Piara Khabra - a Lasting Tribute

Earlier today I left a link on Iain Dale's blog alerting readers to this tribute to the Ealing MP Piara Khabra, whose death was announced today.

This has since attracted some comment to the effect that I should have mentioned my involvement in the digital obits site Lasting Tribute, which I currently run for Associated Northcliffe Digital.

Well, as anyone who has visited this blog will know, I have in fact been quite open about my role as the launch project manager for LT, which went live six weeks ago.

Although I'm obviously biased, I'm very proud of the site. As well as Khabra, those of a political bent will find there obituaries to, among others, Bernard Weatherill, Sir Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Barbara Castle, John Smith and Sir Winston Churchill.

Marr-sterful

I have always had slightly mixed feelings about Andrew Marr. On a personal level, I have no hesitation in saying he is one of the most generous-sprited and courteous men I have met in political journalism. Unlike many of his senior Lobby colleagues, he never adopted a loftier-than-thou approach to those of us on the lower rungs of the profession and would always pass the time of day with anyone who happened to coincide with him in the Press Bar.

On a professional level, though, I always believed he was slightly too close to New Labour for comfort in the job of BBC political editor. Never was this more exemplified than when, on the day of Dr David Kelly's death, he informed us that Alastair Campbell was basically a decent bloke who would be as devastated as anyone by the tragedy, when a more detached and sceptical reporter might have posed some of the key questions that Campbell would now have to answer about how Dr Kelly's name had been leaked.

So I believe Marr made the right call in leaving that particular job to move on to more general presenting, and this was amply borne-out by his History of Modern Britain which concluded on BBC2 last night. It is sometimes said that journalism is merely a rough first draft of history, but this was as authoritative an account of contemporary British life as we are likely to get from any professional historian.

Sure, there were omissions, probably due to the need to condense fifty years into five hours. The Callaghan premiership, which delivered two years of stable and enlightened government from 1976-78 before the chaos of the Winter of Discontent, was virtually ignored. And the impact of New Labour on the countryside, including foot and mouth, the fox-hunting ban and the destruction of the green belt, merited not a mention. But on the whole, this was a tour-de-force which showed that Marr has finally found his niche.

The programme which, in my view, defined the series, was last week's one on Margaret Thatcher, concluding that, for good or ill, "we are all Thatcher's children now." I still can't really forgive Thatcher for the destruction of the deep-mining industry, for desecrating the once-thriving pit villages that formed the backdrop to my early career in journalism around Mansfield, Notts. But from an objective standpoint, I do recognise that, alongside Tim Berners-Lee, she is chiefly responsible for the way we live now.

And this, in turn, demonstrates that Tony Blair, the main subject of last night's final programmme, was not in the first rank of Prime Ministers in the sense that Thatcher was - a fact that Marr, for all his previous closeness to New Labour, seemed to acknowledge when he showed an ironical clip of himself telling the nation that Blair had become "a bigger man" as a result of the Iraq invasion and the toppling of Saddam. In fact he became a much diminshed one - but in his tacit acceptance that even the best reporters sometimes get it wrong, Marr became a "bigger man" himself.

What if Blair had sacked Brown?

Today's Guardian front page - apart from being a rather obvious plug by Patrick Wintour for his mate Andrew Rawnsley's new TV documentary - begs the question of what would have happened had Tony Blair actually sacked Gordon Brown as Cherie Blair and others were apparently urging him to do?

I think I know the answer: Instead of still being a week or so away from entering No 10, Gordon Brown would already have been Prime Minister for several years.

Blair's big opportunity to sack Brown - probably his only opportunity when you think about it - came in 2001 on the back of his second election landslide. Right up until election day, there were strong rumours that he would attempt to move Brown to the Foreign Office, and that Brown might well choose to go to the backbenches rather than accept.

In the event, it didn't happen, and Blair was never again in a position of sufficient strength to contemplate moving the Chancellor. Indeed, by the time the following election came round in 2005, he practically needed to beg Gordon to ride to the rescue of Labour's flagging campaign.

So what would have happened had Blair gone ahead? Well, I suspect all would have been fine and dandy for a couple of years until the Government ran up against the issue of what to do about Iraq. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that Blair would have acted no differently, and that the consequences of the invasion - the dodgy dossier, the Kelly affair, the Hutton whitewash, the Butler report - would have played out exactly as they did.

To my mind, had there been someone of the stature of Gordon Brown on the backbenches at the time, an obvious alternative Prime Minister who was untained by any of what had gone on during the war and the whole grisly aftermath, there would have been a huge clamour both inside and outside the Labour Party for him to take over.

In short, I think that Blair would have fallen in the aftermath of the Kelly/Hutton affair, Brown would have gone on to win a much bigger election victory than Blair actually achieved in 2005, and the Tories would still be looking at a two-election strategy to get back into contention for power.

Of course, Blair was too smart an operator not to have realised all this, which is one of the reasons why he stuck with Brown through thick and thin. Much as he may have felt like strangling him at times, he always knew that it was better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

Blog wars over - official

Well, let's hope so, anyway.

Is Middle Britain finally starting to wake up to Barnett?

The Barnett Formula is usually presented as an item of political arcania of interest only to those of extreme anorak tendencies, but today's Daily Mail front page about the consequences of Scotland's great public spending power demonstrates that it is not.

As I have been arguing for most of the past decade, both on this blog and in numerous columns in the Newcastle Journal, the fact that public spending north of the border is some £1,200 per head higher than in England has real implications for real public services that affect real people. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a really emotive example that brings the story to life, and the row over blindness drugs has seemingly done that.

What is set to make the situation even more combustible is that the new Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is also highly critical of the Barnett Formula - not for the same reasons as many English MPs, but because he thinks it doesn't go far enough.

I've been saying for a long time that, one day, the need for reform of this unfair and outdated formula will become a political issue of the first order. I suspect I won't have that much longer to wait.

Sir Alan's brainstorm

I really can't improve on Lucy Mangan's description of the outcome last night's Apprentice final. "If Kristina doesn't get the job," I scream, "This city's gonna burn!" Sir Alan suffers some kind of massive synaptic misfire and hires Simon. Pass. Me. My. Matches."

I can only assume this was a counter-intuitive response by Sir Alan to last year's debacle, when he went for the "safe" candidate in Michelle Dewberry over the more "risky" alternative of Ruth Badger, only to see Dewberry walk out on him after a few months after getting pregnant by a fellow-contestant, while Badger went on to host her own corporate troubleshooting show on Sky.