Milburn machinations show governnment's desperation

Back in 2003, I went along to a Downing Street press briefing along with the rest of the Westminster media corps expecting to be given details of Tony Blair's latest Cabinet reshuffle.

We emerged 20 minutes later with the very surprising news that the health secretary, Alan Milburn, had resigned from the government, saying he wanted to spend more time up North with his young family.

The sudden departure from government of the then Darlington MP, who until then had been widely tipped as a future candidate for the party leadership, was possibly the most unexpected resignation of the Blair years.

But for shock value, it would have paled into insignificance if this week's rumours about a Cabinet comeback for Mr Milburn - in the very same job he abruptly left nine years ago - had actually come to pass.

The story went that a newly-ennobled Lord Milburn would be brought back by David Cameron to push through the health reforms that Gordon Brown succeeded in blocking nine years ago.

The Prime Minister would then be able to claim - as he already has with Michael Gove's education reforms - that he is merely carrying on the work that Mr Blair and New Labour began, thereby strengthening his claim to the political centre ground.

It seems likely from what has emerged this week that this bizarre proposal was at least discussed at some level in Number Ten, even if those discussions didn’t actually get as far as Mr Milburn himself.

But the fact that such a conversation could even take place at all is an indication of the mess that the Coalition has got itself into over its own attempts to reform the NHS - and in particular the position of the current health secretary, Andrew Lansley.

Government colleagues of Mr Lansley were pulling few punches this week as his flagship Health and Social Care bill suffered another mauling in the House of Lords.

“Andrew Lansley should be taken out and shot. He’s messed up both the communication and the substance of the policy,” a Downing Street source was quoted as saying.

Of course, had Mr Cameron wanted to get rid of him, he had a perfect opportunity to do so last week with the mini-reshuffle sparked by the enforced resignation of the energy secretary Chris Huhne.

But as I have noted before, the Prime Minister hates reshuffles, having apparently been warned against them by former Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell, and for now, Mr Lansley retains his “full confidence.”

To those of us who have been following the progress of the government’s attempts to introduce greater competition into the NHS - and hand over the running of it to reluctant GPs - none of this should have come as any great surprise.

Mr Cameron has been warned on several occasions that the reforms, which are opposed by just about every leading professional body within the service, risked becoming his Poll Tax.

His apparent obduracy over the issue is all the more surprising in the light of his determined efforts before the last election to “detoxify” the Tory brand when it came to the NHS.

As the Conservative Home website pointed out yesterday; “David Cameron’s greatest political achievement as Leader of the Opposition was to neutralise health as an issue. The greatest mistake of his time as Prime Minister has been to put it back at the centre of political debate.”

Plans are now being laid for a debate at the Liberal Democrat spring conference which is expected to result in fresh calls for the bill to be scrapped, if it hasn’t been already by then.

And Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has shrewdly called for cross-party talks on a compromise deal which could see the non-contentious parts of the bill covering public health, social care and GP commissioning kept, while scrapping the bits relating to extending the private sector.

It is understood that this option is now being seriously canvassed within the government, but if adopted it would of course represent a complete humiliation for the health secretary.

When Mr Milburn walked out of the health department, Westminster was genuinely stunned. The greater surprise this time round would be if Mr Lansley stays put.

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.

Scottish independence won't be the end of the devolution 'process'

Back in 1998, a now almost-forgotten former Labour cabinet minister coined the phrase: "Devolution is a process, not an event."

They were in fact the words of Ron Davies, the architect of the Welsh Assembly who is now primarily remembered for his 'moment of madness' on Clapham Common and subsequent 'badger-watching' escapades near the M4.

But as the repercussions of New Labour's devolution reforms of the late 1990s continue to reverberate around the body politic, it is clearer than ever that Mr Davies was spot-on in his analysis.

Just as the former Cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell predicted in his series of 'exit interviews' before retiring last month, the future of the Union has suddenly become one of the hottest of political hot potatoes.

The extent of the Prime Minister's gamble in seeking to strong-arm the Scottish government into holding a straight yes-no vote on independence within the next 18 months should not be underestimated.

A less risky strategy would surely have been for the Westminster government to carry on doing what it has been doing to the Scots for the past 30 years, namely try to buy them off.

The carrot on this occasion would not have been money in the form of the highly-advantageous Barnett Formula of public spending, but rather the promise of more powers – or “devo max” as it is termed.

By handing significant financial autonomy and accountability to the Scottish government while allowing it to remain in the UK, the government would surely have satisfied all but a minority of pro-independence diehards.

But Mr Cameron appears to have eschewed that option in what appears to be an all-out bid to destroy the Scottish Nationalist First Minister Alex Salmond and kill the idea of independence stone dead for a generation or more.

His attempt to set the timetable for the referendum as well as fixing the question is designed to pitchfork the Scots into an early vote in the hope that they will reject independence.

But will it actually have the opposite effect? Will the Scots simply see it as yet more unwanted meddling in their affairs by a distant English premier whose party enjoys so little support north of the border it nearly decided to change its name?

If so, then Mr Cameron is going to look remarkably stupid before this game of political chess is played out. So stupid, in fact, that it could be he, rather than Mr Salmond, who finds himself out of a job.

The future constitutional position of Scotland may seem like a rather arid subject to those of us south of the border, but for the North-East, it could have some rather interesting political repercussions to say the least.

For starters, an independent Scotland would be more likely to compete aggressively against the Northern English regions for inward investment – an issue that has reared its head from time to time even within the existing Union.

The wider implications, though, would be in the change in political balance within England and the impact that this would have on traditionally Labour-supporting areas.

The secession of the Scots would mortally Labour south of the border, ending any prospect of it holding power alone at Westminster again and permanently shifting the centre of political gravity to the right.

The Labour-supporting regions of the North - whose political cultures in fact have more in common with the Scots than with the Southern English – may well then find themselves even more marginalised by the Westminster Parliament.

This, in turn, might well lead to a revival of interest in the idea of devolution within England, perhaps within a pan-Northern context this time round rather than individual assemblies for the North-East, North-West and Yorkshire.

My guess is that if Mr Cameron’s gamble does backfire, and the Scots ultimately vote for independence, it won’t be too many years before we see calls for some sort of 'Council of the North' encompassing all three regions.

Fanciful? Well, maybe. But devolution is, after all, a process, not an event.

Time for Labour to turn to its own 'Iron Lady?'

And so the new political year begins moreorless exactly where the old one left off…with Labour leader Ed Miliband’s long-term survival prospects once more being called into question.

The run-up to Christmas saw growing unease in Labour ranks over Mr Miliband’s failure to make more headway against David Cameron’s Coalition government, in what seemed like the beginnings of a whispering campaign.

Now that the season of goodwill is over, however, the muttering has broken out into the open, with Labour peer and former adviser Lord Glasman claiming that this week that the Labour leader has "no strategy and little energy."

And yesterday’s warning by Shadow Defence Secretary and leading Blairite Jim Murphy that Labour must have “genuine credibility” on spending cuts is being seen as another shot across Mr Miliband’s bows.

Lord Glasman’s comments were significant not so much in themselves as for the fact that they played into what is fast developing into an over-arching narrative about Mr Miliband’s leadership.

Perhaps his most telling point was on the economy, on which he said: “We have not won, and show no signs of winning, the economic argument…we have not articulated a constructive alternative capable of recognising our weaknesses in government and taking the argument to the coalition.”

