he was a loyal party man with Labour literally running through his veins.

But the publication of his book 'The Third Man' this week has surely demolished that defence once and for all.

It has oft been said of Peter Mandelson that he was always better at guiding the fortunes of the party and its leaders than he ever was at managing his own career.

But the lack of judgment that resulted in at least one of his two Cabinet resignations seems to have returned with a vengeance in his apparent eagerness to cash in on the lucrative summer 'beach read' market.

It is not even as if any of the revelations in the wretched book tell us much that we didn't know already.

Much of the focus of attention has inevitably been on whether or not Tony Blair called Gordon Brown "mad, bad and dangerous" and likened him to a "Mafia don."

Well, "mad" is one of those words that gets thrown around a little too loosely these days. It can mean anything from clinical insanity to having a bit of a temper on you.

It is hardly surprising, though, that Labour's opponents in the media have put the worst possible construction on it, with Mr Brown's reputation taking a further battering as a result.

But in my view, the book is far more damaging to Mr Blair's historical reputation than to his successor's.

It confirms what many have long suspected, namely that he did indeed promise Mr Brown in 2003 that he would not fight a third general election, but went back on it.

It is impossible to over-estimate the impact of this on subsequent Labour history. Had Mr Brown been Labour leader up against Michael Howard in 2005, he would have won that election with at least as good a majority as Mr Blair managed.

He would then, in all likelihood, have retired with dignity mid-way through the last Parliament, giving Labour a chance to renew itself in office under a new generation.

As it is, Mr Brown is currently being subjected to all sorts of indignities, with his government's record being trashed by the Con-Lib coalition on an almost daily basis.

But I wonder whether when people realise what the coalition is really doing to our public services – privatising the NHS by the back door being its latest wheeze – they might start to feel some sympathy for the former Prime Minister.

Either way, the Labour Party will doubtless in time come to love Gordon in the way it does all its old leaders – particularly the unsuccessful ones.

One thing it will never now do, though, is to learn to love Peter.

Where is the mandate for 'Canadian-style' cuts?

Are the Tories economic saviours - or are they just opportunistic ideologues using the deficit crisis as an excuse to finish Thatcher's work. Here's today's Journal column.

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One of the shortest-lived and least successful political advertising campaigns of recent times was Labour's general election poster featuring David Cameron as fictional 80s TV cop Gene Hunt.

"Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s," said the catchline, as the Tory leader was depicted astride Hunt's famous red Audi Quattro.

The campaign, which was swiftly pulled, ignored two important facts. Firstly, most people thought Gene Hunt was quite cool. Secondly, many would jump at the chance to go back to the 1980s were it really possible.

For all the bitter folk-memories of the 1984/5 miners' strike, unemployment topping 3m in 1981 and the Toxteth and Brixton riots that summer, it was an altogether gentler age than the one we live in now.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, Mr Cameron's speech on Monday in which he sought to prepare the public for spending cutbacks the likes of which have never been seen before ought to disabuse them of it.

Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is insistent that it won't mean a return to "Thatcher-style policies," and he's quite right. It’s going to be far worse than that.

For all that the Tories still worship the Iron Lady as the premier who began the rolling-back of the state with her 1980s privatisations, there are some parts of the public sector she would have never dared touch.

That is emphatically not the case now. The message coming out from Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne is that no item of public expenditure can now be considered sacrosanct.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not necessarily. All parties are agreed after all on the need to reduce the country's £156m budget deficit, and however many reviews of government 'waste' are carried out, it seems there are always new savings to be found.

But for me, the biggest question mark against the government's plans to adopt the 'Canadian Solution' and radically shrink the size of the state concerns its lack of political legitimacy.

It should not be forgotten that the Tories did not win an outright majority at the election, and that most people who voted Lib Dem certainly did not vote for huge public spending cuts.

While the coalition partners can claim a strong policy mandate in areas such as civil liberties where they fought the election on similar ground, that was decidedly not the case when it came to economic policy.

History is written by the winners, of course, and the government is already busy constructing a political narrative which seeks to justify the drastic economic remedies it now proposes.

Gordon Brown's government, we will be told again and again over the coming months, has left the country practically bankrupt and on the verge of 'doing a Greece.'

