Historical and other parallels

History repeats itself, said Marx (approximately) paraphrasing Hegel, first as tragedy then as farce.

So let Malcolm repeat himself:

• Prime Minister David Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.
• William IV was third son of George III, whose elder brothers were the future George IV and … Frederick, Duke of York and Albany.

Taraaah!

Said Prince Fred is generally accounted to have been the Grand Old Duke of York, who:

… had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were only halfway up,
They were neither up nor down.

Fred, who now is dead, earned that reputation because of the futile Flanders campaign of 1799.

Cameron’s  hill-climbing and descents are as well-established as Fred’s; but he doesn’t have ten thousand men. He has just 304 MPs, and 48 of them are definitely not men. Though many of those women have more balls than their male colleagues.

Further back

Malcolm can’t be bothered to work out what the precise relationship is; but Cameron must be related somehow to the Stuarts. Which brings us to James II and VII.

After the near-rout at the Boyne, James sweatily arrived back in Dublin where Lady Tyrconnell enquired how the battle had gone. He replied, “My cowardly Irish have run away.”

She responded with a hint of acid: “Then I see your majesty has won the race.” Again, a speedy characteristic to be observed in Cameron’s hereditary nature.

The gift of leadership

This is an art or a talent in which Cameron has rarely excelled. Particularly so on matters European.

Which is why he is in his present predicament.

And which brings us to the ridiculous “Referendum Bill”; and Isabel Hardman in the Spectator channeling Lady Tyrconnell:

David Cameron was trying to work out how on earth to deal with the latest Europe row in his party. He heard them demanding legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, and this evening, after nearly a year of letter-writing and speeches, he announced that the Tory party will publish a draft bill doing just that. They still can’t get it through Parliament through the government channels, so they’ll be putting it up for any willing backbencher (of which there are many) to adopt in the Private Member’s Bill ballot.

Figures close to the Prime Minister were hinting to Tory MPs this evening there would be a move for legislation, but they were taken by surprise when, just a few hours later, the announcement was made that the draft bill will be published tomorrow.

So is this it? Is the Conservative party falling on its knees with gratitude? Unsurprisingly, MPs are not doing anything of the sort.

Wherein Malcolm found an echo from Li’l Abner, Al Capp, Johnny Mercer and Stubby Kaye:

Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray.
Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Maché?”
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone; 
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he really saved the day!

Isabel was being as polite as the circumstances permit. For sheer vitriol — and a longer view — there’s  Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times, subtitled in near Marxist terms — and with a flourish from Mao for added relish:

Drama is giving way to farce. The eurosceptic demands are now plain odd

Touchingly, they really believed it would work. When David Cameron pledged a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU four months ago, his team were certain it would pacify eurosceptic Conservatives, disarm the UK Independence party and ensure he would not need to talk again about this electorally esoteric issue for the rest of this parliament.

That speech, his most important deed as UK prime minister after his austere fiscal policy, has failed on all counts. Tories now hound him to go further, Ukip romp on, and he is condemned to revisit the subject periodically on behalf of his party.

Downing Street is mystified by the collapse of the January truce, and commentators also scribble their surprise. But it is not surprising at all. It was predictable, and predicted. We are now a quarter of a century into the Tories’ rancorous fixation with Europe, a single-issue neuralgia that knows no equivalent in any major party in the west, and the pattern is familiar: no concession satisfies those who ultimately want to leave the EU, even if they say it will before receiving it. Mr Cameron, remember, has withdrawn his party from the centre-right caucus in the European Parliament, vetoed a fiscal treaty and cleared a path to exit. On each occasion, Tories have summoned a practised glee before returning to their core view of him as the craven running dog of a europhile establishment.

