An end to Dicking about

After a week or so, the all-purpose political metaphor that is Richard III ought to have breathed its last.

Sadly, it hasn’t.

Chris Riddell’s editorial cartoon for today’s Observer is one more death-rattle:

Paul Goodman, who should also know better, entertains the stupid party through today’s Sunday Times [£], with a similar meme in his assonant Blue on yellow: it will be beastly in Eastleigh:

Even Conservative MPs who are sympathetic to Cameron are viewing Downing Street’s dysfunctionality with bewilderment. And any voter benefit that the prime minister may have won from the first budget cut in the European Union’s history will have evaporated by polling day.

I don’t believe Eastleigh will prove to be another Eastbourne [the October 1990 by-election, won by the Lib Dems, which contributed to Thatcher's unseating]. For while a core of irreconcilables would like to see Cameron buried beneath a car-park for several hundred years, like some latter-day Richard III, he has no obvious successor — in the Commons, at least (although Boris Johnson lurks outside). However, poor results in the local elections in May could put the prospect of a leadership challenge back on the table.

Rather laboured, don’t you feel?

Except, in that article, Goodman knocks off Labour in two sentences, and that in a bracketed aside:

(Ed Miliband’s interest will surely be focused on inflicting maximum damage on Cameron. It follows that he will want his party, a distant third three years ago, to lie low and not filch support from left-leaning former Lib Dem voters.)

The other side of the hedge, back at the Observer, that’s exactly what Andrew Rawnsley reckons, devoting his whole article to:

It is too early for Labour to write off its chances in Eastleigh

Ed Miliband’s party shouldn’t just jeer from the byelection ringside as the Tories and the Lib Dems slug it out

Where Malcolm sits, Rawnsley is by far the more observant, and has a better grasp of the history:

At first glance, Labour has no chance. On the party’s list of target seats, Eastleigh is number 258. Yet Labour cannot afford to sit it out and just jeer from the ringside as the coalition parties slug it out. Ed Miliband now likes to style himself as the leader of the “One Nation” party. He declares that Labour is recovering support in southern England. So he must be seen to be trying to win here. And is it quite such a hopeless prospect for Labour as most people, including the bookies, are assuming? At the general elections of 1955 and 1966, Labour came within fewer than 1,000 votes of winning Eastleigh. Admittedly, the shape of the seat and its demographics have changed considerably since then, but more recent elections also suggest that Labour should not entirely write off its chances. The last time there was a byelection in the seat, in 1994, Labour came second, ahead of the Tories, with more than 27% of the vote. At the 1997 general election, Labour achieved a similar score.

In 2010 it didn’t make sense for Labour to throw resources against Huhne. A 10% return on minimal investment was acceptable — and it was a seat denied the Tories. Not this time. All previous outings suggest there is a natural 25% Labour vote here. With a few more LibDems switching against the ConDem coalition (and Lib Dems happily split allegiances between local and national polls), with a few more plaguing both houses and staying at home, with a bit of natural disgust at ConDem in-fighting, with UKIP picking up disaffected Tories, and with a few more Labour feet on the streets, the 25% Labour vote is rock-bottom. The blue sky of a three-way marginal is the limit.

Rawnsley, unlike Goodman, has done the demographics:

This is not posh Hampshire. Benny Hill is Eastleigh’s most famous product. While it is hardly one of the most impoverished parts of Britain, nor is this former railway town a place that oozes privilege and easy wealth. The typical Eastleigh voter will be first- or second-generation home-owners feeling a painful decline in their living standards and worrying what the future holds for their children. These are the classic “squeezed middle” voters whom all the parties identify as crucial. These are voters whom Labour must aspire to represent if it is serious about forming the next government.

Precisely. To which could be appended: these are voters with no great reason to feel gratitude to either faction in the government. It is also suburban Southampton: not, one might feel, the place where contact with the Continent is most scorned — and the Tory lady does seem a dodgy prospect under close scrutiny for the next three weeks. We can bet on one thing: she will be closely minded.

No, you read it here first

Rawnsley’s closing is this:

A Labour win in Eastleigh seems hugely unlikely to most people today. Because it would be so unexpected, it would be a spectacular result for Ed Miliband and a shocking humiliation for both the coalition parties. If it happens, remember you read it here first. If it doesn’t, forget I ever mentioned it.

For Labour, it is anyway better to fight and lose than not to fight at all. For the Tories and the Lib Dems, only victory will do.

Which is what Malcolm has been suggesting, here and elsewhere, for some time.

Is the future really bright?

The memory is clear from the revival of Close the Coalhouse Door. Malcolm was a bit rusty on the exact Alex Glasgow lyrics, but help was at hand:

“— When its ours, Geordie lad, when its ours:
There’ll changes bonny lad, when its ours!”

“— Are you sure we’ll be all right? Is the future really bright?”

” — (Oh, for God’s sake, man) We’ve won this bloody fight!
An its ours, all ours!”

So, on 1st January 1947, the miners of the North-East (and across Britain) sincerely believed nationalisation would change the nature of pit-work. For many it did: the very next year, Malcolm’s Uncle Ernest Copley was leading the stay-down strike to keep open the Waleswood Colliery. That campaign failed. Today the only mine in the South Yorkshire coalfield is Maltby.

The message, as always, remains: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it —

“— When its ours, Geordie lad, when its ours:
Man, the wife’ll be reet glad when its ours!”