He added: “Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem to be stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways."

That was a clear reference to Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, whose presence in that post is viewed by some as an insuperable obstacle to Labour’s attempts to regain economic credibility.

The ‘credibility’ question was also clearly uppermost in Mr Murphy’s mind as he spoke out the spending cuts issue in a national newspaper article yesterday.

Mr Murphy, who ran South Shields MP David Miliband’s leadership campaign, was ostensibly talking about defence, but the wider message was clear – that Labour needs to stop opposing every government spending cut for the sake of it.

Mr Miliband’s difficulties were compounded yesterday by a leaked memo from his press secretary Tom Baldwin claiming, somewhat absurdly, that he had led Labour to “probably the best recovery of any opposition party in history.”

And he caused himself further embarrassment by referring to the late Bob Holness as the host of ‘Blackbusters’ in a Twitter post as ill-advised as some of Gordon Brown’s YouTube appearances.

So having spent the last year trying to shed the hated ‘Red Ed’ tag, could this be the year when Mr Miliband becomes ‘Dead Ed?’

Well, it is interesting on this score is to see what some of the leading Blairite commentators are saying.

Although a lot of people in the party still believe the wrong Miliband was chosen as leader, there appears to be no great clamour for David to ride to the party’s rescue.

Instead, some of his former supporters seem to be latching onto the Brownite Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as Mr Miliband’s most likely replacement.

Take this, for instance, from The Independent’s John Rentoul, perhaps the most influential Blairite in the ranks of the commentariat.

He wrote: “Yvette Cooper could have won in 2010, had she not said that the time was not right for her and supported her husband, Ed Balls, instead. If she is clever, the Brownites and Blairites could unite behind her. “

Or this from Dan Hodges, a former Blairite insider and special adviser who now blogs for the Daily Telegraph.

He quoted a Shadow Cabinet source as saying: “Yvette’s the next leader of the party. The only question is whether it’s before the election or after.”

For my part, there is no doubt in my mind that Yvette Cooper is the potential Labour leader which the Coalition fears most.

Mr Cameron already has a ‘problem’ with women voters – some would say with women in general – and he could not get away with patronising the redoubtable Ms Cooper in the way he has tried to do with other female MPs.

The long-awaited release of the Margaret Thatcher biopic yesterday may well focus attention on why the Labour Party has so far failed to find its own ‘Iron Lady.’

Could this be the year they finally put that right?

If you want to see the future of politics, just listen to 'God'

Following on from last week's Review of 2011, here's my look ahead to the political year 2012.

---

Predicting the future is always a risky business, but anyone looking for some pointers as to the direction which British politics might take over the next few years could do worse than listen to ‘God.’

Of course, by that I don’t mean him upstairs – though doubtless he might also have something to say about it - but the man who is universally known by that nickname in Westminster circles – the outgoing Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell.

Sir Gus officially retired yesterday as Britain’s most senior civil servant, but not before breaking the habit of a lifetime and firing off a few opinions of his own in a series of exit interviews with assorted media outlets.

In them he warned, among other things, that the greatest challenge facing Britain over the coming years would not be the state of the economy or even its future place in the European Union, but simply holding the United Kingdom together.

Sir Gus’s comments served as a necessary corrective to the fact that the implications of Scottish and Welsh devolution for the rest of the UK have sometimes been overlooked.

In last week’s column reviewing the political year 2011, I noted that the referendum on reform of the voting system held in May last year did not, in the end, prove to be the political game-changer that some of us thought it might be.

But there was something else that happened on the same day which may well prove to be of much greater significance in the longer-term – the outright victory of Alex Salmond’s Scottish Nationalists in the elections to the Scottish Parliament.

We have already seen how Mr Salmond is prepared to use such issues as the Eurozone crisis to press the case for Scottish independence, and we can expect much more of this in the coming year.

On the future of the Coalition, however, Sir Gus was less outspoken, saying that he expected it to run its course until a general election in 2015.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that he should take such a view, in that he played a pivotal role in bringing the Coalition together in the first place, and thus has an emotional stake in its long-term survival.

But ultimately, the Coalition will survive only as long as it is in the Conservatives’ interests for it to survive – and it is here that the underlying political dynamics may well be shifting.

With his party enjoying an unexpected mid-term lead in the opinion polls, might Prime Minister David Cameron be tempted over the next 12 months to try to convert that into the outright Commons majority that eluded him in May 2010?

We shall see. But Mr Cameron is perhaps fortunate in that the issue most likely to bring about a split between the Coalition partners is one on which his party enjoys far greater public support than the Liberal Democrats, namely Europe.

As John Redwood pointed out earlier this month, an election over the UK’s future relationship with the EU would be a very easy one for the Tories to win, and Mr Cameron would not be human if he did not at least toy with the idea of engineering one.

But if that Tory opinion poll lead is raising questions about the future of the Coalition, it is raising even more urgent ones about the future of Labour leader Ed Miliband.

His survival in the role must now be open to real doubt and is surely set to be one of the big running political stories of 2012.

History, at least, would suggest that Mr Miliband has little to worry about. The Labour Party does not do assassinations, and invariably allows its leaders the chance to fight at least one election even if they are patently not up to the task.

Against that, both Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot were at least able to demonstrate mid-term opinion poll leads over Margaret Thatcher, even if they went on to crushing defeats.

Mr Miliband has gained an unlikely ally in the Tory columnist Peter Oborne, who this week praised his attempts to move away from what he called the “manipulation and cynicism of the modernising era. “

But while 2012 may well see a growing appetite for a more value-based style of politics, it is far from clear that the public sees Mr Miliband as the man to deliver it.

Review of the Year 2011

Ever since the formation of the Coalition between David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in the aftermath of the May 2010 general election, British politics has by and large been dominated by two interrelated questions.

The first was whether, in spite of the obvious chemistry between the two leaders, an alliance between two parties with such vastly differing worldviews could actually come close to achieving its stated aim of governing for a full five-year Parliament.

The second was whether the tough economic measures it adopted would succeed in tackling the deficit, as the Tories had argued during the election campaign, or merely succeed in choking-off an incipient recovery, as Labour had warned.

Eighteen months on, those questions remain unresolved, but as the political year 2011 draws to a close, we are at least a little closer to knowing the answers.

On the first point, I wrote at the start of the year that if the Coalition managed to get through 2011, it would in all likelihood survive until its target date of 2015.

In making that prediction – which I may well be forced to revise over the coming 12 months - I was looking to May’s referendum on reform of the voting system as the likeliest breaking point between the two partners.

As it turned out, the Lib Dems’ crushing defeat in the referendum did not prove the Coalition breaker some of us thought it might, despite Mr Cameron having apparently given his party the green light to launch some bitter personal attacks on Mr Clegg.

And late in the year another issue emerged which on the face of it now seems much more likely to prevent the Coalition going the course: Europe.

Mr Cameron’s self-imposed isolation at this month’s European Summit capped what on the face of it was not a great year for the Prime Minister.

He found himself forced into a series of policy U-turns – over privatising forests, reducing prison sentences for defendants who plead guilty, and most notably over the ill-judged attempt to impose competition on the National Health Service.

Meanwhile the phone-hacking affair at the News of the World threw the spotlight on Mr Cameron’s close personal links with the Murdoch empire, while the travails of his defence secretary Liam Fox forced him into his first reshuffle.

