Can 'Red Ed' really command the centre ground?

Twelve months ago, Ed Miliband delivered what I described at the time as probably the most courageous party conference speech by any major political leader over the course of the last two decades.

The Liverpool address, in which he admitted that New Labour had not done enough to change the “values” of the British economy, amounted to no less than an attempt to overturn the political consensus that has been maintained by successive governments of right and left since the 1980s.

This year’ s speech, delivered 30 miles down the road in Manchester, was no less audacious - but whereas then Mr Miliband appeared to be adopting a distinctly leftish analysis of the country’s problems, this year saw him resorting to one of Tony Blair’s favourite pastimes – stealing the Tories’ clothes.

And it is perhaps in that apparent contradiction – between the leftward-lurching ‘Red Ed’ of 12 months ago and the ‘One Nation’ Labourite of this week – that Mr Miliband’s problem lies.

You cannot fault the Labour leader’s instincts in seeking to place himself and his party firmly in the centre ground of British politics. That is, after all, where elections are invariably won and lost.

And Prime Minister David Cameron can surely only blame himself for giving his opponent the opportunity to indulge in a spot of political cross-dressing.

By instinct a One Nation, compassionate Conservative himself, he has allowed himself since entering Downing Street to be blown off course by an angry right-wing rump who cannot forgive him for failing to win the election outright and thereby forcing them into a Coalition with those ghastly Lib Dems.

The past 18 months have seen a grisly procession of rightward shifts, from his backbenchers’ piece-by-piece demolition of Nick Clegg’s plans for political reform, to a reshuffle that saw a climate change sceptic put in charge of environment policy.

So the time was surely ripe this week for Mr Miliband to make a play for the centrist-minded voters that Mr Cameron appears to have all-but-abandoned in his desperation to keep the Boris Johnson fan club at bay.

And there was much about the labour leader’s ‘One Nation’ pitch that rang true, in particular his desire to focus attention and resources on the ‘forgotten 50pc’ who don’t go to university and his determination to speak up as much for the ‘squeezed middle’ as those living in poverty.

I was also impressed by the evident passion with which he spoke up, not for the unions, but for the Union – under threat as never before as a result of Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond’s independence referendum plans.

Mr Miliband is right that only the Labour Party can save it. The Tories and Lib Dems are a busted flush north of the border, and only the Labour Party will ever have the strength in Scotland to defeat Mr Salmond’s nationalists.

Above all, the speech demonstrated that Mr Miliband has the potential to give the Labour Party the clear sense of direction it has lacked since Mr Blair left office in 2007.

Gordon Brown should have done this, and had the opportunity to do so, but for all his talk about restoring the party’s cherished ‘var-lues’, his much-vaunted Real Labour – or was it True Labour? – never really achieved lift-off.

Now we have One Nation Labour, which, if rather short on specifics at this stage, at least sounds as if it might finally resolve the vexed question of what follows New Labour.

If Mr Miliband is to ensure it is more than a slogan, he now needs to spend the 12 months between this and the next party conference putting some policy flesh on the bones.

There was widespread agreement, even among Tory commentators, that Tuesday’s speech was a bravura performance by the Labour leader, a brilliantly-crafted and passionate address that has the potential to be a political game-changer.

But the nub of Ed Miliband’s problem, as the former Tory MP turned political blogger Jerry Hayes put it rather crudely this week, is that he genuinely is the most left-wing Labour leader since Michael Foot.

The really big question is whether, the light of this, Mr Miliband can come to be seen by the voters as a credible occupant of the political centre-ground in the way that both Mr Blair and Mr Cameron were before him.

And on that score, the jury is still out.

Clegg's apology will not ultimately save his leadership

Broken promises are nothing new in politics.  From the Labour Party’s 110-year-old pledge to introduce an elected House of Lords to George H.W. Bush’s infamous one-liner ‘Read my lips, No new taxes,’ history is full of instances of parties and politicians failing to keep their word.

But there seems to be something about the subject of university tuition fees which brings out the worst in politicians where keeping promises is concerned.

Back in 2001, New Labour went into the general election with the cast-iron manifesto pledge:  “We will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them.”

Less than two years later Tony Blair’s government duly introduced them, in the teeth of a backbench parliamentary revolt in which several leading North-East Labour MPs were to the fore.

If Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had been more of a student of history, perhaps he would have reflected on this before issuing his similarly unequivocal pledge not to raise tuition fees in the run-up to the 2010 election.

Then again, had he done so he might have concluded that breaking promises is not necessarily politically fatal.   After all, Mr Blair’s original broken pledge on tuition fees did not prevent him winning a third general election in 2005.

By the same token, keeping your election promises is no guarantee of political success.

Indeed, it was Margaret Thatcher’s determination to stick to a promise to reform the system of domestic rates that led to the disastrous implementation of the poll tax in 1988 and indirectly to her fall from power two years later.

But for the Liberal Democrats, there was something about breaking the tuition fee pledge that seemed to strike at the heart of what the party is and what it stands for.

Partly because of its strong activist base in the education sector, and perhaps also because of its level of support among students, the question of tuition fees had become something of a touchstone issue for the party.

It was certainly one of the biggest reasons why, in the North East, the Liberal Democrats had become credible challengers in seats with large concentrations of students such as Newcastle Central and Durham City.

So in this sense, for the party leadership to change its mind over the issue was always likely to be viewed as a betrayal on a par with a Labour leader calling for the privatisation of the NHS or a Tory leader announcing we should join the euro.

But this is not all.    There was also something about the idea of breaking election promises at all that ran counter to the Lib Dems’ self-image as a party.

This is why the broken promise on tuition fees was such a watershed for the party – the moment it gave up – possibly for all time – any claim to be representative of a “new” or different kind of politics.

It is for all those reasons that Mr Clegg issued his videoed apology to party supporters this week ahead of what is certain to be a difficult party conference for him.

Whether it will do him any good however remains very much to be seen.  Many of the party’s supporters are likely to take a fairly dim view of the fact that he appeared to be apologising not for breaking the ‘solemn’ promise, but for having made it in the first place.

Mr Clegg finds himself in a strange kind of political limbo.  Despite the comments by Lib Dem peer Lord Oakeshott last month that any business that had lost so much market share would now be under new management, the coming conference week will not see any overt challenge to his leadership.

Yet at the same time, it is hard to find many Liberal Democrats who seriously believe Mr Clegg will actually lead them into the next general election in 2015.

The remorseless logic of their plight is that if they are to present themselves to the electorate as a viable alternative to the Tories as well as to Labour, it will have to be without the man who took them into a Tory-led coalition.

But that is next year’s Lib Dem conference story.  For now, Mr Clegg continues to inhabit the ranks of the political living dead.

Hillsborough: The apology still missing

After more than 25 years in journalism, much of it spent covering the political arena, there is little that surprises me any more about the lengths to which some people will go in order to preserve their power, position or reputation.

But in the week that the truth about the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster was finally and dramatically laid bare, even an ageing cynic like me has to confess to being shocked by the sheer scale of deception and disinformation involved.

Of course bad apples can crop up in any organisations, and sometimes, as in the case of the West Midlands Crime Squad in the 1970s or, dare I say it, News International in the past decade, this can extend into institutional corruption.

But the fact that so many pillars of the establishment, from the police, to the ambulance service, the coroners’ service, the judiciary, the government and, yes, the media could somehow collude to deny justice for so long almost – but not quite - beggars belief.

Looking back at that old footage of the disaster, it seems in many ways to have happened in another country, a Britain where football was still a working-class game and where the North-South divide was as much a cultural phenomenon as an economic one.

As Labour MP Andy Burnham put it: “There was an 'us and them' culture in the 1980s where people seen as being troublemakers could just be treated as second class citizens - football supporters, people taking industrial action. That was very evident in the North of England when I grew up."

Some believe it couldn’t happen again, that in the age of email, mobile phones and Twitter a cover-up on this scale would be impossible to carry out even if it were to be attempted.

Yet the battle to get at the truth of what happened in more recent tragedies such as the deaths of Dr David Kelly, Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson suggest that perhaps the country has not changed quite as much as might first appear.

If Hillsborough has been a saga that has showed the best and worst of humanity – and there are many heroes to stand alongside the obvious villains - then it has certainly also demonstrated the best and worst of British journalism.