“— Tell me Jackie, whats in store? What will she be grateful for?”

” — Why, I’ll stop in bed, wi’ her,
When its ours, all ours!”

Self-deception

You’d find a similar bubble cruelly popped by Malcolm d’Ancona in the Torygraph, as he suggests:

Westminster’s Tory tots must do some growing up

The mutineers are living in a Hogwarts fantasy world – where all it needs to achieve growth is a wave of the magic wand

“The Tory century”

He opens:

The Conservatives have a do-or-die decision to make before the next general election – and it is not about the identity of their leader. They must decide if, having dominated the 20th century, they are serious about being a party of government in the 21st. They must decide if they want to retain their reputation as the nation’s crisis managers. They must decide if they want to be seen as political grown-ups, or a bunch of overgrown kids using Westminster as a playground.

At this stage of the Parliament, Ed Miliband was expected to be the tribal chief facing a leadership crisis, and the Lib Dems the party answering hard questions about their commitment to office. Yet, in February 2013, it is David Cameron who is being undermined by talk of a leadership contest, and the Conservatives who – in some garrulous cases, anyway – are more deeply preoccupied by internal party intrigue than by the governance of the country.

Well, well: that must make Asquith, Lloyd George, Clem Attlee — not to mention Beveridge and Nye Bevan — all makers of 20th century Britain, equally all natural Tories.

As for being the nation’s crisis managers, there was that 1946 business when Hugh Dalton had to despatch J.M.Keynes to Washington.  Or the other one, 1974-9, when Denis Healey was coping with the economic ruins of the Heath administration. Odd how, in the parallel universe populated by the d’Anconas, “clearing up the mess left by the previous government” is persuasive only when it falls from Tory lips.

As for the c-word, we could have a good’un cooking right now, as even the Torygraph‘s James Quinn recognises:

Sterling caught in a quiet crisis

It’s only “quiet” until the screaming starts. That could come along very soon; and — as Quinn glosses George Soros (and even the IMF) — the fault is not longer “the previous government” but:

austerity was the “wrong policy at this time”

Have the Tories lost the plot?

Well, some most definitely have — which is d’Ancona’s beef,  following that excellent, if mischievous, Guardian editorial earlier this week

Meanwhile, Andrew Rawnsley takes the argument a step further into the shrubbery — and has something very nasty stirring in there. He emphasises the chasm between Tory myth and Tory reality:

There are few things so forlorn as a cliche that has turned into the opposite of the truth.

Ah, yes, Andrew: the miners of ’47 had just that experience. But, sorry to interrupt, pray continue:

One such is the aphorism of Lord Kilmuir, the Tory grandee, who declared that “loyalty is the secret weapon of the Conservative party”. If you were to tell this to David Cameron, he’d surely laugh. So would all his recent predecessors as Tory leader. It was not even true in Kilmuir’s day as he discovered when he was summarily sacked from the cabinet by Harold Macmillan in the 1962 “Night of the Long Knives”.

The trademark of much Tory history is that the party frequently kills its leaders and its leaders often betray their friends. Ted Heath was toppled by Margaret Thatcher. She was defenestrated and replaced by John Major. That saved the 1992 election for the Conservatives, but the Thatcher regicide injected a virus into the party’s bloodstream that has made life hell for every leader since. His party so tortured Mr Major that he felt compelled to reapply for his job in the “put up or shut up” contest of 1995. They re-elected him and then promptly went back to torturing him. After their 1997 defeat, the Tories went through three leaders in eight years before they arrived at David Cameron. Just half way into his first (and possibly only) term as prime minister, they are at it again. His party swirls with talk of knives being sharpened, signatures on no-confidence letters being collected and assassination plots being hatched.

 Much as Malcolm likes and admires Rawnsley, a piece by Peter Franklin for ConHome, over five years ago, ran on remarkably similar lines. Franklin concluded:

I’ll leave you with another cliché, but one that’s as true as it’s ever been:

There’s no ‘I’ in team.

There’s no ‘I’ in loyalty either. Disloyalty, however, is another matter.

For once, Rawnsley isn’t taking us anywhere, and his perceptions are as mundane as Malcolm’s too often are. We can forgive him, however, for fingering the guilty (as the dissident Tories would see it): Cameron himself —

… his unforgivable crime for many of them: not winning a proper Tory victory at the last election, which fuels the growing fear in Conservative ranks that the same will happen next time. Mr Cameron’s enemies within are absolutely correct that this was a big failure, but they are quite wrong when they go on to say it was because he did not offer enough right wing meat to the voters. The party tried that in 2001 and 2005. In 2001, after four years of Labour government, the Tories made a net gain of just one seat. In 2005, after eight years of Labour and the Iraq war, the Tories made a net gain of less than 1% in the share of vote. There has been some fascinating analysis of voters who thought about voting Conservative in 2010 but in the end didn’t. The conclusion from these studies is that swing voters were unpersuaded by the Tories not because they were insufficiently right wing, but because they were not detoxified enough. Mr Cameron is now paying the price for that.

The “detoxification” cliché

 Rawnsley doesn’t need to spell it in full. The poison in the Tory blood will be evident again next week.

We learn — depending on your source — that 130 or even 180 Tories will vote against the gay marriage bill. That’s more than half the non-payroll vote, even half the parliamentary party.

To what end?

