Hain's time has been and gone

I have, in the past, been a great admirer of Peter Hain. Up to about 2002/3 he was a strong progressive voice within government who was occasionally given licence to challenge the orthodoxy, as when, for instance, he advocated a higher top rate of tax.

There is a plausible counterfactual argument for saying that, had he resigned with his old ally Robin Cook over the Iraq War in 2003, as his former admirers on the left would have expected him to, he could conceivably have mounted a successful challenge to Gordon Brown in 2007, standing as an experienced former minister on an anti-war ticket.

But it is clear that at some point around that time, Hain lost his balls. He failed to speak out against a war he must in his heart of hearts have opposed, and gradually, his left-field contributions to government policy-making dried up.

Never having been entirely trusted by the right and with his credibility on the left now badly compromised, it did not surprise me in the least that he performed so poorly in last year's deputy leadership election, when he found his whole USP had been successfully purloined by Jon Cruddas.

For me, that is what is so tragi-comic about Hain's current predicament - the fact that he spent £200,000 on a campaign which ended in near-humiliation for a man who once entertained serious aspirations to, if not the premiership, then certainly the Foreign Office.

Since then, he has gone on to win one small but important victory as Work and Pensions Secretary, overcoming Treasury objections to secure a £725m rescue package for 125,000 workers who lost pension rights when their employers went bust or wound up their schemes.

But even had the row over his campaign donations not occurred, I think it likely that he would have left the Cabinet at the next reshuffle, and hence I cannot help but think his time at the top of British politics is now drawing naturally to a close.

Who knows - if it meant Gordon could bring in Alan Milburn as Work and Pensions Secretary and stage a public rapprochement with the Blairites, then this is one crisis that the government might even be able to turn to its advantage.

Cross posted at Liberal Conspiracy

Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008

I can't let today pass without mention of Sir Edmund Hillary - probably not the greatest technical mountaineer in history, but without doubt the most important. In the days when it was a great newspaper, the Daily Express greeted his ascent of the world's highest mountain on Coronation Day with the memorable headline "All this and Everest too."

The expedition members had trained beforehand in Snowdonia, basing themselves for several weeks at the Pen y Gwryd Hotel, a favourite fellwalking haunt of mine. I'll bet they'll be raising a few glasses to Sir Edmund in the hotel bar tonight.

Heaven knows I'm fashionable now

Tory leader David Cameron has apparently been paying homage to his "musical hero" Morrissey again, this time with a visit to Salford Lads Club.

We already know that This Charming Man is one of Dave's faves, but which other Smiths/Morrissey classics can be found on his iPod? Here's a few suggestions:

Sweet and Tender Hoodie Hooligan
I Started Something I Couldn't Finish
Miserable Lie
Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
Nowhere Fast
A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours
Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before
Margaret on the Guillotine (Okay, maybe not this one...)

Meanwhile a fellow Smiths fan emailed me with the following comment which may or may not be pertinent.

"Presumably Cameron chose This Charming Man on Desert Island Discs in the hope that people would think the title suited him. Of course, anyone having found the time since 1983 to listen to the lyrics with anything approaching care will have wondered whether he saw himself as the boy on the desolate hillside with his punctured bicycle, waiting for nature to make a man of him, or the charming man who happens by in his charming car, where the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat."

Does anyone know the answer?

Nuclear power - an apology

With apologies to the Eye, here's how John Hutton's announcement on the expansion of the nuclear power industry this afternoon might have read....

"This government, in common with the whole of the UK media, may in the past have given the impression that nuclear energy was the biggest threat to the future of humanity since the demise of Hitler. We were encouraged in this view by the disastrous safety record of the civil nuclear power industry dating from the numerous radiation leaks at Calder Hall Windscale Sellafield from the 1950s onwards to the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 which left large parts of the former Soviet Union, along with most of the sheep in the Lake District, contaminated.

We now realise that this view was in fact totally erroneous, and that the real threat to the future of humanity comes from global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. We further realise that because nuclear energy leaves absolutely no discernible carbon footprint - well, except of course for the whole business of building the power stations, and then transporting the uranium half way across the world to burn in them - it is therefore by far the safest and "greenest" way to meet our future energy needs.

It will also save us the embarrassment of having to resurrect our own indigenous coal industry and give new jobs to all those grubby miners who were so sensibly and cleverly got rid of by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, despite the fact that billions of tonnes of coal still lie untouched beneath our feet and notwithstanding the fact that developments in technology since then could probably extract the energy from this source without actually releasing any C02 into the atmosphere.

This will remain our policy until there is another Chernobyl, in which case we along with everyone else will of course change our minds again."

Nick Robinson and the US elections

Earlier this week I took BBC political editor Nick Robinson to task on this blog for focusing on the frankly irrelevant question of whether Gordon Brown is "enjoying" being Prime Minister. The debate on this continues in the comments to the original post.

Today, Nick was back with a post listing eight reasons why Hillary Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primaries will reverberate through British politics over the coming weeks. And as the excellent Hopi Sen has already pointed out elsewhere, most of them are complete piffle.

I don't want to appear as if I'm running a campaign against Nick. I actually like the guy and remember him from my time in Westminster as one the few senior political journalists who actually spoke to members of the regional lobby. On one occasion he even agreed, at my wife's request, to take a mobile phone photograph of her and me outside No 10 which she still shows off to her mates occasionally.

Nevertheless I am beginning to wonder whether he is falling into the trap - an occupational hazard for all very influential journalists - of seeking to shape the political agenda rather than interpreting it for the benefit of his audience.

The last paragraph of today's post says it all:

"Those who insist that there cannot be any read across from the votes of small American states to British politics will be ignored because they simply don't get it. The political classes are gripped by this campaign. It will continue to feed into commentary, oratory and prediction all year - sometimes absurdly, occasionally aptly. The battle between Clinton and Obama, McCain, Romney and Huckabee is, like it or not, a part of Britain's electoral struggle."

Roughly translated, this means:

"Because, in the absense of a UK general election, I and my senior colleagues in the world of political journalism are gripped by this campaign to the point of obsession, the poor bloody viewer, listener and reader will continue to be forced to listen to us all trying to draw spurious analogies between it and the UK political scene whether or not this is actually justified."

The job of BBC political editor has always involved striking a delicate balance between reporting and punditry. For all his all-round excellence, Robinson's predecessor Andrew Marr occasionally fell off that tightrope, for instance when he publicly commiserated with Alastair Campbell over the death of Dr Kelly.

Far be it from me to teach the man at the top of my former profession how to suck eggs...but Robinson would be better-off in my view following the example of John Cole, who never forgot that the reporting role came first.

It's be nice to Clegg day/week/month/year

Todays PMQs was chiefly notable for the spectacle of David Cameron and Gordon Brown falling over themselves to be nice to the new Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. Expect this to be a central theme of British politics over the next two years as we approach a General Election that currently has hung Parliament written all over it.