2006 and all that

The last day of the year always brings conflicting emotions, but on the whole, I won't be sad to see the back of 2006. Like most years it began promisingly for us, with the works on our house in Derbyshire nearing completion and our family finally settling into some sort of normality after the change and upheaval of the past few years.

The defining moment of the year came on Good Friday, April 14. I had broken up for the Easter Holidays and we spent most of the day in the garden, planting new shrubs and trees ready for the summer.

Gill and I went to bed that evening feeling tired but happy with a week off work stretched out ahead of us. Then, at 3.20am, we got the news that my American brother-in-law Mitch Hodge had been killed in a road accident near his home in Arizona.

We have had many things to be thankful for over the past 12 months, not least the joy that our son George continues to bring us. But when we look back on 2006 in the years to come, it will always be tinged with sadness.

Tonight, as has become our custom in recent years, we will see out the old year over a meal with some of our oldest friends - or perhaps I should say auldest acquaintances.

New Year is, above all, a time of hope, a time for fresh starts. I feel that it's not just in the sphere of British politics that we need one of those.

My preview of 2007

There are a lot of New Year predictions on the blogosphere today, so here is my analysis of what the political year ahead will bring, first published in this morning's Newcastle Journal.

***

Over the years, the job of writing this annual look ahead to what the next 12 months may have in store politically has involved a certain amount of crystal ball gazing.

But it's a bit different this time round. The key political event of 2007 is already more or less set in stone.

At some as yet indeterminate point in the next six months, Tony Blair will finally step down as Prime Minister, almost certainly after chalking-up ten years in 10 Downing Street this May.

Speculation about the political year ahead therefore really boils down to two questions: who will replace him, and what kind of Government will that successor seek to lead?

Much has already been written about the likely leadership denouement, but there are, to my mind, four basic scenarios as to how it could all pan out.

The first is the one that most Labour supporters in their heart of hearts still long for - a "stable and orderly transition."

In this chain of events, Mr Blair announces his departure date, endorses Gordon Brown as his successor, forestalls any serious Cabinet challenge, and the sunlit uplands ensue.

It could still happen, but such is the fragility of the Blair-Brown relationship - and the visceral hatred between the two camps - that the odds must be against.

The second, and to my mind more likely scenario, then, is that Mr Brown wins the leadership, but has to fight a nasty and potentially divisive battle to get it.

It is hard, at this stage, to predict where the challenge will come from. Both David Miliband and Alan Johnson have ruled themselves out in what look like unequivocal terms.

But as I have said more than once in this context, politics abhors a vacuum, and if Mr Brown appears at any point to be beatable, then someone, somewhere will step up to the mark.

In my view, Home Secretary John Reid remains both overwhelmingly the most likely challenger, and the one most likely to force the Chancellor into a serious battle.

Which neatly brings us to the third scenario, in which Mr Brown is not only forced into a serious contest, but actually manages to lose it.

It could surely only happen if a large section of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the party membership became convinced that he could not secure a fourth election victory.

The key to that is the polls, and in particular Mr Brown's personal ratings when up against Tory leader David Cameron.

If these were to go into freefall, it is just conceivable that the Labour Party may reluctantly persuade itself that it was time to look elsewhere.

Perhaps the most intriguing scenario, though, is the fourth and final one, in which Mr Brown was not even a candidate in the leadership election at all.

It would require the intervention of a deus ex machina - either a huge political scandal in which he was implicated, or some personal family or health problem serious enough to force his withdrawal.

In those circumstances, the field would open up to perhaps six or seven candidates, including some of those currently pledged to support the Chancellor.

Messrs Miliband, Johnson, Reid and Hain would be there or thereabouts, but the dark horse could be Jack Straw, who would be seen by many as a natural compromise choice.

I did wonder whether to add a fifth scenario, in which Mr Blair does not stand down at all.

In terms of sheer comedy value, it almost merits inclusion, but not on any serious political criteria.

There was a time when the party, staring at a huge poll deficit and the prospect of a Cameron victory, might have turned and implored him to save them - but no more.

As one senior MP said a while back: "The Labour Party will let him do his ten years. If he tries to go on a day longer than that, they will kill him."

As for what sort of Government Mr Blair's successor will lead, Mr Brown for one has already made clear there will be a renewed emphasis on both constitutional reform and social justice if he takes over.

In Mr Blair's eyes, these are the kind of ideas that "butter no parsnips," but a period of decent, steady government free from scandal may be just what Labour needs.

But if there is one thing about which most commentators - and even some of the candidates - now agree, it is that it will have to be a new government.

Such is the low level of public esteem in which Mr Blair and his administration are now held that "continuity" is now no longer an option.

