Back to the Eighties

The prize for opportunistic question of the week at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday went to Iain Mackenzie, the Labour member for Inverclyde.  Inspired by those dramatic photographs of the cruise ship Concordia, diagonally-posed in tranquil waters off the Tuscan coast, Mr Mackenzie rose to challenge the prime minister on the threat of a similar fate awaiting luxury liners heading for Greenock Harbour in his constituency.  This is because apparently someone has sacked all Greenock’s coastguards.

It seems unlikely, in the system of devolved government under which we live, that the prime minister commands much authority over the employment of coastguards on the River Clyde. The point of the question was presumably to demonstrate the unintended consequences of Mr Cameron’s cuts.  Or was Mr Mackenzie just trying to get his face – a tall and tapering construction, not unlike an inverted lighthouse – into the local papers before the Concordia story, unlike the stricken vessel herself, sinks beneath the waves?  Either way, it felt like an improbable premise for a scandal. Is Greenock really a hot destination on that many luxury cruise itineraries?  Nor can there be too much danger of the captain sailing too close to the shore – allegedly the cause of the Concordia’s downfall – for fear of subtracting from the view of Dumbarton on the other side.

Ed Miliband surprised us less with his originality by leading on the subject of unemployment – the obvious topic on a day when the number out of work rose to its highest total for 18 years.  Like all opposition leaders, Miliband over-prepares for PMQs. He has taken particularly to heart the advice given to courtroom lawyers only to ask questions to which you already know the answer.

“Does he think the unemployment situation will get any worse”, Miliband asked Cameron, a pointless piece of artifice, since he knows full well that the Office of Budget Responsibility, the Government’s official bean-counters, say that yes it will. The prime minister answered  by praising his Government’s wise and generous move to set up the OBR in the first place. When these objective and independent folk say we are going to hell in a handcart we know they speak the truth, and are not just trying to sell us a cruise to Glasgow to take our minds off it. What comfort this is supposed to bring to the long-term unemployed is never revealed.

It was all very reminiscent of the 1980s, when government and opposition bickered incessantly about the unemployment figures and whether or not they had been artfully rearranged. It was Miliband who unwisely invoked this comparison. This, after all, was an era when Labour got battered at elections more thoroughly than a North Sea cod. Moreover, the idea that Mr Miliband is Michael Foot with more scrupulous hair and better suits is one that cannot quite be dispelled, and the Labour leader shouldn’t encourage us to think that way.

At heart, however, this is a question of psychology. For Labour the 1980s were an era of betrayal, anger and injustice. In that way there was something real and noble about them, embodying everything the party exists to fight against. For the Tories meanwhile those same years were a golden time of glut and gaiety, when Thatcher was Thatcher not Meryl Streep, and the Liberals had the capacity to annoy no one more important than the Social Democrats.

Andrew Rosindell, the bellicose Tory who sits for Romford, was also in the 1980s spirit. At his last run-out at PMQs, Mr Rosindell had advised the prime minister to stick it to the Europeans at the Brussels summit. Whether Mr Cameron was inspired by Rosindell’s bulldog spirit to veto the European treaty we shall never know, but today the Essex exocet was on Argentina’s case. He  invoked the “30-year war against Argentina” (by which he meant it happened 30 years ago; it isn’t still going on, except perhaps in Romford) to exhort Mr Cameron not to accept any nonsense from Buenos Aires with its new outbreak of low-level aggression against the Falklands.

The prime minister replied accusing the Argentinians of behaving like colonialists and revealing that the National Security Council had devoted much discussion yesterday to the subject. Really? What did they decide? Our ability to send a task force these days is  constrained by the fact that the French need the aircraft carrier back on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Perhaps we will send the new Royal Yacht that Michael Gove wants to build, always supposing that he can find the private companies to pay for it.  Anyway, with our luck, it will capsize on its maiden voyage and end up floating outside Greenock harbour, with nothing showing except the B&Q logos on its hull.

 

 

Pig Hoo-oo-ey

The first prime minister’s questions of the year began with the unusual, and surprisingly uplifting, news that the processed pig industry is thriving on Humberside.  Mr Graham Stuart, a Conservative MP from the patch, informed the prime minister that an outfit called Cranswick Country Foods in Preston in his constituency – whose rich and reassuring name, so redolent of a line of Range Rovers parked outside an overpriced farm shop, we suspect conceals all manner of unspeakable practices within -  is doing a roaring trade.  Not only is it supporting 1,200 jobs in the area, it has secured an important contract with the US Department of Agriculture, presumably as part of that country’s long-standing interest in extraordinary rendition.  Excellent tidings, though before Mr Cameron had the chance to congratulate the pig-pulverisers of Preston, Mr Stuart added the dark caveat that our own dear Food Standards Agency is standing in the way of even greater export achievement to the Far East.

