“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.”

Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

Figuring it out

The classic Thomist angels-on-a-pin-head is updated by the constant debate on UK unemployment numbers. Today (despite the Thatcher-fest) should inspire a new outbreak:

UK unemployment rose by 70,000 to 2.56 million between December and February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has said.

It meant the unemployment rate for the quarter was 7.9%.

The number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance last month fell by 7,000 to 1.53 million.

Also, the ONS said average regular pay, excluding bonuses, rose 1%, the lowest since records began more than a decade ago.

The number of people in work fell by 2,000 in the latest quarter to February, to just under 30 million, the first time the figure has dipped since autumn 2011.

The ONS data also revealed that 900,000 people have been out of work for more than a year, an 8,000 increase on the three months to November, while the number of unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds rose by 20,000 to 979,000.

Despite the increase in unemployment, the total is 71,000 lower than a year ago. There has been a 62,000 fall in the number of people in part-time jobs, to just over eight million, with a 60,000 increase in full-time employment, to 21.6 million.

As day follows night, the ConDem understrappers have to see all that as “good news”:

Employment Minister Mark Hoban welcomed the fall in the number of people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA), and especially the drop among young people.

Only in a parallel universe is the ministry for unemployment named so perversely. Hoban seems to hail two glad tidings:

1. That the numbers failing to claim “JobSeeker’s Allowance” (it used to be unemployment benefit, and was seen as a right which was paid for by deductions from paid salaries while in work) are down. What that amounts to is many are being dissuaded from claiming their due benefits because of the “skiving” hysteria generated by government propaganda.

2. “… especially the drop among young people.” What drop? In the number of claimants, presumably — see (1) immediately above. The Office of National Statistics are reporting an increase! 18-24 year olds up 20,000 in the quarter, and up 1.5% over twelve months. This is the actuality:

A coolie economy

Beyond these numbers lies a harsher truth. The British are being educated into a low-wage, low-productivity economy. Cheap labour is making investment and industrial improvement unnecessary. Last month the Financial Times‘s Brian Groom was getting closer to the real problem:

Output per hour worked fell 2.3 per cent in the final quarter of 2012 compared with a year earlier, fuelling concern about the UK’s poor productivity since the recession of 2008-09.

The figure was down 0.5 per cent compared with the previous quarter and was the sixth successive quarterly fall, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

John Philpott, director of the Jobs Economist consultancy, said: “The figures for manufacturing productivity are very worrying. Output per hour in the manufacturing sector has now fallen for five successive quarters and in Q4 2012 was 5.2 per cent lower than a year earlier.”

He added: “Such a sharp and prolonged fall is in marked contrast to much of the period since the start of the recession in 2008, during which time manufacturing productivity has generally increased.”

Weak productivity has resulted in an overall rise in unit labour costs despite a squeeze on wages, although this has slowed since the past two quarters.

Other figures show that earnings are growing at just 0.8% over the year, while consumer prices are running at 2.8% (and predicted to rise further to 3.5% by the middle of 2013). Lest we forget, the great ConDem economic miracle (founded 2010) was going to be founded on:

•  a shift from public- to private-sector employment (going nicely, thank you: public sector redundancies continue apace); and
• Britain’s economy would power ahead on consumer spending.

At this point, let us bear in mind a painful fundamental:

Productivity is a key economic indicator used to measure the efficiency and competitiveness of an economy. It is a key factor determining the underlying ‘trend’ or ‘potential’ rate of growth of an economy over the medium-term.

Excuses! Excuses!

Ah, but it’s been the bad weather! Snow! Sun! Drought! Flood! €-crisis! Royal wedding! Locusts in Belgravia! Olympics! Jubilee! Earthquakes in Dorset! (Take your pick, as Gids Osborne does at each reiteration).

Except reality peeps through this dense fog of dissimulation, as Abigail Hughes and Jumana Saleheen ever-so-polititely explained in their study for the second quarter bulletin of 2012. This, without fanfares, gave us the quite shocking comparison of Labour productivity across countries (see right).

It doesn’t need any great expertise in graphicity to spot that, in the years of the Labour government, British productivity was consistently improving and outstripping the competitive economies. Since the crisis, all that has gone into reverse.