The bill will pass. Nobody outside a small group of the politically-committed will notice the passing. Tim Montgomerie gets that one:

There’s lots of nonsense emanating from certain pollsters, notably ComRes, about gay marriage having a disastrous impact on Tory fortunes. YouGov’s Joe Twyman has Tweeted an important link which shows that the effect might well be negative in the short-term but that – AT WORST – it will reduce the Tory vote from about its current 34% to 33%…

Joe’s numbers don’t account for the generational issue. Younger voters really cannot understand the opposition to same-sex rights. The Conservative Party rebels on gay marriage are putting themselves on the wrong side of history.

As of now, the ConHome comments on that article run to some two gross: far too many are defiantly, aggressively the wrong side of the generational issue and the wrong side of history. Yes, many of those can be dismissed as the usual rants from UKIPpers and (by the sniff of it) escapees from the local tin tabernacle.

Then the mainstream Tory press is reporting a new grassroots campaign, and here things may be a bit more serious. Despite protestations:

… along with many faithful, local Conservatives, we have become increasingly concerned at the policy direction of the Party and the apparent rejection of cherished Conservative principles.

This appears, for now, to be a single-issue campaign:

We are particularly disappointed at the manner in which the leadership is seeking to push through the redefinition of marriage, squeezing out the debate, scrutiny and accountability that Conservatives so value. Yet we fear that this experience is symptomatic of a wider problem – of a leadership that is out of touch with its grassroots.

This campaign is mighty mysterious: no address, a mobile ‘phone number and contact only via an anonymous web-site. But that’s how guerrilla warriors work. A cynic might wonder if this is another front of that dubious Coalition for Marriage, or, if not, why a parallel fifth column was required.

No, Mr Cameron, your future is none too bright. Is it?

Mind how you Gove!

No, not the Singing Postman (of whom Malcolm has writ), but what may be going on behind the educational arras.

Watching Guido Fawkes’s recent bleatings, he may be onto something.

There is an on-going spat between Toby Helm ( a decent small-l “liberal” journo at the Observer) and the all-mighty Goveian Empire at the Department of Education. In such contexts, think Gove as Tarkin and his Death Star.

It looks as if:

1. The MinEduc Spads (an Orwellian reference there, please note) were let off the leash to harass Helm. For reference, the SpAds at the Department of Education have form. One is diabolically rude and arrogant, the other destroys the evidence. For the record,  they are (or, as of the next few days,were):
   • Dominic Cummings;
   • Henry de Zoete.
2. When that assault failed, heavy infantry, in the form of the redoubtable Sarah Vine, was deployed.

Sarah Vine? Oh, you know:

Oh Minister, what toe-curling secrets will your wife reveal about you next? His terrible driving. His love of scented baths. Is there ANYTHING writer Sarah Vine won’t disclose about life with Britain’s Education Secretary

 This one will run and run. Tomorrow’s Observer may be worth the read. Oh, look! here it is!

Run, do not walk, to this spat-fest!

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.

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.

Not all-at-sea. Then down to the Quay

Yesterday’s Observer was, in Malcolm’s estimation, a great issue. Things at the King’s Cross Lubyanka (as right) may not be tickety-boo financially; but this is how to fight back. Guardian Media Group must go back to first principles, be a campaigning, aggressive force for the centre-left.

Pride of place has to go to Andrew Rawnsley’s authoritative listing of the:

10 reasons to recast a government or, if you like, 10 tests of whether there was any serious point to holding a reshuffle.

That was worth the entry fee in itself; and will — let us hope — provide him with repeat fees when it reappears in anthologies of political wit and wisdom (and, as in this case, awful warnings).

Elsewhere Toby Helm, politically editing, was black-dotting the eyes, and double-crossing the local tea-party tendency. It was a Stakhanovite effort: Helm’s inky fingers were all over the place. Here we find Helm reminding us that Cameron serially irritates his “natural” Tories in the Shires, there he has David Miliband looking for Blairite inspiration in Barack Obama. He main-headlines with the way the Tories are betraying any “Green” credentials. Any one of those would amount to “good stuff”: together they are an all-out onslaught.

Just what is needed  à la entrée. Normal hostilities are recommenced.

Then there’s page 35, and two seminal pieces. Catherine Bennett on David Cameron’s way with women? Show them the exit. Ms Bennett may, by name, seem an escapee from a Jane Austen novel, but she shows she has one of the sharpest knees to the groin. Below that again, Nick Cohen details how Our children go hungry for want of Tory compassion:

‘Compassionate conservatism” turned from a slogan into an oxymoron on the day when Save the Children launched an appeal to feed the British poor. For what it is worth, that was also the moment when I understood that removing the Conservatives from power is now a national priority.

The charity had launched its first appeal for British children in living memory. It asked the public for £500,000 to help provide them with “the essentials – a hot meal, blankets, a warm bed”. I know what you’re thinking. Why so little? The average Manchester City player earns £500,000 in six weeks. The average FTSE-100 company boss takes £500,000 from shareholders in two months. £500,000 will not buy you a decent flat in a smarter part of London or semi in the home counties. Last month, property journalists gasped like porn actresses at the size of Heath Hall, a 14-bedroom mansion just north of Hampstead. The agent’s asking price for the most expensive home ever to go on sale on the open market was £100m – or 200 times the £500,000 Save the Children want to relieve the suffering of British children.

