Derbyshire memories

For those who are interested in local stuff - and I know there are a few of you out there - here's a link to a piece I wrote about Derbyshire political personalities for a local history site with which I am involved called You and Yesterday. Edwina Currie, Phillip Oppenheim and David Bookbinder are among the names mentioned.

Loyalty still counts for something

Although Tory MP Derek Conway is clearly in the wrong over his generous taxpayer-funded payments to a family member - he is by no means the only MP who does this by the way - I have to admire Iain Dale for his refusal to join the braying pack demanding his instant hanging, drawing and quartering. Conway is a friend of Iain's and he says loyalty should still count for something.

And so indeed it should. Which is why you won't find me calling a decent and honest politician like Gordon Brown a weirdo just because he chews his fingernails.

Britblog round-up nominations

As promised here are my nominations for Britblog Round-up 154 which will appear later today at Philobiblon.

First, Dizzy for his revelation that a new Whitehall department is being created which will involve significant "legacy issues." This can only be a Department for Devolution taking over from the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland offices and the fact that it didn't happen in this week's mini-reshuffle probably meant no more than they aren't quite ready to do it yet.

Second, a great piece from Hopi Sen refuting the silly but oft-heard argument that it would be good for Labour to lose the next general election so it can renew itself in opposition.

Thirdly, I'm nominating Anthony Barnett's response on Our Kingdom to my own post about the Tories' personalisation of the battle against "that strange man in Downing Street." Anthony's argument is that you have to be pretty strange to be Prime Minister anyway.

"Brown maybe getting things wrong. But he is a serious political figure in a land steeped in superficiality - if that is not a contradiction in terms....The fact is that to be a driven politician today demands a personality defect. The proof of this is Thatcher. She was respected even though her popular vote always declined. But everyone knew that she was as strange as a bat out of hell."

Finally, it would be impossible to conclude a round-up of the blogging week without mention of Guido Fawkes and the spat over whether or not he is working for Conservative Central Office (not, as it happens.) In the week in which he was widely credited with bringing down Peter Hain (my view is that his investigative work certainly played a part) Mr Fawkes appears to have put one over on the MSM yet again.

No to Milburn, and no to electoral reform

This week's column in the Newcastle Journal focuses on two stories - Peter Hain's resignation and the subsequent Cabinet reshuffle, and as flagged up in the previous post, the government's decision to rule out PR for Westminster following the review of electoral systems across the UK.

Both of these, in my view, go down as yet more missed opportunities by Gordon Brown. He could, as I have argued in recent week, have used the departure of Mr Hain to strengthen a distinctly middle-weight Cabinet line-up by bringing back a heavyweight from the Blair years, preferably Alan Milburn. Interestingly James Forsyth on Spectator Coffee House takes a similar view. He comments:

"A quick check on the health of a party is whether there is more talent on the back benches than the front bench. Labour are close to that tipping point with Charles Clarke, Jon Cruddas, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Denis MacShane, David Blunkett and Frank Field all out of the front line...If Labour is going to win the next election they have to get their A team on the field. This limited reshuffle suggests that Brown hasn’t grasped this."

In my column I also argue that Brown should have used the review of elctoral systems to order a fresh look at PR for Westminster, as a pre-emptive strike against the Tories for Nick Clegg's hand in marriage after the next election. The piece can be read in full HERE.

The great men of Tower

Like most people who have lived or worked in Wales at some point, I was sad to hear about the closure of Tower Colliery, the last deep mine in the principality. It's a story that has a particular poignancy for me because I was covered the mine's initial closure as a reporter on the South Wales Echo in 1994, as well as the subsequent triumphant campaign to reopen it.

Tyrone O'Sullivan, the South Wales NUM leader turned mine owner, was a top contact during the whole saga and is one of the few people I met in my career in journalism whom I would describe as a genuinely great man. The story was later included in a special publication called Heroes of Coal which is still the single piece of work of which I am proudest in my whole career.

The 270 men of Tower who sank their £8,000 redundancy cheques into keeping the mine open will now share the proceeds of the sale of the land at Hirwaun for redevelopment. I hope they get top dollar - they deserve it.

