IF a week is a long time in politics, then two weeks is twice as long – and the fortnight since this column last appeared seems to have been a particularly lengthy one for Prime Minister David Cameron.
A collective madness has descended upon his party, with rows about Europe and gay marriage punctuated by Cabinet ministers positioning themselves for what many now see as the inevitable post-Cameron succession battle.
Much of this is what Alastair Campbell used to call ‘froth.’ Whatever Michael Gove and Philip Hammond might dream about in bed at night, Mr Cameron is not going to be overthrown as Tory leader before the next election, and if he wins it, this bout of internal rancour will be long forgotten.
And if he loses, or fails again to win an outright majority, he’ll be overthrown anyway – but that’s par for the course for Tory leaders who fail to win elections and nothing that has happened over the past two weeks has altered that underlying reality.
What it may have done, however, is made it rather less likely that he will win in 2015.
Mr Cameron’s once-stated intention to stop his party “banging on about Europe” now seems laughable, while his attempts to detoxify the Tory brand by embracing liberal causes such as same-sex marriage seem only to have alienated his core supporters.
As I wrote in the context of the local election results, the only silver lining for the Prime Minister is that the country still seems less than overwhelmed by the idea of Ed Miliband as his successor.
So long as that remains the case, Mr Cameron may well be able to squeeze the UKIP vote by presenting the 2015 contest as a presidential battle between himself and a man who few voters of a right-wing disposition want to see in 10 Downing Street.
But for me, the most interesting political story of the past fortnight concerned not the fate of Mr Cameron, but the future of the Coalition government which he leads.
It appeared on the front page of The Times a week ago yesterday, and revealed that the Tories are now planning how they would govern without the Liberal Democrats for the last six to ten months of the Parliament.
“We need to have an idea of what we are going to do if at different points it does break up,” a source said.
The paper also quoted a senior Lib Dem as saying that Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg needed to act to prevent them “drifting into a four party situation with us as the fourth party.”
For me, this is a story which has been crying out to be written ever since the Coalition was first formed.
As regular readers of this column will know, I have argued from the outset that the political dynamics are such that it will be impossible for the Coalition to survive a full five-year parliamentary term.
It has long been clear that, in order to avoid humiliation in 2015, the Lib Dems will need to start differentiating themselves from the Conservatives long before polling day.
However it is now becoming increasingly clear that if they are to win back some of their lost core supporters from the arms of UKIP, the Tories will also need to start differentiating themselves from the Liberal Democrats.
Here, for what it’s worth, is how I see it panning out. Next June’s European elections turn into a disaster for both governing parties, with Labour and UKIP forcing them into third and fourth place in the popular vote.
Both Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg will then have to face their party conferences in September 2014 with activists demanding how they are going to recover in time for an election that will then be less than eight months away.
If they try to stay together for the sake of the kids, it will almost certainly put Ed Miliband in Number Ten, in that the Lib Dems will find it impossible to woo back their disenchanted supporters from Labour while the Tories will struggle to win back theirs from UKIP.
The alternative – an amicable divorce with Mr Cameron leading a minority government for the final few months of the parliament - really is the only conceivable outcome.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Saturday, May 04, 2013
A plague on all their houses
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, a fringe party sent
shockwaves through the political establishment after securing 15pc of the
popular vote in the 1989 elections to the European Parliament.
Alas for the Green Party, it could not sustain the momentum
of its unexpected success, and by the time of the following general election in
1992, it has sunk back into relative political obscurity.
So the big question in the wake of this week’s local
elections is whether the UK Independence Party can succeed in 2013 where the
Greens failed all those years ago, and achieve a lasting and significant
political breakthrough.
Certainly the signs currently seem positive for Nigel Farage
and his crew, who weathered a determined smear campaign by the big parties to
emerge as the big winners of Thursday’s poll.
In the North-East, UKIP repeated its surprise second place
at the Middlesbrough by-election last November by coming second to Labour in the
South Shields contest to choose a successor to David Miliband.
