Mutually assured destruction

Behind all the brave talk of new generations, it is my fairly considered view that this Labour conference has been little short of a disaster for the party.

The outcome of the leadership election, via a flawed system that appears to have awarded the prize to the less popular, as well as the less experienced brother, has overshadowed the whole week in Manchester.

Had David Miliband won, as once seemed his appointed destiny, then the week would surely have been a breeze.

Labour would have elected an oven-ready Prime Minister who would instantly have struck fear into the coalition. Instead, the party has opted to do it the hard way.

As I have written before, I don't think Ed Miliband's politics are the problem. He was right yesterday to have distanced himself from some of the issues which caused Labour to suffer such a catastrophic loss of trust at the last two elections, and the 'Red Ed' jibs of the right-wing press will soon be shown to be self-evidently ludicrous.

Another of his nicknames, 'Forrest Gump', is perhaps nearer the mark. The trouble with Ed for me is that, for all his personal ruthlessness in fighting his elder brother for the party leadership and humiliating him in the process, he still comes across as rather well-meaning and naive.

To the Blarites, he was neither Red Ed, nor Forrest Gump, but 'The Emissary from the Planet Fuck' - apparently a reference to the fact that he was the only leading Brownite they could speak to without being told to "fuck off."

This too is revealing. Ed Miliband effectively won this contest by being the acceptable face of Brownism - by contrast with Ed Balls who was seen as its unacceptable face.

But the real problem Ed has faced this week is the psychological outworking of his brother's humiliation, culminating in today's announcement that he will not serve under him.

It undoubtedly leaves Ed weakened, and leaves Labour's already depleted top team looking even more bereft of experience, but it is merely the price he is now having to pay for upsetting the natural order of things.

Ed should perhaps have given more thought to this before he entered a contest which he did not really need to enter - that in destroying his brother, he risked ultimately destroying himself.

This self-destruction is not just a matter of whether Ed can look himself in the mirror at 3am in the morning, but whether, in laying bare the divisions within Labour in order to grab the top job, he has ultimately fatally hobbled his own election chances.

It was for all these reasons, and also partly because Ed's victory has left me feeling rather disconnected from Labour, that I posted a picture of Yvette Cooper on this blog last night under the headline "Labour's next Prime Minister."

Okay, so five years is a long time in politics, and Ed will doubtless grow in stature during that time, but in the increasingly presidential nature of our election contests, he doesn't look or sound to me like a man who could beat David Cameron.

So Dave is in for two (fixed) terms, Labour will turn to someone else for 2020, and Yvette - who in my view could have won this time and spared us this whole psychodrama - will surely make Chuka Umunna wait a while longer.

It is surprising in many ways that we have not yet had a second woman Prime Minister. The 30th anniversary of Thatcher's overthrow would seem an appopriate year in which to remedy that.

As Ed sets out his stall....here's Labour's next Prime Minister

Clegg cannot ignore his social democratic wing

Back in 1999, in his first keynote conference speech, Charles Kennedy insisted that the Liberal Democrats under his leadership would never become a "left-of-Labour party."

Nobody quite took the statement at face value, and neither, I suspect, did Mr Kennedy himself.

Sure enough, over the ensuing two elections, the man then known as 'Chatshow Charlie' succeeded in taking the Lib Dems to their highest-ever parliamentary representation by consistently taking left-of-Labour positions.

In 2001, it was the extra penny on income tax to pay for additional education spending that won over the voters, while in 2005, it was the party's opposition to the Iraq War.

Fast forward eleven years, and current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg is making what at first hearing sound like similar noises about the party's positioning vis-à-vis Labour.

Interviewed before this week's conference in Liverpool, he said: "The vocation of Liberalism is not to be a leftwing ghetto for people who are disaffected by the Labour Party."

The difference between Messrs Kennedy and Clegg, though, is that Clegg means it.

Not only has he gone into coalition with the Tories. He is almost saying 'good riddance' to those left-of-centre voters who have helped keep the party afloat over the past decade as New Labour continued its rightward drift.

He said in his interview: "I'm not denying there is a chunk of people who turned to the Liberal Democrats at the height of Blair's authoritarianism and his fascination with Bush…that was always going to unwind at some point."

True up to a point….but unless he is genuinely relaxed about his party losing more than half its support at the next election, the logic of Mr Clegg's position – if you can call it logic – is very clear.

It is that, between now and 2015, he is going to have to find himself an entirely new set of voters - particularly in the North where the 'disaffected ex-Labour' vote makes up a fair slice of Lib Dem support.

Which in turn begs the question: where on earth are they going to come from?

Before delivering his two-fingered message to his left-of-centre supporters, Mr Clegg would perhaps have done well to consider his party's recent history.

The Liberal Democrats, it should be remembered, are a fairly recent amalgamation of two parties with very different philosophical strands – the Liberals, and the Social Democrats.

The party is therefore itself a coalition of economic liberals such as Mr Clegg who feel naturally comfortable as part of a Tory-led government, and social democrats like Mr Kennedy to whom it is anathema.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why one opinion poll this week showed that more than half of Lib Dem voters regard the coalition as a sell-out, while 40pc said they voted Lib Dem specifically to keep the Tories out.

In his speech on Monday, Mr Clegg made an impassioned plea to his party to "stick with" the coalition, promising it would "change Britain for good."

Well, they'll stick with it as far as the referendum on voting reform next May. But after that, all bets are off are far as I can see.

I'll make another prediction, too. Mr Clegg will not find an army of new Liberal Democrat supporters waiting around for someone to vote for, and he will therefore be forced in the end to try to hang on to his existing ones.

And he won't be able to do that unless he can somehow first find a way of getting his party out of this coalition alive.

The Tories can reap the 'peace dividend'

While some political arguments never quite go away, recurring down the years in different forms and different contexts, there are others that are very much of their time.

An example is the issue of trade union power, and specifically whether it could legitimately be exercised to thwart the will of the democratically-elected government of the day.

This issue dominated British politics from the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, and was responsible during that time for bringing down at least one Labour government in Jim Callaghan's and one Conservative one in Ted Heath's.

It was eventually resolved by Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1985 strike, resulting not just in the marginalisation of the unions but the end of an entire way of life for many mining communities.

Yet to listen to this week's Trades Union Congress in Manchester, you could almost be forgiven for thinking the nation had undergone some kind of collective Life on Mars-type experience.

We learned that the TUC is planning a series of public sector strikes designed to get the government to think again about its spending cuts programme.

There is certainly an argument to be had about whether the cuts are going faster than they need to. There is a related argument about their legitimacy, given the Tories' failure to win an outright majority in May.

But turning the whole debate into a re-run of the 'Who Governs Britain?' controversies of the 1970s hardly seems the best way for the unions to try to win public sympathy for their cause.

Another ancient political argument that seemed to have been settled long ago was the one about Britain's independent nuclear deterrent.

This, too, was a battle that raged during the early 1980s, helping to split the Labour Party in 1981 when the pro-nuclear SDP broke away in dismay at its drift towards unilateralism.

The issue was seemingly put to bed when Labour then proceeded to lose three elections in a row before Tony Blair came along and wiped out all semblance of the party's pacifist tendency – and how.

But by a supreme historical irony, that bit of Labour which broke away to defend the nuclear deterrent has ultimately morphed into that bit of the Lib-Con coalition which now wants to ditch it.

Of all the many issues on which the two sides of the coalition disagree, this promises to be one of the most toxic, with many backbench Tories seeing the renewal of Trident as an article of faith.

Delaying the decision until after the next election will undoubtedly save a few bob – but it is also sure to re-open the debate over whether we should have a nuclear deterrent at all.

Yet for Prime Minister David Cameron, there is a rare political opportunity here – so long as he can square his backbenchers.

For if any government is going to radically reshape Britain's defence capability – and reap the potential 'peace dividend' in terms of savings - then this one is probably best-placed to do it.

Labour could never have abandoned Trident - for the simple reason that it would have brought back all those fears that the party could not be trusted with the nation's defences.

But the Tories, who have never had that problem, might just be able to.

By the same token, the Tories will find it much harder to reform the welfare state – something Labour really should have done in its first term when Mr Blair was carrying all before him.