Fascinating stuff, not least because (and I am grateful to Mr Stuart’s website for this information), Preston is located “east of Hull”, and so we are bound to ask how much more to the far east can you get?  Presumably they are not trying to drop tins of treated trotter into the North Sea, or meet a hitherto unrecorded insatiable demand for pig pate on the Dogger Bank, which can only mean that it is our old friends in China who are anxious for a taste of the Humber’s potted porcine. Mr Cameron looked duly concerned and promised to send a minister from Ag & Fish (or DEFRA as we must now call it) along to sort the FSA, or perhaps it was Mr Stuart, out. The House relaxed.

Though for only as long as it took Ed Miliband to get to his feet. His arrival at the despatch box was greeted by extended cheers, mainly from the Labour benches, though the Tories soon enough cottoned on. As a way of saying here is a man who has screwed up royally in the last few weeks, so we had better offer Mr Loser some encouragement, the gesture couldn’t have been bettered. Undeterred, Mr Miliband proceeded to ask the Prime Minister about train fares.

 This was not in the sense of what you or I would understand as a question about rail tickets. Mr Miliband did not want to know whether the cheapest way of getting between London and Doncaster wasn’t a super-saver off-peak bargain bonus tracker , travelling via Abergavenny in the company of one or more Hindus with a student railcard. However, it might just as well have been the question for the subsequent exchanges told us that, in common with most ticket-window conversations, neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition had much insight into the policies they were talking about.  Mr Cameron insisted that the capacity of the rail companies to charge what they damn well liked for a season ticket was the legacy of Labour’s policy, and Mr Miliband was equally insistent that it was not. 

One is tempted to side with the Prime Minister  in this on the grounds that it is in his interest to remember Labour’s policies, while it is equally in Mr Miliband’s to forget them. However, when the Prime Minister conceded that Labour policy had changed in its last year in office, a smile of triumph spread across the opposition leader’s features as broad as you would expect if he had just heard Lord Glasman had fallen into a sewerage inspection pit outside the Palace of Westminster. Later analysis by impartial UN observers suggested that it may well have been Mr Cameron who was indeed correct. However, by that time the two leaders had moved on to agreeing about Scottish independence, a moment of consensus across the despatch box that was as rare as it was chilling.

And so on to Sir Roger Gale, the Tory who represents North Thanet, who also had trains on his mind. Sir Roger was pleased that the Government was going to build a fast railway line between London and Birmingham – as pleased as anyone might be expected to be who knows the tracks won’t be going through his back garden – but wanted to know why, if HS2 was going ahead, HS1 was being neglected. By this he meant the line that runs fairly quickly from London to Ashford in Kent before slowing to a bucolic meander in the vague direction of the Channel Tunnel.

Sir Roger seemed to be asking for a high speed spur so as to sweep the sleek bullet trains towards his own Kent coast patch. That the geniuses of transport policy haven’t yet got round to making their top priority cutting journey times to Margate down to six minutes may not surprise the rest of us, but it is not for nothing that Sir Roger received the knighthood long overdue him in the new year’s list, for undiminished loyalty to his constituency.   

Like the Giant Rat of Sumatra

Except for a tiresome interregnum when Ken Clarke wanted to talk about making secret intelligence available to the courts, MPs had two hours across lunchtime to talk about Liam Fox. Starting with prime minister’s questions, the opportunity to indulge went right through to the former international man of mystery’s personal statement to the House just before two o’clock. In fact, if only had our legislators been sharper they would have realised that even the Justice Secretary’s stint at the despatch box was no barrier to dissecting Dr Fox and his interesting adventures. There is plenty of secret intelligence relating to this matter that MPs suspect has not yet been laid before the court of credulous opinion.

The prime minister dealt somewhat peremptorily with Ed Miliband’s initial assaults on Fox, arguing that the Leader of the Opposition had left it too late. This seemed rather unfair. If Mr Cameron is going to make it a rule that the Leader of the Opposition is out of order questioning him on matters after they have taken place, this is going to make it rather difficult for Mr Miliband to do his job.  Mr Miliband was being punished, we suspect, for not raising Dr Fox last week, when maybe the prime minister would have found it more congenial occupying that particular patch of moral high ground reserved for men who have set up an inquiry, than defending last Wednesday’s hideous unemployment numbers. Since the aforementioned inquiry only reported yesterday, Mr Miliband might have considered himself within his rights to bring it up.

Anyway, the prime minister had his answer ready, which is that since Dr Fox has resigned the matter is closed. He didn’t quite utter the dread phrase “move on” (this was left for an unctuous Tory backbencher later on when the Leader of the House was making his statement), but you could see it fluttering in front of him, like a balmy Autumn butterfly. Mr Cameron’s strategy, it seems, was rather more theological than political: absolution having been achieved through the act of relinquishing office, all Dr Fox’s sins have been washed away.  Mr Miliband was furious. The prime minister should show a little more humility he suggested, but it was a hopeless plea. This is an opponent who commissions his reports from GOD and who has every intention of entering heaven in a state of grace.

