And another thing…

ONE OF the tell-tale signs that Labour, in the 1980s, was unfit for government was its obsession with issues that had no resonance with the public: unilateral disarmament and internal party “democracy” being two obvious examples.

In Labour’s defence, at least it could be argued (unsuccessfully at the time) that both issues impacted on UK citizens’ quality of life, directly and indirectly.

So how does the Tory Party justify its peculiar obsession with John Bercow and his future as Speaker of the House of Commons? The latest contribution to The Debate No-one Outside Westminster Cares About comes from Lord Tebbit, who says Tories in Mr Bercow’s Buckingham constituency should be free to campaign for candidates other than the Speaker (I wonder who he could possibly mean?).

There are always plenty of MPs who are unhappy with any particular Speaker; even Betty Boothroyd had her detratctors among Labour’s ranks during her tenure. And there seem to be an awful lot of Tories who are not just unhappy about Mr Bercow’s election to the chair of the Commons – they’re absolutely beside themselves with fury.

Why? John Bercow was elected by a good majority in a secret ballot of all MPs. Isn’t that democratic enough for the Tories?

But we all know the reason why some Tories, particularly from Norman Tebbit’s wing of the party, dislike and distrust the current incumbent, don’t we? John Bercow started off his political career on the far right of the Tory Party – and then he committed the ultimate act of Tory apostacy: he changed his mind.

He was open to arguments which countered his previous world view. He was willing to consider the arguments and willing to change his mind. This, naturally enough, annoyed some of his fellow travellers who felt Bercow was not only challenging his own beliefs, but challenging theirs also.

So he was cast out. He became a hate figure. No longer “one of us”.

Strange, then, is it not, that Dave has not suffered the same fate? After all, he claims to have gone through precisely the same Damascus experience as Bercow; he claims to recognise what the Tories did wrong before, he says Conservatism under previous regimes was too exclusive, too uncaring, not green enough.

So why the different Tory attitudes to two apostates? Is it simply that Dave is the leader and Bercow is not? Hardly – imagine the revolt if Bercow had become leader!

No, the answer lies in the party’s perception of the sincerity of the conversions. Bercow is unpopular because his views have genuinely changed. Dave? Well… Let’s just say the party is more tolerant of his “conversion” for some reason.

TOGETHER with his distinctly amateurish call for an inquiry into allegations of bullying at No. 10, Dave’s assertion that it’s his “patriotic duty” to become Prime Minister probably ranks among his Top Ten Cock-Ups Of The Last Seven Days. It will return to haunt him, I hope fear.

Hat-tip to Charon QC for this:

DAVID Cameron believes it’s his “patriotic duty” to beat Labour at the general election.

That’s a bit convenient, isn’t it? For most people, patriotism usually means some sort of self-sacrifice. The men and women who sacrifice time with their families and often an awful lot more than that to serve in our armed forces, for example, are patriotic. Business leaders who constantly promote British industry abroad are patriotic. Athletes who fly the national flag at the Olympics, members of Britain’s domestic and foreign security services, who regularly risk their lives in the interests of their country – they’re patriotic.

But wanting to be Prime Minister? That’s patriotic now, is it?

Well, if we can decide unilaterally that things we want are, by definition, patriotic, then I feel it’s my patriotic duty to win the lottery. I believe it’s my patriotic duty to watch every episode of the sixth season of The Office on DVD back-to-back while eating one of those big tins of Cadbury’s Roses (but with the coffee creams back in).

And I believe it’s my patriotic duty to do everything I can to contribute to the Conservatives’ fourth election defeat.

But then, I guess disagreeing with David Cameron must make me unpatriotic.

PRESENTING a sneak preview of David Cameron’s speech to this weekend’s Conservative Spring Conference:

Conference, we find ourselves at a crossroads – a crossroads for change. Our society is broken – the “broken society”, if you will. And we need to change it. Because it’s broken, and only change can fix something that’s broken. That’s why I will be a Prime Minister for change. Because the country needs change because the country is broken – just like society, that I mentioned earlier: the broken society.

