Who's backing Gordon?

Gordon Brown is today making the most important speech of his career. But as Iain Dale has already pointed out, it is not the reaction in the conference hall that will really matter but the reaction in the media.

Says Dale: "If it bombs, the media will again develop a herd instinct, just as they did last year following David Davis's speech." And he should know of course.

To me this touches on an important issue - just where is Brown's support in the media going to come from in the forthcoming leadership election?

Over recent weeks, even newspapers one might have expected to be loyal to the Chancellor in any leadership campaign have started to question his credentials - as Mike Smithson pointed out on PoliticalBetting.com on Saturday.

Brown's most steadfast ally in the media is likely to be the Daily Mirror. Its Associate Editor Kevin Maguire calls the shots on political matters and he is a long-standing admirer of Brown. Besides that, the Mirror is likely to view a Brown premiership as slightly more in tune with the traditional Labour values held by much of its readership than a continuation of Blairism under an alternative leader.

The Daily Mail has also long been regarded as Brownite territory, largely on account of the friendship between Brown and its editor Paul Dacre, although presumably he also feels that the Chancellor's solidity and experience are the kind of virtues that appeal to Mail readers.

But leaving those two, admittedly influential newspapers aside, Brown appears to be facing an uphill struggle to build a broader coalition of media support as the contest draws nearer.

The Guardian has noticeably changed its editorial tune from "smooth and orderly handover" to "there must be a contest" over recent weeks and it might be that the voices of Brown's admirers on the staff - Toynbee, Ashley et al - are being cancelled out by those of Blairites such as Martin Kettle.

As for the rest, the $64m question is of course which way Murdoch will turn. He is said to like and admire Brown, but in a contest between Brown and, say, John Reid, it is hard to see Murdoch backing the candidate perceived as the more left-wing.

On the other hand the coventional wisdom about Murdoch is that he always backs the winner, in which case, it is hard at the moment to see any departure from Brown.

But if, as is widely believed, Murdoch is planning to endorse David Cameron at the next election, he might just do what he has never done before - deliberately back a Blairite loser, to give himself the perfect excuse to switch his support to the Tories.

I can almost see The Sun's front page now. "Tony Blair was a great British Prime Minister. We were proud to support him through three magnificent general election victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005. But now, by electing the old-fashioned socialist Gordon Brown as leader, Labour has turned its back on Blairism - and so we're turning our back on Labour. Vote Cameron for 2009!"

Lib Dem conference podcast

Can Sir Menzies Campbell shift the Liberal Democrats from being "the real opposition" to a real party of power? Only as a result of a quirk of the electoral system, I argue in my latest podcast which rounds-up last week's Lib Dem conference in Brighton.

You can listen to it in full HERE or read the text version HERE.

Decent, statesmanlike - but political valium

In the last hour - as they say on the BBC - Sir Menzies Campbell has sat down after delivering his first annual conference speech as leader of the Liberal Democrats. And first off, I have to say that the speech contained many good things, notably some judicious and well-founded attacks on the two main parties.

Yes, Tony Blair has squandered an historic opportunity to build a progressive consensus. Yes, the gap between rich and poor is now wider than it was under Mrs Thatcher. And yes, a Government which came into power to "save" the NHS is now closing hospitals.

As for David Cameron - well as Ming oh-so-rightly said, where was he when Mr Blair was allowing Britain to be sucked into its biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez? In the Government lobby backing military action against Iraq, that's where.

All good stuff. But political parties - especially those that aspire to be "serious," cannot live by attacks on the opposition alone. And as their conference week in Brighton draws to a close, I am still struggling to work out what the Lib Dems now stand for - other than not being Labour or the Tories of course.

During the last two elections, the party at least had a unique selling point. Okay, so the 50p top rate of tax was more of a symbol than a genuine instrument of redistribution, but it was a potent symbol nonetheless that put clear yellow water between the Lib Dems and the other parties.