Mr Clarke having come and gone, the battle moved to a different foxhole (this, I believe, is the last remaining fox pun yet to be used in reporting this saga) as the willowy Sir George Young turned up to deliver a statement on the O’Donnell report.  Tory questioners ran out fairly quickly, leaving the Leader of the House to be assaulted on the matter by assorted Labour hoodlums.  Being easily the most courteous man in the universe, Sir George took all of this in his stride, even if the effect was like watching a curate being surrounded by a group of happy slappers.  To one especially vindictive questioner, who would have been all for having Dr Fox dragged from the MoD  and disembowelled in Whitehall, the moment the Guardian caught the scent of something iffy, Sir George replied that it was necessary to proceed with a sense of decency and fair play. Only the gentle baronet could say a line like that in the House of Commons and get away with it.

And so we came to Dr Fox’s own personal statement, which was heard in the traditional silence and sense of rising anticipation that the speaker would slag off the prime minister.  But it was a desperately dull affair, full of tributes to the people of North Somerset, to friends, relations, advisers (official) who had dutifully combined to keep the former defence secretary going these last 20 years.  Of his supposed role as a crack secret agent, whizzing between continents in the company of the faithful Werrity and pulling off various daring coups on behalf of his shady foreign paymasters, we heard nothing. I suppose we shall have to wait for the memoirs.

In fact we heard nothing of Mr Werrity whatsoever, thus denying us even the small satisfaction of discovering whether Dr Fox has decided how to pronounce his amanuensis’ name. We have Werrity and Verity. We also have a man usually described in the public prints as Adam, but quite often as Andrew instead. That makes a combination of four different identities and I dare say that if you were to slit open the lining of Mr Werrity/Verity’s well-travelled suitcase, you would find a fake passport for each one.  Like the giant rat of Sumatra, however, this is a tale for which the world is not yet ready. The House moved to a 10-minute rule bill on the subject of regulating debt management companies and the moment passed.

George Osborne: on growth and growing up

We shall return in due course to the question of Mr Osborne’s observations on onanism, but  for the moment the issue is what business did GQ magazine have in making the Chancellor of the Exchequer their “politician of the year”?

There are others more obviously worthy of the accolade. Tom Watson MP, for example, must be a strong contender. Through his stakhanovite pursuit of the phone hackers, he has done more than anyone in the country, with the exception of James Murdoch, to bring down ruination upon the House of Rupe, and even if you are among the pariahs who don’t applaud the outcome, you can still admire the application . A late entrant into the lists might be Evan Harris, whose effectiveness in orchestrating opposition to Mr Lansley’s health reforms is directly measurable in the rude names he is being called by the Tories.  Dr Harris, they note bitterly, isn’t even a Lib Dem MP anymore (So what? Since when has sitting in the yellow corner of the green benches been the sine qua non of political supremacy?) yet he has managed to overcome this disability to make himself a considerable obstacle on the path that leads to GP commissioning, or whatever it is that Mr Lansley’s utopian destination is called these days.  Since one is statistically more likely to win the lottery than become a Lib Dem MP, Dr Harris’ example of influence well-directed offers hope for us all.  From the Conservative side meanwhile, Michael Gove, after a shaky start, has used his year well to push forward the free school initiative, a refreshing and radical policy that ought to make even the most grumpy Tory hum a little tune.

My own vote for politician of the year, however, goes to Nick Clegg.  True he leads a party whose approval rating is worse than anthrax, and, should he ever flee into political exile, he would find that even Niger has standards to maintain, yet he has secured his position in the only place that matters: the heart of David Cameron.  The rout of May seems long ago now. When Clegg said that he would use those defeats to be even more bolshy and demanding in the Liberal Democrat cause, he was good to his word. Clegg’s influence may be exaggerated by those Conservatives who do his image no end of favours by complaining about it so ad infinitium, but there is no doubt that he has played a weak hand well.  When Cameron was asked the Dorries question about showing Clegg who was boss, the embarrassing little sketch he acted out in reply finished up with a generous pat upon Mr Clegg’s shoulder.  What did that say about who was the boss?

Mr Osborne’s own claim to political gold rests, presumably, on the job he has done with the economy, for how else are we supposed to judge the Chancellor of the Exchequer? Except that the job he has done with the economy is, at the time of writing, very much far from done. It is conventional wisdom that if the Osborne recovery comes through, then the Tories will walk the next election, and even the wily Mr Clegg will be banished from influence. At that time we might want to hang a gong around Osborne’s neck, and listen to another of his dirty jokes. For the moment meanwhile  it is worth observing that confidence in Mr Osborne’s policies is more on the wane than the wax.

