What a Difference a Week Makes

I don't quite know why it is that I've needed such a long break from the blogosphere, but for those of you who have missed my input, I have decided to sum up events during my absence with a few brief bullet points. They are as follows:

1) Miliband the Younger wins Labour leadership contest, mainly due to support from the trade unions.

2) Miliband the Older throws his toys from the pram, giving up Cabinet politics at the time that his party needs him the most.

3) Coalition government continues to tell lies about the necessity to make swingeing cuts in any local government department that looks at them funny. They ringfence defence spending (contractors make fat profits, and it's a glorious throwback to colonial days to have British soldiers swanning around the globe) and also health spending (because cutting that would be unpopular.)

4) Gideon 'George' Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and beneficiary of a trust fund estimated to be worth £4 million pounds, proposes cuts to child benefit. At the party conference, evident panic at the child benefit backlash causes David Cameron to hint that there will be forthcoming tax breaks for married couples, regardless of earnings.

I'm drawing attention to this little policy idisyncracy, as it clearly benefits the middle classes and the rich over the poorer members of society, who are more likely to be single parents and low earners.

Osborne will hold centre stage for the next couple of weeks in the news, at least until the inevitable bad news is released in the comprehensive spending review on 20th October 2010. Incidentally, Guido Fawkes ran a piece in his blog in August which stated that George Osborne was the most popular Tory Chancellor in modern history. I'll be running another piece about Osborne in the near future, as he is also currently topping the Old Statesman 'Smug, Dictatorial Rich Politician Most in Need of a Slap' poll.

A Liberal Gamble

I have spent the last day or two watching pictures come out of the Liberal Democrat Conference in Liverpool, and I wonder if I am the only one who has my head in my my hands when I hear Nick Clegg speaking.

In contrast to the way that Vince Cable strains at the leash, mouth foaming in his restrained desire to put capitalism to the sword, Clegg seems limp and deceitful, a man who postured pre-election firmly at the side of the centre left that forms the backbone of his own party but knows all too well that he is now sleeping with the enemy and is in way too deep to pull out.

The chilly echo that greeted his keynote speech at the party conference is all too telling. Liberal voters have been swift to denounce the Orange Book cognoscenti within the party and many are now of the opinion that the party has completely sold out to the Conservatives. By moving away from the core of his own support, Clegg is now running a lonely three-legged race with David Cameron, and faces the likelihood that while failure to resolve the crisis within the country will see blame apportioned equally, credit for any successes is unlikely to be shared by the blue half of government.

These are unique and uncomfortable times for the Orange Book politicians. Regrettably for the Liberal Democrats, many of their big name politicians are not, in fact, big names at all. Chris Huhne, Mark Oaten and Susan Kramer are not the profiles that will save the party from rejection by its own faithful. In Vince Cable they have at least one extremely knowledgable and respected trump card; however, he is bogged down in the unpopular Royal Mail privatisation debate, and will not win internal political arguments about bank taxes and bonuses.

As the stakes are raised progressively higher in the coming months as those bank bonuses continue unabated and the real scale of economic cuts becomes apparent to the voter on the street, I believe that Clegg will begin to look increasingly like a man gambling in a casino at stakes where he simply cannot afford to lose. Clegg spoke earlier in the week about the 'quiet courage' of the party in choosing to form a coalition government with the Conservatives. These are fine words which fool no-one, and he will not genuinely expect things amongst his own party to stay quiet for long.

But then, this is a new kind of politics, and Clegg speaks of taking risks in government. His supporters will hope that he is aware of just what kind of risk he is taking. The very future of his party is at stake. However, rather than acknowledge this truth, it seems that Clegg has taken to the ether and started to believe his own hype. The Liberal Democrats are, after all, the new kingmakers - it just seems that somewhere along the line, they have begun to fool themselves that they are the kings.

'We are not having someone who built their career on incompetence...'

So went the political epitaph of one Jenny Watson, former head of the Audit Commission, removed from post this week by the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles.

