ConservativeHome's Columnists

Peter Franklin: David Cameron doesn’t get the credit he deserves

94%. That’s David Cameron’s approval rating from the latest ConservativeHome readers’ survey. I don’t know what Vladimir Putin gets from the readers of UnitedRussiaHome, but it can’t be that much better.

So why don’t I think DC gets the credit he deserves?

Well, I suspect that a good chunk of that 94% is fair-weather support – simple appreciation of Conservative success at the expense of Labour and the LibDems. It is, of course, rather nice to be tickling the mid-forties in the opinion polls, but there’s a lot more to DC’s leadership than that.

First of all, there’s the man himself. The public like him and they respect him – a combination we’ve not had in a leader since Harold Macmillan.

Then there’s his resilience. Unlike the rest of the country, DC had a rather sticky summer, thanks to the Brown bounce and the recruitment of a few giddy GOATs from the Tory ranks. Many feared, and some hoped for, a meltdown of the Cameron project, but he kept his cool. Not only that, he stuck to his strategy. What a contrast to his predecessors who were all forced of the path they’d set for themselves: William Hague who left the kitchen table for a foreign land; the Quiet Man who turned up the volume and Michael Howard who took an awful long time to gather his thoughts – changing his strategy no less than seven times.

Peter Franklin: Monkey business at the White House - Must the President believe in evolution?

My Grandma Sally was the odd one out. My other grandparents were larger than life characters, always filling the air with loudly expressed opinions – as one might expect from a preacher, a poet and a paratrooper. Sally, however, never did anything out of the ordinary and mostly kept her thoughts to herself.  But like a lot of quiet people she guarded certain silent lines of belief, which if threatened would be resolutely defended.

An East End girl, I once asked her if she’d been born within the sound of Bow Bells. “Yes,” she replied, “but that doesn’t mean you have to talk like that.” Indeed not.

The only other time I provoked her into laying down the law was when, for some reason, I brought up the subject of evolution. “We did not come from monkeys,” she pronounced, with a firmness that might have quailed Richard Dawkins.

I thought of her last week after reading a piece by Danny Finkelstein on the excellent Comment Central.

It concerned Mike Huckabee, the dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination. I think it’s fair to say that the former is not the latter’s biggest fan – not because of what Mr Huckabee believes in, but because of what he doesn’t believe in – namely, neo-Darwinism:

“My big problem? That Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution.

“Huckabee contends that it doesn't matter, because he is not intending to insist that schools stop teaching evolution. But that really isn't the point.

“The reason that his support for intelligent design matters is that it is ridiculous. Who wants a President of the United States who doesn't accept the basic principles of science, taking refuge instead in a load of mumbo jumbo?”

Had Mr Finkelstein based one of his podcasts on this matter, I’d imagine there’d have been a Grandma Sally firmness to his voice. Nevertheless, I must respectfully disagree with him.

Peter Franklin: Blogging - Revenge of the mainstream media

If there was a list of the top 100 listmakers, there’s a good chance that Iain Dale would take first place (and not because he’d be the one compiling the list). Though he’s branched out since, his listmaking media empire was founded on his unrivalled knowledge of blogs and blogmen. If you want to know who the 53^rd best blogger in Rutland is, just ask Iain.

It’s great that such an immense variety of people are able to share their thoughts without having to stand on street corners ranting at passers-by – but is anyone listening? In particular, are those in positions of influence paying heed to the blogosphere? Busy people don’t have the time to read through a list of 100 blogs, let alone read the blogs themselves. But, make no mistake, they do read some of them. What’s more it’ll be much the same collection bookmarked on browsers across the Westminster village.

Which ones are they? Rather than reel off a top ten or twenty, I’ll just keep going until my list comes to a natural conclusion (and don’t worry, this won’t take long): We’ll start off with the big three – Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes and, of course, Iain Dale. To these one ought to add the somewhat distinct, but hugely popular, Political Betting.

