“Dave, where did it all go wrong?”

Malcolm would welcome the source of the famous George Best anecdote, with that punch-line. Some claim it was from George himself.

But where did David Cameron’s woes begin?

Nick Robinson hasn’t — as far as Malcolm can see — offered his definitive analysis yet [UPDATE: see here]. That cannot be long in coming. His most recent utterance was Europe – That Tory row ‘made simple’, which took the tale back as far as last week. Which cannot be the authoritative version.

James Forsyth, in the Spectator and still pre-occupied exclusively with the Europe thing, went back only to last October:

Shortly before the Conservative party conference last year, the head of the Fresh Start Group of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs went in to see the Prime Minister in Downing Street. The group had heard that David Cameron might make his big Europe speech at the gathering and its head, Andrea Leadsom, wanted to set out what to ask for in any renegotiation.

When Leadsom returned from the meeting, her colleagues were desperate to know what the PM had said: which powers did he most want returned from the EU? What would be the centrepiece of his great diplomatic effort? All Leadsom could do was repeat what Cameron had told her: ‘I don’t like shopping lists.’

This sums up Cameron’s attitude towards this renegotiation: announcing it is enough for the time being. When he eventually did make his big Europe speech in January, it contained nothing as clear as a shopping list. There was lots of hifalutin’ language but painfully little detail.

Of the same parish (and the Speccie is about the best barometer of the local Tory weather), Alex Massie throws  gay-marriage into the argument, and then takes it further:

Gay marriage has cost the party members in (I think) every constituency in Britain. That does not make it a bad policy but it demonstrates, again, that it is better to win the argument than to impose something of this sort upon the party and expect everyone to fall into line because the thought of Prime Minister Miliband is enough to trump all other concerns. There comes a point at which people simply say Sod it, I’ve had enough.

The bigger problem still, however, is that the Tory party increasingly does not look very much like Britain or, especially, England. Worse still, it frequently – and despite all the talk of modernisation – does not seem comfortable with modern England. This is, for sure, in part a feature of the conservative temperament but it does make it harder for the party to recruit new members and harder for it to retain existing members. It is caught in a cleft stick.

The single sex marriage Bill

One day, in retrospect, we may untangle why this became so important. At one level, Malcolm wonders if it is not a form of code, a catch-all for a whole series of gripes and grievances (see below).

The Church of England is no longer the Tory Party at prayer (which axiom the Catholic Herald once attributed to an anonymous 18th-century wag; though it seems more likely to be derived from the suffragist and Congregationalist Maude Royden, reported in the Times, 17 July 1917). We live in a secular (even aggressively so) society, where even the remaining Tories of the shires do not seem the most observant of worshippers. Yet this non-issue has become a cause of massive grief to vocal Tories.

It has to be more signifier than substance: a shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “them”. One to watch here is that pillar of the Tory Right, John Redwood. In February he blogged his view:

I have found this a difficult and divisive issue within my constituency and in the Conservative party. I came to it with no preconceptions.

As a modern Conservative I understand the wish to allow people to live their lives as they choose, as long as they do not harm others.  There is a strong impulse to freedom in Conservatism which can pioneer desirable social reform. I suspect the reformers will win the vote today on the grounds that the law should not prevent same sex people marrying if they wish.

I also understand the strrength of feeling of many traditional Conservatives, who say Parliament should not change or reform long established institutions without good reason. They write to me to say they support civil partnership,  but for religious, historical and legal reasons think marriage has to be defined as a relationship between a woman and a man.  They do not write as bigots, though they are often criticised as such. They point out that the Conservative Manifesto of 2010 did not contain a pledge to change the law of marriage. They point out my personal Manifesto did not do so either.

He then voted “no”: the absence of a manifesto commitment being more important than freedom … which can pioneer desirable social reform.

Cameron: a poisonous, slippery individual

Malcolm has serially rehearsed the view of Ian King, published by The Sun (then still in the Labour camp), on the eve of Cameron becoming party leader:

Along with other financial journalists, I was unfortunate enough to have dealings with Cameron during the 1990s when he was PR man for Carlton, the world’s worst television company. And a poisonous, slippery individual he was, too.

Back then, Cameron was far from the smoothie he pretends to be now. He was a smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists who dared to write anything negative about Carlton -which was nearly all of us. He loved humiliating people, including a colleague at ITV, who he would abuse publicly as “Bunter” just because the poor bloke was a few pounds overweight.

A recent Sun interview with Cameron generously called him a former Carlton “executive”. No, he wasn’t. He was a mouthpiece for that company’s charmless chairman, Michael Green, who operated him the way Keith Harris works Orville.

