Dave's useful idiots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Gunboat diplomat' leaves Coalition in a pickle

More than 20 years ago, a young , Conservative council leader gained a measure of notoriety after unexpectedly seizing control of the hitherto safe Labour authority of Bradford.

Storming into office at the May 1988 local elections, he announced a five-year plan to cut the council's budget by £50m, slash the workforce by a third, and outsource most council-run services to private operators.

For a while, 'Bradford-style Toryism' became something of a by-word in local government circles, with some like-minded authorities modelling themselves on it, while others cited it as a warning of what happened when Tories took control.

After its brief flirtation with uber-Thatcherism, Bradford soon returned to the Labour fold - but that Tory council leader went on to become probably the most influential politician to emerge from local government since Labour's David Blunkett.

His name was of course Eric Pickles and, as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in the coalition administration, he is now in ultimate charge not just of Bradford but of every town and city hall in the country.

Among grassroots Tories, Mr Pickles is a hugely popular figure – but it is fair to say those feelings are not always shared by his Liberal Democrat Cabinet colleagues – or by political leaders in the North-East region.

During the early months of the Coalition, he fought a running battle with Business Secretary Vince Cable over whether the North-East should retain a distinctive regional voice – a battle characterised by briefing and counter-briefing on both sides.

It did not help that Prime Minister David Cameron was bored by the stalemate and told the protagonists to sort it out between themselves rather than taking sides.

What sort of regional political institutions will emerge from that process is still unclear. Many hope the proposed local economic partnership covering Durham, Northumberland and Tyne and Wear will be able to take on at least some of the role of axed regional development agency One NorthEast.

But the limitations of the scorched earth approach to all things regional employed by Mr Pickles and others in the Coalition's early days are already becoming clear.

As was revealed in a parliamentary answer this week, Dr Cable's department for Business, Innovation and Skills is having to create new local offices to carry out work previously carried out by the regional government offices.

This provides further proof of what some of us were saying all along: that if the regional tier of governance did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But if Mr Pickles' pathological hatred of regionalism has caused controversy in the North-East, his attitude to local government spending has caused ripples on a far wider scale.

Newcastle council leader David Faulkner was only one of more than 90 Liberal Democrat councillors who signed a letter to The Times this week protesting at the scale and pace of cuts to their authorities.

Part of their anger stems from Mr Pickles' uncompromising political style, which they described as 'gunboat diplomacy.'

"The secretary of state's role should be to facilitate necessary savings while promoting the advance of localism and the Big Society. Unfortunately, Eric Pickles has felt it better to shake a stick at councillors than work with us," said the letter.

The reference to the Big Society was illuminating, in the context of Labour-run Liverpool's recent refusal to co-operate with Mr Cameron's flagship initiative.

But the wider political significance of the row over local government spending is that it plays into the area of relations between the two governing parties.

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg needs to be able to take his party with him if the Coalition is to survive long-term, and on this issue he is clearly some way from succeeding.

And there is only one place that will ultimately leave the government: in a pickle.

Review of the Political Year 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Region losing its voice as cuts start to bite

The day after David Miliband stepped aside from the Shadow Cabinet and Nick Brown was axed as Chief Whip, a Newcastle Journal headline posed the question: "Has the North East lost its political voice?"

If that was a pertinent question to ask then in the wake of the departure from frontline politics of two genuine regional heavyweights, it is even more so now.

Since then, we have seen the Parliamentary Labour Party fail to elect any of the four North-East MPs who stood for the Shadow Cabinet while choosing no fewer than seven from Yorkshire and Humberside.

And on Thursday, final confirmation that One North East, the development agency which has presided over a regional economic renaissance, is among the 192 quangos being axed by the coalition government.

The contrast with the regional political scene of a decade ago could not be greater. We regularly saw five or six North-East MPs occupying seats around the Cabinet table – depending on whether Peter Mandelson was in or out at any given time.

Their value has been long debated. Tony Blair admitted in his memoirs that he dared not be seen to favour his home region, and at least one of those Cabinet ministers admitted the same to me.

There was also the now largely dismantled regional political infrastructure – ONE, the regional government office created under John Major, and the regional assembly made up of senior councillors and other representatives.

Later on, under Gordon Brown, the North-East had its own minister in Nick Brown. Now it does not even have a single MP in government, let alone someone dedicated to sticking up for its interests.

In retrospect, it is clear that a more concerted effort should have been made to get behind a single North-East candidate in the Shadow Cabinet elections, probably Helen Goodman as she came closest to being elected.

But as it has turned out, the region is fairly well-represented in the middle ranks of Labour leader Ed Miliband's new team unveiled last weekend.

Ms Goodman joins Kevan Jones, Sharon Hodgson, Roberta Blackman-Woods and new MPs Chi Onwurah and Catherine McKinnell as shadow ministers, while Alan Campbell has been promoted to Deputy Chief Whip.

None of them, as yet, has the parliamentary stature of a Nick Brown or a David Miliband, but at least there is hope there for the future.

But if new leadership is going to come from anywhere, it surely needs to come from within the region itself, and here the picture is much less promising.

The moreorless wholesale disappearance of region-wide political institutions has left a void which the coalition's plans for yet more elected mayors will not begin to address.

