Iain Dale presents LBC 97.3 Drivetime programme 4-8pm every weekday. He also blogs at www.iaindale.com. Follow Iain on Twitter.
The poor old LibDems suffered from two rather embarrassing email incidents during their conference. The first was when a press officer sent their entire “Lines to Take” to the media instead of their MPs. MPs and ministers were given a checklist of five things to mention in every radio. “We are a party in confident mood” and “We are the only party which can bring about a strong economt and a fair society” were two of the less memorable mantras the politicos were supposed to spin to a supplicant media. Oh dear. I decided to get this out of the way early in my interview with the chirpy Tim Farron by just asking if he agreed with all of them. The second disaster to strike the LibDem press office was when an inexperienced press officer copied and pasted the wrong bit of a document into a press release, thereby setting a hare running that the LibDems regarded anyone earning more than £50,000 a year as wealthy, and that they would face big tax rises if the LibDems had their way. Cue media hysteria and another story which had to be extinguished as quickly as possible.
There are a couple of explanations for these cock-ups by the LibDem media team. Firstly, apart from the West Ham-supporting Head of Media Phil Reilly (naturally one of the good guys) not a single LibDem press officer has been working for the party for more than eight months. But I wonder if tiredness could be the issue. The entire LibDem front bench and team of special advisers were booked into rooms on the 15th floor of the Crowne Plaza hotel in Glasgow, but it appears they didn’t get much sleep. The exertions of a bonking couple in one of the rooms kept the entire floor awake for most of Monday night. They were apparently “at it” for several hours, and the identity of the couple caused much speculation the next morning. Your humble servant was lucky enough to be present (while waiting to interview the Cleggmeister) when a rather ashen-faced young man emerged from the room looking somewhat dishevelled. Discretion prevents me from identifying the poor bugger. But he did have a smile on his face. I’m afraid I ducked out of asking the Deputy Prime Minister whether he got a full eight hours. Of sleep, that is.
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“Disgraceful.” “I’ve been totally misrepresented,” spluttered a clearly rather angry Paddy Ashdown about an Observer piece last Sunday. So it was with a degree of incredulity that while I was waiting to interview Nick Clegg I spied Ashdown emerging from a lift with The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley. Furthermore, the two of them were laughing and joking as they disappeared into Ashdown’s room. He’s clearly a forgiving sort. Half an hour earlier, I had been told he wasn’t doing any more media interviews. Rawnsley’s charms were clearly more alluring than my own!
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Wandering around the appallingly depressing conference centre in Glasgow, it seemed I was the most popular man in the building. One after another journalists came up to me, slapped me on the shoulder and engaged me in conversation. But after the initial pleasantries, it became clear they had only one thing on their minds. “So, Iain, the Damian McBride book…. What’s in it, then?” They must think I was born yesterday. Luckily, I was able to tell them that I genuinely didn’t know when the newspaper serialisation of the book was commencing. I’m pretty sure they all thought I was spinning them a line, but I wasn’t. They won’t have long to wait. Have you bought your Daily Mail today?**********
The LibDem big idea on free school meals isn’t the vote-winner Nick Clegg thinks it is. When we covered it on my radio show, virtually everyone who got in touch with the programme was against it on the basis that we haven’t got the money, many councils do it already, or isn’t that what Child Benefit is supposed to be used for. There are some red faces among Southwark LibDems who, when it was proposed by the ruling Labour group, spoke out against it. I’m sure they now think it is an even better idea than putting 5p on plastic bags, an idea David Laws assures me is the most popular policy the LibDems have put forward since, er, the abolition of tuition fees. OK, I made that last bit up, but he insists people love the idea. I’m not so sure.
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One man who is spitting tacks about the school dinners idea is George Osborne. Why? Because the Tories had to accept it as a trade-off to get through the marriage tax allowance. I’m told George Osborne is not exactly a fan of this policy, which is as dear to the authoritarian right as mother’s milk. I have never understood why. Being in favour of marriage is surely like being in favour of motherhood and apple pie. We all are, but should it be rewarded by a £3 a week tax break, especially in difficult economic times? I think not. I’m just waiting for which dumbass Tory right winger will table an amendment saying that people in civil partnerships shouldn’t get it as they’re not really married.
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Next year’s LibDem conference will also be in Glasgow, which fills most of us with complete dread. I’ve got nothing against Glasgow. In fact I quite like it, but the conference centre is just awful. A modern architectural monstrosity which has all the atmosphere of a morgue. Yes, cue the easy joke about the LibDems being in their death throes, but it’s not easy to comprehend why they want to come back so quickly. Apparently they were supposed to be in Liverpool, but once Alex Salmond set September 18 2014 as the date for the Scottish referendum, they decided they had to avoid a clash. As a consequence, for the first time, the LibDem conference will take place after the Tories. But will that mean that Parliament returns a week later than normal? I suspect so. I wonder if Nick Clegg cleared that with Mr Speaker.
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One of the LibDem talking points at their conference was the fact that Norman Lamb, the North Norfolk MP, is sporting a smart new haircut. Gone is the gelled flicked up hair at the front. Instead it’s all now slicked back. “Is this the start of a leadership bid?” wondered some commentators. The truth is a little more prosaic. I am given to understand that Norman’s usual hairdresser has returned to Lithuania, so his wife decided to attend to the Lamb thatch. A lesson for us all.