South Yorkshire Police’s deliberate campaign of misinformation found a ready outlet in The Sun, whose then editor was this week forced, to use his own immortal phrase, to empty a bucket of something very nasty over his own head.

Not surprisingly, it was the regional press which demonstrated that journalism can be a potent force for good as well as harm.

It was The Journal’s sister title the Liverpool Echo which, as Labour leader Ed Miliband acknowledged on Wednesday, was primarily responsible for keeping the issue on the political agenda during the long 23-year fight.

But amid all the relief of the campaigners at having finally prevailed, there is, however, one aspect of the truth that is still to come out – the role of Margaret Thatcher.

The documents released this week by the independent inquiry panel make clear that the then Prime Minister was briefed by her aides over the level of deceit by South Yorkshire Police - yet she chose to do nothing.

Is it possible she may have felt she owed them one for helping her win the Battle of Orgreave in 1984 – a decisive encounter in the year-long conflict which ultimately led to the rout of Arthur Scargill’s miners?

She certainly cannot have been expected to show any instinctive sympathy for the victims, having previously been on record as linking football fans to the IRA and the miners as ‘the enemy within.’

In the midst of delivering his “profound apology” to the victims’ families this week on the nation’s behalf, the current Prime Minister David Cameron maintained that the Thatcher government had done nothing wrong.

Well, he had to say that, given the continued emotional hold that the Iron Lady retains over the party which he now rather precariously leads.

But it is nevertheless odd that in the week that has seen everyone from Kelvin Mackenzie to the Football Association to Boris Johnson forced to swallow a large slice of humble pie, there is still one apology missing.

From the woman who sat at the apogee of that complex, interwoven 1980s establishment, there remains an eerie silence.

Was reshuffle the beginning of the end for Cameron?

Much has changed for David Cameron over the course of his seven years in charge of the Conservative Party – but there are two aspects of his leadership that have remained pretty much constant throughout that period.

The first is that he has tried to avoid reshuffles as far as possible. The second is that in his efforts to detoxify the Tory brand he has, by and large, continued to lead the party from the political centre.

Well, it had to end sometime I guess. Two and a half years after taking up residence in Downing Street, he finally summoned the nerve to move some of his more middle-ranking Cabinet members around the political chessboard.

And in so doing, he tilted the balance of power within his government decisively rightwards – and away from that fabled centre ground he has spent so long trying to cultivate.

On the face of it, this looks like pretty poor judgement on the Prime Minister’s part. To win an outright majority at the next election, his party will have to win approximately 2m more votes than it won in May 2010.

Yet history shows that every time the Conservative Party has lurched to the right in recent years – most notably under William Hague in 1999 and Iain Duncan Smith in 2003 - its support has gone down, not up.

Mr Cameron's entire political success, such as it is, has been built on persuading people that he is not like those Tory leaders of old and that his style of politics, like Tony Blair's, is about reaching out to those who are not his natural supporters.

On no issue is the change in Mr Cameron clearer than that of the environment. The man who once rode a bicycle to work to show his party’s new-found commitment to the green cause has now appointed a virtual climate change denier as environment secretary.

Sure, the changes announced on Tuesday may well bring about some superficial advances in terms of both service delivery and presentation.

On the latter score in particular, new health secretary Jeremy Hunt will surely be an improvement on the hapless Andrew Lansley who, in the words of one commentator, “could not sell gin to an alcoholic.”

But these are trifling gains when set against the central strategic error of failing to recognise that parties struggling to hold onto their support rarely solve their problems by retreating into their ideological comfort zone.

Indeed, it is tempting to believe the entire exercise was less a considered piece of political strategizing than an act of petulance designed to put the Liberal Democrats in their place following the spat over Lords reform and the boundary review.

With the forces of the Tory right now ranged even more formidably against him, there is no doubt that Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will now find it even more difficult to persuade voters that he and his party are actually making a difference in government.

Meanwhile Labour leader Ed Miliband continues to make mischief by teasingly holding out the prospect of a post-Clegg, post-election Lib-Lab deal with ‘continuity SDP’ leader Vince Cable in the deputy PM role.

But inept as it may have been to drive his Coalition partners further into the hands of the enemy, even more ham-fisted was the Prime Minister’s treatment of his erstwhile transport secretary, Justine Greening.

Mr Cameron’s decision to remove her, apparently for having reaffirmed the government’s policy to rule out a third runway at Heathrow, has handed his real enemy – Boris Johnson – both a key weapon and a key ally in his campaign to replace the Tory leader.

The long-simmering battle between the two men has now moreorless descended into open warfare, with the London Mayor angrily denouncing Ms Greening’s demotion and demanding a statement ruling out a third runway for good.

Ms Greening – a former Treasury minister, take note – must now be odds-on to become Boris’s first Chancellor if he ever makes it into Number Ten – a double case of Blond(e) Ambition.

Hence a reshuffle that was supposed to relaunch Mr Cameron’s premiership has simultaneously risked alienating floating voters, angered his Coalition partners, and handed his main internal rival a big stick with which to beat him over the head.

From that perspective, it is tempting to see it as not so much a new dawn for his government, but the beginning of the end.

Tony Blair: The once and and future king?

Anyone who has read this column more than once over the past 15 years or so will probably know by now that I have never exactly been the greatest fan of Tony Blair.

It was not just all the spin and smarm, it was the fact that having waited so long for a left-of-centre government, we ended up with one that behaved in much the same way as the Tory administrations that preceded it.

From the perspective of a political journalist on a North-East newspaper, what made it worse was the evident lack of regard in which the former Prime Minister appeared to hold his ‘home’ region.

Having got his big break unexpectedly at Sedgefield in 1983, he repaid the region’s loyalty by ignoring its needs at every turn and allowing its prosperity divide with the South to widen markedly during his time in office.

So why, then, am I secretly clucking with pleasure at the flurry of recent stories suggesting the great man may soon make a return to the political frontline?  Well, partly, I guess, because it would make politics more interesting.

But mainly it’s down to a feeling that, in Britain, we discard our political leaders far too early, that we should be making greater use of their accumulated wisdom in the interests of better and more enlightened government.

In this context, Mr Blair’s own estimation of why he would like the chance to be Prime Minister again makes interesting reading.

“I have learned an immense amount in the past five years. One of my regrets is that what I have learned in the last five years would have been so useful to me, because when you see how the world is developing you get a far clearer picture of some of the issues our country is grappling with,” he said recently.

Now it would be easy to dismiss this as another example of Mr Blair’s colossal self-regard, were it not for the fact that what he says actually rings true.

In the not-so-distant past, after all, people who had been Prime Minister once quite often went on to become Prime Minister again – and usually ended up making a better fist of it than they had the first time round.

If I'm honest, I think I probably have something of a romantic attachment to the politics of the 19th century, when political careers lasted 60 years and the likes of Palmerston and Gladstone could still become Prime Minister in their 80s.

It’s also probably down in part to an instinctive dislike of ageism, a dislike that is becoming stronger as I myself edge nearer and nearer towards the half-century mark.

Asked recently by London’s Evening Standard whether he would welcome a return as Prime Minister, Mr Blair was quoted as saying: "Yes, sure, but it's not likely to happen is it."

One of the biggest reasons it is so unlikely is that, as Mr Blair himself acknowledged on the day he left office, he is not, and never has been, a “House of Commons man.”

He made clear how he felt about the place by resigning as an MP on the very day he resigned as Prime Minister, and it is inconceivable to see him hanging around on the backbenches waiting for his chance to ‘do a de Gaulle.’

Could he, instead, become a House of Lords or a Senate man, one of the elected peers Nick Clegg hopes to see if he gets his way and forces the Tory backbenches to swallow Lords reform?  This, I think, is rather more likely.

But if Tony Blair really does want to be Prime Minister again – and if you are politician, I don’t think you ever quite lose that desire – he would have to do it by a very different route next time round.

He won’t come back as leader of the Labour Party.  They wouldn’t have him even if they lost the next election and the one after that too.

He would probably have to start his own party, join the Tories, or, more plausibly, put himself at the head of some sort of grand Coalition in a moment of national crisis.

And the other thing he would have to do differently, of course, would be to find somewhere to represent that was a long way away from the North-East.