It already seems forgotten that Mr Brown's additional spending 'stimulus' designed to get the economy moving again in 2008/09 was met with widespread public approval at the time.

Such rewriting of history is nothing new. The Tories ensured the Callaghan government was remembered not for repaying the 1976 IMF loan within two years and stabilising the nation's finances, but for the Winter of Discontent.

What, if anything, have Labour's five leadership contenders got to say about all this?

Well, the fact that they have thus far been uncharacteristically muted in their criticisms of the coalition's plans goes to show how far it has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate.

The truth is that the deficit crisis has presented the Tories with a chance to do something some of them have wanted to do for decades, and take the axe to large parts of the state.

Is it the harsh medicine the country needs? Or is it rather just a blatant piece of ideology-driven opportunism?

Ghost of Callaghan strikes again

With the election drawing ever closer, it is hard to say which of the three stories which have dominated the political agenda this week will have done Labour’s chances of a fourth term the most damage.

In a Budget week that was never going to be an easy one for the government, its cause was hardly helped by the revelations surrounding North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers last weekend.

The former Cabinet minister was forced into the humiliating position of having to refer himself to the parliamentary standards commissioner after describing himself as a “cab for hire” to an undercover reporter probing political lobbying.

As the headline on Monday’s Journal editorial succinctly put it: What a way to finish a political life.

By admitting that his initial claims to have persuaded Transport Secretary Lord Adonis to go easy on National Express after it defaulted on the East Coast rail franchise were fantasy, Mr Byers effectively fell on his own sword.

In one sense, he did the honourable thing. Not to have done so would have triggered a far bigger scandal that would certainly have forced Adonis’s own resignation.

Yet although Mr Byers is a politician who, in the words of the former rail regulator Tom Winsor, has an “ambiguous relationship with the truth,” there remains a nugget of suspicion that his claims may not have been entirely groundless..

The idea that he may have brokered a deal with Adonis over National Express does not seem all that fantastical to those of us who know how government really works.

By contrast with Mr Byers, Chancellor Alistair Darling is certainly not a man given to hyperbole or flights of fantasy – although he has occasionally been known to blow the whistle on his own government.

He did it when he spoke of Number 10 unleashing the “forces of hell” against him following a candid interview about the recession, and he did it again this week with his comments about the ‘Thatcherite’ scale of the cuts that will follow the election.

Given that Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been at pains to underplay the extent of the cutbacks, this stark message from his next-door neighbour was about as off-message as it was possible to get.

It reveals once again the tensions between a Chancellor whose focus is on sorting out the public finances, and a Prime Minister more worried about political positioning.

Pre-election budgets are traditionally a time for giveaways, as Mr Brown demonstrated in 2005 with his announcement of a £200 council tax rebate for pensioners.

Any such rabbits-out-of-the-hat this time round would surely have got a belly laugh from a cynical electorate, and Mr Darling was surely right to resist them.

That said, by playing safe, the Chancellor added to the widespread impression of a government that has run out of ideas and is reduced to nicking them from the Tories, as with the stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers.

It had, in truth, a rather fin de siècle air to it – much as the demise of a man once thought of as a future Labour leader provides an apt metaphor for his party’s decline and fall.

But if there is one thing that has really damaged Labour this week, it is not Byers or the Budget, but the unions.

The strikes by BA cabin crew and now the RMT rail union have revived bitter memories of the dying days of the last Labour government in 1979, and are certain to lose the party votes.

Throughout his career, Gordon Brown has fought shy of the parallel with Jim Callaghan, the long-time Crown Prince forced to wait for No 10 by a more charismatic rival.

Once again, though, it seems Mr Brown’s destiny to follow in his footsteps.

Blame, or Gratitude?

Ever since it first surfaced during the 1992 US presidential campaign, the claim that all elections are essentially about “the economy, stupid” has become something of a political cliché.

Like most clichés though, this one contains more than a grain of truth.

MPs expenses, the Iraq Inquiry, antisocial behaviour, the personalities of the party leaders – all will doubtless play a part in helping to shape the forthcoming election battle.