The modesty of last week’s appeal did not enrage Conservatives, however. Rather, the charity’s insistence that British children needed the public’s help to provide them with “hot meals” drove them wild. Conservative newspapers denounced Save the Children as “obscene” for implying that British children were as needy as African children. I won’t waste your time or mine by refuting their arguments in detail. Their main evidence that the charity was now a leftwing propaganda outfit was that Justin Forsyth, its chief executive, was once an aide to that notorious socialist Tony Blair.

 That, and the rest of a potent eleven paragraphs, is worth inscribing in granite, and dropping it from high altitude on any convenient assembly of Tory hierarchs and their smoothie-chopped SpAds. It’s Orwellian, almost Swiftean, in its “savage indignation”:

The collapse in living standards means that those who once lived comfortably now worry about filling their cars and those who once scraped by worry about filling their bellies. You cannot generalise about them or fit them into a comforting Conservative cliche. People of all backgrounds need food parcels: small businessmen and women who can’t get invoices paid; parents who are living on toast or potatoes and spending what little money they have on better food for their children.

To use old-fashioned language, the Conservatives who fail to acknowledge their distress are no longer patriots. Instead of asking how their government can stand by while their fellow citizens go hungry, they denounce the charities, which in however small and pathetic a manner, try to take on the responsibilities of a failed state.

If Rawnsley paid for the entry, Cohen provides for anything else.

From troubles of the world I turn to …

Well, Frank Harvey, a fellow Gloster with Ivor Gurney, would have us consider ducks —

Beautiful comical things
Sleeping or curled
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool …

As a respite from a PoW camp in WW1 Germany, that is understandable. Despite being a “favourite poem” for those pseudo-research exercises, Ducks can cut:

Fearful too much to sleep
Since they’ve no locks
To click against the teeth
Of weasel and fox.
And warm beneath
Are eggs of cloudy green
Whence hungry rats and lean
Would stealthily suck
New life, but for the mien
The bold ferocious mien
Of the mother-duck.

When Anthony Boden was writing a monograph on Harvey, the sharp side came out. This, for brevity (and because Malcolm doesn’t have the original to hand), from a review:

… the poem was written in Holzminden Prison Camp when Harvey was a prisoner of war in the First World War, and had come out of Harvey’s deep gloom during his time there… Boden tells us that when Harvey was told that “during the Second World War one of the English exercises in German schools had been to translate Ducks into German, his reaction was: “Serves the Germans damn well right!”

And so to Wells

The last time Malcolm was in Wells (Norfolk, that is) there was a small convoy of ducks paddling along the quay wall. This, as far as Malcolm can recall is something of a novelty. Still, where there’s Warburton‘s, there will be ducks.

That, contrived as it is, has to be Malcolm’s link to John Naughton, also in yesterday’s Observer. Naughton, unlike most commentators, sees new hope for the failing, flailing giant that is Microsoft:

How Microsoft is looking beyond an app-centric world

Microsoft may have stolen a march on its smartphone rivals by putting social connectivity at the heart of the user experience

Agains the tidal flow, Naughton reckons the Dark Side is ahead of Apple and Android:

There is one company that is trying to challenge the dominance of the app-centric model. It has released phone software that puts social connectivity at the heart of the user experience… This makes the app-centric design of Android and iOS look quite clumsy.

Brave stuff, the week before the latest iPhone is released. But that wasn’t what made Malcolm sit up and take notice of Naughton. It was his intro:

When my kids were small, one of their favourite walks was down Staithe Street in Wells-next-the-Sea, a charming seaside town in Norfolk. Staithe Street is long and narrow and is lined by small shops on either side. What fascinated my kids, however, was not the second-hand book shop, or the antique dealers or the delicatessen or the cafes but the fact that there were several shops selling plastic toys of the kind one finds only in British seaside towns. In addition to buckets and spades and improbable fishing nets, there were exotically shaped pump-action water pistols, plastic swords, three-legged boomerangs, plastic tennis rackets with balls attached by elastic strings and battery-powered devices with lights that flashed and sirens that wailed.

Well, fair enough. There isn’t a seaside or holiday resort in the world that doesn’t sport its tat. It goes with the territory. And Malcolm can tell Mr Naughton those three-legged boomerangs are great fun; so don’t knock it.

Anyway, Wells is like that for just a few weeks in the summer. Much of the year Staithe Street is unfrequented.In a rude, blustery and bone-chilling mid-February north-easterly, Malcolm reckons it’s best for being twelve years old, and charging a bicycle down at full tilt, against the gusts, and doing the equivalent of a hand-brake turn round the corner by the Golden Fleece. He remembers that as well.

Two questions: 2 Is “failure” essential for educational success?

In recent days the English press (note Malcolm is always precise in referring to nationality) has been hailing the school exam results. For a change, not just because of photo-ops up-leaping-skirts and down-bewildered-blouses.

No, we had such gems as the Times reckoning any decline in A-level grades was a good thing, because a 2% “failure” rate meant the qualification was worthless. On the contrary: good pastoral advice and guidance means the minimum of students waste a year or two of their young lives in a hopeless pursuit of an impossible attainment.