Pickles has made a few waves already since his appointment to his new role after passing the position of Conservative Party chairman to Baroness Warsi in May. As well as swiftly ending the proposed changes to unitary council arrangements in Exeter and Norwich, Pickles has declared plans to allow ministers to cap council tax rises where this is demanded by the local electorate. Given his reputation for forcing through his agenda regardless of opposition, I will be following Mr Pickles' career with interest in the near future.

The Audit Commission became ridiculously bloated under New Labour but under the auspices of David Cameron's Big Society, the work performed by the commission will be farmed out to private and voluntary, not-for-profit organisations. Opinions are mixed as to whether the new arrangements, due to come in 2012, will be more efficient or make the required savings that the coalition expects, but it does show the government's commitment to tackling the quango culture established under Blair and Brown.

Jenny Watson retains a number of other jobs including the head of the Electoral Commission, and has come under fire from many quarters for her refusal to accept responsibility for the debacle that occurred at the General Election earlier this year when voters arrived en masse at key times at certain polling stations and were turned away.

The phrase from a source in the Communities department, as quoted in the Times today, reads like a thoroughly unveiled insult. I quote:

'We are not having someone who built their career on incompetence continuing to milk the taxpayer. She is not fit for the role.'

Regardless of your feelings about Ms Watson, it is hard not to feel for her when the country's toughest performance reviewer makes their feelings plain in such a public fashion.

From a wider perspective, I suspect that like me, other political bloggers may be storing this quote away for future use and rubbing their hands with glee. For instance, if the new coalition is vehemently opposed to incompetence, it may wish to cast its eye over the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, who holds one of the highest offices in the land but evidently has a blind spot for the word 'Sandwell'.

Coulson does a Hague

I have decided to invent a new term.  I’m hoping that it will enter mainstream use, perhaps through the initial medium of word of mouth and then into some internet lexicon of frequently used terms, before becoming as popular as the use of the word ‘gate’ after any political scandal.

The phrase will be ‘to do a Hague’. From now on, this will refer to someone who doesn’t think through their actions, despite having every reason to do so. It could refer also to those caught between twin accusations – perhaps that of someone accused of either abuse of a position of power, or incompetence for not having identified a potential conflict of interest.  Maybe there could be a verb form – ‘You’ve been Hagued’.

After my discussion yesterday of the issues that have affected William Hague and his quite extraordinary statement responding to media whispers about his homosexuality, the foreign secretary must surely be glad that it is someone else’s turn in the spotlight.

It seems as though Number 10 communications chief Andy Coulson, former editor of the News of the World, may be questioned again over his role in a 2007 scandal in which royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed for conspiracy to access phone messages left for royal aides.

Coulson maintains, as he has always done, that he had no knowledge of Goodman’s actions.  Indeed, no evidence has ever suggested differently and he has received the full backing of the office of the Prime Minister.  However, without Cameron’s heavyweight presence at the helm due to his paternity leave, the rumours about Coulson’s role in the matter have persisted like a bad smell, prompting Shadow Education Secretary Ed Balls to state earlier this week that Coulson's role at the heart of Number 10 meant that the government's 'integrity' was under question.

For me, Coulson has done a Hague.  While he may well be correct in his assertion that he did not order or have knowledge of Goodman’s activities, the unfortunate question remains of why he did not know what his own staff were doing.  From the detail in the stories that would surely have resulted from such phone tapping, can Coulson not have wondered about the sources of such information?  Should he not have made more effort to find out?

Days pass, the media focus remains and it seems increasingly likely that Coulson will be questioned by Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates about his role in the events that took place three years ago.  Despite their vocal public support, senior Conservatives may well be beginning to get twitchy.  The coalition has quietly built up a decent amount of political capital in the first hundred days since its inception, but Cameron has spoken in the past of 'returning integrity' to government, and with each passing day, Coulson is becoming more and more dirty by proximity.  He will fervently hope that he is not the first high-profile figure to be sent to the coalition’s sacrificial altar.

Share your thoughts in the comments.