Adrian Hilton: The BBC would have us think that Ferguson trumps the Queen

Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, theologian and educationalist. He writes a Daily Mail blog and is still agitating for Ann Widdecombe’s peerage. Follow Adrian on Twitter.

Is there a sporting equivalent for the philosophic or aesthetic philistine? If so, please excuse my socio-lexical ignorance: I must be one. I sat patiently through last night’s BBC News while the Gracious Speech played inglorious left-wing to the centre-mid resignation of Sir Alex Ferguson. I bit my lip as his departure from the field shunted the Coalition’s programme for government from the headlines of the national press, and Twitter tribalists obsessed all day about his legendary record of achievement.

Incredibly, there were even some comparing the moment to the death of The Lady, which is really quite appalling when you think about it. Did the late, great Alex Ferguson really do for football what the late and very much greater Margaret Thatcher did for Great Britain? Did he halt terminal decline, revive a national spirit, liberate half a continent or inspire a generation?

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Henry Hill: Can UKIP become a truly national party?

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

UKIP: A national party?

“The scale of the advance of Ukip has shocked both the two main parties. As expected, it seems to have taken votes primarily from disgruntled Conservatives, but it is also establishing itself in traditional Labour areas. As Tim Congdon has pointed out, if that trend should continue Mr Farage would be able to claim that his was the only truly national party with strong support across the whole of England.”

Above is Lord Tebbit, temporarily forgetting that Alex Salmond has yet to win the 2014 referendum campaign. I know that Anglonats read this column but individual opinions aside, UKIP is very explicitly the United Kingdom Independence Party. It contests Scottish and Welsh elections. It even managed to beat the Conservatives to an MLA in Northern Ireland.

The problem is that, despite its clearly British sentiments, UKIP doesn’t appear to have a game plan for outside England. It continues to poll poorly in elections to the devolved chambers. It at least beat the Liberal Democrats to an MEP in Wales, and former two-term Conservative MEP for North Wales and so-called “Celtic Iron Lady”, Beata Brookes, recently announced her defection. Yet despite being in the unique position of being able to focus their resources on a single council, the Welsh wing of UKIP didn’t even put up a fight for Isle of Anglesey council.

Its performance in Thursday’s local elections was impressive but they are the worst possible local elections for judging UKIP’s non-Conservative reach, consisting as they did almost exclusively of rural English councils. The real tests will come over the next couple of years.

First up are the council elections in 2014. In Manchester, where I studied, the Liberal Democrats look on course to be wiped out, leaving Labour the only party on the council. If UKIP really do have the ability to reach out to Labour voters, then getting elected in a city that last elected a centre-right councillor in 1992 will be a good litmus test.

Next are the European elections. Whether or not UKIP can increase their performance in Wales, more interesting still will be to see if they can scoop a Scottish MEP (if they do, whether they simply unseat the Tory). In Northern Ireland the third European seat is currently held by a Tory-allied Ulster Unionist. Yet that alliance is now over, with the UUP in the doldrums and the still-miniscule NI Conservatives failing to break through. If the Tories run a proper European campaign in the province, which it looks like they will, the UUP seat could be vulnerable.

In response, UKIP have touted their own Faustian pact with a Northern Irish party: the hard-line Traditional Unionist Voice. TUV leader Jim Allister is a former DUP MEP and has worked with UKIP in the European Parliament. With UKIP’s resources behind him it might offer a decent challenge to the seat, although obviously the impact is limited if the branding is all TUV.

At the general election It seems fairly safe to predict that, if UKIP to manage to win any seats in 2015, they’ll be in England. Nonetheless it will be interesting to see whether they can build up a vote outside England, particularly if it starts to cost the Tories their very precious non-English seats.

Then there are the devolved elections. The Northern Irish Assembly is currently scheduled to go to the polls in 2015 (although it might get delayed by a year). UKIP have beaten the Tories to a defector and thus David McNarry will be defending his seat as a UKIP MLA. If he holds it, let alone if UKIP scrape a second one somehow, that’ll be very embarrassing for the local Conservatives.

