“I’m an estate agent. Trust me!”

The Lady in Malcolm’s Life coughed and spluttered her way to and from a City appointment. She brought back the Evening Boris Standard.

Page 2 has a post-Huhne pop-survey (dignified by Ipsos-MORI) on page 2. This tells us:

• 41% of interviewees “generally trust” (and 57% distrust) business leaders to tell the truth;
• which is more than 24% who trust (and 70% who distrust) estate agents;
• and more than the 23% who trust (and 70% who distrust) MPs in general.

Since the bottom of the reliability pile involves “Politicians generally” (18% trusted, 77% distrusted) it would need a keen logician to untangle in what ways the general public differentiate them from their sub-set “MPs in general”.

Remember and despair: one in four of our fellow citizens trusts the snake-oiled property shark.

At a single bound …

… we leap to page 59 for the letters, and the main focus is the “Mansion Tax”. As we might expect from the Evening Boris Standard, this is the usual balanced viewpoints:

• a no-no from “Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates”;
• a no-no-no from “M Truman, Taxation Magazine”; and
• a severe snipe from “Andrew Pearmain, author, The Politics of New Labour“.

We shall not, on this occasion, pause to marvel that a magazine (a glossy?) survives on the topic of licensed mulcting alone, nor a self-proclaimed “author” who needs his magnum opus soldered to his moniker. Well, perhaps for just a moment of mockery.

Let us instead hang on the words of Mr Abrahmsohn. Here is one with considerable North London street-cred (though it’s more “avenues” and “gardens” in Abrahmsohn’s refined world):

Meet the man who holds the keys to Billionaires’ Row

He has sold the world’s most expensive house and rubbed shoulders with the political elite – but life was not always so glamorous for the keeper of keys to Billionaires’ Row.

His office on the edge of Hampstead Garden Suburb, adorned with letters from prime ministers and press cuttings from national newspapers, is a far cry from the shabby hotel room in Golders Green where Trevor Abrahmsohn forged his reputation as estate agent to the globe’s glitterati.

Armed with nothing but a temperamental phone line and a photocopier, the 58-year-old went on to enjoy 35 years selling “trophy mansions” on The Bishops Avenue to Saudi princes, Chinese businessman and Russian oligarchs.

That’s a recent puff-piece from the Ham & High.

And, finally, we have Mr Abrahmsohn’s missive to the Evening Boris Standard:

Mansion tax will never happen

Labour’s announcement of a mansion tax and reinstatement of the 10p tax band yesterday is headline-grabbing before the Eastleigh by-election. What are we to make of the two Eds’ integrity, given they were thew joint architects of Labour policy at the time Gordon Brown abolished the 10p band?

If Miliband had any sense, there is no way he will actually implement a mansion tax that would alienate an important element of middle-class Labour support. In the London property market, the likely £2 million threshold is hardly a fortune: perhaps buying a two-bedroom flat in a leafy, but not super-prime, inner London area, and there are plenty of properties in this bracket that were bought for relatively little years ago.

A mansion tax would have a profound effect on the dynamics of the market: a lot of people would sell up and court cases would be certain as others try to revalue their property. Foreign investors have already been hit by the Coalition’s clumsy levy of 15 per cent stamp duty in the last Budget, and a mansion tax would only magnify their problems; why are we trying so hard to repel them? A far more plausible, consumer-friendly approach is to bring in a range of higher council tax bands above Band G.

Trevor Abrahmsohn, Glentree Estates.

Kettling the pot

Spot the mutually-conflicting assumptions and statements there. Malcolm will tick just three.

For what it’s worth, the average price of a two-bed flat in NW11 (Mr Abrahmsohn’s home patch of Golders Green) is around £400,000. Only in five tight super-prime, inner London areas — W1 (Piccadilly), W8 (Kensington), SW3 (Chelsea), SW7 (South Ken)  and the Brompton Road (SW10) — would one readily hit on a £1 million plus two-bed pad. Those are not areas of solid middle-class Labour support.

Moreover, doesn’t any decent heart bleed for the misfortunes of those foreign investors who plump Mr Abrahmsohn’s portfolio? Malcolm regularly passes down the eternal building-site that is The Bishop’s Avenue (a.k.a. “Billionaires’ Row”). Its very existence involves tearing down perfectly-good (and hardly-offensive) granges, and erecting, in their place, over-sized but tawdry glass sheds — which, in turn, are gone in half-a-decade or so for something even more glitzy and ghastly.

There is a sound — nay, urgent — argument to be made for reforming the Council Tax. It was designed by Michael Heseltine as a regressive tax. It has become far more oppressive with subsequent postponements of revaluation — most recently, and seemingly twice, with malice aforethought, by Eric Pickles. What Abrahmsohn also elides is the distinction between national and local taxation: Council Tax is just that, local.

Bottom line

We should be looking at how we tax property. Since it is even more static than parked cars (which we tax and fine), it’s not rocket science to evaluate its worth and slap a duty on it. The over-inflated property market in London and the more-bourgeois areas of the South-East is ripe for plucking. Only the most self-interested Tory fails to recognise that. Doing so (and improving transport links) could and should encourage “trickle-down”, first to those crumbling areas adjacent to London, then further afield.