A tale of three Prime Ministers

Shortly after Rupert Murdoch sacked him as editor of The Times in 1982, the great newspaperman Harold Evans wrote a book about his experiences which he both hoped and believed would devastate the Australian media mogul.

‘Good Times, Bad Times’ remains a classic of its kind and is still pretty much essential reading for anyone wanting to enter our profession, but if the truth be told, its political impact was far more limited than its author had envisaged.

Over the ensuing decades, Murdoch’s continuing accretion of power over the UK media became by and large a subject of interest only to a few left-wing mavericks, with governments of both colours content to indulge the News International chief in the hope of winning his papers’ backing.

Then came the phone hacking affair, propelling the ‘Murdoch question’ to the centre of national debate to the point where it now threatens to eviscerate the entire UK political and media establishment.

This week’s hearings of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards might be termed a tale of three Prime Ministers, each one giving a subtly differing account of his dealings with the Murdoch empire.

Of the three, Sir John Major - who once promised to create a nation at ease with itself - was the only one who looked remotely close to being at ease with himself.

Actually his most intriguing revelation was not about Mr Murdoch at all but the man who defeated him in that 1997 election landslide.

Sir John’s estimation that Tony Blair was “in many ways to the right” of him seems to confirm my long-held suspicion that Tory governments seeking to reach out to the centre-left end up being more progressive than Labour ones which seek to appease the right.

Unlike Sir John, who admitted he cared too much about what the papers wrote about him, Gordon Brown claimed he barely even looked at them during his two and a half years in 10 Downing Street.

This was one of many scarcely believable claims which, taken together, served to undermine the credibility of what otherwise might have constituted a powerful body of evidence.

Mr Brown effectively accused Mr Murdoch of having lied to the inquiry about a 2009 conversation in which the former PM was alleged to have threatened to “declare war” on News International.

Cabinet office records appear to bear out Mr Brown’s version of events, but claiming he had nothing to do with the plot to force Mr Blair out of office might lead some to conclude he is a less than reliable witness.

The contributions from Messrs Major and Brown contained much that will be of interest to future historians, and may yet have a significant bearing on Lord Justice Leveson’s eventual recommendations.

But in terms of the impact on present-day politics, the key session of the week came on Thursday as David Cameron took the stand.

For such a renowned PR man he seemed very ill at ease, perhaps unsurprisingly given the excruciating contents of the text messages which he exchanged with News International boss Rebekah Brooks.

To his credit, though, Mr Cameron did not attempt to shy away from the responsibility for some of his more controversial actions, admitting that he was “haunted” by the decision to make former News of the World editor Andy Coulson his communications chief.

For me, the party leader who emerged with the least credit from the week was not Mr Cameron but Nick Clegg, whose decision to abstain in the vote over Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s future looked like the worst kind of gesture politics.

If they really wanted to see an independent investigation carried out into Mr Hunt’s role in handling the BSKyB bid, they would have voted with Labour, but this was no more than a cynical exercise in political positioning.

In Journal political editor Will Green’s excellent analysis of the state of the Liberal Democrats in the North-East published earlier this week, Gateshead Lib Dem councillor Ron Beadle was quoted as saying that Mr Clegg would not lead his party into the next election.

Party loyalists aside, it is becoming harder and harder to find anyone prepared to dispute that assertion.

The woman who saved us from President Blair

If there is a single word that has come to define David Cameron's premiership over the past two years - and one that is likely to continue to define it long into the future - it is almost certainly the word ‘austerity.’

But although circumstances have decreed that the administration which he leads is overwhelmingly focused on economic matters, this almost certainly wasn’t the way the Prime Minister originally planned it.

A few years back, the then opposition leader could be heard opining somewhat heretically that perhaps the role of policy-making should be more focused on making people happy than on making them rich.

Alas, after a couple of outings, the so-called ‘happiness agenda’ sank without trace in the face of the financial crisis that gripped the nation from 2008 onwards and which has continued to set the parameters of current day political debate.

Perhaps this week's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, however, have shown that Mr Cameron remains at heart much more of a social cavalier than the economic roundhead his opponents would sometimes like to depict.

Asked on Thursday whether other European countries would benefit from having Jubilee days off like Britain's, Mr Cameron replied with disarming honesty: ''It is not good for the economy, but it was good for the soul.''

The first point is pretty much unarguable, with the £700m boost from overseas tourism barely registering against the estimated £6bn in lost economic productivity over the course of the long bank holiday weekend.

But what the heck, we have all had a damned good party, and after what already seems like years of economic doom and gloom, perhaps that's just what we needed.

Mr Cameron is a not entirely disinterested observer, of course. Historically the ‘King’s Party,’ the Tories invariably enjoy a boost whenever the red, white and blue bunting comes out.

Furthermore, as I noted in last week’s column, the government was pretty much relying on this Jubilee weekend to draw a line under the post-Budget ‘omnishambles’ that has seen it stagger from crisis to crisis in recent weeks.

As the Tory blogger Harry Cole put it: “As a big shiny distraction from our economic woes and the political disaster that David Cameron’s government is perilously close to becoming, the Royal Jubilee weekend was pretty good.”

Whether it will work remains to be seen. But if a new ‘feelgood factor’ can emerge from the Jubilee and Olympic celebrations that will book-end this summer, then perhaps the Coalition can look forward to some sunnier times ahead.

What of the monarchy itself? Well, despite being given a frankly puzzling degree of prominence by the BBC, the Republican cause was pretty much routed by this week’s show of public affection for the Queen.

Left-wing commentators who blame the Monarchy for the decline in social mobility in the UK are forgetting that the first two decades of the Queen’s reign saw the biggest upsurge in social mobility in our history.

On a personal level, surely no monarch could be more deserving of the adulation that has been heaped upon her this week than Queen Elizabeth II.

As the historian Dominic Sandbrook put it: "We have had more exciting, more effusive and more colourful monarchs. But we have never had a sovereign who worked harder, served her country with more devotion, or better represented the innate decency of our national character."

For me, though, as has often been said, the importance of the monarchy lies primarily not in the power that it has but in the power that it denies to others.

And as such, my own debt of gratitude to the Queen is not so much for her devoted life of public service, nor even for the way she has held this country together in a period of unprecedented social change.

No, it is for the fact that, by her very presence at the pinnacle of our political system, she saved us from the baleful prospect of President Thatcher or, even worse, President Blair.

And for that, if for nothing else, I gladly join with the rest of the country in wishing Her Majesty a very happy Diamond Jubilee.

Budget shambles bodes ill for Tories' election prospects

It was of course New Labour, in the shape of former North Tyneside MP Stephen Byers' erstwhile spin doctor Jo Moore, who gave the phrase 'burying bad news' to the English language with her infamous email on the afternoon of 9/11.

But to be fair, it was neither her nor even her party which first invented the concept.  Her mistake was simply to be too brutally explicit about a practice that all modern governments have to a greater or lesser extent engaged in.

This current one is no exception, although its methods of news management at times lack the subtlety that, Ms Moore aside, was often the hallmark of New Labour’s.

This week it appeared to decide that the best such method would be to get as much bad news as possible out of the way before the Jubilee weekend, perhaps in the hope that four days of patriotic partying will mean it is all forgotten by Wednesday.

In this sense it reminded me of one of the standard news management techniques employed by governments of right and left throughout my time reporting on Westminster.

Each year, without fail, the last afternoon before the start of the summer recess would see hundreds of parliamentary answers covering all manner of embarrassing subjects dumped in the Press Gallery - just as most of us were preparing to toast the end of the political year over a few jars.

Then again, if you are going to be forced into the embarrassment of conducting no fewer than three U-turns over measures announced in the Budget, you may as well get them out there in the course of the same 48-hour period.

And if in so doing you can also manage to distract attention from the fact that your Culture Secretary sent James Murdoch a congratulatory message on the progress of his takeover bid for BSkyB on the day the said minister was given responsibility for deciding the outcome of it, then so much the better.

Cynical?  Well, it sort of goes with the territory.  But the point is, so is much of the general population when it comes to politics these days, leaving a question mark over whether such obvious news management techniques actually work any more.

Whether it was Chancellor George Osborne who was trying to take the heat off Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt or perhaps even vice-versa, both men have ended the week looking somewhat diminished.