Next up, it’s Comment Central – an indispensable service courtesy of Danny Finkelstein and his colleagues at the op-ed pages of the Times. Then there’s the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, also worth checking several times a day. The Daily Mail’s Ben Brogan is another must-read. If you’ve got any time left, you might want to add the BBC’s Nick Robinson and Sky’s Boulton and Co to your regular beat. And that’s about it – though the Telegraph’s new Three Line Whip may make it a full top ten.

Peter Franklin: We need a Cabinet Minister dedicated to delivering financial stability

In Britain, the quantity of banknotes and coins in circulation (plus certain Bank of England deposits) is known as M0. Higher M-numbers, such as M4, describe progressively broader definitions of the money supply. But I expect you knew that already. 

What you may not know is that there are negative M-numbers, which describe progressively narrower definitions of the money supply. For instance, minus M9 is the quantity of loose change currently stuck down the sides of the nation’s sofas – or, at least, it would be had I not just made it up.

Still, the sum of money thus taken out of circulation must be considerable – so much so that I have written to Alistair Darling urging him to consider the deflationary influence of soft furnishings on the British economy. So far, he has failed to reply to this or any of my letters – perhaps the green ink is putting him off. Next time, I’ll download my ideas onto a couple of CDs marked “really secret personal details of 25 million people” – which ought to get his attention.

Of course, the real prize would be to find the actual disks – which, you never know, could be lurking in the hidden recesses of your favourite armchair. So the next time you’re grubbing around for an errant fifty pence piece, have an extra good feel. It’s a longshot I grant you, but surely worth a try. I mean, just imagine if you found them!

If it were me, I’d send off the disks to our glorious leader, David ‘Dave’ Cameron, so that he could present them to Gordon Brown during PMQs. Either that or I’d auction them off to the highest bidder – probably the Russian mafia or maybe the promotions department at Readers’ Digest.

Peter Franklin: Consensus confounded

Far from merging in the middle, British politics stands on the brink of a historic divide.

It is said that Gordon Brown is always on the lookout for a political dividing line – that is, something that might put him on the winning side of an argument, with David Cameron on the other. This might take the form of an issue, such as the extended detention without trial of terrorist suspects; alternatively, there may be no policy content at all – merely a stunt of some sort, such as Gordon’s GOAT (government of all talents).

If you ask me, I’d say that the Prime Minister is no more convinced of Britain’s need for 56 day detention than he is of the Labour Party’s need for Quentin Davies – it’s just that he calculated that the fissures thus created would leave his opponents on the shakiest ground. Luckily for us, he’s the one that got rumbled, his high minded proclamations of a new kind of politics exposed as petty gamesmanship. And yet there is something to be said for his approach. What he almost understands, and various Tory strategists have utterly failed to grasp, is that success in politics is not about you moving to the middle ground – it’s about defining the dividing lines that put the middle ground where you want it to be.

For instance, for most of the 20th century the great divide in British politics was over state control of the economy. On one side of the line was the Left, in favour of state control; on the other side was the Right, in favour of free enterprise. Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative were able to highlight the growing economic opportunities offered by the market, making it increasingly clear as to which was the winning side.

This is something that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair understood when they started New Labour. However, they did a lot more than simply cross the old divide. They surveyed the new political territory they found themselves in and drew a new dividing line right across it. This was the divide between private gain and the common good, with themselves on the side of the latter. Where once there had only been Left and Right, there was now a Third Way – in favour of free enterprise and the common good.

Peter Franklin: That's enough fascists, thank you

Once upon a time the insult-of-choice for the acne-ridden juvenile lefty was “fascist!” – which could be applied without thought to just about anyone in authority. As a tendency it was brilliantly caricatured by the Rik Mayall character in the Young Ones, who’d spit out the f-word at all and sundry.