Once we’ve agreed the need, it’s only method that matters. Miliband and Balls have taken aboard the ‘mansion tax’, with due acknowledgements to the likes of Vince Cable. Why not go a step further, and snuffle around site-value/land-value taxation? Which was amply dealt with recently by George Monbiot in The Guardian and taken further by Alex Hern in the New Statesman.

If nothing else, it’s guaranteed to raise the Abrahmsohn blood-pressure.

“Welfare tax”?

Go to the BBC video of yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

Enjoy Miliband winding up Cameron on the Bedroom Tax.

Remember: in Cameron’s world, it’s not a “tax”, it’s a “benefit”. That was his effort, responding to Miliband’s first question. What is the “benefit” of losing £25 a week? That was enough to shock Malcolm — and got to Steve Bell as well:

Indeed the crude brutishness of Cameron’s manner made Malcolm miscue. So back to the BBC video.

The crucial moment comes about 7 minutes and 15 seconds in. Cameron is waxing loud and lyrical about Miliband’s policy deficiencies (though why Labour needs to be lumbered with detailed policy commitments this far out from a fixed election date is another matter).

Malcolm believed he heard Cameron say:

What this Government is doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. But, frankly, the question is one he has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare tax, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefit, if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending.

What the Hansard reporter heard (or was persuaded was said) is subtly different:

The Prime Minister: What this Government are doing is building more houses and controlling welfare bills. Frankly, the question is one that the right hon. Gentleman has to answer, too. If he opposes the welfare cap, if he opposes restrictions on increased welfare, if he opposes reform of disability benefits and if he opposes each and every welfare change we make, how on earth is he going to get control of public spending?

Fair enough: on about the third hearing, Malcolm concedes Hansard is probably right, and Malcolm’s hearing is adrift. Still, the message lingers.

What is fiendishly wrong here is that people in social housing are being punished for disability, or for wanting to stay in long-established homes. They are also being caned because:

• wages are criminally low, and are being driven even lower by deliberate government policies;
• rents in the private sector are too high, and still rising.

Let’s take those in turn, and refer to two items in this current issue of Private Eye:

1. Giz a job

SURF, Scotland’s independent regeneration group, which aims to improve health and wellbeing in deprived areas, received 400 applications in response to an advert for a part-time admin job. Chief Executive Andy Milne also received an email from the folk at Liga UK, who were keen to let him know that they were a “government-funded training provider who help young people gety into the workplace”.

Liga helpfully suggested that Milne consider converting the paid job into an “apprenticeship” placement. After all, it suggested, “If you do take on an apprentice for this role, you only need to pay them £100-£270 per week.” Liga UK also offered a further inducement of the £1,500 placement fee from the government.

What Ligaq failed to mention was that if SURF agreed to shove the poor recruit out of the promised job, Liga could also claim an apprenticeship placement “success” and pick up its own fee. Milne asked Liga why on earth the government would want it to displace a real job with an apprenticeship. He is still waiting for an answer.

By no coincidence, just a week ago Channel 4′s FactCheck Blog ran the rule over:

… the latest stats on apprenticeships in England today, which show that more than half a million people began a placement in 2011/12.

That is costing the government (i.e. the tax-payer) around £1.4 billion — yes, billion — in 2011-12. Moreover, nearly a fifth of these placements run for six months or less. Such turn-over must be money in the bank for the likes of Liga. Moreover, as FactCheck adds:

… a few months spent learning how to stack shelves and a three-and-a-half year stint at Rolls-Royce both count as the same.

2. Gimme Shelter 

Welfare reforms brought in by the coalition were already bringing down rents, said a confident David Cameron in January last year. “What we have seen so far, as housing benefit has been reformed and reduced, is that rent levels have come down, so we have stopped ripping off the taxpayer.”

But have they come down? It seemed unlikely at the time, although it reflected a widespread belief in government that the local housing allowance (the form of housing benefit paid to private renters) was somehow causing rent inflation.

A year on, and with more housing benefit cuts due in April, rents are stubbornly refusing to go anywhere but up. A report from Shelter based on the government’s Valuation Office Agency figures says rents have risen 2.8 percent in the past year. That’s faster than the 1.7 percent rise in house prices and comes at a time when wages are at a standstill.

Several areas saw double-digit rises, including an eye-watering 10.8 percent in one local authority with which Cameron should be fa,iliad: West Oxfordshire, home to his Witney constituency.

This Shelter survey, The Rent Trap, is on-line. It covers only English local authority areas (as, indeed, does the Tory party’s world-view).

Are your dogs barking?

We’ve been stuck since 1892 with that now-exhausted metaphor:

Colonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion’s ability, but I saw by the Inspector’s face that his attention had been keenly aroused.

“You consider that to be important?” he asked.

“Exceedingly so.”

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

 ”The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Lloyd Evans’s PMQ sketch for the Spectator sought imaginative ways round (here’s another dead’un) that elephant in the room:

It was the croc that didn’t snap, the firework that failed to fly, the jeroboam that refused to go pop. Last week, David Cameron’s speech on Europe was supposed to heal a two-decade rift within the Tory family and to set Britain on a bold new course in our relationship with the continent. A week later and the great In-Out gamble didn’t rate a mention at PMQs. Not a peep. Not a syllable. Not a whisper. Ed Miliband didn’t bring it up either.