The financial press had one thing in common with Cameron  — he hated us and we hated him.

If we had any doubts, Cameron insisted on proving King correct: the oft-stolen bicycle (with his papers in the following Lexus),  hug a hoodie, the useless wind-generator on his Notting Hill house, the huskies …

Even then, there were rumblings:

What, many wondered yesterday, did the leader of a major political party hope to gain by dressing up in a duvet and driving a dog sled across the Arctic during the local election campaign? …

[Tory officials] fear Mr Cameron’s snowbound adventure will be seen as a photo-opportunity that will serve only to reinforce the impression that he is a nice chap without any firm policies.

That from the Telegraph, no less.

The Lisbon Treaty kerfuffle

Matters got serious with Cameron’s September, 2007, promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; and his breaking of that commitment in 2009. Barry Legg, ex-MP, Iain Duncan Smith’s Chief Executive of the Tory Party, was incandescent:

The Tory leader stands condemned by his own words.
David Cameron’s future European policy is now incoherent, disingenuous and utterly unconvincing. This is a dark day for the Tory party, but a worse one for Britain.

That opinion did not stand on just one Legg. As recently as this January, Melissa Kite was regurgitating that, significantly again in the Spectator:

Tory MPs have fallen for David Cameron’s cast-iron pledges to hold a referendum before. So are they right in buying into his latest promise? …

Cameron has form on evolving his cast-iron pledges as he goes along. He promised in opposition to allow the British people a vote on the EU Constitution, then when it morphed into the Lisbon Treaty, and was ratified, he said rather legalistically that this meant a referendum was no longer possible or relevant. Then he promised that there would be no new ceding of powers to Brussels – and once the Coalition was formed that pledge was broken as well.

I hope the initial confidence being shown by eurosceptic Tories about his latest promise proves founded.

A life of grind

And, of course, the feet of clay were again spotted. Cameron, was called to order by his back-benchers, and had to up the ante with the nonsense of the draft bill on a 2017 referendum.

There are umpteen very obvious reasons why that one will fall short:

• it won’t get support outside the Tory party;
• it won’t get parliamentary time for the same reason;
• it attempts to bind a future government;
• it requires the Tories to win outright a General Election;
• it needs the co-operation and complicity of the other EU nations (all more than a bit pissed at Cameron’s inadequacies and posturings);

and — perhaps above all —

• it defies prime ministerial life-expectancy. Let’s assume that all the above “ifs” came to pass; and by Wednesday 1st November 2017 a mythical Prime Minister Cameron was launching his in/out EU referendum campaign. Cameron would, by then, have occupied Number 10 for 7 years, 5 months and 22 days (2732 days in total). That would make him the 15th longest-serving PM of all time, all the way back to Robert Walpole. Longer than Baldwin, nearly as long as Harold Wilson’s two sessions.

Cameron’s juvenile tendency

The starting gate for Malcolm’s ramblings here was Steve Richards in today’s Guardian. The headlines suggest this is quite an “end days” offering:

Cameron had the chance to defy the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ and remake his party. He failed

This week he’s been exposed. There was little thinking on what modern Conservatism might be like. Now he can only busk it

Richards starts with the Tory Party itself:

Relations between the leadership of the party and its activists are more strained and complex than at any point since the removal of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. Focus on the policy trail rather than the Harold Macmillan-like emollient character of the prime minister and Cameron is implementing a radical agenda that should largely delight his activists. He has delivered an economic policy to the right of the Republicans in the US, overhauled the NHS and welfare in a way that Thatcher would not have dared, and offered an in-out referendum on Europe. Yet the so-called loons are not content and want much more.

That is quite provocative. We are back where we started: where did it all go wrong?

Richards argues it isn’t that the Tory grassroots have gone “loon”, or Tea-Party, or are lost in the elephant grass to the far right of the fairway. It’s the inconsistency of the whole programme:

The Tory activists have a case too. They have been subjected to a clunky, unsubtle “modernisation” project in which social liberalism, while sincerely espoused, has been added on to the rightwing programme partly in an attempt to secure broader appeal. There has been little deep thinking from Cameron about what a modern Conservative party might be like, but rather a shallow effort to retain most of the thinking on Europe and the state that lost the Conservatives three successive elections, with the addition of support for gay marriage.

The result is an unsatisfying, insubstantial clash between unreformed dwindling local parties and a leadership that acquired the top positions far too early in their careers with only half-formed ideas about what they wanted to change in relation to their party and the country.