In the real world the young ones are getting on a bit, and the teenage Marxists of yesteryear now find that it is they who fill the positions of authority – the truth having long dawned upon them that a sensible degree of order and discipline does not in fact amount to the horrors of fascism. However, while the zits of the new establishment may have disappeared, the language of leftwing abuse lives on – by virtue of a remarkable migration across the political spectrum:

If someone calls you a fascist these days, and you’re not in fact of the goose-stepping persuasion, then the likelihood is that your accuser is a rightwing polemicist. For instance, should you have the temerity to deplore the rise in, say, obesity or excessive alcohol consumption, then it’s not because you’re concerned about the well-being of your fellow citizens, it’s because you’re a ‘health fascist’. Now, as I recall, the real fascists weren’t that bothered about the health of their victims; so perhaps equating Dr Gillian McKeith with Dr Josef Mengele is just a tad inappropriate.

Peter Franklin's column will return next week

Peter Franklin: What Britain needs is a hypertext constitution

There are two great myths about the British constitution:

The first is that is unwritten. This, of course, is wrong. As every politically literate person ought to know, most of it is written – in the form of countless items of case law, statute law and international treaty. What we do lack is a document in which all these strands are tied together in a single, supreme constitutional statement. In other words, the British constitution is uncodified.

The second great myth about the British constitution is that it is inflexible. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are, of course, a few archaic laws and practices that linger on long after their natural lifespan, giving the impression of a constitution preserved in formaldehyde. However, these are peculiarities, not fundamentals – and it is the fundamentals, not the peculiarities, that are the problem. Or, rather, it’s the fact that the fundamentals of our constitution – especially our system of common law – can be, and have been, eviscerated without the informed consent of the British people.

Peter Franklin: Politics is showbiz for gorgeous people

The bumper book of political myths has a new entry. Filed under ‘Campbell, Menzies – reasons for resignation’, it states that Ming quit as leader of the Lib Dems because people thought he was too old.

This is nonsense.

Born in 1941, Michael Howard is the same age as Ming Campbell. Yet at the last election, few people were saying that he was too old to run the country. They may have said a lot of other things, but his age was not a problem. Howard’s greying hair may even have been an advantage, helping to soften his image – these things are relative.

Other prominent figures born in 1941 include Bill Oddie, Jackie Collins and Richard Dawkins. I’m not suggesting that any of these should run for high office. After all, one is a wildlife presenter, one writes trashy bestsellers and the other is Joan Collins’ sister. But despite being in their mid-sixties, all of them seem lively sorts to me.

The brutal truth is that Ming Campbell had to go because people thought he looked too old: His hair, complexion and physiognomy, when viewed through the distorting effect of television, gave the impression of a man older than his years. Thus it was aesthetic imperfection that the people took against not the year of his birth.

Peter Franklin: Inherit the spin

The Labour Party has just learned a very painful lesson in the use and abuse of statistics. For years they dismissed calls to lessen the burden of inheritance tax by insisting that it only affects 6% of estates every year. This is only of interest to the very rich, they argued. However, it was obviously not just the very rich that responded so positively to George Osborne’s conference pledge.

What, then, is going on?

So far, I’ve no reason to doubt the statistical accuracy of the 6% figure. But just because a statistic is true, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be used in a misleading way. For instance, though we’re supposed to think that ‘only 6% of estates’ means the ‘richest 6% of estates’, this ain’t necessarily so. The rich, after all, are well-versed in the ways of tax avoidance, not to say evasion. I even heard of one case where a wealthy man instructed his heirs to keep his body in the freezer should he die too soon after transferring his riches in the form of a gift. Once the minimum period required to avoid inheritance tax had elapsed, the plan was to thaw out the corpse and get it cremated before anyone got suspicious.

Peter Franklin: Learning the lessons of yellow Saturday

It would, of course, be very wrong to laugh at our Prime Minister’s recent humiliation (a point I made forcefully to the casualty nurse as she was sewing up my sides last Sunday). With the broad vistas of a full Parliament opening up before us, we’d do much better to learn the lessons of the last few weeks.