Once past the ritual exchange of abuse (or rather Cameron’s abuse when confronted by Miliband’s profession of reason), the main meat of PMQs:

• included two excellent questions (one historical, one equine)

and

• concluded with a poor ad-hominem response by Cameron to Gorgeous George Galloway’s ad-rem on double standards of foreign policy.

Let’s deal with the last of those first, here as Lloyd Evans saw it:

The session ended with a blood-soaked question from George Galloway. Referring to the latest troop-surge in Mali, he invited the PM to ‘adumbrate the differences between the throat-slitting jihadists’ of north Africa and ‘the equally bloodthirsty jihadist’ in Syria. Easy to answer convincingly but Cameron descended to mere abuse. ‘Wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he will have the support of the right honourable gentleman.’

A pity he served up a slur rather than an argument against Galloway who, if nothing else, is a formidable debater.

 When the Speccie disses Cameron, as it does on a regular basis, there’s usually a grain of good sense involved somewhere. Though, but naturally, not on the visceral issues of Europe or renewables.

Galloway’s barb went home, and will fester. Because it came from Galloway, Cameron may endure it — at least until the Hercules descends at RAF Brize Norton and more body-bags from North or West Africa are delivered to Cameron’s back-door. Another, perhaps more dangerous wound was delivered from over Cameron’s shoulder.

Pontifical Sir Peter

Simon Hoggart, the wittiest of the lobby reporters and sketch-writers, has a regular vamp about Sir Peter Tapsell. Here, for example, from September 2011:

Does Sir Peter Tapsell actually exist? I ask the question following his own question – nay, speech – on Wednesday, which was magnificent. It could have been a pastiche of the perfect Tapsell address. I imagined his words being carved into tablets of polished black basalt, mounted in the British Museum, etched deep so that even the partially sighted can feel their way to his eternal wisdom.

Possibly Sir Peter is a mass thought form, created by Tory MPs, for whom he recalls their party as it used to be, and Labour MPs, who wish that it still was. Certainly it is true that the whole House looks forward keenly, yearningly, to his every word.

When the Father of the House arose in the middle of prime minister’s questions, a great throb of excitement ran along all benches, rather like the moment in a Victorian seance when the eerie manifestation of a dead Red Indian appeared above the fireplace. This moment of glee was followed, as it always, is by a hushed and expectant silence.

Malcolm will  be disappointed if tomorrow’s Guardian fails to include mention of lapidary inscription, or — at the very least — quills and vellum. Fortunately for the mirth and instruction of the nation, as Father of the House (the longest serving Member) Sir Peter has a proprietary right to be called at question time. So to today:

Sir Peter Tapsell (Louth and Horncastle) (Con): As my right hon. Friend sets forth on his pacific mission to Algeria, will he, with his great historical knowledge, bear in mind that when Louis Philippe sent his eldest son to Algeria in the 1840s on a similar venture, it took a century, massive casualties, the overthrow of the Third Republic and the genius of General de Gaulle to get the French army back out of the north African desert?

Hon. Members: Answer!

Mr Speaker: Order. We want to hear the Prime Minister’s answer to this question.

The Prime Minister: I can reassure my right hon. Friend that I am planning only to visit Algiers. I am sure he put down an urgent question at the time of the events to which he referred, and got a response.

Two things don’t come out in that bare Hansard transcript:

• Only those backbench and the Speaker’s interruptions saved Cameron, gave him recovery time.
• This was the second, in a row, of very effective questions. Cameron hadn’t done very well on the previous one, either:

Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab): On the subject of food safety, can the Prime Minister confirm that traces of stalking horse have been found in the Conservative party food chain?

The Prime Minister: Somewhere in my briefing, I had some very complicated information about the danger of particular drugs for horses entering the food chain, and I have to say the hon. Gentleman threw me completely with that ingenious pivot. The Conservative party has always stood for people who want to work hard and get on, and I am glad that all of my — all those behind me take that very seriously indeed.

Nice one, Mister Ed!

The weekly corrida de toros (always a lot of bull, but today a bit of horse) of Dave and Ed was a nice one today. Only the true die-hard thought Cameron did the business. Even the ranks of ConHome could scarce forbear to fleer:

[Miliband] probably won the exchanges on points, despite Cameron having the better of the arguments.  The Prime Minister all but used the “R” word, alluding to consulting the public and gaining the “full-hearted consent of the British people”.  His insistence that a Conservative Government would want to take powers back from Brussels, and that a Labour Government would give more away, was right.  But my sense is that to the lay voter hinting that you want a referendum in future while arguing that you don’t want one now looks muddled.

That’s Paul Goodman who, despite Malcolm’s partisan sniping is good — and getting better:

Downing Street must be anxious about women’s votes.  From the Tory backbenches, John Glen raised the gain which the Government’s proposed pension reforms will bring to some women, and Mary Macleod plugged childcare: I may be wrong, but both questions had the smell of the Whips’ Office about them. Laura Sandys asked about the great horsemeat scandal.  Cue the Rebekah Brooks jokes.