For Mr Cameron, cutting Trident, and maybe finding a less costly form of nuclear deterrence, could prove to be the easy bit.

Balls holds the key

Politics has seen many changes over the past couple of decades - but if there is one thing that has changed out of all recognition, it is the science of opinion polling.

I have been in this game just about long enough to remember the infamous BBC exit poll in 1987 predicting a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher's Tories won a 102-seat majority.

By contrast, this year's exit poll - also predicting a hung Parliament - was very nearly spot-on, not just in terms of the overall outcome but also in terms of the number of seats won by each party.

But if most elections are becoming easier to predict, Labour leadership election are surely the exception that proves the rule.

There are two fairly straightforward reasons for this. Firstly, the single transferable voting system, which usually means that contests are decided on voters' second and sometimes even third preferences.

Secondly, the make-up of Labour's electoral college, comprising MPs, trade unions, and party members, which makes it nigh-on impossible to conduct a meaningful opinion poll.

So the widespread expectation that South Shields MP David Miliband will be crowned as Gordon Brown's successor later this month needs to be taken, at the very least, with a small pinch of salt.

While the Shadow Foreign Secretary certainly has the most support among MPs, and probably among party members, no-one quite knows what the union ballots will come up with, or how important those second preferences will prove to be.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, they only have to look at what happened in the party's deputy leadership election in 2007, when Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn were seen as favourites by the pundits.

They completely underestimated the level of support among the grassroots for Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas, whose second preference votes ultimately won Ms Harman the job.

That said, leadership elections are not the same as deputy leadership elections where you might feel more able to vote for someone you like the sound of, without necessarily worrying about whether they are capable of winning a general election.

There is a good argument for saying that if the same six candidates as contested the deputy leadership in 2007 had been contesting the leadership, Mr Johnson would have won.

The conventional wisdom in this election has been that Ed Miliband is everyone's second favourite candidate, and that if David is not sufficiently far enough ahead on first preferences, he risks being overhauled by his brother in the latter stages.

The key to it, as with the 2007 deputy leadership election, will be what happens to the second preferences of the third-placed candidate.

Following his strong performance in bashing the coalition, and showing real fighting qualities over the course of the campaign, I think this will in all likelihood be Ed Balls.

I am quite sure this is why talk of a 'pact' under which Mr Balls would become David Miliband's Shadow Chancellor has been doing the rounds over the past couple of weeks.

As it is, I am not sure there ever was such a pact or whether it would even be deliverable.

Mr Balls and the elder Miliband do not appear to share the same views about the importance of tackling the deficit vis-à-vis the need for economic growth, and that may make his appointment as Shadow Chancellor somewhat problematical.

Either way, by my reckoning Ed Miliband will probably need to win at least three fifths of Mr Balls' transfers in order to pip his brother to the post.

My hunch is that he won't, and that it will indeed be David wearing the crown a fortnight tomorrow.

For PM, it has to be DM

No leadership election occurs in a political vacuum. For good or ill, the current race for the leadership of the Labour Party will invariably be shaped in part by the context in which it is taking place.

Like it or not, it is the Blair-Brown years, and their ultimately shattering denouement in the general election defeat of 6 May, which provide the inescapable backdrop to this contest.

For at least one of the candidates, Ed Balls, that defeat already looks likely to have dealt a terminal blow to his leadership aspirations.

For all his pugnacious qualities - none of the candidates have landed as many blows on the Lib-Con coalition as he has - the party was never going to replace the defeated Gordon Brown with, well, Gordon Brown Mark II.

But if this has been a difficult election in which to be a Brownite - all the candidates have been anxious to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the former Prime Minister - being seen as a Blairite is not much of a recommendation either.

If by publishing his memoirs in the week the leadership ballot papers went out, Tony Blair hoped to influence the contest in favour of his protege David Miliband, it only goes to show how delusional he has become.

Mr Blair's account of his 'Journey' is already a bestseller, but many Labour members will be aghast at his decision to kick Mr Brown when he is down while simultaneously refusing to criticise Prime Minister David Cameron.

Then again, why would he, since he too clearly believes that the coalition is a Blairite continuity administration, doing exactly the things he would have done had he not been thwarted by nasty old Gordon.

So far from boosting the elder Miliband's candidature, the book looks likely to provoke a backlash against Mr Blair which could well harm the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

But in my view, that would be a shame, because, aside from all the factionalism, David Miliband is the best qualified candidate to take Labour back into government.

I have to confess that at the outset of this contest, I was leaning more towards Andy Burnham, which would have been the first time Durham North MP Kevan Jones and I had agreed about anything.

But while Mr Burnham is clearly the candidate most attuned to the needs of the North, his oddly tribal, Old Labour-ish campaign has seemed at odds with the 'new politics' of co-operation and coalition.

Of the other candidates, Ed Balls has already been dealt with, Diane Abbot would clearly take Labour back to irrelevance, while I wonder whether Ed Miliband is really ready for the top job.

I like a lot of what he has had to say about the need for Labour to regain its values before it can think of regaining power, and the 'Red Ed' jibes from the Blairite camp are self-evidently ludicrous.

For me, Ed's problem is not his politics, but the fact that he comes across as rather well-meaning and naive - a nice guy, an original thinker even, but not quite tough enough to be leader - and maybe PM - just yet.

By contrast, the one quality his elder brother possesses above all is that, having already held a major office of state, you can easily imagine him as Prime Minister now.

Mr Blair was at pains in his TV interview with Andrew Marr on Wednesday to stress that the South Shields MP is his own man, and that is one thing he was right about.

As a North-East Blairite, he could easily have got sucked into the silly tribalism that affected some of his former parliamentary colleagues in the region who saw any criticism of their beloved leader as a betrayal, but to his credit he never did.

I have no doubt at all that if he wins, David's first priority will be to unite the party and draw a line under the feuding once and for all.

But will he win? That is the question to which I will turn my attentions in next week's column.

Blairite, Thatcherite - or maybe both?

The milestone of a new government's 100th day in office is one of those political landmarks which is perhaps given undue significance by commentators.

After all, it would be a pretty poor sort of government that failed to reach the target, even one cobbled together from two wildly differing parties in the wake of an inconclusive general election result.

Nevertheless, while the first 100 days of a government's life do not necessarily determine its character, they do provide significant pointers to what sort of administration it is likely to become.

In the case of the Con-Lib coalition, it is reasonably clear that the dominant theme thus far has been what its critics would call the "Tory cuts" agenda rather than "Liberal reform" one.

Lib Dem deputy leader Nick Clegg, minding the shop this week and next during Prime Minister David Cameron's holidays, is understandably keen to disabuse the voters of this notion.

He insisted yesterday that being in government meant the Lib Dems were able to make progress with a "liberal agenda"- but few believe him.

In a different way, Chancellor George Osborne, who by contrast has provided the dominant voice of the coalition thus far, was also at pains to emphasise this week that the government is about more than cuts.

Although his big speech on Tuesday was focused on the continuing need for spending reductions, it was tempered with talk of creating a 'fairer society' in the longer-term.

For what it's worth, my own view on the coalition is that it probably has over-emphasised its determination to cut spending at the expense of its reformist credentials.

What reform proposals there have been, notably on education and the NHS, have been largely about shrinking the size of the state – something that is intimately bound up with the spending cutbacks.

There has been much less talk of political reform besides the announcement of the date of the referendum on the voting system, something which is likely to turn into the hottest of potatoes for the coalition.

What, for instance, has become of the much-vaunted 'Freedom Bill' to abolish hundreds of unnecessary regulations brought in by New Labour? Has the coalition belatedly decided they were necessary after all?

The debate over what sort of government this really is was thrown into relief by the decision of the former Darlington MP Alan Milburn this week to become its 'social mobility tsar.'

It inevitably led to cries of betrayal from some of his more tribal ex-colleagues, Andy Burnham and John Prescott among them.

A more charitable interpretation of his actions, though, would be to see the coalition as a Blairite continuity administration, implementing the public service reforms Mr Milburn himself advocated when in government.

Although he would never use these words, the former health secretary might well echo the sentiment: "I never left New Labour, New Labour left me."