One of the arguments made at the time of the regional assembly referendum was that a future Conservative administration would find it harder to get rid of an elected body than a panoply of unelected ones.

In retrospect, this was surely right. After all, the coalition is not abolishing the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament, even though those institutions cost many times more than the RDAs.

Hopes continue to linger that the government may yet allow the creation of a region-wide Local Economic Partnership to provide a single regional perspective where necessary.

But Whitehall's signals on this have been mixed to say the least and while Business Secretary Vince Cable may be supportive, it is clear that not all of his colleagues share his viewpoint.

Much of the debate around the governance of the North-East over recent decades has essentially been about the need for a distinctive regional political voice.

It is no exaggeration to say that, in a few short months, the coalition has managed to set back that cause by at least 20 years.

The old politics is back

Is politics returning to normal? Even before the government's pettyfogging decision to boycott Question Time over, of all things, the presence of Bad Al Campbell on the panel, the signs were there. Here's today's Journal column.

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After the unchartered waters of the post-election period and the initial excitement of the Lib-Con coalition deal, the political events of the past week had a reassuringly familiar feel to them.

A Conservative Chancellor unveiled a swingeing package of spending cuts. Labour frontbenchers queued up to attack them.

Meanwhile a Conservative Education Secretary unveiled plans to reduce the role of local authorities in schools – as Labour accused him of trying to recreate a two-tier education system.

So much for the 'new politics.' This was just like old times.

For the North-East, the new political era is already carrying unwelcome echoes of the Thatcher-Major years.

National newspapers have once again started to carry long features on the region's plight, and how its relatively high proportion of public sector jobs will leave it vulnerable to the spending cutbacks. Tell us something we don't know.

The one bright star on the horizon is that ministers have bowed to the demands of this newspaper among others to retain a region-wide economic body.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles moreorless confirmed on Wednesday that this would be the existing job-creation agency One NorthEast, albeit in a radically slimmed-down form.

But though some will doubtless bemoan the loss of Labour's child trust funds, there is a consensus of sorts over the cuts, the only argument being whether they should have happened now or later.

Michael Gove's education proposals - a re-run of the Major government's grant-maintained schools initiative - are however likely to be far more controversial.

By opening the way to thousands of schools to become 'academies,' the Tories' real aim appears to be to further neuter the role of local government.

For all the talk of 'localism,' all this will result in is more and more schools being directly-funded – and thus ultimately controlled – from the centre.

Labour activists, many of whom are teachers and many more of whom work in local government, will hate this measure probably more than any other to emerge from the coalition so far.

In terms of the Labour leadership contest, it ought to play into the hands of the former children's secretary, Ed Balls, who led the attack on it this week in his usual combative style.

Nevertheless Mr Balls remains very much an outsider in the race which thus far looks set to be a contest between the Miliband brothers, David and Ed.

The election of South Shields MP David as Labour leader would, at least, be some compensation for the fact that the North-East is the only region without a single MP in the government.

Of all the many vignettes that have emerged from that strange five-day post-election limbo when no-one quite knew who had won, one of the most intriguing concerns a 3am conversation between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown.

The former Lib Dem leader was apparently begging his old friend to broker a Lib-Lab coalition and finally realise their dream of a new 'progressive alliance.'

But Mr Blair said no, it was time Labour went into opposition, arguing that if it clung on to power this time round, it would pay a terrible price at the next election.

As the initial euphoria around the coalition subsides, and the harsh reality of its programme starts to bite, it is looking increasingly like the right judgment call.

Region's ambitions derailed once more

Among the stories to catch my eye this week was one warning that the £16bn Crossrail scheme to link East and West London may have hit a potentially deadly snag.

An area of the capital destined for tunnelling as part of the scheme may, it turns out, be the site of a missing 16th century burial ground for victims of anthrax.

Since long-dormant anthrax spores can spread through the air and cause fresh infection if disturbed, this doubtless poses something of a dilemma for the engineers working on the project.

Nevertheless, transport secretary Lord Adonis said a compulsory purchase of the affected area, beneath a car park near the old city walls, was still expected to go ahead.

Given recent developments – or rather lack of them – in the North-East transport arena, this episode may well have brought some wry smiles in this part of the world.

While nothing must be allowed to get in the way of Crossrail - be it hell, high water or anthrax - it’s a different story when it comes to the region’s hopes of inclusion in the planned high speed rail network.

Work on the new 250mph line linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is due to begin in 2017 – the year Crossrail is due to be completed.

But it won’t be coming to the North-East any time soon, if at all. Under the current plans, the 21st century will be into its fourth decade before there is the remotest chance of that.

You had to feel for poor old North-East minister Nick Brown, who has lobbied hard for the region to be included in the network, reduced last weekend to a lame pledge to do something about the East Coast Main Line.

The same Lord Adonis has refused to give any commitment to extending the high speed link to Newcastle, saying it was important to concentrate on a “deliverable” project.

This is despite a consultants’ study which found that extending it would create 95,000 jobs by 2040, and the government’s own HS2 team advising that including the North-East in the network made the “best business case.”

Neither should we supposed things would be any better with the Tories, who want a cheaper link from London to Leeds that would leave out the East Midlands as well as this region.