Even that lacks the sheer horror that Ben Brogan, for the Torygraph, evinces:

It may be, as some Tories tried to explain yesterday, that a cunning new strategy is evolving before our eyes, one that Mr Gove and his friend Mr Cameron are developing as part of their wider campaign to shove Labour – and the Lib Dems – on to the wrong side of popular causes. By this theory, Europe is no longer a divisive, dangerous issue for the Tories to be caught arguing about, but is in fact a vote-winner. Look at us, the Conservatives are now shouting, we are so crazy about Europe that we are desperate to give you a vote on it and – nudge nudge, wink wink – we might just join you in voting to get out. By allowing his colleagues to say it all in public, and say it loudly, Mr Cameron is giving himself free advertising for his Euro-robustness two years early. The tease of a referendum, the catwalk of Tory beauties sashaying in their see-through ideological out-fits, the Cabinet loyalists talking naughty – it’s all part of a great plan. By allowing his colleagues to talk up the possibility of a British exit, the Prime Minister’s hand is strengthened in the EU negotiations to come. First welfare, then immigration, now Europe: everything is lining up in Mr Cameron’s favour.

Except it isn’t, of course. No 10 has lost control of this one. Even those involved admit it’s a Euroshambles. After all, can any of this truly be said to advance the cause of a Conservative victory in 2015? Surely the first part of Mr Cameron’s negotiating strategy requires winning the general election? Does an inward-looking spat about Europe really fit alongside the message about a global economic race and the importance of the EU/US trade deal that Mr Cameron found himself promoting in Washington yesterday?

Surely soon we must be reaching the end-game? That can involve just one (or both) of two possibilities: the defenestration of Cameron, and/or the collapse of the ConDem coalition. Either way the lunatics have taken over the Tory asylum.

Which brings Malcolm back to:

Half-awake and UKIPping

The Tory bourgeoisie are heavily into the Great UKIP furore. Over on the Spectator‘s Coffee House blog, James Forsyth is keeping the pot on the simmer: Why the Tories need their own Nigel Farage.

To which the answer inevitably and unarguably came:

Was Nigel Farage not the Tories’ very own Nigel Farage?

Malcolm offered his own take:

When I was an active candidate, the assumption was differential abstention. Our lot went down because our buggers wouldn’t turn out, not generally because they had defected. Anyway, the other mob quickly gave them a sickener, and soon enough (say two years) they were back on track.

By the same token, I have always suspected there really is a subterranean “nasty party” based on bloody-minded ness and perverseness, which only transpires to cause pain and grief to us decent types (of any proper persuasion). This vegetable growth, vaster than empires and more slow, is about the only political leaning that is thus burgeoning.

Moreover the hysterical media – Speccie excepted only on grounds of socio-economic classification – have laid the responsibility for all our woes at the door of the EU. Then only because Gordon Brown was no longer in town. This is scapegoating (my spell-check threw up “scape-gloating”, which is about the right flavour). Once the scape-gloaters have identified the scapegoat, all that remains is to drive it out of the hamlet.

Which, of course, received the usual raspberries.

Still, he’s a dogged old soul, and came back with:

No, I still don’t get it.

Nationally, UKIP has 147 out of a total of 2,439 council seats (say 6%). Tories have control of half the Councils (and will effectively add to that with by local arrangements with odds, bods and sods). On the usual deplorably-low turnout, UKIP scored 23% of the vote — what’s that: six or eight per cent of the total electorate?

It’s mid-term, and — thanks to the centripetal instincts of both major parties — local authorities have minimal residual powers. It’s child-welfare, street-cleaning, dustbins and dog-catching stuff. Yawn!

There were areas, and even regions, where UKIP did much better than average. So, what? Farage’s rag, tag and bobtail are never going to be the disciplined cohorts that the SNP or SF manage.

Then there is a specific example: Barking and Dagenham. When, in 2006, the BNP surged to a dozen seats on the local authority, it finally shook the local Labour operation out of its complacency, somnolence and decrepitude. Four years later, the BNP were wiped out.

Similarly, those areas where UKIP have made a showing tend to be where the old parties (especially the Tories) are at best lackadaisical, at worst senile. I’d be putting my money on the likes of the Greens being a bigger long-term threat to the established order than UKIP — particularly so if environmental issues can be brought to the fore, and folk can be induced to love windmills.