Edible equines

That’s another chewy matter, currently being digested across the media, including Slugger O’Toole, where Pete Baker has opened his Boucherie Chevaline. Not surprisingly, it’s a bizarre goulash of serious concern and dismal punning:

• One of the few, very, very, few, successful native industries Ireland could boast of was its meat industry, specifically beef. Following the Irish economic collapse it was about the only economic success story Ireland could point to. This will absolutely devastate it.
• I was just checking my burgers in the fridge there……Aaaannnnd they’re off!!!

For different reasons, Malcolm likes both of those … and had to participate, in part recollecting an earlier post here:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

Even so, the presence of real meat (beef, horse, or whatever) in burgers is the least of his worries. It’s not the meat that concerns him: like the 99.9% of known germs slaughtered by household cleaners … the problem lies with the other and unknown bits.

One small wrinkle: the Irish tests which revealed the horse DNA date from two months since. What’s been happening since? Why does it become public only now?

Back to the bear pit

Miliband’s smirk at PMQs must have registered all the way to Brighton: he was winning, and he knew it.

Inevitably the Tory (and other) commentators are getting antsy. Hence the demands for a definitive statement of the Labour position, usually expressed in the whinge: Miliband must commit NOW! To which must go the answer: No chance!

Simon Jenkins (in the Guardian) tried, rather tortuously, to reel in his sprat:

From the moment in 2003 that Gordon Brown stopped Tony Blair joining the euro, Cameron’s speech was waiting to happen. The evolving euro would sooner or later need a tight political corset to enforce fiscal, budgetary and monetary union. Britain and other states would not join this, and would therefore need to negotiate their relationship with this euro-specific regime. Labour’s Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, both party to Brown’s victory over Blair, know this well. There need be no disagreement.

No disagreement? Come, come: that’s not the nature of British adversarial politics.

James Forsyth, Speccie-lating away, would like to see a Tory ploy in the whole thing:

Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now shut the door to Labour offering a referendum, putting Labour on the wrong side of public opinion. They believe that once Cameron has actually delivered his speech, the atmosphere will change and Miliband will have to say what he would do.

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

On a succession of vital topics raised in the interview, Mr Miliband said he couldn’t answer because we are too far out from an election: we will have to wait for the manifesto.

One has to read the rest of that, in the context of the tormented Torygraph, fully to realise Brogan’s frustrated pain that Miliband is not to be hooked. The full beef is hoarsely delivered by David Hughes:

Labour is marching on the spot, going nowhere fast. While the party’s policy review is churning away, Miliband appears to think that he and his front bench can confine themselves to lobbing bricks at the Tories and leaving it at that.

Is that wise? At the last general election Labour won just 8.6 million votes – that’s just a smidgen more than Michael Foot got when facing Margaret Thatcher in 1983 in what is generally regarded as Labour’s most abject post-war electoral performance. That suggests there’s a big job of work to do rebuilding the party, thrashing out a credible post-Blairite position. Instead, Ed Miliband seems content to coast, apparently seduced by Labour’s opinion poll lead into believing the next election is in the bag.

Big mistake.

Which amounts to a genteel version of those pointless and repetitive demonstrators’ chants:

— Wha’ d’we want?
— A target to hit!
— When d’we wan’ it?
— Now!

A problem made in and by the Tory party to eviscerate itself

The bottom line has to be there is no European crisis. Thanks to a steady steer from Angela Merkel, the worst of the €-mess seems to be passed. Ireland is selling bonds again. The appalling Berlusconi is polling at 20-25% and won’t be coming back. Greece and Spain are bleeding; but still only walking wounded. François Hollande has opened his second front (albeit in Mali); and dragged Cameron part-way into the mire: nice one, Frankie!

Only Cameron’s Britain seems to have conniptions; and so — after six months of dither — we may be able to read Cameron’s lips. As Miliband summed it:

The biggest change that we need in Europe is a move from austerity to growth and jobs, but the Prime Minister has absolutely nothing to say about that. This is the reality: the reason the Prime Minister is changing his mind has nothing to do with the national interest. It is because he has lost control of his party. He thinks that his problems on Europe will end on Friday, but they are only just beginning.

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

• not about Britain — though it may include a “shopping list” of unrealisable aims,
• not about a referendum — though Cameron will do his best to imply just that,
• not about Europe, for Cameron and his government have rendered themselves impotent side-liners.

No: it is essentially about:

• fabricating some semblance of Tory unity until the 2015 election (any hopes for the Euro elections of 2014 must already be written off);
• fending off UKIP and Tory back-benchers’ night-stalkers — if Tory policy on Europe came as a stick of seaside rock, the six letters through the stick would read F-A-R-A-G-E;
• The referendum, which Cameron flinched away from before, has now become the last hope: that (not 10% or whatever in the polls) is a measure of how successful UKIP has been.

Bated breath?

Last Monday Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, gave a bald assessment of just how desperate Cameron’s position is:

… he has set out how we might get that referendum on Europe after the next election, but there is a series of ifs:

• If he wins the next election alone (in other words doesn’t have to get this past Nick Clegg)
• If he can persuade other European countries, particularly Germany that they need and want treaty change
• If Britain can then get what it wants in negotiations
• If he thinks he can then win a referendum

If all that happens, well then, yes, there will be a referendum which he thinks will approve a new better settlement for Europe.