Even Madame Lagarde, the head of the IMF, who it seems to me harbours the same sort of sparkle-eyed interest in Mr Osborne that Hilary Clinton was once supposed to feel for David Miliband, has started to say that the course might need to be adjusted. It was rather touching really that the Treasury should make such a thing of Madame Lagarde’s description of the deficit-reduction programme as “appropriate” – much as a small child might come back from pony club proudly bearing a rosette for eighth place.  As the economy itself continues to lollop along, some sort of change in emphasis, if not in direction, seems inevitable.  There is much talk of plan A+ and yesterday’s papers were full of stories of how Mr Osborne is energetically bullying his colleagues for ideas for economic growth.  The trouble is that we have been here before. Between the Autumn spending review last year and the March Budget we were told continuously that the new priority was growth. The Budget itself, supposedly focused on this great endeavour, turned out to be as instantly forgettable as a half a dozen of Gordon Brown’s efforts combined.

Madame Lagarde is not the only older woman on the Chancellor’s tail. The aforementioned Mrs Dorries also assailed him for his off-colour comments when picking up  the GQ award. How shocked she really was I have no idea. There seems to be an informal rota system operating where one female Tory MP at a time must continuously be in the public eye and Mrs Dorries, having taken over the shift from Louise Mensch, might have made the remark only for the purposes of fulfilling her remit. More striking from where I was sitting was that David Mitchell, who was hosting the GQ awards, complained that the Chancellor’s comments had lowered the tone of the evening. When the progenitor of Peep Show thinks you have acted in bad taste, it really is time to be sacking your scriptwriters.

The obvious point to make, of course, is that it is impossible to imagine say Rab Butler or Nigel Lawson, or even Alastair Darling, taking to the podium to muse on the careless masturbatory habits of the teenage generation (I am tempted to extend the parallel all the way back to Gladstone, though it would be nice to think of the old boy, in comparable circumstances, making a nudge nudge reference to saving a fallen woman for himself, leaving Disraeli, the David Mitchell of his day, to harrumph in slightly jealous irritation).  That Mr Osborne’s remarks were unworthy of the office he holds is a truth as palpable as to express it is pompous. Judging by its reaction, even the audience on the night – who I assume was not made up of bishops’ wives and army colonels – was unimpressed.  It may have been a joke that was, to paraphrase the IMF, “inappropriate”, but more interesting is what it says about Mr Osborne.

When Mr Osborne was the shadow chancellor, he was not taken very seriously, at least not as the shadow chancellor. He was thought to be a sharp political strategist – which is another way of saying that he liked playing at politics – but notes and nods were regularly said to be circulating in the City and elsewhere to the effect that his grasp of economics and business was less than masterful. Alistair Darling in his memoirs cruelly exposes how, at every point of the unfolding economic crisis of 2007 and 2008, Mr Osborne’s response was either lightweight or opportunistic, or frequently both.  Even allowing for the fact that Mr Darling remains a practising political opponent of Mr Osborne, these jibes ring true. Adept as he was and is at the paintballing side of political larking about, Mr Osborne is no financial colossus.

The Chancellor’s achievement since taking office, such as it is, is to have driven this feeling about him into the background. At some point in his days as the then opposition’s master strategist he decided that the smart thing for Tory election prospects would be to assault the deficit, and to damn Labour as the insane debt-raisers who nearly buried Britain, and he has stuck to that plan with a robotic determination that is in its way impressive.  For as long as he was able to make it appear that the only economic policy Britain needed was one to eliminate the deficit, Mr Osborne, fighting a battle whose terms he had been able to dictate, commanded the field. In the process, he was able to banish any other thoughts about the weaknesses in his make-up.

To repeat, this has been a political, not an economic, achievement, and perhaps GQ would argue that is reason enough to hand Mr Osborne their award. The problem, however, is that as the global economic situation worsens, it is becoming clear that dealing with debt is only part of what needs to be done, and not the whole answer.  If we wish to assess the Chancellor’s mettle, we would be better off doing so by seeing what sort of response he can muster on the all important questions of economic growth and jobs. Admittedly he is not helped by having as a partner a Business Secretary who is no more useful to a productive economy than a squashed can of Coca Cola, but Mr Osborne’s own record on this front so far is hardly convincing either.  He still has everything to prove. He has to show us that he is capable of a growth strategy that includes, though is not limited to, growing up.

Wednesday 7th September

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, is sometimes likened, chiefly by her enemies it must be said, to Edwina Currie, one of those many Tories wiped out by the political meteor of May 1997.  The comparison does not carry with it any predictive DNA. It does not mean that Mrs Dorries will one day end up as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing or the author of several eyebrow-raising Westminster sagas or in bed with the prime minister.  Particularly not the last now, one imagines, after Mr Cameron connived in the humiliation of his backbencher in a scene that was every bit as portentuous as it was juvenile.