Mr Hunt’s position remains the most precarious of the two.  Although Prime Minister David Cameron continues to insist he has done nothing wrong, Labour is to force a Commons vote on whether he has breached the ministerial code.

He may survive that ordeal, but he surely cannot survive too many more embarrassing revelations about his links with the Murdoch Empire and his obvious cheerleading of the BskyB bid.

But while Mr Hunt’s recent travails have probably put an end to his hopes of one day succeeding Mr Cameron, Mr Osborne’s has undoubtedly been the greater fall from grace.

Okay, so his job is not under any immediate threat, but his reputation as the Tories’ strategic genius - even his opponent Ed Balls once called him the best politician in the Tory Party – is probably damaged beyond repair.

Did no-one tell him it was not such a great idea for a seriously wealthy, Old Etonian Chancellor to slap a tax increase on a product which, rightly or wrongly, is largely associated with the ‘working man?’

Did no-one tell him that cutting off a key source of funding to charities at a time when the Tories are trying to build a ‘Big Society’ was not exactly joined-up government?

For all the sound and fury surrounding phone hacking and the Leveson Inquiry, the Conservatives will not ultimately win or lose the next election over the question of whether Mr Cameron got too close to Mr Murdoch and his lieutenants.

They will win or lose it on Mr Osborne’s handling of the economy, and specifically on whether he has managed to tackle the deficit and get UK plc growing again.

With the current Parliament now approaching its half-way point, this year’s Budget needed to be a success, providing a springboard for the recovery the Tories hope will see them through to victory in 2015.

The fact that it has now turned into a shambles of the highest order does not augur well for the government’s prospects.

Clegg fires welcome warning shot over regional pay

When the history of David Cameron’s government comes to be written, the Budget delivered by Chancellor George Osborne on 21 March may well be seen as a decisive turning point in its fortunes

Whether it was the pasty tax, the granny tax, the tax on charitable giving or the abolition of the 50p rate, those looking for something to criticise in the Chancellor’s package found plenty of things to choose from.

But of all the measures announced by Mr Osborne two months ago, surely the most pernicious as far as the North-East is concerned was the proposal to introduce regional pay rates – paying teachers and other public sector staff in Newcastle less than people doing the same jobs in London.

Far from seeing the prosperity gap between richer and poorer regions as an evil which needs to be addressed, the idea of regional pay takes such inequality as an incontrovertible fact of life and then threatens to institutionalise it throughout the entire British economy.

Despite the efforts of some North-East MPs and union leaders, the proposal has received little national attention up until now, demonstrating once again the London-centricity of our national media.

But that may be about to change.  For the question of regional pay now appears to be playing into the much wider political narrative concerning the longer-term future of the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition.

In what can only be seen as a shot across Mr Osborne’s bows, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg warned this week that his party could not sign up to a policy that would exacerbate the North-South divide.

It seems that regional pay has now joined the growing list of issues, alongside Europe, House of Lords reform and Rupert Murdoch, where the two parts of the Coalition are singing from increasingly varying hymn sheets.

Speaking to the National Education Trust in London Mr Clegg said: “Nothing has been decided and I feel very, very strongly as an MP in South Yorkshire, with a lot of people in public services, we are not going to be able simply willy-nilly to exacerbate a North-South divide.

“I think people should be reassured we are not going to rush headlong in imposing a system from above which if it was done in the way sometimes described would be totally unjust because it would penalise some of the people working in some of the most difficult areas.”

Perhaps the most heartening aspect of Monday’s speech was simply hearing a senior minister – the Deputy Prime Minister no less – talking about the North-South divide again.

It became practically a banned subject under Tony Blair, who first attempted to dismiss it as a "myth,” then tried to con the region into thinking something was being done about it by inventing a spurious target to narrow the gap between the three richest regions and the six poorest.

In one sense, Mr Clegg’s intervention is not unexpected given his own status as a South Yorkshire MP in what is a genuinely three-way marginal constituency.

Mr Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell has stated that Mr Clegg's only hope of retaining his Sheffield Hallam seat at the next election is to join the Conservative Party, and even making allowances for Alastair’s obvious partisanship, I’ve a sneaking suspicion he may be right,

But in the meantime, it is clearly in the Lib Dem leader's interests to try to put some clear yellow water between himself and the Tories on issues with a particular relevance to the Northern regions.

In view of the Lib Dems’ dismal performance in local elections in the North since the party joined the Coalition in 2010, it is surely not a moment too soon.

Mr Blair’s indifference to the whole issue of regional disparities was partly responsible for the Lib Dems’ dramatic surge in support in the region between 1999 and 2007, with Labour-held seats like Newcastle Central, Blaydon and Durham City briefly becoming realistic targets.

Meanwhile at local government level, the party took control of Newcastle from Labour, and actually managed to hang on to it for seven years before being swept away in the post-Coalition backwash of May 2011.

It will be a long way back for the party to reach those giddy heights again, still further if it is to mount a serious challenge for additional parliamentary seats in the region.

This week, however, Mr Clegg might just have taken the first step along the road.

A renewal of vows? Pull the other one

There is a school of thought that says that once a government gets itself into a position where it needs a relaunch, the brand is probably already so badly tarnished as to render the whole exercise pointless.

To be fair, the Coalition is probably not at that point yet. It is only two years into its existence, and governments of a far older vintage have come back strongly from similar periods of mid-term blues before now.

But the largely negative reaction to this week’s relaunch, with Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech at its centrepiece, does suggest that the government’s current difficulties go deeper than merely a run of bad headlines.

Coming in the wake of a disastrous Budget, a dismal set of local election results, and the continuing slow drip of damaging revelations from the Leveson Inquiry, it seems the Coalition is currently suffering from a bad case of the political Reverse Midas Touch.

Three major criticisms have been made of the legislative package announced by Her Majesty in what, for her, was surely the least eagerly-awaited public engagement of this her Diamond Jubilee year.

The first was that, with only 16 Bills, it was ‘too thin,’ but for my part, I wonder whether this was not in fact a point in its favour.

Over the past two decades, we have been subjected to an increasing deluge of legislation, for instance the 21 criminal justice bills spewed out by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s administrations over the course of 13 years.

A Conservative-led government, committed to reducing the burden of regulation and shrinking the size of the state, should perhaps have made more of a virtue of this year’s relative paucity.

The second most oft-heard criticism this week was that there was little or nothing in the programme specifically directed towards tackling the country’s current economic difficulties or producing a programme for growth.

But this, surely, is a category error.  Budgets, not Queen’s Speeches, are where you set out your economic policy, and Labour leader Ed Miliband should perhaps have known better than to make the main focus of his attack.

The third main criticism of the Speech – and the biggest one as far as most Tory backbenchers are concerned – was that it concentrated too much on Lib Dem hobby-horses such as House of Lords reform and not enough on issues that mat

Again, this depends on your point of view.  A second chamber elected by proportional representation from region-wide constituencies could well provide a stronger voice for regions such as the North-East – but I can well understand why the Tories, in particular, would not want that.

For me, the most fundamental flaw in Wednesday’s speech was not that it was too thin, too lacking in economic content or too Liberal Democrat, but that it lacked a unifying narrative which would give people a reason to support the government.

Say what you like about Mr Blair, his Queen’s Speeches never suffered from this deficiency, even if, as time went on, they tended to be more about protecting people from nightmares than giving them dreams of a better future.

Perhaps the reason it lacked a unifying theme because it was less the product of one man’s over-arching vision and more the product of compromise between the government’s two constituent parties.

In this respect, the most interesting political story of the week was not the Speech, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s interview with the Daily Mail in which he bemoaned his lack of freedom of action to do the things he really wanted.

What was especially notable about this is that, while Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg loudly and often complains about the Conservatives, Mr Cameron very rarely does the same about the Lib Dems.

Yet here was the Prime Minister saying:  “There is a growing list of things that I want to do but can’t…..there is a list of things that I am looking forward to doing if I can win an election and run a Conservative-only government.”

This week’s relaunch had been billed in advance by some cynics as the Coalition’s “renewal of vows,” but Mr Cameron’s interview shows this to be well wide of the mark.

In truth, it seems to be heading all the more rapidly for the divorce courts.

Johnson the real winner once again

You can look at yesterday's local election results purely in terms of the 400 or so council seats lost by the Conservatives and the 800-plus gained by Labour.