All that apart, it’s good to see the Observer chewing over what all this amounted to. Particularly when the paper’s main political spot is back in the hands of Andrew Rawnsley, and he is on-track:

Mr Gove … always said that he would not greet exam results as his Labour predecessors did by patting himself on the back and saying: “What a good boy am I.” How could he, after all? It would have been rather hypocritical when his has been a strident voice alleging that the value of GCSEs and A-levels has been corroded by the “dumbing down” of exams and the over-generous awarding of grades.

So in his first two Augusts as education secretary, when records continued to be broken, Mr Gove did not look terribly content. He has had to wait until now to find something to celebrate about the exam results season. “Brilliant!” he cried as GCSE grades fell for the first time in the exams’ 24 years of existence. “More children are failing.” Well, all right, he didn’t quite say that, at least not out loud. But he looked pretty satisfied to me and, given all that he has said in the past about making exams tougher, he ought to be happy about that and the dip the previous week in A-level grades.

He has had to stress, of course, that he put no direct pressure on Ofqual, the regulator, to force down grades. The regulator has in turn denied that there was any heavy breathing down its neck from the education secretary. Ofqual’s boss assured viewers of Newsnight that she took her “independence” so seriously that she had never had a single conversation with Mr Gove about grades. Some people have found this hard to believe, but I am inclined to take both him and her at their word. The education secretary would not need invite her in for a coffee for the head of Ofqual to know that he wants to make it harder to achieve pass and top grades. He would not need to do so because he has swished the cane of “academic rigour” in countless interviews and speeches in which he has made it abundantly clear that this is what he wants to happen.

There’s a flavour there of Tom Hood’s Faithless Sally Brown:

They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll’d the bell.

Gove did not need to give explicit instruction to Ofqual chief regulator Glenys Stacey. Recall that Gove has systematically replaced anyone who questioned his diktat in education. One of his early appointments was Isabel Nisbet to head Ofqual,  succeeding Ed Ball’s appointee, Kathleen Tattersall. A political appointment; but not political enough, for Nisbet went on record:

There are certain types of questions you get asked a lot when you are the chief executive of the qualifications regulator Ofqual. As today is officially my last day in the job, I can answer them pretty bluntly.

“Are A-levels and GCSEs getting easier?” I don’t believe that they are – although I do acknowledge the evidence that teachers and candidates are now much better drilled in preparing for them.

“Is level 3 hair and beauty really as difficult as A-level maths?” Frankly, I don’t care about this kind of extreme comparison, and neither do university maths departments, nor the employers of apprentice hairdressers and beauticians. The important thing is that exams and qualifications should be fit for purpose – they should be demanding, assess what they are supposed to, support the progression that they claim to, and reinforce the best teaching and learning.

Eminently sane, logical, so out-of-kilter with the Goveian dogma. Thus we arrive, a dog-whistle away, at Glenys Stacey. Who explicitly takes personal responsibility for directing a shift in grading;  and tells the BBC and the nation (ignore the sexist legs that obsess Youtube), “I am tightening up …”

All we need to know now is how, why and when the edict went forth to the exam boards to raise the barrier. Parliamentary committee members are doubtless sharpening claws already for that cat-fight.

Glenys Stacey had already had a stab at the issue in her presentation of October 2011, Standard bearing: A new look at standards. She was already indicating that past comparisons were the order of the day:

we should continue to prioritise comparable outcomes over comparable performance.

That means the biggest enemy of the system is that nebulous but ever-present bug-bear, “grade-inflation”:

In reality, the differences between the two are very subtle – perhaps the difference of a single mark on one or two units contributing to an A level, but we can see … that the cumulative effect of small changes can be considerable.

Those of you with long memories will be thinking this is a return to the norm referencing used for A levels between 1963 and 1987, where approximately 10 per cent of students in each subject were expected to achieve a grade A, 15 per cent were expected to achieve a B, and so on. But that’s not what we’re doing. We know there are differences in the entry between subject and between awarding organisations, and we have more sophisticated ways of predicting the outcomes for a cohort of students, and we’re certainly not proposing to abandon those.

Our guiding principle has been one of comparable outcomes. All other things being equal, we’d expect the results for a particular cohort of students to be comparable with the results of the previous year’s students. When we talk about ‘comparable performance’, we mean senior examiners looking at the work the students have produced and comparing it to the work of the previous year’s students. 

Which can only mean that we are applying some degree of ‘norm-referencing’ (limiting this year’s results to the same parameters as previous years’) — except we’re not, and we shall maintain that with endless formulae of words.

For those new to this debate, the question amounts to a simple one: do we mark the papers, or do we mark the cohort. If this years’ students are comparable to previous generations (and statistically they should be) we can award the “top” 10% and a-grade, and work down the deciles. No grade inflation possible there.

Except that’s not how the system works, not how the National Curriculum works, not how schools have been forced to work, not how teachers have been obliged to teach (in Ms Nisbet’s unfortunate word, above, “drilled”), not how students have “learned”.

For absolutely everything taught and learned under the National Curriculum is — or should be, objective and “criterion-referenced”. Take, for example, English — which is at the centre of this year’s hoo-hah. Here are the prescribed criteria for writing at C-grade:

Learners’ writing shows successful adaptation of form and style to different tasks and for various purposes. They use a range of sentence structures and varied vocabulary to create different effects and engage the reader’s interest. Paragraphing is used effectively to make the sequence of events or development of ideas coherent and clear to the reader. Sentence structures are varied; punctuation and spelling are accurate and sometimes bold. 

