No, Nick, it’s not quite the same

What a busy few days: political names falling

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
in Vallombrosa

Wait! Dodgy comparison here: those were the fallen angels Milton consigned to Hell. And they were thick, not politicians. Never mind, same difference.

So, with all the excitement (Alan Johnson, Balls, Yvette, Blair, Coulson, and now Cowen on the edge), it took Malcolm a while to bother with Nick Robinson’s Friday post. He starts:

Do you remember where you were when Peter Lilley was replaced by Francis Maude? What do you mean Peter who? It was a big moment. No really it was.

Well, yes, if pushed Malcolm can just about recall that yawn-inducing moment. But then Malcolm is a politics junkie.

Robinson’s point is this:

will the replacement of Alan with Labour’s other Ed matter as much as we news boys have said it will? Or could it be that we’re still addicted to reporting on Labour? … we all know the plot of the nation’s favourite political soap opera, don’t we? But could these guys be the Messrs Lilley and Maude of today?

Robinson then resiles:

I think we are right to be excited by this shadow cabinet reshuffle. The economy is the central issue of the day. Who is right and who is wrong about the deficit, tax and spending will not just define our political future but many people’s personal futures.

There is a profound difference between Lilley and Maude in 1998 and Johnson and Balls today.

The Labour Government then was sitting on a majority of 179; and clearly would not be displaced within two parliaments or more. The Tories were a reduced rump of just 165 MPs. Everyone knew that the Tory Shadow Cabinet was an irrelevance. Lilley’s biggest fan was himself: he never recovered from the bathetic parody of The Mikado he essayed at the 1992 Tory Conference. Maude is the good-living, upright, “family-friendly”, multi-millionaire who fronted a porn business. If they didn’t deserve ignorance of their existence, they earned their ignominy.

Today the Tory-led Government has a working majority; but it is an unsettled beast. LibDems lie in their teeth about how agreeable the coalition experience is; but only the few with ministerial red boxed are convincing. Meanwhile the Tories barely conceal their contempt for their LibDem partners; and openly hug themselves at the discomfit of Laws or Vince Cable. It required a self-induced Tory humiliation at the Old & Sad by-election to save Clegg’s face. The old schisms (Europe by tradition and above all) have not gone away. This is not a stable government.

Similarly, compare the Tory plight of 1998 with Labour in 2011. There is a remarkable confidence about the Labour opposition: members have been flooding in to the wider party, many are reinvigorated returnees, others are disillusioned Lib Dems: both categories are well-versed in electioneering. Despite the sniping that is aimed at Ed Miliband, he is knocking lumps off Cameron in every confrontation: not enough for the Tory press to declare he has won the bout, but enough to unsettle the PM. And when Cameron is unsettled, he gets loud, bullying and spiteful. The image, one that Peter Brookes exploits tirelessly, that does not go away is Cameron as Harry Flashman. That is why an anecdote re-emerged in the last couple of days: Malcolm saw it as far back as December 2005:

this morning … The Sun’s business editor Ian King described the party leader in waiting David Cameron as a “poisonous, slippery individual” – highlighting the time Cameron was PR man for “the world’s worst TV company” Carlton in the 1990s. “He was a smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists who dared to write anything negative about Carlton – which was nearly all of us.”

There is another profound difference between 1998 and 2011 (see right), as headlined by YouGov’s Anthony Wells, at his UKpollingreport site. That is, it goes without saying, a notional figure. What is not is the depths to which confidence in the economic management by the Tory-led coalition has fallen, and the speed thereof. Wells again:

… note the questions on the economy – 78% think the current state of the economy is bad, one of the worst since the general election. The feel good factor (those thinking the economy will get better over the next 12 months minus those who think it will get worse) is minus 55, the second worse it’s been since the election. As we saw during the last Parliament, economic optimism does have a significant impact upon voting intention, that won’t have been the case so much since the election because the economic state will have been seen as something the government inherited, but over time the relationship will have started to build up again.

Weirder still and weirder …

… shall thy bounds be set.

Tory Britannia is a very peculiar institution.

There is, in the most hyperbolic bombast, the Sunday Telegraph editorial:

The economic policies that Mr Osborne is putting into action involve cutting the deficit, shrinking the state, and trying to ensure that the private sector has the conditions in which to flourish and so to create jobs for all. He believes that prosperity comes essentially from individual initiative, hard work and entrepreneurship, from the free choices of people to produce and purchase goods in a competitive market, and not from the authoritarian diktats of state officials who everywhere have the same abysmal record of destroying rather than creating wealth.