The scene was Prime Minister’s Questions  where Mrs Dorries used her chance to pitch one at the PM to ask when he was going to show the deputy prime minister who is boss.  Mrs Currie, a former junior minister, was once defended by her then departmental chief, Norman Fowler, as someone who says what other people are thinking, and Mrs Dorries would seem to have inherited that knack. Those Conservative MPs who are not thinking that it is time Mr Cameron stood up to Nick Clegg are thinking that it is time he shoved the deputy prime minister’s head down the toilet pan and pulled the chain. There must, they reason, be some upside to that Eton training.

It was therefore a good question, but Mrs Dorries – or Mad Nad as she is sometimes known – may reflect that it wasn’t a particularly opportune moment for her to be asking it. For the last few days she has been engaged in an energetic campaign to amend the law on abortion so that the purveyors of these particularly beastly operations are barred from advising women whether or not to have one.  There may well be some quiet merit in this proposal, but the British political establishment likes to think that its failure to obsess about abortion is one of the few things that still sets it culturally above America. Mrs Dorries, by harping on about the subject, threatens that delicate status quo and so when she rose to ask her question she was met with the sort of embarrassment across the House that inflicts a family gathering just before a drunken uncle gets up to tell a dirty joke.

The question was also unlikely to be given the attention it deserved, because it spoke to some personal needle between Mrs Dorries and Mr Cameron. The prime minister was initially thought to be in favour the Dorries amendment, but then let the Polly Toynbee side of his character win out and changed his mind. This did not endear him to Mrs Dorries, nor she to him after she called the volte face “gutless”. She suspects moreover that the inner Toynbee in Mr Cameron was released by the outer Clegg, who likes to poke the prime minister in various liberal directions, just for the pleasure of showing his backbenchers that he can.  It has been reported that the prime minister chose to put the stability of his coalition ahead of the rights of the unborn child which, as anti-abortion campaigners would no doubt observe, is, after all, where most other considerations reside.

Less attentive to the significance of the issue for his backbenchers than to the person who was raising it, Mr Cameron flushed and blushed and then embarked upon an answer which began “I know that the honourable lady is frustrated….”.  I have no doubt that this was an innocent opening, and on the way towards addressing Mrs Dorries’ upset at having her efforts on abortion rebuffed. Yet no sooner had the word “frustrated” issued from the premier’s lips than the House – or its dominant male contingent at least – collapsed amid collective giggles and guffaws. Frustrated you see. Geddit? Even Sir George Young, not somebody who you would automatically suspect of intimacy with locker-room humour, threw his head back and smirked. Having thus inadvertantly imparted dirty thoughts into around 300 minds, the prime minister allowed them to wash there a little by joining in the general merriment. Then he made a joke of declaring defeat on the question itself and sat down. Finally, he gave Mr Clegg a pat on the shoulder for all the world as if he were the butt of the humour that had been unleashed around the chamber. In the context of a question from one of his own side about being too matey with his deputy, it was not just an arch, but an ill-advised, gesture

What does this little incident tell us? About the House of Commons, not very much since you do not have to subscribe to any of the doctrines of sexism to understand that it is still a place where much misogyny abides. About the prime minister, a little. Those who say that he is not as nice as he claims will have found here some small evidence to bolster their case. Those who make the more serious charge that he is either blind or indifferent to the gulf that is opening between him and his backbenchers over the balance of power in the coalition will also have had their suspicions strengthened.  For them the joke will soon start to wear a little thin.

Cameron Buries Good news

David Cameron has been using the nuclear explosion of outrage that has greeted the Milly Dowler phone-hacking revelations as an opportunity to bury good news.  The prime minister announced this morning that Speaker Bercow is to be sent into exile. To Afghanistan. Now  we know why the Speaker’s wife, our Sal, has been seen recently wearing a sheet.

The curious announcement was made this morning that Mr Bercow is to participate in a UK-Afghanistan parliamentary exchange scheme.  The existence of  this part of the rich Anglo-Afghan heritage will, I think it is fair to say, have come as a surprise to most British parliamentarians, including the Speaker himself.  Now he is to be its beneficiary. Bercow will trade places with his opposite number in Afghanistan’s lower house, the Wolesi Jirga, Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi. Mr Ibrahimi’s catch phrase “I ask the House to reflect on what the Taliban will think of this sort of behaviour” has become a firm favourite with viewers of Al-Jazeera’s immensely popular parliamentary sketch show Kabul Kapers.  

Moments before announcing the Bercow banishment, Mr Cameron had issued an impassioned plea to Afghanistan’s warring factions to cease their violence. Presumably the idea is that they should give it a week or two to allow plenty of time for the Speaker’s plane to arrive. Best of all, however, was the reaction of a Downing Street spokesman when asked whether Mr Bercow had been asked to take part in the exchange. “I am sure he is fully supportive of our efforts”, replied the spokesman. Or will be, perhaps.

I dare say  too that the Commons will be a much brighter, happier, place for being presided over by Mr Ibrahami.  Tory MPs will be interested to know that he comes from the province of Kundoz. So they won’t have to think of him that differently from Speaker Bercow after all.

