Defending Ken Clarke – The Final Post!

The Tory Reform Group now has an excellent “shiny new blog” called Egremont, so if you’ve landed here from the old home page or by some other remarkable feat of internet legerdemain – since very few people ever have landed here it has to be admitted – then do go there straight after you’ve finished.  And you won’t, sadly, need to come back, as this is the last post on the old blog.  So forgive me a bit of old guard partisanship as I lay into Tim Montgomerie’s ludicrous caricature of our beloved president, Ken Clarke.

Montgomerie now uses two principal outlets for his brand of right-wing “mainstream” conservatism, the Conservative Home site and the Daily Mail (And how annoyed we should be that he’s nicked our very own former description from us!).  While David Cameron is hardly a liked quantity on either of these platforms, for real pantomime villainy look no further than the genial, widely liked Justice Secretary, the Leader Who Never Was, and – despite his desire to release a load of prisoners and give those who remain inside the vote – still one of the most popular Tories in the country (yes, I know, we haven’t set the bar very high have we?).  Today, the day on which Mr. Clarke, in another of his trade-marked outbursts of political honesty has announced that the middle classes don’t yet know what is to hit them and when they do, Coalition popularity may well be at what we term a premium, Mr. Montgomerie has used both of his outlets to make sure we know what a lethal, despicable figure the Justice Secretary is.  According to the Mail’s under-stated headline, Clarke is a disloyal, pro-Europe old bruiser who should be given the boot.  Remarkably for a Daily Mail headline, there are considerable accuracies within it.  Even his best friends would never use the term Euro-sceptic to describe Clarke, although some might venture “Euro-pragmatic”.  He is certainly an old bruiser too, who takes few enemies.  But really, disloyal?  The servant of four Tory prime ministers disloyal?  If you want disloyalty, look no further than the intransigent euro-sceptics who see no virtue in supporting a party leadership that it will never agree with.  I suspect Mr. Clarke’s voting record under Tory administrations compares very favourably with that of, say, Bill Cash, but would Mr. Montgmerie ever consider Mr. cash to be a “disloyal old bruiser”?  Conservative Home at the moment positively revels in the disloyalty of a right-wing praetorian guard, standing over the eternal flame of Thatcherite purity, with all that that brings (a receding Tory vote, an absence in the cities and provinces, a heinously divided UK polity….).

The crux of Mr. Montgomerie’s boiling over frustration with Mr. Clarke is that he has been disloyal to three Tory leaders.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Montgomerie found he could probably live with the disloyalty to John Major and William Hague, but what the old-time Thatcherites – sorry, mainstream conservatives – will never forgive is his frank advice to Margaret Thatcher to go now as she was finished, in those fateful days in November 1990.  Other people rather admire Mr. Clarke for his bluntness on that occasion, at a time when so many of his Cabinet colleagues were simply trooping in to tell the Lady that of course they would vote for her, and then weeping a little into the bargain.  One Nation Tory though he was, he had been one of her more radical ministers, shaking up first health and then education in a way that lesser, even Thatcherite, men might have shrunk from doing in those harsh, divided times.  But Clarke was no fantasist – he knew Thatcher was finished and was kind enough to break through the wall of political fiction that had been built around her in order to tell her so.  Mr. Montgomerie paints this as a long-term plot, part of Mr. Clarke’s persistent manoeuvring to get rid of her.  Hmmm.  I remember those days, and my recollection is that Ken Clarke was more interested in heading down to Ronnie Scott’s or a Brick Lane curry house than doing anything so unseemly as plotting.  The plotting was mainly conducted by the right anyway, who were far more numerous, or Machiavellian experts such as Tristan Garel-Jones.  Mr. Montgomerie’s reading of recent political history is remarkably facile.

Clarke’s opposition to a referendum under John Major – Mr. Montgomerie’s second great accusation – was certainly to do with his general and always public support for the EU as it stood, but it was hardly a strategy designed to undermine a Prime Minister whom he actually liked and with whom he formed a strong working relationship.  Mr. Major’s position was made far more difficult and malign by the actions of his euro-sceptic MPs, who thought nothing of trying to undermine support for the sitting Tory premier, and whose own disloyalty almost certainly contributed to the eventual Tory defeat in 1997.

As for Mr. Montgomerie’s third charge – that Mr. Clarke opposed William Hague’s “Keep the Pound” campaign – this was such a fatuously simplistic campaign that it had already failed to make any resonance with the British public.

