And another thing…

AFTER some conspiring with comrade-in-blogs Jonathan Isaby over at conservativehome yesterday, we agreed that our campaign to persuade returning officers to count votes on the same night as polling might be helped by the tabling of an Early Day Motion (EDM) to that effect.

The fact that Chairman Pickles himself added his name as one of the top six supporters undoubtedly encouraged others of his party to support it. By the time it was tabled last night it had attracted 69 names (the clerks couldn’t read Chris Huhne’s signature so it will be added belatedly today) and many more have been added to the list today.

The EDM reads:

That this House is concerned at reports that growing numbers of Returning Officers are considering postponing the counting of votes cast on the day of the General Election until the day after polling; believes that in the 21st century it would be a regressive move not to announce constituency results as early as possible; further believes that public confidence in the results could be undermined by delays in the counting of ballot papers and that fewer voters would be able to watch the results being announced if this were done on a Friday afternoon; and calls on local authorities throughout the United Kingdom to ensure that all ballot papers are counted immediately after the close of polls on General Election night, as has been the practice in previous General Elections.

There’s already been a bit of media interest in the subject; I’m giving a couple of interviews later this afternoon. If we can get the numbers up as high as possible, that’ll send a clear message that when there’s an election, the voters, as well as the parties, have a right to know the result as early as possible.

YOU know that something’s up when Jonathan Isaby of conservativehome calls you late on a Sunday evening. News of a developing political scandal, perhaps? An invitation to one of his frequent and excellent parties?

No, but a subject of import, nevertheless – specifically, how to save general election night. As The Sunday Times reported yesterday, an increasing number of killjoys council chiefs are planning to postpone their local counts until the day after polling, thereby killing any sense of excitement that traditionally surrounds the most important night in the political calendar.

Jonathan gives his own excellent reasons for opposing this move in the Facebook group he has set up (and I would urge you to join). But my own reasons for wanting the counts to happen as soon as the polls close are:

• personal – no candidate wants to be forced to wait an extra excruciating number of hours before finding out his fate. It’s just not fair; and
• spectacle – how many people have been turned on to politics by the drama and tension of a Thursday nigh election count? That would be utterly lost if we couldn’t find out the results until the following afternoon while everyone’s at work.

In fact that last reason is why I’m also opposed to electronic counting in the National Lottery style: can you imagine how dull it would be if, when the polls closed at ten, David Dimbleby, instead of giving us an exit poll result, told us what the precise actual result of the general election was?

General election only happen every four or five years. Is it really too much to ask that counts actually take place in the same way they’ve been carried out for generations?

ACCORDING to received wisdom in the Tory Party, Speaker John Bercow would have no more legitimacy or support in the House of Commons than his predecessor because, like Michael Martin, he is unable to draw support from across both main parties.

It is true that the vote which put Michael Martin in the Speaker’s chair was horribly partisan. I couldn’t find a single Tory MP who voted for him in the final division. That wasn’t a great start, I admit (and incidentally, I wasn’t elected to parliament for another eight months, so I didn’t have a vote).

But this idea that Michael was finally forced out because of that initial vote in 2000 is patently absurd. For the vast majority of the nine years he occupied the position of Speaker, Michael Martin was unassailable. He was re-elected twice, after the 2001 and the 2005 elections, without opposition or even a murmur of dissent.

And although I don’t believe that his most vociferous detractors in the House, like Douglas Carswell, were acting out of snobbery, Michael was on the receiving end of ignorant snobbery throughout his tenure (the nickname "Gorbals Mick" was coined by a journalist who (a) didn’t know and didn’t care that Michael never lived in Gorbals, (b) assumed that an association with Gorbals was in itself offensive, and (c) believed the the use of an offensive and derogatory term for Roman Catholic was somehow acceptable).

What drove Michael out was not the fact that he had no or little support from the Tory opposition when he was first elected as Speaker, but the perception among some that his political judgment on issues such as expenses and Damian Green was poor. Had he handled either or both of these issues differently, there would have been no move to oust him, irrespective of the vote in October 2000.