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I have a column in the gay lifestyle magazine Attitude, and in this month’s issue I have written a light piece about why gay people have the reputation for liking a certain type of music. I’m sure Tory MP Nick de Bois will be hugely impressed that he gets an honourable mention. But I won’t spoil his fun by revealing the context. He will have to buy a copy! Or more likely get one of his staff to!
By Paul Goodman
Follow Paul on Twitter.
The Confessions of Gordon Brown, Kevin Toolis's window into the seventh circle of the former Prime Minister's soul, has been well-reviewed - both in the sense of positively and thoroughly. I came to the play's run at the Trafalgar Studios with a preconception of it. Toolis is a man of the Left, or was when I knew him: I remember him telling journalists around a dinner table in Belfast that they should have a view on Northern Ireland's troubles, and not just an eye for the facts. (I rather sympathised with the point he was making, though my take on events was different from his.) He went on to study and write about terror more broadly. I imagined that his play would be at once unkind and sympathetic - suggesting that Brown was a great lost leader of the left, brought low by his own flaws and follies.
And unkind it is - or, rather, unsparing about the Brown I glimpsed on the other front bench of the House of Commons, and that most of us saw on a screen or read about online. Brown is up early, sleeplessly prowling Number Ten, struggling to get ahead of events, and failing - on his way to losing an election. He is the only character in this one-man play and Ian Grieve becomes a ringer for the former Prime Minister. The black suit! The purple tie! The bags under the eyes! The heavy walk, scowl, and hunched shoulders! Grieve's Brown shouts, swears, slouches, bellows for staff, bangs at a computer keyboard with podgy fingers, lurches and shuffles woundedly, picks at a Kit-Kat - cries for a grid, new ideas, new slogans, new announcements: anything to deliver him from the coming defeat. A speech, a speech, my kingdom for a speech!In between, he rages at his enemies: Robin Cook, foreign dignatories, Gillian Duffy, clueless aides, Alistair Darling, the incomprehensible English and, above all...You Know Who. "Every hour more of him was one hour less of me," Brown cries in his agony. Grieve is outstanding - and quick on his feet, which is almost as important. On the evening I was there, he pumped hands with members of the audience, twitted one about his resemblance to Darling, compered a quiz about who was Defence Secretary during the Iraq War, and turned maniacally on a man whose mobile rang: "If it's Tony," he raged, "tell him to f**k off!" Not witty, perhaps. Or particularly insightful. But horribly plausible and true to life. Laughter trilled throughout from the back row, a bit to the right of me, as Michael Gove and Matthew Hancock enjoyed the show.
And sympathetic it is, too. Or at least, not unsympathetic. (The Labour Party, with its unfailing knack of grasping the wrong end of the stick, has banned the play from its coming conference.) If Grieve's Brown has the desparation of Richard III, it is the Richard of the night before battle: vulnerable, frightened, suddenly alone. There is something moving about the Toolis/Grieve account of the youthful rugby accident that nearly lost Brown his sight, of his weeks of isolation in hospital, of the blurred vision he has endured since - and, shining unbearably bright in the darkness, the example of his father, "the Minister, John Brown". His son's school motto, recited at the door of Downing Street, was: "I will do my utmost." Brown did his utmost to be Prime Minister: that's to say, to look, act, and above all inhabit the part. But he simply wasn't up to it.
What ultimately makes and keeps the play interesting is that Toolis gets this. And because he gets it, he doesn't so much paint Brown as a lost leader as lampoon the absurdity of modern politics: the gloss, the spin, the marketing, the "height, hair and teeth". Indeed, the play breaks out of the confines of one cramped room at a particular time, and turns itself into a meditation on the nature of leadership. In his programme note, Toolis works, probes, and worries away at what this might be - whether, indeed, it is possible at all. Meanwhile on stage, daylight is about to swallow up Brown/Grieve. "Despair is best shared alone," he half-whispers, half-growls. An old tale says that the time in hell is always eternity. Both when the play begins, throughout, and as it ends, the clock at the back of the stage is showing 6.40.
Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist and writer. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.
Welsh FM calls for end to devolution ‘tinkering’
I find Carwyn Jones, the Labour First Minister of Wales, completely maddening. He simply refuses to adopt, on the constitution at least, a set of positions that cohere with my likes and dislikes. He appears a staunch unionist, to a certain value of that term, whilst also a committed devolutionary who has precious little good to say of a role for London – i.e. Britain – in most Welsh affairs.
His latest intervention is a case in point. Jones believes that devolution has been implemented in a slapdash fashion and needs to be brought to a stable, sustainable conclusion – to be made ‘an event, not a process’, in a reversal of the old maxim. This is a position I hold myself, and outlined in March both here at ConHome and as part of ITV News’ ‘Wales in a Changing UK’ series. It’s a fine thing to see a senior politician, especially one from Labour, if not quite stepping outside the “more powers” camp then at least articulating a point at which he will do so.
The problem with this position lies in actually coming up with proposals for stabilising the constitution and moving politics and public expectations on from the era of fragmentation. One, mooted on ConHome, is the notion of a ‘new act of union’. Jones prefers a codified British constitution, which would carry a US-style presumption against central government in any case where the balance of power between London and Cardiff was in doubt.