Ken Clarke is one of the big figures of contemporary British politics, respected for his integrity and his general human-ness.  That he maintains a fundamental loyalty to the idea of the European Union is of course the reason why he never became leader of his party, for he would never abandon deeply held beliefs.  Certainly it also pits him against the current consensus of the Tory Party.  But the British people seem rather less bothered by Europe than the narrow membership of the Tory Party, and Mr. Clarke’s broad political outlook, firmly rooted in the values of One Nation Conservatism, has always had more appeal than that of his more right-wing, authoritarian rivals.  I rather doubt that the jovial Lord Chancellor will actually serve out the whole of this government, and when he goes he will be depriving the government of one of the few publically connected members they have.  There are many things that make him a frustrating politician, but let us have no truck with the nonsense that he is some sort of treacherous, disloyal Mandelsonian who has single-handedly destroyed three Tory leaders.  It is utter bilge, and Mr. Montgomerie should try filling his Daily Mail pages with more elevated material.

Meanwhile, it’s goodbye from this TRG blog, and over to Egremont!

Alan Johnson’s Tragedy

The first stark and rather tragic message from the Alan Johnson resignation is why on earth would anyone subject themselves to such a relentless goldfish bowl existence. Whatever the ins and outs of Alan Johnson’s personal problems, the chances are they have been exacerbated by his political existence and now he and his family have to bear with the merciless, hysterical tabloid press coverage of it. Little wonder that so many decent people, who share the human characteristic of all of us of being flawed, would think twice – or often not at all – before entering the world of political public service.

Away of the personal side of the story, the Tories are claiming to be pleased [although see Paul Goodman's take on Conservative Home] that Ed Balls is now shadow Chancellor. Their line is that this is the man who is the co-architect of Gordon Brown’s economic recession, but frankly that won’t wash for long, and the real problem for them is that Balls represents a much more distinctive voice on economic affairs, and is a far more competent spokesman than the lamented Mr. Johnson. My prediction is that Balls will be making life significantly more difficult for George Osborne, as well as depriving David Cameron of some of punchlines in PMQs – after all, he won’t be able to claim any more that the shadow chancellor can’t do his sums.

James Forsyth on the Spectator site comments on the double-edged consequence for the Tories of the Balls appointment, concluding that Balls’ tactical superiority over Johnson won’t outweigh the Tories’ fundamental strategic advantage.  Let’s see.

Warsi’s Woes

With the Conservative Party licking its wounds over Oldham, it hasn’t been a great day for party co-chairman Baroness Warsi.  In a prickly interview on the Today programme she levelled some pretty sharp accusations at the ‘right-wing’ of the party.  It’s no good complaining about the campaign’s lack of vigour if you didn’t go up and campaign yourself, she said.  Not an unreasonable comment.  What was careless was to attribute this so specifically to a particular group.  Of course, everyone knows that there is a vocal group of right-wing Conservatives who are deeply suspicious of the Coalition.  That many of them might also be quick to leap into criticism of the party’s by-election efforts is only to be expected.  But it would have been cannier of Warsi not to leap so crudely into the fray.  As it is, she has given some useful ammunition to those opponents of Mr. Cameron who would like to see him gradually denuded of modernising supporters in top positions.  She would have been wise to exercise more restraint.

The reaction to her comments has meanwhile been concerted and over the top.  Top prize probably goes to the Spectator’s James Forsyth, who wrote of ‘fury that the party chairman is attacking a section of the party.’  Honestly.  She’s truly disgraceful.  It’s almost like writing off an entire group of slightly different party thinkers as, say, ‘wets’.

Oldham’s Message

A Labour seat has been held by a Labour candidate with an increased majority at a time when the fiscal conservatism of the existing Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government is starting to prove unpopular. So far, so relatively predictable. The furore surrounding the discredited former Labour MP for the seat, Phil Woolas, originally gave rise to the hope amongst the narrowly defeated Liberal Democrats that they might be able to take the seat. That they didn’t is not the biggest blow the party could have received, especially given that they have managed to sustain their vote (adding a small 0.3% on a lower turnout) at a time when the Lib Dems as a party, and Nick Clegg as leader in particular, have been given a hammering over student fees. So they can breathe reasonably freely today.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, may find the result rather less encouraging. Reports are that they ran a lacklustre campaign, despite keeping their strong local candidate, in order to give the Lib Dems a clearer run. Their vote, in consequence, pretty well collapsed. Whatever the original strategic reasons for such a campaign, it is clear that it was an error.  I am a supporter of the Coalition government, as are many TRG-ers.  I want them to succeed and I admire the effective way in which co-operation between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats goes on in government.  But I also want people to be able to vote for Conservative candidates, who campaign with full blooded distinction as such.  As it happens, a better campaign in Oldham may not in fact have damaged the Lib Dem chances as much as Cameron and co obviously thought. Whatever the state of play in Westminster, the Tory and Lib Dem voters are not so easily transferable it would seem.  I don’t always agree with the analysis on Conservative Home, but Jonathan Isaby’s conclusions from Oldham posted this morning do bear reading, and seem today to be pretty much on the nail.  We can and must keep coalition politics going, but it doesn’t need to be at the expense of annoying a large swathe of the Conservative Party.