Let us ignore the farcical aspects of this story, which require no further comment from the Conservative Party – and certainly no repeat of that half-witted little stunt with the brown bottles. Instead, let us ponder upon the tragic elements, in particular the betrayal of the electorate and their hopes for a healthier democracy.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister he spoke of a new kind of politics. It was a cathartic moment, a sense that the spin and sleaze of the Blair years had fled from the presence of a better man. David Cameron, ill-advisedly packaged as the ‘heir to Blair’, found himself treated more as an effigy than an heir.

But then came the miracle of the conference season. You’ll recall Ming Campbell pointing a bony finger at an ecologically-responsible toilet and the sniggering that followed. Well, looking back we can now view this episode as a prophetic foretelling of the fate – and indeed the content – of Gordon Brown’s fresh start.

But the thing is that the people of this country still want a new kind of politics. With Brown at bay and Campbell enjoying his retirement as leader of the Lib Dems, the ball is in our court. We need to commit to a programme of serious, far-reaching reform to our political institutions. Clearly, the European policy and localisation agendas are of huge relevance here, but they do not excuse us from proposing reforms to Parliament itself, the heart of our democracy.

Peter Franklin: The struggle for Conservative values must begin with loyalty

There's nothing quite so pathetic as a cliché that isn’t true anymore. For instance, if you were to tell someone that loyalty is the secret weapon of the Conservative Party they’d laugh in your face. As secret weapons go, it’s got about as much chance of turning up as Saddam’s nukes – indeed since Margaret Thatcher was forced out of office by her own colleagues, only Michael Howard has received anything like the loyalty a Conservative leader deserves from his party.

I’ve no intention of using this article to name the guilty men. Rather, I want to identify the various justifications for the routine treachery that has done so much damage to us in recent years. Disloyalists are to be found across the Conservative spectrum, but Tory traditionalists might like to note the very modern attitudes that lie at the heart of each wretched excuse:

(1) Blind loyalty is a dangerous thing

There is no virtue that cannot be taken to destructive extremes. Contemporary culture rarely fails to remind us of that fact, but forgets that there has to be something virtuous to be perverted in the first place. The traditional virtues, in particular, only have to be named to evoke some negative image. This is certainly the case with loyalty, with its sinister associations of corrupt cliquishness and fanatical devotion. And yet loyalty – meaning respect for, and service to, a legitimate source of authority – is in normal circumstances a great and good thing. It is instructive that Lord Kilmuir, the Conservative Lord Chancellor who first remarked that “loyalty is the Tory’s secret weapon”, also led for the prosecution at the Nuremburg trials.

Peter Franklin: The greatest Prime Minister

Just occasionally, the broadcasters surprise us with a programme that makes no concessions to the lowest common denominator. One such was ‘Prime Ministers’, aired on BBC4 last weekend. Chaired by Andrew Marr, it featured Peter Hennessy, Anthony Howard, Simon Jenkins, Andrew Roberts and Polly Toynbee sitting in a studio debating the relative merits of the British Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century – for a solid two hours. Blissful! 

With pleasing numerical symmetry, the Twentieth Century had twenty Prime Ministers. But which one was the greatest? 

Narrowing the field isn’t difficult. We can start with Lord Salisbury, whose Premiership was a Nineteenth Century affair straying into Twentieth as if out of sheer reactionary cussedness. Then there were six Prime Ministers whose time in office was too short to be of much significance: Arthur Balfour, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Andrew Bonar Law, Anthony Eden, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and James Callaghan. Callaghan could also fit into the next category – Prime Ministers whose premierships were destroyed by the unions, the other two being Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Next we have two Prime Ministers destroyed by their relationship with their own parties: Ramsay Macdonald and John Major. Usually placed in a category of his own is Neville Chamberlain, but surely Stanley Baldwin deserves equal if not greater blame for the legacy of appeasement. 