The story everyone missed

Or maybe it was the story the government buried, I'm not quite sure. But amid all the excitement of the Hain resignation, the fact that Nu Lab has once again appeared to knock electoral reform on the head has inevitably received little attention.

I'll be saying a lot more about this in my weekend column in The Journal, which will be posted on Behind the Lines at some point tomorrow, but I have to say this goes down as a major, major missed opportunity by Gordon, both in terms of his attempts to restore trust in the political system, and in terms of positioning his party ahead of an election which in my view has hung Parliament written all over it.

Yesterday's announcement from Justice Minister Michael Wills stated that the review of electoral systems across the UK had found that voters in Scotland and Wales were "confused" by proportional representation, and ruled out its introduction for Westminster.

This was one of the areas where I and many others hoped that Brown would display more radicalism than had been the case with Tony Blair. Slowly, inexorably, those hopes are fading.

Gordon goes for youth

Gordon's first enforced reshuffle is now almost complete and it is clear he won't be doing either of the things that I urged in my previous post - abolishing the almost-meaningless post of Welsh Secretary along with the other territorial posts, and bringing back a heavyweight from the Blair years to bolster his flagging administration.

Instead, he seems to have taken the opportunity to underline one of the key themes that marked his first attempt at Cabinet-making last July - that we are now in the throes of the transition from one Labour generation to the next.

James Purnell, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, the three main beneficiaries of today's changes, are all in their 30s. All have been spoken about at one time or another as potential leaders of the party, and to paraphrase Tony Blair, clearly they are the future now.

Brown had the opportunity to bring back Alan Milburn, or David Blunkett, or Charles Clarke, and he passed on it. It means they are almost certainly now not returning to the Cabinet table.

I know very little about Andy Burnham, and I am indifferent to the charms of James Purnell, but Yvette Cooper is someone I have always rated highly. Regular readers of this blog will know that I regard her as the premier politician in the Balls household, and the likeliest to make it to the top of the greasy pole.

It is reasonably well-known that Blair spitefully delayed her promotion to the Cabinet as a way of getting back at Ed Balls, but what is less well-known is that her early career in government was hampereed by chronic fatigue syndrome. To successfully come back from that is no mean feat in itself.

The predictable choice of 59-year-old retread Paul Murphy to the Welsh Office appears to fly in the face of the accent on youth, but it just may be the case that this is intended to be a relatively short-term appointment.

I still believe that a restructuring of the territorial posts into a "Department for Devolution" is on the cards at some point, if only for the reason that the current situation is pretty indefensible.

A couple of other aspects of the reshuffle have thus far passed relatively unnoticed, so I shall briefly mention them. Stephen Timms, a member of the Blair Cabinet who was unaccountably excluded by Brown, returns in Caroline Flint's old role of Pensions Minister.

And finally....there's a new role in the Cabinet Office for blogger Tom Watson, the man who once said he would never return to government, although it later became clear he was taking the michael.

Hain quits - but what happens next?

Well, I said it was only a matter of time.

The interesting thing now is to see how Gordon responds to this, his first, enforced reshuffle. Will he do the boring, obvious thing and promote Andy Burnham to Work and Pensions Secretary and bring in a trustie like John Healey as Chief Secretary to the Treasury? Or will he do the imaginative thing and bring back a heavyweight like Alan Milburn or David Blunkett to run the DWP? And will he finally scrap the territorial departments as Dizzy and myself both speculated last weekend?

Fundamentally, is Brown seeing the departure of Hain as an opportunity, as Blair would have done, or a threat, as Major would have done? The answers could tell us a lot about the kind of Prime Minister he will ultimately turn out to be.

5pm update: So far, it's looking fairly obvious and predictable - Purnell to DWP, Burnham to DCMS, Yvette Cooper to the Treasury, Caroline Flint to Housing Minister. Still no word on Wales though.

6pm update: It's Paul Murphy for Wales and no restructuring of the territorial departments. This is the very boring, as well as the very shortsighted option. More later.