Since Mr Cameron is on record as claiming that he is the true 'Heir to Blair,' I have no doubt that this is how the Prime Minister sees his own administration

Others, though, see it differently. To many on the left, Mr Cameron is not so much an arch-Blairite as an arch-Thatcherite, taking the axe to areas of the state even she would have seen as sacrosanct.

Perhaps, though, he is both. Such is the extent to which these two former Prime Minsters have dominated the politics of the past 30 years that it is hard for the current one to escape their influence.

After just 100 days, it is far too early to give this government an 'ism.' But if I had to, 'Blatcherism' would perhaps be the one I would choose.

Some advice for Tony Blair

"So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you."

Matthew 6, vv2-4

Why did Milburn do it?

Some possible reasons as to why Alan Milburn (Lab, Darlington 1992-2010) has decided to go and work for David Cameron. Not all of these are necessarily mutually exclusive, and not all of them are necessarily intended as criticisms of the former health secretary.

(i) He genuinely sees Cameron as the 'Heir to Blair' and sees the coalition as a Blairite continuity administration carrying out the same kind of public service reforms which he (ie Milburn) was prevented from pursuing in government by Gordon Brown and his allies. He certainly would not be alone in this view of recent political history. There is evidence that Cameron himself sees it this way.

(ii) He genuinely believes there is a need to tackle the slowdown in social mobility and sees himself as the best person to do this. Though doubtless so does IDS, which should make for some interesting policy discussions.

(iii) He wants to put two fingers up to Brown and Co for sidelining him within the Labour Party and failing to make more use of his ideas on social mobility in the run-up to the last election. If so, this is hardly surprising. I myself advocated on a number of occasions that Gordon should set aside his personal loathing of Milburn and take on board some aspects of the agenda he was putting forward. It could have greatly helped in the task of "renewing" New Labour intellectually that Brown ultimately failed to accomplish.

(iv) He wants to launch a new political party positioned somewhere between the Lib Dems and Labour. Okay, I don’t really believe this, but stranger things have happened and by joining a Tory government, the Lib Dems have left a bit of an opening in the market for a new centre-left grouping, though if he wins the Labour leadership, I would expect David Miliband to move fairly swiftly to plug this.

(v) Ego. Always a consideration where Milburn is concerned. But perhaps, on this occasion, not necessarily a deciding one.

The coalition will collapse long before any lasting realignment of the right

A FEW weeks back, I wrote about the new government's attempts to construct a new political narrative in which the blame for the forthcoming spending cuts is laid firmly at Labour's door.

Any casual observer of the political scene might be tempted to regard this as the kind of routine knockabout that is only to be expected in our adversarial system.

But make no mistake, the coalition's concerted efforts to rubbish the reputation of Gordon Brown and his government is no mere idle politicking.

It is rather, absolutely crucial to the longer-term survival of David Cameron's Con-Lib administration.

For now, the political honeymoon that the coalition has enjoyed since Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg tied the knot in the Downing Street rose garden in May continues moreorless unabated.

But surely not for long. The cuts will soon be coming thick and fast, and the flak will then be flying equally fast in the government's direction.

Hence the coalition's determination to deflect the coming opprobrium by building as broad a consensus as possible that Labour's mismanagement of the economy is to blame.

This week's "Labour legacy love-in" between Lib Dem Energy secretary Chris Huhne and Tory chairman Baroness Warsi was but the latest phase in the strategy, and we are promised more to come.

As I have also previously noted, the government is in serious danger of over-egging the pudding here.

The voters are no fools, and if the coalition is seen to be protesting too much about the previous government's record, they are all the more likely to smell a rat.

Very little of it washes with me, I'm afraid. The Lib-Cons are choosing to go faster than Labour did in cutting the deficit not because there is no alternative, but because they hold a different economic viewpoint.

Mr Huhne in particular sounded very unconvincing at Wednesday's joint briefing, which is hardly surprising given that before the election, he shared Labour's critique of the Tories' planned austerity measures.

But for me, the really interesting thing about the Huhne-Warsi press conference was not what it says about the past but what it could signify for the future.

Inevitably, it sparked speculation that the coalition partners could agree not to fight eachother at the next election, which Lady Warsi hardly discouraged by failing to give a straight answer to a straight question about it.

Talk of a 'coupon election' - LibCons v the rest – is surely wildly premature, but it wouldn't be the first time that coalitions have led to more lasting political realignments.

Back in the 30s, the 'National Liberals' were ultimately absorbed into the Conservative Party after joining the Tory-dominated national government that ruled the country from 1931 to 1945.

So could this present-day coalition ultimately lead to the formation of a new, centre-right grouping, further marginalising the Tory right and reducing the Lib Dems to a social democratic rump?

You can see why a centrist Conservative like Mr Cameron and a right-leaning Lib Dem like Mr Clegg would be comfortable with such a scenario.

But the problem is that both the Tory right and the Liberal Democrat centre-left have a compelling interest in seeing the coalition collapse long before the two parties get anywhere near that point.

For that reason, it remains my view that, sooner or later, one or other of them will ensure that it does.

After five years, a new look

I always liked the classic Rounders 3 template, which is why I've stuck with it on this blog for the past five years. But I've wanted a three-column template for some time, and now I've finally found one I like I thought it was time to give the blog a new look. It's not a "relaunch," it doesn't mean blogging is going to return to 2006/7/8 levels (it can't, basically) but I hope readers will like it and find some of the links easier to find. I expect I will add the odd refinement here and there over the next couple of weeks or so.

If anyone would prefer to remember the blog the way it was, an archived version of everything up to March 2009 has been preserved for posterity as part of the British Library's web archive project.

The coalition fractures start to show

Prime Minister David Cameron committed something of an historical gaffe this week when he referred to Britain having been the Americans' "junior partner" in 1940 in the war against Hitler.

Given that the US did not even join the war until 1941, it was not even historically accurate, quite apart from the, probably unintended, slight on our own WW2 heroes.

But while Mr Cameron was busy making friends across the pond, his own 'junior partner' was committing a possibly more serious gaffe in regard to a more recent conflict.

Standing in at PMQs, deputy premier Nick Clegg allowed himself to be goaded by Labour's Jack Straw into declaring the 2003 invasion of Iraq "illegal."

The comment was interesting on both a personal and a political level. It demonstrated that, for all his polished performances in the TV election debates, Mr Clegg hasn't yet quite made the transition from leader of a protest party to statesman.

While many voters will applaud his honesty in speaking from the heart, ministers sometimes have to be more circumspect.

More broadly, the comment also highlighted the fact that the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are very different parties, one instinctively pro-establishment, the other instinctively anti.

As we come to what is generally considered to be the end of the political year, the talk at Westminster is inevitably that the coalition is showing its first signs of fracture.

If the truth be told, the tensions were there from the start, but they really only began to come to a head once the scale of George Osborne's Budget cuts became clear.

If there were protests on the Lib Dem side about that, they were then more than matched by the mutterings on the Tory benches following the announcement of the electoral reform referendum to be held next May.

Then, this week, came Mr Clegg's PMQs outburst and a separate row over the Lib Dems' proposed graduate tax to pay for higher education, which the Tories have now turned their backs on.

Still to come in the autumn is a party conference season in which I expect to hear Lib Dem activists sounding-off loudly about the Tories' plans to reform education and the NHS.

With an election theoretically five years off, no-one is currently paying too much attention to opinion polls, but they nevertheless paint an intriguing picture of how the public mood has shifted since 6 May.

Leaderless Labour are up an average five percentage points for the loss of Gordon Brown, which tells its own story of what might have happened had someone else been leading them on election day.

Meanwhile Mr Cameron's Tories are up around eight percentage points at 44pc, while Mr Clegg's Lib Dems have slumped to around 13pc.

The worrying conclusion here for the Lib Dems is that while the public seems to generally approve of what the government is doing, it is currently only benefiting the Tories rather than them.

One of the most prescient questions of the week was posed by the blogger Henry G Manson, writing on the excellent PoliticalBetting.com website.

In a neat reworking of the title of an old club anthem from the late 1980s, he asked: "Clegg: How low can he go?"

Henry's point was that there has to come a point beyond which Lib Dem MPs and activists will not allow the party's support to slump before they are finally moved to act.

I suspect that this is a question which will not only help shape the politics of the next 12 months, but one which may ultimately determine the fate of the government.