Peter Franklin: Eurosceptics for Europe

Last week, Ming Campbell sidled up to the British electorate last week and made an improper suggestion:

“Psst, fancy a referendum?”

Well, a referendum would be lovely, in particular the one we were promised on the proposed EU constitution – now repackaged as the so-called “Reform Treaty.” However, the item on offer from Mr Campbell was something else altogether; namely, a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. As a proposition, it doesn’t even have the virtue of originality – Labour’s Keith Vaz, another EU enthusiast, was flashing it around earlier this summer.

If you ask me, the federalists are up to something. Indeed, one could say the whole business smells fishier than the Common Fisheries Policy – except that wouldn’t be very fishy at all, on account of there being no fish left. So let’s just say Ming’s idea of an all-or-nothing referendum stinks to high heaven.

It’s long been a federalist tactic to conflate anti-federalism with anti-Europeanism. But in this regard, they’ve had a great deal of inadvertent help from their bitterest enemies:

Though I consider myself a staunch eurosceptic, I can’t help noticing that some of my fellow sceps are a couple of paragraphs short of an EU directive. Now I don’t just mean the out-and-out loonies, the sort who equate Brussels with the ten-headed beast of Revelation. No, I mean those otherwise sane individuals whose principled scepticism is tainted by some very odd and deeply unhelpful misconceptions.

Foremost among these notions is what I call the ‘bad fantasy novel view of history’. Aficionados of fantasy fiction will be familiar with the make-believe maps that grace the opening pages of many sub-Tolkeinesque works of, ahem, literature. Usually, the heroes of the story live in the west of the imaginary continent thus depicted, while the east is home to sundry orcs, hobgoblins and other bugaboos – which just about sums up the mental map that many people in this country have of the real world.

Peter Franklin: Shining a light on dark Brown

Gordon Brown likes to claim the credit for Britain’s economic stability, but his real talent is for political instability. Never one for head-on confrontation, he has always acted to destabilise his opponents, allowing them to crumble before coming forward to step over the pieces.

Consider the fates of successive Home Secretaries – David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid – all of them seen as rival heirs to Blair at one point or another, but all destroyed by a combination of the Home Office’s native incompetence and the distinctively unhelpful machinations of Gordon Brown’s Treasury.

But, of course, these were just side shows to the main event – the long, slow destruction of Tony Blair’s Premiership. As with the Home Secretaries, Blair’s wounds were, in part, self-inflicted. But from the moment he entered 10 Downing Street, he had the undermining tactics of his neighbour to contend with. In the wake of Iraq, Blair no longer had the strength to resist. By 2004 he was forced to announce that he would not fight a fourth election. The fact that Blair hadn’t actually fought a third election was of no concern to Brown, who was quite happy to ride a lame duck on to the battlefield.

Pausing only to help Alan Milburn on to his sword, Brown charged into a Labour third term – attempting not one but two coups in the course of 2006. The first of these, in the wake of local election defeat and botched reshuffle, was a failure. Brown’s self-serving call for “a stable and orderly transition” did him more damage than Blair. For the first time, the polls indicated that Brown would be less popular than Blair. The great destabiliser had managed to destabilise himself. Then came the second, more successful, coup attempt in September, a tumultuous month concluding with Blair making his last conference speech as party leader.

Peter Franklin: The secret of wealth

Here is a website you may not have heard of: Arts and Letters Daily is one of the hidden gems of the Internet, consisting very simply of links to some of the best online writing in the English language. There is no obvious ideological bias to the selections, just a preference for articles and reviews of real substance. Of course, ‘aggregator sites’ such as this one could not exist were it not for the various newspapers, magazines and online equivalents publishing original work. Sadly, it would seem that from ALD’s lofty perspective, not many of these are British. With all too few exceptions, our media gives very little space to the extended essay, with serious factual writing relegated to the ghettos of academia and wonkland. We do, of course, have a flourishing blogosphere – but that is a medium where individual posts are typically counted in tens or hundreds of words, not thousands. This leaves a gap in the market. If you want anything meatier than, say, an article in the Spectator, then you have to go for a full-length pamphlet or book – you won’t find much in between.