Ooof! There’s one deep in the solar plexus!

Now for some archaeology

For Richards, the cleaving goes back back:

The likes of Cameron and his senior advisers make their tentative moves at the top of a Conservative party that has changed fundamentally. None of Thatcher’s successors has addressed the nature of the change. Famously, she transformed the party from the top, making it much more ideological. Much less reflected on is when it became far more rebellious in spirit. The change from below can be precisely identified, taking place at two key moments in its recent history.

That’s the trouble with ideology: once the bacillus is out of the test-tube, the plague is imminent. Particularly so among Tories, who had no previous exposure to any -logy, and so had no immunities.

Then Richards retraces to two seminal moments:

The first was the activists’ response to the introduction of the poll tax in the late 1980s. Previously ultra-loyal Conservative councillors, the rock on which the party was based, were passionately opposed – and for the first time in their lives vented their anger in public…

The next key event was the Conservative conference in the autumn of 1992, held after the government had been forced to leave the European exchange rate mechanism. The anger aimed at the then prime minister, John Major, in speeches from the platform was unyielding and, crucially, the insurrectionists were starting to enjoy themselves.

That’s quite convincing. It traces a direct life-line from the Bruges Group, through John Major’s “bastards”, to (the wasted talent of) Hague, to the loopy enstoolment of Iain Duncan Smith as Hague’s successor, the “dog-whistle” politics of Michael Howard’s 2005 Campaign (when Lynton Crosby whistled to a dog that wasn’t there), through the growing distaste for Cameron’s PR-style, to the present “loons”.

Richards may be in error in several respects:

• He omits the anger over Cameron’s double-standards and double-dealing at the time of the expenses scandals. Some Tory MPs went to the wall, while other offenders (Gove, as one example) were exonerated.
• He misses the further resentment over Leveson, that Cameron turned loose a beast that came back to rend his natural allies in the Press. Clearly, The Daily Telegraph does not easily forget and forgive, even if Murdoch may.
• He glosses over the NIMBY factions, all steamed up over wind-turbines, HS2, lessened building controls, loss of local authority powers (and revenues). Malcolm suspects all, and more, of that is in the sub-text of resistance to “gay marriage” — someone, something has to be blamed for the diminution of Tory power in the shires.

There’s three ways in which Cameron has offended the Code, betraying the old loyalists, the Press barons, and the “turnip Taliban” (remember them?).

• And over his assumption about Labour:

They ["the insurrectionists"] have been enjoying themselves ever since while Labour, though with its own deep structural problems, has acquired an iron discipline in public.

And again:

Cameron had an opportunity to remake his restive party and perhaps widen the membership when he won the leadership in 2005, although it would have been a titanic struggle. In terms of daunting context he was much closer at that point to Neil Kinnock, who acquired the Labour leadership 1983 and began a long, painful, arduous journey. Cameron opted for the primrose path instead, declaring that his party must be nice to the poor in Darfur and being photographed on a council estate or with huskies. This did not amount to a significant challenge to activists in the way Kinnock and then Tony Blair updated Labour, partly because on many issues Cameron was at one with his grassroots.

The Stolen Bacillus

Ah! we’re into H.G.Wells at last! We’ve been waiting for this!

Indeed. In the ’70s, in Opposition, Labour took the ideology wholesale. It didn’t infect all-comers. It did inoculate the host, though it took many years for the infection to clear the body. And Labour is not readily going to take the Kool-Aid so soon again.

Now it’s the Tories’ turn. We must observe closely to see if their infection becomes the UKIP pandemic we are promised (Malcolm suspects not).

As H.G. finishes his neat little tale of the bacteriologist and the purloined bacillus:

“You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist. No – don’t faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation of that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and I think cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and like a fool, I said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to poison the water of London, and he certainly might have made things look blue for this civilized city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course, I cannot say what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the three puppies — in patches, and the sparrow — bright blue. But the bother is, I shall have all the trouble and expense of preparing some more.”

1% of austerity. 99% of low calculation

The British Sundays know what — pending a major disaster — next week’s stories should be.

It’s all about The Make Labour Look Like the Party for Skiving Fat Slobs bill, as Andrew Rawnsley explains:

This is the legislation that will put a 1% cap on increases in most state benefits over the next three years. Nominally, this is being done in the name of collective national belt-tightening and fairness. The country is brassic. Working people, in both the private and public sectors, will have been very fortunate if their incomes have kept pace with price rises over recent years. Many have seen their living standards badly corroded. It is therefore only just that those drawing benefits should also suffer a period of retrenchment. That was the argument rolled out by Iain Duncan Smith last week as he prepared the pitch for the vote. But there has always been a partisan purpose to this measure, which has never really been disguised since George Osborne announced it in his financial statement last month. The state pension is excluded from the squeeze, even though the elderly have generally done relatively better than any other group over recent years. But, then, there are more pensioners than there are unemployed and pensioners are much more likely to vote.