Personally, I cannot for the life of me fathom why a codified constitution is preferable to what we have at the moment. Currently our constitution is constantly updated, with the power to do so vested in Members of Parliament elected by us. A codified constitution would be drawn up by people elected either at one point in time or not at all, and would be maintained thenceforth by judges attempting, with varying levels of sincerity, to scry the intentions of its ever-more remote drafters.
So it’s scarcely perfect. Nonetheless, with any luck Jones’ move will prompt other figures, both within Wales and without, to respond with their own proposed solutions. If enough people do so, we may alight on a good one. Stranger things have happened.
Northern Irish grammar schools speak out against abolition
Northern Irish grammar schools have come out fighting against proposals which they believe may see them forcibly merged with non-selective neighbours. The heads of four such schools met to discuss their deep concerns about area-based reforms proposed by Sinn Fein’s John O’Dowd. His predecessor, Caitríona Ruane (also of Sinn Fein, who appear always to get education), was also an opponent of selective education, which persists in the province on a level unseen in Britain outside Buckinghamshire and other such strongholds of selection. She abolished the ‘eleven plus’ transfer examination.
Unionists, traditionally allies of the grammar school system, have stepped up. Although Peter Robinson publicly defended the ‘Dickson Plan’, within which two popular grammars fear they’ll be forced to merge with comprehensives, he took pains to point out that if a proposal was unpopular with the community it would be open to challenge by the executive. Both and UUP and DUP appear to support such a right of appeal right across Northern Ireland, which would if implemented most likely place every grammar beyond harm’s reach.
Labour and SNP choose by-election candidates
The nationalists have an opportunity to shore up their majority in the Scottish parliament coming up, as both they and Labour announce their candidates for the upcoming Dunfermline by-election. The election is to replace outgoing nationalist MSP Bill Walker, who has eventually been forced to resign after being convicted of 23 domestic abuse charges.
He had previously been suspended and then expelled from the SNP, but refused to resign his seat, thus putting another dent into their parliamentary majority following their seizure of the speakership and the resignation of two backbenchers over a u-turn in nuclear policy.
After falling short at the Aberdeen Donside by-election in June, this is Labour’s second opportunity to take a nationalist seat – and whereas Donside had an SNP majority of over 7,000 after the 2011 election, Walker only beat his Labour opponent by 590 votes last time around.
US public largely considers Northern Ireland conflict ‘resolved’, according to diplomat
According to Dr Richard Haas, formerly American envoy to Northern Ireland and now chair of an all-party commission on parades and other ‘divisive issues’, claims that Americans were surprised when he was asked to do the job as most of them thought the conflict in the six counties was resolved.
Perhaps they’ve been looking at the polls – the latest, commissioned by the Belfast Telegraph, revealed that less than four per cent of Northern Irish citizens would vote for the immediate abolition of the border and union with the South, and only a further 22 per cent would vote for it ‘in twenty years’. Despite all of Ulster’s local parties being fixated on the constitutional question, there are small yet hopeful signs that their public is moving on without them – and may in time drag the politicians along in their wake.
Although a segment of the US population and political class – consisting mainly of Irish Americans – has historically taken a great interest in Northern Ireland (to the extent, in a tiny minority of past cases, of funding and equipping the Provisional IRA), according to Dr Haas the recent tensions in the province are not high on America’s priority list. Looked at one way, that’s a sign of progress in itself.
Grant Shapps is Chairman of the Conservative Party and MP for Welwyn Hatfield
Getting people involved remains one of the most important things for any politician to do. Our job is to bring individuals together to forward our common beliefs and goals. That’s something that’s been a proud tradition of this party and the country for centuries.
But today we’re witnessing some of the greatest advances in communication ever known. Personal technology is more affordable and accessible than ever before. We’re connected in ways never thought possible, even a generation ago. Through social media, growing numbers of people can speak for themselves.
With such enormous changes, it's easy to understand the concern that traditional party membership won’t survive. But I disagree. It’s just that it will change. Mass communication may have taken a digital turn, but it’s not the end for membership. In fact, quite the opposite.
All around us, new movements are bringing people together. The London Olympics Gamesmaker programme engaged thousands of volunteers from across the country using digital technology, and rewarding people for their dedication. This was a form of short-term membership.
The 2012 Obama campaign reinvigorated supporters ahead of the Presidential re-election – creating a renewed zest for grassroots campaigning. These volunteers were effectively short-term members. And across the world, people are growing campaigns of their own – made easier by donation sites such as JustGiving and the sharing facilities of sites like Facebook and Twitter.It’s clear that people still want to be members of their chosen community. What’s changed is the form that this association takes. Sometimes it’s more issue based. Sometimes more transient. But it is no less meaningful as a result. Today, in a world where you can choose between the traditional town hall meeting or a debate on Facebook, individuals are opting to create their own patterns of association, membership and sense of belonging.
If parties are to build from the ground up, we must do the same. Full members of our party still have the most rights and control – choosing Members of Parliament and the Party leader. But we shouldn’t be turning our backs on folks who want to be involved, just because they haven’t shelled out £25 to join us yet. That’s why we’re inviting new ways to contribute and interact – and our approach is already changing things on the ground.