But when all is said and done, it is the state of the British economy which will be uppermost in most peoples’ minds when, as now seems certain, they come to cast their votes on 6 May.

One of the many reasons for this is that there is an unusual degree of unanimity between the two main parties that it should be so.

It is more often the case in politics that the two parties will seek to push different issues to the fore – for instance the health service in Labour’s case, law and order and defence in the case of the Tories.

In this election, though, both the two main parties are convinced that focusing on the economy is in their electoral interests, even though they can’t both be right about this.

It is hardly surprising that, in the wake of the worst recession since the 1930s, the Tories see Labour’s economic management as its weakest spot. What is more so is that Prime Minister Gordon Brown still believes it is his strongest suit.

That much was clear from the speech Mr Brown delivered on Thursday in which he appeared to invoke Churchillian rhetoric to describe his battle to keep the economy afloat over the past couple of years.

Mr Brown said the worst was now over, but the recovery remained fragile and that withdrawing the support he put in place in 2008 would drive the economy back into recession.

He was once again driving home what will be his central campaign message, that the recovery is not safe in the Tories’ hands.

And once again he declared “I will not let you down” – just as he did on the steps of Number 10 the day he took over as Prime Minister, in what already seems the faraway summer of 2007.

Of course, Mr Brown is enough of an historian to know that the British electorate does not usually see general elections as an opportunity to say “thank you.”

Having saved Britain from its biggest external threat since 1066, Churchill famously lost the 1945 election, largely because the public was motivated more by a desire for change than by a desire to express its gratitude.

The Tories’ response to the Prime Minister’s speech was predictable. “The biggest threat to the recovery is five more years of him,” said Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.

Five more years of Gordon Brown. We heard that at the Conservatives’ Spring conference the weekend before last, and we’ll be hearing it a lot more from Tory lips over the coming weeks.

The problem facing Mr Brown, as ever, is that the economy is a double-edged sword for him.

There is a broad consensus that he has been at his best in tackling the economic crisis over the past two years. But there is also a consensus that, during his time as Chancellor, he helped create the conditions which allowed the recession to occur.

So what it boils down to is this. Will the voters give Mr Brown the credit for leading Britain out of the recession, or will they punish him for failing to prevent it in the first place?

On the answer to that question, more than anything else, the result of the 2010 general election will rest.

Achilles Heels

All elections leave a lasting legacy, but if there was one election in modern times which has influenced more or less everything that has happened in British politics since then, it is surely 1983.

The catastrophic defeat suffered by Michael Foot’s Labour Party in that year began the process of self-examination and reform which eventually begat New Labour in the 1990s and shaped the politics of today.

In the wake of Mr Foot’s death aged 96 this week, the most intriguing tribute came from the lips of Tony Blair - “he was as far removed from the techniques of modern politics as it was possible to be.”

Only Mr Blair with his silken charm could have made this sound like a compliment. In truth, he dedicated moreorless the whole of his career to wiping out all trace of the Labour Party which Mr Foot represented.

Labour went into that 1983 election with so many weak spots it must have been hard for Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to decide which one to target.

The 700-page manifesto with its raft of left-wing policies – later dubbed the longest suicide note in history – was not the half of it. Their real Achilles Heel was poor Mr Foot himself.

This week’s outpouring of grief over the death of this much-loved Labour hero was doubtless genuine, but the harsh truth is that Mr Foot should never have become Labour leader.

His narrow victory over Denis Healey in 1980 robbed it of the one man who might have been capable of stopping the Thatcher juggernaut in its tracks.

Twenty-seven years on, Labour is once more going into an election in which its leader is viewed as its Achilles Heel.

David Cameron certainly thinks so. That much was clear when he unveiled the Tories’ campaign slogan ‘Vote for Change’ at the party’s Spring conference in Brighton last weekend.

What he was really saying to the public here was: “You either vote for me, or you get another five years of you know who.”

As I noted in this column several months back, persuading the public to vote for five more years of Gordon Brown was always likely to be Labour’s toughest challenge in the forthcoming contest.

And yet, as it turned out, the week’s events have exposed the Tories’ own Achilles Heel, in the shape of its deputy chairman and billionaire benefactor Lord Ashcroft.