It is doubtful that legislation was actually necessary. Putting it to a parliamentary vote was a cunning device to create a dividing line – or so the chancellor hoped – that would put the Tories on the side of hard-working “strivers” and force Labour to choose between endorsing a benefits squeeze that many in its ranks would see as a betrayal of its core values or looking like the defenders of idle “scroungers”.

On the other hand, as the Observer‘s front page headline story (by Daniel Boffey) notes:

Half a million soldiers, nurses and teachers will have their income slashed under the coalition’s benefits crackdown, according to a new report. The chancellor’s sub-inflation rise in benefits and tax credits over the next three years will hit a whole range of the country’s most trusted professionals.

Up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds, according to the Children’s Society. The revelation appears to contradict the government’s stated intention to target shirkers and scroungers, and will raise the temperature of the Commons debate and vote on the plan on Tuesday.

Which suggests that Cameron and Osborne are betting the farm on casual opinions from focus groups being more viable than righteous anger among millions of ripped-off middle-class voters. Hmmm … could make 2015 tricky.

In the shrubbery, something very nasty stirs …

The Sunday Times [£] goes even further. The editorial shrieks:

2013: THE YEAR WE CRACK THE WELFARE STATE

If that seems grotesquely and Murdochian neoCon, the content equally suggests such a superficial impression is not unfair:

The coalition’s record, as it will new presented tomorrow, is not bad. Financial storm clouds have not gone away and the risk is of a loss of Britain’s triple-A credit rating, but the country has moved away from the fiscal edge. Michael Gove’s school reforms are welcome and have further to run. A different health secretary has taken the heat out of changes to the National Health Service. Crime has fallen by 10% over the past two years despite spending cuts and tension between ministers and police. Yet this is also a government prone to drift and bouts of incompetence, as we saw last year.

Fortunately the Sunday Times, even at the expense of  half-a-dozen tired  clichés and the odd very partial statistic, is ever-present to insert anally a poker alongside any missing backbone. Let’s not pause to think:

• Have Gove’s “reforms” worked? Is education really on the up?
• Is the “heat” out of the NHS?
• Has real crime (and opposed to “reported crime” — reported and recorded, that is, to fewer desk-sergeants and closed police stations) actually declined by such a conveniently measurable amount?

No, let’s be swept along by the Sunday Times editorialist’s flow:

British people are not averse to change and know that the size of the state in general, and the welfare state in particular, has to be reined back. Welfare changes should be simple and fair. When the chancellor decided to take away child benefit from most higher-rate tax-payers, he thought this ticked both boxes. But while HM Revenue & Customs has made the best of a bad job, the change is anything but simple. Some of those who are losing out would also question its fairness.

Of course, had those “losing out” read Saturday’s Times, avoiding any unfairness would have been made pellucid clear (cut your hours, up your pension contributions, do a fiddle with your partner …). Note, too, no blame can — in this definition — fall on the putative 18th baronet Osborne of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon — he of the “omnishambles” budget. He was merely “ticking boxes”. The devil is in the detail, and HMRC’s implementation.

Onward and … err … upward?

The mid-term review will signal the government’s intent of implementing the Dilnot commission’s recommendation of a cap on individual liability for care costs, although Treasury worries about the long-term bill mean the cap is likely to be set at more than double the £35,000 that the commission had recommended. A white paper on pensions will pledge a new single-tier pension but is already setting hares running about big increases in the retirement age in decades to come.

Gosh: isn’t all that positive inducement to vote Tory in 2015? Particularly when the ST‘s front page (and page 2) has it that:

Elderly people will have to pay £75,000 towards their care home bills before the government steps in to provide financial help.

Lest we forget: the essential issue at stake in care of the elderly is that homes have to be sold to pay care bills. £75,000? Just lift it out of the bank? Well, perhaps not:

On average, a Brit has the grand total of just £2,205 sitting in the bank. This is peanuts – it equates to just 1.7 times the average monthly take-home pay…

There are, of course, some people who save lots. They’re called the rich. ING has a model of the distribution of savings across the UK population, and after about the 95th percentile, it starts to really take off. It was ever thus, of course, but I’d bet my cash Isa that just as income inequality has grown markedly in the past decade, so has savings inequality.