As for the leaders – for Nick Clegg, it may be a bit of a relief that attention could turn for a while to the Tories’ woes. After all, he has been a useful lightning conductor for them for a little longer than he might have liked. For David Cameron, it’s another in his endless round of internecine warfare with his traditionalist opponents. And for Ed Milliband, the result has bought him some time off from the quiet sniping about his leadership that was already beginning.

Sarah Palin Didn’t Shoot Gabrielle Giffords

Congresswoman Giffords, seriously wounded, and six innocent by-standers, all mown down by gunfire, are the victims of another deranged loner who America’s laws allows to carry a gun with impunity.  But Congresswoman Giffords is also a Democrat who voted for President Obama’s healthcare bill, and who supports abortion.  Her seat was one of 20 targeted by Mrs. Palin for taking back, illustrated by the helpful device of a rifle crosshairs over the seat on a map of the USA.

Now Mrs. Palin’s aggressive imagery – she also talks of not rereating but ‘re-loading’ – may or may not have directly influenced the killer of Judge John Rolls and the wounder of Congresswoman Giffords, but it is part of an increasingly poisonous political atmosphere in America.  In the hours following the tragic event in Tucson, which has also seen the death of a 9 year old girl, taken to see the Congresswoman because she had recently been elected to her school’s student council and developed an early interes in politics, the political blame game has ratcheted up.  Some extreme commenters on internet sites have tried to blame Mrs. Palin directly for the shooting.  Clearly ridiculous.  This in turn has led conservative commentators to launch shrill defences of the Chosen One in their turn.  The British blogger Cranmer, a usually thoughtful and stimulating writer, has produced  arguably one of his worst ever posts where he has sought to caricature the critics of Mrs. Palin by focusing on the lunatic fringe, and paint her as a martyr for the lovely, sensitive right.

In fact, there is a serious case for the right in America to answer.  This is the right of extreme rhetoric, gun-toting imagery and shock jock talk radio hosts.  The judge who was killed in the shooting had himself been the target of ferocious and murderous abuse from these people.  Mrs. Palin glories in her polarising status.  She has removed her infamous cross-hairs graphic (why, if it was so innocent?).  A blogger on the Daily Kos blog (liberal leaning) sums up the right-wing problem thus:

Those whose violent, eliminationist rhetoric has polluted the air waves and other media for the past couple of decades, ramping itself up a little more each year, especially with the arrival of an African American in the White House, are, of course, denying that the shootings of a Congresswoman, a judge, a child and bystanders on a street corner in Arizona have anything to do with their savage words. No surprise. One thing they’re good at is refusing to accept any responsibility for the consequences of this murderous talk, whether it’s Timothy McVeigh blowing up a federal building or Scott Roeder assassinating a doctor.

The Arizona sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, similarly raises the issue of whether vitriolic and bigoted rhetoric might not have had an influence on the unbalanced mind of the shooter.  Sarah Palin didn’t shoot Gabrielle Giffords.  But she is the high priestess of an increasingly intolerant and aggressive politics that creates the atmosphere for just such an action.  As a final thought, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish offered this reflection on 1963 from William Manchester’s ‘Death of a President’:

“In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .”

Mainstream Conservatism?

A few years ago TRG was one of the proud members of an organisation called Conservative Mainstream. Fearful of the rightward drift of the Tory Party after its catastrophic election defeat in 1997, Mainstream served as an umbrella for like-minded liberal Tory groups to coalesce under, and perhaps have greater weight.  It even spawned a parliamentary offshoot – imaginatively called Parliamentary Mainstream – which contained a number of One Nation luminaries, and was chaired by Damian Green.  Well, the Conservative party returned to the ‘mainstream’ and the organisation itself fell into abeyance.  But it seems that mainstream Conservatism just doesn’t die, or indeed even appear in similar guises.  For Tim Montgomerie, of Conservative Home, has now launched his own clarion call for a return to, er, mainstream conservatism, as a response to the party’s drift – well, leftwards.

