Labour has future of electoral system in its hands

When Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg took the historic gamble of joining the Tory-led coalition government last May, he created for himself an excruciating political conundrum.

By forcing the Conservatives to grant a referendum on reforming the voting system, Mr Clegg opened up the tantalising prospect of turning the Lib Dems from a party of permanent opposition to one of moreorless permanent power.

Yet at the same time, by aligning himself with what was bound to be an unpopular administration, Mr Clegg simultaneously ran the risk of seeing the prize of electoral reform swept away on a tide of anti-government protest votes.

The fact that he then went on to make himself the most hated man in Britain in some quarters by breaking a 'solemn promise' on university tuition fees only served to underline the point.

For make no mistake, Mr Clegg is set to become the central figure in the May referendum that was finally given the go-ahead this week following a last-minute game of parliamentary ping-pong between the Lords and Commons.

At the moment, the 'no' campaign is not talking about him, trying instead to make the argument against the proposed new Alternative Vote system on the grounds of cost and complexity.

But don't be fooled – these are just the opening skirmishes, and before too long, this is going to get personal.

'Don't give Nick Clegg a permanent seat at the Cabinet table' is quite simply the no camp's most potent message in this campaign, and it's one we will be hearing a lot more of in the run up to the 5 May vote.

Perhaps understandably, Mr Clegg has so far been nowhere to be seen in the 'yes' campaign, even going so far as to tell Radio Four's Today programme yesterday that the referendum was "nothing to do with" him.

Instead, in the week that The King's Speech swept the board at the Baftas, the pro-reform camp wheeled out the film's much-decorated stars Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter to voice their support.

While Ms Bonham Carter, as the great grand-daughter of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, does at least have some family political tradition to maintain here, one could be forgiven for asking 'who cares?'

But that is not the point. The point is that here are two high-profile personalities supporting electoral reform whose names are not Nick Clegg.

On the Labour side, several prominent ex-ministers have already got involved on the 'no' side, including John Prescott, whose track record in referendum campaigns should probably make opponents of electoral reform somewhat wary.

But what should Labour supporters of AV like party leader Ed Miliband do – stay out of it and let the luvvies do the talking, or seek to provide a measure of leadership themselves?

In a sense, it's a win-win situation for Mr Miliband. If the referendum results in a 'yes' vote, the evidence of recent elections suggests it will benefit his party.

But if the country votes 'no', the coalition will be destabilised, perhaps even to the extent that an early general election could result.

The attitude of the Labour leadership will ultimately be crucial, in that it will almost certainly be Labour voters who decide the outcome of this.

Conservative supporters will by and large vote to keep first past the post, as David Cameron urged yesterday. The Lib Dems will vote en masse for change.

The great temptation will be for Labour supporters to vote tribally against AV in order to give the Coalition a bloody nose, but given a strong enough lead from Mr Miliband, my hunch is that most of them will back the change.

That is, of course, assuming they can overcome their dislike of Nick Clegg.

Mandy takes up the reins

Whoever ends up leading Labour into the election, the past seven days have shown where the power really now lies. Here's today's Journal column.

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Traditionally, the time of the year between the start of the MPs long summer recess in July and the build-up to the party conferences in September has been known as the political ‘silly season.’

In most years, an uneasy peace descends over Westminster, and political journalists are reduced to writing about such ephemera as John Prescott finding a baby crab in the Thames and naming it after Peter Mandelson.

But with an election less than a year away and Gordon Brown’s government still mired in difficulties at home and abroad, nobody expected this to be one of those summers when politics effectively goes into abeyance.

And something else has changed too since Mr Prescott observed that tiny crustacean in 1997. From being the butt of Old Labour humour, Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool is now seen by most of the party as vital to its slim hopes of election victory.

In one sense, it’s a fulfilment of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s more controversial pronouncements.

Asked once how he would know when his mission to transform his party had been completed, he replied: “When the party learns to love Peter Mandelson.”

With Mr Brown off on his holidays this week – in so far as the workaholic PM is ever off-duty – the former Hartlepool MP has been large and in charge around both Whitehall and the TV studios alike.

In so doing, he demonstrated beyond any remaining doubt that he has now inherited the mantle of his one-time tormentor Mr Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister in all but name.

Lord Mandelson is sensibly playing down excitable talk that he could actually become the next Labour leader, although one influential backbencher declared this week that he was the only person who could beat the Tories.

There has not been a Prime Minister in the House of Lords since Lord Salisbury in 1902, and to have one in 2009 would be extraordinary even by the standards of Lord Mandelson’s topsy-turvy career.

Nevertheless, one had the unmistakeable sense this week that this was a moment he had been looking forward to for a long time, such was the relish with which he took up the levers of power.

His aim was nothing less than to set a new strategic course for Labour as it approaches an election that almost everyone now expects it to lose, and lose badly.