When unemployment is so high (although the jobless figures are becoming meaningless these days), when wage growth is zero or falling, when inflation is at 2%-3% (and with VAT rising), then the idea that the ordinary ­person could or will be saving more was ­always a stretch of the imagination.

We can, but naturally, skim lightly over such pinko propaganda (it was Patrick Collinson in the Guardian, and as far back as those cliff-edge days of January 2010).

For the sake of brevity, the ST‘s paragraph on Duncan Smith’s universal credit can be passed: it’s going to be a total cock-up, we all appreciate, but provided we keep the perpetrator’s name in the frame, we also know whom to blame — and it’s not going to be Dave or Ozzie if the ST can help it! And so, to a happy conclusion:

The public mood has shifted on welfare but will still become impatient with a government that displays incompetence, let alone presides over a disaster. It is important to get this right. Indeed, it must be one of the biggest priorities this year.

As opposed to a priority of government being not getting it right? And, of course, we well recognise that, this last Leveson year, the whole Murdoch Empire has been shown to be admirably competent, on the side of the angels, disaster-proof, and “right” — as here, far right. After all, across the water, the WSJ, on Rupert’s order, picked Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate, and then spent the campaign ignoring all the polling evidence. Not to mention Fox News.

Austerity: economy, parsimony, and judgment

Malcolm doubts it one of the best-known or quoted (or, as more often, misquoted) bit of Edmund Burke, though it deserves to be. It’s Burke at his vituperative and vitriolic best.

Malcolm hat-tips Hugh Dalton’s Principles of Public Finance, all the way from 1922. And that, hardly coincidentally, from very early in the text, page 7 of volume 1: — Dalton, like most economists and moralists, like Marx and Joyce in their different spheres, being one of those many authors of whom it is easy to tire, even in the first chapter.

Therefore, a well-composed word to the wise (and a dearth of cliché) from Edmund Burke, Collected Works, volume V, page 229. Burke has it in for his Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator. Bedford had criticised the payment of a state pension to Burke — and Burke had no compunction is contrasting his public service to those of the Russell family, who had become great and good by pandering to Henry VIII.

Burke saw an overgrown Duke of Bedford machinating to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity of the crown.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense and great expense may be an essential part in true economy. Economy is a distributive virtue and consists not in saving but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment and a firm sagacious mind.

Shooting the messenger?

Here’s one that will have after-shocks:

A police constable with the diplomatic protection group has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, Met Police say.

The officer was arrested late on Saturday and bailed on Sunday to return in January. He has been suspended.

The arrest was made by officers investigating how national newspapers came to publish police records of an incident at Downing Street.

In other words, the Met have thrown thousands at an internal investigation and pay for a suspended officer. Mitchell (a miserable non-apology for a ‘gentleman’) largely got away with it. OK, he lost office, but he was over-promoted, he owned his elevation to Cameron’s need to keep his right-wing ultras in line, and the nation is not greatly at a loss for dispensing with his services: in Sir George Young the Tory Party, parliament and the country have the better man.

Presumably the Met is still racing to catch up with its own serial failures (at far higher levels than any mere police constable) and complicities with the Murdoch press.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

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.

Tagged as “human waste”

A few greybeards may remember — back in the ’80s? — that the (then broadsheet) Times caused a small sensation when it published a full-page nude. Malcolm cannot remember the context — it was presumably an advertising stunt. He seems to believe the model was Trac(e)y Neve; and the issue was a sell-out.

Anyone with a clearer recollection. please help.

Are you ready for this?

Smelling-salts to the ready.

And so to the cartoon on the main comment page of today’s Times [£].

Remember this is the Times.

It is owned by Murdoch.

It is therefore distantly related to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

Malcolm is prepared to make a small wager (give up this blogging lark?) neither of those would see this as decent political comment:

Andy? Is that really you?

Does the Guardian‘s ever-delightful Notes & Queries column want to imply something? Try this:

How best to avoid being bitten by a menacing dog?

Dogs always think that they live in a pack, and normally all you have to do to subdue a (psychologically undamaged) animal is to assert convincingly that you stand higher in the hierarchy than he does. If baring your teeth, snapping and barking loudly is beyond you, any gadget shop will sell an ultrasonic device that will bark very loudly on your behalf, at a pitch conveniently beyond human, but not canine, hearing. I’ve seen such an instrument work astonishingly well on a Greek village dog: dog to hangdog in a second.