Support for our party now ranges all the way from a simple ‘Like’ on facebook to becoming a Member of Parliament – and many different forms along the way. It all adds up. The person joining our campaign for an EU referendum through a click on our virtual "Co-sponsor the Bill" app might not go on to share our campaigns on the economy or child protection. Yet these micro campaigns allow for expressions of support on specific issues.
Together, this all amounts to hundreds-of-thousands of people who now keep up-to-date with Conservative ideas and campaigns that they care about each week. And so we’ve modernised our campaign network to meet this new demand. Direct from the Conservative homepage, volunteers can join Team2015 and work to secure victory in our 40/40 target seats. This has already allowed nearly 3,000 people to make a very meaningful contribution to the campaign. But unlike in days gone past, we don’t require them to pay us before we accept their help. So some of these people aren't members just yet. Some might never be members in the traditional sense. But they all form part of a wider Conservative family – a broad church – carrying their own Conservative message to the nation.
And I’m confident that by inviting more people not simply to join, but to join in, we’ll increase our participation levels even further in the years to come.
Garvan Walshe was the Conservative Party's National and International Security Policy Adviser until 2008. Follow Garvan on Twitter.
It’s been 40 years since the Yom Kippur war, when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a surprise attack on Israel, which came close to threatening the state’s existence. Golda Meir’s government had received plenty of intelligence that an attack was coming. Like all intelligence, it was far from conclusive. The Israelis chose to discount it, and mobilised only hours before the Arab attack came.
At least in 1973 Israel had no reason to doubt Egypt’s strategic intentions. Jerusalem knew she might deter war through deft diplomacy and by keeping a keen watch on her borders but there was no doubt about Cairo’s hostility. Things are different now.
There may not have been dancing in the streets of Ashkelon as news of Mohammed Morsi’s ouster spread, but there was certainly relief, if not a certain amount of satisfaction, that the Muslim Brotherhood, begetter of Hamas, had been cut down to size. Thus a friend, whose views reflect the exact centre of informed Israeli public opinion so closely that she could serve as a one-woman focus group, punned to me on July 2nd, as tanks sealed off Cairo’s streets and security forces at last got a chance to put their ample stocks of tear gas to use: “He’s certainly proved he’s no sissy.”
Egypt’s liberals too thought that he seemed a good idea at the time. Mohammed el-Baradei even offered himself up the coup’s Official Mannequin (then Deputy Official Mannequin after the Islamic fundamentalists of the Nour party objected to him), only to resign, shocked — SHOCKED! — that the security forces had started shooting people.Now those liberals and human rights activists are being rounded up and journalists are being tried. The Brotherhood’s sit-ins were dispersed, and its leaders put in jail with much less fuss than many (including me) had expected. For all I know, radicals may be gathering in cellars and in encrypted internet chat-rooms to plot their revenge, but so far there’s little evidence they are capable of posing a serious threat outside the Sinai peninsula. It looks as though Egypt has avoided civil war, but the cowing of the Brotherhood could well have come at an extremely high price: the inflation of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s ego.
Al-Sisi had seemed a modest man. Mohammed Morsi saw him as the ideal replacement for the Mubarak-era generals he had swept aside. Cautious and pious, he would surely be the last person to play Zia ul-Haq to Morsi’s own Zufikar Ali Bhutto (that Pakistani comparison can still be said to be exaggerated: al-Sisi has yet to have Morsi put to death). And even if, perhaps, he has been persuaded somewhat reluctantly to intervene by the huge popular unrest he could see, by the Islamists’ mismanagement of the economy, and, not uncrucially, by their intent to replace the military’s economic empire with the Brotherhood’s own; even if, at the time, he planned to apply no more than a gentle nudge to Egypt’s political system after which he could return to his well-appointed barracks, admire his reflection in his perfectly polished boots, pose in his numberless hats, and drive around in the latest American-made supplied vehicles...all those crowds holding up your picture, chanting “We love Sisi” and “the Army and the people are one hand,” are bound to go to a chap’s head.
Now it looks as though he’s consolidating power with impressive ruthlessness and skill. Once he’s done, where is he likely to go next? What could be better than to bid for leadership of the Arab world? What could be better, in fact, than to succeed where Nasser, Sadat, Assade père and even Hamas had failed?
Serious Israeli heads dismiss the idea. Since the coup, Egypt and Israel have co-operated extremely closely in fighting terrorists in Sinai and making life so difficult for Hamas that the Islamists even considered asking Fatah back to help control border crossings. Under the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Israel always gets more aid, and is guaranteed a “qualitative edge” in equipment: a war would be foolhardy in the extreme. And besides, a war would cut off revenue from the Suez Canal that Egypt can ill afford to miss and damage the tourism sector, receipt of the dividends from which has become a chief preoccupation of Egypt’s military.
Yet, as it reorganises its own amed forces, and plans the forces it intends to maintain over the next couple of decades, Israel should bear in mind that though wars are almost always economically irrational, they still somehow start. It should recall Israel’s qualitative edge is there to balance Egypt’s inevitable quantitative one, and as good as co-operation is now, plans can change swiftly. After all, it was in March 1939 that Poland’s Foreign Minister could confidently assert: “I trust Hitler. He has some large ambitions for Europe."