If there is one great, fat non-issue in these parts it is the EU. Outside the Tory kennel (the Torygraph, the Murdochery, and — were it to be considered a “newspaper” — the Express) the whole EU thing is of less national importance than whether Wigan can avoid the drop. Short of a real dog-fight the EU isn’t going to rise up the agenda.

Here’s a small Malcolmian prophecy: were the EU referendum to come about, barely half the electorate would bother to turn out. The in/out/shake-it-all-about decision would be made by around a quarter of the adult population of the UK. It’s like the old TUC retirement joke: “The General Committee have passed a vote of thanks for your services by 15 to 8, with 22 abstentions.”

So let’s get on with real life.

Are your dogs barking?

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

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

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

“Exceedingly so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pontifical Sir Peter

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hon. Members: Answer!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice one, Mister Ed!

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

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

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

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

Edible equines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the bear pit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oddly enough, Benedict Brogan got the message:

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

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

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

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

Big mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cameron speech, now on Friday, is:

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

No: it is essentially about:

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

Bated breath?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My enemy’s enemy is — not necessarily — my friend

When David Blackburn at the Speccie recommends a piece by George Eaton at the Staggers, in the bushes something stirs.

Both sides, in short, are evaluating what happens now the Lib Dem vote has collapsed. And whether the UKIP surge can continue. Either way, it is for Labour to exploit and the Tories to repulse  and repel (actually, they do that, en masse, quite well).

Eaton’s piece is the terser, but makes three points (which Malcolm glosses here) on the back of the Corby by-election:

• The Labour vote increased proportionately by nearly 10%. Were that to be the norm at a future General Election — which, we must assume is still slated for 7th May 2015 — Labour would romp it. As it happens, Malcolm would not be surprised if — given the faintest glimmer of an economic silver lining in 2014 — the Coalition didn’t somehow collapse this ‘fixed’ (in any sense you choose) parliament. Indeed, Cameron may be able to achieve just that by his long-trailered, long-over-due ‘big’ speech on Europe — and some kind of pledge/promise/wishful thinking on a referendum (cue Tom Newton Dunn at The Sun — this is one topic where the Murdoch press are a ‘must read’).
• If the Lib Dem decline persists, Labour stands to pick up those Tory/Labour marginals where the Lib Dem vote exceeds the present Tory majority (Eaton counts 37 of these). Several of those are seats (such as Clegg’s) with a large university student vote. The previous generation of those students (who will have passed on by 2015) were blinkered by the Lib Dem hypocrisy on fees, and by natural resentment at Labour’s involvement in US wars: go figure.
• If the Lib Dems do a Lazarus, and/or if the incumbency factor works in the Lib Dem MP’s favour, the Tories also lose out — because, again on Eaton’s arithmetic, there are 38 Lib Dem seats where the Tories run second. What Eaton doesn’t include is the West Country factor, where the Lib Dems (in fact, unreconstructed Liberals) have deep roots, and should continue to blossom.

Blackburn attempts to put a good face on what was an appalling day for the Tories:

• the rise of independents;
• that it was all a profoundly anti-politics election, and low turnout is a long-term trend. Err … is it? —

What is agreed by all-comers, is that Cameron is:

• damned if he does — any concessions to the rabid Right and the UKIPpers alienates the centre, leaving that ground open to the Labour ‘One Nation’ ploy.

and

• double-damned if he doesn’t — the Tory Right and the Right Outside are ‘on manoeuvres’, as Norman Tebbit cogently explains:

… there is plenty for the Conservative strategists to worry about. Whilst the BNP did rather poorly, particularly in Corby, UKIP on the whole did rather well. In the very low poll at Manchester, UKIP came within half a dozen votes of overtaking the Conservatives. At Corby, where the Conservative vote collapsed, UKIP scored a respectable 5,000-plus votes, triple that of the Lib Dems, and at Cardiff they marginally increased their vote.