That’s a shame, because British readers are missing out on articles like this one from the freemarket journal Reason (and featured on Arts and Letters Daily). Entitled ‘Our Intangible Riches’, it sets out the findings of a recent World Bank report on the make-up of the world’s wealth. Three categories are used:

• natural capital, which is farmland, forestry, fisheries, mined resources and the like);
• produced capital, which is machinery, equipment, buildings and other manmade structures; and
• intangible capital, i.e. human resources – whether in the form of the labour, skills and knowledge of individuals or the value of various institutions such as a country’s legal system.

Now, here’s the important bit. According to the report, natural capital accounts for just 5% of humanity’s wealth, produced capital a modest 18% and intangible capital a whopping 77%. This represents a spectacular confirmation of the theories of Hernan de Soto, the Peruvian economist who argued that the key to development in poor countries is the strengthening of civil institutions – in particular, local systems of property rights. It also goes a long way to explaining why old-fashioned aid policies, which have focused on increasing natural or produced capital, have so often ended in failure. All along they were ignoring the most important source of wealth, i.e. intangible capital.

Peter Franklin: Is our society really broken?

Is our society broken, as David Cameron says it is?  The Independent thinks not, fretting only that “repression and authoritarianism will further demonise disaffected young people and drive them away from a life of purpose.”

Cleverly, but misleadingly, the leader writer compares the deaths of Rhys Jones, last week, and James Bulger, in 1993, alongside the statements made by the Opposition in the wake of each murder. Seizing on parallels between what Tony Blair said then, and what David Cameron is saying now, it concludes that the “anti-social behaviour of a minority is a general problem that has always been with us.” To be fair, there is an acknowledgement that “guns, and indeed knifes, are a problem that may be worse now than 14 years ago”, however, this trifling detail is not allowed to distract the Indie from its argument.

Tempted as I am to administer a thorough fisking (particularly to the notion that our young people are being menaced by “repression and authoritarianism”), I think it’s worth concentrating on what we actually mean by a broken society.

According to a leader in the Times, our society is not broken, but “fractured” – the point being that gang culture is only taking hold in certain enclaves, not in every community.

However, this is a distinction without a difference – after all, David Cameron described our society as broken, not shattered. To use a medical analogy, a bone need not be multiply fractured to count as broken – a single fracture, if sufficiently severe, is enough to render a limb useless.

Peter Franklin: Hypercapitalism or hi-tech conservatism?

So, a largely predictable reaction to last week’s competitiveness report from John Redwood. Not having read the thing myself, I’ve no idea whether this really was, as widely billed, Redwood’s blueprint for a hypercapitalist Britain – all motorways and no regulation. Thus I won’t be dissing his utopia just yet.

However, if one picks through the output of our leading freemarket think tanks, the heady scent of hypercapitalism soon becomes apparent. Alongside a car-fixated view of transport policy and the traditional bonfire of red-tape and bureaucracy, other key elements include dramatically reduced taxation, the relaxation of planning constraints and an all-pervading eco-scepticism. Optional ingredients include immigration limited only by employer demand, the privatisation of public services and a heartfelt devotion to nuclear power.

Needless to say, this vision of the future has its opponents – and not just on the Left. Conservatives, big ‘c’ and small, are well represented in the ranks of our conservation movements. The uniform of the planning protester is as much twinset-and-pearls as nose-ring-and-dreadlocks: crusty conservatives and crusties standing shoulder-to-shoulder against the developers.

