The darker side of Mr Sunshine

Whenever politicians attack eachother in the run-up to a general election, it is safe to assume that some journalist somewhere will write a story beginning with the words: “The gloves came off in the election battle today as….”

In truth, the gloves are hardly ever on in British politics, such is the extent to which our adversarial system encourages bare-knuckle fighting between the protagonists.

Nevertheless, Tory leader David Cameron’s attack on Premier Gordon Brown over MPs expenses at the start of this week did represent something of a step-change in the pre-election skirmishing.

“Gordon Brown cannot reform the institution because he is the institution. The character of his Government - secretive, power-hoarding, controlling - is his character,” he said.

Such language certainly represents something of a paradigm-shift from the noble aspirations set out in Mr Cameron’s victory speech when he became Tory leader in December 2005.

“I'm fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing,” he said back then.

There was more than an element of calculation in this, given that all recent polling evidence suggests that the public is equally fed-up with Punch and Judy politics, or ‘negative campaigning’ to use the technical term.

Indeed, it has since emerged that an internal report on the Tories’ 2005 election campaign found that personal attacks on Tony Blair had actually done more damage to them than to Labour.

Now what was really interesting about this finding was that it showed that politicians saying what the public is thinking is not necessarily always the way to win elections.

Even before 2005, a growing number of people felt that Mr Blair had taken the country into war with Iraq on a false prospectus – but when the Tories branded him a “liar,” the attacks backfired.

Why was this? Well, partly, it’s because the floating voters who actually decide elections are not always thinking the same way as the wider public – as the Tories also found when they talked about immigration.

The biggest reason, though, is that when opposition politicians resort to negative campaigning, it invariably leads the public to assume they have nothing positive or new to offer.

My own hunch is that Mr Cameron was on the right lines when first took over, and that his subsequent decision to “get personal” is a significant strategic error on his part.

Maybe he thinks Mr Brown is now so unpopular that he can freely insult him in the knowledge that the public agrees with him, but if so, he is confusing what the public thinks with what the public wants.

Mr Brown may well be unpopular – but what people really want to hear about from Mr Cameron is his policies, not what he thinks of his opponent.

If he continues to talk about personalities rather than policies, they will fairly swiftly conclude that it’s because he hasn’t got any.

If there is one single quality the public is looking for in its politicians today, it is authenticity.

Just as Gordon Brown sold himself to us as a “serious man for serious times,” so Mr Cameron sold himself as the man who would put the “sunshine” back into British politics.

But as the Labour blogger Paul Richards put it this week: "When he attacks Gordon Brown’s personality, Cameron no longer sounds like a decent family man. He sounds like a public-school bully, flogging his fags for burning the toast.”

In other words, he can’t suddenly start playing Mr Nasty when he’s sold himself to us as Mr Nice.

Cameron seeks to tone-down Tories' harsh message

There are some weeks as a political commentator when you can find yourself racking your brain for something to write about. On others, though, you find yourself somewhat spoilt for choice.

That the past week falls into the latter category there can be no doubt.

We’ve had Clare Short giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, telling us that Tony Blair’s real reason for going to war was that he wanted to be up there with the ‘big boys.’

It’s a pity she didn’t feel strongly enough about it at the time to join Robin Cook in resigning before the conflict. Who knows, by acting together they might just have prevented it.

Then we had Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused of having let down the armed forces while Chancellor by imposing strict limits on defence spending prior to the invasion in 2003.

And we saw the conclusion of the tortuous negotiations on Northern Ireland policing, paving the way to full devolution and, perhaps, a ‘hand of history’ moment for Gordon before he leaves office.

Meanwhile the MPs expenses row reared its head once more, with independent watchdog Sir Thomas Legg finding that more than half of MPs had made “inappropriate or excessive” claims.

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer yesterday revealed that three of them – Elliott Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine – will now face criminal charges.

Also in the news this week was Labour’s plan for a referendum on proportional representation, a deathbed conversion that has something of the air of tragi-comic farce about it.

I remember getting terribly excited about all the Blair-Ashdown manoeuvrings in the late 1990s, and how they planned to create a progressive-left alliance that would keep the Tories out of power for 100 years.