In short, while Labour seems to have stemmed the loss of votes to BNP, the Tories are still losing support to UKIP; and even worse for Mr Cameron, UKIP is strengthening in advance of the 2014 European elections. The Tory cry that a vote for UKIP is a wasted vote may be wearing a bit thin.

All that is the prime focus on today’s editorial in The Independent:

Mr Cameron is caught in a difficult bind. He is facing a Labour Party showing tentative signs of recovery from its 2010 defeat, while to his right there is an anti-EU party attracting votes at a point when Europe soars up the political agenda. But if the Tory leader hardens his stance on the EU to appease Eurosceptics, he risks giving up an even greater share of the more moderate centre ground he once sought to occupy. And his departure from this electorally fertile terrain in other policy areas is one of the reasons his party struggled in the by-elections.

That’s without tangling too closely with the tar-baby (a dangerous metaphor, Malcolm fully appreciates, but one which he can happily defend on non-racist terms) of ‘localism’. ‘Localism’ may have been a good notion in happier times, but the centralisers of Tory policy (Gove, Shapps, Pickles …) have done for it, good and proper.

And another thing …

The North impinges further south each year.

The Tories are rapidly heading towards extinction north of the Trent and outside of the leafiest of shires. David Blackburn, in that piece noted above, cheerfully quotes himself from the previous day:

… the Tories’ woeful showing in South Yorkshire (beaten into 3rd by the English Democrats) and in Durham (finished a miserable 4th), to say nothing of the debacle in the Manchester Central by-election (where the party lost its deposit), should concern the party.

That is, not necessarily, even for socialist bigot like Malcolm, a good outcome.

‘Should concern the party’? Should concern the nation! For all its faults the Tory Party (indeed the two-party system) is essential to British democracy as we know it. Much as the Lib Dems might wish for a “three-party system”, that — as we have painfully discovered through this benighted ConDem coalition — arrives at sterility and even extremism (Gove, Shapps, Pickles … Duncan Smith, secret courts). Of course the whole system could — and arguably should — be given a whole new architecture, by devolution of real power to regions and localities and/or by proportional representation. For the time being, pending that day of universal liberation, we have to work within the parameters we have got.

Now we have the weekend commentariat to expect in the Sundays. That should be instructive, particularly if one or other of the ‘usuals’ comes up with a different, original interpretation. And, as Malcolm’s Dear Old Dad frequently opined: ‘It must be true: it’s in the papers’.

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.

Dropping behind

Somewhere Malcolm has a Kodachrome slide of the hero of the hour.

The hour was several decades back. The location was Aix-les-Bains. The occasion was some local festivity which involved a procession. The procession concluded with a troop of mounted gendarmes (or similar), predictably marking their progress along the thoroughfare.

Then, and only then, came the hero.

He was a municipal road-sweeper with his broom, shovel and cart. As he went about his task he received the most enthusiastic cheering and applause of the whole show.

Cameron at PMQs

Departmental ministers must feel empathy with the road-sweeper: David Cameron’s performances too frequently involve similar leavings and unwelcome clearings-up. Here is Isabel Hardman in The Spectator blogs:

Yesterday at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron surprised the whole chamber and the department concerned by announcing a brand new energy policy.

In response to a question from Labour’s Chris Williamson about what the government was doing to help people reduce their energy bills, Cameron said:

‘We have encouraged people to switch, which is one of the best ways to get energy bills down. I can announce, which I am sure the honourable gentleman will welcome, that we will be legislating so that energy companies have to give the lowest tariff to their customers – something that Labour did not do in 13 years, even though the Leader of the Labour party could have done it because he had the job.’

That this was one of Cameron’s policy-on-the-hoof moments was underlined by the fact that he was responding to a question from a Labour MP, not a planted one from a loyal Tory backbencher. Then his spokespeople struggled to brief journalists on any further details other than what the Prime Minister said, which was that apparently energy companies will ‘have to give the lowest tariff to their customers’. The Energy and Climate Change department appeared surprised by the policy. Energy companies were also rather astonished and said they were urgently seeking further details of this new policy and how it would affect their business. The implications for those companies’ business models did seem rather large. Today Caroline Flint told MPs at Energy questions that the Prime Minister of ‘making it up as he goes along’.