Such pessimism about the party’s prospects is hardly surprising given its dire performance in the Norwich North by-election ten days ago, a result which if replicated across the UK would give David Cameron a majority of 240.

So far, it has not led to a renewed bout of speculation about Mr Brown’s leadership, but it has brought about a growing realisation that he has lost the argument over “Labour investment versus Tory cuts.”

This tired old mantra has been central to Mr Brown’s re-election strategy, but has failed to gain any traction with a cynical public that believes spending cuts will follow whoever wins in 2010.

What Norwich North did was to present an opportunity to those Cabinet members who want to move away from a strategy which they think the public now regards as fundamentally dishonest.

Hence the new note of candour in Lord Mandelson’s interview with BBC Newsnight this week when, without actually using the c-word, he accepted that cuts would indeed be part and parcel of a Labour fourth term.

“I fully accept that in the medium term the fiscal adjustment that we are going to have to make….will be substantial. There will be things that have to be postponed and put off, and there will probably be things that we cannot do at all,” he said.

It wasn’t the only change in election strategy Lord Mandelson announced this week. He also appeared to commit Mr Brown to a televised debate with Mr Cameron, despite Downing Street’s insistence that the Prime Minister remains opposed to the idea.

“I think television debates would help engage the public, help answer some of the questions at the heart of the election, help bring the election alive in some way,” he said.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that it still won’t happen, for the simple reason that electoral law obliges the big broadcasters to give the Liberal Democrats almost equal airtime to that of the Labour and Conservative parties.

This will mean that Nick Clegg will have to be included in any head-to-head between the party leaders, something the other two might be keen to avoid.

But that is by-the-by. The real significance of Lord Mandelson’s comments this week is that he now feels in a strong enough position to set out his own agenda without clearing it with Number Ten.

Some could even see it as the beginnings of an attempt to distance himself from Mr Brown and prepare the way for a new leader with a new, more open style.

After the failed “coup” in May I predicted that Mr Brown would, at some stage, come under fresh pressure to stand down in favour of Home Secretary Alan Johnson, and nothing that has happened since has caused me to revise that view.

Mr Brown’s position remains weak. Labour MPs who effectively put him on probation in May spoke then of the need for a demonstrable improvement in Labour’s performance by the autumn, but there is absolutely no sign of this happening.

But whatever internal machinations occur in the run-up to the conference season – and my guess is that there will be plenty – one thing is becoming increasingly clear.

It is that whether it is Mr Brown or Mr Johnson who leads Labour into the next election, it will be Lord Mandelson who is once more pulling the strings.

Stating the obvious

Alan Milburn says that Labour must bring forward a message of "change" if the party is to win the next election. John Prescott says that in order to win the party needs to remain united.

They may be coming at the situation facing the party from different directions, but both are right.

Haymaking while the tills ring

Hay-on-Wye is a gorgeously romantic little spot which can occasionally cause people to lose their heads somewhat...but even so, the behaviour of John Prescott and Michael Levy at the Hay Festival this weekend takes some beating when it comes to political mischief-making.

During a book-signing session for his autobiography, Prezza let it slip that he thought David Miliband would be a good leader of the Labour Party.

Although he made clear he was talking about the future rather than the present,his comments were predictably over-egged by the media into a story about possible alternatives to Gordon Brown.

Prescott has been in politics long enough to know that this was exactly what would happen, so just what exactly was he playing at here? Surely nothing as cheap and nasty as deliberately undermining the Prime Minister in order to garner a bit more publicity for his wretched book?

Meanwhile Lord Levy burnished his growing reputation for serial and gratuitous acts of disloyalty by opining that Gordon Brown "lacks Blair's way with people."

I have used this before, I know...but if ever there was anyone who needed to hear Clem Attlee's famous words of advice to Harold Laski, it is surely Levy. "I can assure you there is widespread resentment in the Party at your activities and a period of silence on your part would be welcome."

North-East referendum defeat was Prescott's "greatest regret"

Having closely followed the long debate over North-East regional devolution in my old role as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal, I was intrigued to read this story in today's Guardian, in which John Prescott speaks of the failure to win the 2004 regional assembly referendum as his "greatest regret" in politics.

It was obvious all along that Prescott attached huge importance to the issue. Unfortunately for him, no one else in the Blair Cabinet thought it was remotely important, including of course the then Prime Minister himself.

Prescott is often derided as a figure of fun, but it is a measure of his underlying seriousness of purpose as a politician that he should regret this policy failure more than, say, the Prescott punch, the Tracey Temple affair, and building on the green belt, all of which had a much bigger impact on the way he was viewed by the press and public.

Regional government is now about as fashionable as a Spam fritter-eating Phil Collins fan in hot pants, but I for one have to admire Prezza for the fact that he is still happy to be identified with such an unpopular cause.