What that means, in practice, is that

• writing at C-grade
  • shows accurate spelling and sentencing;
  • is well paragraphed;
  • has a fluent, apt style;
  • apt vocabulary;
  • describes and explains logically;
  • narrative is controlled ;
  • and the set tasks are completed.
• writing at D-grade
  • has some repeated spelling mistakes which go beyond occasional ‘typos’;
  • confuses the use of full stop and comma;
  • paragraphs are mostly accurate;
  • tyle is mostly apt;
  • here is  some lack of fluency
  • and the set tasks are largely covered.

So it should be a matter of “tick the box and get the grade”. Except, of course, Ms Stacey is subjective — and blatantly so — in her ”I am tightening up …”

It appears the only way schools can maintain the grading for their “better” students, as Ms Stacey constantly ratchets the grade-barriers,  is to ensure that there are more at the other end. For if we up the dunderhead ratio, we maintain the numerical comparison with former years.

Surely something wrong.

If you’re in one, stop digging

Denis Healey is guaranteed his eternal place in the anthology of political axioms for his 1983 First Law of Holes, as in the headline here.

William Keegan, in today’s Observer, gives the saw a new burnish:

Indeed, when the economy is depressed, and business and the general public (we so-called consumers) are cutting back, the only way to prevent the situation from becoming worse is for the public sector to fill the gap, not to make it even bigger.

“Healey’s Law” has been quoted before in this column and is worth repeating. It goes as follows: “When you are in a hole, don’t dig any deeper.” As for all that public sector borrowing, it is being done at negligible interest rates – much lower than the rate at which the private sector can borrow for all those “private” infrastructure initiatives the government is doctrinally trying to encourage. As Robert Stheeman, head of the UK Debt Management Office, observes: “It’s extraordinary. If you had told me just a few years ago how low they [the UK's borrowing costs] could go, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

That, as part of a heart-felt plea for the early re-deployment — by preference to unemployment— of Gideon George Osborne:

… one notes that there is much speculation about a cabinet reshuffle, although there is also much guidance that this will not involve the most obvious candidate for such a shuffle, namely the chancellor.

Cameron’s more illustrious predecessors, such as Harold Macmillan, would have had no hesitation in giving a discredited chancellor his marching orders. But to sack Osborne would of course be to admit the failure of the strategy, and invite retribution from the rating agencies. A Macmillan, of course, would have been big enough to call their bluff.

Osborne is having a difficult weekend elsewhere. The Sunday Times [£] dishes a bit of dirt with:

The Osbornes at No 42 — and at No 48

Sir Peter Osborne, 17th baronet, and his wife, Lady Felicity, have put their six-bedroom house in a prestigious street in Notting Hill, west London, on sale for a reported £15m.

But they have also found an estimated £10 million to splash out on a five-bedroom house near-by.

This is what certain circles regard as “down-sizing”. Malcolm understands the problem full well, and himself has contemplated removing from Redfellow Hovel to a kennel. That apart, the ST [still £] gives it both barrels:

Earlier this year Osborne Sr embarrassed his son with an interview in which he talked about his lavish lifestyle at a time when the chancellor was under fire for cutting the 50p top rate of tax to 45p. George Osborne claimed in 2009 that “we’re all in this together” when he announced a public sector pay freeze.

For those who have been in a Tibetan lamasery these last few years, that George Osborne utterance was delivered to the 2009 Tory Conference. Even then, and among his own, it went down like a bucket of rat’s regurgitation, as here from George Pitcher in the Torygraph:

My esteemed colleague, Dr Simon Heffer, opens his critique of George Osborne’s Manchester speech by wondering what the shadow chancellor’s mantra “We’re all in this together” might mean and why he repeated it so often.

I think I know precisely why. It’s the upper class way of saying “I feel your pain”. And there is an alternative view and it’s this: No you don’t. It’s a bit rich frankly (and, yes, I do see the irony in that phrase) for the son of a baronet and the heir to a trendy wallpaper fortune to claim that we’re all in this together, all up the same creek in a chicken-wire tub with a similar absence of paddles.

Somewhere a trifle more soigné than “a chicken-wire tub”, we re-encounter Sir Peter Osborne, still in the ST [£ — lest we forget]:

In the magazine How to Spend It, the 69-year-old baronet said he had his eye on a £19,000 Italian writing desk and spoke of his love of Savile Row suits and “unforgettable” holidays on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique.

Somehow that pretentiousness is echoed, and answered, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, acknowledging the death of Gore Vidal.

An unnamed friend of ours had lunch with Vidal in his final home in the Hollywood Hills… a house that could have served as backdrop to one of the more Gothic episodes of Columbo. Mini-staircases connected proliferating rooms; plaster arches stretched between functionless beams; a wrought-iron gate guarded the living-room. Vidal had left La Rondinaia, his fabled villa on the Amalfi coast a few years before, no longer able to negotiate the steep cliff paths.

And then this gem, which is the epitome of Vidal’s astringency:

Around the dining table were six chairs with metallic backrests moulded into the shape of goats’ heads at the crest. ‘I bought these in Rome twenty years ago. The dealer saw my interest and immediately started, Oh . . . ancient-this, cinquecento-that . . . . I said, No they’re not. They’re the chairs from the movie Ben-Hur. I wrote it.’

Let us hope Sir Peter, 17th baronet of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon, would as easily recognise any dirty work when acquiring his £17,000 work-station.