Just as there was once a time when everyone claimed to be a ‘One Nation’ Conservative (even Margaret Thatcher deployed the phrase, though probably through gritted teeth and certainly without referencing the grand old man of Tory One Nationism, Benjamin Disraeli), now it seems we can’t move for fear of dislodging another squatter on the ground floor of mainstream conservatism.  Of course, the whole thing is a bit of a fraud, for as Tim Montgomerie surely knows, there is no agreement on what constitutes mainstream Conservatism.   Mr. Montgomerie’s mainstream conservatism is simply a front for the advancement of more New Rightist, Thatcherite ideas of the national liberal variety.  It is a continuing sign of how concerned the Thatcherite right are with the direction of the Conservative Party, and it has usefully provoked a further debate about what it means to be conservative.  The most recent salvoes fired, following Mr. Montgomerie’s pronouncement, are very ably summed up and linked to by Platform 10, whose own blogger Fiona Melville provides the most articulate, and convincing, of the responses.

In reviving the term Conservative mainstream, Mr.Montgomerie may not have done much for the consistency of that theme, but he has ensured that the debate about conservatism is kept very much on the front burner.  Our own commitment now should be to join the debate with vigour, and continue to promulgate the ideas of One Nation conservatism (liberal is too wide and imprecise a designation here) which we believe to be part of the mainstream, in the wider party.  After all, what else should mainstream conservatives be doing?

[This post is a slightly amended version from the original]

Right Wing Bloggers Hang Up Their Computers

It may have passed many of you by, and gone largely unnoticed by the majority of the British public, but two Tory bloggers have announced that they are no longer carrying on with their blogging.  It’s a move that has drawn considerable comment (online) and raised the question of whether the Tory part of the blogosphere is ‘imploding’.

The most significant – and longer established – of these is Iain Dale, who has decided that blogging is the thing to give in the midst of a busy life.  His publishing company has been behind some high profile political books recently, including David Laws’ account of “Five Days in May”, and Mr. Dale has moved into 5 nights a week radio broadcasting on LBC.  He has made the transition from new to mainstream media, and decided that mainstream media is where it’s at.  He’s not wrong.  Whilst his own blog was widely read – one of the few that could claim this – and probably (though unquanitifably) carried some influence amongst Tory activists and big cheeses, blogging still doesn’t make public conversations with the predictablility and regularity of mainstream media.  Mr. Dale influences more people with his radio show, and has a bigger consequent profile, than he did from his blog alone.  I suspect his suspension/cancellation of his blogging activities is an admission of this.

Less consequentially, the Tory student blogger ‘Tory Bear’ has also stopped.  This was definitely a minority interest blog, and when Tory Bear tried to influence the recent Conservative Future election, he only managed to persuade 60 people of the virtues of his preferred candidate.  (Mind you, with  a membership of 18,000, Conservative Future itself only motivated 200 people to vote.)  With the exception of one or two ‘big beasts’ (sadly not including the estimable blog you are reading!) the blogosphere is still on the margins of political influence, even if it generates a vigorous political debate amongst its largely self-contained audience.  Political Insight magazine commented after the election on the internet election that never was – the television debates led virtually all the election coverage, and it was a glorious bit of mainstream media maladministration that caused Gordon Brown’s memorable ‘bigoted woman’ gaffe.  Even scandal waits for the mainstream media to pick it up before it becomes a central – if regrettable – part of the political conversation, as William Hague’s special adviser travails showed.

Nevertheless, whilst it may lack the hitting power of the mainstream media, internet politics is a vibrant part of the political scene.  The existence of our own website and occasionally updated blog is testament to our belief that a political organisation needs a web presence to help further its views and join in that competitive task of persuading and engaging with others.  The web is wonderfully democratic.  It allows the promulgation of a huge range of views and ideas – indeed, the very range available is one of the things that arguably limits its overall influence.  And the retiring of two bloggers, even if one has been such a web fixture as Iain Dale, should merely open the space for other people to step in.  The indefatigable Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home has recently been identifying new blogs of the right, and offered a seven point defence of blogging against an FT critique of the same.  Mr. Montgomerie, too, uses the mainstream media – a regular column in the paywalled Times for example – to promote his views, but there is no doubting that the internet is his primary mode of influence peddling.  Less prominently, but for One Nation Conservatives just as essentially, liberal Tories at Platform 10 maintain a regular series of thought-provoking pieces designed to keep the Conservative debate alive and balanced.   The internet, and especially the Tory part of it, is alive and well – but yes, it does change!

The Poverty Problem That Should Bother One Nation Tories

The Coalition isn’t quite a government in the image of One Nation Toryism, but it’s certainly nearer than we’ve seen for a long time, which is why Nick Cohen’s blog post on the Spectator site should bother us all considerably.  Cohen, one of the most stimulating commentators of the left, opens with this provocative comment -

Conservative readers still don’t understand why the Coalition is hated in the poor areas of Britain.