Jesse Norman is the Member of Parliament for Hereford and South Herefordshire. His new biography of Edmund Burke was published recently. Follow Jesse on Twitter
Last Saturday, I was honoured to be the after-dinner speaker at the Conservative Renewal Conference in Windsor. What follows is based in part on what I said then, minus quite a few jokes.
"Ladies and Gentlemen:
It’s a great joy to speak at a conference devoted to ideas, and especially to conservative ideas. Ideas, not people, are what ultimately rule us. They are always in charge, for good or ill, whether we know it or not - this is what Keynes is hinting at in his famous line about today’s politicians being the slaves of some defunct economist. And ideas have real consequences. So it’s wise for us to reflect on them, and their limitations.
For some reason in recent months I seem to have acquired the reputation of being the Che Guevara of the modern Conservative Party. This is absurd, of course; I am the very opposite of a revolutionary. But it does mean that the press have started to scrutinise my public remarks with all the fervent enthusiasm of a group of Miley Cyrus fans at a twerking convention. Whatever “twerking” is.
Let us start by surveying the political battlefield together. On one side, we see our ministerial battalions carrying all before them: in the Treasury, in Education, in Work and Pensions, in Local Government, and a host of other places. On the other side, Labour is in retreat, and driven hither and yon by their union paymasters. Twisting and jerking to the beat of Len McCluskey and his colleagues.Ladies and Gentlemen, you may say Labour isn’t twerking. But I put it to you that Labour is in fact twerking…twerking hard. And it’s not a pretty sight.
Meanwhile Tony Abbott has won a thumping victory in Australia, and Angela Merkel looks set to win in Germany. In other words, all around the world conservative ideas are on the march.
And I would ask you all to notice one remarkable fact: that our own Conservative-led government has launched one of the most vigorous and decisive programmes of political reform in our history…as part of a coalition… in the teeth of the worst recession in recorded history… and with, not merely the consent, but the increasingly evident support, of the British people. That is a quite extraordinary achievement.
But there is a fascinating further possibility: that we are also seeing a much deeper change in the nature of politics. There was a first great reckoning after 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power determined to reassert democratic control over the political process, to conquer inflation, and to get Britain’s economy moving once again.
Now we have a second great reckoning. The public know, the public understand, that in the immortal words of Liam Byrne, “There is no money left.” In other words, the possibility of big increases in state spending no longer hangs over British politics. Gone, for a while at least, is the pushmi-pullyu by which governments were able to cop out of economic policy by pumping up demand, only to have to retrench ingloriously thereafter. Instead we have, for the first time in six decades, a long-term hard budget constraint. No more state bail-outs.
I would argue that this fundamentally alters the basic assumptions of politics itself. It means attention must fall onto society as such, and its institutions. We are in a Burkean moment, and here we have a great Burkean lesson, that man is a social animal, that from our actions arise habits, shared practices, norms and institutions: those stores of collective wisdom, that give our lives their point and purpose; whether they be the church, the family, the pub, the football team. They put one in mind of that great definition of a conservative: someone who believes that institutions are wiser than people. Their counterpart is modesty in political action: reform, not revolution.
There remain the three great tasks of reform: continuing to improve our public services; enabling Britain's vast array of independent institutions to cope with rapid social change, without undue dependence on the taxpayer; and rekindling the British industrial spirit, the spirit of wealth creation and entrepreneurial energy, not the spirit of a narrow and rent-seeking crony capitalism.
But our great institutions also include Parliament, and the Conservative party. And at a conference devoted to conservative ideas let me turn briefly to another great conservative thinker, Michael Oakeshott.
For Oakeshott, a fundamental idea is that of conversation. For him our culture and society are shaped by a vast, enveloping and evolving conversation, through which different traditions play into and cross-fertilise one other, each with its own voice, be that of science, of business, of the arts, of religion, of the law.
Why does this matter? For three reasons:
So I would end with a request to you, and to all our Conservative friends and colleagues: indeed a plea, as the late Elvis Presley so nearly said, for “a little more conversation”. With that conversation so invigorated and flourishing will come a great flood of new intelligence, new energy and new ideas. Without that conversation, we will stagnate. With it, there is nothing we cannot accomplish together.
Thank you, and good evening."
Iain Dale presents LBC 97.3 Drivetime programme 4-8pm every weekday. He also blogs at www.iaindale.com. Follow Iain on Twitter.
It’s difficult to say much about the Nigel Evans case without prejudicing his trial, but one thing is for certain. Over the last few months he has found out who his real friends are. And that will be even more the case over the months leading up to his trial. I know several people involved in political scandals over the years and the common thread among them is their shock at how easily people they had regarded as lifelong friends cast them by the wayside at the first sign of gunfire. I well remember when my friends the Hamiltons were accused of raping a woman in Ilford and I took to the television studios to defend them. I was told by several people that I should stop doing so. "Why?" I asked. "Because it would not be good for your career". I gave a pretty dusty response and said somewhat forcefully that a friend is a friend is a friend, and that you wouldn’t be a very good friend if you abandoned a friend at their time of dire need. And that is what I and no doubt many of you will feel about Nigel Evans’s situation. Small messages of support can mean a huge amount to someone in his position. His world will have been rocked to its foundations. He has had to resign from the job he loved and is now facing calls to resign his seat too. He must resist them. The concept of being innocent until proven guilty must be adhered to, and it is for his friends to defend his right to remain Conservative MP for Ribble Valley pending the trial verdict. Nigel protests his innocence. I believe him. And before anyone suggests otherwise in the comments (because I am sure they are will), it has nothing to do with him being gay. It has nothing to do with him being accused of sex crimes. It’s that I don’t believe the Nigel Evans I know would hurt a fly. P.S: If you do comment on this below, please be aware of the laws of contempt of court.