But his difficulty in giving that big speech on Europe in about a week’s time is what if he’s wrong on any one of those ifs?

There’s as much chance of all that coming to pass as Mrs Brooks’s ex-policehorse, Raisa, doing a Lazarus out of the Tesco’s chiller.

A Nelsonian eye

Fraser Nelson, at The Spectator, always gives good value, even when one needs violently to disagree. Actually, says Malcolm, that’s the best journalism: it makes one think, one has to ponder counter-arguments, and we all benefit from rubbing against the grain.

Here is the man himself:

Ed Miliband has adopted a rather simple strategy: do nothing, and wait for your opponents to screw up. It’s lazy, but undoubtedly effective. The Tories are playing along perfectly. The last week has given plenty ammunition for his new theme — which he repeated during his union Sponsored Walk yesterday — ‘they think they are born to rule, but they are not very good at it.’

There are five short(ish) paragraphs of that: Nelson believes in making his play, and leaving us to it. Good for Fraser — presumably he doesn’t pay himself by the line.

Labour-loyalists night be warmed by this died-in-the wool Tory’s conclusion:

Now, I think an Ed Miliband victory would be a calamity for Britain — he has no policies and his ‘predistribution’ nonsense suggests naïveté of the most dangerous kind. But recent weeks have done nothing to change the balance of probability pointing — just — to Ed Miliband sending Christmas cards from No 10 in just three years’ time.

There’s partisan loyalty and there’s realism: it looks as if Mr Nelson gets them both there. The telling headline, in Spectator tasteful red,  is:

Ed Miliband’s winning strategy

Malcolm took his dissection kit to that Nelsonian introduction:

Ed Miliband has adopted a rather simple strategy: do nothing, and wait for your opponents to screw up.

Well, yes. All administrations fall foul of time: the gilt wears off, the guilt sets in. The rate of polling attrition is usually measured at 1% per annum or so. It’s just that this shower accelerate the process immeasurably. Or, as Uncle Bill Shakespeare had it:

Thou hast described
A hot friend cooling: ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay,
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith;
But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle;
But when they should endure the bloody spur,
They fall their crests, and, like deceitful jades,
Sink in the trial.

Ooh, err, Missus. From 1599, and still rings a bell.

Moreover, the whole ideology (not a good word ever to use in any British political context) of this ConDem coalition was to come in with a Plan, and in a fixed timetable to deliver it. Such sweet innocence.

As soon as any sensate being heard debt reduction, constitutional and electoral systems, welfare simplification, ‘eddicashun’ , Old Uncle Tom Cobley ‘n ‘ all, would all be sorted in a fixed time scale, eyes misted over. We all muttered, “Like hell’.  The more a government attempts, the less it will achieve — simply because targets are not that accessible, and the Great British Public simply do not like change. They are, and always have been small-c ‘conservative’. As it says on that eighteenth-century church bell in Essex:

Success to the Church of England, and no enthusiasm!

Apart from anything else, a fixed five-year parliament, with a definitive election date and closure set for May 2015, was guaranteed to work against the economic cycle. It denies the administration the one clear advantage it has always had — to go to the electors at the moment of its choosing. Those over-educated, but politically-illiterate public-school boys hadn’t understood Shakespeare’s pragmatism in Henry V, being dazzled by the initial flashy, bumptious rhetoric:

we’ll bend it to our awe,
Or break it all to pieces: or there we’ll sit,
Ruling in large and ample empery ..

It’s lazy, but undoubtedly effective.

Rubbish. The hardest job in British politics is to lead an Opposition — particularly a Labour one, in conflict with the bulk of the press, and the ever-surging power of Murdochery:

• The first aim is to establish a personality — and Miliband has done that against a sustained onslaught from the capitalist press barons. Who now speaks lightly of ‘Red Ed’? Even Miliband himself makes a joke of it in his recent Conference speech.
• Second base is to control the party: the amazing thing is how little dissent there has been in the Labour Party, given that drubbing through 2008-10. Compare the situation in 1980-82. If there was any doubt over Miliband’s grasp it was that he deliberately courted the booing of union extremists at the Hyde Park Rally yesterday.
• Third base is to win the weekly jousting at Prime Minister’s Questions (so taking ownership of the thirty-second clip on the evening news bulletins). Over recent months Miliband has succeeded, against all the odds, in matching , confronting, annoying and seeing off Cameron. As long as Cameron cannot control his inner Flashman, he is doomed. Last week’s PMQs was a total disaster for him. Not only did Miliband draw blood over Mitchell as ‘toast’, Cameron offended conservative and parliamentary principles (certainly those of ‘good manners’ and noblesse oblige) by his dismissal of Chris Bryant:

Do you know what? Until he apologises, I am not going to answer his questions—[ Interruption]

Even Tory polemicists regarded one that as ‘possibly unwise’. So, next:

• The Home Run is when the Tory press, as Nelson does here, start to see the light:

The Tories are playing along perfectly.