Meeow!

The usual explanation of why production and productivity are falling, while employment hasn’t yet plummeted, is “labour hoarding”. Employers, not necessarily out of loyalty to their employees, keep a larger work-force than they currently require. That has a logic: no business, in straits, is without a Micawber belief that Something will turn up; and reliable employees are not a commodity to be dispensed with lightly. Others place weight on a woolly notion of “intangible investment” (that amounts to improved R&D and ‘software’) — something with all the odour of a ‘thought experiment’, an economist’s version of Schrödinger’s cat.

Boston, 15th April 2013

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave
The secret force to find
Which fired the little State to save
The rights of all mankind.

But right is might through all the world;
Province to province faithful clung,
Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled,
Till Freedom cheered and the joy-bells rung.

The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart;
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart,
Till these echoes be choked with snows,
Or over the town blue ocean flows.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston.

 

Bragging or fagging?

It’s one of the many obscene puns that Bill Shakespeare … err … slipped in. It’s there at the end of Love’s Labours Lost:

Adriano de Armado: I do adore thy sweet grace’s slipper.
Boyet [Aside to Dumain]: Loves her by the foot, —
Dumain: He may not by the yard.

You don’t get it? Well, try the Wycliff Bible version of Genesis XVII.11:

 Ȝe shulen circumside the flehs of the ferthermore parti of ȝoure ȝeerde.

That  Ȝ is the letter ‘yogh’ (read the letter as a ‘jhuh’) and solved the problem implicit in the modern ‘y’ — either a consonant or a vowel, with two very different pronunciations.

If you’re still at a loss, the OED gives the eleventh meaning of “yard” as “the virile member”.

That’s the groundwork done.

So consider why Malcolm was amused by this one:

As seen in the Thomas Becket, 21 Best Lane, Canterbury.

Value and votes

As Albert Einstein (quite when and where Malcolm doesn’t recall) had it:

The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving.

Admittedly, his pre-eminence in bumptiousness is a close run thing with Alex “Wee Eck”  Salmond, but if there is one bumptious individual in Britain well assured of his “worth” is it the egregious Nigel Farage of UKIP.

Suddenly we have a whole swathe of commentators suggesting that, had Farage been the Kipper candidate at the Eastleigh by-election, on Monday of this week he would be taking a seat in the Commons.

Really. Really?

For all the froth, Diane James — by all accounts, an excellent candidate — polled 11,571 (27.8%) for UKIP. Mike Thornton for the LibDems managed 13,342 (32.06%).

So, to the question: would Farage have parachuted in and pulled a further 2,000 votes, say — another 5% or so of the poll? Malcolm feels that is extremely unlikely:

• The Labour vote was unchanged — it has been squeezed to its die-hard core by tactical voting (not ideology) on the decent principle of AIBAT (anyone but a Tory).
• Yes, there was considerable defection, compared to 2010, among both LibDem and Tories — again, had UKIP the clout to squeeze that further?
• That leaves only the option of UKIP engaging with and motivating the Don’t Knows and Stay-at-homes. And they didn’t — unlike the imported LibDem hordes — have the feet-on-the-streets and the local knowledge to achieve that.

Einstein had another thought — it was on a plaque in his office at Princeton — we could apply to Farage as the electoral wunderkind:

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

 

Screwing the screwers

While Malcolm was swanning around Berlin, the Guardian seems to have expanded the Westminster digested column to a full G2 page. Somehow, too, John Crace’s by-line goes missing this week — though, not for the on-line version.

Crace on top form, then:

Cameron: … Now I suppose I’d better do something about my own party. Any thoughts on a bill that would show the country the Tories are totally united?

Theresa May: Gay weddings. We need to send out a strong message that the Conservatives are no longer the nasty party.

Cameron: Great plan. Sam’s very keen on it, too. Though we must leave plenty of opt out clauses for religions that don’t like gays so they don’t have to marry them if they don’t want to. If you know what I mean.

May: Of course. It would be remarkably intolerant of us to ask the church to treat gays equally.

Sir Roger Gale MP: That’s absolutely outrageous. May I just remind the House that I have been married three times, so no one is better qualified to speak on the sanctity of marriage than me. And quite frankly it is absurd to think that anyone other than a man and a woman should be granted such an honour.