Finally, there are the Welsh and Scottish elections in 2016. These elections have an element of PR, so the question is whether or not UKIP can win any seats on the regional lists (and who from). Unlike Wales, where some small progress has been made, UKIP is very much the outsider in Scotland – to the extent that the unionist campaign have declined to include the party in their official bid to maintain the UK. With their combination of Anglo-centric right-wing politics and plan to abolish MSPs (but keep the Scottish Parliament, with Scotland’s MPs sitting part-time), it is very hard to envisage them making a real breakthrough.However, UKIP themselves seem more confident and are taking steps to ensure that their Scottish members influence the party’s image and policy making, which is a positive start.

It is these elections, and not English rural councils, which will demonstrate whether or not UKIP is able to genuinely carry the centre-right standard into territories which have spent the best part of twenty years resisting the Conservatives.

The future’s bright, the future’s…

Your columnist is up in Northern Ireland this week, spending a week on placement in the archives of the Orange Order in Belfast. It’s very nice to be back in the city, which is one of my favourites, and enjoy a few days buying things with pounds and catching up on iPlayer. It’s an interesting experience.

I’m staying in West Belfast, with the Catholic chairman of Conservative Future Northern Ireland. The archive is on the other side of a city, in a loyalist community. My journey to work and back takes me past painted kerbstones, rival flags, murals, and all the iconography of the scary Belfast we see on the news.

Yet contrary to what you might expect if you only experience Northern Ireland through the mainland news, on the whole Belfast and most of Northern Ireland is lovely. If you steer clear of a few trouble spots the people are friendly, the scenery stunning, the grand Victorian buildings splendid and the modernist monstrosities hard to find.

It isn’t normally my intention to turn this column into an extension of a tourist office, but with its Soviet-style public sector economy, unsavoury politicians, armed militants and frightening history Northern Ireland often gets something of a bad rap, which I suspect contributes to the sizeable “what’s the point” attitude you can find in England. To my mind, nobody who has visited Northern Ireland recently can fail to see why it’d be our loss to see it go. I got my first impression of Belfast during the recent flag riots and managed to fall in love with it anyway.

By the by, can you guess which biscuit is the favourite at the Orange Order HQ? Club Orange, of course. Testament, I am sure, simply to their excellent taste in chocolate snacks.

Greg Clark: We in central government have so much to learn from local authorities

Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells.  Follow Greg on Twitter.

As usual, almost all of the coverage of last week’s local elections was about national not local politics. So, once again, the huge contribution that local government makes to this country was all but overlooked. Amid the ongoing analysis, I think that this is a good time for Westminster politicians to pause  and show some gratitude for the work of our councillors.

From my own perspective as a DCLG-turned-Treasury minister, I can certainly vouch for the fact that the progress that has been made so far in reducing Labour’s deficit would not have been possible without the contribution made by local government. If anyone doubts that our councils are important in this respect, then just consider the fact that a quarter of all public spending takes place at the local authority level. The fight to rebalance the nation’s books needs to be won in our town halls and county halls, not just Whitehall.

While all parts of the public sector need to go further and faster in learning to live within sensible spending constraints, local government is setting the pace. Local authorities have already made significant economies over the past three years. What’s more they have achieved these savings by focusing on reducing overheads and bureaucracy, while seeking to protect frontline public services. It is a tribute to their efforts that residents’ satisfaction with their councils has actually increased over this period.

In part, this is due to the fact that so many councils were ready for the inevitable and necessary squeeze on spending, having had the foresight to begin their preparations well before the 2010 general election. If the national government of the day had practiced a similar degree of prudence, then the current task of deficit reduction would have been a lot easier.

Britain was already an over-centralised country in 1997, but over the next thirteen years the Blair and Brown administrations added massively the burden of control by creating even more quangos, compliance mechanisms, targets and ring-fences. In 2010, the new government turned the tide of centralisation. As local government asked, we got rid of the unelected quangos that controlled our elected councils – the Government Offices of the Regions, the Regional Development Agencies, the Standards Board and other bodies have gone.