Andrew Coulson, Musselburgh, E Lothian

Well, he knows about psychological damage, about positioning in the hierarchy, barking, about going from  dog to hangdog in a second, and — most suspiciously of all — about the electronic contents of gadget shops. And his name … Andy, is that really you?

Dirty digging?

You can’t keep a good dirt-disher down.

Interesting to see indefatigable John Ward is serving ordure réchauffé at The Slog:

The story so far: we know that the Groucho Club run by JHJ Lewis indulged in unregulated surveillance. We know that a website using the same domain and name as The Groucho was an active paedophile linking forum for at least a year. We know that Mr Lewis has donated a probable six-figure sum over time to the new Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. We know that Lewis gave Hunt £4000 to visit New York, where he hob-knobbed with the Murdoch media elite. We know that ten days later, James Murdoch met David Cameron and confirmed that the Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper would support the Conservative Party in the forthcoming election. And we know that Lewis was in charge of a major Tory paper on UK Tourism, one in which the Prime Minister took a keen personal interest. Today, in Episode Three of the Hunt-Groucho Saga, The Slog discusses what the chances are of these being significant, or simply coincidental, connections.

The listing of Jeremy Hunt’s bungs is interesting, in itself. As for the spicier stuff, one can only wish Ward luck. What London, Britain and — indeed — our position in the World needs at this time is something seriously to tut-tut over.

• And we haven’t had anything scrumptiously salacious since the Sainted Diana met Pillar Thirteen and her eternal rest.
• And it’s that old saw about all the best Labour scandals being about money, but all the best Tory ones being about sex.

But if Ward has got anything here, it’d out-Profumo the lot. Just what Britain’s reputation needs.

As for that Lewis was in charge of a major Tory paper on UK Tourism, one in which the Prime Minister took a keen personal interest thing, it relates in part to:

… a Tory taskforce invited to produce a special report, UK Tourism in a Competitive World, which could form a blueprint for the Conservatives’ approach to business tourism. 

The brief from taskforce chairman JHJ Lewis was to “find a recipe that unleashes the vibrancy of our historic cities and market towns that preserves our magnificent heritage, that celebrates our rolling countryside and revives our coastal resorts – not for the ephemera of yesterday’s memories but for the hard cash of tomorrow’s economy”.

Though, the short and snappy comment by “Dylan Jones, Editor of GQ Magazine”, as here, might have some passing relevance.

We have to draw (ahem!) lines somewhere.

University challenge?

Currently the Great London Met disaster is trending.

Malcolm admits to being torn over this one. The students, and potential students, have been sold a pup. They have been treated quite disgracefully by the whole government and institutional bureaucracy.

Yes, we need wider access to higher education.

Yes, we should encourage overseas students  — and lecturers, and distinguished academics — to find a place, however transitory, in London. Everyone benefits.

But…

… there is something badly, madly, sadly wrong with some of our weaker “universities”.

Once upon a time this was the reputable Northern Polytechnic, one of those fine institutions that George Bernard Shaw recommended to the nation in Man and Superman:

Tanner: A little moderation, Tavy, you observe. You would tell me to draw it mild. But this chap has been educated. What’s more, he knows that we haven’t. What was that Board School of yours, Straker?

Straker: Sherbrooke Road.

Tanner: Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something: Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old school-fellow.

Straker: You don’t know nothing about it, Mr Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic.

Tanner: His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin, or Glasgow. Not even those Non-conformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy. Regent Street! Chelsea! the Borough!—I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you?

Straker: No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like.

Shaw, remember, had been on the London Schools Board. He knew of what he wrote. In a way, he could see where English technical education was failing. And Straker, the mechanic, is the Superman round these parts.

A disaster in the making

Let’s admit, the way London Met recruits has played straight into the hands of Damian Green.

So, let’s get that one out of the way immediately.

Green is an ambitious Mr Toad. He smoked his tyres in the run-up to Election 2010 over the immigration scare. He certainly left marks on the road.

Hence, he may have some reason to feel that the ConDem pact excluded him from a promised place at the Cabinet table.

It is re-shuffle time. Everyone in the second and third Tory ranks is feeling uncomfortable. Green needs to leave some more rubber on the carriageway.

London Met is in trouble

It consistently ranks at the bum-end of any league table. Only the University of East London keeps it off bottom spot. It has financial problems, which go back far beyond the present crisis.

Malcolm admits he has seen the joint from the inside. And is definitely not impressed.

Where to go?

Clearly something has gone awry with the way the UK has expanded higher education.