The Electoral Commission has now ruled that his £5.1m donations to the Tories were “permissible,” but the row over his tax status seems set to rumble on.

It had long been thought that he agreed to become resident in the UK for tax purposes when he received his peerage in 2000, but it has now emerged that he has paid no tax on his overseas earnings since then.

Not the least of the Tories’ problems is that their former leader William Hague, who recommended him for the peerage, only became aware of this fact in the past few months, and Mr Cameron even more recently than that.

The Tories have inevitably sought to portray all this as a distraction from the main issues of the economy and how to tackle the deficit, and so in a sense it is.

And yet, if it leaves a bad enough smell in those marginal constituencies which have been targeted by the Ashcroft millions, it may yet save the day for Labour.

A few months back, it seemed possible that Gordon Brown might lead Labour to an even worse result in 2010 than Michael Foot did in 1983 - an outcome which would have neatly brought the New Labour story full circle.

Thanks in part to Lord Ashcroft, he is now back in with a fighting chance.

Michael Foot: Greatness marred by misjudgements

There seems little to add to the reams of material that has appeared both in print and on the airwaves about the death of Michael Foot. He was undeniably a great parliamentary figure and his death moreorless severs the only remaining link with the days in which politicians were expected to command the House of Commons by the power of their oratory rather than command the news media by the succinctness of their soundbites. As Tony Blair said yesterday, he was as far removed as it is possible to be from the techniques of modern politics, and maybe that is no bad thing to have inscribed on your tombstone.

Nevertheless....I have to say I have been struck by the degree of sentimentality in some of the tributes, notably from Lord Kinnock, about Foot's contribution to the Labour Party in the period after the 1979 defeat. To listen to some of what has been said, anyone would think he saved the party during that grim period. The truth was he actually came close to destroying it.

In my view, Foot would have gone down as an immeasurably greater man had he not succumbed to the vain belief in 1980 that only he could succeed in uniting the party.

Of course, he not only failed to unite it - the Gang of Four split off to form the SDP shortly after his election as leader - but the programme around which Foot subsequently united the remainder of the party was one which was so out-of-kilter with the prevailing wind in British politics at the time that it resulted in Labour's worst election defeat since its arrival as a major political force.

The harsh truth was that Foot should never have become leader of the Labour Party ahead of Denis Healey and, in so doing, he robbed the party of the only leader who would have been capable of stopping Thatcherism in its tracks.

Had Healey succeeded Jim Callaghan, the split in the party would probably still have occurred, but it would almost certainly have occurred from the opposite end of the party spectrum, with the hard-left heading off into well-earned irrelevance.

Labour under Healey would have been in genuine contention for power at the 1983 and 1987 elections and would certainly have returned to office earlier than it ultimately did.

More significantly in terms of present-day politics, it would also not have been necessary for the party to ditch its entire Croslandite social democratic tradition as it ended up doing under Tony Blair in its desperation to return to power after four successive election defeats, and to retain it at all costs thereafter.

Any political career inevitably contains its share of misjudgements, and Foot made one other which I would like to mention here - namely colluding with Enoch Powell to scupper Harold Wilson's modest plans to reform the House of Lords in 1968.

This act of ideological purism - Foot wanted the Lords abolished, not democratised - resulted in the Second Chamber going unreformed for another thirty years, and the survival into the 21st century of a legislature defined in part by heredity.

As someone with more than a superficial knowledge of political history, Foot should have taken the long view, and realised that parliamentary reform in this country has only ever proceeded by increments.

For the man whose accession to the party leadership inadvertently begat New Labour, it goes down as another example of unintended - but not entirely unforseeable - political consequences.

The 'character question'

During the course of his long career, Gordon Brown can have faced few more humiliating episodes than having to run the gauntlet of journalists last Monday shouting the question: "Are you a bully, Prime Minister?"

A man who has dedicated his political life to the pursuit of social justice, and whose concern for the underdog is genuine, found himself accused of unforgiveable behaviour towards junior staff in no position to fight back.