You can look at them in terms of national share of the vote, with Labour opening up a seven-point lead over the Tories that if repeated in a general election would put Ed Miliband comfortably in Number 10.

You can look at them in terms of the almost wholesale rejection of the government's plans for a network of powerfully elected mayors in our major cities, not least in Newcastle where the idea was rejected by a majority of almost 2-1.

But whichever way you choose to look at them, it's already pretty clear that Thursday was a very bad night for the Coalition.

It was always likely that the Tories would try to get us to look at the results through the prism of their star performer Boris Johnson's ultimately successful re-election campaign for the London Mayoralty.

But this really won't wash.  Johnson is a political one-off, and so, in a different sense, is his Labour opponent Ken Livingstone, who found himself deserted in this election by a significant element within his own party.

Although in the short-term Mr Johnson's narrow win provides the Conservatives with a convenient fig-leaf for their wider failure up and down the land, in the longer-term his victory is a disaster for David Cameron.

Once again, Boris has proved that he is the proven winner in the Tory ranks, in marked contrast to a leader who couldn't even score an outright election win against the exhausted volcano that was Gordon Brown in 2010.

In one sense yesterday's results were entirely predictable given the catalogue of disasters that the government has visited upon itself lately.

Mr Cameron will hope he can draw a line under it all in time-honoured fashion, with a relaunch of the Coalition - or as some are calling it, a renewal of vows – likely to come as early as the next fortnight.

This will be followed by a wide-ranging summer reshuffle that could see Ken Clarke and Andrew Lansley thanked for their service and replaced by younger, more media-savvy operators such as Grant Shapps and Chris Grayling.

But even this poses difficulties for Mr Cameron, with the long-planned promotion of Jeremy Hunt having to be put on hold pending his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards.

For my part, I wonder whether something deeper than mere mid-term blues is at work here - whether a public that was initially disposed to give the Coalition the benefit of the doubt has now started to do the opposite.

It is surely significant that, while 12 months ago the Tory vote held up as the Lib Dems bore the brunt of voters' anger over the austerity measures, this time round they were both punished equally.

Equally ominous for the Conservatives is the rise and rise of the UK Independence Party, which took 13pc of the national vote in a set of elections where it traditionally makes little impact.

If UKIP can start taking as many votes off the Conservatives in a general election, it might even one day force them to embrace the merits of proportional representation

Mr Miliband, though, will refuse to get carried away by any of this.

Six months ago I thought the public had by and large made up its mind about him, but maybe they are taking another look and liking what they see.

The biggest encouragement for the Labour leader is the fact that the party appears to be on the march beyond its traditional strongholds.

Not only is it winning back bellweather Midlands cities like Derby and Birmingham that will be crucial to its general election chances, but also more southerly councils such as Harlow, Plymouth and Great Yarmouth.

As for the North-East, having rejected regional government in 2004 it has now rejected the nearest thing to it, a Newcastle city region led by a powerful, Boris-style elected mayor.

While I am no great fan of presidential-style politics, it is hard to see how the region can compete effectively for its share of the national cake without such powerful advocates.

Fear of change, the desire to stick to the devil you know, remains a powerful factor in determining political outcomes, and Thursday’s mayoral referendum was no exception.

And if there is a crumb of comfort anywhere for Mr Cameron in yesterday’s results, it may well be in that.

The end of the beginning

Honeymoon period is doubtless an overworked term in politics – but all governments to some extent or other tend to enjoy a period of time in which the prevailing public attitude towards them is one of general goodwill.

Tony Blair was lucky enough that his lasted nearly five years, though that was in part down to the general uselessness of the Tory opposition of the time and the benign economic climate which he had inherited.

The public enthusiasm generated by the formation the Coalition government in 2010 was never quite on the scale of that which greeted Mr Blair’s arrival in 1997, and hence was never likely to last quite as long.

Nevertheless until relatively recently, the government was still widely seen as competent, and though its economic policies may have polarised opinion in some quarters, the press and public were still tending to give it the benefit of the doubt.

All that started to change with the Budget. The granny tax, the pasty tax and the row over tax relief on charitable giving combined to make this the biggest PR disaster to come out of the Treasury since Gordon Brown’s 75p pension increase.

There followed the woeful mishandling of the prospect of an Easter fuel strike, leading to what turned out to be a quite unnecessary spate of panic buying.

The government’s difficulties continued with the fiasco over the attempted deportation of Abu Qatada after the Jordanian terror suspect’s lawyers ran rings round Home Secretary Theresa May.

And by the end of last week, the run of mishaps had even acquired a name: omnishambles.

Things got no better at the start of this week as outspoken Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries tore into Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, branding them “arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.”

Then Jeremy Hunt, one of David Cameron's closest Cabinet allies and a potential future Tory leader, found himself accused of operating a ‘back channel’ of communication with the media mogul Rupert Murdoch during his bid for BskyB.

His special adviser took the rap and resigned, but this failed to quell opposition demands for Mr Hunt himself to fall on his sword.

It brought forth the wounding jibe from Labour’s Dennis Skinner: “When posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants.”

But all of this really pales into insignificance besides the news that was delivered by the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday morning: that the government had, after all, led us into the dreaded double-dip recession.

Months of Labour warnings that the government was cutting too far, too fast were suddenly and dramatically vindicated.

It is too early to say whether it will prove to be a political game changer on the scale of, say the 1992 ERM debacle or Mr Brown’s election-that-never-was in 2007.

But it does, almost certainly, mean the end of a period in which the government’s claims about the economy have generally been given greater credibility than the opposition’s.

The politician whose personal fortunes have most closely mirrored those of the government over the past six weeks is Mr Osborne.

He has gone from being seen as the strategic genius of the Tory benches to being widely blamed for many of the government’s current difficulties.

The corresponding beneficiaries are Boris Johnson – Mr Osborne’s main rival for the future Tory leadership – and of course the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls.

As the former Labour special adviser Dan Hodges put it in the Daily Telegraph: “Ed Balls has won the right to be listened to now. That doesn’t mean people will automatically agree with what he says. But they will listen.”

In the light of the ONS figures though, perhaps the most damaging attack on the government last week came not from Mr Balls or even Mr Skinner, but from Ms Dorries.

The particularly lethal nature of her comments is that they play into a growing preconception about Messrs Cameron and Osborne that is being heightened by the worsening economic conditions.

A Prime Minster can get away with being a posh boy so long as he is competent on the one hand, and empathetic to the plight of those worse off than himself on the other.

On both of those scores, Mr Cameron is currently being found wanting.

Labour must share blame for region's plight

Over the past few weeks, the domestic political agenda has been dominated by the continuing fallout from what has by now surely become of the most controversial, even reviled Budgets of recent years.

It started within a few minutes of the Chancellor sitting down on 21 March with the revelation that he had performed a stealth tax raid on pensioners' incomes by freezing their personal allowances - the so-called 'granny tax.'

It continued with the belated realisation that, in pursuing the entirely laudable objective of limiting the amount of tax relief that can be claimed by the super-rich, the government had also made life much, much harder for the charitable sector.

And throughout it all there has been the ongoing row over the so-called pasty tax, coupled with increasingly laughable attempts by Old Etonian ministers to get with the workers by claiming to be fans of the hot snacks.

But until this week, no serious consideration had been given to the particular impact of George Osborne's proposals on the North-East.

So first off, congratulations are due to Gateshead MP Ian Mearns, always a doughty campaigner on behalf of the region, for securing a 90-minute debate on that very subject in Westminster Hall on Tuesday.

Having spent quite a lot of my career covering such debates, it would be easy for me to write them off as so much hot air, but that would be an overly-cynical view even for me.

They may not change anything, at least in the very short term, and the ministerial replies may be invariably formulaic. But where they do succeed is in raising consciousness of an issue to the point where it becomes harder to ignore, and that sense they are vital.

It was clear from the start that this was a Budget that was particularly pernicious in its potential impact on the region.

Quite apart from the impact on Tyneside-based pasty-maker Greggs, one of its central recommendations was the introduction of regional pay rates, which would institutionalise regional income disparities in the public sector for no better reason than the fact that they already exist in the private sector.

Mr Mearns chose not to dwell on that particularly in his opening speech to Tuesday's debate, however, choosing to highlight some damning statistics about the effect of Mr Osborne's higher-rate tax cut and the government's spending priorities.