He goes on to suggest that the Coalition cuts in public spending, unallied as they are to any private sector investment, could be a disaster for the poorer UK citizens utterly dependent on a range of public services.  As well as the obvious areas of concern for poorer communities, Cohen cites the cutbacks in police spending as a betrayal of the one area of Conservative policy which has always traditionally benefited them.

Conservatives, if not Liberals, used to be tough on crime. Obviously, people of all conditions are the victims of criminals, but crime is still a class issue. Criminals are overwhelming poor young men who rob or abuse their equally poor neighbours. Hence the first ambition of anyone from the working or under-class, who strikes lucky, is to move to a “good” – i.e. safe – neighbourhood. Tories once knew that, yet now they are in power they have decided to cut law and order harder than any other service.

He then publishes in full a Sunday Mirror piece by Susie Boniface about the impact of public spending cuts in working class areas unlikely to be visited by many Tory politicians.  Even given the necessary political bias, it is an eye-opening piece, and should be read by all One Nation Tories who still owe some loyalty to the original One Nation vision that Disareli espoused and so many others sought to practise.  Disraeli noted that Britain was divided into

 ”Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets: the rich and the poor.”

Boniface’s Worksop could have been tailor made to represent the ‘dwellers of a different zone’ whom the politically active members of the other nation will never come in tco contact with.  After her vivid discussion of the problems of the Worksop poor, Boniface comments:

But what remains is this: the banks will still owe us £850bn. And every penny we save with these cuts will have to be repaid, with interest, when the elderly have to stay in hospital because there are no care home places, when stroke victims need more care because they didn’t get help in time, when women are beaten by their husbands because there’s no charity to help them, when the homeless are on the street and shoplifting to stay alive.

Whatever the economic realities behind the Coalition’s spending cuts, it’s time for One Nation Tories to start thinking about how the plight of the poor, so necessarily dependent upon effective public services, can continue to be properly alleviated in a society all too much in danger of seeing the Two Nation gap widen.  This is not a time for government to opt out in favour of a vaguely articulated, and barely executed, Big Society; it is a time for fresh economic and political thinking that properly targets the public service state.   Making the cuts is one thing.  Keeping a civilised, progressive and united country is quite another.

Ed Miliband’s Woes

David Cameron taunted Ed Miliband a great deal yesterday at PMQs, not least with his reflection that he’s been in the job a few months now – clear implication ‘and still nothing achieved’.   To then mark him out as ‘son of Brown’ was simply brutal.   Well, that’s the nature of the knockabout politics that Cameron once wanted to see the back of, but the Daily Mail’s sketch writer Quentin Letts has a withering assessment of Mili Minor’s parliamentary performance yesterday, and today, as the PM hopes for success in bringing the World Cup to England in 2018, Ed’s spokeswoman Kate Myler has muddied the waters with some ill advised tweets.  Not a great time to be the Labour leader.

Save Our Students?

As if the protests weren’t losing the students enough support, the nauseating video below, which looks as if it’s been knocked together by the under-worked Media Studies students of Northumbria University, is hardly going to do much more to help the student cause.  It’s one thing to complain that fees are unfair, quite another to then use one of the best known anthems for helping child poverty in Africa as your new theme.  Nick Clegg and Vince Cable don’t need to worry about Labour attacks – at this rate the student movement itself will have moved public support towards them!

[Hat-tip - Guido Fawkes]

The Helping Hand of Thatcherite Peers

David Cameron must be wondering whether his Thatcherite peers, or putative peers, are really worth the bother.  Last week Lord Young caused embarrassment in the way he appeared to suggest that, at this time of austerity, we’ve never had it so good.  Now,  the soon-to-be-Lord Howard Flight has echoed that old Josephian error of condemning the breeding habits of the lower classes (the FT has a measured judgement on his remarks here).  Flight, of course, has form on inappropriate comments – it was an earlier one on the level of possible budget cuts that forced former leader Michael Howard, no shrinking violet himself, to remove him from the parliamentary candidates list.

There is no end of right-wing commentators rushing to endorse Mr. Flight’s comments (take the Telegraph’s Ed West for example).  There was no end of right-wing commentators rushing to endorse Lord Young last week.  It is possible that the views they have each indelicately expressed have intellectual merit, although this is a very arguable point in each case.  What is inexcusable is their inability to recognise how their comments can be reported and interpreted for the nation’s 24 hour news dialogue, and by definition their apparent belief that they do not need to offer David Cameron their judgement in weighing their public comments carefully and responsibly.

