Advantage Tory right as Huhne exits stage left

So farewell then, Chris Huhne – well for the time being at any rate, as the erstwhile Energy Secretary quits in order to fight charges of perverting the course of justice in relation to a driving offence committed in 2003.

The leading Liberal Democrat politician was left with no choice but to resign from the Cabinet yesterday after effectively being charged with lying to the police over whether he or his ex-wife was driving at the time of the incident.

Mr Huhne, who continues to deny the charges, will now have to clear his name if he is to stand any chance of resuming what has been an eventful career over the course of less than seven years as an MP.

For now, though, his Lib Dem colleagues will have to manage without his combative presence around the Cabinet table as the curse that has seemed to bedevil the party’s senior figures since the last election strikes again.

They lost their cleverest minister, David Laws, within 16 days of the Coalition taking office, and nearly lost their most well-known, Vince Cable, over his ill-judged pledge to destroy the Murdoch empire – uttered before it succeeded in destroying itself.

Now they have lost their most abrasive in Mr Huhne, the stoutest defender of the party’s interests within the government and, by some distance, the Tory backbenches’ least-favourite Liberal Democrat.

Few Tory tears will be shed at his departure. Right-wing internet bloggers who have had Mr Huhne in their sights for some time were literally cracking open the champagne yesterday morning – and one even posted a video of himself doing so.

The evident Tory glee demonstrates the fact that Mr Huhne’s enforced resignation is likely significantly to alter the balance of power within the Cabinet in their favour.

His successor Ed Davey is a capable minister who deserves his Cabinet promotion - but he is no Chris Huhne, described by one commentator yesterday as a “political bulldozer who would try relentlessly to get his way, and who was not averse to media shenanigans to advance his cause.”

It was Mr Huhne, rather than Nick Clegg, who led the attack on the Tories over their handling of the referendum on the voting system last May, when Mr Cameron gave the green light for a series of bitter personal attacks against the Lib Dem leader.

And it was he who articulated the Lib Dem rage over Mr Cameron’s decision to veto a new EU treaty at the Brussels summit in December.

What gave Mr Huhne a particular degree of authority within the Cabinet was his strong power base within the party as a two-time leadership contender and de facto leader of the party’s social democratic tendency.

He could very well have become his party’s leader instead of Mr Clegg, had not a pre-Christmas postal strike in 2007 led to thousands of votes in his party’s leadership election arriving after the ballot boxes had closed.

Until yesterday, he would have been the likeliest replacement for Mr Clegg were the latter to have been forced out by party activists still grumbling over his decision to join the Coalition.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron, the party’s distinctly Coalition-sceptic president, now looks odds-on for that role, possibly as soon as 2015 in the event of Mr Clegg’s three-way marginal Sheffield Hallam seat turning either red or blue next time round.

The short-term impact, then, of Mr Huhne’s departure is that it will embolden the Tory right and make this look even more obviously a Conservative-led government than it already is.

This in turn will be good news for Labour and Ed Miliband, whose essential line of attack on the Coalition is that it is a Tory government in all but name, and who this week restored some of his party’s sagging morale by putting Mr Cameron on the back foot over bankers’ bonuses.

The real nightmare scenario for the government, though, would come if Mr Huhne were to go to jail – forcing a by-election in his highly marginal seat of Eastleigh which would pitch the Lib Dems and the Tories against eachother.

And the potential consequences of that for the Coalition hardly need spelling out.

On this issue, it's the bishops who are out of touch

Religion and politics have always been a potentially lethal combination. It is way too simplistic to say they don’t mix. Actually the problems usually arise from the fact that they tend to mix only too well.

The question is not so much whether they do mix, but whether they should mix, such is the potential for rival politicians to extract wildly differing interpretations from the same religious texts.

The most infamous blurring of the lines between the two that has occurred in recent years was when Tony Blair declared that he would “answer to his maker” for joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Looking back, I don’t think he was really saying that God told him to go to war. But what the statement did reveal was that Mr Blair saw a clear moral justification for the decision that derived, at least in part, from his purported Christian values.

In theological terms, the former Prime Minister could point to some fairly heavyweight support for his espousal of the so-called ‘Just War’ theory, however politically inept it was to have expressed it as he did.

No less of an authority than the 39 Articles of the Church of England state: “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.”

But just as Christian pacifists have always taken issue with this point of view, so too has the question of state welfare versus individual charity been another long-running bone of contention among believers.

And it is this issue that pitched religion back into the spotlight this week, as a group of Church of England bishops attempted to scupper the government’s plans for a £26,000 cap on benefit payments.

The days when the C of E was ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’ are thankfully long gone, although it would probably still be fair to call it the SDP at prayer were it not for the fact that the SDP is also long gone.

So it’s not particularly surprising to see them endorsing what is essentially a social democratic position on welfare, highlighting the ‘bias to the poor’ that is found throughout Scripture and in particular in Jesus’ ministry.

But not all agree. For former archbishop Lord Carey, among others, the country’s £1trillion deficit, and the fecklessness and irresponsibility which he claims the benefits culture rewards, constitute far greater moral evils.

"The sheer scale of our public debt is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today. If we can't get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren,” he wrote.

The theological arguments will go on – but what about the politics? Well, for my part, I reckon the Coalition has got this about right.

While I am normally quite content to see bishops and other faith leaders attempting to bring a moral perspective to bear on policy-making, on this issue they appear to have seriously misjudged the mood of public opinion.

Establishing a benefits cap at what is around the level of the current average wage will hardly be seen as unfair by the great majority of the population, although admittedly it will hit people disproportionately in London where housing costs are higher.

Even that, though, makes a fairly pleasant change from the disproportionate hit that the North-East and its neighbouring regions have had to sustain as the result of other public sector spending cutbacks.

The bigger political picture here is that, in proposing the benefit cap, the government is seeking not only to tackle the deficit, but also to appeal to a group of voters who are becoming seen by both main parties as the key to electoral success over the next few years.

Gordon Brown used to call them ‘hard working families’ – but they have now become known as the ‘squeezed middle,’ people who are working as hard as ever but whose real incomes have declined significantly over the course of the economic downturn.

The bishops and others will worry – quite rightly – of the risk to social cohesion in focusing attention on relatively middle-class voters at the expense of those at the bottom of the income scale.

But even they might have to concede that continuing to condemn such people to welfare dependency is the surest way to create a permanent underclass.

Too late for Ed to change the public's minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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