He revealed that, while in London, the South-East and East Anglia, nearly 195,000 taxpayers will reap the benefit of the tax giveaway, in the North-East the figure will be fewer than 5,000.

On transport spending, the disparities are even more alarming. Mr Mearns revealed that more than 160 times as much is being spent on transport infrastructure projects in London than in the North-East.

"Once more, the people of the North East are paying the price for an economic strategy made in and for the wealthier south," he said.

He didn't, as it happens, mention the proposed HS2 high-speed link, but although it has its supporters, my own view is that it is not necessarily the panacea that some say it is.

For one thing, it won't arrive here until 2032 at the earliest. For another, any economic benefits to the wider North are likely to migrate towards Leeds and Manchester, which will be getting the link a good half decade earlier.

But the most fundamental question that has to be asked of any Labour politician when raising the issue of the North-South divide is why the party did not do more to address it during its 13 years in power from 1997.

Ian Mearns at least can point to a consistent track record on that score. As a leading figure in North-East local government during the Tony Blair years, he was one of those who regularly highlighted that administration's failure to address the issue, while the likes of Nick Brown and David Clelland also argued strenuously behind the scenes for a better deal for the region.

But the party as a whole allowed Mr Blair to get away with two particular claims that, taken together, served fatally to undermine the case for a more proactive regional policy.

The first was that the differences within regions were as great as the differences between them. The second was that any attempt to rebalance the economy risked harming the Southern regions which were the main driver for the economy as a whole.

Whatever the merit of these arguments, they became, over time, an excuse for simply doing nothing.

In the words of its response to a 2003 report on the issue: "The government does not accept the proposition that increased public funding to the less prosperous regions is a necessary condition to improve their prosperity."

The sad truth of the matter is that New Labour had an historic opportunity to do something about regional economic disparities at a time when it had a fair political wind behind it and, crucially, public spending as a whole was rising.

For the Coalition to try to tackle the gap in the current economic environment is a much harder task.

It's regional devolution, Jim, but not as we knew it

Writing last Saturday, the Newcastle Journal's regional affairs correspondent Adrian Pearson opened his column with the words: "If an elected mayor is the answer, what could possibly have been the question in North Tyneside?"

Well, allow me to have at least a stab at providing an answer.

There are plenty of cynical explanations. Elected mayors were originally the brainchild of the Tory cabinet minister Michael Heseltine in the early 1990s, and were seen by some at the time as an attempt to circumvent the power of high-spending, left-wing Labour councils.

Indeed, as Adrian pointed out in his column, this was precisely what later happened in North Tyneside, where Labour's stranglehold on local politics was finally thwarted by a succession of Conservative mayors in what became a recipe for decade-long infighting.

By the time New Labour came to enact Heseltine's proposed reforms, though, the agenda had changed somewhat. I believe Tony Blair's primary motivation for implementing elected mayors was simply to try to revive flagging voter interest in local government by, well, sexing it up.

In that sense, it was no more than a reflection of the trend towards ‘presidential’ politics that reached its apogee under Mr Blair, and which continues, though to a slightly lesser degree, under David Cameron.

The sorts of arguments that were heard then - "increased accountability through increased visibility" - are still used to promote the elected mayoral idea today - but a decade or more on, the debate has now become much more bound up with economic development and in particular with redressing regional economic disparities.

It is now very much part and parcel of the "city regions" concept that emerged from the wreckage of the regional government debate after the North East Assembly referendum debacle, with elected mayors seen as a way of giving their areas the kind of clout that properly-empowered assemblies might once have exercised.

This argument is already very much to the fore in the debate over whether there should be an elected mayor of Newcastle, for instance.

The city has yet to even make a decision on the issue - but already people such as Lewis Goodall of the regional policy think-tank IPPR North are talking openly about a directly-elected leader or 'metro mayor' not just for Newcastle but for the entire Tyneside conurbation.

"To really counterbalance the power of London, mayors need to have real powers to forge the destiny of their area," he wrote in Good Friday's Journal.

"Over time, this might mean a move towards a metro mayor for the wider city area - not just Newcastle but the surrounding conurbation too, with powers over economic development and transport."

To those of us with long memories, what is particularly interesting about that comment is that it was precisely those powers that the proponents of an elected regional assembly demanded - and failed to get - prior to the 2004 referendum.

I have always believed that had Mr Blair been more inclined to hand such powers to a regional body, the public might well have been more inclined to vote for it.

But regional government was only ever a means towards the greater end of tackling the North-South prosperity divide.

And as Lewis Goodall also pointed out in his piece, this is still very much with us, with the government planning to spend £2,700 per head on infrastructure projects in London compared to £5 a head in the North-East.

Looming over the whole debate over elected mayors is the larger-than-life figure of London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Not only has he enhanced the ‘accountability’ argument in favour of mayors by being a highly visible elected figurehead, he has also enhanced the economic argument by using his undoubted clout to further deepen that imbalance.

Mr Cameron’s own decision to axe regional development agency One NorthEast didn’t help matters either – but a gaggle of elected mayors flying the flag for the region could go some way towards filling that gap.

It isn’t regional devolution as we once knew it, Jim, but it might turn out to be the best form of regional devolution on offer.

Heir to Blair in more ways than one

Shortly after becoming leader of his party in 2005, David Cameron caused consternation among Conservative supporters by claiming that he was the true ‘heir to Blair.’

In one sense, it was a strange move, since the former Prime Minister had by then already begun the long, slow descent from the public adulation that greeted his arrival in No 10 to the public disillusionment that hastened his departure.

But Mr Cameron’s boast had a larger strategic purpose, namely to fix himself in the public mind as a politician of the centre ground and at the same time portray Mr Blair’s putative successor Gordon Brown as one who would abandon that territory.

And since entering Downing Street, he has continued in the same vein, claiming more than once that his health and education reforms are no more than a continuation of the changes initiated by Mr Blair a decade ago and thereby portraying Labour’s opposition to them as indicative as “lurch to the left.”

Mr Cameron has also found himself praised by former Blairite apologists such as John McTernan for his policy of liberal interventionism abroad, most notably in Libya.

But over the past week, much less welcome comparisons have started to be drawn between the two leaders as the government’s political fortunes took a marked turn for the worse.

At some points over the past seven days it has looked as though recent history may be repeating itself, such is the sense of déjà vu surrounding some of the government’s current crises.

Where New Labour has its 45p pension increase, the Coalition has its granny tax. Where New Labour had the fuel protests, the Coalition has the threat of a tanker drivers’ strike. And where New Labour was accused of selling honours for cash, Mr Cameron now finds himself accused of selling access.

No wonder that one of Mr Blair’s former speechwriters, Phil Collins, called it the government’s worst week in office so far, before going on to note wryly that under Mr Blair, each week was portrayed as being a worse one than the last.

Far more scathing was the verdict offered by the Conservative-leaning commentator
Peter Oborne, who saw this week’s events as signs of a shift in the political landscape.

“David Cameron’s claim that the government represents the interests of Britain as a whole now feels baseless and cynical, replaced by the growing perception that he represents nothing more than a coterie of rich and privileged men,” he wrote.

Oborne went onto to accuse Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne of embracing “the worst aspects of Blairism: the obsession with very rich men; the divergence between public statements and private conduct; the preference for policy making through private cabal; and the almost demented Blairite contempt for their own party members."

This is only one example of what appears to be a deepening gulf between the government and its natural supporters, both in the press and in the country.

The Daily Telegraph was never that keen on him anyway, tending to regard him as “not really one of us” in much the same way as The Guardian once saw Mr Blair.

More worryingly for Mr Cameron, the Daily Mail now appears to have turned on him over the 'granny tax’ while The Sun has him in its sights over both the 'pasty tax' and the failure to do anything about fuel prices.

Some will say it's a good sign, showing that Mr Cameron is still occupying that fabled centre ground. Others will point out that alienating your natural allies is a political dead end, as Mr Blair eventually found to his cost.

Mr Cameron’s problems with the Tory press – and the wider party - really stem from one thing: his failure to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2010.

Had he succeeded in doing that, they would have forgiven him all his attempts to define himself in opposition to his own supporters, forgiven his portrayal of the Old Tories as a “nasty party” which he was determined to detoxify.