Eny fule kno the problems there. What Cameron seems to be saying is there would be only one tariff , and that available to all. At the moment there is a prolixity of tariffs with each and every energy supplier: they depend on whether gas and electricity are bought from the same supplier, how billing and payment is made, how long the contract extends, whether the transactions involve on-line accounts, and so forth. The result has to be confused and confusing, but it does represent relative costs on the supplier. A single tariff would inevitably be more expensive, and involve much less control for the canny consumer, much less competition (or what goes for it in this pretence of an energy-market).

Might as well nationalise the whole nonsense

Result: chaos

If Isabel Hardman was unconvinced (and she has other examples of Cameron’s cavalier regard for normal practice) then others, like Charles Maggs, are happy to use the s-word:

Shambles: Energy minister didn’t know about energy policy announcement

The government’s own energy minister seemed unsure of his department’s policy today, after he struggled to answer questions of a plan announced by David Cameron in  the Commons.

John Hayes admitted he was not expecting the prime minster to announce the policy yesterday, in a performance which suggested Cameron overstepped the mark during this week’s PMQs.

“Does he consult me on every issue? The answer is no,” he told MPs after Labour won an urgent question on the policy.

“But had we been discussing this policy? The answer is yes.”

He added: “This is a policy intent.”

Humiliatingly, there were calls of ‘more’ from opposition benches as Hayes’ answers came to an end.

Give that man a shovel and broom.

Corduroy

A while back Malcolm took time out to extol the writing of Ronald Blythe. Even further back a Blythe essay, The Salutary Tale of Jix, got a mention. Both came to mind because of yet another of those synchronicities.

First, Ferdinand Mount (who provoked that thought of Blythe last February) was at it again: this time in last week’s Spectator:

Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield — his 1969 bestseller about a fictional Suffolk village from 1880 to 1966 — exposed quite how back-breakingly grim country life was for most farmworkers, like his own father, a Gallipoli veteran.

The essay on former Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks came to mind when Theresa May went political over the non-extradition of young Master McKinnon:

Speaking in Parliament this afternoon, Home Secretary Theresa May confirmed that she would halt Mr McKinnon’s extradition because it would be “incompatible with his human rights”. The 46-year-old suffers from Aspergers Syndrome and depression and his supporters have warned that he would be at risk of suicide if he was held overseas. After seeking medical and legal advice, the Mrs May has concluded that Mr McKinnon would not be fit to stand trial in the United States. Instead it will be up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether a trial should be conducted in the UK.

Mrs May’s decision is controversial because only two weeks earlier the government approved the extradition of Talha Ahsan, a south Londoner accused of running a jihadi website who also suffered Aspergers. Mr Ahsan’s family believe the decision on Mr McKinnon was deliberately delayed until after Talha had been extradited.

While all pale-pink liberals might feel that McKinnon deserved this amount of absolution, Mrs May is not out of the woods yet. Indeed she has made political what ought to have been purely-and-simply a judicial matter. She shot; she scored:

Betfair has slashed the odds of the Home Secretary becoming the next Conservative leader from 23/1 to 14/1.

In the bad old days, Tory Home Secretaries sent men to the gallows in search of applause from the Tory back-benches. Now, in these softer times, it merely involves cocking snooks at the US system of true “separation of powers”. Oh, and kicking at Europe does no harm either (except to UK citizens who might find themselves in a Bulgarian prison cell, or worse, with no hope of extradition).

However, back to more pleasant topics.

There was yet another reason why Malcolm felt affinity with Ferdy Mount’s enthusiasm for Blythe. It was the Suffolk connection, and a direct link from Blythe’s cottage to its former occupant.