Still digging

If the young Master of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon is in need of excavation guidance, so — it would seem — is Willard Romney, another of those tortured souls with forename problems. As Gideon was forsaken for George, so Willard prefers to be called a glove.

List to the authoritative Nate Silver at FivethirtyEight:

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.

Further to the Right, but also under the NY Times Big Tent, we find an equally unconvinced Ross Douthat. Doubthat, we should recall, was the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. That, though, was 2008, and before the rise and rise of the Tea Partyers. Now Douthat is plaintively wondering Why Paul Ryan?  [That headline has to be a direct rebuttal of the WSJ's endorsement last Thursday, entitled Why Not Paul Ryan?]

Malcolm feels Doubthat’s pain:

Romney has been running a cautious, content-free campaign, and picking Ryan will effectively force him to become much more substantive on policy, while giving the country the clearest possible choice heading into November. But setting up a clash of worldviews doesn’t address Romney’s most glaring policy weakness, which is the (understandable) fear among hard-strapped voters that Republican policies will benefit the rich more than the middle class. Ryan’s association with entitlement reform is at best orthogonal to that weakness, and at worst it exacerbates it substantially. What’s more, by picking him Romney may have passed up a golden opportunity to take advantage of the Obama campaign’s leftward tack over the last year: Instead of making a sustained play for the center of the country, he’s chosen to raise the ideological stakes.

If there is a bigger hole to be dug in US politics, it’s anything that involves “ideology”. In the case of Ryan, a policy wonk of high orders, the ideology involves shrinking US public debt (a good thing!) over forty long years (i.e. kicking it as far as possible into the longest grass) by killing off healthcare spending. Critics note that means increasing public debt (from $10 trillion to $16 trillion) over the next ten years. Any comparison with the economics of the Bush years are, naturally, profoundly unwelcome.

In the latest conservative.org ratings Ryan scored 80%, down from a 96% a year earlier. Considering Michelle Bachmann rated 95% (but still doesn’t qualify for the ACU “Defender of Liberty” rosette), we into serious weirdo bat-shit here.

Observer of a train-wreck

In the absence of Andrew Rawnsley, normally Malcolm’s first port-of-call on a Sunday, but “away”., “Michael Cohen in America” gets the Observer‘s main political comment spot, right under Chris Riddell’s, as usual, smart, tart cartoon.

Cohn bemoans:

The defining characteristic of modern American politics is the growing conservatism, even radicalisation, of the Republican party. Beginning in 2009 with the birth of the Tea Party movement, a party that was already fairly conservative began moving to an even more isolated spot on the American political spectrum. The result was, and is, an unprecedented period of legislative obstructionism, pronounced political polarisation and a party that is more ideologically conservative than perhaps at any point in history.

He checks off the newest notches on the extremists’ gun:

• Texas where, in a Republican primary, Tea Party darling Ted Cruz defeated the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst.
• Kansas, where in Tuesday’s Republican primaries for the state Senate, conservative candidates, pushed by the state’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback, and backed by dollars from the infamous Koch brothers, trounced all but one of the body’s remaining moderate Republicans.
• Missouri, where congressman Todd Akin, another conservative darling, won a Republican Senate primary versus two more moderate contenders.

All of which, and more. is pushing Romney further and further rightwards:

Romney has followed the crowd, adopting increasingly strident political positions. This was true throughout the Republican primary season as Romney, facing off against a motley collection of Tea Party-approved also-rans, was forced to take stances on immigration, government spending, taxes, abortion and a host of other issues favoured by the party’s most conservative members but that left him vulnerable to Democratic counterattack.

Illegal immigration is perhaps the best example. It’s an issue that is a veritable cri de coeur for the Tea Party and Romney embraced their views to the point where he attacked unpopular Texan governor Rick Perry for insufficient rigour in cutting social services for illegal immigrants in the state. It gave Romney a boost in the Republican primaries but also provides a hint as to why he is losing Hispanic voters to Obama by a 2-1 margin.

If that doesn’t amount to digging a hole, the selection of Ryan seems like excavating a slit-trench:

With confirmation that Romney has selected a conservative favourite, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, to be his running mate the capturing of Romney by the far right is complete. While Ryan is popular on the right, he is the author of the so-called Ryan budget, a House of Representatives-passed bill that would eviscerate the social safety net and end the federal senior health programme, Medicare. His selection allows the Obama campaign to attack Romney even more directly over the most unpopular elements of the Ryan budget (which the candidate has already foolishly endorsed). It is a disastrous pick, but is emblematic of the extent to which Romney’s hands have been tied by the Tea Party. Pacifying them is as important as reaching out to less conservative voters. Rather than leading the GOP, Romney is simply following the herd.

Not just a conservative favourite, but — we now hear — the one anointed by Rupert Murdoch (and therefore, by osmosis, Fox news), no less:

Thank God! Now we might have a real election on the great issues of the day. Paul Ryan almost perfect choice.

God? almost perfect? This is getting a little too teleological for Malcolm.

Malcolm feels we should have sympathy for moderate Republicans — now an endangered species — in their hour of need. Steve Morris, one of the sacrificial victims in the hecatomb that was the Kansas primaries, was affronted:

Morris, the president of the National Conference of State Legislatures which is holding its annual summit meeting in Chicago this week, said conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Kansas Right to Life spent between $3 and 8 million.