But he failed, even when up against an opponent whom they regarded as at best, ineffectual and, at worst, bonkers.

And until, like Mr Blair, he can prove himself a real winner, Mr Cameron will never truly capture his party’s heart.

Bad news management costs Osborne dear

There is a hoary old adage in British politics that a Budget that looks good on the day invariably looks like a turkey a few weeks later.

But there can be few Budgets in the recent past which have unravelled quite as quickly as George Osborne’s latest package unveiled to MPs on Wednesday.

Within an hour of him sitting down, #grannytax was the top trending item on Twitter and the revolt against the Chancellor’s ‘stealth tax’ raid on pensioners was under way.

Rarely have the following days’ newspapers seen such a degree of unanimity over a Budget statement – or made such depressing reading for the man from Number 11.

Part of the largely hostile press reaction can be put down down to poor presentation and rank bad news management on the part of the government.

As one Labour veteran reminded us, Gordon Brown’s modus operandi was to get all the bad news out there beforehand and hold the good stuff back for a big ‘rabbit-out-of-the-hat’ announcement on the day.

The government appears to have taken the opposite approach with this Budget, with more leaks than a St David’s Day parade as one heterographically-minded blogger put it.

Indeed one reason it has had such a bad press is that most of the more positive measures were old news by the time the Chancellor got to his feet.

There were at least some good points. Annual tax statements will be a welcome addition to the public’s right to know, while the 2p cut in corporation tax ought to help meet the desperate need for new jobs.

And the imposition of 7pc stamp duty on the purchase of homes over £2m is the nearest we are likely to come to the Lib Dems’ cherished “Mansion Tax.’

Furthermore, despite its appalling presentation, I don’t necessarily go along with all the criticisms that have been made of the so-called ‘granny tax.’

As the Institute of Fiscal Studies has pointed out, pensioners have so far done better than younger people from the government’s austerity measures, and this at least helps even things up a bit.

Inevitably, much of the ire of left-of-centre politicians and commentators has been directed at the 5p cut in the top rate of income tax, worth around £42,500 a year to someone earning £1m.

It provided Ed Miliband with the best joke of the week – and perhaps of his leadership – telling the Prime Minister he will save so much that he “will be able to afford his own horse.”

A more serious moral point was made by the commentator Martin Kettle, arguing that the top-rate tax cut highlights the different worlds inhabited by the super-rich and the rest of us.

“The vast majority of us would be prosecuted if we opted not to pay [tax.] If the rich don’t pay, the law is changed to reflect the fact that they won’t pay up,” he wrote.

The economic arguments over the efficacy of the 50p rate will doubtless run and run, but this is perhaps one area where the politics should have trumped the economics.

If the 50p rate symbolised the fact that ‘we’re all in it together,’ then the political damage to the government engendered by its removal may well outweigh any economic benefit in the longer term.

The move towards a single personal tax-free allowance of £10,000 has been widely welcomed, but - just as Mr Brown once did – Mr Osborne is recouping some of the cost through so-called ‘fiscal drag.’

It means around 300,000 middle-income earners are finding themselves dragged into the 40p tax rate at the same time as top-rate taxpayers see their own rates cut by 5p in the pound.

But saving the worst till last, for me the most pernicious of all the Budget measures – at least as far as the North-East region is concerned - is the proposed introduction of regional rates of pay in the public sector.

As has been pointed out, this will only serve to entrench existing regional economic inequalities and institutionalise low-wage economies in areas such as the North-East, Wales and South-West.

The government’s argument seems to be that as private sector pay is lower in these regions, so therefore public sector pay ought to be lower too.

To me, that sounds suspiciously like two wrongs make a right.

Nothing gets politicians so worked up as a Boundary Review

THIS week, The Journal reported that there had been more than 900 objections lodged with the Boundary Commission over its plan to alter the face of the region’s one real rock solid Tory enclave – the parliamentary seat of Hexham.

The plans, drawn up last September as part of the government’s proposal to reduce the size of the House of Commons by around 50 seats, would see historic country boundaries crossed in the name of ‘equalising’ the size of constituencies across the country.

If the proposals go ahead, the North-East will see its overall representation in Parliament fall from 29 to 26 with no part of the region unaffected by the changes.

For some of the region’s MPs, it is likely to mean the end of the political road, while those that survive are will find themselves standing for re-election in constituencies almost unrecognisable from their existing ones.

In nowhere than Hexham has the opposition to the government’s plans been more intense.

All three main parties – including the Conservatives and their sitting MP Guy Opperman – have come out against the proposals, with the 950 letters of opposition equalling the number received in all the other 28 North East constituencies put together.

What the opponents of the changes find particularly galling is the fact that the proposed new constituency will breach the historic county boundary between Northumberland and County Durham, with Haltwhistle moving into a newly-created seat of Consett and Barnard Castle.

Other proposed new constituencies in the region – for example Newcastle North and Cramlington – will see the traditional divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas breached, although, perhaps surprisingly, these seem to have aroused much less opposition to date.

But the ongoing debate over Hexham could prove to be a microcosm of a much larger battle over the government’s proposals which could yet influence both the timing and the outcome of the next general election.

In my column last week, I speculated that Nick Clegg’s proposals for House of Lords reform could ultimately prove to the rock on which the Coalition founders, with Conservative peers, who want to maintain the second chamber’s built-in Tory majority, threatening to derail his plans.

What does that have to do with Parliamentary boundaries, I hear you ask? Well, potentially quite a lot.

For the Lib Dems are threatening to retaliate against the potential loss of their leader’s cherished Lords reform plans by scuppering the Tories’ attempts to reduce the number of MPs.

Now at first sight, you might think this was yet another ill-judged policy intervention by the Lib Dems that is likely to prove about as big a vote-winner for them as their support for the Euro.

Years of mounting public cynicism about politicians – capped by the MPs’ expenses scandal – have created a climate in which any party advocating a reduction in their numbers is likely to be on pretty firm electoral ground.

But politicians are never so exercised as when their own jobs are under threat – and for that reason alone, a Lib Dem revolt against the boundary review proposals could have a very real prospect of success.

A small number of Tory MPs affected by the changes – some of them only elected for the first time in 2010 and whose parliamentary careers face being cut off in their infancy – might even be persuaded to join such a rebellion.

This is not just about the Lib Dems getting their own back on the Tories, though. There is undoubtedly an element of calculation in the party’s stance.

It is estimated that the boundary changes will be worth an extra 20 seats for the Conservatives at the next election – some of which will undoubtedly come at the expense of their Coalition partners.

The changes will therefore make it much more likely that there will be a majority Conservative administration next time round, and correspondingly much less likely that the Lib Dems will again be in a position to hold the balance of power.

Killing off the boundary review might yet be the Lib Dems’ best hope of hanging onto their ministerial limousines. And it might even win them a few votes in Hexham.

The Coalition will not last five years

In last week's column, I suggested that the key strategic task facing the Liberal Democrats as they gather for their spring conference in Gateshead was to find a way of winning back the support that has deserted them since they joined the Coalition in 2010.

And doubtless there will be plenty of ideas floating back and forth at The Sage this weekend as to exactly how they should go about it.

They could, as some argue, stop the Health and Social Care Bill in its tracks. The Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee is among those warning this week that if they don’t take what may be their last opportunity to do this, it will seal their fate as a party.

Or they could, as Business Secretary Vince Cable has suggested, use their influence to help shape next month’s Budget, taking everyone earning less than £10,000 a year out of tax and introducing a ‘mansion tax’ for the super-rich.

Their leader, Nick Clegg, certainly wants to see the party getting on the front foot and proclaiming its successes in the Coalition rather than apologising for being part of it.

“Now it is time to move on. To stop justifying being in government and start advertising being in government. To stop lamenting what might have been and start celebrating what is. To stop defending our decisions and start shouting our achievements from the rooftops,” he said yesterday.

But whichever way they turn, will it make the slightest difference to the party’s electoral prospects?

Well, if history is any guide, no. The plain facts of the matter are that involvement in a Coalition is almost always disastrous for the smaller party, whatever political achievements it manages to extract from it.

The most recent example was the Lib-Lab pact in 1977/78. This was perhaps the most enlightened and humane period of government in my lifetime, but it still ended up doing the then Liberal Party terrible damage.