Let’s start in the Fulham Road

Last Friday morning, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm had taken a dander down to Chelsea, to view Thomas Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row. The Carlyle’s moved here in 1834, and it became a focal point of the literary and cultural scene.

It is quite extraordinary to walk into the parlour and see it authentically reproducing Robert Tait’s painting from 1857:

From there we climb up this modest home, through domestic intimacies, all the way to Carlyle’s remarkable study in the attic (complete with Victorian sliding roof-light). Two hours well-spent, not excluding the basement kitchen and walled-garden.

Then to lunch.

A few days back a columnist responded to the question of what long-married couples still find to talk about on holiday. The answer was “Where shall we lunch?” followed by “Where shall we have dinner?”. Malcolm sadly acknowledges a germ of truth in that.

Friday’s lunch was in the Fulham Road, very pleasantly but virtually in solitary state.

That, however, wasn’t the point to which Malcolm is driving. It is that the restaurant was only a few doors away from the branch of Daunt Books. And, finally, we have reached Malcolm’s point. The Lady took away a worthy novel in hardback. Malcolm’s single purchase was more modest: a delicious reprint of Adrian Bell’s Corduroy from 1930.

Once upon a long-gone time Malcolm had the trilogy: Corduroy, Silver Ley (1931), and  The Cherry Tree (1932) — moreover, they were Faber hardbacks (though not, sadly, first edition). One or more may still be lurking in the attic of Redfellow Hovel — however, when Malcolm re-shelved his books some years back the ‘non-fiction’ (i.e. everything that wasn’t a novel) went on the end-wall. History was the middle five shelves. Poetry below that. Drama the next two. Guide-books et al. on the bottom. Sorted alphabetically, and reaching high above this lot, was everything else. So Bell, Adrian would be right at the top: in the very apex of the attic, sixteen shelves high. It seemed a good idea at the time.

The guilt-pile by-passed

At midnight last night, after relishing and digesting every paragraph, Malcolm reached page 287, and last. That chimed well with Bell ensconced in his ‘Silverly Farm’, acquired — as is traditional for these exchanges — at Michaelmas, just the day before:

I walked with a lantern to my small farm across the fields. Darky and Dewdrop [his two recently-acquired horses] peered at me over the wall of the yard. The night air refreshed me, and I felt far from sleep. I lit my lamp and opened my new account-book at the first page.

A grounding in Suffolk

The story (really a simple, but beautifully-linked chain of reminiscence) involves the author’s year of apprenticeship at ‘Farley Hall, Benfield St George’, Mr Colville’s farm in Suffolk. This is the faintest fictionalising of Mr Savage of Bradfield St George, just outside Bury St Edmunds (which Bell renders as ‘Stambury’).

In the course of the year, the young Bell experiences the whole cycle of the farming year, growing physically, mentally and constitutionally away from the sophistication and “elegance” of his family home in Battersea and into the boots and corduroy (a subtle motif throughout) of rural Suffolk. At Christmas (Bell went to Suffolk only in October) he is already conscious of the distance he has travelled:

I returned home to London, to a world of narrow sky and no darkness, to find the old life half strange already. My brown Sunday boots, in which I motorcycled home, once again seemed uncouth there, and I was asked to change them, as they would ruin the carpets. These ‘gentleman’s’ boots!

I re-entered a world of nervous significance, where the very furniture was a complex language, and a piece placed so had, to some perceptions acute as Bob’s for weather signs, the subtle rightness of a mot juste. This world fearful of mud splashes, that yet breathed grimy air ( remembered the threshing-men grappling muddy iron while they breathed air like well-water); a world of hurtful probing into personality.

I noticed most keenly the brilliance of electric light after oil lamps, and the absence of anything worn, or uneven, or over-grown. Interiors had the illusory quality of flashed scenes of midnight storm. In fact, the whole Christmas sojourn had a flashed effect, flat and unrooted, with people gesturing and smiling as in a charade. I was called with ‘Giles’ or ‘Hodge’ , and treated to enquiries of ‘Ow be thou mangel wurzels?’ Either that or I was a courageous self-emancipator, the wind whistling through my hair.