Another traditionalist: Hear, hear! Adultery is an holy estate and not something that should be made available to a bunch of same-sex perverts.

Gale: Indeed, if we open marriage up to practising homosexualists then we might as well tear up the Bible completely and let every Tom, Dick or Harry marry his dog.

Yet another traditionalist: Steady on old boy! You’re losing some of the Tories from the shires here. They’re very fond of their labradors.

Gale: Or worse still, a member of their own family.

The Queen: Shut up, you horrible little man. There’s nothing wrong with marrying one of your relatives.

What Gale said in Tuesday’s debate was hardly less surreal, but even more deliberately offensive:

…  if the Government are serious about this measure, they should withdraw the Bill, abolish the Civil Partnership Act 2004, abolish civil marriage and create a civil union Bill that applies to all people, irrespective of their sexuality or relationship. That means that brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters and brothers and sisters would be included as well. That would be a way forward. This is not.

Oooh, you are awful!

Jump across the staple from that Crace to Stephen Moss, on Revenge is rarely sweet. Another tea-time treat, listing the betrayed wives who have done so much to enliven social discourse:

There are dozens of examples of women in the public eye, or whose partners are in the public eye, who seek revenge. When Robin Cook left his wife, Margaret,she wrote a book detailing his alleged infidelities and heavy drinking. When the then Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik split with his weather-presenter fiancee Siân Lloyd in 2006 and succumbed to the charms of Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia – he called it a “meeting of minds” – Lloyd wasted little time in rubbishing Opik. “I regard our break-up as my lucky escape,” she said. “It is just a huge relief to be out of that relationship. He’s a fool when he’s in love and totally oblivious to the damage he is doing to his reputation.”

Journalist Maria Shriver reportedly took revenge on her former husband Arnold Schwarzenegger by leaking material on his infidelity and the child he had fathered with his mistress. Lady Sarah Moon avenged herself on her straying husband by cutting up his designer suits, covering his car with paint, and leaving much-prized bottles from his wine cellar on their neighbours’ doorsteps. Princess Diana exacted her revenge for her failed marriage in a gripping TV interview watched by 15 million people. More stomach-churningly, there are those stories that periodically appear about women who cut off the penises of their unfaithful husbands, which is taking an eye for an eye to extremes.

All of which, over 1100 words, is put in the literary contexts of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and particularly Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay, On Revenge. That last one is pungent, moral, uplifting, pertinent — and all in fewer than 450 words. Irish Leaving Certificate English introduced Malcolm to Bacon; and it’s a delight which has lasted over half-a-century. Ten minutes with Bacon can occupy the mind for hours thereafter, relishing the words, weighing the eternal truths. In the case of On Revenge, however, Malcolm guesses Bacon was building on the bare dozen or so words of the fifth maxim of the sixth book of Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

In the matter of Vicky Pryce seeing off Huhne, though, let’s hear it from Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, chapter III):

… one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.

Scrapbook (1) — file under politics

This, and the next, post is Malcolm in full-on Autolycus mode, snapping up whatever ill-considered trifles others discard or mislay.

First, then, John Harris in The Guardian, with the Tory Party Losing the plot. At least that was the newsprint title: on-line it’s:

Can David Cameron see off the Tory troublemakers?

The same-sex marriage bill has opened up deep rifts between the different factions within the Tory party. So how do insiders view the crisis that threatens to engulf David Cameron?

A bit Rentoul, Questions To Which The Answer Is No, there, Malcolm feels. Still, the essay included three of those political quotations that Malcolm cherishes:

“Pretty Fanny”

…  until the arrival of Thatcher, the Tories were a party of power: pragmatic, flexible, supremely confident – and rarely moved to the extent of passion by much more than vague patriotism and a sense of their own importance … The party-at-large was more of a giant social club than a political organisation, and the people at the top often cleaved to the mindset beautifully captured by Arthur Balfour, the Tory prime minister between 1902 and 1905: “Nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all.”

At a quick guess, Harris purloined that from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, whose The Strange Death of Tory England gets mentioned elsewhere in the article. Quite why that one, of so many Balfour gems, is the most cited may be explained in that it so perfectly matches the laid-back ennui that, unfairly, typifies Edwardian England between the Boer and the Great Wars.