And with the economy flatlining and unemployment on the rise, Chancellor George Osborne was forced to revise growth forecasts downwards and borrowing forecasts upwards as he conceded that the deficit would not, after all, be paid off in the current Parliament.

The fact that, in spite of all this, Mr Cameron ended the year ahead in the opinion polls probably says less about him that it does about the plight of the Labour opposition.

Party leader Ed Miliband’s one big success – and it was a not inconsiderable one – was to lead the attack on Murdoch and in so doing prevent him taking control of BSkyB - the first time the political establishment had stood up to the ageing media mogul in three decades.

He also made by far the most substantial of the three party leaders’ speeches in what was otherwise a distinctly unmemorable conference season, setting his face against the “fast buck culture” of the Thatcher-Blair years.

But the largely negative public reaction to the speech showed the extent of his task in winning over an electorate that still seems resolutely underwhelmed by him, and as Parliament broke up for Christmas, the muttering about his leadership in the Labour ranks was growing.

Mr Miliband’s failure to make the political weather was all the more baffling given the grim economic news, which increasingly appeared to bear out Labour’s warnings against cutting “too far, too fast.”

Inevitably the impact of the cuts was most keenly felt in the North-East, where more than 30,000 public sector jobs disappeared at a time when they were apparently still being created in other more prosperous regions.

But Labour remained hampered both by its failure to articulate a clear position on the deficit and by its perceived complicity in having created the problem in the first place.

And unless and until the public changes its collective mind about who is really to blame for the country’s economic plight, Mr Cameron’s continued political ascendancy seems assured.

On the big issues, is Cameron actually a worse PM than Brown?

A few weeks ago, a backbench Conservative MP got himself into a spot of bother after being caught on tape using a four-letter word to describe his leader David Cameron.

Given that the offending word used by backbencher Patrick Mercer began with an ‘a’ rather a ‘c’, the implication was not so much that he finds the Prime Minister personally unpleasant as that he regards him as a bit of a clown.

Mr Mercer’s accompanying description of Mr Cameron as “the worst Prime Minister since W.E. Gladstone” was generally viewed at the time as a rather unwarranted slur on both of these two worthy occupants of Number 10 Downing Street.

But in the wake of his potentially career-defining veto at last week’s EU summit on the future of the Eurozone, the question ‘Is Cameron actually any good?’ has suddenly assumed an added pertinence.

It is, of course, far too early to tell whether the Prime Minister did the right thing by blocking the proposed Treaty on stabilising the currency or whether it will turn out to be, in the words of his own deputy Nick Clegg, “bad for Britain.”

It may be a decade or more before we are able to arrive at a settled historical judgement on the issue, by which time Mr Cameron will almost certainly no longer be in office.

Will Hutton, the former Observer editor and author of influential 1990s tome ‘The State We’re In,’ believes it will turn out to be a mistake of historic proportions, and that by 2020 a flatbroke Britain will be begging to join a newly-thriving Eurozone.

This is however currently very much a minority view. Mr Cameron may have turned us into what one Cabinet minister this week called ‘the Billy No Mates of Europe,’ but if the opinion polls are anything to go by, the public seems to be applauding rather than condemning him for that.

As far as short-term tactical considerations are concerned, Mr Cameron’s actions at the summit cannot be faulted.

He knew that if he agreed to the proposed Treaty, his party’s increasingly self-confident right-wing would use it as an excuse to demand a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU – the last thing Mr Cameron wants to see.

Rather than entertain that possibility, he chose instead to risk infuriating his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, knowing full well that they are in no position to bring down the government and fight a general election, especially over the issue of Europe.

Political pundits who tell us that Europe is a potential coalition-breaker are forgetting the fact that the Lib Dems’ pro-Europeanism is wildly unpopular in the Southern seats where the Tories are their main opponents.

So looked at purely from a domestic political point of view, Mr Cameron’s gamble seems so far to be duly paying off.

After a fortnight in which the Chancellor admitted his borrowing forecasts were wildly off course, unions staged the biggest strikes seen in a generation, and the Prime Minister was outvoted 26-1 at an important international gathering, the Tories pulled two points ahead of Labour in the polls.

This is a deeply worrying state of affairs for Labour leader Ed Miliband, one which victory in the Feltham and Heston by-election on Thursday night will have done little to alleviate.

As I wrote in this column the week before last, Labour ought to have a compelling narrative on the economy, but the public is currently not listening. So too it is with Europe.

Ultimately, however, Prime Ministers are not judged on whether or not they manage to secure a short-term tactical advantage over their opponents, but on whether or not they are seen to have acted in the national interest – a judgement that will rest in part on consequences as yet unseen.

It is already clear, for instance, that Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond intends to use the issue to ratchet up calls for full-blown Scottish independence, arguing that the UK’s new-found isolation will harm the economy north of the border.

For Mr Cameron, who leads what is still nominally called the Conservative and Unionist Party, this would be as perfect an illustration of the law of unintended political consequences as you are ever likely to see.

Perhaps the so-called ‘Little Englanders’ in his ranks should be careful what they wish for.

A large slice of humble pie for Osborne - but was it really a game changer?

An extra £111bn of borrowing over the next five years. A fresh squeeze on public spending. No prospect of any tax cuts before the next general election.

It is easy to see why many commentators have described Tuesday’s Autumn Statement by Chancellor George Osborne as a ‘game changer’ in British politics.

Here we have a government that was elected in order to sort out the nation’s finances and eliminate the budget deficit by 2015 admitting that it will fail in that central objective.

Far from the being able to fight the next election on the sunlit uplands of fresh economic growth following the hard years of austerity, it will now have to do so against a continuing backdrop of cuts.

As the BBC’s James Landale put it on Tuesday evening: “Just as the facts have changed, so must the politics.”

“Until this morning, the assumption had been that the election would be about which party was best placed to use the proceeds of an incipient recovery – what taxes would they cut and what spending would they increase. That debate is now for the birds.”

And yet, and yet…I wonder if the Chancellor’s statement really has altered the terms of the underlying political debate about the country’s economic prospects all that much.

Despite all the economic doom and gloom, and the large slice of humble pie that the Chancellor has been forced to swallow this week, nothing has yet happened to demonstrate beyond doubt either that the government’s prescription is mistaken, or that a better alternative exists.

On the face of it, Labour’s narrative ought to be a compelling one. It is that an incipient recovery that was already under way by the time of the last election was then choked-off by a combination of spending cutbacks and “austerity rhetoric.”

But the public remains to be convinced that Labour’s more limited ambition to halve rather than eliminate the deficit in four years would not have landed us with a different set of problems.

There is also, still, a powerful residual feeling that Labour is really to blame for the country’s economic plight, even though history will surely show that Gordon Brown’s actions at the height of the banking crisis in 2008 saved us from a far worse fate.

This is a large part of the reason why, for all Mr Osborne’s difficulties, the opinion polls continue to show that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are still less trusted on the economy than their Conservative counterparts.

A real political game changer is the kind of event which transforms the fortunes of the key players involved almost overnight.

Sadly for Mr Brown, his decision not to hold an election in the autumn of 2007 was one such example. After that self—inflicted humiliation, the public never saw him in the same light again and nothing he did was able to reverse that negative perception.

For the Tories, the ejection of the UK from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 is the one that sticks in the mind, destroying in one fell swoop the party’s hitherto prized reputation for economic competence.

I’m no apologist for George Osborne, but I don’t think being forced to downgrade the growth forecast for 2012 from 2.5pc to 0.7pc or even up the public sector borrowing requirement by £111bn quite falls into the same category.