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Poor old Rachel Reeves. She’s been badly let down by the Labour Party’s media team. Quite what on earth they thought they were doing by demanding a full public apology from Ian Katz, Newsnight's Editor, for his tweet which described Reeves as "snoring boring" I just do not know. It made a drama out of a non-crisis. The best way to handle these things is to laugh them off, not ramp up the rhetoric. Sending a normal tweet as opposed to a direct message is a very easy thing to do and many of us have fallen prey to this over the years, me included. It happened to me recently. Luckily I retrieved my tweet within 20 seconds of sending it and no one seemed to have noticed. Sadly for Rachel Reeves, she will now become the Steve Davis of politics, and the word "boring" will forever be associated with her. The truth is she is nowhere near making any Top Ten List of boring politicians. She is very good company indeed, but when she goes on the media she is so on message that you wonder if she has been programmed by Peter Mandelson. When I interviewed her in February she managed to say the same thing 18 times in a five minute interview. If you’re in doubt, you can listen here. Once described as "having the face of an angel and the voice of Pat Butcher", Reeves has suffered from being promoted too early. She needed to learn her trade on the back benches and in junior shadow positions, but like Chuka Umunna she has been thrust into the limelight far too soon. One or two Conservative junior ministers, who are pushing for immediate promotion to the cabinet, might learn something from this. Be careful what you wish for.
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Still no reshuffle, then.
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I approach this weekend with some foreboding. I normally look forward to the conference season. It’s a time to meet old friends, indulge in some heavyweight political gossip sessions and rejoice in a gathering of likeminded political tribes. But this year the Liberal Democrats are in Glasgow. Don’t get me wrong, I have got nothing against Glasgow, having only been there once before...but Glasgow? For a party conference? Apparently, delegate numbers are way down on the norm and commercial exhibitors will also be far less prevalent than in the last couple of years. To put it bluntly, it’s a bloody long way to go. Even further than Blackpool was! I’m told that the LibDems will also be returning there next year for their pre-election conference, a decision which completely defies logic. But I am told all of the other venues they normally use were booked up. Further proof that the LibDems don’t really do long term planning.
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I am well aware that my political interviewing style is closer to that of the late Sir David Frost rather than Jeremy Paxman, but just occasionally I surprise people by baring my teeth. It happened this week with Sajid Javid, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury who had come on to talk about George Osborne’s speech on the economy. All was going well until he queried my figures on the deficit. OK, I said, how much did it reduce last year, I asked, quite reasonably. "Well the important thing is that it’s falling," he said. Maybe, but that didn’t answer my question. It turned into a mini Paxman-Michael Howard moment. I don’t think it is unreasonable for a Treasury Minister to have those figures at his fingertips. I regard Sajid as a friend, but friendship has to go out of the window when you’re being paid to do a proper journalistic job, as Sajid no doubt realised. Credit to him, though. Unlike Rachel Reeves, he responded in exactly the right way and texted me making light of the whole thing. It’s never a good idea to fall out over something like this. You can hear the exchange here.
Adrian Hilton is a conservative academic, theologian and educationalist. He writes a Daily Mail blog. Follow Adrian on Twitter.
Of all the cities of antiquity, Pompeii is quite possibly the best known. “It was lost, and is now found; it was destroyed, and is now preserved.” Frozen in time, it provides a unique window on Roman cultural and intellectual life, and holds a mirror up to so many of our own attitudes, features, gestures and obsessions.
My fascination with the city and its catastrophic destruction goes back to childhood: I recall in my Latin textbook Ecce Romani pictures of a dog mosaic and a weird skeleton: ‘canis ferocissimus est.’ And frescos of Caecilius and his family: ‘Caecilius iterum clamavit.’ I was an avid collector of postcards, guidebooks and magazines on the topic. I had read Pliny’s harrowing account and Lord Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii by the age of 13: ‘Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere.’ Supping with Glaucus and gambling with Clodius are what all schoolchildren should be doing, instead of sexting their friends and surfing the internet in a cyber-life of meaningless meandering.
I eventually got to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum leading a GCSE Classics group there a few years ago, and was finally able to see and touch that famous Cave canem mosaic, walk through the exotic bathhouses, and buy my very own bronze statue of a dancing faun. I also visited the Naples Museum to satisfy my curiosity of all those naughty erotic pieces of statuary so carefully screened from innocent eyes (though Year 10 weren’t remotely fazed by any of it).
With that authentic experience, I was in two minds as to whether I should visit the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum’, which has had a mixed reception. Those who loved it invariably admired the gruesome preservation of life and agonising death; those who loathed it seem to complain about the stifling heat in a dreary, airless space full of sweaty bodies, children crying and exasperated mothers trying to escape the claustrophobic blackness. Pretty much, in fact, what first-century Pompeii would have been like.When I finally managed to get tickets a few weeks ago, yes, I found myself in a superheated sauna of pyroclastic gases, trampled underfoot by tens of thousands of tourists. But the thermal shock and discomfort were worth it to get a sense of just how suddenly the domestic harmony and community frenzy of one balmy August day in AD 79 can be so suddenly engulfed by an apocalyptic image of horror. You just don’t get that walking leisurely around the satyred gardens of Campania.