The furore surrounding the views of Lord Young and Mr. Flight reminds us how the Thatcherites used to almost delight in alienating majority opinion in the country.  It may well also be leading David Cameron, who has done so much to de-toxify the Tory brand, to wonder whether reaching out a conciliatory hand to the unreconstructed right is really worth the effort.

Education, Education, Education

A final post for today, if only out of guilt that on the two linked domestic issues dominating the day’s news – the student protests and Michael Gove’s White Paper – I really should have something to say!  Well, I’m conscious of how difficult the student fee issue is for prospective students, but I fear I have little sympathy with their protests.  Too many sixth formers on a jolly and too few acknowledgements that privileged university education simply isn’t economically viable in an age of cuts.  Quoting Paxman to the not very articulate kids on Newsnight – “Why should the dinner lady’s taxes pay for your unviersity education?”

As for Gove, no-one doubts he is one of the thinking engines of the present government, and his White Paper, packed with bright ideas, requires a little more in depth reading than I’ve been able to give it so far.  I like the idea of dealing with an over modular exam system; I’m in favour of placing traditional academic subjects at the heart of the curriculum, not least because it benefits the poorer classes for whom a school education is IT, unlike the middles who can benefit from books, culture, education and pushiness at home.  Some of the ideas seem a bit gimmicky – armed forces personnel are good at discipline in the non-conscripted armed forces, but may not be quite so good when confronted with grumpy, conscripted and unwilling teenagers in a classroom.  And some of the headline stuff is a little misleading – headmasters can have more power to exclude pupils, but only if they can also provide the funding for the excluded pupils’ continuing education.  That is a severely limited freedom.

But the big picture is reforming the system, and what Gove has suggested merits, and will generate, much comment and analysis over the next few days and weeks.  He could well add himself to that pantheon of Conservative Education Secretaries, which includes Butler, Baker and Clarke, who have seriously reformed the state system in a way that dictates all subsequent change.

Finally, have a look at Fraser Nelson’s list of things students didn’t protest about in the past 13 years – quite illuminating.

Palin’s World

With the two Koreas engaged in their most serious dispute since the Korean War itself, it’s good to know that the US President knows his South from his North.  Don’t rest too easy though. The Tea Party favourite for the Republican nomination in 2012, the one and only Sarah Palin, has just revealed her own unique perspective on the situation, as she announces that we must stand by “our North Korean allies”.  The full account, and a recording from the Fox radio show she was commenting for, is here [link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan's excellent Daily Dish blog].

The Tin-Eared Tory Right

Bagehot’s Economist blog is always worth checking out, along with his weekly column.  Here he explains why George Osborne needed to contribute to the Irish bail-out, and puts paid to the argument that all that’s needed is for the Irish to leave the euro.  It’s a little more complicated than that, you won’t be surprised to learn.

A European Flurry

First of all, congratulations to Martin Callanan MEP on his election as the new leader of the Conservative MEPs in the European Parliament.  He’s the most Euro-sceptic leader they’ve had, but he is a decent and shrewd individual who may just make something of the new job.  He is also one of the few Conservative representatives of any elected form to hail from the North East, which area he used to represent in the Young Conservative movement where he was a luminary of the right, but always an amenable one!

As the MEPs give their support to an avowed sceptic (Martin Callanan won over 50% of their votes on the first ballot in a three-way race), Simon Heffer’s bemoaning of the neglect of the right wing in David Cameron’s Tory party clearly couldn’t be more timely.  Using the agreement to contribute to the Irish bailout as his hook, Mr. Heffer sounds his familiar tune about the wretched liberalness of a Cameron led party.  Suggesting that the regicide committed against Margaret Thatcher in 1990 has yet to be fully avenged, he suggests David Cameron is engaged in an all out war with the Tory right:

I sense that Mr Cameron would actually rather like a fight with these people. In his desire to make a permanent coalition with the Lib Dems and marginalise the Thatcherite/Powellite Right for all time, this [Europe] could be the ideal issue for him on which to make a stand. He has displayed his visceral contempt for their way of thinking in the last few days in his callous and offensive treatment of Lord Young, who, when he stopped being useful to Mr Cameron, was removed with all the ceremony of a 17th-century quack slicing off a wart. How much longer is the disfranchised Right of the Tory party going to endure such humiliations and contempt before it remembers that it, too, has a mandate?