Dirty Dick

Harris follows that, in the very next paragraph with:

For most of the past century, it was Labour that was most often distracted by internal strife, something that prompted the senior party figure and political diarist Richard Crossman to bemoan the different ways that each of the titans of British politics responded to political difficulties. “When the Tories are in trouble,” he wrote in 1956, “they bunch together and cogger up. When we get into trouble, we start blaming each other and rushing to the press to tell them all the terrible things that somebody else has done.”

Malcolm has the faintest suspicion that Harris is inverting Andrew Marr’s 1999 article for the New Statesman, Fear and Loathing on the Left, which is where one can also find that tit-bit from Crossman’s back-bench diaries.

That one catches Malcolm’s attention, not just because of the palpable truth and bitterness it contains, but specifically with the word “cogger”. One feels it implies all false mateyness and chaps-together, a variant of “codger” — as Dickens has it:

‘You have been drinking,’ said Ralph, ‘and have not yet slept yourself sober.’

‘I haven’t been drinking YOUR health, my codger,’ replied Mr Squeers; ‘so you have nothing to do with that.’

Ralph suppressed the indignation which the schoolmaster’s altered and insolent manner awakened, and asked again why he had not sent to him. [Nicholas Nickleby]

Or it’s a bit of that school slang (Crossman was Head Boy at Winchester, and didn’t it show)  that sticks to us through life. “Cogger” is a double-edged weapon, and typically so in Crossman’s fine Italian hand. In seventeenth-century cant, it was one who cheats at dice. Later, in Ainsworth’s Latin dictionary of 1783 it was the translation for:

Palpator, a flatterer, coger, cajoler, sycophant, glozer.

Hey! Hey! LBJ!

Harris inevitably reaches the thorny topic of ConHome:

… the website-cum-movement whose figurehead is Tim Montgomerie, the man who briefly served under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership as his chief of staff, before going on to position himself as the voice of Tory activists. It may be some measure of the febrile state of Tory politics that Montgomerie is one of the most influential Conservative voices, who torments the leadership on a regular basis. Yesterday, he was orating from the pages of the Times, arguing that the Tories were in a ”fundamentally unhealthy” state, that Cameron’s modernisation project “has been conducted casually”, and that the prime minister’s political machine “has the attention span of a goldfish”.

There are only three good reasons (and they are good) for reading ConHome: Montgomerie, Paul Goodman (the ex-MP for Wycombe) and the spectacle of Tories making fools of themselves.

Harris continues:

Montgomerie is also a high-profile supporter of Johnson, whose most notable contributions to last year’s Tory party conference were a frenzied “Boris rally”, and a new website that crystallised his view of the correct Tory path, with its url reminiscent of the political satire The Thick of It: strongandcompassionate.com. What Cameron thinks of Montgomerie is not a matter of record, though his constant manoeuvrings may bring to mind what Lyndon B Johnson famously said of advisers to President Kennedy: “They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I’d feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff.“

Possible error there: that one is more usually accredited to Sam Rayburn, and said to LBJ (though, of course, Johnson was quite capable of recycling it). Rayburn was the Texan Democrat who was the longest-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives. His seventeen years, over three terms, in possession of the Speaker’s gavel (as well as an intimate knowledge of the dirt under the fingernails of Texan politics) gave ample chance for his earthy wisdom to be recorded.

And next, it is hoped, to booky things …

Constitutional reform only happens if …

… it suits the interests of those implementing it.

Not just an historical truth, indeed an axiom, but the punch-line of a beta++ effort by Steve Richards for Independent Voices.

Let’s take on face value Richards’ headline:

Why fixed terms parliaments are a nightmare for leaders and a gift for rebel MPs

Our Chief Political Commentator says that Conservative MPs can plot and stir because the next election is still years away

Hold on! Surely that’s what a true Independent would wish? And … err … yes, it somehow reminds Malcolm of …. Ah, yes! —

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion…

If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?

Indeed, the authentic Burkean voice from the College Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin (founded 21st March 1770), of which — much later, and far less oratorically polished — Malcolm’s alter ego was once a minor officer.