For those of us who have followed the debate about regional spending over a number of years, it’s a depressingly familiar picture.

It has long been clear that the North-East’s relative lack of good transport links are the biggest single obstacle to its competitiveness, and the biggest single reason for the endurance of the North-South divide.

Sadly, the die was cast on this years ago when the government declared, around the same time as it gave the original go-ahead to Crossrail, that there was no relationship between regional spending and regional economic prosperity.

It was, of course, a lie, but it was a lie that enabled ministers to claim that spending £16bn improving London’s transport system would have absolutely no adverse impact on poorer regions.

That, of course, is a nonsense. Between them, Crossrail and the new high speed link will dramatically widen the prosperity gap between those regions that already have good transport connections and those that have never had them.

Of all the many reactions to the high speed decision, perhaps the quaintest came from the chief executive of One North East, Alan Clarke.

“The phasing of the development of a high speed network is important and must not lead to areas of economic disadvantage,” he said.

“Lead to?” Wake up and smell the coffee Alan. Economic disadvantage has been here for decades – and it’s about to get worse.

Miliband rises as Griffin bombs

All the media attention this week was on Nick Griffin and the BNP. But meanwhile, some possibly more significant developments have been taking place behind the scenes in the Labour Party. Here's today's Journal column.

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There is a widely-held maxim in our profession that all publicity is good publicity. But after Thursday night's Question Time on the BBC, I wonder if Nick Griffin would necessarily agree.

In the run-up to the programme, there were widespread fears that the British National Party leader's appearance would somehow give the far-right group the mainstream political respectability it craves.

Critics of the BBC's decision to allow him to appear cited the upsurge in support for Jean-Marie Le Pen's neo-fascist National Front party in France in 1984, following a high-profile television performance.

But in the event, those who were worried on this score need not have feared. Far from giving his party added credibility, Mr Griffin's appearance on the programme merely confirmed that neither he nor his party are serious political players.

If Mr Griffin was the political genius that his admirers - as well as some of his opponents - clearly believe him to be, then maybe they would have had a point.

But Mr Griffin is no Jean-Marie Le Pen, still less an Enoch Powell, and my overwhelming impression from watching the programme was to wonder why anyone would want to vote for this clown.

Grinning your way through a YouTube video about MPs' expenses as Prime Minister Gordon Brown did earlier this year is one thing. Grinning your way through a question about whether or not you denied the Holocaust is quite another.

For my part, I cannot disagree with Justice Secretary Jack Straw's verdict, that far from providing the BNP with a platform for a political "breakthrough," the whole episode has been a catastrophe for the party.

Meanwhile, back in the real world of serious politics....strange things seem to be stirring in the Labour undergrowth.

Today sees the return to the region of the one-time Hartlepool MP Peter Mandelson to deliver the annual South Shields Lecture in the constituency of Foreign Secretary and potential Labour leadership contender David Miliband.

The confluence of these two leading Blairites in the region at the same time has led to excitable talk that Lord Mandy may be preparing to throw over poor Mr Brown in favour of the perennial young pretender.

While this may be a case of putting two and two together and making 17, there is a certain political logic to some of the speculation, in that most Labour MPs now believe the Prime Minister to be incapable of leading them to victory next May.

But as Mr Brown's fortunes have continued to decline, Miliband Senior seems to have overcome the political banana-skins that afflicted him during 2008 to become, once more, the flavour of the month.

As I noted a few weeks back, his cause has probably been helped by the fact that his chief rival, Home Secretary Alan Johnson, has now said he's not up to the job of PM so many times that most of the party agrees with him.

As well as resuming his front-runner status for the Labour leadership, Mr Miliband is also being spoken of as a contender for the post of EU foreign minister or "high representative," due to be created once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified.

Mr Miliband used Twitter to deny the rumour yesterday, but some insist he'd be happier in that role than in No 10, and that it's actually younger brother Ed who is Mandy's chosen one.

I wrote several months ago now that I did not believe Mr Brown would lead Labour into the General Election if it became clear that the only consequence of that would be a catastrophic defeat.

The recent drip-drip-drip of information about the Prime Minister’s health, some of it emanating from within Downing Street itself, seems to confirm that an exit strategy is being carefully devised.

At the moment, I suspect Mr Brown is keeping his options open in the hope that something will turn up, but yesterday’s news that the country is still in recession will hardly have lightened his mood.

One slogan heard doing the rounds this week was “New Year, New Leader” – and once again, the name of Miliband seems to be in the frame.

Cameron does the vision thing

Tory leader David Cameron has always sought to model himself on Tony Blair, and his policy-light, rhetoric-rich speech in Manchester on Thursday was no exception. Almost everything else about it was designed to demonstrate that he is both the heir to Blair and the antithesis of Brown. Here's today's Journal column.

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It is inevitable that, as the Conservative Party moves closer and closer towards government, people will start to pay more and more attention to what a Britain led by David Cameron would actually look like.

The Journal has already begun to do just that, posing the question in Monday’s edition as to what a Tory administration would do for the North-East.

The answer, from where I’m standing, is probably precious little – Mr Cameron’s “pledge” on dualling the A1, for instance, is even more vague than the half-hearted promise uttered by Tony Blair as opposition leader 13 long years ago.