Whatever the truth of the situation – and it has to be said that Downing Street’s carefully-worded denials were somewhat less than convincing – the revelations by journalist Andrew Rawnsley have certainly done Mr Brown no favours.

They do not make him a bad man. But as the election looms, they certainly raise questions about his ability to deal with the pressures of his role, and hence whether he is up to another five years in office.

Talk of the 'character question' in relation to Prime Ministers invariably leads to speculation about how some of our great leaders of the past may have fared under the kind of media spotlight today’s politicians have to endure.

Was Winston Churchill a bully, for instance? Almost certainly yes, but arguably some of those self-same character traits helped us win the Second World War.

Would the sexually rapacious David Lloyd George have survived the kind of intense scrutiny of his private life that modern-day politicians undergo? Almost certainly not.

And just what on earth would the tabloids do to a latter-day Gladstone who was found to be in the habit of touring round the streets of London at night trying to rescue fallen women from a life of vice?

So I am always tempted to allow politicians a certain amount of leeway in terms of their individual character flaws, on the grounds that these can and often do go hand in hand with genius.

That said, the public is surely right to expect its leaders to treat those around them with respect, and to ensure their private behaviour matches their publicly-stated ideals.

What saved Mr Brown this week was the intervention of the rather aptly named Christine Pratt, of the National Bullying Helpline, who unwisely disclosed that employees of 10 Downing Street had rung her supposedly confidential service.

It enabled the Labour spin machine to turn its fire on her, thus distracting the media’s attention from the scene of the original alleged misdemeanour.

To my mind, though, there were two aspects of the story that were particularly damaging. Firstly, the timing.

Amid growing signs of economic recovery, Labour has been steadily pegging back the Tories’ poll lead which last weekend was back down to six points in one survey.

In an intervention that might have led Monday’s news bulletins had the “bullying” story not overshadowed it, former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine moreorless admitted we were heading for a hung Parliament.

This week’s events will have given the Tories some respite from this apparent attack of the jitters.

By far the most damaging aspect of the accusations, however, is that they reinforce an already widely-held view about Mr Brown’s style of politics.

The Prime Minister may or may not have “bullied” Number 10 staff. What his people have undoubtedly done down the years is use the black arts of spin to batter a succession of fellow ministers and potential rivals into submission.

Alistair Darling, who claimed “the forces of hell” had been unleashed against him by No 10 after a rather-too-candid interview about the recession, is only the latest in a long line of figures to feel the sharp end of this.

It is primarily because Mr Brown has such ‘form’ in this regard that Labour may find it harder than it thinks to bat these accusations away.

Was the 'election-that-never-was' actually the political judgement call of the century?

Sorry Jack, but you were right all along. Gordon Brown made the right call not to hold an election in autumn 2007 - and if all the recent chatter about hung Parliaments proves to be correct, he will ultimately be vindicated in it. Here's today's Journal column.

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Amidst all the many and varied factors that have contributed to the unpopularity of Gordon Brown’s government over the past couple of years, one stands out above all others.

It came, of course, in October 2007, a little over three months into his premiership, when Mr Brown decided not to call the snap general election for which some of his closest allies had been actively preparing.

From being 11 points ahead in the opinion polls during his party’s conference a fortnight earlier, Labour suddenly found itself up to 20 points behind, a reversal in fortune from which the government has never quite recovered.

As such, it seems likely to be remembered as the decisive moment when Mr Brown lost it - lost the respect of the British public, lost the political initiative to the Tories, and lost any chance of securing his own personal mandate.

At the time, I was one of those who argued that holding an opportunist election when there was no need to do so risked destroying Mr Brown's hitherto highly-prized reputation as a serious statesman.

I was by no means alone in this. Another who urged restraint was the Justice Secretary Jack Straw, one of only three men to have served continually in the Labour Cabinet since 1997.

Yet with the benefit of hindsight Mr Straw has now changed his mind, saying this week that he was wrong and that the Prime Minister should have called that autumn '07 contest.

For my part, I am still not convinced. The public do not like unnecessary elections – especially in November – and I still reckon the best Mr Brown would have ended up with was a hung Parliament.

There has been little talk of hung Parliaments since then, but it has suddenly revived over the past week, thanks largely to a - possibly rogue - opinion poll showing the Tory lead down to just six percentage points.