Richards’ Big Thing amounts to this:

The current parliament is already nearing the end of its natural life. Symptoms of mortality take many forms. In terms of policy Cameron has made waves recently with two big announcements. Both apply to the next parliament and not this one. His proposals for a referendum on Europe and high speed rail take effect after the next election. The more immediate agenda in the Commons is of little significance compared with those post-election policies and the near revolutionary measures placed before MPs in the Coalition’s early unprecedented flurry of reforming zeal.

In other words, the health of the body politic depends on a renewal of the parliamentary mandate in the short term, not in May 2015.

Yet, as he makes clear, with little to do, and at a time when MPs should be honing their knives for re-election, it’s all gone deadly, flatly dull. The death of the Bill to change boundaries was the last straw, which is why (even after Clegg slit its throat) the Bill was kept in suspended animation while all kinds of pressures were brought to bear:

• Over the weekend, were the DUP really told they could exempt Northern Ireland, if only …
• Why does James Kirkup (who should know better) and other susceptible post-adolescents keep afloat the notion that the Bill can be revived?

And, for the Satan’s Blood (“800,000 Scoville units”) in your political chilli, muse on what MPs get up to, when otherwise not exerted. Why, they plot, of course! Or, as Richards renders it:

There will be no election in 2014. After the next 12 months there will be another whole year before the election moves fully into view. There is still plenty of time to be disloyal, to speak up for principled conviction, to plot and plan against a leader. This has some danger for Clegg. But Cameron is the main victim as news surfaces of a plot to install a successor … if he loses the election. Such plots happen for many reasons. One is that Conservative MPs have time on their hands, lots of it. They will rally round next year, but not this. The fixed-term has made prime ministerial life less secure rather than more.

Even so, Malcolm has another gripe with Richards’ piece, particularly so in the rest of that final paragraph:

Constitutional reform only happens if it suits the interests of those implementing it. Presumably Cameron thought that in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. But most fixed-terms in other countries last a maximum of four years. Five years is far too long. And of those five this is much the most dangerous for leaders hoping to flourish when the still distant election finally arrives.

As Malcolm recalls, the LibDems, suspicious that Cameron and Osborne would dump them were an electoral opportunity to open, inserted the time element in the coalition agreement. Now, what could possibly have provoked that partisan fear into the pre-nup?

Second, Richards is absolutely correct. Five years was, is and always will be too long. Malcolm’s Pert Young Piece had considerable difficulty in  explicating the five-year term, at the Anzac Cove gathering, 2012, to a band of highly-dubious antipodean democrats. It’s also been commonly accepted, nearer home, ever since the Fixed Term Parliaments Bill was first out there in the wild. Anyway, consider:

• The “ones-we’re-bound to lose” (Macmillan-Home in 1959-64; Wilson-Callaghan in 1974-79, Major in 1992-97; Blair-Brown in 2005-10) went into a fifth year;
• To which might be added the “one we miraculously didn’t lose” (Major, 1992) which also went to the wire.

Versus:

• the ones “we can win” (Thatcher in 1983, 1987; Blair in 2001, 2005) which took advantage of the opportunistic electoral windows.

On that basis alone, the 2010-15 government had given away its main electoral advantage: the chance for any prime minister to exploit a particular moment, one when the economic and electoral cycles could be matched. So, a Malcolmian prediction, when the next parliament assembles, if there’s a majority government, the 2011 Act will be repealed in short order and shall hear no more of fixed -terms.

In short, there’s that gross misunderstanding: in the unusual circumstances of a Coalition a fixed-term would bring stability. Richards, wisely predicates that with the weaselly “presumably”. Consider the normality of UK politics: in the forty years from Wilson to Cameron we will have had just three governments defenestrated — in 1979, 1997 and 2010. The success of Gordon Brown was that the expected Tory take-over didn’t happen (and, in Malcolm’s book, history will be very much kinder to Brown than current poison has it).

Burke, whom we had above, had the Fixed Term Parliaments Act bang to rights, and as far back as 1780:

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as this they are of all bad things the worst, worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the rest of our institutions

Let’s add a word to the wise:

The people can recognise them. And resent them

MRD still A

Malcolm hopes nobody has forgotten MRDA. There’s a memory nudge on the right of this screen.