As befits true conservatism, this is nothing new. Anti-capitalist sentiment was a feature of the Young England movement, which counted Disraeli as a leading member. Disraeli’s novels, most notably Sybil, contained horrifying descriptions of conditions in the growing industrial cities of the North. Arguably, it was the Liberal Party that was the more committed representative of Victorian capitalism, with Conservatives reluctant to let go of the agrarian past. In culture too there was a conservative reaction to industrialisation. Pugin, Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites looked back to the Middle Ages for inspiration. Of course, some of these regarded themselves as radicals, even socialists, but theirs was a strangely conservative kind of radicalism, holding up the craft guilds of Medieval Europe as an idealised model for the trade unions.

Peter Franklin: The Second Left

Last week I wrote an unassuming little article entitled ‘Home truths for the Right’. While unlikely to win me the Simon Heffer Prize for Outstanding Services to Soundness, it did prompt a fair bit of comment, some of it quite excitable.

One post, however, really stopped me in my tracks. It happened to come from a fellow ConservativeHome columnist, Andrew Lilico, who in response to my contention that rightwing ideas have been marginalized in British politics, firmly disagreed:

“I'm sorry but this is just plain *wrong* - and it's very important to accept that you are just *wrong*, because much follows from it. It just isn't true that no-one listens to the thinkers of the Right. On the contrary, the thoughts of the Right are dominant everywhere, except perhaps in the Conservative Party. We overwhelm the policy debate, in which there is so little left-wing opposition that even committed left-wing ministers in the Labour Party have been unable to push any sort of left-wing agenda through. Take, for example, the case of the abolition of the Internal Market in the NHS. Frank Dobson would have loved to provide a left-wing alternative - but there wasn't one. It is right-wing ideas that dominate in health, education, international relations, monetary policy, and many other key areas.”

As I say, I was quite taken aback. I had expected vigorous opposition to most of my other points, but I thought that this one was the least controversial. I can say in all sincerity that some of my best friends are rightwingers, and I don’t think they’d disagree for a moment that their ideas have been pushed to the sidelines. Indeed, not only would they accept this – they’d also have some pretty strong views as to who’s to blame: namely, the Conservative Party establishment for failing to take a lead.

Peter Franklin: Home truths for the Right

“I’m not that pessimistic now, because I wasn’t that optimistic before.”

These level-headed words are by far the wisest I’ve heard on the recent ups and downs of the Conservative Party. They come from someone who would describe himself as belonging to the Right of the Party, but who is, in this context, atypical of his fellows, most of whom don’t know whether to hang their heads in despair or dance a little jig.

Gloom, not glee, is the more appropriate response. The setbacks suffered by Team Cameron have in no way advanced the standing of the Right with the electorate. Instead, the centre of political gravity has shifted to the Left, towards Gordon Brown. I hope that this is a temporary phenomenon and that the unpopularity which attached to Tony Blair will, like the fleas of dead dog, soon attach to his successor.

Of course, midway through a third term, Labour ought to be consistently unpopular. But can this really be blamed on David Cameron? After all, he has at least proven that a centrist Conservative Party is capable of benefiting when Labour is unpopular – something the Right has not managed in a generation. Before judging others, the Right – both within and beyond the Conservative Party – must ask itself why, after ten years of Labour Government, it remains on the margins of British politics.

Prevailing cultural conditions are unfavourable, but is the Right really so helpless to resist? Perhaps the root cause of its chronic weakness is internal. In which case, it is time for the Right to face up to a few home truths. Here are ten of them:

(1) Crippling self-indulgence. Politics is a hard slog. Territory has to be fought for inch by inch. You rarely achieve your objectives overnight. That is something the Conservative Party’s free marketers understood even in the statist depths of the post-war period. Through patience and discipline they built up the powerful position from which Margaret Thatcher was to eventually win the war against socialism. What the Tory rightwingers did not do was depart to found their own political party. What a contrast to so many of today’s rightwingers who have dribbled off to UKIP, Veritas and various other groupuscules. Other than getting a clutch of deeply unimpressive MEPs elected (thanks to the EU-imposed electoral system), the only impression these splinters have made is to ensure the survival of federalist Lib-Lab MPs in a number of marginal Westminster constituencies. Thanks a bunch.