For beyond the timeframe of the next 12 months, Labour faces the prospect of what will surely be its most difficult election campaign since 1992.

The situation is not beyond recall. Mr Cameron too faces difficult challenges over the next year, not least the task of producing some actual policies in place of what so far has amounted to little more than mood music.

In short, the Tory leader remains vulnerable to the charge of all style and no substance, and it could yet all come good for Labour if it gets the leadership transition right.

But first, the party has to do what it really should have done a long time ago - and wave farewell to Mr Blair.

Hazel Blears goes up in my estimation

Whatever health minister Ivan Lewis has said today, there can be no doubt that Hazel Blears' protest against NHS reorganisation in her constituency is deeply embarrassing for the Government. It demonstrates not only that its internal discipline is continuing to break down, but also that ambitious, up-and-coming ministers like Blears are now able to defy those on the way down like Patricia Hewitt with impunity.

Blears also has the merit of being right. Like the abortive police force mergers project, which was sensibly scrapped by John Reid in one of his first acts on replacing Charles Clarke as Home Secretary, the current health reorganisation is doing exactly the opposite of what people want, and taking services further away from the people they serve.

In my area, the main A&E hospital in the centre of Derby is being closed and all services transferred to a site on the city's western extremity. That will no doubt make a huge amount of sense to people who live to the north, east and south of the city - not.

I have always regarded Hazel Blears as a just another shameless New Labour careerist, but perhaps there is more to her after all. She has certainly gone up in my estimation this week, and more importantly, I suspect she will also have gone up in the estimation of thousands of Labour members with votes in the party's deputy leadership election.

President Gore and other things I got for Christmas

Regular readers of this blog will know I was a huge fan of the political counterfactuals book, Prime Minister Portillo and Other Things That Never Happened. So it was great to find the new volume, President Gore.... lying under my Christmas Tree on Monday.

This one digs deeper back into political history than the original, for instance postulating what might have happened if the 1832 Great Reform Act had not been passed or if Sir Robert Peel had lived longer. I haven't had time to read it through from cover to cover yet, but three chapters dealing with more recent events immediately caught my eye.

The first, by Peter Riddell, looked at the question of what might have happened had Harold Macmillan succeeded in taking us into the Common Market in 1957. By and large I agree with Riddell that it would have made us far more European-minded as a country, but I disagree that it would have led to a moreorless permanent period of Conservative Government, under Macmillan and then Ted Heath, throughout the late 50s, 60s and early 70s. Riddell forgets that that was an era of political pendulum swings, and that Harold Wilson proved a much more successful election-winner than Heath.

The second standout chapter for me was written by the book's editor, Duncan Brack, and looks at what might have happened to the Liberal-SDP Alliance had it not quarrelled over defence and lost a third of its support during 1986. Brack presents a convincing argument that the row could have been avoided given a bit more political commonsense on the part of the protagonists, David Steel and David Owen, but I think he underestimates the extent to which Owen was determined to wreck the Alliance, and that, in this regard, the defence issue was little more than a pretext.

The most fascinating chapter, for me, was the one by R.J. Briand on whether,if John Major had become Chief Whip in 1987, would have have saved Margaret Thatcher from defenestration at the hands of her own party in 1990, only to see her defeated by Neil Kinnock at the ballot box in 1991. Quite possibly. By contrast, Mark Garnett's chapter on Michael Howard becoming leader in 1997 only served to demonstrate that very little would have changed for the Tories in that period, and that whoeever the Tories chose in 1997 and 2001, they were onto a loser.

Anyway, it all goes to show once again that there is very little historical inevitability about anything. I have always thought that the political history of my own lifetime would have turned out very differently if Jim Callaghan had fought an election in 1978, achieved a hung Parliament, gone into coalition with Steel, brought in PR, established a moreorless permament anti-Tory coalition....and relegated Margaret Thatcher to an interesting footnote about a failed ideological experiment instead of coming to dominate the landscape of the past 30 years.

The most wonderful time of the year

Christmas Eve is and always has been my favourite day of the year, a day of wonder and expectation, a day for wrapping presents and preparing good things to eat, a day for listening to Carols from Kings on the radio, and singing them in church and in Belper Market Square later tonight.

No matter how much they try to commercialise Christmas, or secularise it, or even just turn it into into a week-long food and drink fest punctuated by endless episodes of EastEnders, it will never, for me, lose its magic and spirituality.

So if anyone is visiting this blog today, it's time to stop thinking about politics, or even about England losing the Ashes, and start thinking about what it is that we are celebrating.

I leave you with the words of Thomas Hardy, who, in this short poem, summed up the meaning of Christmas better than I, or any other writer for that matter, could ever hope to do.