Elegant villas, rooms adorned with exquisite paintings, gardens with fountains, all reconstructed to bring alive a lost world in sensuous detail. There were kitchen saucepans and cooking utensils; pitchers, plates and goblets; a charred children’s cot and a carefully-crafted storage chest with melted brass fixtures. It was all so much more immediate and intense than visiting the real thing at the height of the Amalfi tourist season. There were pictures and portraits, sculpted marble statues, and murals in vivid scarlet and pastel shades of pastoral tranquility. There was even real food – carbonised olives and nuts and petrified bread – all carefully prepared by Sotericus for an imminent feast, but never finally eaten in the villa of Diomedes or the house of Loreius Tiburtinus.
It is essentially an exhibition of artefacts, but you get a vivid sense of the real people who bartered in the Forum; stood for political office; scrawled their graffiti and vulgar inscriptions on the walls of the local bar; and who grunted their moments of ecstasy in the brothels, intoxicated (quite literally) on Bacchus-worship. The imperial cult had a special place in the religious life of Pompeii. Its hierarchy of priests and priestesses participated in the celebration of the divinity of the Emperor, and so held prominent positions in Pompeian society. But, as was in the days of Noah, they were all oblivious to the Great Day of Wrath that was about to consume them.
As Vesuvius belched out its sulphur and steam 20 miles into the atmosphere, some 20,000 people beneath were scorched to death or reduced to ash. Over the ensuing hours, the hubbub, prosperity and opulence of Pompeii and Herculaneum would be entombed beneath metres of volcanic residue and molten basalt, waiting to be discovered almost two millennia later. You can but stare in wonder at the twisted plaster cast of an entire family preserved in a moment of terror – the ghosts of a husband shielding his face and a mother grasping her children to defend them from the fires of Orcus.
This is the stuff of living history: not only does it still inform our own architecture, art and interior design, it keeps the likes of Mary Beard in a full-time job, and civilisation is all the better for that. It’s just a pity that so many schools long ago dropped Latin for Home Economics, exchanged Greek for Drama, and shunted out Classical Civilisation in favour of Media Studies. Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii has it all, and more. And the British Museum’s ‘Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum’ would enthral any who are fascinated with at the original Ground Zero.
Greg Clark is Financial Secretary to the Treasury and MP for Tunbridge Wells. Follow Greg on Twitter.
The Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann has shown that most of the differences in income and wealth creation between nations can be attributed to how complex their economies are. Broadly speaking, poorer countries make simple things that everyone else can make, while richer countries make things that are complex that not everyone makes. According to one study, in the US, the average employee works with 100 other people to do their job, while in India the average employee works with four.
As Hausmann puts it: “for a complex society to exist, people who know about design, marketing, finance, technology, operations and trade law must be able to combine their knowledge to make products. Modern man is useless as an individual: making a computer is a team sport.” Adam Smith, of course, had the same insight two centuries earlier.
This is one of the reasons why, across the world, cities are emerging as the places where economic growth is strongest. The purpose of cities – their raison d’etre – is to bring people together to allow them to specialise in what they do best and to collaborate with each other. One of the reasons why London has been so successful is that you can find just about anything you want there – experts, specialists, products, services, finance and labour.
Conversely, places that are not complex enough to support a highly sophisticated economy are losing ground to places elsewhere in the world that are. And the better connected successful places are with each other, the stronger is the potential for economic growth.Britain is unusual in having, outside London, a number of great cities that are quite poorly connected with each other and, to varying degrees, with the capital. Countries around the world are bringing their principal cities together through fast, easy transport links. In Britain, there is the potential for the cities of the North and Midlands to have transport connections with each other that not only link our principal economic clusters, but which can endow them with many of the benefits of a single city. With HS2, it will take 38 minutes to travel from Birmingham to Sheffield, and 41 minutes to Manchester. These are journey times that are less than the time it can take to travel within and across London – say from Enfield to Croydon, or from Ealing to Stratford.
HS2 offers the prospect of transforming the economic geography of our country. It can make our cities as well-connected with each other as is London itself. This opens the prospect of businesses and people being able to be based in any one of them without losing out on the inexhaustible range of connections, suppliers and collaborators that has impelled our biggest city’s economic success.
Henry Hill is a British Conservative and Unionist activist and writer. Follow Henry on Twitter. He is also editor of the non-party website Open Unionism, which can be followed on Twitter here.
Maze peace centre ‘killed off’ by Castlederg republican rally
Peter Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party and First Minister of Northern Ireland, has stated during a TV interview that it was the backlash against a rally held in memory to two IRA terrorists that led to his party withdrawing its support from plans to build a peace centre in what used to be HM Prison Maze, on the site of the former Long Kesh Detention Centre.
The rally has garnered headlines for a speech made by Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly, who said of two Provisional IRA members slain by their own bomb:
“They were ordinary young men in the extraordinary circumstances of the early 1970s who rose to the challenge of the time. They had a vision of equality and freedom and they knew the risks they were taking to achieve it but they could not stand idly by or leave it to others.