Once upon  a time there was a clear hierarchy: Oxbridge, Redbrick, concrete, lavatory tile. Unfair and silly. But we knew where we were when we (and our accepting institutions) made the choice. Nobody questioned that — say for engineering — a red-brick out-boasted any Oxbridge. Or if nukes were your thing, you went to Manchester. Or that concrete East Anglia’s creative writing beat anything else hands down. Even for accountancy, Wolverhampton was your thing.

Then it all went mad

Anywhere could have a “university”. One of the great arguments for Hull School of Art being translated (via the Humberside College of Higher Education and Humberside Polytechnic) into the University of Lincoln was that Lincolnshire was the last county of England to be denied its proper “university”. Lest we forget: it’s not one of the worst. Many of these “newest” universities are nothing of the sort: they teach undergraduates in a limited range of disciplines. Some might as well be specialist institutions — the Luton School of Computing, and the like.

Worse still, with the ConDem coalition, any joint — public, private (who cares?) can offer degrees. The market will decide — even though it might take ten years for the market value of a degree from Little Piddlebury International University of Chiropody to be valued in the public forum. So what? Several thousand students will have coughed up to £9,000 a year to test the market. Yes, the market will decide. Sigh.

Meanwhile degree mills will continue to churn out would-be lawyers, managers, social workers, health managers, information technologists and , of course, ready-coined apprentices in umpteen branches of the  media.

What’s to be done?

In the case of those unfortunate overseas students at London Met (and — one can but guess — in this xenophobic period, they are but the first of an annual swathe), not much. Some enterprising civil-rights lawyers will doubtless pursue their reasonable claims through the courts; and a settlement will be arrived at. Probably, and conveniently, after the next General Election.

However, Malcolm has a Modest Proposal.

In effect the universities have already created their own league table:

• The Russell Group

The Russell Group represents 24 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector.

• The 1994 Group

The universities of Durham, Exeter, York and Queen Mary, University of London, have joined the Russell Group, it has been announced.

The four universities have left the 1994 Group, which represents smaller, mainly campus-based, research-intensive universities, to join the Russell Group of elite universities.

It increases the membership of the Russell Group to 24 and reduces the 1994 Group’s membership to 15.

• Million+

We use rigorous research and evidence based policy to solve complex problems in higher education. We publish research reports and policy papers and we submit evidence to parliamentarians, government and other agencies. 

And little fleas have lesser fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em. And so ad infinitum.

In effect we have a Premier League, a Championship , and a couple of lower divisions.

Promotion and demotion

This we sadly lack, as yet.

So, here’s a wonderful opportunity for “open government” and the “big society”.

Micky Gove at the Department of Education would have to nominate these league tables — though with around a hundred institutions, it might work best if we had five divisions of twenty teams a league. OK: that might mean half a dozen have to go to the wall, or down into the Totesport Combination, where London Met is already. It might be more humane to arrange a few shotgun “mergers” to save Vice-Chancellor faces (and pensions).

Job done, we formalise an annual competition with promotion and emotion. We might award points, exactly as now, on a basis similar to that of the Times Higher Education Supplement:

Our rankings of the top universities across the globe employ 13 separate performance indicators designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge transfer. These 13 elements are brought together into five headline categories, which are:

• Teaching — the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)
• Research — volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)
• Citations — research influence (worth 30 per cent)
• Industry income — innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)
• International outlook — staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).

Indeed, the proposal gets better and better. Introducing a commercial element — each university could rebrand itself with sponsorship on the shirts: Adidas Liverpool, Honda Reading, Barkers Leisure Parks Aberystwyth — should appeal to those weirdo free-marketeers like ex-Times man, Micky Gove.

The THES comes from the belly of the News Corp beast. That’s the Murdoch octopus. Which has its own television arm in Sky. Were Murdoch in one form or another to sponsor the league, all we need to add is a swimsuit round — and the annual ceremonial promotion and demotion is ripe for primetime viewing:

Hello, Sky Center!

Here are the votes of the International Outlook panel:

FeetBiche Boat Cam’ Brig-tonne, douze points. FitBitch Boot Camp Brighton, twelve points …

Nut jobs with guns

They lined up  to milk The Dark Knight Rises Bane/Bain homophones for what they could get.

• Jon Stewart:

“The Daily Show” host took a comical stab at GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney by tying his former company Bain Capital to its supervillain namesake, Bane.

Stewart joked that Romney’s old venture capital company “happens to bear the same name as the most frightening and current ‘Batman’ villain.”

Bain Capital has been labeled by Democrats as a “jobs killer,” and Stewart wasted no spearing Romney’s campaign bid by airing a list of Bain Capital’s purported villainous acts.