Not just the Tories. The LibDem element is pulling its weight.

The magnificent, magisterial Andrew Rawnsley, doing today’s Observer opinion piece, listed the heads for being mounted on spikes:

I can’t help feeling a tiny spasm of sympathy for the fallen chief whip. In the bumper book of cabinet resignations, a volume to which the coalition has now added four entries, this is a most bizarre chapter. One of his colleagues asks: “Should someone have a 30-year career destroyed because of a seven-second outburst?” You know, that’s a reasonable question.

There are strong arguments for why certain members of this cabinet ought to resign. Creating a complete mess of the reform of Britain’s most important public service would be a sound reason to leave ministerial office, but Andrew Lansley is still in the cabinet. Becoming intimately enmeshed with a media corporation to a degree that would be unacceptable even if that company were not also the subject of a criminal investigation would be another powerful reason for a minister to quit, but Jeremy Hunt is still in the cabinet, as, for that matter, is David Cameron.

Breaking a solemn manifesto pledge not to increase tuition fees could be regarded as a compelling reason to resign, but Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem colleagues are still sitting around the top table. In comparison, briefly losing your rag with a police officer seems to sit at the very trivial end of the spectrum of resignation-worthy offences, the more so when the officer involved had long since accepted an apology and the police had said they were taking no further action.

True enough. Indisputably so. Except that’s not the measure of this particular cock-up. As Malcolm was saying elsewhere:

General opinion now has it that such Mitchell outbursts were not previously unknown. So the answer might be “prevention rather than cure”. Note how, after “Thrasher”, we have the emollient Sir George — whom I’d regard as an inspired choice. 

My complaint above, and previously, is not whether the PM handled it badly (and he did), but what went wrong with the whole Downing Street operation. Any decent PR operator (hmmm … can we think of one?) should recognise when, if and how a “bad press” moment is containable. From the beginning this one wasn’t.

Similarly, once ‘Gids’ Osborne was rumbled over his shimmying into First Class on Virgin Rail, he should have had the sense to busy himself publicly with impressive paper-work.  Quite honestly, it didn’t matter if he were marking up form for the Profab Windows Handicap at Bath. Just look busy, puzzled, committed, engaged, involved in the public good. He didn’t: instead he allowed himself to be snapped, shoulders adjacent, with the pouting Polly, apparently watching an entertainment on an iPad (as right).

Which brings us to:

The last week has given plenty ammunition for his new theme — which he repeated during his union Sponsored Walk yesterday — ‘they think they are born to rule, but they are not very good at it.’

 And that is the bottom line here. For Miliband, by comparison, is getting good at it. Compare Osborne’s rail trip (and the public image thereof) with this:

The pendulum is swinging

Miliband may be über-Geek, but sooner, rather than later, the nation will finally tire of public-school amateurs.

A chapter of “accidents”?

They were a group of lads (all of Malcolm’s vintage), working out of RAF Wittering . That was the base for ground-attack aircraft (duck as you raced up that bit of the A1!) — hence ‘Hedgehoppers’. Because they were military, they had to be “Anonymous”. And, also hence: Hedgehoppers Anonymous:

And they were good. Far, far better than many of the catch-penny beat groups that “made it” longer.

Indelible

For those of a certain age, of a certain disposition, that lyric stays imprinted:

It’s good news week:
Someone’s dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere,
And blackening the sky.

It’s good news week:
Someone’s found a way to give
The rotting dead a will to live,
Go on and never die.

If the first stanza/verse explains why these guys were out-of-kilter with the 1960s RAF, the next one remains omni-present.

Take the last few hours

The Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell story has been one that kept giving for the Labour opposition. There will be broken hearts among the Labour Party tendency that Mitchell finally went for the political equivalent of a Darwin Award:

The prime tenet of the Darwin Awards is that we are celebrating the self-removal of incompetent genetic material from the human race. Therefore, the potential winner must be deceased, or at least incapable of reproducing. The traditional method is death. However, an occasional rebel opts for sterilization, which allows her more time to enjoy the dubious notoriety of winning a Darwin Award.

The bitter-sweet joy is that it took Mitchell this long: a month of poisonous news-stories, which will not have finished with his resignation. The other barrel is loaded with his last-minute as International Development Secretary decision to award £16 million to President Kagame of Rwanda (The rotting dead a will to live):

Downing Street approved the controversial decision last month by the then international development secretary Andrew Mitchell to restore British aid to Rwanda in spite of fears about the human rights record of the president, Paul Kagame.

As Mitchell faces criticism over his decision to grant £16m in aid on his last day in office, it emerged that the move was backed jointly by No 10 and the Foreign Office (FCO). Hours after his decision last month Mitchell took up the post of government chief whip.

What remains inexplicable is the double standard whereby

• President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir  of Sudan  was indicted by the International Criminal Court,

while

• Kagame travels the world scot-free,  unindicted and, by the UK government, well-rewarded (at least until the next discreet volte-face).

But then David Cameron has been well-serviced (not least courtesy of Andrew Mitchell) with juicy photo-ops and news-clips in Rwanda.

Credit where it’s due

As Mitchell departs, Sir George Young is slotted, seamlessly, into his place.

Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, has been around the block somewhat. He did well enough under John Major (as Financial Secretary and then Transport Secretary) but was one of the decent, unpushy Tories who seemed to miss out when the ConDem coalition was formed. He was Leader of the House (surely the one job for which he was made)  until, as it seemed, he was made redundant in the Great Cameron Re-shuffle — to provide a fig-leaf for the defenestrated Health Secretary, Lansley.

Now he is back; a gentleman to the marrow. Where ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell was supposed to intimidate, the Bicycling Baronet will charm. Where Mitchell swore, Young will soothe. True noblesse oblige.

For once it is an inspired choice.

But we haven’t finished with the rotting dead

Just when Mitchell was going for the seppuku solution, “Gids” Osborne was rubbing in the message of We’re not all in this together:

George Osborne is reported to have stumped up an extra £160 for a first class train ticket after being told he could not sit in the restricted area with his standard class fare.

ITV News correspondent Rachel Townsend said she was travelling on a train to Euston when the chancellor got on at Wilmslow, in his Tatton constituency, and tried to get away without paying the extra charge.

Townsend made perfect use of Twitter to report that journey under the hashtag#getGeorgeinstandard, as an aide to the chancellor reportedly tried to persuade the conductor to let her boss stay in first class away from, for want of a better word, the plebs.

What goes missing there is the female “aide”, who apparently had to sort out the penalty fare (as well as her own?). This from the BBC:

The story was broken via a series of tweets by ITV reporter Rachel Townsend, who works for Granada Reports in the North-West of England.

She said: “Very interesting train journey to Euston Chancellor George Osborne just got on at Wilmslow with a STANDARD ticket and he has sat in FIRST CLASS…

“His aide tells ticket collector he cannot possibly move and sit with the likes of us in standard class and requests he is allowed to remain in First Class.

Malcolm’s emphasis: there are indeed some to whom privilege comes unnaturally natural.

Tin-foil hats at the ready!

Feel free to go all conspiracy-theory at Huffington Post:

Ummm … decisions! decisions!

Underneath the arches

Osborne was hurried, shielded, escorted out of the side, goods, entrance of Euston Station to avoid the welcoming party of assembled press vultures and a few Labourites. Should “Gids” Osborne think he is out from under, he should reflect on a fellow traveller who also tried to take the easy way through.

Further north, there’s  York’s historic Micklegate Bar, one of the four medieval entrances through the ancient city walls. Anyone who has been to York will recognise it as the gate near the railway station, where the A59 from Harrogate and Knaresborough joins the A1036 road from Tadcaster. Most likely the Roman legions, hiking up Ermine Street, came this way. The present Micklegate (from Northumbrian Anglian micil: great or large in size, bulk, or stature — there may be a clue there) has been in situ these seven hundred and odd years. Ignorant modernists find it clearly prefaced with a height warning: 8ft 6in. Even so, this afternoon a delivery lorry attempted the impossible.

God luck to both the lorry driver and “Gids”, as they talk their separate ways out of their present embarrassments.

And the latest from London …

The broadsheet columnists whistle a certain hit from the 60′s as they conceive appropriate stories for the weekend editions.

Shower

A letter in today’s Guardian reads:

I wish Ed Miliband would drop the phrase “this shower”, and replace it with “this lot”. “Shower” makes him sound like a wartime Spitfire pilot.

Brian Lewis

Pontefract, West Yorkshire

And what precisely is amiss with a  sounding like a wartime Spitfire pilot, Mr Lewis? Since the rest of Miliband’s speech was invoking the ghosts of the past in the cause of national unity, of One Nation Labour, it seems fair game.

Yet, Malcolm sees Mr Lewis’s etymological point, which is the authorised version, as endorsed by the Oxford English Dictionary:

shower, n.1

 f. A group or crowd (of people). Usu. derogatory, a pitiful collection or rabble. slang.

And gives the earliest citation as:

1942   G. Kersh Nine Lives Bill Nelson ii. 13   I’ve seen him with some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw in your life.

Kersh

That would be Gerald Kersh, one of the more extreme characters on the fringes of British literary life from the 1930s. The novel cited there is The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, written when Kersh was — or wasn’t — working for the Army Film Unit.

His best-known (even most notorious) novel was Night and the City from 1938, which pioneered a particular kind of anti-hero. Harry Fabian is a Soho (that’s London’s Soho) wide-boy, who operates any rackets he can, poses as an American song-writer (with, alas, an unconvincing accent and scanty knowledge of his topic or his artists), and eventually sells off his girl-friend into prostitution. That would make it mere sexploitation, except that Kersh has an eye for squalor  and strikes a totally-different tone to the glitz and pseudo-glamour of the American pulp:

Bagrag’s Cellar is a dragnet through which the undercurrent of night-life continually filters. It is choked with low organisms, pallid and distorted, unknown to the light of day, and not to be tolerated in healthy society. It is on the bottom of life; it is the penultimate resting place of the inevitably damned. Its members comprehend addicts to all known crimes and vices …

Kersh sold the film-rights of Night and the City for $40,000, and Jules Dassin directed Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney in a London setting. Since Dassin was on the McCarthyite black-list, the film had numerous difficulties. Even so, it has risen from obscurity, is widely recognised as a prime example of English noir, and IMDb rates it as 8/10. The Finns didn’t like it, and it was banned for fifteen years.