For all the talk of game changers and transformed political landscapes, I actually find myself wondering whether this week’s events might not help the Conservatives in the longer-run.

If history is any guide, it suggests the answer might be yes. While voters appear to have a habit of ditching Labour governments at times of economic difficulty (1979, 2010) they seem more inclined to stick with Conservative ones (1983, 1992).

The Tories will of course hope that some of the pro-growth measures announced this week – for instance bringing forward £5bn of spending on infrastructure improvements – will have made at least some impact by the time we come to go to the polls again, even if few in this part of the world will have been fooled by the reannouncement of some old money for the Tyne and Wear Metro.

But if not, they could find that their most potent message come 2015 could well be that familiar old refrain: “Keep hold of nurse for fear of something worse.”

Osborne's date with political destiny

‘Make or break’ is doubtless an overused term in politics. Many are the times when it is said that a politician needs to make the “speech of his life” on such and such a day, only for the same old cliché to be trotted out again the next time he makes one.

Yet for Chancellor George Osborne, this Tuesday’s autumn statement on the economy is genuinely shaping up to be one of those dates with political destiny.

For years, Mr Osborne has been the man with the plan as far as the Tory Party is concerned, and his plan on taking over at No 11 Downing Street in May last year was straightforward and simple.

It was: sort out the deficit in the first couple of years, wait for economic growth to start kicking in again, sprinkle some carefully-targeted tax cuts around, and then win the next election hands down.

But it’s all gone horribly wrong. Far from providing a platform for new growth, 18 months of austerity measures have pitchforked the economy back towards the ultimate horror of a double-dip recession.

As such Mr Osborne’s masterplan for economic recovery – and outright Tory victory in 2015 – now looks hopelessly optimistic.

And of course, it is not just the fate of the economy and the government that is at stake here, but Mr Osborne’s own chances of succeeding David Cameron as Tory leader.

If recovery comes and the Tories win an overall majority next time, there will be nothing to stand between him and No 10. But if they lose – or are forced into another five years of coalition - it will be Mr Osborne who gets the blame.

All of which make Tuesday’s statement if not quite the “speech of his life” then certainly the most important he has made since that Tory conference address of 2007 which frightened Gordon Brown off from holding an election.

To succeed, he must somehow manage to reconcile two seemingly contradictory goals.

Firstly – and this almost goes without saying - he must manage to reassure the markets that the government remains serious about tackling the deficit.

But equally, he now needs to reassure an increasingly sceptical public that the government has a plan for growth – if not a ‘Plan B’ as Labour still insists on calling it, then at least a Plan A-Plus.

It is already clear from several strategically-placed leaks that switching more spending into capital investment in infrastructure is going to be central to Mr Osborne’s plans.

It all seems a far cry from the days when Margaret Thatcher commented sniffily: “You and I come by road or rail, economists travel on infrastructure” – but no matter.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander gave an insight into the government’s thinking in a speech to the National Association of Housebuilders on Wednesday.

"We are shaking the Whitehall tree to make sure no-one is stockpiling capital that can be put to good use today. That's why next week's announcement will switch funds to capital spending plans,” he said.

This is all of a piece with Mr Cameron’s speech on Monday setting out measures to boost the housing market, both by encouraging the construction of more homes and by helping first-time buyers obtain mortgages.

And yesterday Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg got in on the act by pre-announcing a £1bn scheme to help the young unemployed, apparently to be paid for by further savings in other areas.

The risk for the government is that it will all be too little, too late to counteract the chilling effects of 18 months of what Labour leader Ed Miliband this week called “austerity rhetoric.”

But if he can use Tuesday’s statement to get the economy moving again at last, then it may yet all come right – for the coalition, for Mr Osborne, and most importantly for the long-suffering British public.

Lost North jobs still seen as a 'price worth paying'

Youth unemployment topping 1m. An additional 129,000 people out of work in the past month. The overall number of jobless at its highest level since 1994. This week’s unemployment figures told their own story.

If people were not already sufficiently well-appraised of the dire state of the British economy, Wednesday’s figures, coupled with more downbeat forecasts from the governor of the Bank of England, will surely have removed any lingering doubts.

Yet in the North-East, as is customarily the case when the economy as a whole is struggling, the picture is even bleaker still.

As The Journal reported on its front page the Monday before last, this region has seen a staggering 32,000 public sector jobs lost in the past year, while, public spending cuts notwithstanding, the number in London and the South East has actually risen by the same amount.

It is now more than a decade since the launch of The Journal’s original Case for the North campaign aimed at closing the economic divide with the South.

At the time, it was estimated that if economic growth continued at the same rate, it would take around 30 years to bridge the gap – a state of affairs which many of the region’s MPs and other political leaders regarded as intolerable.

I have to confess I don’t know whether any subsequent analysis has been carried out as to how long it would now take, but I don’t find it easy to hazard a guess as to how many more decades might have been added to that figure.

Back then, I wrote that the North-East cannot be expected to tolerate as a matter of course systemic imbalances in economic growth between regions, but in fact that has since become the unspoken policy of the British Government under both Labour and Tory administrations.

All of which makes the continuing debate over the direction of the economy perhaps more pertinent in this region than in any other.

For months, this debate has been stuck in a kind of stasis in which Labour endlessly and increasingly fatuously calls on the Government to adopt a ‘Plan B’ while the Government equally stubbornly insists it must stick to its course.

But this is now becoming more than just an arid intellectual battle between rival economic theories. People’s jobs, businesses and livelihoods are at stake.

The plaintive tone of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech to the Social Market Foundation on Thursday certainly conveyed the sense that a crisis point has been reached.

"Austerity at home, collective austerity abroad is no solution to the problems of jobs, growth or the deficit,” he said.

“Don't believe those who will tell you that any change in course will make us like Greece. The markets are as worried about the lack of growth in the economy as they are about debt levels.

"Knowing what we know now, about our economy, about growth prospects, about unemployment, about higher than expected borrowing, it would be the height of irresponsibility for the government to carry on regardless.

"I urge David Cameron: change course now, change course for the sake of our young people, change course for the sake of the country."

As it is, Mr Miliband is pushing at a partially open door in seeking a shift in the Government’s emphasis from deficit reduction to growth.

Chancellor George Osborne is understood to be working on a package of pro-growth measures to be unveiled in the autumn statement later this month.

They are likely to include a new job-creation initiative for the young unemployed, incentives for private companies to invest in big infrastructure projects, and a scheme to under-write mortgages for first-time buyers.

There may also be a rebate for high-energy using industries to alleviate the impact of green taxes, blamed by RTZ Alcan for Thursday’s decision to close its plant in Northumberland.

Some of that will doubtless help the North-East, as will Thursday’s announcement that Virgin Money, newly-enlarged with the acquisition of Northern Rock, will have its headquarters in Newcastle.

But it scarcely amounts to a regional economic policy, still less a strategy for tackling the enduring North-South divide.

Thirteen years ago, lost North-East jobs were seen by the then governor of the Bank of England as an “acceptable” price to pay for preventing the South-East economy from overheating.

Now it seems they are once again being viewed as a price worth paying.

Theresa May faces long-drawn-out demise

To kick off this week’s column, here are a couple of questions for political anoraks with long memories or people who were paying attention in school history lessons.

Number One: Who was the last British politician to move directly from the office of Secretary of State for the Home Department to that of First Lord of Treasury and Prime Minister?