As regular readers of this column will know by now, our skewed electoral system means the Tories have to be 10-11 points ahead of Labour to be sure of securing an outright Commons majority.

And lo and behold, alongside talk of a hung Parliament comes fresh talk about proportional representation, with Labour confirming it will pass legislation before the election to enable a referendum on the voting system to be held after it.

It’s a smart tactical move by Mr Brown, as it means an incoming David Cameron government will have to repeal the legislation to stop the referendum taking place – unlikely if the Tories end up dependent on Lib Dem support.

That Mr Cameron is facing the distinct possibility on having to rely on Nick Clegg to put him in No 10 is seen by many as proof that he and his party have yet to "seal the deal" with the electorate.

If he is to become Prime Minister, it seems to likely to be more a result of Labour's ineptitude and lack of fresh vision than out of any great public enthusiasm for the Conservatives.

But what is also interesting about the recent chatter is that it puts a slightly new perspective on Mr Brown's October 2007 decision not to go to the country.

Had he done so, and gone from a majority of 66 to a hung Parliament, it would have gone down in history as a terrible misjudgement.

But were he to secure one in 2010, in the teeth of the worst recession for seventy years and up against a moderate, likeable Tory opponent, it would not look anything like that.

Is it just possible that ‘bottler Brown's' great election choke could yet come to be seen as the political judgement call of the century?

Could it be Prime Minister Bercow one day?

At the risk of giving the Tories another bout of apoplexy, there are some interesting historical precedents surrounding the election of very young House of Commons Speakers in terms of what happened in their subsequent careers.

The year 1789 is chiefly remembered for being the year of the French Revolution. But it was also the year the Commons elected two thirty-something Speakers who both went on to occupy Number 10 Downing Street.

The first of these was William Grenville, who was elected Speaker at the ripe old age of 30 and held the office only very briefly before quitting to become Home Secretary.

In his place was elected the 32-year-old Henry Addington, who remained in the Chair until 1801 when he suddenly found himself elevated to the Premiership in place of his childhood friend Pitt the Younger, who declared that Addington was the only successor he could countenance.

In the meantime, Grenville had gone into opposition, along with his close ally Charles James Fox. But in 1806, he was summoned by King George III to head up what was termed the Ministry of All Talents, though unfortunately for him, it only lasted a year.

Even further back, in 1715, one Spencer Compton was elected to the Commons chair at the age of 42 - four years younger than John Bercow is now. He served as Speaker for 12 years until 1727, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as the 1st Earl of Wilmington. In 1742, he succeeded Sir Robert Walpole as Prime Minister.

Bercow has said he will do nine years in the Chair, effectively two full Parliaments plus the toe-end of this one. That will make him 55 when he stands down - younger than Gordon Brown was when he became Prime Minister in 2007.

The only remaining question is: If Bercow did decide to pursue a post-Speakership career, would it be as a Tory or a Labour MP?

What would he have made of it?

I've not got time to wade into the MPs expenses row in detail as yet, although I have made my views on Mr Speaker Martin clear on Iain Dale's blog.

But meanwhile, on the day that, 15 years ago, Britain lost a great Prime Minister in waiting, a thought occurs: what would he have made of it all?

The changing face of politics

Did Margaret Thatcher save Britain? Can Hazel Blears really become Britain's second woman PM? And could the MPs' expenses revelations ultimtately rebound to Gordon Brown's advantage? Just some of the questions addressed in today's Journal column.

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All general elections bring change, but some general elections bring more change than others, and there is a pretty universal consensus that the one that brought the most change in recent times was the one that took place 30 years ago this week.

For better or worse, Margaret Thatcher's victory over Jim Callaghan in that 1979 contest has cast its shadow over moreorless everything that has happened in British politics in the ensuing decades.

There is still, to my mind at least, a debate to be had about the Thatcher legacy. The widely-held view is that she “saved” Britain, which is the fundamental reason why the Labour Party subsequently found it necessary to take on most of her ideas.

But in many ways we were a more contented society back then, and while the “opportunity economy” which she ushered in may have made some people considerably better-off, it has not necessarily made people happier or more secure.