Said one, ‘How splendid to be free of dress formalities; hats, for instance.’

‘But I always wear a hat,’ I replied.

Malcolm recalls — just barely — north Norfolk before electricity arrived, and with it mains drainage (try the latter without the former to power sewer pumps). Even then, out of the towns, darkness could be absolute: he also recalls a terrifying moment, circa 1961, frost-bitten, near Sutton Bridge in the Fens. The persistent sleeting drizzle had shorted out the electrics of his aged Lambretta. The only glimmers in the entire universe were the faintly-red-glowing fuse-cover on the handlebars, a horizon smudged with the lights of King’s Lynn far away across the tundra, and a car’s headlamps approaching out of the far distance.

Bury St Edmunds? I didn’t know he was dead!

To a younger generation, who have never fully known such dark, such silence, Adrian Bell’s memories — where sweated and frozen human strength and dexterity still mastered the yet-to-be-mechanised land — must be totally alien. Even so, his description of ‘Stambury’, is instantly recognisable:

At the end of the town opposite to that at which the cattle-market was situated were the ruins of a great abbey, a memory of old ecclesiastical significance. Public gardens had been laid out within the walls. They were deserted today. I walked the lawns under bare boughs tranced to the stillness of stone in the frosty air. Shattered arches stood yup lonely from the grass. A door stood open in an enclosure of ruined wall. I looked in, and found a gardener there sweeping up the last leaves. It had been a family burial-place, he said. ‘The mossyleum, they call it.’ He looked around. ‘There ain’t much moss here now, but doubt less there was at one time.’

At the end of the garden a river ran, and a monk’s bridge spanned it. All this was in grave contrast to the bustle of market-day beyond the walls.

The tufted abbey walls flanked one side of a sloping space, called (on account of the inn that stood opposite) Angel Hill. As I passed out of the gardens a traction-engine stood fuming before the gate-tower, with a timber-drug sent to deal with a fallen tree within. here was a dragon which the blunt-nosed saints in the niches confronted with holy calm.

That, in the late 1960s, was Malcolm’s daily walk to his teaching, at the Grammar School, just across that monk’s bridge.

Number One daughter now regularly flies, business class, from New York to Houston, India, Hong Kong and places east and west, in her daily profession. Once, though, she was perambulated, to be christened at St Mary’s, on Honey Hill, which turns left at the end of Angel Hill. She nearly got born in the bar of the Suffolk Hotel (but that’s another story), which stood on the corner of the Buttermarket:

The chief shopping-place of the day was the Old Butter Market. Here beef and pork and poultry were turned by the alchemy of the coin to feminine adornments, tobacco, silks, and scents. here wives and daughters strolled.

So, you see, Malcolm has unfinished business. He needs the other volumes of Adrian Bell’s trilogy. Can he scale those attic heights? Were he to do so, would he find Bell, Adrian?

Only then can he tackle Carlyle and Sartor Resartus  — which for those denied a classical education means, The tailor re-tailored, and might bring us back to Bell’s problems with  ‘gentleman’s’ boots and unfashionable, sturdy, agricultural corduroy.

Ticks every box

Malcolm, in bedroom-decorating mode, has been attempting to formulate a pertinent comment on the Tory conference. It is a depressing distraction — though he was tempted to pursue the Scottish Tory leader’s daftness over this one:

Almost nine in ten Scots receive more from the state than they pay in tax because of a ‘corrosive sense of entitlement’ north of the border, a top Tory said yesterday.

Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, said it was ‘frightening’ only 283,080 households – 12 per cent of the total – pay more in taxes than they get back in public services.

She told the party’s annual conference in Birmingham that Scots are now so reliant on ‘the gangmaster state’ that the public sector accounts for more than half of the nation’s wealth.

Miss Davidson said the ‘rotten system’ of state patronage had been fuelled by Labour and the Nationalists.