 

The Frisking of our Pensioners

The House of Commons yesterday addressed itself to the inevitability of old age.  This is quite normal. Our MPs spend many hours talking about things over which they have no control and generally seem the more contented for it. Usually it is the European Union robbing them of their potency, but the EU being currently otherwise engaged organising a car-boot sale for the Greek economy, the inaudible and noiseless foot of time stepped up for duty on this occasion.

The good news, as Health Secretary Lansley set off on his long, dull statement in response to the Dilnot Commission on the funding of long-term care, was that Ed Miliband had already promised co-operation and consensus from the official opposition.  This was a relief, especially to those of us worried that we would find ourselves with one side of the aisle promising dignity, security and comfort for our old folk and the other pressing for a bullet in the back of the head followed by a short drop into a lime-laced pit.  John Healey, Mr Lansley’s opposite number, anxious not to become the pit party, talked about Mr Miliband’s “big offer” and called for “cross-party, cross-government” talks. Later, MPs on all sides of the chamber referred to recent instances of care-home providers getting into financial difficulties. Mr Lansley, who seemed, as far as I could tell, generally less of an enthusiast the consensual approach, certainly wasn’t in the business of offering Southern Cross-party talks.

There is history here. In a brief outburst of extreme political naivety before the last general election, an attempt was made then for the parties to agree upon how long-term care for the elderly should be funded, The experiment fell apart amid much acrimony. Mr Lansley fiercely holds that it was the other lot who reneged. However, his are the fingerprints upon the phrase “death taxes” that burst into the public space at the moment of implosion. That standard-bearer of political consensus, Dennis Skinner, offered Mr Lansley yesterday the chance to atone for his harsh words, but the Secretary of State declined.

Besides, Mr Lansley would say that, if atonement were needed, he has already done his bit by commissioning Andrew Dilnot and a couple of others to produce another long and well-considered report upon this most interminable and imponderable of issues.  Mr Lansley is not the first Secretary of State to spring into action and commission a report, and no doubt he will not be the last. The favourite Westminster metaphor talks about kicking an issue into the long-grass. The funding of long-term care has had more time in the hayfield than a wench in Tom Jones.

And is destined for a good deal more if the evidence of yesterday’s statement is anything to go by.  Mr Lansley promised that he would “consider the [Dilnot] recommendations as a priority”. This in the great gearbox of government action roughly equates to a reluctant shift into second and even that stands ready to be reversed:  the Secretary of State went on to point up the need to “consider the recommendations carefully against other funding priorities and calls on our constrained resources”.  Quite why, in the light of these red flashing lights, the Conservative backbencher Oliver Colville felt the need to ask Mr Lansley whether he had discussed the report with the Treasury is a mystery.

Dilnot’s main proposal is that there should be a cap on the amount an individual should have to pay towards the cost of his or her own care, before the state-funded cavalry arrives to pay the rest of the bill.  Nobody from any party seemed to object much to the idea of there being a cap; all that needs to be decided through the many more months of “stakeholder engagement” that lie ahead is the level at which it should be set. In truth, the answer to this question can be arrived at not by consulting the copious old-age lobby, but by talking to a decent actuary who can let you know how much the different options cost.

Certainly, all the evidence is that the Government’s approach to the massive celebration that, we are told, is extended old age, is more actuarial than philosophical. All Labour’s questioning in one way or another concerned the ways in which the state’s engagement in our dotage (as we should think of it)  should be calculated, calibrated and controlled. There was, for example, much agreement with the Dilnot proposal that there should be a standard eligibility test for meals on wheels, a sort of national pensioner-frisking exercise to decide which ones get past the gate and into the garden of state munificence. Without it, of course, we shall be exposed to that most disgusting of modern pestilences, the postcode lottery.

There was little sign, however, of any Tories, front or backbench, departing from this received wisdom: barely an attempt to argue for individual foresightedness or the bastion of the family to prepare the defences against the vandalism of time. We shall all need to throw ourselves upon the mercies of the tax-payer, seemed to be the message; the only question being when and for how much.  Indeed, Mr Lansley referred to a particularly gruesome manifestation of this inevitability when he started burbling on about something called “telehealth whole system demonstrator pilots”.  Personally,  all the telly-health I hope to get in old age is the opportunity to slump mindlessly in front of The Weakest Link. It seems, however, that the Secretary of State has something more interactive in mind, possibly involving press-ups.

Only two Tories offered brief hope of a way out.  Charlie Elphicke from Dover asked the Secretary of State about prevention, though what might have been a promising line of inquiry into research funding for the elixir of eternal youth degenerated into something altogether more mundane about respite care. And David Nuttall from Bury North wanted to know about the legalisation of euthanasia, before revealing that he was against this approach and not advancing it as a solution.

