Lib Dems take control of Derby

After a near three-week hiatus following the local elections, the Lib Dems last night took control of Derby City Council, my old stamping-ground during my days as a local government reporter in the late 1980s.

With 18 seats to Labour's 17, the Tories' 14 and two independents, the Lib Dems' hold on power is precarious, and although the other two parties rejected new leader Hilary Jones' offer of a grand coalition, there will clearly have to be very close co-operation between the parties if anything is to get done.

Furthermore, there is a potential sting in the tail for Ms Jones' new minority administration in the shape of independent councillor Wendy Harbon, who was thrown out of the Lib Dems last year and has since moved to Blackpool.

She was nowhere to be seen at last night's Cabinet-making meeting of the full council, and if she continues in this vein, she will be thrown off the authority, forcing a by-election in Darley ward, until recently a Labour stronghold.

Anyway to cut a long story short, if Labour were to win back this seat, it would be back in control of the city on the casting vote of the new Mayor, Barbara Jackson, who was also elected yesterday.

Sometimes, you know, I miss all this....

Come on you Reds

I may be a Londoner by birth, but I'll be cheering on Man U tonight, if only for purely sentimental reasons. It's fifty years since the Munich disaster destroyed potentially the greatest English club side ever, forty since Matt Busby's reconstructed team, George Best to the fore, walloped Benfica 4-1 at Wembley to lift the European Cup for the first time. With history on their side, surely they cannot lose?

May 22 Update: The right result, even if it was a bit of a game of two halves - but you have to feel for John Terry. Once again, sport proves its ability to humble even the greatest - one is reminded of Bradman, b Hollies, 0.

Fathers made redundant

Last night's votes on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill were, for me, perhaps the most depressing outcome to a parliamentary debate since Labour MPs went back on their 2001 manifesto pledge not to introduce tuition fees.

I have blogged previously about the hybrid animal-human embryo issue, but to be absolutely honest, what really wound me up about the Bill was not this, but the fact that it effectively denied the importance of fathers in bringing up children.

I did not oppose this simply because I am a Christian, but because it cuts across everything in my own experience both as a father and as a son.

It is blindingly obvious to all sensible people - those not consumed by political correctness - that the absense of fathers and other male role models has been a major contributory factor to social breakdown in some of our most deprived communities.

If MPs - and we are talking all three main parties here - want to deny children the right to grow up with a father, that is their lookout. In one sense it is scarcely surprising, since they also voted last night to deny hundreds of children a year the right to any life at all.

Just don't ever let them tell you again that they are putting "the family" at the heart of policy, or that "the interests of the child" are paramount. Patently, they are not.

Has Milburn's time now come?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following sentences in my Saturday Column in the Newcastle Journal.

"Potentially the most promising “change candidate” is Darlington MP Alan Milburn, whose still-youthful appearance belies his five years’ Cabinet experience. More importantly, he alone among Labour’s big-hitters has demonstrated an appetite for thinking outside the box. Whether he actually wants the job is unclear, but in my view, this could be his time."

Today, as I noted earlier, Mike Smithson on PoliticalBetting.com has claimed that Milburn is preparing to challenge Brown for the leadership if Thursday's Crewe and Nantwich by-election turns out as disastrously for Labour as everyone is now predicting.

I have no idea if the story is true, although as Iain Dale has already noted, Mike is not the sort to take a punt on such a tale. But as I have previously made clear, in the event of a leadership vacancy, the former health secretary would in my view be an extremely strong candidate.

Like most on the centre-left who hoped that under Gordon the Labour Party would rediscover its lost moral compass, I have been extremely saddened by what has happened to his premiership over the past seven or eight months.

Granted, he has not played his cards well - although the critical strategic error was not cancelling the autumn election as most allege, but allowing the speculation about an autumn election to get out of control in the first place.