Morris noted that the Koch brothers also helped fund the campaign, using Kansas as a testing ground for their ideas. “They said it will be an ultraconservative utopia,” Morris said of the Kochs. “It depends on your definition of a utopia.”

A new definition of “digging for victory”?

Between the present and when the reaction comes, as it surely will, there will be many more political graves. And decent men and women in them.

Monday, bloody Monday

It might be the damp gloom of a London morning, as drizzle festers into heavy, slow droplets.
It might be the twinge of a pulled leg muscle (Moral: “Don’t run after a bus or a woman: there’ll be another along in a minute”).
Most likely it’s the faintest lingering of a white wine hang-over.

Anyway, Malcolm is distinctly Gershwin-ish:

I was a stranger in the city:
Out of town were the people I knew.
I had that feeling of self-pity —
What to do, what to do, what to do?
The outlook was decidedly blue

Any day improves on a dose of Ella, even though that isn’t her best version.

as rough As are the swelling Adriatic seas

Coffee taken, it’s catch up with yesterday’s unconquered newsprint. Susannah Clapp, doing theatre for The Observer (in a very good edition, all round), is a trifle snippy about Trevor Nunn’s Kiss Me Kate at Chichester:

It could be called Trevolution: that peculiar pace at which a Nunn show unwinds. At its best it brings a long array of new detail. At its worst it’s sluggish and wit-dispelling. Kiss Me Kate is Nunn at his worst. Cole Porter’s terrific music and dextrous, startling rhymes can both leaven and expose that most arid of Shakespeare’s plays on which it is based. Not in this production, which adds facetiousness to the disagreeableness of The Taming of the Shrew.

That will transfer to the Old Vic in September, and the Redfellows are already booking for it. Most of the other critics are far more positive: Christopher Hart, all Cultured up for the Sunday Times, coos nicely:

Alex Bourne, playing Fred Graham/Petruchio, has the necessary mordancy and domineering harshness, but he convinces with actorly vanity and hamminess … Hannah Waddington is … perfect and touching as Lilli, swaggeringly, boorishly manly as Kate in I Hate Men.

Possibly the best laughs come from the fantastically dim and subservient blonde (or is he?) Lois Lane, played by Holly Dale Spencer. Of the minor characters, Wendy Mae Brown makes the most of a sadly small role.

The choreography by Stephen Mears is an absolute joy, as good as anything you’ll see in the West End, and the singing is crisply clear … Trevor Nunn’s productions have not always been entirely successful recently, but this is a great return to form, loading on numerous neat touches and visual gags ..

There has to be salt with all this red meat, so Hart chimes with Clapp to conclude:

Tighter pacing and some cutting might have helped. The one universal complaint you regularly hear among theatre-goers is that it went on too long. I’ve never heard anyone say it was too short.

Her name is Katharina Minola

Malcolm has had a very soft spot for Kiss Me Kate, ever since Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson at the long-gone Regal:

Having occasionally to teach The Shrew convinced Malcolm that the druggist’s son had improved on the son of the glover.

Later he saw Michael Blakemore’s Broadway revival at the Martin Beck Theatre, still running in the summer of 2001. On that same trip, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm agreed to defer viewing New York City from the top of the World Trade Center: it would always be there another year. Marin Mazzie was Lilli/Katharine then, and came to London with the production, where Malcolm caught the show again.

Harkening back to Christopher Hart on lengthy performances, there’s an obvious rejoinder in the magnificent patter-duet that is Brush Up Your Shakespeare. With the requirements of Eisenhower-era “decency”, this was necessarily and shamefully abbreviated for Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore in the 1953 MGM film. As a result, Malcolm had never relished the full-length version until done by Lee Wilkof and Michael Mulheren, which was one of the show-stoppers. Here (in a rostrum performance) is the finest five-minute scene change in theatrical history:

As the rain passes, and the day moves to noon, with a hint of brightness, the lethargy lifts.

And, that, folks, is how Malcolm clears his head, this World UFO Day.

A vice-regal lodging

Good to see the spirit of Roy Brooks still persists among the provisional wing of the estate agent profession.

As among today’s Irish Times property porn:

For newbies, Roy Brooks operated out of the King’s Road, Chelsea. He died in September 1971, having made a reputation for himself with unmissable advertising in the Sunday Times and the Observer. For example, this gem:

Wanted: Someone with taste, means and a stomach strong enough to buy this erstwhile house of ill-repute in Pimlico. It is untouched by the 20th century as far as conveniences for even the basic human decencies are concerned. Although it reeks of damp or worse, the plaster is coming off the walls and daylight peeps through a hole in the roof, it is still habitable judging by the bed of rags, fag ends and empty bottles in one corner. Plenty of scope for the socially aspiring to express their decorative taste and get their abode in The Glossy, and nothing to stop them putting Westminster on their notepaper. Comprises 10 rather unpleasant rooms with slimy back yard, 4,650 Freehold. Tarted up, these houses make 15,000.

Desmond Wilcox was a friend of Brooks, and used him to sell his house. The friendship survived Brooks’s ad, which described the corner of Wilcox’s sitting-room:

… a white painted brick feature for holding exotic drinks. Rather theatrical and in keeping with the pretentious style of the owner.

The wit and wisdom of Roy Brooks is still available in two booklets (The successor firm’s web-page includes a further example of the inimitable Brooks style).