So, where did we get to?  Another Commission come and gone. Another white paper promised in another spring. Much nodding of heads about the intractability of the problem; much agreement on the “principles” and hopes for more consultation and consensus. No clue about how we are going to pay for it. Shakespeare had this illimitable and endlessly repeating process right: sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

The home life of our dear Leader of the Opposition

When politicians start to appear in the public discourse routinely with the prefix “poor” in front of their names, it is generally a sign that it’s time to call in the undertakers. Ask poor Mr Major who started to appear this way from about, as I recall, 1995. It was a long, slow, decay in this case and we can only wonder if Ed Miliband is destined to last as long now that he is Poor Mr Miliband after his spooky “these strikes are wrong” interview that everyone is looking at today.

According to this account of said interview, written by the reporter who conducted it, Mr Miliband had three aides on hand to help him through it. And not one of them able to find the off-switch.  The interview is simultaneously hilarious and gruesome that it doesn’t really require commentary, though picture, if you, will, the scene as PMM arrives home from work that evening:

Mrs M:  Ed darling, if you could just switch off the Nintendo for a moment. What do you say that we order in a takeaway and then make it an early night?

PMM:    I say that these strikes are wrong and that the Government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner.

Poor Mrs M too.

Incidentally, I treasure the line in Damon Green’s account that the prime minister’s aides won’t allow him to be photographed in front of “anything Etonian”. That must make shots with the full Cabinet tricky for a start.

This leads on to a thought I had the other day that 2015 – the scheduled date for the next election –  is two hundred years on from the Battle of Waterloo.  Moreover, the precise anniversary – Waterloo Day – is 18th June and a Thursday that year. What better platform could there be for the Conservatives to enjoy an ever-popular patriotic, squash the frogs theme for their rallying cry?

Except that, alas, the last legal date for the election is 11th June, the week before. So near, yet so far. Now it turns out that the point is academic in any case.  There must be some reporters out there who will recall that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. So Cameron cannot be associated with it even if he wanted to.

 

 

 

 

 

Miliband’s cunning plan: still no answer

It is now three weeks since Ed Miliband launched his unbelievably cunning strategy for prime minister’s questions of asking the prime minister questions.  Mr Cameron, who took up to eight months to work out that his health secretary’s health reforms were political suicide on stilts, cannot claim a reputation for being quick on the uptake. There was, from today’s evidence, no sign that he has yet spotted the Miliband secret weapon, still less worked out how to counter it.

Mr Cameron has available to him the conventional three options for dealing with challenges put to him across the despatch box: he can answer the question; or ignore it; or answer another question altogether. The prime minister is in fact quite good at answering the question when the inclination takes him. When the Conservative backbencher Graham Evans today inquired whether the PM felt that the men of Bomber Command killed in the war deserve to be remembered, he had no hesitation in thinking that to be the case.  Labour members quite often seek to test Mr Cameron’s opinion on whether he is an insufferable Etonian bully-boy, presiding over a Cabinet of monsters steeped in the blood of pensioners, and he rarely feels the need to smudge his reply. Yet when Mr Miliband rises to speak, the prime minister’s certainties desert him.

Both dodging tactics were on display today. There was a period in the middle of the Miliband innings when the prime minister started to answer not the leader of the opposition’s immediate question, but the one he had put to him on the previous go. For a while it looked as if PMQs was going to go the way of the famous Two Ronnies’  Mastermind sketch. If Mr Miliband had had the wit to ask Mr Cameron if he knew what Burke’s peerage was, the PM would surely have replied a study of old fossils.

Perhaps mindful of where this was heading, the prime minister switched tactic. He stopped answering the question altogether. On and on droned Mr Miliband with ever more detailed interrogations about the impact of the NHS reforms. Did the prime minister know how many new statutory bodies would be created by the changes? Well, of course, he didn’t. Nobody does. Mr Miliband supplied an answer – he likes to do that – 521 as it happens, but this has no more status than a child’s church fete estimate of he number of sweets in a jar.  By the time anyone in the Department of Health has finished counting, half of them will have been abolished and twice as many again re-created under different initials. Such is the endearing and enduring nature of British health policy.

The only thing Mr Cameron has to count is the number of the opposition leader’s questions, so that by the time he has had his six, the PM is then free to launch into his pre-prepared rant.  This took the form of a litany of all the things that Mr Miliband hadn’t asked him about – strikes, the economy, Greece and so forth – each of which, according to the prime minister, revealed either political vulnerability or shocking lack of judgement, or both.  It is not the first time Cameron has tried this out and each time I cannot help but imagine him as a suspect under police interrogation. “Ha”, he says, “I notice that all the detective chief inspector wants to know is where I’ve hidden the body; he simply wouldn’t dare to tackle me on my views of 17th century chamber music”.

