Is it time for a Ken Clarke comeback?

Fraser Nelson spent most of this article in the Spectator assessing the state of the Brown premiership, but in a revealing throwaway paragraph near the end he also had some trenchant words for David Cameron and his team.

David Cameron has meanwhile been going back to his constituency and preparing for government. This has involved a fairly sober assessment of how many genuinely Cabinet-grade people he has on his team (he struggled to get into double digits). Ideally, his next reshuffle should be the last. It is vital for his prospects that the Tory frontbench look and sound like a competent government-in-waiting in comparison to the disintegrating Brown Cabinet.

I think this assessment is pretty near the mark. For all the government's troubles, there are really only two shadow spokesmen who look as if they could do a better job than their opposite numbers - David Davis (Home Affairs) and George Osborne (Treasury.) What they are desperately short of is gravitas.

If Cameron wants his Shadow Cabinet to look like a government-in-waiting as Nelson suggests, the man he needs is Ken Clarke, ideally in a cross-cutting, non-departmental role such as Shadow Leader of the House where he could deploy his political skills across the board.

Iain Dale once wrote a light-hearted but brilliantly entertaining political counterfactual about how a Michael Portillo-led Tory Party managed to overturn Tony Blair's first majority and win the 2001 election. Key to Portillo's victory was persuading Clarke to rejoin the frontbench.

Okay, so that was fiction, but I reckon that if Cameron were to pull off the same stunt now, it would have a not dissimilar effect on his election chances. Ken Clarke is still one of the most popular politicians in the country, and as last week's Question Time showed, remains a class act.

Could Gordon stand down?

Today's Saturday Column poses the question that would have been unthinkable even a few short weeks ago: Could Gordon Brown stand down as Labour leader before the next General Election?

The digested read goes something like:

Labour MPs are now openly speculating as to whether Brown will fight on 2009/10.

This is in part down to the government's recent disasters, and in part to a sense that the Prime Minister is not enjoying the job.

Unless the political situation improves for Labour, there would be little to be gained by Brown staying on indefinitely.

The silver lining is that neither D. Miliband nor Balls come up to the mark as potential successors.

Having long believed that Brown did indeed have what it takes to renew Labour in office, this is not a scenario I hoped or expected to be outlining at this stage in the lifetime of his premiership, but it is becoming a very real possibility nonetheless.

I would say he has, at best 6-9 months to turn the situation round. If by that stage the prospect of a David Cameron election victory has hardened into inevitability, Labour really would have little to lose by changing horses once again.

The Special One

I don't especially like Jose Mourinho - the man's obvious arrogance aside, his tactics at Chelsea with the wonderful players at his disposal seemed unduly negative at times - but there is no doubt that he is the man favoured by readers of this blog to restore the fortunes of England's national side.

The full result of my poll on who should succeed Steve McClaren was as follows:

Jose Mourinho 40%
Fabio Capello 13%
Martin O'Neill 12%
Harry Redknapp 9%
Arsene Wenger 7%
Guus Hiddink 6%
Sven Goran Eriksson 5%
Stuart Pearce 3%
Luis Felipe Scolari 3%
Sam Allardyce 2%

The interesting thing about this, particularly on a blog that is read by quite a lot of English nats, is that readers don't seem that bothered about the nationality issue. Only 26pc went for a British manager as opposed to 74pc for a foreigner.

As I've said before, my choice would still be Hiddink, on account of his track record in achieving success with ordinary players. Wayne Rooney and possibly Gabriel Agbonlahor aside, let's not kid ourselves that we are currently awash with young talent in this country.

Not a day longer

Natually I will oppose any attempt by the government to extend the period of detention without charge by longer than 28 days - it is far too long already - but I've not blogged specifically on this since Sunny Hundal and my co-conspirators over at Liberal Conspiracy are doing a pretty good job already.

I would just add that on the whole gamut of issues surrounding individual liberty, including of course ID cards, it seems to me that the Tories are currently more in tune with the public mood than the government, a peculiar and rather dangerous position for an avowedly left-of-centre administration to be in.

Frustrate their knavish tricks

Hard on the heels of the controversy about whether Wales should be represented on the Union Jack, I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone kicked up a fuss about the sixth verse of the National Anthem, with its references to crushing "Rebellious Scots."

Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith says "concerns" have been raised that the anthem is "anti-Scottish." But if indeed such concerns have been raised, it is clearly by people who don't know what they are talking about.

The verse about rebellious Scots was abandoned after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 and never officially became part of the National Anthem as such. It does not appear in any hymnbook or songbook I have ever seen, and I would be surprised if it has been sung even once in public worship during the last 200 years.

In short, I think someone is trying to manufacture a non-existent row here. I wonder why.

On a related topic, I was one of thousands of people who signed a Downing Street petition in support of a specific anthem for England separate from the UK anthem. A couple of weeks back, I received the following rather dismal response from No 10.

"There are currently no plans to introduce an official English anthem, but the Government recognises that the constituent parts of the United Kingdom may quite properly have national songs for which they have a particular attachment. However, the choice of anthem at sporting events is entirely a matter for the sport concerned."

Tony Holland RIP

I'm a bit late in the day with this, but Tony Holland was in my view one of the foremost television figures of the last 30 years. He not only created EastEnders and most of its core characters (the Beales and Fowlers were based on his own family), he was the programme's creative driving force in the days when it was worth watching.

His contribution to British television over the last half century is matched only by that of another Tony - Tony Warren, the creator of Coronation Street when it, too, was a ground-breaking drama. Interestingly both men were gay, which may or may not have made it easier for them to write for what have always been primarily female audiences.