“It is a harsh reality of resistance that we lose some of our best activists during armed conflict and Seamus and Gerard along with their other comrades whom we remember here today, paid with their lives.”
Kelly claims that people who oppose making this sort of speech about PIRA militants creates a ‘hierarchy of victims’ with ‘republicans and nationalists’ at the bottom, notwithstanding that most of his critics are objecting to his subjects’ terrorism rather than their nationalism and would, one hopes, place loyalist murderers alongside their republican counterparts at the very bottom of whatever ‘hierarchy of victims’ exists. Unionists have accused him of giving succour to dissident republican terror groups – a charge Kelly denies.
The cost of such rhetoric, on top of the pain it causes to the relatives of victims of terror and the damage it does to inter-communal relations, now includes (for the moment, at least) the Maze peace centre initiative. This should hardly come as a surprise to a politician of Kelly’s experience: for both the DUP and Sinn Fein, its more than their jobs are worth to be seen to be letting the other wide get the better of them.
Scottish brothers win appeal over ‘bedroom tax’
Two Scottish men have successfully appealed against a reduction in their spare-room subsidy, opening the way for thousands of appeals. Ian Nelson maintained that his spare room ought to be turned into a wet room, since he struggles to get in and out of the bath – which at least suggests the charge concentrated his mind on how best to make use of the space.
His brother David successfully argued that at 50 square feet his room is too small to be a bedroom (for a point of comparison, here is a visualisation of a room with 48.75 square feet of floor space). The judge ruled that any room under 50 square feet is too small to be a bedroom and that any between that and 70 square feet (which I fear may include my own quarters, at present) is ‘only suitable for children under 10’.
Although the court case is expected to prompt a deluge of appeals, it does not appear to have sustained the criticism that the policy is fundamentally inhumane. One case involves the room not being able to be put to use for a lodger or paying guest (surely a legitimate exemption) and the other evolves repurposing the room and putting it to use – although that change must surely be done to sustain the exemption, less exemption be granted to all spare bedrooms that could conceivably be turned into something else. If these changes are made, then the policy is still promoting the more effective use of public housing stock.
Nominations open for ‘St David Awards’, a new Welsh honour
First Minister Carwyn Jones has formally launched Wales’ very own honours system, and nominations are open. There will apparently be nine of these awarded annually, in the categories of “bravery, citizenship, culture, enterprise, innovation and technology, international award, sport and young person's award.” One of these will be awarded at the discretion of the First Minister, with the other eight being dispensed at the discretion of a committee.
In an unhappy hat-tip to modernity, the new honour will not be organised into an order and recipients will receive neither a medal to wear nor, as far as I can see, any post-nominal letters (perhaps things the Welsh Conservatives might fix one day). Instead, the winners will receive a hand-carved trophy and the runners-up a certificate. You can nominate people here.
As part of his case for the awards, Jones points out that apparently few Welsh people receive the higher UK awards. Perhaps this has something to do with Wales having no national order, whereas England has the Order of the Garter (which presumably encompasses Wales as it has Northern Ireland), Scotland has the Order of the Thistle, and Northern Ireland theoretically has the Order of Saint Patrick (which although dormant remains the third most senior order in the UK, if I recall correctly).
Perhaps that is something the government might consider rectifying. They would want to avoid its name clashing with the new prize, so the Order of Saint David is likely out. Yet that still leaves the Order of the Dragon – and who, in their heart of hearts, wouldn’t like the opportunity to style themselves a Knight of the Dragon?
God save the… oh, never mind: a farewell to Ireland
I had the opportunity to go to the BBC’s ‘Proms in the Park’ in Northern Ireland on Saturday. I spent last week across the water to hand in my Masters thesis, but except for one day trip to Dublin to hand it in and see off Trinity College I spent most of my time up in Belfast, and was invited to the Proms to celebrate. These used to be held outside the rather magnificent city hall, but have recently moved to the old Harland and Wolff slipway where the Titanic was built, just across the river from Belfast’s still-functioning port.
It was, on the whole, as good an evening out as you might expect, but it ended on an irksome note. As a Briton there are precious few opportunities where one can unselfconsciously belt out the national anthem without looking like a total loon, and of all places the last night of the Proms is supposed to be one such refuge.
Alas, not for us. The Northern Irish proms had joined Albert Hall for what we presumed was the end of the concert, but cut us away after the nth verse of Land of Hope and Glory very sharply indeed. Instead of God Save the Queen, we were treated to the theme music for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It doesn’t have quite the same impact.
I do understand that the playlist must have been a little sensitive, and that putting ‘Ireland’s Call’ on it (with the stage bathed throughout in green lighting) and keeping ‘Rule Britannia’ off it made sense in order to ensure everyone had an enjoyable evening. But did we really need to forgo the national anthem too?
Of course, I think this only applies to Northern Ireland. Looking at the TV coverage the only location they actually cut to during the anthem is Hyde Park, and I've heard word-of-mouth that Scotland at least missed out on the anthem as well. Regardless of the reasoning, it brought an otherwise enjoyable evening – indeed, an enjoyable year – to a close on a slightly disappointing note. Who knows when I’ll find the opportunity to sing it again – some patriotic corner of the party conference, perhaps.