I’d love to know what sort of mandate he thinks the Right of the Tory Party actually has, and why he considers David Cameron, the man who endorsed his MEPs leaving the embrace of the main centre-right grouping within the European Parliament because it was too ‘federalist’, to be a Europhile desperate to demolish the sceptics.  It is worth remembering that after the failed efforts of three discernibly right-wing leaders to bring the Conservatives back into government, it took a modernising centrist to perform that task.  As for mandates, whatever else the British people want, they haven’t yet endorsed a right-wing brand of Conservatism!

Did AV Deliver a Worthless Leader?

Conservative Home is having fun at the expense of the new Labour leader.  In the job for just eight weeks, and now back after his paternity leave, Tim Montgomerie has managed to unearth quite a bit of evidence to suggest he may be floundering.  He needs to make his presence felt, opine some.  He should work out his differences with his shadow cabinet colleagues, say others.  And he certainly needs to reassure his own backbenchers that he’s up to the job.  Electoral change supporters must be hoping that no-one remembers that Ed Miliband was delivered to Labour by an Alternative Vote system that managed to bypass his brother David, who topped the poll on the first count.  Oh, dear.  Churchill’s dismissal of AV seems to be ringing all too true – that it delivers the most worthless votes for the most worthless candidate.  Let’s hope for his sake that Miliband Minor doesn’t become the poster boy for the ‘No’ campaign!

The Tory Right and Our General Election Chances

Alex Singleton on the Telegraph site wonders whether the Tory right could cost David Cameron the next election.  I did do a double take when I saw the headline, wondering whether the Telegraph really were employing a journalist who was openly suggesting that right-wing politics might prove too off-putting for the electorate, but it turns out that wasn’t quite what Singleton was arguing.  In common with a lot of the disgruntled Thatcherite faction of the party, he wonders whether the ideologically committed Thatcherite activists will go out and canvas for a Cameron government that continues to turn its back on their wishes.  Actually, although Singleton suggests a whole host of issues, he really only discusses one – Europe of course (although grammar schools get a walk on mention).  He raises the canard of disgruntled Euro-sceptic Tories jogging along to UKIP, and cites the 106 vote majority of pro-EU Tory MP Matthew Offord in Hendon as an example of where UKIP might just remove Tory seats.  Hmmm.  It’s not a wholly convincing case to be honest.  UKIP were working flat out to remove pro-EU Tories at the last election, and the chances are that if they couldn’t do it last time, there is little to suggest they will succeed next time, especially if the Coalition has a good following wind behind it.  The Tory Euro-sceptics for whom Europe is the key issue have already defected to UKIP; the remainder will stay with the Tory Party because they are interested in power and believe that they can recapture the leadership for a more Euro-sceptic candidate next time (not that Cameron’s Euro-pragmatism indicates any sort of newly discovered pro-EU position in any case).  Some UKIP defectors may even move back if the party looks like winning a second term. Priti Patel, now an MP, was a national organiser of the now defunct Euro-sceptic Referendum Party, which sought to oust Tory MPs (and succeeded, in the case of David Mellor), yet in the afterglow of their failure she like many others quickly gravitated back into the Tories, believing it provided choicer pickings. 

Singleton has sounded the alarm, in the way that Conservative Home regularly does, as a way of trying to push the government into a more right-leaning direction.  The real problem for the Tories, however, is provided in Singleton’s conclusion.  He asks “If [Cameron] carries on ignoring their [Thatcherite] brand of Conservatism, can he really expect to secure enough MPs to give him a second term?”, inducing the suggestion that only a move right will assure David Cameron of enough party support to win next time.  But the real dilemma is in turning the question around – if David Cameron does decide to reach more clearly into his membership’s Thatcherite heartland, can he really expect the swing voters who lent him their vote in 2010, in the belief that he had decontaminated the Tory brand, to do so again in 2015?

Who’s Tim Farron?

He’s the Liberal Democrat president, obviously.  And naturally, he’s not interested in the leadership. Today.  But he is a critic of Clegg from the left, and as Andy Mayer on the Liberal Vision blog points out, it could be his job to start leading the ‘loyal’, left-wing opposition within the Liberal Democrats:

Tim Farron is likely to spend the next two to four years as President planning the Leadership bid that he is crystal clear he does not want. This will involve walking a tight-rope between constructive opposition and sabotage. He will become one of Ed Miliband’s sternest critics whilst agreeing with almost everything he says. He will be effusive in his praise of Nick Clegg whilst disagreeing with almost every decision he takes. He may occasionally stick-up for the Leadership at Conference to show willing whilst privately supporting attempts to get anti-government motions passed via caucuses like the SLF. He and Nick are real friends, but they are both also ambitious politicians.

The win for the left is not in this Parliament and internal elections, it is if and when Tim gets his shot at the big job.