And we’ve scrapped the Regional Spatial Strategies, the Comprehensive Area Assessment inspection regime and the 4,700 targets that made up the Local Area Agreements system. Getting rid of so much bureaucracy has made a direct contribution to the task of deficit reduction. But even more importantly, it has made it easier for councils to innovate and achieve more with less – building on what they’ve already achieved.

Central government has much to learn from local government and its important that it does so. Through new measures like the City Deals programme, we need to give councils a much stronger right of initiative – giving them a full say in the devolution of resources and responsibility.
After all the fundamental mistakes of the previous decade, a little humility on the part of Westminster and Whitehall is surely in order – as is a little gratitude to those far beyond SW1 who are putting things right.

Garvan Walshe: Foreign policy for growth - Britain should fight for a transatlantic free market.

Garvan Walshe is former National and International Security Policy Adviser for the Conservative Party. Follow Garvan on Twitter

The planes lined up in two rows separated by a flat expanse criss crossed by buggies and food-skiffs of the air; laid out like Canaletto's Venetian merchantmen against the spring sunset.

Frankfurt airport, a temple to commerce in Germany's business city. Home to a financial institution unloved by readers of this blog, and a city where you can take a glass mug of beer and dip your feet into the Main river without being commanded to decant it into a flimsy plastic receptacle or be precluded by barriers and signs and underemployed men in bright yellow jackets from sitting on the edge, beer in hand.

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Iain Dale: John Hayes should keep quiet, and Justine Greening should be reshuffled

Follow Iain on Twitter. Iain also blogs at www.iaindale.com. Iain Dale presents LBC 97.3 Drivetime programme 4-8pm every weekday.

So, with county council elections only five days away, it was good to see Croydon Conservatives spending last Saturday campaigning in neighbouring Surrey and helping their neighbouring Conservatives do as well as they possibly could. What’s that I hear you saying? They weren’t campaigning at all? They were sitting on their fat arses holding a one day conference at a hotel five miles from the Surrey border? Surely not. But it gets better. Not only that, but one of the party’s vice chairmen, Alok Sharma MP, was one of the speakers, alongside local MP Gavin Barwell, MEP Charles Tannock and Tim Montgomerie, late of this parish. The conference was all about Britain’s relationship with Europe and how to defeat the UKIP threat. May I respectfully suggest that this conference, vital, though I am sure it is, might have been better timed if it had taken place a few weeks later? One thing is for sure, it would never have happened when Sir Anthony Garner was running the party organisation. You may remember that period. It was when the Conservative Party used to win elections.

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Are there no depths to which some people won’t lower themselves? Yesterday I was alerted to the fact that somebody had put a Thatcher funeral Order of Service on eBay. They had put a reserve of £77 on it. Simply appalling.

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Mr Matthew Bellend, the Independent on Sunday’s rather useless diarist, is becoming a tad tiresome. You may recall from last week’s diary that he seemed bemused by the fact that I had paid my respects to Lady Thatcher while her coffin lay in St Mary’s Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster. It’s taken him three works to work out that I have a parliamentary pass. Apparently he now thinks that is a big scandal, and is set to reveal all on Sunday. Had he actually done what any credible journalist would do and picked up the phone and asked me, I’d have happily told him. For like many people in politics I help an MP out from time to time by doing bits of research and contribute ideas for the odd speech. It’s something I have done for many years and it’s set out for all to see in the Register of Interests. I don’t get paid. I don’t cost the taxpayer anything. There’s nothing in it for me. I’d like to describe it as a bit of public service, but clearly, as I didn’t go to Eton, that wouldn’t be right, would it?  So go on Mr Bellend, do your worst.  I’d find it all rather amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic.