Peter self-destructs for the final time

Asked once how he would know his transformation of the Labour Party would be complete, Tony Blair famously replied: "When it learns to love Peter Mandelson."

Judged purely on that measure, however, it seems from this week's events that the party which Mr Blair led for 13 years still has a way to go.

There was a point, 18 months or so ago, when it looked as though the former Hartlepool MP had finally managed to win his way into the hearts, as well as the minds, of the party faithful.

But all the goodwill engendered by his return from Brussels to stand at Gordon Brown's side during his government's most difficult days has been dissipated at a stroke by his decision to publish a trashy account of the New Labour years.

In the past, many Labour people who found Lord Mandelson's style of politics distasteful have nevertheless forgiven him on the grounds that he was a loyal party man with Labour literally running through his veins.

But the publication of his book 'The Third Man' this week has surely demolished that defence once and for all.

It has oft been said of Peter Mandelson that he was always better at guiding the fortunes of the party and its leaders than he ever was at managing his own career.

But the lack of judgment that resulted in at least one of his two Cabinet resignations seems to have returned with a vengeance in his apparent eagerness to cash in on the lucrative summer 'beach read' market.

It is not even as if any of the revelations in the wretched book tell us much that we didn't know already.

Much of the focus of attention has inevitably been on whether or not Tony Blair called Gordon Brown "mad, bad and dangerous" and likened him to a "Mafia don."

Well, "mad" is one of those words that gets thrown around a little too loosely these days. It can mean anything from clinical insanity to having a bit of a temper on you.

It is hardly surprising, though, that Labour's opponents in the media have put the worst possible construction on it, with Mr Brown's reputation taking a further battering as a result.

But in my view, the book is far more damaging to Mr Blair's historical reputation than to his successor's.

It confirms what many have long suspected, namely that he did indeed promise Mr Brown in 2003 that he would not fight a third general election, but went back on it.

It is impossible to over-estimate the impact of this on subsequent Labour history. Had Mr Brown been Labour leader up against Michael Howard in 2005, he would have won that election with at least as good a majority as Mr Blair managed.

He would then, in all likelihood, have retired with dignity mid-way through the last Parliament, giving Labour a chance to renew itself in office under a new generation.

As it is, Mr Brown is currently being subjected to all sorts of indignities, with his government's record being trashed by the Con-Lib coalition on an almost daily basis.

But I wonder whether when people realise what the coalition is really doing to our public services – privatising the NHS by the back door being its latest wheeze – they might start to feel some sympathy for the former Prime Minister.

Either way, the Labour Party will doubtless in time come to love Gordon in the way it does all its old leaders – particularly the unsuccessful ones.

One thing it will never now do, though, is to learn to love Peter.

'Miserable pipsqueak' won't rescue Balls

Ever since the new coalition came into office, the consensus has been that its political honeymoon would last only as long as it took for real cuts in public services to start happening.

While people seem happy for ministers to talk about efficiency savings and even 25pc cuts to government departments, they become rather less so when that starts to impact on local schools, hospitals and police.

So this week's announcement of the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme, aimed at refurbishing every school in England, was one announcement the government needed to get right.

And as we all now know, Education Secretary Michael Gove managed to get it totally and spectacularly wrong, producing at least four different lists of the schools affected each of which contained inaccuracies.

In this region alone, the original announcement led to building work being halted at 46 schools including five in South Tyneside.

However it later emerged that all five of these schools had been mistakenly included on the list and that the work would, after all, be continuing as planned, although other areas were not so lucky.

Those who long to see a bit of passion restored to the political arena will have loved Labour MP Tom Watson's Commons attack on Mr Gove after the minister was forced to make one of several apologies for the blunders.

Former whip Mr Watson concluded his onslaught with the words "You're a miserable pipsqueak of a man, Gove!" – incurring the wrath of Speaker John Bercow who swiftly ordered him to withdraw.

Ultimately, though, it is not the chaotic presentation of this announcement which is the real issue. It is the fact that cuts to school building projects should be happening at all.

Once again, the government has tried to pin the blame on Labour, arguing that the Building Schools for the Future programme was wasteful and bureaucratic.

This would be all very well, had Mr Gove outlined how the new government proposes to refurbish our dilapidated school buildings in a more cost-effective and less bureaucratic fashion.

His failure to do so leads one to assume there is no such plan, and that they will consequently be left to rot.

One consequence of this week's fiasco has been talk of an upturn in the fortunes of Labour leadership contender Ed Balls, who has led the attack on Mr Gove.

The Shadow Education Secretary is currently trailing in, at best, third place behind the Miliband brothers in the race, but with voting not due to happen until the end of August, much could theoretically change before then.

For my part, I don't think it will. While accepting that Mr Gove's hapless performance this week has given Mr Balls a chance to shine, I think the party has by and large made up its mind about him.

Sure, they want to see his combative political skills used to good effect in a senior role - almost certainly Shadow Chancellor – but my hunch is they want someone more emollient as leader.

The longer-term impact of the week's events is likely to be less on Labour and more on public perceptions of the coalition.

Even within the North-East, the scrapping of the rebuilding programme runs the risk of creating a postcode lottery between areas such as Newcastle, where all the projects had already been approved, and Durham, where 14 have had to be cancelled.

It is invariably going to create a huge sense of injustice in those areas unlucky enough to miss the cut-off point and which now face an indefinite wait for new facilities.

And at some point, that sense of injustice is something the coalition will need to address.

How open is the Labour Party to persuasion?

Cross-posted from Political Betting.

Early on in the Labour leadership battle, Mike [Smithson] drew what I thought was potentially a good analogy between David Cameron’s succesful campaign for the Tory leadership in 2005 and Andy Burnham’s candidature for Labour this time round.

Young Burnham, he surmised, could turn out to be the Cameron of this campaign - a relative unknown coming from behind to win while better-known front-runners faltered.

As it is, Burnham has hardly achieved lift-off. He has fought an oddly Old Labour sort of campaign, of which the last straw - no pun intended, Jack - has been his opposition to the proposed AV referendum which Labour supported in its manifesto.

But that’s not my main point. My question is: is there actually room in this race for any of the candidates to ‘do a Cameron,’ or is the nature of the contest such that the prospect of anyone springing a surprise is already closed-off?

One major difference between this and the Tories’ 2005 race is that the candidates are not being subjected to the pressure-cauldron of a party conference hustings.

When the Tories did this, it enabled them to weed-out a front-runner in David Davis who, whatever his other virtues, was clearly incapable of making a decent platform speech, in favour of someone who wowed his audience by speaking without notes.

Another key difference is the nature of the two parties. As I have pointed out on my own blog, the Tories are historically much more open to making unexpected choices of leader - Margaret Thatcher over Ted Heath in ‘75, William Hague over Ken Clarke in ‘97, Iain Duncan Smith over the same opponent in 2001.

Labour, by contrast, almost always sticks to the front-runner, sometimes because the front-runner is clearly the best candidate (Neil Kinnock in 1983, Tony Blair in 1994) but sometimes out of sentimentality or a resdual belief in ‘Buggins’ Turn.’

My hunch is that most of Labour’s electorate has already made its mind up about this election, and it is now a contest between the brothers. While it is not yet clear which of them will win, it is clear that one of them will.

I’m not sure what current prices are available on Burnham, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott, but whatever they are, my candid advice to PB aficionados would be: ignore them.

Troubled times for Clegg and Co

After the initial thrill of seeing Liberal bums occupying ministerial seats for the first time since the wartime coalition of the 1940s, the past couple of months have proved something of a reality-check for Britain's third party.

First, there was the loss of their rising star David Laws from the coalition Cabinet after just 16 days following revelations in the Daily Telegraph about his expense claims and his private life.

Then the Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, was forced to do a Robin Cook and swiftly dump his wife for his mistress after their affair was exposed by the News of the World.

Mr Huhne kept his job, although conspiracy theorists would doubtless see a pattern in this double embarrassment for key Liberal Democrats at the hands of Tory-supporting newspapers.

But of course, the unease currently being felt across Nick Clegg's party is not just about the personal difficulties of individual Lib Dem ministers. It goes much deeper than that.

The first two months of the coalition have been dominated by the Tory 'cuts' agenda, with Chancellor George Osborne emerging as the dominant figure in the government much as Gordon Brown did under Tony Blair.