Is Prescott rewriting history?

Gordon Brown has not been a particularly lucky Prime Minister so far - while some of his mistakes have been of his own making, others, such as "discgate" and the David Abrahams affair were down to others' incompetence. But looking at the headlines of the last couple of days, I wonder whether the Prime Minister is perhaps more fortunate in his enemies.

Who are these people who are currently twisting the knife? An ex deputy leader who was very lucky not to be sacked himself by Tony Blair, a failed ex welfare minister who has borne a deeply personal grudge against him for the past decade, and a sleazy fundraiser whose activities did more than anyone else to bring disgrace on the party.

The activities of Lord Cashpoint in persistently seeking to link Brown with the cash for honours affair on the strength of absolutely no evidence are simply beneath contempt. It's the kind of thing you expect from Tory bloggers, not people who are allegedly supporters of the Labour Party.

As for Frank Field, he has been seeking to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of Labour MPs by spearheading the rebellion over the abolition of the 10p tax rate, but such is the depth of his hatred for Gordon that anything he says about him is worthless.

John Prescott is a different case altogether. His loyalty to the party and determination to hold it together at all costs has been the hallmark of his long career, which is what makes the revelations about the Blair-Brown feud in his memoirs all the more surprising.

I wonder if he is re-writing history somewhat. Either that, or else his words are being rather badly edited.

In truth, I don't think for a moment he actually wanted Tony to sack Gordon or for Gordon to resign and attack Tony from the backbenches. Prescott knows perfectly well that both of those scenarios would have led to civil war in the party, and that is not something which he would ever have wanted.

I think his comments have more the air of exasperation about them. If he did indeed urge Blair to sack Brown, it was probably said more as a reductio ad absurdam than anything else.

Contrary to the impression given in the book, I am in fact as certain as I can be that he wanted Brown to succeed Blair, saw him as the best guarantor of the Labour Party's core values, and was working quietly to ensure his succession from a fairly early stage.

Indeed I was told all of this by one of Prescott's very closest ministerial colleagues shortly after the 2001 election.

The same source made clear that Prescott envisaged continuing as Brown's deputy for a while, presumably on the assumption that the handover would come sometime in the 2001-2005 Parliament.

Blair's decision to stay on until 2007, coupled with the Tracey Temple affair, evidently put paid to that ambition.

The lone voice

I expect most bloggers will disagree or even laugh at this, but there is a certain, magnificent stubbornness about John Prescott which I can't help but admire. While the New Labour project as a whole has been all about shifting with the political wind, that is one thing you can't lay at Big John's door.

Two years and three months ago, the people of the North-East dealt a death-blow to the prospects for English regional government by voting 4-1 against plans for an elected North-East Assembly. It immediately became clear that the idea was dead in the water as far as other regions were concerned and it swiftly disappeared off the political agenda.

Those of us, amongst whom I include myself, who initially supported the idea as a way of rebalancing our lopsided constitution, were forced to reappraise our position. I eventually concluded that an English Parliament represented a more promising way forward for English devolution, and recent polls seem to have borne that out.

Yet, to listen to his speech to the New Local Government Network yesterday, none of it seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr Prescott's belief in the inevitability of his regionalist dream.

"A regional level of administration is necessary alongside the need for the new localism. Regional planning is an essential part of the accountability that is needed from elected representatives rather than appointed regional civil servants," he said.

"I'm sad that regional government was rejected in the North East, but I believe that England will eventually move to elected regional government - just as Scotland and Wales originally rejected devolution and then voted for it."

Some might call it contempt for the electorate. Others might call it losing touch with reality. Both would be justifiable accusations, but for me there is still something admirable about a politician who is prepared to say what he thinks in defiance of the conventional wisdom.

He may be wrong, he may even be stupid - but at least he's genuine.

Prescott tells it like it is

Wny does the media hate John Prescott so? While Alastair Campbell talks his customary load of mendacious bollocks over Tony Blair's departure date, Prezza just tells it like it is.

A few weeks back, in my North West Enquirer column, I predicted that the leadership and deputy leadership issues would need to be settled before the end of Labour's conference in Manchester. It seems Mr Prescott now agrees.

Writing on the BBC website, Nick Assinder goes further, speculating that the conference could be the stage not just for an announcement about the leadership, but for a leadership election.

My latest assessment of the situation as the Parliamentary term drew to a close last week can be found on my latest podcast available via the this is sites or by subscription to iTunes.

Note: This post was supposed to go up yesterday but Blogger appears to be somewhat temperamental at the moment. Given by the unusually small number of new posts on other political blogs yesterday it seems I'm not the only one who had problems.....

John Prescott v the Snobbocracy

Yesterday, Iain Dale published a light-hearted post asking some of his 114,000 readers to nominate John Prescott's greatest achivement.