While nobody expected the Conservatives to win here - it has
been Labour or Liberal since the Great Reform Act of 1832 – the result was
little short of a humiliation for the Coalition parties.
Not only were the Conservatives beaten into third place by Farage
and Co, the Liberal Democrats were beaten into seventh place by a ragtag and
bobtail collection of independents and fringe parties, including the BNP.
It suggests that, unless they can somehow extricate
themselves from the Coalition in time to re-establish themselves as an
independent force, the Lib Dems are facing electoral wipeout in the region come
2015.
But while South Shields provided an interesting snapshot of
the current state of opinion in the North-East,
UKIP’s strong performance there was but a foretaste of what was to come
across the rest of the country.
When last I counted, the party had gained 139 councillors
across England compared to a loss of 106 for the Lib Dems and 320 for the
Tories.
The political impact was immediate, with a Tory Party that
had earlier in the week attempted to brand UKIP as a bunch of racist clowns
being forced to eat a very large slice of humble pie.
“It’s no good insulting a political party that people have
chosen to vote for,” said Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday, effectively
withdrawing his previous claim that UKIP members were “fruitcakes.”
The real headache for Mr Cameron’s Tories is that, with the
general election now only two years away, they are no nearer knowing how to
deal with the threat of the anti-EU party.
Announcing a referendum on UK membership to be held in the
next Parliament was supposed to lance the boil – but Thursday’s results show it
has had no effect whatever in curbing support for UKIP.
The situation is likely to get worse for Mr Cameron before
it gets better. Mr Farage entertains
legitimate hopes of first place in the popular share of the vote in next year’s
Euro-elections, and a strong performance then will give his party even greater
momentum going into 2015.
It is already looking very likely that, if TV debates are to
be a part of the next general election campaign, the UKIP leader will have to
be given a slot.
But if Thursday’s results were bad for the government, they
were not a bed or roses for Labour either.
As ever, the party performed strongly in the North-East,
holding South Shields and regaining the North Tyneside mayoralty, as well as winning
15 council seats to become the biggest single party in Northumberland and
tightening its grip on County Durham.
But nationally, the party’s failure to win outright control
of Lancashire and Staffordshire County Councils, or to do better in the South,
leave a huge question mark over its ability to win in the key battlegrounds, as
well as its claims to be the ‘One
Nation’ party.
On what was a bad night for Mr Cameron, the only saving
grace is that it was a not much better one for Ed Miliband.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Blair is back, and Miliband will have to deal with it
If being Prime Minister is inevitably the toughest job in
British politics, then being a former Prime Minister is surely not that far
behind.
Of the three surviving bearers of the title, the only one
who has made anything approaching a decent fist of it over the course of recent
years is that much under-rated figure, Sir John Major.
I will never forget his quiet dignity in defeat on that
bright May morning in 1997 when he spoke of curtains falling and actors leaving
the stage before going off to watch some cricket at The Oval.
And he has continued to be dignity personified throughout
the ensuing years, never once succumbing to the temptation to criticise any of
his many successors as Tory leader and only ever intervening in a way helpful
to his own party.
In this, Sir John was determined not to follow the example
of his predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who made clear her own intentions shortly
after he succeeded her by declaring her skill at back-seat driving.
The Iron Lady, who was finally laid to rest this week,
clearly found being an ex-Prime Minister rather harder to come to terms with than
the actual job itself.
So, it seems, has Gordon Brown. When he lost the premiership in 2010, those
of us who still counted ourselves among his admirers hoped he would rebuild his
reputation by becoming a good constituency MP and backbench elder statesman.
Unfortunately, he has veered off into the biggest political
sulk since Edward Heath’s, barely ever turning up at the Commons and, save for
a rather self-justificatory attack on Rupert Murdoch, saying almost nothing of
any value since leaving Number Ten.
But the former Prime Minister whose post-Downing Street
career provides the greatest fascination, for me at any rate, is surely Tony
Blair.