For the Lib Dems, it has meant the humiliation of being forced to eat their pre-election words, when they warned that cutting too deep, too fast could cause another recession.

More and more grassroots Lib Dems, and even some of the party's more left-leaning MPs, have started to ask the question: What's in this for us?

Well, this week came the answer – news that a referendum on changing the voting system from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote is to be held next year, probably on 5 May.

For Deputy Prime Minister Mr Clegg, who will formally announce the move next week, it represents perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime chance to achieve the Lib Dem Holy Grail of electoral reform.

There are strong practical arguments for having the vote this early on in the Parliament, in that if it were held any later there would be little chance of getting any changes through in time for the next election.

Against that, though, is the obvious danger that it could shorten the coalition's life by about four years if the referendum is lost.

Were that to happen, of course, there would be little incentive left for the Lib Dems to remain in the government, and Mr Clegg would come under pressure from his party to obtain a swift divorce.

This might, in turn, provide a perverse incentive for the Conservatives not to campaign too hard against the change to AV, although premier David Cameron has insisted that he will.

The referendum poses a dilemma for Labour, too. The logic of opposition suggests it is in their interests to get a 'no' vote in order to try to bring down the government and force a 2011 election.

But many Labour MPs favour AV, and both Miliband brothers have made clear the party will campaign for a 'yes' vote if they win the leadership.

Whether or not Mr Clegg succeeds in his ambition will depend at least in part on whether the coalition can retain the broad popular support it currently holds.

As the North-East knows all too well, referenda held at a time when the government is unpopular tend to result in resounding 'no' votes.

The biggest danger for the 'yes' campaign is that the public comes to view this as an irrelevance when set against the economic problems facing the country – as many Tory MPs already do.

Not for the first time in recent months, the Lib Dems are finding themselves having to negotiate uncharted – and shark-infested – political waters.

End of the 'golden generation'

Long-standing readers of this blog - if there are any - will doubtless have noted the distinct lack of blogging on the 2010 World Cup thus far compared with 2006. Partly it's a symptom of changing times. Life was considerably less busy back then - only one child, a house and garden that needed little doing to it, a considerably less demanding role at work than the one I now hold.

But really those are just excuses. The main reason I haven't blogged on the World Cup until now is that England's performances in it were so dire it was moreorless impossible to summon up the requisite degree of enthusiasm.

I don't think I was by any means alone in this. Friends who were happy to come round to our place and drink beer at 8am in the morning for England's early-morning kick-offs during the Japan-South Korea tournament in 2002 seemed oddly resistant to footie-related get-togethers this time round.

Is it that we are eight years older and wiser? Or is it simply that England are just shite?

Each World Cup is, in one sense, an opportunity to relive the experiences of the previous ones. Some football fans of a slightly older vintage than myself still long to repeat the thrill of our 1966 triumph, the more so perhaps as it recedes further and further into the dim and distant past.

But I was too young to remember much about that. For me, it is Italia '90 which continues to cast a shadow over each subsequent tournament, Sir Bobby Robson's men who continue to make each subsequent England team suffer by comparison.

They called this the 'golden generation,' but Capello's motley crew couldn't hold a candle to that lot. Sure, on paper you would rate John Terry a better player than Terry Butcher, Steven Gerrard above David Platt, Wayne Rooney above Peter Beardsley even. But they wouldn't play for Fabio like those boys played for Sir Bobby twenty years' back.

And with such evident lack of passion on the pitch when compared to the England teams of old, how on earth could we fans be expected to work up the same level of excitement as of yore?

The general consensus in the papers this week has been that the 2014 generation of potential World Cup players is considerably less gifted than the present one, although it is surely too early to say whether the likes of Jack Rodwell, Kieran Gibbs, Jack Wilshere and Conor Wickham will go the way of Rooney and kick-on to world-class status, or flatter to deceive in the manner of other one-time prodigies such as Theo Walcott and David Bentley.

But it need not necessarily be a handicap. The only truly world-class players in our World Cup-winning side in 1966 were the goalkeeper, Gordon Banks, the captain, Bobby Moore, and midfield fulcrum Bobby Charlton. Were they not national heroes, some of the others would almost have qualified for the description 'journeymen.'

The difference was that Sir Alf moulded them into an effective unit, much as Sir Bobby somewhat serendipitously managed to do with his charges in 1990.

If someone - Martin O'Neill perhaps - can do that four years from now, then perhaps the flame of that unforgettable summer may yet flicker into life again.

Playing for the highest stakes

Whenever we journalists describe something as a "political gamble," or even a "huge political gamble," I sometimes think we need to go and take a lesson in the avoidance of cliché.

The fact is, all political decisions require an assessment of the balance of risk, and in that sense, all political decisions are gambles to some extent or another.

Delaying the general election until moreorless the last possible moment was a gamble for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for instance.

He was gambling on the fact that the economy would pick up sufficiently before 6 May to show the electorate that his prescriptions were working. It wasn't that far away from coming off.

The gamble unveiled by Chancellor George Osborne in his first Budget on Tuesday, however, was of an entirely different order.

This wasn't just a gamble with his own future, or that of the Con-Lib coalition. It was a gamble with the future of the whole country and the jobs and livelihoods of millions of its people.

The debate over the Budget has thus far focused on two issues. First, whether it could reasonably be called "fair" and "progressive," and secondly, whether or not the £40bn extra spending cuts and tax rises were avoidable.

All I would say on the first point is that it depends how you define fairness. Some will say that the rise in VAT to 20pc is fair because it will affect everyone in the same way, while others will say it's unfair because it will disproportionately hit the poor.

The more illuminating debate surrounds the second point – whether this Budget was indeed unavoidable, or whether these cuts are at least in part ideologically motivated.

As I noted last week, the government's attempts to lay the blame for the cuts at Labour's door has aroused the opposition from its post-election slumber and forced it to stand by its own, more limited deficit reduction plan.

The really difficult thing is that no-one knows who is right about this. There is no clearer consensus among the economists about how fast the deficit should be cut than there is among the politicians.

In short, it's a case of suck it and see. We will only find out the answer once we have been there and done it.

Whatever the outcome, it is no exaggeration to say that the politics of the next decade and beyond will be shaped by it.

If Mr Osborne's strategy works, and he succeeds in bringing down the deficit without causing another recession, then David Cameron will almost certainly win a second term and probably, this time, with an outright majority.

But if it he is wrong, the current political status quo will be transformed

The coalition's political honeymoon will come to a swift end, and Mr Brown will start to look not so much like a failed leader as a lost leader, or a prophet without honour in his own country to use a Biblical analogy.

A vindicated Labour Party would then be on course for a victory at the next election every bit as crushing as the one it achieved in 1997, four years after the last Tory government's claim to economic competence was swept away by Black Wednesday

The Conservatives could be out of power for another generation, while their Liberal Democrat collaborators may well be wiped off the political map entirely.

While some on the left might welcome this apocalyptic scenario on the grounds that it would be good for the fortunes of the Labour Party, the cost in terms of human misery would surely be too great.

For that reason, we'd better all hope that Mr Osborne's great gamble does indeed pay off.

Labour's would-be leaders must not stand for this

And so at last the real cutting begins. A new hospital in Hartlepool. A business loan that would have guaranteed hundreds of jobs in Sheffield. A huge modernisation programme for libraries.

All gone in a flash, along with another £2bn worth of projects apparently approved by Labour in its last few months in office, though in the case of the hospital, it seems to have been in the pipeline for rather longer than that.

And at last, too, some real passion from Labour in opposing the Con-Lib coalition's programme of cutbacks - both from Liam Byrne on the floor of the House on Thursday, and later from David Miliband in the BBC studios.

The defeated party finally found its voice as Mr Byrne, the man who came close to making it a laughing stock with his 'sorry, there's no more money' note to his successor, managed to redeem his own somewhat battered reputation.
The shadow chief secretary told Lib Dem opposite number Danny Alexander: "The country....will be aghast at your attack on jobs, your attack on construction workers, your attack on the industries of the future and the cancellation of a hospital.

"In five minutes this afternoon you have reversed three years of Liberal Democratic policy of which you were the principal author. What a moment of abject humiliation."