(2) A limitless supply of useful idiots. Still, better an honest ’kipper than the sort of Tory who spills his guts to the media. Clearly, this isn’t just a rightwing problem. Indeed, the worst offenders have tended to be on the Left of the Party. Nonetheless there’s something particularly idiotic about the rightist variety. At least when the former feed the mainstream media’s appetite for anti-Conservative stories, they demonstrate a degree of ideological consistency. The latter, however, should not mistake the media’s flattery and attention with any kind of sympathy for the rightwing cause. The agenda is pure and simple: to do as much damage to the Conservative Party as possible. That is why useful idiots – right, left and centre – are always welcome at the BBC.

Peter Franklin: Abolish the Treasury

I know what you did last summer. 

Amid the hosepipe bans and dwindling reservoirs, you slashed the flood defence budget. 

By ‘you’ I mean Her Majesty’s Treasury, which would no doubt object that the budgetary decision was taken by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has immediate responsibility for flood defence. Never one to miss a trick, HMT would also point out that Defra had been given all the money it needed and only ran short thanks to its lavishly incompetent implementation of the Single Payment Scheme for farm subsidies. This much is true. But what has flood defence to do with the Single Payment Scheme? Not much. Until 2001 they were the responsibility of different departments.  Nevertheless rules are rules, and the rule in this case was that, irrespective of Britain’s flood defence needs, flood defence work had to be postponed because somebody somewhere buggered up yet another public sector IT contract. 

Welcome to the wacky world of the Treasury, the guys who make the rules in Whitehall. 

Peter Franklin: The most important fact in British politics

The Brown bounce is proving to be a bumpy ride. Nevertheless, I am sure the experts are right when they tell us that we won’t see a true picture emerge until after the conference season. But perhaps we need an even longer perspective, because we seem to have forgotten the most important fact in British politics:

Which is that the last British recession ended in 1992.

That’s over sixty quarters of continuous economic growth – more than enough to pave over ten years of New Labour Government. So forget Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Forget the long saga that is the Conservative Party in opposition. Just think GDP. Nothing else goes quite so far in explaining why they keep beating us.

That is not to say they deserve the credit. No, that belongs to the following:

(a) The Thatcher reforms
(b) The rise of China
(c) Not joining the Euro
(d) The pursuit of a sane monetary policy

Gordon Brown opposed (a), had nothing to do with (b), had something to do with (c) and, thankfully, did not trust himself with (d).

Peter Franklin: The lopsided blogosphere

In his first column Peter Franklin argues that blogging is changing British politics... but only on the Right.

Is the Left useless at blogging? Labour activist, Mike Ion, posed the question last year, after noting the Right's domination of the British blogosphere. A few months later, he was at it again, noting that:

"Right of centre political "gossip blogs" like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale's Diary receive hundreds of thousands of hits each month and are proving to be influential in setting the news agenda ahead of the printed and broadcast media. Left of centre, pro-government blogs are nowhere near as popular and, as yet, not particularly influential - few (if any) are read by the likes of Nick Robinson and Adam Boulton."

However, this time, he found cause for optimism (proving that for every negative Ion there must be a positive Ion):

"It could just be however, that things are about to change. Respected and influential commentators like Tim Montgomerie, who runs Conservative Home are predicting that 2007 will be the year when Labour blogging (and bloggers) comes of age. If Montgomerie is proved right, if left wing blogging is to have an impact in 2007 then it is likely to be as a direct result of the contest for the deputy leadership of the Labour party."

Well, the deputy leadership contest has come and gone, and the British blogosphere is as lopsided as ever. There is no sign that Labour blogging has come of age. The Right remains dominant, with Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale and ConservativeHome top of the pile.