The Scottish National Party, led by Alex Salmond, described her comments as her ‘Mitt Romney moment’ …

For once Wee Eck found a proper response at the end there.

Alex Massie, for the The Spectator, said all that needed to be said in a succinct headline:

Scottish Tory Leader to Scots: Drop Dead

It looks even better on the web-page in pillar-box red.

But there’s still that lurking problem: what to say about the Cameroon-fest? Well, Max Hastings knifed Mayor BoJo very effectively — so much so that yesterday’s Mail piece gets re-cycled in today’s Guardian. Mmmm … how often do you get that kind of cross-over?

Ah! but facing that, here’s the best comment on the whole charade, in the letters column:

I am not a millionaire. I am not a tax avoider. I am not a banker. I work (proudly) in the public sector. I do not hate immigrants. I recognise that most people are poor because of obscenely low wages and a chronic lack of jobs, not because they are lazy or “scroungers”. I believe that, on balance, the EU is a good thing. I fully support a woman’s right to choose whether she wishes to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, and that no one else should try to control her body or fertility. I believe that trade unions are vital to protect workers from unscrupulous employers, and that employees need statutory protection and rights in the workplace. I believe that it is ordinary working people who actually create Britain’s wealth, not a handful of business tycoons. I believe that far too much of this country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 1%.

Sorry, Mr Cameron, but the Conservative party is definitely not for people like me; never has been, never will be (The Tories are for everyone, Cameron to tell conference, 10 October).
Pete Dorey
Bath, Somerset

Or, as those with a “privileged” education would recognise: verbum sapient sat est.

 

IT begins …

Frank Turner is a bit of an acquired taste. There’s a YouTube vid of his Isabel (which is not available in the UK) and, failing that, it’s here (but doesn’t want to embed):

I’ll admit that I am scared of what I don’t understand.
But darling, if you’re there, gentle voice and soothing hands,
to quiet my despair, to shore up all my plans, darling, if you’re there…
And so the world has changed, and I must change as well.
The machines we’ve made will damn us into hell.
And the time will come when all must save themselves.
I will save my soul in the arms of Isabel.

For the purposes of right now, it’s Isabel Hardman in the Spectator blog:

Allowing Iain Duncan Smith to dig his heels in at the Work and Pensions department in last week’s reshuffle sent out two messages. The first was that the Prime Minister is not as authoritative as he should be: telling someone that you’d rather they moved to one department, but that it’s ok for them to remain where they are isn’t exactly ‘butch’, to borrow the PM’s own favourite word. The second is that the Prime Minister was worried about the future of the DWP’s reforms, and was keen to put someone else in charge of implementing the behemoth computer system for the universal credit, even though events meant he was unable to do so.

Instantly, Frank Turner’s convoluted lyric starts to make sense. Especially the bit about the hellishly damnable machines.

Infernal information technology 1

With good reason, then, Liam Byrne was being demanding in the Commons today:

It is quite clear that the Treasury thinks there will be a state of chaos around Universal Credit. The Cabinet Office thinks there is chaos, Number 10 thinks there is chaos. Surely it is time he told the House exactly what is going on, and put before us the business case that he is trying to keep secret from this House, or is there something that he is trying to hide?’

Let’s be honest, here: is there anyone who can put “government department” and “new computer system” in close proximity, without a frisson of fear? And this one will cost “no more than £2.5 billion”. So, let’s not remember the (what was it?) £11 billion , or £12 billion, even  £15 billion, (depending on your source) thrown at computerising NHS records. Lest we forget, that, too, was priced originally at £2.3 billion. Hold on to your wallets.

In general, then, and without reservation, we can safely predict:

• the Universal credit system is a great idea —
• but so was the Titanic, and the Groundnut Scheme, and the Poll Tax, and railway privatisation, etc., etc.
• The Universal Credit system will in due course collapse,
• but a whole generation of computer whizzes and IT bods will retire, in comfort, to country estates.

But, darling Isabel, keep doing what you do so well with your gentle voice and soothing hands.