Pretty Abominable

Okay, so it's a five year old story recently given new legs. But I couldn't let the week pass without commenting in some way on the fresh attempts by Her Majesty's Press Association to put regional lobby journalists out of work by offering to take over their jobs.

This story has been extensively covered by the UK Press Gazette, and also, in one of his less distinguished moments, by Guido Fawkes, who appears to take the side of PA by suggesting that its service can be provided for "a fraction of the cost of having your own lobby correspondent drinking in the bar all day."

I won't dignify that with a response, but the fact is PA has been trying to do this for five years. One of my former editors received a letter from PA encouraging him to sack me as long ago as 2001, but thankfully, it went straight in the bin as, like most editors, he realised that good regional political coverage depends on being able to work a single patch well and not try to juggle four in the air at once as PA's "Lobby Extra" service attempts to do.

As the Express and Star's John Hipwood said: "Times are hard and all regional newspapers need to look closely at their costs. But you do not improve the situation by removing your own Lobby correspondent, making do with an inferior alternative and thereby reducing the quality of your product." All power to your elbow, John.

Balls for Leeds, Battle for Lords

There has been much speculation of late as to the fate of Treasury minister and Gordon Brown first lieutenant Ed Balls following the Boundary Commission's decision to do away with his Normanton constituency. Well, I reckon the answer lies in this recent post on Labour Watch.

It reveals that Leeds West MP and former Foreign Office minister John Battle, has become the latest MP, at the age of just 55, to announce he will not be standing again at the next General Election. Leeds West is but a short train ride away from Normanton and his decision leaves a convenient opening for Mr Balls.

Call me a cynic if you like, but I have been in the political game too long not to believe that Battle's reward for this unexpected act of selfless generosity will be to return to government under Gordon Brown as a Minister in the House of Lords.

Mr Balls meanwhile is tipped by many to succeed his old boss at the Treasury, but I reckon the Brownites have pulled off another deal over that one - with one-time Blairite leadership favourite turned enthusiastic Brown cheerleader David Miliband.

Just whose candidate is Jon Cruddas?

There's a widely-held view abroad in the blogosphere at the moment that Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas is the Blogger's Candidate to become Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. I am sure this perception is at least partly behind Cruddas's recent surge in the betting from around 25-1 last week to 8-1 now.

There is also a related debate going on over at Labour Home as to whether the "Diamond Geezer" is the Left's Candidate. And there has also been some interesting speculation on Political Betting and in other places as to whether Cruddas is actually Gordon's Candidate, and whether the Chancellor is secretly backing him in return for the support of the big union leaders.

Well, I can't enlighten anyone on the latter point, except to say that practically everyone in the contest has been named as "Gordon's Candidate" at one stage or another. A few months back, the conventional wisdom was that he was backing Harriet Harman - until, that is, someone wrote a story implying he was backing anyone but Harman.

On another occasion, he was said to be backing Alan Johnson in return for the Education Secretary not standing against him. The truth is, no-one really knows who Gordon is backing except Gordon himself, and I doubt very much whether it would be in his or anyone else's interests to tell us.

What about "Blogger's Candidate," then? Well, again, I find it hard to see how this legend arose. Alex Hilton, probably the most influential Labour blogger by dint of his stewardship of both Recess Monkey and Labour Home was said by the Daily Pundit to be backing Cruddas, but this is emphatically not the case.

What Cruddas is clearly becoming, though, is, the "Heartlands" Candidate - or more specifically, the candidate both of the unions and, more generally, those party members who have felt disenfranchised by the Blair leadership and want a bigger say in the formation of party policy.

Rightly or wrongly, they perceive the other main candidates - Harman, Johnson, and Peter Hain - as establishment figures who are more interested in futhering their own Cabinet ambitions than repairing relations between the Government and party, and Cruddas's disavowal of any interest in becoming Deputy Prime Minister has proved a compelling sales pitch.

On top of all that, Cruddas is also by far the best organised of the four candidates, as the Daily Mail's Ben Brogan recognised some time back.