So if Bercow wins on Monday, he will be judged not on the breakdown of his support (there won’t be one this time anyway, because it’s a secret ballot), but on how he performs in the job.

And I have no doubt that he is well up to doing such a crucial job with immaculate skill. As Jonathan Isaby has said, Bercow is a parliamentarian to his fingertips. He knows procedure, has a remarkable capacity for retaining facts, would be a master of procedure, and is friendly and capable. He is also an honest and principled man who will be unafraid of leading reform where it’s needed.

So irrespective of how certain Tories will want to speculate about how much support he actually wins, Speaker Bercow would be difficult to undermine, provided he does the job he’s elected to do.

Whether he does actually win or not… ah, there’s the rub. Monday will be very, very interesting, and I’m looking forward to it.

HAVING used my latest podcast to declare publicly my support for John Bercow as the next Speaker, I’m delighted that, for the first time, some non-sectarian sense seems to have descended on at least one corner of the Tory blogosphere.

Jonathan Isaby, an all-round good chap (for a Tory) has written a piece for ConservativeHome in support of Bercow’s candidacy. This is in stark contrast to the party line taken so far by most online Tories. 

Contrast Jonathan’s thoughtful and sensible words with this nonsense, also from ConservativeHome, where brave unnamed Tory MPs actually threaten to remove Bercow at the start of the next parliament if he’s elected next week.

This speaks volumes about David Cameron’s Conservatives, but three things spring to mind:

1. After years of whining about Michael Martin’s alleged sympathy towards his former party, it seems their main grievance was that they didn’t have a Speaker biased towards them;

2. So much for the "new politics" of the Cameron era within the Conservative Party; they’re as cynical and partisan as they ever were; and

3. Today’s Conservative Party believe the government party should decide who becomes Speaker.

There’s been a lot of utter nonsense spoken and written about how Bercow’s popularity among Labour MPs is all to do with a government whipping operation aimed at saddling a future Tory government with a Speaker they don’t want. "He’ll be the third Labour Speaker in a row," according to one of the Great Anonymous Spinless, says ConservativeHome.

I genuinely don’t know of a single Labour MP worth his or her salt who would pay the slightest attention to the views of a government whip on this matter. I decided at the outset that I would support a Conservative MP. I then decided, independently, that if Bercow stood, I would support him. This is nothing to do with his level of support or popularity on his own benches. Choose to disbelieve me if you wish, but that will nevertheless remain a fact.

Votes for the Speaker will be anonymous, so never again will a Speaker be able to be undermined in the way Michael Martin was, by grumbling and complaining that he was elected by the votes of the Labour Party. Bercow may indeed win thanks to Labour support, but we will never know for certain.

I offer two challenges to Bercow’s detractors: if you believe there’s a strong case for removing him for party political reasons after the next general election, then publicly explain what that case is without hiding behind anonymous briefings.

Secondly, whoever is elected Speaker will have my support, whether or not I voted for him or her. That’s how democracy works — you express your view and then accept the result, even if you disagree with it. Will every Tory MP say likewise? Or will these spineless men of little principle continue to hide behind their anonymous briefings and plot to politicise the Speaker’s office, thereby undermining the institution of the Commons itself?

IT DOESN’T take much snow, does it, to bring the whole of the nation’s thought processes to a grinding halt. I mean, in other parts of the world, like Oslo and New York and Calgary, they don’t allow a few inches of the white stuff to paralyse our computer keyboards, to deep freeze our brains so that the only arguments we can make are those that can be extracted from the folder marked “hardy perennial”.

 Alas, that’s what a couple of right-leaning giants of the blogosphere have done today, and since they are both personal friends, I’ll leave the sarcasm at that.

First off, the estimable Benedict Brogan of The Daily Mail, makes, I fear, a rather premature judgment that Westminster is deserted because of the weather (he’s spot-on when he says that LibDem Opposition debates are highly expendable, however).