Electoral reform was to prove the stumbling block. It was when Jack Straw rubbished Roy Jenkins' 1998 report recommending the Alternative Vote that Paddy Ashdown decided to quit as Lib Dem leader.

Yet here we are, more than a decade on, and Labour is now endorsing that very system - surely a case of too little too late if ever there was one.

But in terms of its likely influence on the coming election campaign, perhaps the most significant story of the week was the apparent Tory confusion over public spending.

For months now, the main dividing line between the two main parties has been over the timing of spending cuts, with the Conservatives arguing that the scale of deficit requires action sooner rather than later.

Yet here was David Cameron at the start of the week attempting to reassure us that there would be “no swingeing cuts” in the first year of a Tory administration.

Were the Tories ‘wobbling’ on public spending, as Lord Mandelson was swift to allege? Shadow Chancellor George Osborne says not - but with election day looming, they do appear to be trying to blur the edges somewhat.

We have already seen this Cameroonian tendency to try to face both ways in relation their policy on regional development agencies, which were widely assumed to be for the chop within weeks of the Tories taking over.

Yet when this newspaper and others went and reported that, on the basis of some rather too candid comments by frontbench spokesman Stewart Jackson, the Tory machine swiftly went into row-back mode.

Mr Cameron’s apparent determination not to frighten the horses invites further comparisons with Tony Blair in the run-up to the 1997 election.

It didn’t do Mr Blair any harm, of course – but the public is older and wiser now.

Behind the bluster, Blair shifts his ground

It may have been the most long-awaited event of the political year to date – but at first sight, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s appearance at the Iraq Inquiry yesterday was something of a non-story.

Well before he took his turn in the witness chair, we knew moreorless what we were in for – an unapologetic defence of the 2003 conflict.

And so it proved, as Mr Blair insisted he was right to remove Saddam Hussein, that there was no "covert deal" with George Bush, that intelligence was not tampered with, that Parliament was not misled, and for good measure, that he'd do it all again.

If he ever has to choose a song to play at his funeral, it will surely be Robbie Williams' ‘No Regrets.’

But it's only when you look behind the defiant words that you begin to see just how much the former Prime Minister has actually shifted his ground since 2003

Take weapons of mass destruction, for starters. The original, ostensible justification for going to war in 2003 was that Saddam had WMD, some of which were capable of being fired at strategic targets within 45 minutes.

At one press conference I attended around that time, Mr Blair expressed his "100pc confidence" that WMD would be found.

But we now learn from yesterday's evidence that what the former Prime Minister really meant by this was that Saddam merely had the "capacity" to build weapons of mass destruction.

"The decision I took - and frankly would take again - was if there was any possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction we should stop him,” he told yesterday’s hearing.

In other words, he didn't have them - something I don't think I can recall the former PM saying at the time.

Then there is the 45-minute claim itself. Mr Blair admits with hindsight that the claim had been misunderstood by the press that it would have been better for the government to have corrected this at the time.

As a matter of fact, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had already conceded this point, well before the current inquiry even began

But what this amounts to is an implicit admission that the late weapons inspector Dr David Kelly was right to have raised concerns about the way the 45-minute claim had been presented in his discussions with the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan which later formed the basis of the BBC’s reports.

I don't recall hearing that either in the summer of 2003, when the Downing Street spin machine was busy hanging poor Dr Kelly out to dry.

Finally there was the new prominence given to the significance of 9/11, with Mr Blair saying his attitude to Saddam had "changed dramatically" after the terror attacks.

"I never regarded 11 September as an attack on America, I regarded it as an attack on us,” he told the inquiry.

Although the 'dodgy dossier' of 2002 had made a half-hearted attempt to draw links between al-Qaeda and Saddam, no-one took this terribly seriously, and it was not an argument that was much heard around the time of the invasion.

Perhaps the fact that he is making it now is an example of what he himself admitted in his TV interview with Fearne Britton last December – that the lack of WMD would have meant that “different arguments” had to be deployed to get us into the war.

Right at the end of yesterday’s hearing, inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot practically invited Mr Blair to utter the “R” word. His refusal finally provoked an outbreak of barracking from the hitherto well-behaved audience.

Those who hoped that yesterday’s proceedings might somehow heal the divisions of the conflict have already seen those hopes dashed.