Mr Miliband went even further, when invited onto the BBC's Newsnight that evening to discuss the cuts - in particular the cancellation of the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters.

"We were looking to facilitate a genuine industrial revolution in the North of England. It's been thrown away by an act of gratuitous economic vandalism," he said.

The sense of outrage that finally welled-up from senior Labour politicians this week has been long brewing.

As I wrote last week, the government is making a very determined effort to construct a political narrative in which "irresponsible" Labour is blamed for wrecking the economy and leaving a mess for the coalition to clear up.

It is, however, in danger of gilding the lily - just as New Labour's own 'repeat messaging' of its achievements ultimately caused people to disbelieve everything it said.

Indeed, the new Office for Budget Responsibility this week found that, far from being irresponsible, previous Chancellor Alistair Darling had been too cautious in his borrowing forecasts, and that it will actually be £22bn lower over the next five years.


Some of Labour's leadership contenders have appeared reluctant to defend the previous government's record, two of them even claiming they were against the Iraq War even though they were government advisers at the time.

But rather than let the coalition traduce its economic legacy and use that as a justification for cuts, Labour needs to take the fight to its opponents.

Sure, the Brown government was not perfect. But it was doing no more than following classic Keynesian economic theory - that you stimulate spending to achieve recovery, then wait for tax revenues to eat into the deficit before making cuts.

I for one am pleased that at least one of the contenders is prepared to defend that perfectly respectable position.

One of the main criticisms against David Miliband as a leadership candidate has been that he is simply too cerebral, that he lacks the moral passion to energise a movement which Harold Wilson rightly termed "a moral crusade or nothing."

Well, on Thursday night, we saw the South Shields MP try to answer some of those criticisms.

Some called his Newsnight performance a "rant." Some even questioned his fitness for office. But for me, it was no more than a recognition of one of the iron laws of politics.

Namely, that before you can be Prime Minister, you have first to make a success of being Leader of the Opposition.

Where is the mandate for 'Canadian-style' cuts?

Are the Tories economic saviours - or are they just opportunistic ideologues using the deficit crisis as an excuse to finish Thatcher's work. Here's today's Journal column.

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One of the shortest-lived and least successful political advertising campaigns of recent times was Labour's general election poster featuring David Cameron as fictional 80s TV cop Gene Hunt.

"Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s," said the catchline, as the Tory leader was depicted astride Hunt's famous red Audi Quattro.

The campaign, which was swiftly pulled, ignored two important facts. Firstly, most people thought Gene Hunt was quite cool. Secondly, many would jump at the chance to go back to the 1980s were it really possible.

For all the bitter folk-memories of the 1984/5 miners' strike, unemployment topping 3m in 1981 and the Toxteth and Brixton riots that summer, it was an altogether gentler age than the one we live in now.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, Mr Cameron's speech on Monday in which he sought to prepare the public for spending cutbacks the likes of which have never been seen before ought to disabuse them of it.

Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is insistent that it won't mean a return to "Thatcher-style policies," and he's quite right. It’s going to be far worse than that.

For all that the Tories still worship the Iron Lady as the premier who began the rolling-back of the state with her 1980s privatisations, there are some parts of the public sector she would have never dared touch.

That is emphatically not the case now. The message coming out from Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne is that no item of public expenditure can now be considered sacrosanct.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not necessarily. All parties are agreed after all on the need to reduce the country's £156m budget deficit, and however many reviews of government 'waste' are carried out, it seems there are always new savings to be found.

But for me, the biggest question mark against the government's plans to adopt the 'Canadian Solution' and radically shrink the size of the state concerns its lack of political legitimacy.

It should not be forgotten that the Tories did not win an outright majority at the election, and that most people who voted Lib Dem certainly did not vote for huge public spending cuts.

While the coalition partners can claim a strong policy mandate in areas such as civil liberties where they fought the election on similar ground, that was decidedly not the case when it came to economic policy.

History is written by the winners, of course, and the government is already busy constructing a political narrative which seeks to justify the drastic economic remedies it now proposes.

Gordon Brown's government, we will be told again and again over the coming months, has left the country practically bankrupt and on the verge of 'doing a Greece.'

It already seems forgotten that Mr Brown's additional spending 'stimulus' designed to get the economy moving again in 2008/09 was met with widespread public approval at the time.

Such rewriting of history is nothing new. The Tories ensured the Callaghan government was remembered not for repaying the 1976 IMF loan within two years and stabilising the nation's finances, but for the Winter of Discontent.

What, if anything, have Labour's five leadership contenders got to say about all this?

Well, the fact that they have thus far been uncharacteristically muted in their criticisms of the coalition's plans goes to show how far it has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate.

The truth is that the deficit crisis has presented the Tories with a chance to do something some of them have wanted to do for decades, and take the axe to large parts of the state.

Is it the harsh medicine the country needs? Or is it rather just a blatant piece of ideology-driven opportunism?

Miliband Major has the Big Mo

The Con-Lib coalition overcame its first major crisis over the past week with the resignation of the Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws after what must be the shortest Cabinet career on record.

Doubtless it is a huge loss to the government. Mr Laws was easily the most popular Lib Dem on the Tory benches, and as such was a vital bridge between the two governing parties.

That said, it says a lot for the strength of David Cameron and Nick Clegg's alliance that Mr Laws' shock departure, after revelations about his expense claims and his private life, failed to sever it.

Although there do appear to have been some behind-the-scenes disagreements about how the resignation should be managed – and how Mr Laws should be replaced – in public at least the coalition managed to maintain a united front.

Debate will linger on over whether Mr Laws was right to resign, although my own feelings are that he made the right call in judging that he could not be the man to oversee expenditure cuts having claimed expenses he was not entitled to.

But after a month of writing mainly about the coalition, I'm going to focus instead this week at what is happening on the opposite side of the House.

Granted, Labour's leadership race hasn't exactly sprung into life yet, with most of the better-known contenders ruling themselves out on the grounds of age and the current front-runners a monochrome set of white, middle-class former policy wonks.

But with a swift return to power a real possibility for Labour if the coalition were to hit the buffers, the choice is certainly not without significance.

Many Labour activists in the North-East will doubtless be hoping South Shields MP David Miliband can emulate Tony Blair and Ramsay Macdonald and become the third party leader to hold a seat in the region.

History is certainly on his side. While the Tories are often inclined to favour the unexpected in their choice of leader, Labour almost invariably opts for the most 'obvious' candidate.

It usually pays off, too. Harold Wilson over George Brown in 1963, Jim Callaghan over Michael Foot in 1976, John Smith over Bryan Gould in 1992 and Tony Blair over Margaret Beckett in 1994 were all the right choices.

As if to prove the point, on the one occasion on which Labour passed over the obvious successor - choosing Mr Foot over Denis Healey in 1981 – it proved a disaster.

Support for the six candidates among the North-East's 25 Labour MPs is fairly evenly spread.

David Miliband currently has six nominations from the region, Ed Balls five, Ed Miliband four, and the other three candidates one each.

While left-wingers Diane Abbott and John McDonnell appear unlikely to get the 33 nominations necessary to join Mr Balls and the Milibands on the ballot paper, former health secretary Andy Burnham still might.

The one North-East MP backing him thus far is Durham North's Kevan Jones, who is not a bad person to have on your side in an internal party election.

Ed Miliband began the contest looking handily-placed, potentially the most open to fresh ideas and the least weighed-down by previous baggage. Mr Balls meanwhile is a proven campaigner who is sure to get big support from the unions.

But it is the elder Miliband who appears to have that crucial electoral asset: momentum.

Most of the heavyweights from the Brown Cabinet have lined-up behind him and as well as being the most experienced of the candidates, he both looks and sounds the most Prime Ministerial.

It is early days – but the Labour leadership is already looking like it is David Miliband's to lose.

The old politics is back

Is politics returning to normal? Even before the government's pettyfogging decision to boycott Question Time over, of all things, the presence of Bad Al Campbell on the panel, the signs were there. Here's today's Journal column.

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After the unchartered waters of the post-election period and the initial excitement of the Lib-Con coalition deal, the political events of the past week had a reassuringly familiar feel to them.

A Conservative Chancellor unveiled a swingeing package of spending cuts. Labour frontbenchers queued up to attack them.