We can’t go on like this, with a broken society, always broken, never changing. We need a new government that will mend that broken society, that will bring about change – change in government, change in the country and, yes, change in our broken society.

Our critics say I’m not being specific enough about change. Well, here are some specifics: we will change the economy, we will change our schools, and we will change the health service. Because they’re all broken. And we need change, not broken-ness, and only change – change for the better – can change what we need to change, because (that’s enough “change” – Ed)

FROM today’s Sunday Times:

Here’s another thing that some people might have overlooked about the Tories: the Conservatives still haven’t recovered, in the public’s minds, from the Major years. Yes, he left office nearly 13 years ago and there will be many people voting this time round who can barely remember a Conservative government and others who can’t remember one at all.

But they will be outnumbered by those who can and do. The Conservatives lost catastrophically for a reason, or for many reasons. In the immediate aftermath of 1997, there were many who predicted that the party would never recover electorally, that it was finished. Others (me included) refused to write them off but felt it would take them a very long time to get back to the point where government was a realistic target.

Too many Tories thought that all they had to do was keep quiet, behave themselves, and wait for the pendulum to swing back towards them. But it’s now becoming clear that such a strategy was flawed. It’s predicated on the assumption that the pendulum is still working normally, and I’m not sure it is.

It’s still too early to predict a definite outcome one way or the other, but the message from the polls is that the momentum is with Labour. If the Sunday Times poll is confirmed by other polls (and I accept that might not be the case), then Labour will head into the campaign with a healthier polling position than Major did in 1992. There is some discussion in the blogscape that a fourth Labour win would be good for the Tories in the same way that a four Tory victory in 1992 effectively finished Major’s party for the next three elections. I’m not so sure.

In the aftermath of the 1992 election, Labour held its nerve. It didn’t implode. It got on with the job of offering effective, if safe, opposition under John Smith, and then even more effective, and radical, leadership under Tony Blair.

What would happen to the Tories were Labour to win a fourth successive Commons majority? I’m sure Cameron would not survive. But he would not be replaced by another “moderniser” in the same mould. The party would be in danger of disintegration as the old right wing, anti-EU brigade took their revenge on the Cameroons. Such civil war didn’t happen to Labour because Kinnock had taken Labour in the general direction the party wanted to go. Cameron cannot say the same.

I’ll be out door-knocking in the constituency later this afternoon. The view of my agent, campaign manager and activists is entirely uniform: the sooner Gordon calls the election, the better. Let’s get on with it.

IF YOU can put to one side your (and my) partiality for a second, let’s have a look at what’s happening to the Conservatives at the moment.

However far ahead they are in the polls, no-one doubts that the gap has narrowed in recent weeks. Labour’s hope is that that trend continues or even accelerates between now and polling day. Cameron’s hope, of course, is that the gap widens again. No-one can predict either development with any certainty, though it’s hard to see what might reverse the trend towards Labour, given the assault we, and Gordon Brown, have endured already. What else is there in the Tories armoury? What do they imagine they can pull out of the bag that voters haven’t already seen?

James Forsth of The Spectator seems to agree that something is going terribly wrong with the Tory campaign. I’ve always maintained – to indignant disagreement from Tory bloggers – that there isn’t anywhere near the same levels of enthusiasm in the country for Cameron’s new Tories as there was in 1997 for Blair’s New Labour. I’m sure we can all at least agree that that much is true.

Other historical parallels are tenuous at best. After Labour’s cataclysmic performance in the 1983 election, Neil Kinnock was always going to be given at least two goes at overturning the Tories’ massive Commons majority. But there is at least one valid comparison of him and Blair: Blair had one shot. Had he failed to become Prime Minister in 1997, he would have been replaced very soon afterwards as Labour leader, presumably by GB. Similarly, Cameron has one shot at this. There is far too much grumbling from the Tory old guard, too many bitter pills swallowed by MPs so desperate to become ministers that they’re prepared to parrot the Cameron line… for the time being. But Cameron himsef knows that failure in the 2010 general election will mean a career as a back bench elder statesman of his party in the mould of William Hague.