Number Two: What do Reginald Maudling, Kenneth Baker, Charles Clarke and Jacqui Smith all have in common?

The answer to the first question is Viscount Palmerston in 1855. The answer to the second is that all four found that the job of Home Secretary proved to be their political graveyard, the exit route out of government from once-promising careers.

Before they came to grief, at least three of the above named had previously been mentioned as potential leaders of their parties - as indeed was the current incumbent, Theresa May, when David Cameron got into difficulties over his relationship with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire earlier this summer.

But such is the extent to which the Home Office is subject to sudden
political storms which seemingly blow up out of nowhere that it is scarcely surprising that Lord Palmerston’s 156-year-old record remains intact.

Ms Smith put it well in an article this week which simultaneously expressed sisterly sympathy for Mrs May while also gently managing to twist the knife.

"What is it about the Home Office that means we’re unsurprised to see the headlines explode in a frenzy of finger pointing, accusations, leaks and denials? More than any other British political institution, it has been the mirror that reflects back to people the things they worry about most – crime and punishment, equality and injustice, homegrown terrorists, noisy neighbours."

On the face of it, the similarities between the difficulties now facing Mrs May and those that brought down Mr Clarke in 2006 are striking.

Mr Clarke had to go after the Home Office took its eye off the ball over border checks and ended up letting a small number of individuals into the country who had been convicted of crimes overseas.

Granted, we don’t yet know whether any foreign criminals have been allowed into the UK as a result of the latest relaxation of border controls that occurred on Mrs May’s watch this summer.

But since we have no idea at all who actually was allowed in, this is surely just a matter of time and chance.

The key point at issue appears to be what degree of personal responsibility Mrs May exercised over the decision to relax border checks and whether operational staff went beyond what she actually asked for.

Brodie Clarke has quit as head of the UK Border Force after being accused by the Home Secretary of doing precisely that, although he vigorously denies acting improperly.

The argument has distinct echoes of another past Home Office debacle – the sacking of Derek Lewis as head of the prison service by Michael Howard in the mid-1990s.

On that occasion Mr Howard said Mr Lewis had had full operational responsibility for deciding whether to suspend the governor of Parkhurst Prison. Mr Lewis claimed that Mr Howard had overruled him.

So where does this current story go from here? Well, unlike many Home Office firestorms, this one could prove to be a slow burner.

Mr Clark will put his side of the story in an appearance before the Home Affairs Select Committee next week that is certain to make uncomfortable listening for Mrs May.

Even more ominously for the Home Secretary, he is threatening to lodge a claim for constructive dismissal - a case which Mrs May’s Labour predecessor Alan Johnson believes he stands a good chance of winning.

My own view for what it’s worth is that Mrs May has committed two cardinal political errors which may well ultimately cost her her job.

She has attempted to blame officials rather than accept that as a minister, the buck stops with her, and has thereby admitted that she is not actually in control of her department.

As Ms Smith put it: "In British politics, it has never proven a robust defence to admit that you don’t know the numbers on immigration, or to give any impression other than that you’re in control and becoming more controlling."

The story probably still has a fair way to run, but I suspect this may ultimately prove to be the decisive word on the matter.

Cameron could lose big as Balls makes mischief

The week before last, 81 Conservative MPs ignored the blandishments of the party whips, and the pleas of Prime Minister David Cameron, to demand a referendum on EU membership.

It was the biggest rebellion of Mr Cameron's six years as party leader, but with Labour also supporting the government, it was far from being the tightest parliamentary vote since the Coalition took power.

For that, you would have to go back to July, and the vote on whether the government should contribute an additional £9bn to the International Monetary Fund to help prop up other countries’ ailing, debt-ridden economies.

On that occasion, the Coalition's majority was reduced to just 28 votes, with 32 Tories joining Labour in the lobbies to oppose the bailout plan.

At the time, Chancellor George Osborne hoped that would be the end of it, and that the international debt crisis would be making no further claims on the generosity of British taxpayers.

But in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, and specifically the Greek bailout, it seems that yet more billions will be required after all.

Mr Cameron was at great pains to stress yesterday that increasing Britain’s contributions to the IMF does not mean UK taxpayers are propping up the Euro.

“Britain will not invest in the IMF so the IMF can invest in a Eurozone bailout fund. That is not going to happen,” he said.

But nevertheless, there is a certain amount of hair-splitting, if not to say outright disingenuousness, going on here.

The role of the IMF is after all to help countries in economic distress all round the world – and there seems no reason why that could not include countries in the Eurozone.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has called on the government to make clear that “directly or indirectly this money will not end up supplanting the European Central Bank and putting liquidity support in for Spain and Italy. “

As the mischievous Mr Balls knows perfectly well, there are plenty of Tory backbenchers who privately suspect this is exactly what is going to happen to the additional IMF cash.

So why is this such a potentially difficult issue for Mr Cameron? Well, do the maths.

If there was a rebellion on the latest IMF handout, only this time on the scale of the EU referendum revolt, the government would not only lose – but lose big.

It is clear that Downing Street has already wised-up to this danger and is trying to argue that a second Commons vote would be unnecessary.

Asked about it yesterday, Mr Cameron said the July vote had "allowed for some extra headroom and what we would anticipate doing would be within that headroom.”

And there is, of course, another reason why the government is keen to avoid such a vote – namely that it would further highlight the divisions in the Coalition between his party and the Liberal Democrats.

The Coalition’s inherent instability derives from the fact that it is a marriage of convenience between two parties with wildly differing worldviews, and on no single issue is this more clearly exemplified than on that of Europe.

The Lib Dems, at some cost in terms of their own popularity, have consistently advocated the concepts of European integration and “ever closer union” for most of the past 30 years.

By contrast, the Tories have been drifting steadily in the opposite direction – to the point where Mr Cameron – our most Eurosceptic premier since we joined the EU – is seen by some on the right of his party as a creature of Brussels.

Going into this year, it seemed likely that electoral reform would be the rock on which this fragile Coalition ultimately foundered, but already that seems a very distant memory.

While the debacle that was the AV referendum in May has effectively buried that issue for a decade, the issue of Europe has risen phoenix-like from the flames.

Mr Cameron spent a good part of his leadership in the early years telling his MPs to stop ‘banging on’ about Europe, doubtless conscious of the fact that the issue had destroyed the last two Conservative governments.

Now that it is back on the agenda, I suspect they won’t stop banging on about it until it has broken this one too.

Victory strengthens Cameron's hand against rebellious party

Of all the many factors that determine political success and failure, there can be no doubt that luck features pretty high on the list.

David Cameron has always been a lucky politician. He had the good luck to be elected to the Tory leadership at just the point when people were starting to tire of New Labour, and the good luck to be battling for power against Gordon Brown rather than Tony Blair.

This week his luck held out again, just at the point when it looked as though it might be finally running out.

Amid continuing fallout from Liam Fox's resignation and a looming Tory backbench rebellion over Europe - remember those? - news came through of the death of Colonel Gadaffi - another enemy in whom Mr Cameron has been fortunate.

When Britain first entered the Libyan conflict on the side of the anti-Gadaffi rebels earlier this year, I have to confess that my first reaction was: "Oh, no, here we go again."

At best, I feared another misguided crusade to foist Western-style political values on an Islamic country with no tradition of democracy, and at worst, a lengthy civil war costing hundreds of British lives.