Irwin Winkler’s 1992 remake, translated to New York, with Robert de Niro and Jessica Lang, is late-night TV movie fodder, and nowhere in the same league.

Partridge

Although a devoted admirer of all-things OED, Malcolm knows that for vocabulary dredged from the lower depths Eric Partridge is your only man, and the editions of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English the authority. Here we find illumination:

5. In what a shower!: army c[atch].p[hrase]. directed at members of another unit: since 1919. ‘Some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw’ (Gerald Kersh, Bill Nelson, 1942). L[aurie]. A[tkinson]. notes the phrase’s prob. origin in shower of shit from Shropshire: Londoners’ early C.20. Reinforcement by alliteration. What a shower!, or the derive. it’s showery!, was in the RAF, ca. 1930-50, a c.p. ‘addressed to one who has just made a bad mistake’ (Partridge, 1945).

Malcolm therefore disagrees with Mr Lewis. Knowing the full Salopian version of the term adds extra spice.

A speculation

If the expression has military origins (which seems likely), and was — hypothetically, like much else — imported and borrowed from military service, then there is another possible approach.

It amounts to Oswestry.

In 1915 the Army took over Park Hall, just outside the town of Oswestry (which itself is close to falling out of Shropshire and into Wales). It became one of the main initial training depots for the infantry. The soldiery, especially if they were away from the big cities for the first time, were none too chuffed about Oswestry: it was a long way from home, rural if not rustic, isolated, lacked what they saw as basic amenities (booze and … female company), and it rained a lot.

By one of those mysteries that might not be too hard to explain, a conflagration destroyed Oswestry Camp soon after Armistice Day, 1918. Only when the Second Unpleasantness came along was the site re-occupied.

Even after that, the dreaded “call-up” papers might arrive, summoning callow youths to Oswestry. Not that this was a far worse option than, say, Catterick or Aldershot, but the odour prevailed. The precipitation of Shropshire might not, therefore, be merely Reinforcement by alliteration — the Londoner using the term might well know of what he spoke.

One last problem, though

A couple of recent times, when the Lady in his Life and Malcolm were frequenting London “gastro-pubs”, there appeared on the menu “a half-Shropshire chicken”. What is never explained the other half of its ancestry.

Branson source

Anyone who has difficulties comprehending the tizz over the West Coast franchise is not alone, but — for want of a better explanation — should watch, with interest, Beardy Branson’s interview on this evening’s Channel Four News:

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First, take note of Branson’s harrumphs, umms and aahs. He knows he is back in the game; and his intent here is not annoying anyone more than necessary. Still, he is about as skilled a communicator and interviewee as they come. So: a reasonable conclusion:  he knows more — or, unbriefed, a lot lot less — than he says here.

What is more politically significant, if not dynamite,  is the revelation that the Department of Transport has been sitting on the acknowledged errors of reading the accounts since … 10th August. That puts both Justine Greening and the present Secretary of State into the crosshairs.

Consider also the post Michael White has on the Guardian site:

Having heard her successor, the ex-miner Patrick McLoughlin, make a decent fist of an apology on Radio 4 — hours after officials revealed they had made errors in calculating rival bids from Virgin the FirstGroup – my initial reaction was, no, the secretary of state is not responsible for errors made by his/her accountants even though they are constitutionally required to take responsibility for all that goes on in the department.

Then I remembered a relevant fact. It just so happens that by training and professional background Greening, 42, is, yes, an accountant and finance manager whose background includes working for such giants of the trade as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Big Pharma’s GlaxoSmithKline and Centrica.

So, the questions stare us in the face:

• When was the Ministry told she (and it has to be “she”) had the numbers wrong? If not 10th August, when?
• Was “ex-miner Patrick McLoughlin” told of this whoops-oh-nasty when he was “promoted”?
• Was Ms Greening pushed sideways because of the same?
• Why was this festering pustule squeezed only at last night’s midnight hour?
• Where is the fine Italian hand of “Dave” in all this? If you don’t get the point there, consider White’s nudge:

In his combative Today programme interview with Evan Davis on Wednesday morning, Ed Miliband used an interesting word to describe the latest shambles to beset the government: a lack of “grip”. A team that knows its direction of travel can overcome difficulties like this, the Labour leader said, but not if it’s aimless. David Cameron once hugged huskies and hoodies but now seems uninterested in either, he added.

Remember, unlike most recent Labour leaders, Miliband does have experience of government, both as a special adviser and, later, a minister in the cabinet office – heart of Whitehall…

Oh, to hell with it! — If it wasn’t flaws, technical or significant or whatever —

• Did money change hands?

No!

Ed Miliband’s best line:

Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out-of-touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, back-of-the-envelope, miserable shower than this Prime Minister and this Government?

Malcolm would like that on a tee-shirt, please.

Yes!

Following Ed Miliband’s speech, John Rentoul tweets:

Didn’t Labour rebuild Britain 1999-2010? Do we have to do it again, so soon?

For only proper response, see headline.