Then we have Jontahan Isaby, late of the Telegraph and now at Conservative Home. Jonathan opines:

So here’s the view I’m enjoying from my window as I tap away at the keyboard. But isn’t that the view that you’d get from many a home in New York for much for the winter? Or Moscow? Or Oslo? The list could go on. Yet I’m not aware that children go without an education for weeks or months on end in those cities because the schools shut whenever it snows. And the trains still run, and the tubes and buses still ferry millions of people to and from work. And as far as I’m aware, the airports in those cities remain open throughout the winter as well. 

So is anyone able to explain why on earth it is that it just seems to be Britain which comes to a grinding halt at the first sight of snow?

In fact, the first comment in response (from a Barry Williams) said exactly what I was going to say:

If you regularly get snow then it is worth spending a lot on money on the infrastructure to keep the roads moving. A snowplough on every road is worthwhile if you have thick snow every year for a couple of months. It is much less cost effective, as in the case of the UK, where heavy snowfalls are infrequent and usually only clog up the roads for a day or two.

Maybe in Dave’s Brave New World, we’ll have a plough on every corner, eh?

A few years ago I recall a number of motorists being stranded on the A11 (if I recall correctly) overnight because of a very rapid deterioration in the weather. On the Jeremy Vine Show shortly afterwards, one of the stranded motorists was interviewed. Inevitably, predictably and depressingly, he directed his ire at the local roads authorities: “I listened to the radio the night before and it warned of heavy snow. Now, if I heard it, the local authority must have heard it too, so why weren’t they prepared?”

What made me even more annoyed at this half-wittedness was Vine’s acknowledgement that the interviewee had a point! “But if you heard the weather warning, why did you go out in your car?” was the obvious retort. So obvious, in fact, that it never came.

Anyway, snow or no snow, I’m making my way southwards aboard a Virgin West Coast train and so far, so good. I’ll keep you informed.

WHEN the sensible and loyal Jonathan Isaby of ConservativeHome is unhappy, the Tory Party should sit up and take notice.

Today Jonathan recalls the objection of a Conservative front bencher who didn’t want moved to a higher profile post by David Cameron because he didn’t want to give up his outside interests. “Such an attitude at this juncture is unacceptable,” Jonathan tells his readers.

This is all part of the debate about whether the Shadow Cabinet should give up “lucrative” outside interests. The FT reports that Cameron’s original plan to force his shadow ministers to do so has been shelved.

In fact, I sympathise with the view that MPs should have outside interests, even interests for which (horror of horrors!) they receive payment.

Surely the point of this story is that Cameron’s authority has been dented by his colleagues’ refusal to do as he wanted? And isn’t there an echo here of previous parliaments, when Shadow Cabinet members were reluctant to divest themselves of extra income because they didn’t believe they would become ministers any time soon?

Just asking.

Attended the launch party of my Facebook friend Jonathan Isaby’s book, Boris v Ken, co-written by Giles Edwards. No sooner had I arrived in a very crowded upstairs room at a pub in Horseferry Road when who should walk in but…

“Britt Ekland!” I gasped excitedly to an SNP MP and a Scotland on Sunday reporter.

Britt Ekland! Star of one of my all-time favourite films, The Wicker Man, and, of course, the actress who played Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun, opposite Roger Moore’s 007.

She looked exactly as I had last seen her in a documentary about her marriage to the late Peter Sellers: still very glamorous and gorgeous. Britt Ekland. I could hardly believe it.

“Do you want me to go and speak to her?” asked the rather too-eager nationalist.

“No, I want to,” I replied, leading the way through the crowd.

Britt Ekland! Fantastic. Once, just after being elected, I had passed Roger Moore at Heathrow’s Terminal One, and had ever since regretted not stopping to speak to him. I doubt if I’ll ever get another chance. But here, right in front of me, was a real life Bond girl, and I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity, oh no.

“Excuse me,” I ventured, straining to be heard over the noise of the crowd around me, desperately trying to create a good impression for this screen icon. “But are you Britt Ekland?”

She smiled. “No.”

Oh.

Britt Ekland: never met Tom Harris