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I had Sadiq Khan on my LBC Drivetime show the other day talking about Governor Grayling’s new spartan prison regime. Khan was all in favour of it. Quite right, he said. Tough on crime etc. Now there’s one politician who’s not going to be outdone on the right. I ended the interview by asking him how he thought Labour would do in the local elections. Much sucking of teeth followed. ‘It’s going to be very difficult for us, Iain’. ‘Why so?’ I gently enquired. ‘Well, do you know, I didn’t realise this but if you put all those county councils together, it covers the area of more than 250 MPs?’ I thought for a second and replied ‘ Yes, Sadiq, it’s many of them in the south of England that you’re going to need to beat at the next election, if you’re to win the next election.’ The thought hadn’t really occurred to him. It seems to me that Labour campaigners are going to need to familiarise themselves with the likes of Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire rather than spend their time in the northern strongholds. I’ve never understood why it’s so criminal for the Tories to have so few seats in north, yet Labour get a free pass on their almost total lack of seat south of line between the Wash and Bristol.

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I am most amused by the suggestions in any of the newspapers that David Cameron is being dragged to the right, as if legislating for a European referendum as if in some way a right wing thing. A majority of LibDems support the idea of such a referendum and in my book it’s a politically mainstream thing to do. Which is why I am astonished Nick Clegg has already said he won’t support such legislation. He’s fallen into a very big trap indeed. And it’s one only Ed Miliband can spring him from. If the LibDems want to be painted as not supporting a referendum, that’s their affair, but if I were Ed Miliband I wouldn’t want to go into the election campaign while having scuppered such legislation.

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As well as the papers suggesting that Cameron is being dragged to the right (Europe, cancelling aid to South Africa, taking away TVs from prisoners etc) the papers all seem to mention John Hayes as the architect of this trend. Naturally I cannot possibly bring myself to believe that Mr Hayes himself has briefed such newspapers, because that would be rather improper for a senior parliamentary adviser to the prime minister, wouldn’t it? But if he has, he wouldn’t be doing anything different to any other member of a political court. There’s nothing like telling people, especially journalists, how important you are. The thing is, you can indeed become important, but only when others have worked it out for themselves rather than constantly being reminded of it. David Cameron is said to be amused by John Hayes. I can understand why. He’s good company and an arch parliamentary gossip. He tells a good yarn. But anyone at the Downing Street court who is suspected of opening their gobs to the papers too often will do well to remind themselves that what the Prime Minister giveth, the Prime Minister can easily take away.

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One Conservative MP, who for these purposes had better remain nameless (yes, I know, I know, I am wimping out) – let’s call him Rupert -  was spied in Portcullis House on Wednesday. “Ah, Rupert,” said a colleague. “Not out on the county council election election trail?” “No,” said Rupert, I am giving my county council candidates exactly the same level of support that they gave me in the general election – which is none at all.” Strangely, Portcullis House was rather well populated with Tory MPs on Wednesday.

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Is Justine Greening still alive? It’s just that she seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth in much the same way as Oliver Letwin did in 2001. She’s becoming the scarlet pimpernel of the Tory Party. They seek her here, they seek her there, they seek her everybloodywhere. She seems to be indulging in a year long flounce, having been moved from Transport to International Development last year. This week she decided, quite rightly, to end aid our £19 million a year to South Africa. For some reasons our fellow G20 member (yes, we give aid to a fellow G20 country – unbelievable) got the arseache and accused Greening of being rude by not giving them advance warning. But instead of coming out fighting and giving her side of the story she retreated to her bunker and left it to someone to issue off the record briefings. Much more of this kind of amateur-night behaviour and Miss Greening may find herself replaced yet again. I wonder if it has yet occurred to her that if the PM had left her at Transport she would have had to resign over the West Coast rail franchise debacle. What a pity we now have an International Development Secretary who clearly hates the job, while her predecessor, who was very good at it and thoroughly enjoyed it, languishes on the backbenches. I wonder if I am alone in thinking that at the next reshuffle the PM might do very well to restore Andrew Mitchell to his old job.

And on that bombshell I will leave you to mull over the local election results. I suspect it won’t be much fun.