Meanwhile a Conservative Education Secretary unveiled plans to reduce the role of local authorities in schools – as Labour accused him of trying to recreate a two-tier education system.

So much for the 'new politics.' This was just like old times.

For the North-East, the new political era is already carrying unwelcome echoes of the Thatcher-Major years.

National newspapers have once again started to carry long features on the region's plight, and how its relatively high proportion of public sector jobs will leave it vulnerable to the spending cutbacks. Tell us something we don't know.

The one bright star on the horizon is that ministers have bowed to the demands of this newspaper among others to retain a region-wide economic body.

Communities secretary Eric Pickles moreorless confirmed on Wednesday that this would be the existing job-creation agency One NorthEast, albeit in a radically slimmed-down form.

But though some will doubtless bemoan the loss of Labour's child trust funds, there is a consensus of sorts over the cuts, the only argument being whether they should have happened now or later.

Michael Gove's education proposals - a re-run of the Major government's grant-maintained schools initiative - are however likely to be far more controversial.

By opening the way to thousands of schools to become 'academies,' the Tories' real aim appears to be to further neuter the role of local government.

For all the talk of 'localism,' all this will result in is more and more schools being directly-funded – and thus ultimately controlled – from the centre.

Labour activists, many of whom are teachers and many more of whom work in local government, will hate this measure probably more than any other to emerge from the coalition so far.

In terms of the Labour leadership contest, it ought to play into the hands of the former children's secretary, Ed Balls, who led the attack on it this week in his usual combative style.

Nevertheless Mr Balls remains very much an outsider in the race which thus far looks set to be a contest between the Miliband brothers, David and Ed.

The election of South Shields MP David as Labour leader would, at least, be some compensation for the fact that the North-East is the only region without a single MP in the government.

Of all the many vignettes that have emerged from that strange five-day post-election limbo when no-one quite knew who had won, one of the most intriguing concerns a 3am conversation between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown.

The former Lib Dem leader was apparently begging his old friend to broker a Lib-Lab coalition and finally realise their dream of a new 'progressive alliance.'

But Mr Blair said no, it was time Labour went into opposition, arguing that if it clung on to power this time round, it would pay a terrible price at the next election.

As the initial euphoria around the coalition subsides, and the harsh reality of its programme starts to bite, it is looking increasingly like the right judgment call.

Wanted: More candidates

I have to confess to being decidedly underwhelmed thus far by the Labour leadership election. Aside from the fact that many of the best candidates have ruled themselves out of the running on the grounds of age - always a depressing state of affairs for those of us who are nearer 50 than 40 - the distinctly monochrome nature of the four leading candidates, all white middle-class males who moved into important positions in government on the back of having once been junior research assistants to Gordon Brown or Tony Blair, leaves little to get excited about.

Of the four - I am discounting Diane Abbott and John McDonnell as no-hopers - the one that has so far talked the most sense is Andy Burnham. He at least seems to have some understanding of the Labour Party's roots, and a coherent story to tell about how it managed to lose touch with its natural supporters over recent years. I have also, in the past two days, been impressed by Ed Balls: the new government's divisive new education reforms, a throwback to the mid-1990s mania for grant-maintained status, will surely give him a platform from which to rally support.

Of the Miliblands, there is much less positive to be said from my point of view. To tell the truth, I would not be unhappy with either of them as leader, and David's so-called 'Blairite' credentials - a fatal drawback if genuine - have always been seriously overplayed in my view. But I wonder whether either of them are quite combative enough for the role at a time when the Con-Lib coalition is threatening to carry all before it.

Certainly Harriet Harman made a good stab at puncturing David Cameron's growing self-confidence this week, and I still don't think it is entirely outside the bounds of possibility that she could come into the race. For one, I don't think she would be entirely happy to see Abbott carrying the torch for Labour's wimmin. For another, I think it's very noticeable that some of the key Brownites who were behind her deputy leadership campaign - the likes of Nick Brown and Kevan Jones - have yet to declare for any of the other candidates.

What this is all leading up to is that, to my mind, the field is currently way too narrow. I am hugely disappointed that Yvette Cooper has decided not to stand - if brother can stand against brother, then why not wife against husband? - but I do understand her reasons. No such considerations apply, however, to the other great absentee from the race - Ben Bradshaw.

He was an experienced and successful minister. He was not clearly associated with either Brown or Blair but was regarded as having been loyal to both men. He has an interesting personal backstory that resonates with 21st century Britain. He is good-looking, articulate and good on TV. Perhaps most importantly of all, he has had a life outside the Westminster goldfish bowl and a successful career in the real world. Why is he not standing?

Going home

For the last couple of years or so, Ashes to Ashes has been the only must-watch programme on TV for me, and last night's final episode certainly lived up to its billing.

DCI Gene Hunt's world, it turned out, was a kind of purgatory for dead cops, with Gene as the guardian angel trying to usher them all into pub heaven while his nemesis Jim Keats, a thinly-disguised Satan, attempts to send them to hell/oblivion/a nightclub where Club Tropicana is playing on endless loop.

Some will no doubt think it's a bit of a cop-out but speaking personally, I find the idea of the afterlife a lot more believable than the idea of time travel. Then again, as a Christian, I suppose I would do.

Heaven is a concept which, like most people, I sometimes struggle to understand. Who can even begin to fathom what it is and what it might consist of? But in my limited human understanding - and at the risk of being slightly subversive - I find the idea of heaven as the inside of a warmly-lit pub as good a metaphor for paradise as anything...

Is this what Cameron wanted all along?

Two things are holding the new Lib-Con coalition government together. The first is liberalism, economic and social. The second is a mutual loathing New Labour and all its works. Here's today's Journal column.

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Last week, I suggested that the enthusiasm with which Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced his new Liberal Democrat partners hinted that coalition might have been the election outcome he wanted all along.

If I’m totally honest, I don’t think there is any ‘might’ about it. As several other commentators have remarked over the past week, Mr Cameron is clearly more at ease with his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg than he is with most of his own backbenchers.

Had he succeeded in gaining a narrow overall majority on 6 May, Mr Cameron would now be at the mercy of a bunch of hardline right-wingers, much in the way that John Major was throughout the 1992 Parliament.

As it is, he can now safely tell them to get stuffed in the knowledge that the Lib Dems’ 57 MPs give his government a near-unassailable parliamentary majority – unless of course, they themselves rebel.

There is no sign of that happening at the moment. Granted, Business Secretary Vince Cable looks less than chuffed to be playing second fiddle to Chancellor George Osborne, and well he might in view of the latter’s relative lack of economic expertise.

But that apart, there seems to be a remarkable degree of cohesion between the two sides over the coalition agreement that was finally published in its full, 34-page format this week.

Some critics have said the coalition is merely held together by the desire for power, but for me that is way too simplistic.

I think the glue that is holding it together, for the time being at any rate, is rather a mutual loathing of what New Labour perpetrated in office, coupled with a mutual determination to address those perceived mistakes.

The economy is the most obvious example. Whatever their differences during the campaign, there is general agreement between them that deficit reduction is the coalition’s No 1 priority.

The new government’s unfolding narrative in this area is essentially that the previous administration had been spending far too much and it is this one’s job to balance the books.

The revelation that former chief treasury secretary Liam Byrne had left a note in his drawer saying “sorry, there is no more money” has hardly helped Labour’s cause in this regard.

That said, his Lib Dem successor David Laws appeared to have suffered something of a humour collapse in his account of the discovery of the infamous document.

Or take civil liberties. Here too the narrative is already clear – that Labour came close to turning us into a ‘surveillance society’ and it is the coalition’s task to unpick that.

Doubtless Labour was dealt a difficult hand in having terrorist outrages like 7/7 happen on its watch, but its response to those terrible events is increasingly seen as having been too authoritarian.

Some past Conservative leaders have also had a distinctly authoritarian tendency – and some of those right-wing backbenchers still do – but Mr Cameron’s own worldview is very different.

The Prime Minister is, and always has been, a liberal Conservative. Hardly surprising then that he should have described his government as such on its first full day in office.

In embracing partnership politics to such an extent, it is tempting to think Mr Cameron might be paying heed to a lesson from history.