Then again, since New Labour has spent the intervening period doing very little for the region itself, the two main parties are probably pretty even on this score.

Labour’s abject failure to do more to help the least well-off during its long period in power is already emerging as a key Tory campaign theme.

“Don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down,” said Mr Cameron on Thursday, in a passage aimed fairly and squarely at Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister’s people have already responded by pointing to the Tories’ decision to stick by their controversial 2007 pledge to raise inheritance tax thresholds for the richest 1pc of households in the country.

But having presided over a marked growth in inequality since 1997, the government is onto a loser here, and notwithstanding his own party’s record on the issue, Mr Cameron is certainly within his rights to point it out.

Thursday’s keynote speech – light on policy but big on rhetoric – seemed designed as a deliberate contrast with Mr Brown’s policy-rich but rather underwhelming effort of a week earlier.

Its central theme – an attack on “big government” – was certainly audacious, coming in the midst of an economic recession caused primarily by a failure properly to regulate the financial markets,

But the “anti politics” mood created by the expenses scandal, coupled with the general mood of disillusionment towards Labour’s target-setting and micro-management, makes this fertile ground for the Tories.

Mr Cameron is not making the case so much for deregulated financial markets, as deregulated schools, hospitals and councils, the “new localism” that Labour flirted with under Mr Blair but comprehensively abandoned under Mr Brown.

What policy detail there was in Manchester was to be found not in Mr Cameron’s speech but in Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s – another echo there of the Blair-Brown partnership.

He finally set out his plans to reduce the fiscal deficit by proposing an increase in the retirement age to 66, a one-year pay freeze for public sector workers, and a clampdown on “middle-class” welfare payments such as child tax credit.

By coming clean about his proposed cutbacks, Mr Osborne runs the risk of seeing his plans picked apart in the way John Smith’s proposed tax rises were in 1992, but in my view the electorate will respect his candour.

In any case, it wasn’t Smith’s Shadow Budget which lost Labour the ’92 election, but Neil Kinnock’s absurd histrionics in Sheffield – something Mr Cameron is unlikely to repeat.

With Labour having failed to produce a political “game changer” in Brighton, Mr Cameron had only to avoid a disastrous blunder this week in order to end the conference season in pole position for the election race.

Not only did he do that, he actually managed to articulate what Mr Brown has consistently failed to offer – a “big vision” of Britain’s future.

The best bit of Thursday’s speech was the last bit - the “view from the summit” passage where Mr Cameron started to set out the kind of Britain he wants to build once the deficit has been paid off.

After ten years of Mr Blair, the public was fed-up with this style of politics. Two years of Mr Brown has been enough to bring it back into fashion.

Not-so-new Labour say their goodbyes

This week's Journal column focuses on North-East matters, namely the forthcoming retirement of at least ten of the region's 30 MPs. Most of them are going not because of the expenses row but because they're 60 and facing a spell in Opposition, but some of them will leave a bigger hole than others....

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All general elections involve goodbyes. Over the last decade and a half, those who have bidden farewell to the Commons’ green benches have included such North-East political luminaries as Don Dixon, Sir Neville Trotter, Dr David Clark and Derek Foster.

In between times, the region also saw two of its most famous ‘imports’ move on to fresh woods and pastures new – Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair.

But even that loss of political talent looks set to be dwarfed by the scale of the exodus when the next election finally takes place.

Ten of the North-East’s 30 MPs have already announced they are standing down – or in the case of Stockton North’s Frank Cook, had it announced for them – and several more may yet follow.

As well as Mr Cook, who has been deselected, those on the way out include former ministers Hilary Armstrong (Durham North West), Alan Milburn (Darlington), Doug Henderson (Newcastle North) and Chris Mullin (Sunderland South).

They are joined in the queue for the exit door by backbenchers Jim Cousins (Newcastle Central), Fraser Kemp (Houghton and Washington), John Cummings (Easington), Bill Etherington (Sunderland North) and Peter Atkinson (Hexham).

Some of these departures can be put down to natural longevity – with the exceptions of Mr Kemp and Mr Milburn, all are either at or approaching the normal retirement age,

But there has inevitably been speculation that the MPs’ expenses scandal, while not directly implicating any of the above-named in wrongdoing, may have persuaded at least some of them that Parliament was no longer worth the candle.

For my part, I’m not sure. While some no doubt view with trepidation the prospect of having the public pore over their expense claims online, it is as nothing compared to the far grimmer prospect of Opposition.

With Labour providing 28 of those 30 MPs, the prospect of a Labour defeat in 2010 will inevitably have a bigger impact in the North-East than elsewhere.

Most of the Labour MPs who are retiring have already experienced a longish spell in Opposition prior to 1997 – but back then, they were in their 40s, and could look forward confidently to ministerial office one day.

For an MP past his or her 60th birthday, five years of Opposition presents a quite different proposition. Even if Labour is only out for one term, there would be little for them to come to back to save for a lap-of-honour on the backbenches.

So Ms Armstrong and Mr Henderson, for instance, are right in their assessments that it is time for a younger person to take over the reins in their respective seats, and although they have not all said so explicitly, the same goes for many of the others.

That is not to say, however, that some of those going will not constitute a grievous loss to the politics of the region, and indeed to the UK as a whole.