Anyway, for those lucky enough - or should that be sad enough? - to have access to the Parliamentary Channel via Freeview, there was the chance to relive it all again last Monday, as the channel replayed all 17 hours of the BBC's election coverage.

I flitted in and out of it between DIY jobs and the snooker, the main points of fascination for me being the impossible youth of David Dimbleby and other BBC presenters, and hearing Labour politicians speaking with genuine working-class accents.

Superficially, there would seem to be obvious parallels between that time and this - a failing Labour government, a faltering economy, an experienced but somewhat shop-soiled Prime Minister, an untried Tory leader whose time nevertheless looked like it had come.

But that's way too easy. In truth, Mr Brown would probably kill for the kind of personal ratings enjoyed by Big Jim, and Labour's predicament then - popular leader but unpopular policies - is moreorless the reverse of the position the party finds itself in now.

Either way, one politician who clearly had Margaret Thatcher very much in mind this week was the Communities Secretary, Hazel Blears, who enlivened the Bank Holiday weekend by launching an astonishing attack on Mr Brown.

She told the Observer that the government had shown a "lamentable" failure to get its message across, and that the public no longer believed any government policy announcements.

Ms Blears has since denied her comment should be seen in any way as a criticism of Mr Brown's leadership, but this is hogwash.

The giveaway was her use of the words "You Tube if you want to," a phrase which anyone over 40 will immediately recognise as an echo of the Iron Lady's famous soundbite: "You turn if you want to, the Lady’s not for turning."

Ostensibly, Ms Blears was of course referring to Mr Brown’s laughable performance on YouTube when he grinned his way through an announcement of a clampdown on MPs expenses.

But the subtext was clear: Ms Blears was suggesting that she is the new Margaret Thatcher, a plain-speaking, down-to-earth woman impatient with silly fads such as using internet video channels to make policy statements.

So can Hazel Blears really become Britain’s second woman Prime Minister? Well, I thinks she thinks so, although her last place in the 2007 deputy leadership election is hardly an ideal base from which to launch a successful leadership bid two years on.

That said, Mrs Thatcher herself is the supreme example of a rank outsider who propelled herself into the leadership ahead of more experienced and more highly-thought-of rivals.

In any case, to give Mr Brown his due, he promptly ignored Ms Blears’ protestations by going straight back onto YouTube to do a campaign broadcast for the European elections on 4 June.

But any hopes the Prime Minister may have had of regaining the political initiative in the run-up to those elections were hit by yesterday’s revelations about the Cabinet’s expense claims.

Although no rules appear to have been broken, stories about Mr Brown paying his brother £6,577 to cover the cost of cleaning services, Jack Straw overclaiming for his council tax, and Ms Blears juggling claims between three homes are hardly helpful at this juncture.

Whatever explanations ministers may offer, many voters are now conditioned to believe all politicians are guilty until proven innocent. – a sad state of affairs no doubt, but one which the political elite has largely brought on itself.

The wider political impact of these revelations may well depend on what is uncovered when the Daily Telegraph gets round to publishing the expense claims of the Tory frontbench, as no doubt it will do in the next few days.

Who knows, if it turns out that some of them have broken the rules while Mr Brown’s team stayed largely within them, it may even rebound to the Prime Minister’s advantage.

Indeed, at least one conspiracy theorist has already suggested that Brown Central could have orchestrated the whole thing as a way of staving off the anticipated Labour meltdown on 4 June.

If a real spin genius like Alastair Campbell was still at No 10, I’d be tempted to believe that, but it’s way too clever for the blundering bunch of incompetents that currently surround the Prime Minister.

The expenses issue is, at bottom, more an illustration of the changing relationship between politicians and the public than an indictment of any particular individual or party.

Old parliamentary stagers like Middlesbrough MP Sir Stuart Bell may look back fondly to the “age of deference” when MPs were implicitly trusted and the public left them alone to do their work.

But thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, and more generally the public’s desire for greater transparency in our political system, those days are gone for good.

It’s just another of the many ways in which politics has been transformed since the day Margaret Thatcher walked into 10 Downing Street all those years ago.