Aged just 54 when he left office in 2007, it was never
remotely likely that the former Sedgefield MP would go gently into that good
night as Sir John had done ten years earlier, and some sort of comeback was
always on the cards.
For a time, this looked likely to be at European level, with
the presidency of the European Council of Ministers the most obvious potential
destination.
But thwarted in that ambition by the surprise elevation of
Herman van Rompuy, his attentions have turned back to domestic politics and,
specifically, the future of the Labour Party.
Mr Blair took to the pages of Labour house journal The New
Statesman to warn party leader Ed Miliband that his opposition to welfare
reform and spending cuts risked reducing Labour to a party of protest.
In another recent intervention, he declared that the result
of the last election would have been closer had he still been leader, thereby implying
that the party’s chances of winning in 2015 depend on the extent to which it
stays true to his legacy.
This, incidentally, is poppycock. Whatever Mr Brown’s failings, had Mr Blair
gone on and on and attempted to win a fourth consecutive term in the teeth of a
recession, and with the baggage of Iraq
still hung around his shoulders, he would have gone down to a landslide of 1997
proportions.
But no matter. Blair
is back, and it is clear that the younger Miliband had better get used to the
fact.
For now, the party leader’s stock response has been to turn
Mr Blair’s own revisionist methodology against him, saying: “Tony Blair taught us the world changes. The
world does change and we will learn our lessons."
But while this is undoubtedly true, he will eventually have
to explain in much more detail how the Labour Party under his leadership has
responded to those changes.
Over the past couple of weeks, Prime Minister David Cameron
has had to suffer the inevitable unhelpful comparisons with an illustrious
predecessor who won three straight election victories where he could only
manage a hung Parliament.
Mr Miliband’s chances of going one better may well depend on
how far, if at all, he can escape from Mr Blair’s long shadow.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Thatcher: There WAS an alternative
The first thing I need to say about Margaret Thatcher is
that when it comes to the former Prime Minister, I can scarcely be regarded as
a disinterested or objective observer.
I spent most of my early adulthood wishing she was no longer
in Number Ten, and much of my later journalistic career was spent in areas such
as South Wales and the North-East where the impact of her policies had been
most adversely felt.
As Journal political editor from 1997-2004, much of my work
revolved around the question of how the region should tackle the North-South
divide which, if not created by her, was certainly sharply exacerbated during
her long premiership.
So in the unlikely event that anyone has come here expecting
to read another syrupy paean of praise to the Iron Lady following her death
this week, it’s probably best to look away now.
Many millions of words have already been written and spoken about
the woman who led Britain for 11 tumultuous years, but ultimately the debate
seems to come down to the question of whether she saved the nation, or
destroyed it.
Probably the answer is a bit of both. Looked at in the round, the Thatcher legacy
suggests a strange ambivalent power for good and bad which seems to run through
most of the policies with which she is most closely associated.
Take the iconic right to buy scheme, for instance. Yes, it enabled council tenants to buy their
own homes, and the dramatic increase in social mobility it fostered helped
break down the class barriers which held Britain back in the post-war years.
But the downside was that housing policy ceased to be a
debate about who could build the most homes, and became instead a question of who
could do most to artificially inflate the value of the increasingly limited number
of homes available.
Then there were the employment laws. It is beyond question that prior to 1979 the
power of the union barons had got out of hand and that Mrs Thatcher’s changes
helped restore a measure of democracy to a nation in danger of becoming
ungovernable.
Yet in smashing the unions, she also ushered in an era of
job insecurity which has had a baleful effect on the national psyche.
I could go on. Deregulation
of the City of London made it a world financial centre that spawned untold
riches for Britain’s financial services industry, but led directly to the
banking crisis that caused the 2008 crash and the subsequent recession.
Even the Falklands War, by rolling back the post-Suez defeatism
in which British foreign policy had been enmeshed since 1956, paved the way for
Tony Blair’s disastrous intervention in Iraq twenty years later.