As it turned out, though, my fears proved groundless. Mr Cameron promised that Britain's role would be limited to aerial bombing rather than boots on the ground - and he was as good as his word.

He also repeatedly stressed the importance of Britain's national interest in the removal of Gadaffi, rather than making the case for Britain's involvement on moral interventionist grounds as Mr Blair might have done.

The involvement of the former Libyan regime in the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984 and the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 was of course well-documented, even if only one person has ever been convicted of either crime.

What was less well-known until the start of this conflict, was Gadaffi's involvement in arming the IRA and thereby prolonging the bitter conflict that blighted these shores from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.

In this respect, Mr Cameron was merely following in a much older tradition of British foreign policy - the one first established by Lord Palmerston in the middle of the 19th century.

"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow." he said in 1848.

The danger for Mr Cameron, as the BBC's Nick Robinson has pointed out, is that having succeeded in Libya he develops something of a taste for military conflict.

In this context it is worth remembering that Mr Blair's first war was the successful intervention in Kosovo, not the later much more problematic entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some credit, too, should go to Dr Fox who, whatever his other shortcomings, left the Ministry of Defence with a reputation more formidable by far than any of his short-lived Labour predecessors.

Having faced down Chancellor George Osborne over the spending review last autumn, securing proper ongoing funding for our armed forces may well prove his most important legacy.

Victory over Gadaffi does not, by any stretch of the imagination, remove Mr Cameron's wider problems within his own party.

His enemies on the right are not in the least pleased by the substitution in the Cabinet of the right-wing traditionalist Dr Fox for the socially-liberal Justine Greening, who came in as transport secretary in last Friday’s enforced reshuffle.

They are said to be even more incensed by the elevation of a Cameron 'favourite,' Chloe Smith, to a middle-ranking Treasury job, ahead of what they see as more talented, but also more right-wing, rivals.

And above all, they are up in arms over the imposition of a three-line whip against plans to hold a referendum on EU membership in 2013, due to be debated in the Commons next week.

With mounting concern over the implications of the Eurozone bailout, this last issue has the potential to be as toxic for Mr Cameron as it was in the 1990s for his predecessor-but-three, John Major.

Unless the three-line whip is modified, there may well be resignations in the government’s junior ranks.

But in his calm and authoritative handling of the Libyan conflict, Mr Cameron has once again demonstrated why he is vastly more popular than his party.

And so long as that remains the case, they won’t dare push him too far.

A tale of two reshuffles

A couple of months back, I wrote a column highlighting the absence this year of one of the hitherto regular features of the political scene – the summer Cabinet reshuffle.

Partly this could be attributed to David Cameron’s hatred of them. He had made clear he saw no purpose in shifting ministers around every 12 months, and wanted his team to stay in place for the duration of the five-year Parliament.

But while the Prime Minister should doubtless be applauded for such good intentions, politicians are always ultimately at the mercy of events.

And with the departure of Dr Liam Fox from the government yesterday afternoon after a week or more of damaging allegations about his links to unofficial adviser Adam Werrity, Mr Cameron has been forced to have a reshuffle after all – an Indian summer reshuffle, if you like.

Alastair Campbell famously said that if a story about a beleaguered minister ran for more than ten days it constituted a genuine crisis management situation rather than a mere media frenzy, and Dr Fox had already passed this point.

Whether or not he is found to have breached the ministerial code – Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell has yet to reveal his findings – the former defence secretary’s behaviour has been extraordinary by any standards.

I would be the last person to condemn politicians for needing to let off steam occasionally, but most of our elected representatives manage to do that without adding a day onto an official overseas trip in order to stage a boozy party with their mates in Dubai.

But if that element of the story was somewhat comical, more serious was the suggestion that Dr Fox had created a parallel foreign policy operation, with the help of ‘advisers’ paid for by a shady bunch of right-wing ideologues.

Dr Fox owed his position in the Cabinet to having come a good third in the 2005 Tory leadership contest, and to his status as the unofficial leader of the ‘traditionalist’ Tory right.

It partially explains why, even allowing for his dislike of reshuffles, Mr Cameron appears to have fought unusually hard to retain the defence secretary, long after his departure had begun to assume a certain inevitability.

It is hard enough for Mr Cameron trying to hold together the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, while also trying to hold together the coalition of left and right, Europhiles and Eurosceptics, social liberals and traditionalists within his own party.

His appointment of transport secretary Philip Hammond as Dr Fox’s successor last night will have been calibrated not to upset that delicate balance, as well as keep the changes in government to a minimum.

In contrast to the Prime Minister, Labour leader Ed Miliband was so keen to have a reshuffle this year that he changed his party’s rules in order to do it.

The changes he announced last Friday by and large succeeded for the simple reason it did what Tony Blair’s reshuffles seldom did - and put round pegs in round holes.

So, for instance, former health secretary Andy Burnham, who had looked lost for ideas at education, moves back to cover his old brief, while the former schools minister Stephen Twigg, who returned to the Commons last year after losing his seat in 2005, takes on the education portfolio.

I am less optimistic about the much-hyped Chuka Umunna’s elevation to the role of Shadow Business Secretary up against Vince Cable, a man more than twice his age and with ten times his knowledge of the business world.

Nevertheless, focusing his changes on these three key policy areas makes good sense for Mr Miliband, as they are the areas where the opposition most needs to make political headway over the coming months.

The government may have won a narrow victory in the Lords this week over its controversial health reforms, but the issue remains a toxic one for the coalition and a potential election-loser for Mr Cameron.

For now, however, Labour will be content to have secured the unexpected scalp of a man who two weeks ago seemed secure in his role as one of the most senior ministers in the government.

How many more unwanted reshuffles will Mr Cameron be forced to perform before he comes to realise they are simply part of the territory.

Cameron's glass may be half-full - but the policy cupboard remains half-empty

It is generally true to say that in order to be successful in politics, you have to be capable of conveying a sense of optimism about your country and its future.

One of Tony Blair's key strengths at the start of his leadership was his ability to communicate a vision of a bright 'New Britain' in contrast to the greyness of the John Major years.

Later, David Cameron donned the same mantle, exhorting the voters to "let sunshine win the day" as he pitched himself against a tired old Labour government.

But there can come a time when optimism crosses the line into mere boosterism, and in my view it’s a line Mr Cameron crossed in his party conference speech in Manchester this week.

"Let's reject the pessimism. Let's bring on the can-do optimism. Let's summon the energy and the appetite to fight for a better future for our country, Great Britain," he told the Tory faithful.

And again: "So let's see an optimistic future. Let's show the world some fight. Let's pull together, work together, and together lead Britain to better days."

If, by his own admission, Ed Miliband is no Tony Blair when it comes to speechmaking, then David Cameron is no Winston Churchill either.

And I sense that I was not the only one who was left somewhat unconvinced by the Prime Minister's attempts this week to summon up the bulldog spirit.

To take another of Mr Cameron's optimistic soundbites: "Right now we need to be energised, not paralysed by gloom and fear."

Yet in the eyes of many, it is his government which has produced the economic paralysis by cutting too far, too fast and choking off the fragile recovery that had begun to see us through the downturn.

In this context, the announcement of a mere 0.1pc growth in the economy during the last quarter could not have come at a worse time for Mr Cameron.

Against that gloomy backdrop, his attempts at uplift were no more persuasive than his earlier, now seemingly discarded mantra that "we're all in it together."