• Chris Lehane:

“It has been observed that movies can reflect the national mood,” said Democratic advisor and former Clinton aide Christopher Lehane. “Whether it is spelled Bain and being put out by the Obama campaign or Bane and being out by Hollywood, the narratives are similar: a highly intelligent villain with offshore interests and a past both are seeking to cover up who had a powerful father and is set on pillaging society,” he added.

• And also starring:

Conservative commentator Jed Babbin told Secrets, “Now we have the new Batman movie with super-villain Bane, the comic book bad guy who broke the Bat’s back. How long will it take for the Obama campaign to link the two, making Romney the man who will break the back of the economy? Romney can’t win if he’s constantly on the defensive,” he said.

Even GOP advisor Frank Luntz jumped into the fray. “Hollywood does it again,” he told Secrets. “[Romney] had to know all this was coming and he should have done a lot more to prepare for it.”

• Inevitably:

Rush Limbaugh had to offer his two cents’ worth:

Have you heard this new movie, the Batman movie, what is it, The Dark Knight Lights Up or whatever the name is.  That’s right, Dark Knight Rises. Lights Up, same thing.  Do you know the name of the villain in this movie?  Bane.  The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e.  What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy?  Bain.  The movie has been in the works for a long time.  The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time.  Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane?

Ex America semper aliquid horrendum

(Reuters) - A masked gunman killed 14 people at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie in a suburb of Denver early on Friday, sparking pandemonium when he hurled a teargas canister into the auditorium and opened fire on moviegoers.

Fifty others including children were wounded in the attack on the showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in a mall in the Aurora suburb, some of whom were treated for the effects of tear gas, hospital officials said.

There can’t be a connection. Can there?

Trigger hacked-off: help from on high at hand?

“Trigger” Mulcaire may have scored Wimbledon’s first, ever, but more recently it’s been all own goals.

Let us then celebrate that the Supreme Court (it had to go that far!) has told him to cough on who was his News International puppet master.

Mulcaire received as much as £850,000 from the News of the Screws for his dutiful services, hacking upwards of 5,795 people (as of the November 2011 count). We may safely assume it wasn’t out of petty cash. The obvious name in the frame is Greg Miskiw, the News of the Screws Assistant Editor, That’s assistant to Andy Coulson. Now — conveniently  — Miskiw is a resident of Palm Beach, Florida.

A further reasonably assumption is this went all the way to the top, even beyond Miskiw, particularly because Max Clifford waived his claim for compensation after he met with Rebekah Brooks (but before Mulcaire’s conviction) and agreed a fee of a cool million for Clifford’s slimy future services.

The Orange card

Miskiw may have a 28-pounder shell, primed and ready, in his ammunition locker, because nobody, but nobody will be too keen on developing the Northern Irish dimension. Once again we are back to Stakeknife.

Miskiw was buddies with Alex Marunchuk, once the Screws crime reporter, then Irish editor. Marunchuk was a partner with Jonathan Rees in Pure Energy. Miskiw and Rees were partners in Abbeycover, which itself was an adjust of Southern Investigations, which takes us to ex-copper and child-pornographer Sid Fillery. The Rees-Marunchuk link takes us into trojan emails and computer hacking (and so to the police Operation Tuleta). Then there’s Operation Kalmyk, which is focused on Rees hacking Ian Hurst (a.k.a. Martin Ingram) — which is the Stakeknife connection.

As Malcolm was noting a year back, by that stage we are into the viscera of the beast, the notorious Force Research Unit, at Thiepval Barracks, in Lisburn.

_________________________________________

No, no, a thousand times no. This is not paranoia.

The Smithwick Tribunal in Dublin is looking at the IRA murders of Chief Sup Harry Breen and Super Bob Buchanan of the RUC at Jonesborough in the South Armagh/County Louth border country, apparently returning from a covert meeting with the Irish security service in Dundalk. Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP MP, has alleged that the IRA were tipped off by Garda DS Owen Corrigan. Corrigan’s IRA “handler” is alleged to be the (equally alleged) double-agent Freddie “Stakeknife” Scappaticci. Scappaticci, along with the late John Joe Magee of Dundalk are (even more alleged) to have been the key members of the IRA “nutting squad”. One further “alleged” is that Scappaticci was second only to the OC IRA Northern Command, a certain Máirtín Mag Aonghusa, MP, MLA.

Ian Hurst, after extensive going-and-froing was induced to give evidence to Smithwick: that was redacted for public consumption. The RTÉ reports, especially that of 26th April, should be required reading.

And you thought it was all about Milly Dowler’s phone?