Before the 1997 election, Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown held extensive discussions about a coalition, but the sheer size of Labour’s majority eventually rendered the idea untenable.

Mr Cameron was dealt a rather different hand on 6 May – but has actually managed to turn a perceived setback into an opportunity.

If the new Prime Minister is already showing a determination to learn from the mistakes of previous ones, then that can only be an encouraging sign.

In the end, the public got what it wanted

So is it a betrayal of millions of people who voted Liberal Democrat to stop the Tories getting in - or a noble attempt to set aside party differences in the greater national interest?

Is it a reflection of the public will as it was expressed on 6 May – or something absolutely no-one actually voted for?

Opinions have invariably been divided about the new Con-Lib coalition that took office this week following Gordon Brown's protracted but ultimately dignified exit - and doubtless will remain so.

Whether it succeeds or fails - and much will happen between now and the scheduled date of the next election in 2015 - British politics will surely never quite be the same again.

Given that I have said as much already, it won't surprise readers to know that I think this is probably the outcome that best makes sense of the inconclusive election result.

Whether by accident or design, the public has got what it wanted - change, but in a way that avoids entrusting the fortunes of the country entirely to the Tories.

Were it not for the case that the coalition had a fair wind of public opinion behind it, it would probably not have come about.

By contrast, the public's reaction to any Lib-Lab deal would have been far more hostile - as the likes of John Reid and David Blunkett realised from the start.

In retrospect, Mr Brown should have realised this too rather than allow himself to be persuaded by Alastair Campbell and Lord Mandelson into trying to stitch together such a deal on Tuesday.

Maybe he was playing a longer game. By staying in No 10 and holding out the prospect of a deal, he enabled Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg to wring concessions out of the Tories that he would not otherwise have been able to.

Whether that was intentional or otherwise, we have ended up with a much less right-wing government as a result, and perhaps we owe the former Prime Minister a debt of gratitude for that.

That said, the enthusiasm with which the new Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced his new partners suggests that he may actually prefer it this way to governing alone.

There will be plenty of time over the coming months to analyse the new government - but what of Labour, in the week that it took its leave of power after 13 years?

Some think that by steering clear of a coalition that is destined to become hugely unpopular once the cuts start to bite, the party has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Had Labour somehow managed to stagger on in office, the resulting public backlash could have ended up destroying it for a generation.

As it is, the party now has an opportunity to rebuild and, free of the poisonous legacy of the Blair-Brown rivalry and the mistakes of the past 13 years, rebuild it surely will.

My own assessment of New Labour is that it was handed a remarkable opportunity to reshape British politics for good which, by and large, it squandered.

It has well and truly paid the price for its timidity. Mr Brown's opposition to Roy Jenkins' 1998 electoral reform plans finally came back and bit him on the bum this week - much as Jim Callaghan's opposition to Barbara Castle's 1969 trade union reforms were to bite him on the bum ten years' later in the Winter of Discontent.

He probably did save the economy from meltdown in 2008/9, but without a 'big idea' to take it forward, it was clear his government had run out of road.

It now falls to Messrs Clegg and Cameron to bring about the lasting changes which Messrs Blair and Brown ultimately failed to deliver.

Old school reunion

Contrary to what some people believe, I'm not a class warrior, and this apart, I'm generally feeling pretty positive about the Cameron-Clegg coalition thus far. But there must be some truth in the suggestion that the two former public schoolboys' shared social background made it easier for them to deal with eachother than with gruff old, state school educated Gordon, and this spoof report from the Daily Mash hits the nail on the head.

The coalition deal was finally sealed yesterday evening during a hastily arranged phone call between David Cameron and Nick Clegg where they compared notes on the daughters of minor aristocrats that they had felt up at charity balls in the 1980s.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: "We knew we had a workable, four-year deal when David and Nick both realised they had probably fingered the Hon. Charlotte Brampton during the same Henley Regatta."

Sheer, er, class.

Coalition to hold Inquiry into West Lothian Question

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I've not noticed any bloggers or journalists who have thus far picked up on this intriguing paragraph in the Lib-Con policy agreement document published yesterday:

We have agreed to establish a commission to consider the West Lothian Question

This could of course be no more than a means of kicking the issue into that bit of St James's Park where they can't quite get the mower - but it's certainly good to see it at least on the new government's agenda.

No to 55pc

In response to a request earlier from my old friend Toque, I joined a Facebook Group dedicated to blocking the new government's daft proposal to stop this and future parliaments from being dissolved on a simple majority.

Here is what I wrote on the wall:

The 55pc proposal is the one really, really stupid idea* in an otherwise very sensible and forward-looking policy agreement by the new coalition. I am generally in favour of fixed-term parliaments in so far as we need to curb the power of Prime Ministers to seek dissolutions at the most electorally advantageous time, but there must always be an override to allow for situations where the government has lost the confidence of the House. The measure of this is and should continue to be 50pc of MPs plus one. To try to set that bar any higher is completely undemocratic, completely unworkable, and in fact completely implausible, in that no government that had lost the confidence of a majority of the House could ever hope to retain the confidence of the public.

* That was written before Cameron made Coulson his Director of Communications - easily the coalition's worst decision so far.

Local paper reveals Brown is to stay on as an MP

I have to say I was gratified to read this story today, and not just because it gave us a great top story on HoldtheFrontPage this morning.

In my view, Tony Blair's decision to quit as MP for Sedgefield in 2007 in order to swan off round the world making millions of pounds was completely deplorable and an insult not only to his constituents but to the House of Commons.

My heart sank on Tuesday evening when Boulton and Co started suggesting that Gordon would do the same following his resignation as Prime Minister and Labour leader, but of course I should have known better.

Gordon always had that loyalty to his own people that Blair lacked, and there is no way a man with a public service ethic as strong as his would not wish to continue to serve his constituents as a backbench MP. Well done to the Fife Free Press for correcting this ill-informed national media speculation.

A strong-ish and stable government

So, what to make of the new Cabinet line-up unveiled by Nick and Dave (as they are now referring to eachother) earlier today?

On the whole, it looks like a good team. For those of us whose primary concern is to ensure that this is a radical reforming government, the key to it is Nick Clegg's appointment as Deputy Prime Minister with responsibility for constitutional and political reform. This should mean Clegg exercising real influence over the government's political direction, and should ensure he doesn't end up like Geoffrey Howe, for whom the title of DPM was no more than a courtesy.

Other plus points for me include Ken Clarke's move to head up the Justice Ministry - a suitably weighty job for a man who still has much to contribute to British political life - and the return of IDS, who now gets the chance to show that social justice and right-wing Conservatism are not necessarily contradictions in terms.

I'm also naturally delighted to see Chris Huhne given the climate change ministry, given his excellent work in this field on the Lib Dem frontbench prior to his 2007 leaderhsip challenge. Doubtless Matthew Parris will have other views, but Chris is a politician of the first rank and richly deserves this opportunity.

On the downside, I think the Tories have probably hogged one or two jobs for their own people that might justifiably have been given up to brighter Lib Dem talents. What will Owen Paterson bring to the Northern Ireland job that Paddy Ashdown, say, would not have done? What will make 1997 retread Andrew Mitchell a better International Development Secretary than, for instance, Ed Davey or Michael Moore? The need to retain a certain balance between Tories and Lib Dems has militated against having the best people in some areas.

I also think Cameron has missed an opportunity to bring back David Davis, and his failure to do so moreorless condemns the one-time leadership contender to seeing out his career on the backbenches. A pity, because like Ken, he too still has much to give, and his championing of the civil liberties agenda over the past couple of years would appear to be a very good fit with this new government's own priorities in that area.

On a more procedural point, I was surprised to see that the job of Leader of the House of Commons has been relegated to non-Cabinet status. This makes little sense when, in a coalition scenario, good business management will become more, not less, important to the government's fortunes. I was also surprised to see the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland offices all retained even though both parties have at various points in the past called for them to be subsumed within a single Department for Devolution.

Finally, for professional reasons, I was disappointed to see Jeremy Hunt go into DCMS - for what appear to be entirely ideological reasons he has vowed to scrap the independently-funded regional TV news pilots that could have provided a lifeline for the regional press, but doubtless this will be covered in greater depth in the days and weeks to come in another place.