Paul Goodman: Colleague Harrison and Comrade Weatherhill: "This House" at the Olivier Theatre

By Paul Goodman
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Mike Smithson of Political Betting urged me, after I recommended an early break-up of the Coalition, to see this account of life without one - that's to say, of the travails and trials of the Labour Governments of 1974-1979, which had either a slender majority or no majority at all.  Only the Lib-Lab pact, towards the end of the period, allowed the whips to breathe more easily.  What they did before, after and during it provides James Graham, the author, with the substance of his play.  In particular, his gaze is fixed on two of them: Walter Harrison, Labour's Deputy Chief Whip, and Bernard Weatherhill, his Conservative opposite number.

This was the pre-Twitter age. No, never mind that: this was the pre-mobile phones age, when the the system was in the public sector and it took months to get one. There were only three television channels,  government fixed wages (or tried to), inflation touched over 25%, the unions were a mighty power in the land, the Prime Minister was rumoured to be a Soviet spy, America was traumatised by Watergate, and today's culture of disclosure was almost unimaginable. (Jimmy Saville was master of all he surveyed on Top of The Pops.)

In Graham's Commons, class divisions between the parties are as unrelievedly demarcated as those in any episode of Are You Being Served. There are few women, and those present in the Whips' Office (Labour's Ann Taylor) are treated as honorary men.  Some MPs are hauled through the lobbies blind drunk. Others lie sick on hospital trolleys and are counted through to vote.  Others still drop dead of sheer exhaustion.  Whips shout and scream, accusing each other of cheating.  Labour start with no majority, gain a small one, see it eroded by deaths and by-elections, win some relief from the Lib-Lab pact, watch it end - and are finally brought down.

This House started in the National's smallest theatre, the Cottesloe, and has transferred to its largest, the Olivier.  The staging slickly makes the most of its big spaces.  A huge Big Ben clockface hangs as a backdrop like a full moon.  A mini-rock band perches near it - ringing the musical changes of the times, as they move through Bowie to the Sex Pistols.  Members of the audience mingle with actors on green benches, which swing to and fro, re-creating the adversarial battleground of the Commons.  The Speaker is mauled, manhandled, mugged. No, hold on a second. He's not being mugged. He's being dragged to the Chair!

From it, he calls out the names of the MPs by constituency - whether the action is set in the Chamber, where a bonkers-looking Heseltine grabs the mace and brandishes it, or in the Government and Opposition Whips' Offices, where exhausted men and one woman crack up and make up.  "Wakefield," calls the Speaker. "Croydon North East". "Henley." "Chelmsford." Those of us old enough to remember the MPs of the period (a category into which I fit - as does Smithson, come to think of it) may be distracted by the physical differences between the politicians and the actors that portray them, but the renditions somehow ring true.

It is ensemble acting but, for me, two performances stand out.  The first is Vincent Franklin's apprehensive Michael Cox, who becomes Labour's Chief Whip: bowed, stooped, body hunched defensively against shock and betrayal, he finds solace by clambering up to the clock tower and nattering to an attendant.  The second is Rupert Vansittart's portly Carol Mather - or, rather, Carol Mather MC, whose impressive bulk, wartime courage and graphic swearing are a throwback to a vanished age.  But the axis around on the action turns is Reece Dinsdale's Harrison and Charles Edwards's Weatherhill.

Like the two soldiers in that last poem by Rupert Brooke, the two men are drawn together by adversity.  "I am the enemy you killed, my friend," Brooke writes, and their mirror-image work as fixers somehow turns Graham's whips, so different in political viewpoint, into reflections of each other.  He writes in the programme note that "some incidents and characters have been altered for dramatic purposes", so I doubt that, driven by a sense of honour, Weatherhill offered, in effect, to save the Labour Government by not voting in a division.  But I may well be wrong.