When assessing the Thatcher legacy, therefore, the key
question becomes could we actually have had the good without the bad? Was there, despite what the Iron Lady herself
said, an alternative?
I would like to think so.
While the challenges of globalisation would eventually have forced
British industry to become more competitive, the impact of this would have been
slower and less brutal than the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing base
in the early 1980s.
It has to be remembered that, far from being an historical
inevitability, Mrs Thatcher was in fact a very lucky Prime Minister.
Labour in 1980 put itself out of serious contention for
power by choosing the wrong leader and then splitting, while a couple of Exocet
missiles in the wrong place in 1982 might have sunk not just the Falklands task
force, but her premiership with it.
For me, the most interesting counterfactual question about
Mrs Thatcher is what would the country have been like had she never become
Prime Minister or, alternatively, been ousted in 1982-83.
Had a Tory wet like Jim Prior or a Labour moderate like
Denis Healey run Britain in the 1980s, and invested the proceeds of North Sea
Oil in social reconstruction rather than tax cuts, would we have ended up with
Swedish-style social democracy rather than US-style neo-liberalism?
Since those days, we seem to have become a politically more
united country, but a much more economically and socially divided one.
And if forced to make a judgement, I think I like the
Britain she created rather less than the one which she destroyed.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
David Miliband: A right decision, borne out of a wrong one
So, then, David Miliband – political colossus, or inconsequential footnote? The greatest loss to British politics since the fall of Margaret Thatcher, or a failed leadership wannabe who will soon be forgotten?
There were plenty of opinions flying around this week in the
wake of the South Shields MP’s shock decision to quit Parliament for a
well-paid but scarcely high profile role running an international rescue
charity in New York.
Predictably, it was his old mentors Tony Blair and Peter
Mandelson who led the grief-fest, both expressing the hope that this would be
but a temporary exile from which their protege would one day return in triumph.
Many Blairite cheerleaders in the media viewed Mr Miliband
as so significant a figure that the ‘project’ would not survive his departure,
though in truth it has been no more than a twitching corpse since his 2010
leadership election defeat.
The Conservative commentator Peter Oborne, writing in the
Telegraph, took a rather different view of his career, however.
“Any detached judge has always been able to see that David
Miliband was not front rank. He is a
hopeless public speaker and has never once expressed an original thought,” he
wrote.
Oborne contrasted Mr Miliband’s “cosmic sulk” after losing
the Labour leadership to his brother Ed with Denis Healey’s loyal service under
Michael Foot after a similarly unexpected setback in 1980.
The difference between them, he argued, was hinterland: Healey, who fought with distinction in the
Second World War, knew that losing the leadership was a trivial matter by
comparison, whereas Miliband, who has spent his entire adult life in politics,
had no such perspective.
My own view for what it’s worth is that David Miliband was
not a complete politician, but nevertheless still the best on offer at the time
Labour was choosing a successor to Gordon Brown in 2010.
Oborne is right to point out that he certainly wasn’t in the
front rank as an orator, but this didn’t prevent John Major reaching Number Ten
and staying there for nearly seven years.
Where he was more lacking was in his tactical acumen – as
was seen in his various hamfisted attempts to set out a distinctive New Labour
policy agenda during the Gordon Brown years.
If these were covert leadership bids, they were
spectacularly unsuccessful ones. If they
weren’t, he should have taken much more care to ensure they were not
interpreted as such.
In his favour, he was certainly one of the brainiest people
operating in public life over the past decade or so and also, it has to be
said, one of the nicest.
As regular readers of this column will know, I was never a
huge fan of New Labour, but with David it never spilled over into personal
acrimony in the way it occasionally did with some of his North East Labour
colleagues.
But it was not so much his cleverness or niceness that made
him the best candidate to lead the party in 2010, it was simply that he was the
party’s most popular and well-known figure among the wider public.