The delicious, delightful and definitely dangerous Mandy came instantly to mind after this, from the LibDem MP, John Leech (majority 1,894):

The government has published its mid-term report, and as expected Media coverage is naturally focusing on parts of the agreement that are not on track. However our own party analysis shows about 95% of the Coalition Agreement is on course.

The MTR also shows the huge extent of Liberal Democrat influence in Government. We have taken policies directly from the front page of our Manifesto and we are now delivering on them in Government.

Mr Leech then helpfully lists his Top 10 Liberal Democrat Achievements!

No: he doesn’t mention the double- or possibly treble-dip recession.

He doesn’t find space to mention £9,000 fees.

Minor stuff like that must be the delinquent 5%.

The LibDems are:

Delivering an extra £2.5 billion into schools!

That is despite:

the largest cut in education spending over a four-year period since the 1950s [Channel 4 News]

and

Funding for struggling schools has been slashed to cover a £1bn overspend in the academies programme [The Independent].

On Planet Leech the Lib Dems are:

Creating 1 million jobs and 1 million apprenticeships. 84% more apprenticeships in Manchester

and

Youth unemployment is lower than when we took office, thanks to our £1 billion Youth Contract, which gets young people off the dole and into work through apprenticeships, work placement or training.

Which runs the face of the reason of the Daily Telegraph:

The “bleak” outlook for young people is predicted within a new study by the Institute of Public Policy Research, which also expects long-term unemployment to near the 1m mark. Both figures would put hundreds of thousands of people at risk of permanent “scarring” in the labour market, the IPPR said…

The headline unemployment rate shows there are 2.56m unemployed people in Britain. But the consultancy report shows a further 3.05m are “under-employed” – desparate to find more work or longer hours but cannot – and a further 2.58m people are “economically inactive” but want a paid job.

The overall work shortage rate compared to the working age population is 23.8pc; three times higher than the official unemployment rate.

That, to some extent, trumps Stephanie Flanders’ wondering about the statistic that Britain’s finest economic brains simply cannot explain. Contrary to Leech’s cooking the books on youth unemployment:

Figures released today (16/11/11) show that the overall number of jobseekers allowance claimants has risen by 9,770 (13.5%) in Greater Manchester over the past year.

With national youth unemployment now past the 1 million mark, Greater Manchester saw a slight monthly rise in the number of claimants aged 16-24 of 180 (0.7%) to 27,080 – the highest level since youth unemployment peaked in the wake of the recession, and a level not seen since March 2010.

Memo to Mr Leech: the ConDems took over in May 2010.

Let’s not omit here Leech trumpeting that the LibDems:

 Secured the biggest ever cash rise in the full state pension, worth an extra £650 every year.

“Worth”, Mr Leech? Michael Meacher’s and the Kushners’ letter in today’s Guardian give chapter-and-verse of how ConDem policies are hurting. Or, specific to pensioners, there’s this:

For the whole population, inflation – measured by the retail prices index – has jumped by 14.4 per cent since September 2007.

For those aged 50 to 64, it has been 18.5 per cent, rising to 20.1 per cent for those aged 65 to 74. 

But it jumped 20.3 per cent for people aged 75 and above. Dr Ros Altmann, director general of Saga, said the ‘horrifying’ figures highlight the problems facing older people battling inflation on a fixed income.

Added to which:

the charity Age UK said the cost of living has added £1,173 to bills  for those aged 55 and above in  a year.

Does that qualify as an achievement, Mr Leech?

Malcolm really cannot be arsed to demolish the rest of this friable, tendentious nonse, but number 10 of Mr Leech’s achievements deserves a lunge for the sick-bag:

 Scrapped ID cards and removed innocent people’s DNA from the police database

Aw, sweet! Fair enough: but you and your colleagues are complicit in the:

Draft Communications Data Bill [which] wants to force ISPs to store the who, when and where of all online activity, including email, instant messaging, social media activity, web browsing and VoIP calls for a year.

So it’s back to Miss Rice-Davies for the last word:

Well, he would, wouldn’t he?

The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations (J. M. & M. J. Cohen, 1971) 190:69