The most startling omission in Wednesday’s speech was the absence of any policy detail from the Prime Minister on how he plans to ensure that economic growth in the next quarter does not grind to a halt altogether.

“Here’s our growth plan,” he said. “Doing everything we can to help businesses start, grow, thrive, succeed. Where that means backing off, cutting regulation – back off, cut regulation. Where that means intervention, investment – intervene, invest. Whatever it takes to help our businesses take on the world – we’ll do it.”

Commenting on this passage on his blog, Alastair Campbell wrote: “What was happening in the Team Cameron speech meetings? Did nobody stop and say ‘er, Prime Minister, this is a bit embarrassing, and doesn’t really say anything?’”

Okay, so Campbell is hardly an objective observer - but he knows what it takes to produce a good conference speech, and he also knows a turkey when he sees one.

The background story bubbling away behind the scenes at this conference was the nascent leadership battle to succeed Mr Cameron.

Home Secretary Theresa May made her pitch for the affections of the Tory Right by inflating a somewhat tendentious story about an over-stayed student who defied deportation on the grounds of owning a cat into front page news.

Then, as always, there was Boris Johnson, the London Mayor lobbing his own hand-grenade into the Tories' never-ending debate about Europe by announcing he favours a referendum on EU membership.

And even Mr Cameron himself felt the need to acknowledge Chancellor George Osborne's leadership ambitions, jesting about his choice of The Man Who Would Be King as an audio book.

But joking aside, the Prime Minister should surely be deeply worried by this outbreak of posturing and positioning among the potential contenders for his crown.

The result of the last general election showed that the public are not entirely convinced by him, and I sense that his party are increasingly unconvinced by him too.

Do the Tories believe that Mr Sunshine’s unflagging sense of optimism will be enough to save them from the gathering economic and political storm clouds ahead?

Or are they already secretly planning for Life after Dave?

Miliband shows the extent of his boldness, but the reaction shows the extent of his task

Of all the many soundbites devised by Tony Blair’s speechwriters for their leader’s party conference speeches, among the most irritating was the claim that New Labour was “at its best when at its boldest.”

If New Labour had ever done anything remotely bold, it might have had more of a ring of truth about it, but all it ever really did was to maintain and entrench the political and economic consensus established in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher.

It was this implicit recognition of New Labour’s shortcomings which lay at the heart of Ed Miliband’s conference speech in Liverpool this week, and which gave Labour’s current leader his own, rather more plausible claim to boldness.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, in setting out explicitly to overturn that consensus, Mr Miliband has made what was probably the most courageous conference speech by any major party leader over the course of the last two decades.

If anyone thinks I am overstating the case here, they had only to listen to the predominantly negative public reaction to the speech in Wednesday morning’s radio phone-ins.

Far from being a platform from which to relaunch his leadership, the speech left Mr Miliband on the back foot for much of that day, forced to defend himself against claims of a “lurch to the left.”

Does that mean the speech was not so much brave as foolhardy? Well, had it been a pre-election conference, then perhaps so.

But what Mr Miliband was setting out to do was not so much to secure a short-term electoral advantage as to change the entire terms of the political debate, and in this respect, he at least has time on his side.

Much of Labour’s week in Liverpool has been a collective ‘mea culpa’ for the failings and missed opportunities of the Blair-Brown years.

The warm-up act for Mr Miliband was provided on Monday by Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who expressed his own regrets over Labour’s economic record.

But while Mr Balls was talking merely about some aspects of economic management, the scope of Mr Miliband’s admission went far wider. “We did not do enough to change the values of our economy,” he said.

While cleverly branding David Cameron – the youngest Prime Minister in almost 200 years! - as the “last-gasp” of the ancien regime, the clear message was that Messrs Blair and Brown were also part of that failed consensus.

Not the least ambitious aspect of the speech was its attempt to restore the concept of ‘morality’ as a defining feature of our political culture.

Usually when a politician starts banging on about morality it precedes a dramatic fall from grace, but the confluence of the MPs’ expenses scandal, the banking crisis and phone-hacking has created a moment of opportunity which Mr Miliband has not been slow to spot.

Having already made his pitch for the moral high ground by leading the attack on Rupert Murdoch this summer, the Labour leader sought this week to build on that good work.

Now that Nick Clegg has vacated the role, there is a clear gap in the market for a ‘Mr Clean’ of British politics, and Mr Miliband has an authentic claim to the mantle.

Was it a lurch to the left? Well, in the sense that it was setting its face against the centre-right consensus of the past 30 years, then yes.

But on closer inspection there was little in the speech that would fit any traditional idea of left-wingery.

For instance, Mr Miliband said at one point that “government spending is not going to be the way we achieve social justice in the next decade.”

Had Tony Blair said this, everyone would have seen it as further evidence of his determination to bury Old Labour-style tax-and-spend and shift the party several degrees further to the right.

When Ed Miliband fought his brother for the Labour leadership a year ago, he made clear that he thought it was time to move on from New Labour.

At the time, this came over merely an adroit piece of positioning in a party weary of the factionalism of the Blair-Brown years, but now it is starting to look like there was real substance to it.

The largely hostile reaction to Tuesday’s speech illustrates the scale of Mr Miliband’s task – but at least he has a clear idea where he is going.

Now all he needs to do is to take the public with him.

At some point, Clegg will have to start thinking about the next election, not the last

If one sign of a good politician is the ability to learn from the greats that have gone before you, then Nick Clegg certainly hit the mark in at least one respect this week.

“You don't play politics at a time of national crisis, you don't play politics with the economy, and you never, ever, play politics with people's jobs," the Liberal Democrat leader told his party conference in Birmingham on Wednesday.

Westminster watchers of a certain age were instantly transported back more than a quarter of a century to Bournemouth, 1985, when Neil Kinnock tore into the grotesque chaos of Militant-run Liverpool.

“I’ll tell you – and you’ll listen!” he told the delegates as left-wing MP Eric Heffer stormed out of the conference hall. “You can’t play politics with people’s jobs, and with people’s homes, and with people’s services.”

But words aside, was there any parallel between Kinnock’s great oratorical tour-de-force and the Deputy Prime Minister’s rather more pedestrian
efforts of this week?

Well, up to a point. Kinnock’s words were of course solely directed at his own party, and so, to an extent, were Mr Clegg’s.

Coming as they did at the end of a lengthy defence of his party’s decision to join the Coalition, the words seemed primarily a rebuke to those Lib Dems who would rather they had sat on the sidelines.

That might have been better ‘politics,’ in that the Lib Dems would not now be languishing at 15pc in the opinion polls – but the whole thrust of Mr Clegg’s argument was that the national interest required him to set such considerations aside.

Currently, people views on whether the Lib Dems were right to join a Conservative-led Coalition will depend by and large on whether or not they agree with the Conservatives’ economic prescriptions.

In the North-East and other regions where the fragile recovery of 2010 appears to have been choked-off by the government’s public spending cuts, it is hardly surprising that many one-time Lib Dem voters think they were wrong.

But ultimately the question of whether Mr Clegg was right or wrong will be left to the judgement of history.

If Chancellor George Osborne’s great economic gamble ultimately succeeds and the economy returns to strong growth before 2015, it will look like a good call – but if not, he will be seen to have sold his birthright for no more than a mess of potage.

Thankfully, there are at some Liberal Democrats at least who already seem to be making plans for the latter eventuality.