This Not-So-Charming Man

A couple of weeks back, the right-wing columnist Richard Littlejohn made a vile attack on Gordon Brown in which he made reference to his "kiddie fiddler smile." That estimable blogger Paul Burgin was one of those who were suitably outraged, expressing the view that Littlejohn should not be allowed to get away with such a "joke."

I left the following comment on his blog:

It's not a joke, Paul, it's a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public mind. It's not just the likes of Littlejohn who are doing it, you can see also see it happening on all the leading right-wing blogs.

When I wrote this, I had in mind a particularly disgusting post on Guido in which a sock-puppet called "Stanislav" claimed the Prime Minister was suffering from chronic mental illness as a result of having repressed his homosexuality, and that marrying Sarah and having children as the prospect of No 10 drew closer had essentially been a front.

Of course, David Cameron would never utter such contemptible rubbish. But nevertheless, it's clear from his interview with the new Times editor this morning, in which he describes Mr Brown as "that strange man in Downing Street," that portraying his opponent as somehow not one of us is a key part of the Tory leader's political strategy.

Mr Cameron clearly wants to portray himself as This Charming Man, and Brown as (to quote) This Strange Man, but if the public has any sense it will backfire. What on earth gives Cameron the right to describe another man as "strange" and by what measure of "normality" does he seek to judge the Prime Minister?

We are all individuals, and the fact that, like Esau, Gordon Brown is not a "smooth" man does not necessarily make him a bad man. Increasingly, for the political and media class, it seems that the worst crime is to be different.

Cross-posted on Liberal Conspiracy and also featured on "Best of the Web" on Comment is Free.

Three Little Pigs "offensive"

Yes, sadly true. And in a further development, Pink Floyd have been forced to rename the opening track of their classic 1977 album, Animals, as Cats on the Wing.

Ken - a flawed political genius

Much comment on the blogosphere today over Martin Bright's adept character-assassination of London Mayor Ken Livingstone on Channel 4 last night. Iain Dale makes the perfectly reasonable point that if even the Political Editor of the left-leaning New Statesman is joining what appears to be a concerted media campaign against him, it leaves the Labour Party with something of a problem.

For me, the key question is the one posed by Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy, namely is Ken still the best candidate on offer for the liberal-left, particularly in view of the need to block that frivolous twit Johnson. The consensus on the site appears to be that Brian Paddick is now their best option, but knowing his view on drugs I cannot possibly go along with this.

As it happens, the question is academic for me as I no longer live in London and won't have a vote this time round. But I voted for Ken at the first two Mayoral elections and in view of what he has achieved for the capital, I don't regret having done so.

Ken is a flawed character, to be sure. But without wanting to get all preachy about it, we all are.

Could Hain's demise mean the end of the territorial departments?

Yesterday Dizzy speculated that the government was about to create a new Department for Devolved Affairs from the existing Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland offices.

By complete coincedence I said much the same sort of thing in my Saturday Column in the Newcastle Journal, arguing that the departure of part-time Welsh Secretary Peter Hain would create an opening for such a structural reshuffle.

The Prime Minister would have done better, in my view, to have acted more decisively and used the departure of Mr Hain as an opportunity to strengthen his beleaguered administration.

Firstly, it would have freed up a Cabinet berth for Darlington MP Alan Milburn, bringing much-needed fresh thinking into the government and enabling Mr Brown to stage a public rapprochement with the Blairites.

Secondly, it would have created an opening for a long-overdue structural reshuffle, combining the territorial Cabinet posts under a single Department for Devolved Affairs.

Why Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland still need a Cabinet minister each when they all now have their own elected First Ministers is not just beyond me but many other observers besides.

Britblog roundup nominations

This week's Britblog Roundup will appear later today at Liberal England. From now on I'm going to try to make a practice of nominating the five best posts I've seen anywhere on the blogosphere each week, so here without further ado is this week's list:

A slice of sheer genius from Tim Ireland

Cranmer is not impressed with the idea of Blair as President of Europe

Melanie Philips reckons the MSM are ignoring the story about the plot to kill the Queen.

Ben Brogan puts the Tories on the spot over Northern Rock

Justin McKeating wonders if it's worth Peter Hain carrying on living

You are also allowed to nominate something from your own blog, and this week I've gone for my warm welcome back for King Kev.