The MP who will be most sorely missed in terms of his dogged and occasionally lonely championing of the region’s interests will, without doubt, be Jim Cousins.

Meanwhile the ones who will leave the biggest holes in terms of their wider contribution to Parliament and to centre-left politics more generally will be Chris Mullin and Alan Milburn.

So why single out those three? Well, Mr Cousins first. Back in the days before 1997, the Newcastle Central MP had legitimate ambitions to be a minister, and served at one time as part of Robin Cook’s Shadow Foreign Office team.

But to the region’s very great fortune, he lost that job and ended up in what turned out to be the very much more influential role of backbench member of the Commons’ Treasury Committee.

For the past 12 years, he has used that platform to advance the interests of the North-East at every opportunity, from bemoaning the impact of London-centric interest rate policies in the late 90s to helping facilitate the rescue of Northern Rock last year.

Jim would have been a perfectly competent minister, but the truth is he’d have been wasted. Quite simply, there has been no finer advocate for this region over the past two decades.

But if the North-East owes Mr Cousins a great debt, the country as a whole owes a greater one to Mr Mullin – another who found his talents more suited to being out of government than in it.

His championing of the cause of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four highlighted two of the worst miscarriages of justice of the past half-century, and led to lasting changes in the criminal justice system.

As for Mr Milburn, he will, to my mind, go down as largely unfulfilled political talent. He had a lot more left to contribute to the Labour Party, and had he chosen to do so, could have helped Gordon Brown renew its policies for new political times.

Unfortunately the two men found themselves unable to work together for the good of the party – a sure sign of a party that is about to lose power.

Inevitably, there have been suggestions that the great exodus will fundamentally change the political culture of the North-East, but that remains to be seen.

While the imposition of all-woman shortlists in some seats may very well make the Northern Group of Labour MPs less male, whether it will make the North-East less Labour is much more open to doubt.

The Tories can legitimately entertain hopes of winning perhaps three additional seats in the region next year, and the Liberal Democrats two – but that still leaves Labour as the overwhelmingly dominant force.

The region is seeing not so much a changing of the political guard, as the swapping of an ageing Labour generation for a younger one.

The day Downing Street "lost it"

Most journalists have a favourite story, and most people who knew me in my Lobby days would probably assume mine was the infamous Eddie George gaffe - in which the then Bank of England Governor told me that lost North-East jobs were an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in London and the South.

But they would be wrong. The story I enjoyed the most was actually written a year earlier in October 1997 and concerned the then Labour Cabinet Minister and South Shields MP, Dr David Clark.

A Downing Street press officer, perhaps mistaking me for someone who could be relied on to unthinkingly recycle the New Labour spin, told me that Dr Clark had "lost it" and would shortly be sacked in a reshuffle. We duly turned the story round, reporting that far from having "lost it," Clark was actually the victim of a smear campaign, and splashed it all over the front page.

But what was No 10 up to, exactly? You can read the full story in my "Where Are They Now" column this month's edition of Total Politics which focuses on the Good Doctor's short but fascinating Cabinet career.

Jobs crisis threatens Brown's "New Deal"

Today's Journal column is the last to be illustrated n its print version by cartoonist Geoff Laws who is leaving the paper. He provided a great illustration of Gordon Brown injecting the arm of a stricken hospital patient while all the blood drained out of the other side. You'll have to buy the paper to see it, but if you read the column below you'll get the meaning.

Enjoy life outside newspapers Geoff - and don't stop eating the seared scallops.

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First this week, some words of thanks. For all of the 12 years of this column’s existence, its words have been brilliantly illuminated by Geoff Laws’ wonderful cartoons.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and since that is the average length of the column, the old adage was never more apt than in the case of the long-running Linford – Laws partnership.

Geoff is now leaving the staff of The Journal– although he will still be contributing regular restaurant reviews to the paper – so today’s illustration will be his last.

I’m sure regular readers of the column will join me in thanking him for brightening up our Saturday mornings for so many years, and wishing him all the very best for the future.

And so without further ado to the politics. In my preview of 2009 last week, I ventured the possibility that the next 12 months may be rather difficult ones for Gordon Brown as the state of the economy worsens.

Well, nothing I have seen in the first full week of the New Year has done anything to dissuade me from that view.

Sure, the Prime Minister has come out fighting, as by now we would expect him to, with a whistlestop regional tour and a package of public works designed to create 100,000 new jobs.

But out there in the “real economy,” companies continue to go to the wall and jobs continue to go – not least in this region which on Thursday saw the loss of 1,200 posts at Nissan in Sunderland.

For the North-East, this is about as bad as it gets, short of the closure of the entire Nissan operation in Sunderland as was feared at various points in the late 1990s.

The car plant has long been emblematic of the “rebirth” of the region as a manufacturing centre after the painful demise of its coal and steel industries in the 1980s.

Its current plight illustrates the difficulties Mr Brown is facing not just in trying to mitigate the worst effects of the recession, but also in convincing the public that he is succeeding.

While he is desperately trying to give the economy a shot in the arm with his public sector job plans, the lifeblood continues to drain out of it in the shape of private sector job cuts.

The Prime Minister does, at least, have a clear strategy – to create and preserve British jobs amid predictions that in 12 months’ time one in 10 of us will be unemployed.