Never mind the old dinosaur of Simon Hughes – keep watching Farron. 

Oh, and Mayer’s cutting summing up of would-be radical Evan Harris’ agenda is worth republishing too:

Evan’s vision of a party obsessed with increasing spending, state control through councils, and endless redistribution schemes “distinctive, radical, and progressive” is far from assured.

Kim Il Gove Shouldn’t Worry About Decentralisation

Michael Gove received the barb from Andrew Marr that he was trying to be a Kim Il Gove, centralising decisions about education as much as possible.  A particular blow for Gove given that his education reforms are, at least rhetorically, about decentralising control of education.  But Mr. Gove shouldn’t defend himself too strongly from the charge of centralising some decisions.  After all, his attitude to modules (he wants rid of them), spelling and grammar (better please) and history (er – chronological history anyone?)  all probably represent genuinely popular approaches that wouldn’t necessarily be introduced by the teaching profession. I’m a teacher (of history actually – we begin in 1066 and move on from there) and I love it, but I also know that there are as many approaches to education as there are teachers in schools, and a little bit of top-down order is no bad thing.  The National Curriculum – a Thatcher/Baker triumph, let’s not be mealy mouthed about it – did more to pull secondary education up by the bootstraps than any number of valiant initiatives from individual teachers.  And few would argue with the necessity of primary school literacy and numeracy hours – imposed from above.  Teachers can be brilliant, creative and inspiring practitioners in the classroom, but it doesn’t mean they should have control over the whole curriculum.  Good schools can provide extra-curricular enrichment opportunities for teachers’ pet loves – I thoroughly enjoyed delivering a sixth form general studies course on the glories of the English language’s finest comic writer, P.G.Wodehouse, who you won’t find on any literature exam canon.  But they also need to ensure their students are moving forward along a national, commonly agreed curriculum to give their students the best chance of competing in the world outside.  Exams, too, need to be rigorous and genuinely competitive, something the modular system increasingly dissipates.

So Mr. Gove shouldn’t worry about Andrew Marr’s North Korean jibe.  He should worry about the reaction to his school sports announcement – either another case of a very poorly managed policy announcement, or else a genuinely bad decision.  We should be careful before leaping to the latter conclusion – sports is a contentious issue in education, and the School Sports partnership that is no longer being ring-fenced by Gove achieved many things, but may not be the best way of ensuring that schools develop their own competitive sports ethos.  As with any national body, there is an element of bureaucracy hidebounding its progress.  But Gove does need to be cleverer with his public relations (alas), and his defence of his ideas.  He may be as centralising as a North Korean dictator, but he hasn’t yet managed that gentleman’s level of news management.

And finally, since we’re on education, what about other ideas.  Such as Latin returning to schools, and the general re-introduction of the grammar school system (which, when suggested by Simon Heffer on ‘Any Questions’ this week received strong applause – admittedly from an audience gathered in a grammar school for the programme!).

The Coalition Should Have The Courage To Stand As One In Oldham

Phil Woolas has brought shame on himself and significant embarrassment to the new Labour leader with his forced removal from parliament.  His desire to smear his Liberal Democrat opponent in the last general election, and to use the lethal issue of immigration in such a careless way, has resulted in his barring from parliament and the need for a new by-election in Oldham East, where he beat his Liberal opponent by just 103 votes in the last election.  That is Labour’s problem. The Coalition’s problem is – or should be – how to approach the by-election itself.

With voices such as those of Francis Maude and Nick Boles already holding out the thought of maintaining the coalition beyond a single parliament, it is not too fanciful to consider standing a single candidate in the Oldham East by-election.  First of all, the Tories do not have a good chance in this seat on their own.  On current polling evidence, neither do the Liberal Democrats, despite their near miss in May.   Second, it is foolish to deny that the two parties currently pursue a single governmental agenda, and are keen to defend and protect that.  This will not be a by-election, where both parties may once again be seeking their different mandates to govern.  This is a by-election, a comment on the existing government and, indeed, the opposition party whose demeaned candidate has caused it.  All of this points to the need for the coalition to have a united front and to agree a single – almost certainly Lib Dem in this instance – candidate for this seat.  It was disappointing to hear William Hague on the Andrew Marr show throw his support behind a separate Conservative candidate, in a move that could only result in an easy win for Labour.  Oldham East represents an electoral chance for the Coalition which they should seize.  They may live in unpopular times, and even a single Coalition candidate might struggle to win this seat, despite the shame of Mr. Woolas.  This shouldn’t stop them, however, from having the courage of their current unity and standing as one before the electors of Oldham East.  Let us hope wiser counsels than Mr. Hague’s now prevail.