So can he do it? Well, there now has to be a very real possibility that Cruddas will gain first place in the trades union section of Labour's electoral college. Although it is union members, not their Gen Secs, who nowadays make that decision, the recommendations of the big union bosses still count for something and I expect most members will follow their lead.

But where the Cruddas campaign will almost certainly fall down is in the PLP. I would be mildly surprised if Hain does not top the MPs' ballot, and there will be significant support there for Johnson and Harman as well - all of which will leave Mr Cruddas needing to come either first or a very good second in the vote among party members to win.

For my part, I am also not at all convinced that having a Deputy Leader who is not actually a member of the Cabinet will necessarily improve the links between party and government in the way that Cruddas suggests, and that the flaws in this proposal may unravel as the campaign progresses.

Either way, you can place your own Labour leadership and deputy leadership predictions by visiting another of Mr Hilton's many internet projects HERE.

Should ex-PMs quit the Commons?

We are only a year and a bit into the current Parliament, but already 11 Labour MPs have announced they will not be contesting the next General Election. Tribune's Barckley Sumner has posted the full list on Labour Home.

As Barckley himself notes, one name not currently on the list is that of Tony Blair, but it is widely assumed that, in view of his decision not to fight a fourth election as leader, he will not be contesting Sedgefield again either. Indeed, his agent John Burton appeared to confirm this in an interview with the Newcastle Journal's Ross Smith about 18 months ago.

The practice of former Prime Ministers standing down at the election immediately following their departure from No 10 is a relatively recent constitutional development. Margaret Thatcher started it, leaving the Commons in 1992, two years after her defenestration as Premier.

Likewise, her successor John Major, who famously took the view that when the curtain falls, it's time to leave the stage, quit the Commons as soon as decently possible, at the 2001 election which followed his landslide defeat at the hands of Mr Blair in 1997.

But there are other historical precedents. David Lloyd George, who was ousted as Premier in 1922, stayed on as an MP for a further 23 years, while Winston Churchill remained on the backbenches for nearly a decade after his retirement from No 10, and was pushing 90 when he finally left the Commons at the 1964 election.

More recently, Sir Edward Heath stayed on for 27 years after his eviction from No 10 before stepping down in 2001. It became known as "the longest sulk in history," but I suspect he was motivated not only by a determination to outlast Thatcher, but by a genuine desire to see the Tory Party return to the sort of centrist politics he espoused.

Sadly for him, he died only a matter of months before David Cameron took over as party leader and began the long march back to the centre ground.

I suspect that Sir Edward's example is one that subsequent premiers have been keen to avoid. But nevertheless, I am by no means sure that ex-premiers leaving the Commons at the first available opportunity is necessarily a good thing for the country.

I think our national legislature is much the poorer for the loss of the accumulated wisdom of those who have "been there and done that." It also makes politics less interesting.

I would have paid good money to hear John Major, whose government New Labour successfully tarred with the brush of sleaze even though it only ever involved very minor figures, ask Mr Blair a PMQ about the cash for honours affair which, by all accounts, will shortly result in him being personally questioned by Scotland Yard.

It's also a shame from her own point of view that Mrs Thatcher was not in the Commons when Britain was forced out of the ERM. She had, after all, always resisted joining, only being persuaded to do so by Mr Major and Douglas Hurd, and it is just about conceivable that she could have got her old job back.

Perhaps the wisest example to follow is that of those former premiers who opted for a happy medium, staying on till the election after next following their initial departure from office.

These include Harold Wilson, although he slightly blotted his copybook by voting for Michael Foot rather than Denis Healey in the 1980 Labour leadership election, and James Callaghan who stayed on until 1987.

When Churchill died in January 1965, Wilson, who was then Prime Minister, concluded his tribute in the House with the words: "We in this House, at least, know the epithet he would have chosen: He was a good House of Commons man."

Sadly, that could never be said of Tony Blair. And his contempt for the institution is reflected in his decision - if such it be - to leave it.