It may seem obvious that a party wanting to return to power
at the earliest opportunity should take note of what the public thinks when
choosing a leader, but actually they seldom do, as both Mr Healey and later Ken
Clarke also found to their cost.
In the end, it is this very popularity that has forced Mr
Miliband to the point where he now feels Labour’s chances of winning the next
election would be better if he were 3,000 miles away from Westminster.
It was this, coupled with the peculiar dynamics of Labour’s
electoral college which showed he was also the most popular choice of Labour
activists and MPs, which would always prompt those comparisons with his
brother’s performance.
Has he taken the right decision? For himself, for his brother, and for the
Labour Party, almost certainly yes.
But that still doesn’t alter the fact that the Labour Party
made the wrong one when it decided to pass him over.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Seldon is right: Balls should fall on his sword
At the end of last week’s column, on the back of an opinion poll showing the party 11 points clear of the Tories, I suggested that the next general election in 2015 was beginning to look like it might be Labour’s to lose.
Premature? Well probably. But there seems to be a growing view in political circles – not least on the Tory backbenches - that Labour is on course to become, at worst, the largest single party in another hung Parliament.
At the same time, however, there remains a strong awareness that despite favourable poll ratings and the growing unpopularity of the Coalition, the party still has one huge Achilles Heel: the economic record of the last Labour government.
And the man who, more than any other, personifies this is the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls – Gordon Brown’s chief economic adviser for most of his time at the Treasury and his closest political ally once he got to Number 10.
In my political preview of 2013, published on the last Saturday of 2012, I predicted that Labour leader Ed Miliband might eventually be obliged to resolve this difficulty by relieving Mr Balls of his responsibilities.
So it came as no huge surprise, to me at any rate, to see this view being repeated by no less a figure than Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College and the pre-eminent historian of the Blair-Brown years.
“As somebody who has written about you for many years it falls to me to say this: the time has come for you to fall on your sword,” he told Mr Balls in a New Statesman article this week.
“Ed Miliband would be a much stronger leader without you. Forgive me, but you stop Ed breathing fresh air. With you close to him, his breath will always be stale and smell of a toxic brand… Without you, Labour could present itself as a clean party, free of the factionalism and brutalism that so tarnished it when Brown was boss and you were his consigliere. “
If the Godfather allusion seems unnecessarily brutal, Seldon at least went on to hold out the prospect that Mr Balls could one day return to the front bench as a “redeemed and respected figure.”
He even went so far as to say that he might yet succeed to the party leadership one day, predicting that the public will eventually tire of the trend towards young leaders.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for Tories to start leaping to the defence of the man they believe is their greatest electoral asset.
One prominent Conservative blogger praised his “good political brain” and grasp of economics, and suggested that, far from being a drain on Ed Miliband’s leadership, he acts as a useful lightning conductor for him.
The irony of all this is that Mr Balls has, broadly speaking, been proved right in his attack on the government’s economic policy since 2010, namely that it has cut too far, too fast and in so doing snuffed out an incipient recovery.
With growth still sluggish, it is hard to gainsay the central thrust of his argument that the Coalition needs a ‘Plan B’ in order to get the economy moving again.
But whereas people may agree with Mr Balls’ analysis of the problem, this does not mean they necessarily agree with his solutions.
And Mr Balls’ real difficulty is that, rightly or wrongly, many voters assume his much-vaunted Plan B would be no more than a return to the policies that got the country into such a mess in the first place.
One of the most successful and oft-used Tory slogans of all time is the one originally coined by Harold Macmillan’s government at the 1959 election: “Life’s better with the Conservatives – don’t let Labour ruin it.”
It was used again to good effect in the last week of the 1987 campaign after the Tories’ “wobbly Thursday,” and variants such as “Britain is booming – don’t let Labour blow it” have resurfaced from time to time.
So long as Ed Balls remains in the shadow Treasury brief, the Tories won’t need Saatchi and Saatchi to devise their next election slogan for them.
It will be quite straightforward: “Britain is on the way back. Don’t let Labour Balls it up.”
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