“I want to show how we will be able, though public investments and public works, to create probably 100,000 additional jobs over the next period of time in our capital investment programme – schools, hospitals, environmental work, transport,” he said last weekend.

Mr Brown even went so far as to suggest that combating the recession could be combined with the grand purpose of re-equipping Britain for the digital age.

“When we talk about the roads and the bridges and the railways that were built in previous time – and those were anti-recession measures – you could talk about the digital infrastructure at a period when we want to stimulate the economy,” he added.

It’s hardly surprising to hear Mr Brown talk like this. In a sense, he’s now in his political comfort zone.

If people sometimes think Mr Brown seems to be revelling in the economic downturn, it’s perhaps because it has opened the way to the kind of New Deal politics he has always believed in.

He’s been compared in much of the media this week to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who built America out of the Great Depression in the 1930s, although I seem to recall making that comparison myself a while back on these pages.

With President-elect Barack Obama being spoken of in similar terms, he is no doubt hoping that some of those comparisons – and some of that stardust – will rub off.

But while Mr Brown has certainly hit the ground running at the start of the New Year, the other two parties have not let been letting him have things all his own way.

David Cameron has launched a further bid to detoxify the Tory brand by talking about the need for “ethical capitalism,” a fresh twist on the old Blairite saw about economic efficiency and social justice going hand in hand.

It’s a brave, if somewhat belated attempt to tackle the perception of the Tories as the “do nothing” party, content to let laissez-faire economics and the recession run their inevitable course.

Meanwhile Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg decided to have a reshuffle, although it is unclear what, if anything, was achieved by this.

But to conclude this week, here’s a few further thoughts about Nissan together with a bit of a history lesson.

I alluded earlier to the fact that, in the late 1990s, there was a question mark over the entire future of the Nissan plant, but the issue back then wasn’t the state of the UK car industry – far from it.

No, it was the almost evangelical belief on the part of the plant’s Japanese owners that Britain – and more importantly, their own business - would be better off in the euro-zone where most of its markets were based.

The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was known to be worried that contracts to build new models would go to Nissan’s European plants unless ministers made more positive noises about the euro.

Interestingly, it is not an argument that has been made this time around – but let’s just suppose that it were to be.

What would Gordon Brown do if a major British employer were to go to him and threaten to move tens of thousands of jobs to Europe unless Britain joined the single currency?

We saw in 2008 the impact that changes in economic circumstances can have, when the credit crunch turned the once-derided Bennite policy of bank nationalisation into the political flavour of the month.

The baleful prospect of a million UK job losses in the next 12 months could similarly turn the current conventional political wisdom on its head.

Is this one reason to vote Tory?

Setting tribalism aside for a moment, I have to applaud the Tories for thinking outside the box and refusing to go along with the conventional wisdom on airport expansion. Instead of a third runway at Heathrow, they plan to build a new high speed rail link to the Midlands and the North.

To hear the Conservatives actually advocating major investment in (a) rail infrastructure, and (b) the North of England was a real breath of fresh air and shows how much politics has been turned on its head since the 1980s and 1990s when both would have been anathema. Much more of this sort of thing and I might even vote for them.

My only criticism of the plan was that the Tories' proposed new high-speed rail route appears to run only from London to Birmingham to Manchester to Leeds. What about Newcastle, Dave?

The Pundit calls it right again

Credit where credit's due. While I got all excited about the return of King Kev to Tyneside last January, the UK Daily Pundit declared in the comments that he'll be gone by the end of the year.

I suppose I should have known better. But so, more importantly, should the Board of Newcastle United Football Club.

All quiet on the Barnett front

Why has it all gone quiet over the Barnett Formula? And could it be anything to do with Glasgow East? Here's my column in today's Newcastle Journal.

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Earlier this year, a brief flurry of excitement went around the Westminster village that Gordon Brown might be about to do something that few thought possible for a Scottish PM.

The Treasury had ordered a study into the workings of the controversial Barnett funding formula which governs the allocation of public spending within the UK - surely a precursor to its eventual abolition.

At the same time, Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems agreed to set up a Commission to look at the Scottish Parliament’s powers and funding, likely to include consideration of whether the Scots should move towards greater financial self-sufficiency.

Could the 30-year-old formula, long a source of disquiet in the North-East on account of the tens of millions of additional spending it awards to Scotland, finally be on the way out?

BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson certainly thought so, proclaiming on his blog that "the skids appear finally to be under the Barnett Formula.”

I myself was slightly more circumspect, commenting on these pages that the long battle for a fair funding deal for the North-East still had a way to go yet.

Since then, though, nothing. Maybe Mr Brown has thought better of it. Maybe the various reviews, studies and commissions are taking longer than expected to come to fruition.

Most likely, it's been put on the back burner pending the resolution of other political crises requiring more immediate attention.

The issue, of course, has not gone away. This week's report by the regional think-tank ippr north once again underlined the case for reform.

It found that although the gap between Scotland and the North-East in terms of public spending has narrowed in recent years, it still stands at £716 per head.

The report's main author Guy Lodge said the Barnett formula was no longer "fit for purpose" and should be replaced.

"It does not result in a fair distribution of spending, and is becoming an increasing source of tension between the nations of the UK," he added.