Three of the authors's previous plays are based on Conservative politicians - not always sympathetically - and much of his account is drawn from former Labour Whips.  So I feared the worst.  I shouldn't have done.  The wily Harrison may be at the forefront of the play, but Graham presents the views of the two sets of politicians fairly and evenly: "You don't mind s**t, so long as everyone's equally in the s**t," Julian Wadham's Humphrey Atkins cries to Cox (or words to that effect).  Graham triumphantly captures the claustrophic fragility of the 1970s.  His play ends with Margaret Thatcher's voice intoning her opening words outside Downing Street.

All this is a reminder how quickly time speeds by and how antique the past becomes. But the play also conveys a sense of the slowness of the passing of time.  "Five years, my brain hurts a lot/Five years, that's all we've got," the cast chants as it joins Bowie's chorus.   I came to this This House very late, and its run is almost over.  But a moral I draw from it is that while governing without Coalition for half a decade would be unbearable, doing so for six months would be another matter entirely.  "Better hope, though, it's not another hung Parliament in 2015," I said to an MP friend with whom I saw it. I suspect that the same thought had already occured to him.

This House ends its run on May 16

Henry Hill: The challenge of teaching non-nationalist national history

Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist, and author of the blog Dilettante. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.

Teaching national history, avoiding nationalism

How to teach history in schools is a fascinating, complicated and important topic. It is also a fundamentally political one. Given that most school pupils do not go on to study history at an academic level at university, or even past GCSE level, their school lessons can underpin their understanding of the past for the rest of their life, an understanding which often shapes someone’s identity and even their politics.

I recently wrote elsewhere about the hornet’s nest that is the teaching of ‘national history’. That article was prompted by a debate held in the closing stages of my Masters degree here in Dublin about the practical impact of changes in historical understanding and practice (called ‘historiography’). Between them, the Irish and British examples demonstrated the problems both of teaching a historical narrative to school pupils and of not doing so.

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Greg Clark MP: Why shouldn't you be able to use your mobile phone to deposit, withdraw and transfer money?

Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells.  Follow Greg on Twitter.

The success of Britain’s financial services industry matters to all of us. Together with the associated business services sector, it employs two million people up and down the country. Furthermore, it contributes one pound out of every eight of all the taxes paid in Britain.

That very importance carries risks – which is why this Government has done what the previous one failed to do: legislated to create a stringent supervisory regime so that banks can no longer look to the taxpayer to bail them out, and to charge a permanent annual levy to contribute to the greater risk they are associated with than other companies.

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Stephan Shakespeare: Why it's a mistake to target only a small section of voters

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There is a widely-held and wrong assumption that only a small section of the electorate is open to being persuaded from their current political voting intention to a different one. A second, also wrong assumption is that these few voters are located along specific parts of a supposed political spectrum, for example where left and right blur into each other, and that the strategy for winning elections is to understand specific narrow band and target it.

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Garvan Walshe: Time for a Syrian No-Fly Zone

Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Adviser for the Conservative Party.  Follow Garvan on Twitter.

You know those envelopes that come in the post. They start out plain, maybe with a company logo in the corner. You put them in the drawer, promising to get back to them later, but life gets in the way. Then another arrives, this time with a message printed on the outside:

URGENT: ACTION REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY

You know you should get around to dealing with it, but you feel there’s something you’d rather not see inside. A bill that’s a bit larger than you’d like perhaps; or may be an unpleasant medical procedure.

Every time we hear of a new atrocity that Assad’s henchmen commit in Syria we react in this kind of way, hoping it will go away, suppressing the knowledge that it will only get worse. The latest is the evidence that he’s used chemical weapons. No, cut the jargon: that he’s begun to use poison gas against his own people.

We have to admit that Syria doesn’t present the clear case for humanitarian intervention that graces international relations textbooks. Though Assad’s regime is vile, the opposition is divided into factions unpleasant and incompetent. It lacks articulate spokesmen (think Haris Silajdžić of Bosnia). Worse, the most militarily effective rebels appear to be Islamist fanatics who, if they eventually won, would turn Syria into a theocratic tyranny every bit as hostile to its own people and just as likely to harbour terrorists.

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