On the subject of the health reforms themselves, the prime minister was pleased to observe that they had gained the support of Tony Blair and of the former Labour health minister Lord Darzi. However, he mispronounced the latter’s name so it came out as Lord Darz-eye, as if Mr Cameron might have been temporarily under the impression that GP commissioning had been well-reviewed by the prime minister of Afghanistan. Later, a sycophantic Tory MP from Wales, Guto Bebb, observed that Nye Bevan would be spinning in his grave at what Labour was doing to the NHS in the Prinicipality. Regular observers of health politics will know that Nye Bevan has been spinning in his grave for one reason or another ever since he died 51 years ago, and possibly even before that. Another questioner wanted to know about renewable energy to which the answer surely is to harness the power emanating from the founder of the NHS expressing his posthumous displeasure at that organisation’s subsequent and inexorable decline.

Two nations: divided by the CRB

Overflowing with respect for even the most cantankerous opponent, and oozing reasonableness from every pore, Michael Gove arrived at the despatch box yesterday to answer an emergency question on Thursday’s teacher’s strike. When he speaks, Mr Gove does so in organised, manicured and precisely stressed phrases, as if talking to very small children (which of course he largely is). He sounded like a fashionable actor trying to do responsible for the story-time slot on CBeebies.

It thus came as some surprise to discover, as the questioning continued, that Mr Gove had himself once been, in the words of Labour member Bill Sefton, a “staunch trade unionist” and had gone on strike. A picture has surfaced of young Gove on the picket line, the future Secretary of State being instantly recognisable as the only one whose placard contains semi-colons.  “I lost my job as a result of taking industrial action”, Mr Gove solemnly informed the House, using this observation to draw the deeper moral that going on strike never solves anything. If there was a shallower moral for teachers to draw that going on strike gets you fired,  Mr Gove was too refined to say so. One would no more expect such Tebbitry from him than you would dockyard language from the Queen at an investiture.

At the time of his ill-fated action, Mr Gove was a journalist on the Aberdeen Press and Journal, and I am sure that publication was immeasurably the poorer for appearing that week without its practical woodworking column.  There is a passage in Stephen Fry’s novel Hippopotamus when its hero, a poet, laments the fact that if all the poets in the country went on strike (as opposed to all the sewage workers) no one would care, or even notice. The same could perhaps be said of all the journalists in Aberdeen. These days, in any case, a little army of bloggers and tweeters would rush in to fill the anxious void.

The loss of a great many teachers on Thursday, by contrast, might be held to be damaging to the national fibre which is why Mr Gove’s statement, in between regretting the action in absolute – one might almost say ablative absolute – terms, laid great emphasis on what could be done by schools to stay open despite everything.  Mr Gove’s department, we learned, is compiling figures on how this effort is going. Given that department’s record for organising information, this is not necessarily a source of reassurance. Doubtless we shall soon be told that of the country’s seventeen and a half million schools and academies, nearly twenty-five million expect to be able to muddle through.

Muddling through will involve volunteer effort from parents, something that the Secretary of State has been anxious to try to whip up. In this he received enthusiastic support from Tracey Crouch, a Tory from Kent, who demanded to know what she “and other colleagues who have a CRB certificate” could do to help. Ms Crouch, who is a qualified football coach, could doubtless be found some PE to take somewhere. Listening to her offer, however, one is tempted to conclude that truly we are two nations after all, divided between those authorised by the police to remain in the vicinity of children and those for whom the jury is out. Ms Crouch’s fellow MPs who do not have the requisite documentation from the fuzz will I expect be allowed to hang around the school gates, fondling their bags of sweets.

It is tempting to regard the great schools relief effort as an example of the Big Society where the oppressive instruments of the state – in this instance the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – are overthrown by the brute power of cheery amateurism. Personally, I think the parallels are more historic. Think back to the general strike in 1926, when men in fedoras got to drive  buses and trains for a day or so before the TUC, broken by the unstoppable practicality of the middle-classes, called the whole thing off. That this was also the fulfillment of a boyhood dream for many was a happy by-product of an otherwise dark week in our history.

Of course, not many boys say that when they grow up they want to be a classroom assistant, so the analogy might break down at this point. The Speaker though both dresses for the part of a minor prep school master and, say his enemies, behaves increasingly as if that is what he is.  Mr Bercow is also no fan of Mr Gove, yet on this occasion even he could find nothing to fault in the Secretary of State’s immaculately polite presentation.

There was, however, one brief moment of danger. Discussing what he had or had not said to the teaching unions while still in opposition, Mr Gove appeared to come close to accusing Andy Burnham, his opposite number, of misleading the House – an offence high upon the roster of parliamentary naughtiness.  Mr Bercow must have blinked, or nodded off, for he allowed the Secretary of State time to recover. Mr Gove re-stated the point in a manner that implied he would be less astonished to find Simon Cowell splashing about in his morning sugar puffs than Mr Burnham misleading the House. We all knew what he meant anyway, but even Bercow was quelled by his charm.