Much of what has happened since then, however, has either been down to the incompetence of minor officials and party functionaries (discgate, David Abrahams) or, in the case of Northern Rock and the whole gamut of issues stemming from the global credit cruch, down to economic circumstances way beyond his control.

If he cannot now recover - more specifically, if the voters of Crewe and Nantwich deliver him a knockout blow - then Milburn is in my view the next best choice to lead the party into the next General Election.

In historical terms, it would be a bold move. Milburn would be the first premier since Churchill to take over mid-term while not occupying a major office of state (Eden, Home, and Callaghan all went from the Foreign Office to No 10, Macmillan, Major and Brown from the Treasury) and Churchill had of course previously been both Home Secretary and Chancellor.

Of the three current holders of the major offices, David Miliband has been much touted but is still less than fully-formed as a politician in my view, much as William Hague was when it fell to him to lead the Tories. He is still in the next-leader-but-one category.

The younger contenders - the likes of Purnell, Balls, Burnham and Ed Miliband - are even more lacking in experience and gravitas, while the older hands - Straw, Johnson, Harriet Harman - have simply been around the block too many times now.

At 49, Milburn is the right age for No 10 and having served in Blair's Cabinet, but not in Brown's, can combine top-level experience with relative freshness, enabling him to more credibly claim to be the "change the country needs" than Brown has been able to do.

It is true that he lacks a power base in the party, but then so do most of the other names that have been mentioned. There has never been a "Straw-ite" faction or a "Johnsonite" faction for instance, and even Miliband has allegedly failed to cultivate much of a following in the PLP.

It is also true that there have been various unsubstantiated rumours about his private life prior to his present relationship which, in the context of a leadership election, could result in a certain amount of mud being flung, as indeed was flung at Gordon in 1994.

Milburn would also have to overcome the suggestion of dilettanteism arising from his two Cabinet resignations. Some claimed it was a case of "can't stand the heat," but I genuinely believe he made a long-range calculation about his chances of succeeding Blair, correctly realised that Brown had it in the bag, and resigned to spend more time with his young sons at what was a critical age for them (they are older now.)

One thing I always believed though was that Milburn would return to frontline politics. Could this now be a case of "cometh the hour, cometh the man?"

++ Milburn to challenge Brown says PB.com ++

Mike Smithson has a potentially huge story HERE. Mike is to the political blogosphere what Phil Webster of The Times was to the Lobby in my time there - if he has a story, it's worth taking seriously.

More on this from me later.

Clegg "to back election winner" shock

God forbid that I ever turn into one of those gnarled old ex-lobby hacks who continually lament that political reporting is not what is was in their day....but the latest breathless revelations from Rosa Prince of the Telegraph's new-look political team had me shaking my head.

Writing on the usually excellent and informative Three Line Whip blog, she informs us that Nick Clegg will back David Cameron to become Prime Minister in the event of the Tories being the largest single party in a hung Parliament at the next General Election.

"Before now, it had been thought likely that Mr Clegg would wait until after an election to embark on negotiations with both of the main parties in the event of a hung Parliament. But The Daily Telegraph understands that he has decided that the public would not forgive him if he propped up a Labour administration that they had voted to throw out."

Well, blow me down. How long did it take The Daily Telegraph to "understand" that one, I wonder? I mean, it's not exactly rocket science, is it, to suggest that there would not be many votes for Cleggover in propping up a defeated Brown administration? With a second General Election likely to follow within the space of a year, he knows perfectly well it would be electoral suicide for him and his party.

The real dilemma for Clegg will come if Labour is the largest single party and the Tories are sufficiently far behind that they cannot form a government even with Lib Dem support - still a possible if currently rather unlikely scenario. In those circumstances the Lib Dem leader might be obliged to prop-up Labour in order to avert constitutional chaos.

Avid election speculators may like to take part in my Poll on the election outcome which I will be running between now and whenever the election comes. I plan to tot up the results each month and track the changes to see how opinion among blog readers is moving.