Every bald assertion there is debatable. Let’s leave them there: time will tell. What is already telling is that even the Tory press are having doubts. Hence the opposite view, however many caveats, in the Sunday Times:

The wisdom of the coalition’s economic strategy remains questionable …

This has been a bad few days for the economy and the government … The coalition’s economic honeymoon is over and now we are in for the hard grind of marriage. The latest clutch of economic data shows an uncomfortable mix of slowing growth, rising unemployment, a moribund housing market and high inflation. Some of that was expected but some of it goes to the heart of the question of whether the coalition’s economic strategy is the right one.

Unemployment rose by 49,000 over the latest three months. While its level of 2.5m has not soared as much as feared, the details were worrying. More than a fifth of young people are unemployed, the highest since current records began in the early 1990s. Elsewhere, record numbers are working part-time because they cannot get a full-time job.

The government’s great hope is that business will replace the 300,000-400,000 jobs due to be shed by the public sector by 2014. Shrinking the bloated public sector is the right thing to do but, after a good start last year, private sector job creation has slowed.

Get that? Unemployment has not “soared”  because of the hang-over investment by the out-going Labour government. Whew! That’s a relief! And we can safely predict that Tory ministers will continue to cut the ribbon to open Labour-conceived projects for a good couple of years yet, just as Boris Johnson continues to claim Ken Livingstone’s legacy for his own. So, no hypocrisy there.

Now on to more intimate matters.

If Tory PR is the blue rinse on the whited sepulchre, it’s the cosmetic detail that does it.

Take, for an example, the Home section of that same Sunday Times. When you flick through the property porn [Kate Moss's "jinxed" ... home in St John's Wood, north London, has sold for £10m a few weeks after coming onto the market] on the way to the architectural mess that is a £460,000 two-bed, adjacent to Dungeness nuclear power station, you pass:

This distressed painted cabinet [which would] make a beautiful bathroom showcase for collections from seashells to soaps.

Malcolm instantly recognises why he could never be a Sunday Times Tory. His bathroom is strictly utiltarian. You go there, do the business and get on with life. Furthermore, since bathrooms tend to be steamy (“Fnarr! Fnarr!”) places, excessive and redundant ornamentation doesn’t seem a bright idea. But, for heaven’s sake, who in their right mind (far right in the case of the Sunday Times) proudly displays a collection of soap?

Further unplumbed depths

Elsewhere we discover that a prominent Tory peer has been having his wicked way

with a penniless former socialite who came to him for help in a dispute over child maintenance.

Or as Billy Bennett rendered it:

She was poor but she was honest,
Though she came from ‘umble stock,
And her honest heart was beating
Underneath her tattered frock.

But the rich man saw her beauty,
She knew not his base design,
And he took her to a hotel
And bought her a small port wine.

It’s the same the whole world over,
It’s the poor what gets the blame,
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure,
Isn’t it a blooming shame?

Well, let’s be accurate here. The dirty deed was done over:

a lunch of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference smoked salmon washed down with chilled Sancerre.

The old political nostrum holds: all the best Labour scandals are financial; Tory ones involve sex.

It’s worth dashing through the public prints to see how each rips the story to make difficult seeing the original source (was it the Sunday Mirror?). One has to look closely to find a different “take” on the sordid little tale. However, the Mail on Sunday just about contrives one. First, the Mail is emphatic who was at fault:

Lords leader had affair with notorious Green Party activist

Clear message: never trust a tree-hugger. You might be her next victim.

Way down the page, below a very suggestive piccy (as right) of said leering, lecherous Lord and Gids Osborne (not quite holding hands, but the eyes have it), we are regaled with this:

The sex scandal is the first public relations crisis to hit the Conservatives since Mr Cameron’s communications director Andy Coulson was forced to resign over the phone hacking row at his former newspaper, the News of the World.

Normally, Mr Coulson would have swung into action to prevent a media firestorm. Instead it was left to his deputies to handle the situation.

Ah! That’s what a Downing Street spin-doctor does! Post-coital prophylaxis!

James Thomson (1700-48), with or without Thomas Arne’s musical ac-cump-pany-ment, was there before Coulson:

The Muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair;
Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crowned,
And manly hearts to guide the fair.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.