In the meantime, it’s hard to come across a single Tory MP whose confidence has not been dented in the past few months. The talk has gone from how large the Tory majority will be, to how many seats short of a majority the party will win, to whether or not they’ll even be the largest party after polling day.

I’m not saying for certain that the polling gap will continue to narrow, but I would be surprised if there weren’t at least a few Tories who are contemplating, with the appropriate amount of dread, the prospect of (at least) another four years of opposition.

Hat-tip to Douglas McLellan, by the way.

DAVID Cameron’s “detoxification” of his party has focussed on so-called “progressive” issues; we are invited to believe that the Tories are now concerned with social exclusion, homosexual rights, inequality, representation of women and minorities in parliament, Third World development and climate change, to name but a few.

I don’t buy it.

Yes, I’m sure there are a handful of Conservatives for whom these issues are, indeed, political priorities. And there is certainly a critical mass of current Tory Party members and MPs who can maintain enough of an interest in these issues to make Cameron’s claims sound plausible.

But in order to discern the true nature of any political party, we should asky why anyone joins his political party of choice in the first place.

I’ll hazard a guess here – and I’m sure you won’t be slow in coming forwards to correct me if I’m wrong: most Tories join the party because their priorities are primarily economic. They want to see lower taxes and a strong economy. Socially they want to see a return to “family values” and their specific definition of what that term means. Historically and instinctively, the Tory Party has been opposed to any improvement in gay rights and suspicious of sexual equality.

On the other hand, people join the Labour Party because they want to fight injustice, either economic injustice towards the poorer and more vulnerable in society, or the injustice of exploitation of workers through the sharp practices of employers.

And that about sums it up for me: no-one really joins the Tory Party in order to fight against injustice (unless you count the “injustice” of having to pay tax). Now, Tories will argue, justifiably, that you can’t protect the vulnerable or provide decent public services unless the economy is generating the wealth needed to pay for them. But those are consequences, not priorities.

This goes to the very heart of the case against Cameron’s Conservatives. He talks a good game about the need to fight inequality, get more women into parliament, combat climate change, etc. But none of these reasons come anywhere close to being the reasons he joined his party in the first place. I would be willing to bet that when he first appeared before the selection committee of Whitney Conservative Association, they did not figure anywhere in his speech.

These are “passport” issues; he needs to display them in order to gain entry into government. But once safely inside, he would pay as much attention to them as a tourist does to his passport once he’s unpacked in the hotel room, subsequently only brandishing it when the need arises.

True progressives – who care deeply about these issues – would do well to ask themselves if the modern Tory Party’s priorities really do reflect their own. And work out the answer before polling day.

HAS DAVID Cameron or his advisers ever stopped to ask themselves why, exactly, he’s not seen as a trustworthy person by a large number of voters?

Today’s vacuous nonsense is a perfect example of why he’s still not taken seriously as a potential Prime Minister; his remarks about Gordon Brown and the MPs (and Tory peer) charged over their expenses could have been drafted by Sarah Palin’s nanny speechwriter.

I know of no-one – the Prime Minister included – who approves of the attempt to use parliamentary privilege to escape prosecution. The issue of privilege in general is one that is of great concern and interest and should be publicly debated. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for politicians, let alone the Prime Minister himself, to seek to interfere in a criminal case that is currently active.

What’s more, the final decision as to whether the accused individuals are able to resort to privilege is not a political decision to be made by ministers; it is a legal one to be decided by the courts, one that must be taken in accordance with statute as it existed at the time of the alleged offences.

So should we be surprised that Cameron, under pressure from his own party because of the recent narrowing of the poll gap and his poor performances at PMQs, has resorted to this kind of desperate tactic? Of course not. None of the parties has emerged well from the expenses scandal, but Cameron obviously believes that a narrative of “a plague on all your houses” might be converted to “this happened on Labour’s watch” so long as he affects a tone of wounded outrage and indignation, implausible and unjustified thought that may be.