In its response to Thursday's report, the Treasury certainly gave little indication that anything was about to change.

It said there were "no plans" to change the Barnett formula, describing it as "a fair allocation which reflects population shares in the different nations of the United Kingdom" - which is pretty much what it's been saying for the past 11 years.

But whatever the reason behind the apparent lull in government activity around the issue, it is doubtful that much more is going to happen in the next fortnight at least.

Why? Because on July 24, voters in Glasgow East will go to the polls to elect a successor to Labour MP David Marshall, who resigned his seat on the grounds of ill-health last month.

Like Crewe and Nantwich, like Henley, this was undoubtedly a by-election that Mr Brown could have done without.

The main opponent will be Alex Salmond's Scottish Nationalists, and even the slightest movement on the Barnett Formula is bound to be exploited.

Mr Salmond, indeed, got his retaliation in early in his response to Thursday's report, saying: "It is abundantly clear that the motivation of both Labour and the Tories on this issue is slashing Scottish spending."

He claims that, far from being subsidised by England, Scotland's oil revenues are actually subsidising the rest of the UK to the tune of £4.4bn a year.

Does Glasgow East represent any sort of threat to Mr Brown, given that Mr Marshall had a majority of 13,507and had held the seat for Labour since 1979?

Well, ordinarily, no - but these are not ordinary times and the Prime Minister's record in by-elections thus far hardly inspires confidence.

Furthermore, there is one aspect of the Glasgow East contest that carries a particular danger for Mr Brown - the fact that it is taking place in his own Scottish political backyard.

If he can't win this one, Labour MPs will justifiably start to wonder whether he can actually win anywhere.

Mr Brown can at least take comfort from the fact that the by-election is taking place two days after the start of the summer Parliamentary recess, reducing the scope for plotting.

But the fact that even Harriet Harman has been talked about during the past week as a possible replacement demonstrates the extent of the trouble the Prime Minister is in.

My guess is that Labour will hang on, and that the immediate danger for Mr Brown will recede until the start of the conference season in September.

But as for the future of the Barnett Formula, the Prime Minister finds himself as caught between a rock and a hard place as he ever was.

It was, I think, always Labour's hope that it could safely ignore the problem, and that the formula would simply wither on the vine as spending between the different parts of the UK gradually converged.

It has now become clear, though, that this process will take so long that unless something is done sooner, the union could well fall apart in the meantime.

Reforming the Barnett Formula might have been one of the many radical things that Mr Brown dreamed of doing once he got to Number Ten.

Now he's there, though, he has found himself far too preoccupied simply with staying alive.

Two fingers to the electorate

As promised, my weekly column in today's Newcastle Journal focuses on Mr David Clelland's little local difficulty, the row over MPs expenses - and what it all tells us about trust.

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Over the course of his political career, David Clelland has been a notable servant of the North-East, both as an MP for the past 23 years and as leader of Gateshead council before that.

But in spite of – or perhaps because of – his doughty work on behalf of the region, the Tyne Bridge MP has only twice hit the national headlines.

The first was ten years ago, when he left his wife for his then secretary Brenda Graham, now the second Mrs Clelland, although media interest in the “story” proved thankfully short-lived.

The second was this week, when it emerged that he had told a constituent, Gary Scott, where he could “stick” his vote at the next election after he sent Mr Clelland a letter of complaint about the government’s record.

Mr Clelland’s actions have engendered widely differing reactions. Some have cited his behaviour as evidence of the “arrogance” of the political class and the growing gulf between MPs and the public.

To those of this persuasion, MPs are “servants” rather than “masters” and should behave as such, no matter what the provocation.

Others have seen Mr Clelland’s dismissive response as an indication that Labour has given up on the next general election already.

As Mr Scott himself told The Journal: “Labour are struggling for supporters as it is but if they don’t want voters who dare to question policies, they are finished.”

But on the opposing side of the argument, there are those who have applauded Mr Clelland’s honesty in speaking from the heart rather than sending the standard stock reply: “Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.”

Surely, they argue, we want our MPs to be human beings, not machines? It’s a fair point.

Still others have hailed Mr Clelland a hero for striking a blow for MPs who long to be able to tell vexatious letter-writers where to get off.

Said one MP’s researcher: “They regularly write book-length tomes on everything from climate change to Big Brother and expect the MP to address each and every point - all of which takes time away from helping constituents in true need.”

For my part, I would in the natural scheme of things have a fair degree of sympathy for this point of view, and indeed for Mr Clelland personally.

By and large, he has been a good thing for the North-East – most notably in campaigning for both a fairer funding deal and a stronger political voice for the region over the course of many years.

One thing, though, makes me stop short of a more whole-hearted endorsement – the fact that, on Thursday night, he voted to keep the discredited system of MPs allowances.

This, to me, says rather more about Mr Clelland – and the other 171 MPs who voted alongside him – than a minor spat with a constituent.

For the benefit of those who missed it, MPs were presented with a report from a special committee recommending the end of the so-called “John Lewis List” which enables them to claim expenses for new kitchens and TVs.

The review committee also wanted to replace the so-called £24,000 allowance for the upkeep of second homes.

In the event, MPs voted by 171 to 143 to keep both, although many more abstained.