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Wishing you a Christmas full of wonder

My Political Review of 2006

It's been a highly eventful year politically, so for those who would like to relive with me the ups and downs of the past 12 months, here's my Political Review of the Year, first published in this morning's Newcastle Journal.

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IT was the year of Charles Kennedy’s downfall, the year of David Cameron’s rise and rise – and the year John Prescott was forced to give up any remaining claims to be taken seriously.

But the political year 2006 will be remembered, above all, for one over-arching story – the long, slow demise of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It was a story that took on many different guises. The police investigation into “cash for honours.” The increasingly bitter power struggles with Gordon Brown. Iraq’s descent into chaos following the disastrous war that Mr Blair helped initiate.

But these stories were really all one – the story of a leader who had long outstayed his welcome, yet who, in the vain search for a legacy, continued to rage against the dying of the light.

But to begin at the beginning – to borrow another of Dylan Thomas’s famous phrases – the year kicked off with attention focused on another party leader.

Dissatisfaction with Mr Kennedy’s leadership had been simmering within Liberal Democrat ranks for a while, and before the New Year was a week old it had finally boiled over.

Having belatedly admitted to a drink problem, Mr Kennedy was forced out in a revolt by his own MPs, some of whom probably owed their seats to his personal popularity with the voters.

Sir Menzies Campbell saw off a spirited challenge from newbie MP Chris Huhne to win the leadership, but he lacks his predecessor’s common touch and the party’s ratings remained in the doldrums.

For the Tories, too, it was a testing year, as David Cameron continued his march towards the political centre-ground to the dismay of the party’s more traditional elements.

Like Mr Blair before him, Mr Cameron set out to define himself in opposition to his own party, notably by backing redistributive taxation and highlighting green issues.

It was all too much for some, and his talk of “tough love,” “hug a hoodie” and “letting sunshine win the day” was widely ridiculed.

But it seemed to strike a chord with the electorate, with the Tories ending the year eight points ahead of Labour in some polls – enough to convert into an outright election win.

The Cameron phenomenon was partly, though not solely responsible for the continuing political malaise within Labour.

For the fist time since 1997, Mr Blair was up against someone who looked like a genuine contender for power – but Labour seemed unsure of how to respond to the Tory young pretender.

With all the self-delusion of those who remain in power too long, the Prime Minister continued to see himself as part of the solution rather than the problem.

But the voters begged to differ, and a dismal set of local election results in May saw more and more Labour MPs come to the view that he should stand down sooner rather than later.

Initially, Mr Blair tried to blame the poor showing on the revelation of Mr Prescott’s affair with his diary secretary shortly before the poll, and a row over the deportation of foreign prisoners which had been badly mishandled by Home Secretary Charles Clarke.

He staged a dramatic Cabinet reshuffle in which Mr Clarke was summarily sacked and Mr Prescott stripped of all his remaining powers.

But the view among a growing number of Labour backbenchers was that the person Mr Blair really needed to reshuffle was himself.

It all came to a head in September. A group of previously loyal MPs signed a letter demanding that Mr Blair set out a timetable for his departure.

At first, it seemed the tip of the iceberg. There was excited talk at Westminster that up to 50 MPs would join in and that a Cabinet minister would deliver the coup-de-grace with a Geoffrey Howe-style resignation.

But although the coup attempt faltered, Mr Blair was forced to make clear that he would stand down next summer, and that the forthcoming conference in Manchester would be his last.

The Blairites, furious that their man had been backed into such a corner, attempted to implicate the Chancellor in the plot as relations between Labour’s Big Two plummeted to an all-time low.

It was clear that a patching-up operation would be needed to get through the conference, but Mr Brown’s attempts at conciliation were undermined when Cherie Blair was heard to call him a liar during his keynote speech.

Thereafter, an uneasy truce prevailed. Mr Brown remained on probation, while the Blairites secretly hoped another contender might step up to the mark.

But their great hope, Environment Secretary David Miliband, ruled himself out of the race, while new Home Secretary John Reid also appeared reluctant to join in.

Mr Brown’s succession began to appear increasingly assured, if only from the lack of plausible alternatives.

He even received a somewhat double-edged endorsement from Mr Blair, who warned Mr Cameron during a Commons debate that a “big clunking first” would soon lay him out on the canvas.

By the year end, it seemed politics had gone into a bizarre state of inertia, with Mr Blair increasingly in office but not in power.

He suffered the humiliation of becoming the first serving premier to be questioned by police over abuse of the honours system, but still he hung on, sullying not just his party’s reputation but that of politics in general.

In an emotional final keynote conference speech in Manchester, Mr Blair had declared that his most important legacy would be a fourth term Labour Government.

But history may well judge that, by his actions during 2006, he greatly reduced the chances of such an outcome.