In a widely-reported speech at the start of the conference, party president Tim Farron made it clear that the ‘marriage’ with the Conservatives, while currently good-natured, would inevitably have to end in divorce.

In one sense this was no more than a statement of the bleeding obvious from Mr Farron, who is widely expected to succeed Mr Clegg as Lib Dem leader.

Even if Mr Osborne manages to preside over an economic miracle, the Lib Dems cannot go into the next election hanging on to the Conservatives’ shirt-tails. Rather they will need, between now and then, to re-establish their identity as an independent party.

One of the fundamental rules of politics is that when you go into an election, you at least have to make a pretence of fighting to win.
People simply will not vote for a party that sees holding the balance of power within a hung Parliament as its explicit objective.

One thing you can be absolutely sure of is that the Conservatives won’t be going into the next election with the objective of another Coalition – explicitly or implicitly.

Many on the right of the party still blame David Cameron for failing to achieve an outright majority in May 2010 when faced by an exhausted, hapless Labour government. They will simply not permit him to aim for anything less next time.

How Mr Clegg ultimately handles this dynamic will, I suspect, determine whether it is he or Mr Farron who leads the Lib Dems into that election.

It is entirely possible that he may go down as one of those politicians – Ramsay Macdonald being another example – whose names become a byword for betrayal within their own parties.

This year’s conference was all about reassuring the doubters in his party that he did the right thing in May 2010.

The next one, however, will need to be much more about what he is going to do come May 2015..

Could boundary review put regional governance back on agenda?

Over the course of the long debate about North-East regional governance, one of the most oft-heard arguments was that the region lacked the clout to make its voice heard at Westminster.

Well, if that was true then, when the region sent 30 MPs to the Commons, it will be even more the case after the next election when its representation will fall to just 26.

This week’s review of the Parliamentary boundaries will leave no part of the region untouched, with every single one of its current 29 constituencies affected.

Some constituency names – Blaydon, Wansbeck, Stockton South – will disappear from the electoral map altogether. Others will be variously merged, dismembered or renamed.

In sub-regional terms, the impact of the Boundary Commission’s proposed changes will be fairly evenly spread.

Northumberland and Teesside will each suffer a net loss of half a seat, while Durham and South Tyne and Wear will each suffer a net loss of one.

Faced with the choice of having constituencies that crossed county boundaries, or ones that crossed the River Tyne, the commissioners somewhat bizarrely opted for the former.

The result is a series of new seats – for example Newcastle North and Cramlington – where the traditional divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas will be breached.

In terms of the impact on individual careers, one odd, but surely unintended consequence of the proposals is that two of the region’s ‘awkward squad’ – Wansbeck’s Ian Lavery and Blaydon’s Dave Anderson – are among those most at risk.

And those MPs which survive are likely to find themselves standing for re-election in constituencies which are almost unrecognisable from their existing ones.

Much of Nick Brown’s Newcastle East constituency, for instance, will go into the newly-created seat of Newcastle South.

It remains to be seen whether Mr Brown, who will be a month short of his 65th birthday by the time of the next election, will see that as an appropriate moment to call time on his long and distinguished career.

So much for individuals – what of the impact on the electoral politics of the region?

Well, for all the widespread assumption nationally that the changes are designed to clobber the Labour Party, this seems unlikely to be the case here.

The Liberal Democrats have been Labour’s main challengers in many of the region’s inner-city seats, but given their collapse in support in the North of England generally, Labour have little to fear in this regard.

While Hexham can be expected to remain solidly Conservative, and Berwick and Morpeth is likely to remain Lib Dem at least as long as Sir Alan Beith is its MP, the proposed changes appear to create few obvious opportunities for the Tories and Lib Dems elsewhere.

The biggest impact of the changes is likely to be on the influence of the region as a whole.

In terms of Parliamentary representation, it already lacked the critical mass to do much to influence the overall direction of government policy, as was seen during the Blair years when the region was effectively taken for granted.

This gradual loss of influence coincides with another broader trend, namely the increasing divergence between domestic policy in England and in other parts of the UK.

Post-devolution, Scotland and Wales had already begun to develop policies on health and education that are well to the left of the UK’s as a whole, and the Coalition’s public services reforms in England are further widening the gap.

The end result of all this may well see the North-East increasingly out of sympathy with the political consensus within England, yet unable to do much about it.

With its predominantly left-of-centre political culture, the region might start to look longingly in the direction of Scotland and Wales and the devolved powers which they enjoy.

It was widely assumed that the resounding no vote in the November 2004 regional government referendum had settled this question for a generation, perhaps even for eternity.

Seven years on, the day when it starts to creep back onto the agenda may not now be too far-off

The glorious failure of Tony Blair

Over the course of the years in which I reported on political conferences for The Journal, I listened to a fair few party leader’s speeches, some of them good, some of them almost embarrassingly bad.

Of the latter category, the one that most stands out is Iain Duncan Smith’s “The Quiet Man is turning up the volume” fiasco from 2003, closely followed by John Major’s solemn 1995 pledge to increase the number of pee-ing stops on Britain’s motorways.

But the one truly great conference address of those years was the one delivered by Tony Blair on the afternoon of Tuesday 2 October 2001, a little over three weeks after the 9/11 attacks had thrown the world into a state of turmoil.

Both as a piece of oratory, and as a superbly-judged response to the political demands of the moment, it is up there with all-time conference classics such as Neil Kinnock’s scourging of Militant in 1985 and Margaret Thatcher’s “Lady’s not for turning” from four years’ earlier.

"This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us,” the then Prime Minister told the Brighton gathering.

"Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community can.

"By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone.

"For those people who lost their lives on September 11 and those that mourn them; now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial."

But even though, ten years on, it is impossible not to admire Mr Blair’s passion and idealism, it is also impossible to escape the conclusion that his stated mission to "re-order the world around us" in the wake of the attacks proved to be a glorious failure.

More than that, it begs the question whether, in his subsequent foreign policy decisions – most notably the invasion of Iraq - Mr Blair himself contributed to that failure.

The former Prime Minister was right in his analysis that 9/11 was an opportunity to build a better, right to seek to articulate the hope that, out of this monstrous evil, some good could somehow emerge.

No, what was wrong was not the initial idea, but the subsequent execution of it by Mr Blair and other world leaders over the ensuing decade, which has, if anything, served to deepen rather than heal the world’s divisions.

Within that bigger picture thrown up by the shaken kaleidoscope of 9/11, there were a whole series of little pictures.

It was, for instance, the beginning of the end for Stephen Byers, the former North Tyneside MP who until then had been spoken of as a future Labour leader and Prime Minister.

His career never recovered from the revelation that his press officer, Jo Moore, had spent the afternoon of 9/11 telling colleagues it was now “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.”

And if 9/11 marked the beginning of the end for Mr Byers, it also marked the beginning of the end for his erstwhile leader, as the Blair premiership was blown irretrievably off course by the ensuing global ramifications.

Most fundamentally of all – and ironically in the light of Mr Blair’s soaring vision of a new world order - 9/11 was the moment when politics ceased to be about selling people dreams of a better future and became more about protecting people from nightmares.

Until the economy returned to centre stage in 2008, the political agenda for much of the ensuing decade became dominated by security issues - a trend which only accelerated when Britain experienced its own ‘9/11’ on 7 July 2005.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, it seemed barely imaginable to most of us that such a thing could happen, least of all on American soil.

But such has been its impact that, ten years on, it is now almost impossible to imagine a world in which it had not taken place.