Overwhelmingly, it was Labour MPs who voted in favour of retaining the current system, even though Prime Minister Gordon Brown had indicated that he favoured reform.

Conventional wisdom might suggest that North-East MPs, who have to live away from their constituencies during the week, would naturally tend to support generous allowances for second homes.

Other regional parliamentarians besides Mr Clelland who voted to keep the current system included Nick Brown, Kevan Jones, Stephen Byers and Ronnie Campbell.

But significantly, it was by no means a universal view among the Northern Group of Labour MPs, with Sir Stuart Bell, Vera Baird, Helen Goodman and Chris Mullin all backing the proposed reform.

It is also worth noting that Sir Alan Beith, whose constituency is further away from London than any MP in England, let alone the North, also supported change.

What we have here, then, is not so much a regional divide as a clash of values – between MPs who think it is fine to charge the taxpayer for new tellies and those who would draw the line at that.

Perhaps at a deeper level, too, it is a clash of values between those who care what the public think of them, and those who are happy to tell the electorate to “stick it” – to coin a phrase.

In the context of the overriding need to rebuild public trust and confidence in the political system, Thursday’s vote was not just perverse, it was stupid.

Yes, MPs need a certain amount of taxpayers’ money to do their jobs, but for them to insist on their right to buy TVs and sofas on the public purse – particularly at this stage in the economic cycle – was just asking for trouble.

It was not, of course, backbench MPs who were primarily to blame for the loss of public trust in politicians that has occurred over the past decade and a half.

It started with the Tory sleaze of the mid-1990s and intensified as a result of New Labour’s spin and sleaze over the past 11 years under both Mr Brown and Tony Blair.

Yet here was a rare opportunity for backbench MPs to do something about it, to actually start to rebuild the frayed bond of trust between them and the people they purport to represent.

By spurning that opportunity, it is not just Mr Clelland who has given a metaphorical two fingers to the voters.

And ballots to you too, sir

Veteran North-East MP David "Stick your vote" Clelland was among the 172 MPs who voted to keep the "John Lewis List" in Thursday night's vote on the expenses system. What does that say about him, and about the other MPs who voted against reform?

I'll try to give some answers in my Newcastle Journal column tomorrow.

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.

Milburn: Next election up for grabs

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part one
Uploaded by broadbandtvchannel

I am pleased to be able to carry on this blog an interview with the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn conducted by Graham Robb, an old friend from my days as Political Editor of the Newcastle Journal.

Together with Labour supporter Nick Wallis, former Tory election candidate Graham hosts a programme called "Northern Decision Makers" which features on his new broadband TV channel.

In the interview, which is in two parts, Mr Milburn says the next general election will be the closest since 1974 and argues that it is currently "up for grabs."

While he concedes that Gordon Brown could lose, he also predicts that so long as Labour gets the over-arching narrative right and presents a message of hope, the party will win an unprecedented fourth term.

The interview also contains some further interesting thoughts from Mr Milburn on the social moblity agenda which he has continued to champion during his time outside government.

It is well worth watching, and provides further proof in my view that a place should be found for the Darlington MP back at Labour's top table.

Northern Decision Makers - Alan Milburn part two
Uploaded by broadbandtvchannel

At long last....

Just when you thought that the Brown Government was going to do absolutely nothing to address the English Question...up pops today's Telegraph with the revelation that that Prime Minister has ordered a review of the infamous Barnett Formula.

The figures on how the formula awards Scotland an extra £1,500 per head in public spending per year speak for themselves, but a good practical example of how this operates was recently uncovered by the Newcastle Journal which revealed that the £16bn Crossrail project would automatically mean an additional £1.6bn for Scotland - irrespective of whether it needed it.

I have to confess I had given up hope of anything being done about it this side of the general election. In a Journal Column last November, I argued that Labour's real opportunity to reform the formula came in 1999/2000 when the party was riding high politically and public expenditure as a whole was rising so sharply that the adjustment could effectively have been concealed. Now, the politics of the situation have changed utterly, with the SNP now very much in the ascendant, while public spending is no longer rising anything like as fast.

I can only imagine that Mr Brown has either become convinced that the formula is wrong in principle - a view that would be hard to reconcile with his treatment of the issue while at the Treasury - or that he has concluded that the rising level of English discontent over the issue outweighs the obvious political risks from north of the border.

March 6 update: There appears to be some doubt over whether the Telegraph story is actually true, but if so I wouldn't blame the newspaper for that. The Government has been speaking with a forked tongue over this issue for at least a decade. My hunch, for what it's worth, is that while there may be no changes planned to the BF as yet, something is rumbling in the Whitehall undergrowth.

Not Black Wednesday yet

This weekend's column in the Newcastle Journal naturally focuses on the political fallout thus far from the Northern Rock nationalisation, announced a week ago today.

The full version is on Behind the Lines as usual but the digested read is:

Labour did the right thing nationalising the bank, although, driven by an irrational fear of the n-word, they took slightly too long to get there.

The Tories' response to the crisis has been confused from the start, as a result of which the party has failed to articulate a credible alternative.

The public's reaction thus far demonstrates that this has not been Labour's Black Wednesday, although there remain unanswered questions over Granite.

All in all, the whole episode ought to mark the end of our love affair with financial deregulation.