Now the party has ditched it in favour of a fiendishly complex set of tax proposals, the main effect of which will be to take hundreds of thousands of middle-income income earners out of the 40pc bracket and into the 22pc bracket. While this might well prove a vote winner if the Tories or Labour don't nick it first, progressive taxation it isn't.

As for Sir Menzies himself, besides the palpable decency and obvious statesmanlike qualities, where was the spark, the star quality that is going to force the public to stand up and take notice as they did with Cameron a year ago?

I listened to today's speech open to being convinced that he is the right man to lead the party. But alas, I remain to be.

Air travel: Monbiot spells it out

I guess a fair few of my regular visitors already read the Guardian, but in case you missed it, I recommend that EVERYONE who has ever stepped on an aeroplane reads this piece by George Monbiot today.

The exponential growth in commercial aviation and the increasing availability of "cheap" flights with complete disregard for their true cost to the environment has been a long-standing concern of mine. Some politicians are now starting to talk about it, but as Monbiot argues, few would be prepared to contemplate the draconian measures that will almost certainly be needed if climate change targets are to be met.

Farewell to the Enquirer

Earlier this year, I was asked to write a weekly political column for the North-West Enquirer, a new weekly regional newspaper based in Manchester. It was a high quality product with which I am very proud to have been associated over the past six months.

Against the backdrop of long-term decline in the newspaper industry, it was a very brave experiment of founders Nick Jaspan and Bob Waterhouse to launch such a paper at this time. Some would say it was foolhardy, but I for one thought that developing a paper as a niche publication might just work in today's increasingly fragmented market.

Sadly, it didn't, and the paper was placed in administration yesterday afternoon after a refinancing package collapsed. The timing was particularly sad in view of the fact that next week's Labour Party Conference is in Manchester and offered great potential for the kind of serious regional-national coverage to which the paper aspired.

I had already written my column for this week, which both looks ahead to the conference and focuses on what seems to me to be the highly damaging issue for New Labour of proposed hospital closures. You can read it in full on my Companion Blog by clicking HERE.

In defence of Benedict

I hold no brief for the Roman Catholic Church. My general view of it is much the same as the bloke who wrote the script for Godfather III. But I do think Pope Benedict is being very unfairly, if somewhat predictably pilloried for his comments about Islam.

Don't get me wrong. If Benedict was primarily a political figure, a Head of Government or Head of any other State but the Vatican, then I would agree that he was under a duty to be inclusive and non-confrontational in his statements about people who held different religious beliefs. Or no beliefs at all for that matter.

But the role of the Pope is not - or should not be - to be a political leader or Head of State. It is to be the spiritual leader of hundreds of millions of Christians across the world.

And if the leader of the world's biggest Christian denomination cannot speak out against another religious faith which, by its very existence, denies the esssential truths of the Christian gospel, then who on earth can?

I have thought for some time now that we have been headed down a very dangerous road in our society, whereby lampooning Christians and Christianity is virtually de rigeur among the liberal elite but criticising any other faith - and in particular Islam - is almost on a par with racism.

Laws purportedly designed to promote "religious tolerance" are instead promoting a form of religious intolerance, whereby no-one is allowed to say anything about another religion, even if its beliefs are antithetical to one's own.

This will naturally militate against belief systems such as Christianity which make exclusive claims to validity, in favour of a syncretistic, New Age mush that holds that all religions are equally valid - and therefore equally meaningless.

I would not be in the least surprised if, in my lifetime, it became a criminal offence in this country to preach the authentic Christian gospel - that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

At the conclusion of her piece in today's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting bewails the fact that the Catholic Church is in danger of "failing the great challenge of how we forge new ways of accommodating difference in a crowded, mobile world," speculating that Pope Benedict has "another direction altogether in mind."

Too right he has, Madeleine. He is trying to take a stand against the relativism that is poisoning Western Culture and threatening to snuff out our religious freedoms. And about time too.