I should have known better than to get involved of course...but I rose to the bait and suggested that perhaps his greatest achievement was managing to reach high office at all given his deprived background and the degree of social prejudice that he has had to encounter as a result.

It duly provoked a tidal wave of abuse with one poster suggesting I should be locked up in a padded cell next to Ian Huntley and another branding me "sad" and suggesting I need psychiatric help.

You can read the whole thread in all its glory HERE.

Update: Many of the comments on both Iain's blog and this one carry the assumption that Prescott owed his election as Deputy Leader to his links with the unions and to the "Old Labour" block vote. This is not quite historically accurate.

In fact, Prescott got the gig largely as a result of his steadfast loyalty to John Smith the previous year during the 1993 conference row over one-member-one-vote (OMOV) in contrast to the incumbent deputy, Margaret Beckett, who made the mistake of appearing to give only lukewarm backing for the idea.

Hence when Smith died and the two leadership jobs came up for grabs, it was Prescott rather than Beckett who was the modernisers' choice for deputy, bizarre though this may seem in view of their subsequent careers.

Doubtless some of the unions supported Prescott, but most of the left-wing ones, including the one of which I was then a member, voted Beckett-Beckett for leader and deputy leader.

It's not just Tory bloggers who think Prescott should go

The last time I wrote anything about John Prescott was four weeks ago in my Saturday column which appears in the Newcastle Journal, Derby Evening Telegraph and Lincolnshire Echo.

On that occasion I wrote:

"Mr Prescott’s sole case for continuance in office rests on the argument that it would be better for the Labour Party to resolve the leadership and deputy leadership issues at the same time.

"True - but that is not an argument for Mr Prescott to cling on till Mr Blair goes. It is, rather, an argument that they should both go now."

So why the reticence since then? Well, it's not that I've been avoiding the subject. It's just that nothing that has happened in the whole Prescott saga in the meantime has caused me to revise this opinion in any way.

The fact that Mr Prescott received hospitality from a millionaire who wants to open a casino in the Millennium Dome, or that Guido Fawkes has named the third Prescott mistress merely confirms me in my view that Labour needs a clean sweep at the top.

Today the story has taken a different turn with claims that "Tory bloggers" are behind a "dirty tricks campaign" designed to force Mr Prescott out of office.

The series of claims was made via Mr Prescott's biographer and unofficial media spokesman Colin Brown in today's Independent.

"Friends of the Deputy Prime Minister claim he has been the target of a "dirty tricks" campaign by "bloggers" with Tory right-wing links. They are furious at the use of two Westminster internet sites to name a third woman with whom the bloggers allege John Prescott has had an affair, and a woman civil servant in Beijing who is said to have rebuffed his advances.

Mr Prescott's allies have privately urged him to take action to remove the smears or close the sites down. His advisers said he was unlikely to do so, to avoid giving them more prominence.

"It is the black arts," said a Prescott ally. "They are running a dirty tricks campaign and they are being used as a conduit by journalists."

The Labour MP was named by a "gunpowder plot" website called Guido Fawkes. Friends of the blogger said it was run by a libertarian conservative, Paul Staines, a former Tory activist. The website yesterday challenged Mr Prescott to sue. The Prescott camp also accused Iain Dale, a past Tory parliamentary candidate, of using his own personal blogsite to recycle the smears."

The BBC's Nick Robinson has also waded in, attempting to play down the Prescott story and accusing bloggers of "attempting to make the political weather."

Naturally Iain and Guido have given their various responses to these claims and these can be read HERE and HERE.

So what to make of it, in particular Prescott's claim that journalists are using blogger as a conduit? Well, knowing how journalism works, I don't doubt that the odd bit of gossip probably does flow back and forth between the blogosphere and the mainstream media.

In the old days, when newspaper hacks had a story they couldn't quite get past the legals, they would pass it on to Private Eye, or to a diary column where less rigorous legal restrictions applied. Nowadays, they just end up on Guido and Iain Dale.

As an aside, it's a pity they can't be shared around a bit as Iain and Guido don't really need the traffic....but does it really amount to "dirty tricks?" by "politically motivated" bloggers?

Okay, so Iain Dale is a former (and future?) Tory candidate, but then again Nick Robinson is a former chairman of Macclesfield Young Conservatives, and he is taking a much softer line on the story.

But just as it is not just Tory MPs who have expressed concern about Prescott's behaviour, neither is it just "Tory" bloggers who have done so.

In fact, there are plenty of us on the centre-left who can see the damage he and Blair are doing to the progressive cause by remaining in office so long past their sell-by-date.

The latest speculation is that the end result of all this will be that Prescott will resign as Deputy Prime Minister but hold on to his (meaningless) role of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

If so, it can only serve as a temporary device for getting them through to the party conference in Manchester, when the issue will have to be settled.