Far from emerging strengthened, their vote went down at the subsequent general election in 1979 and several of their most high-profile MPs, including the deputy leader John Pardoe, lost their seats.

Further back, the 'National Liberals' who joined the Tory-dominated National Government in the 1930s ended up simply becoming absorbed by the larger party.

And David Lloyd George’s 1916-22 Coalition, in which the Tories also held a numerical majority, likewise ended disastrously for the Liberals and their leader despite victory in the First World War.

It is partly for this reason that I have argued from the outset of the Coalition that, while the Lib Dems probably had no choice but to join it, they also needed to find a way of getting out of it alive – preferably well before the next election is due.

The Health and Social Care Bill, on which the Lib Dem rebels are more in tune with public opinion than the government is, would have given them a plausible pretext, although the party activists’ last-ditch bid to halt the Bill now looks unlikely to succeed.

Europe, by contrast, would not be a good reason for the Lib Dems to try to collapse the Coalition, for the simple reason that on this issue, it is the Tories who are much closer to the mainstream public view.

One less widely-canvassed possibility is House of Lords reform – not the sexiest of issues, for sure, but one on which the Tory ‘backwoodsmen’ seem almost certain to thwart Mr Clegg’s well-meaning attempts to drag the British Constitution into the 21st century.

The last time I discussed the possibility of the Coalition ending before its due-date of 2015, a commenter on my blog reminded me that the government has already passed legislation to bring in five-year fixed-term Parliaments.

My view, however, is that this could turn out to be no more than a quaint constitutional notion, given that the legislation also allows for a two-thirds majority of MPs to dissolve Parliament ahead of its term.

Let’s just suppose that David Cameron decides he wants an election. Would Labour MPs, in such circumstances, really vote to keep him in office until 2015?

It stands to reason that the Coalition will not last five years. It will, rather, last just as long as both of its partners want it to.

The real issue which the Lib Dem spring conference needs to address

Back in the bad old days of two-party politics, the Liberal Democrat spring conference was one of those recurring events in the political calendar which even political journalists struggled to get too worked up about.

Sure, the BBC invariably ran a short item about it – but that was only because its rules on impartiality oblige it to give Lib Dem gatherings the same coverage as those of the other two main parties.

How times have changed, however. Not only is this year’s spring conference in Gateshead a big story in the North-East, but it is also set to attract the kind of national media attention which the third party could once only dream of.

At stake could be the future of a flagship piece of government legislation – and in the longer-term, the future of the government itself.

Last year’s spring conference saw Lib Dem activists effectively force their Tory coalition partners to order a ‘pause’ in the controversial Health and Social Care Bill designed to hand large parts of the NHS over to GP consortia and increase competition across the service.

A year on, and this year’s may yet result in the hated Bill’s final demise.

Alongside Europe, the Bill remains perhaps the biggest point of division between the two Coalition partners, despite continuing attempts by both party leaderships to soften it at the edges in the hope of avoiding a showdown.

But even a desperate entreaty by party leader Nick Clegg and much-loved veteran Baroness Williams this week looks unlikely to head-off an attempt at next week’s gathering to kill of the legislation once and for all.

Unlike on Europe, it has been clear for some time that the Lib Dem tail is wagging the Tory dog when it comes to the NHS.

Earlier this week, Lib Dem peers put forward a fresh series of amendments to the Bill in the House of Lords designed to further water down the requirements for increased competition.

Initially, the government said it was ‘not minded’ to accept the amendments, but once they were duly passed, it decided not to try to overturn them.

At the same time, Mr Clegg and Lady Williams issued a letter to party members saying that the Bill as now amended contained all the necessary safeguards and should therefore now be “allowed to proceed.”

Early signs are, however, that activists are determined to press ahead with a conference vote on the motion, which calls for the "deeply flawed" Bill to be "withdrawn or defeated.”

One prominent Lib Dem, Graham Winyard, has already resigned from the party over the issue, warning Mr Clegg that his support for the bill would be "a slow-motion disaster" for the NHS and the party.

Labour has not been slow to seize on the divisions, with shadow health secretary Andy Burnham attacking Mr Clegg’s “stage managed posturing” over the Bill.

He urged Lib Dem rebels to work with Labour and dismantle the Bill to remove the provisions relating to competition.

But of course the Lib Dems’ problems go much wider than health. Their real difficulty lies in the fact that voters have deserted the party in droves since it joined the Coalition.

In this sense, it is ironic that they are meeting in the North-East at a time when the party’s standing in the region has possibly never been lower.

A poll carried out by YouGov the week before last showed the party now has the support of just 4pc of the region’s voters – lower than the UK Independence Party on 7pc.

The days when the Lib Dems entertained serious hopes of winning parliamentary seats such as Blaydon and Durham City now seem a very long way away indeed.

Under Charles Kennedy’s leadership from 1999-2006, the party pursued a successful strategy of appealing to disaffected Labour voters as well as its own traditional supporters, gaining its higher number of MPs since the 1920s.

It is now facing the nightmare scenario of its parliamentary representation being reduced to single figures for the first time since the revival of third-party politics began in the 1970s.

It is hard to dispute the analysis of Gateshead councillor Ron Beadle that, in electoral terms, the Coalition has been a “disaster” for the party.

This, not the future of the health bill, is the real issue which this spring conference needs to address.

What next for David Miliband?

It was Clement Attlee who famously told a Labour colleague that a period of silence from him would now be welcome, thereby inadvertently earning himself an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

And it is certainly true that there are times in politics when it is best to keep your head down and your mouth shut.

By and large, the past 15 months have been such a period for David Miliband, the South Shields MP and former Foreign Secretary who, until October 2010, had been widely expected to become leader of his party.

But it wasn't to be and, rather than risk the sort of comparisons that might have undermined his younger brother's leadership, the elder Miliband stood bank from the political frontline and confined his public statements to the occasional supportive message.

Such was ostensibly the nature of his article in the New Statesman a couple of weeks back in which he outlined a seven-point plan for the future of the party and called for “restless thinking” in its bid to recapture power.

He made a point of praising his brother Ed on no fewer than four occasions, highlighting his success in maintaining party unity, and having spoken out "powerfully" over issues such as welfare cutbacks.

But that, of course, did not stop the political commentariat once more portraying David’s intervention as a covert leadership bid.

The resulting furore saw Mr Miliband forced into another round of interviews in which he appeared to rule out any return to the frontbench on the grounds that it would merely perpetuate the “soap opera.”

One rather venomous interpretation of his actions came from the Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in an article headlined: ‘The sniping and self-pity of a truly feeble man.’

Likening Mr Miliband’s political modus operandi to the game of Knock Down Ginger, he accused him of thrice raising the standard of internal revolt before “scuttling away to hide in the bushes.”

“The pattern was set in the summer of 2008, when David wrote a barely coded article in the Guardian lacerating Gordon Brown. The moment it was greeted as the challenge to the PM’s authority that it certainly was, off he scarpered, denying any such intent,” he wrote.

“Within a year, his close friend and Cabinet ally James Purnell resigned, laying the ground for David to oust Mr Brown by doing the same. Again he bottled it, and stayed."

Mr Norman saw the New Statesman article, and the semi-retreat that followed it, as more of the same, going on to suggest a permanent silence from a man he charmingly described as “a mincing paean to metrosexual narcissism.”

It was left to the former Labour North official and Blairite blogger Hopi Sen to leap to Mr Miliband’s defence, pointedly describing Mr Norman as a “food writer” alongside various other less polite terms.

But beneath all this knockabout lies a serious point - namely what is to become of a politician who still has much to say about the future direction of his party – but who is unable to say it without his actions being either over- or mis-interpreted?

As one of those ubiquitous ‘friends’ put it: “This is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the Labour Party. The way the cookie has crumbled, the only way he can do that is through argument and debate.”

Perhaps the real purpose of David’s New Statesman article was to find out whether he can actually now start to contribute to that debate without others seeing it as an attempt to further destabilise his brother’s somewhat faltering leadership.

If that was indeed his intention, the answer seems to be a resounding no.

Sadly, the likely upshot of this is that Mr Miliband may well come to feel that the only way to end the soap opera will be for him to remove himself from the political arena entirely, and leave Parliament at the next general election.

And given his stature in both the country and the region, I, for one, would consider that a shame.