Total Politics: The Knives explains life in government "better than anyone in recent times"

Total Politics in its print incarnation c. February 2012

I was delighted to note this very involving, detailed, personal piece on the Total Politics site by James Frayne, in which he describes The Knives as ‘a startlingly accurate glimpse into the life of a secretary of state’. Observing that ‘everything about life in government departments pressures politicians to behave in ways that are reactive and short-termist’, Frayne proceeds to assert that The Knives ‘explains this better than anyone in recent times’ and is kind enough to credit me for particular authenticity on a specific number of counts.

I take this as well-informed opinion because James Frayne was director of communications for the Department for Education between 2011 and 2012, working for then-minister Michael Gove, having come from employment at a number of lobbying and PR firms. One of these was Portland Communications, founded by Tim Allan, close colleague of Tony Blair while Blair was Labour leader. (Recently Portland had the amusing distinction of being accused by some halfwit cultists of Jeremy Corbyn of having ‘incited’ the latest formal challenge to Corbyn’s risible pseudo-Labour-'leadership'.) Anyhow: from the DoE Frayne moved on to the Policy Exchange think tank in 2014, and now runs his own consultancy, Public First.

The story of Gove's controversial tenure at Education was drafted and rehearsed continually even at the time: there will be a definitive account in due course, I'm sure. Meanwhile, in noting from his own Whitehall experience that ‘politicians make many decisions on the basis of competing pressures’, and must endlessly face ‘flak’ that ‘comes at short notice and demands an immediate response’, Frayne certainly gives a sketch of modern politics that I recognise from my researches.

Debating the Future of Social Housing at the Durham Book Festival (Saturday October 18 2014)

Debating in Durham: from left, John Tomaney, James Meek, Lynsey Hanley, RTK

Saturday October 18 saw me back at the Durham Book Festival for the first time since 2011, the purpose being a discussion of the UK’s housing crisis – and the share of that pain facing the social housing sector – with a couple of excellent writers who have, like me, published on the subject. My contribution is a new book called Our House, Your Home: The Past, Present & Future of Social Housing, commissioned by New Writing North and the Gosforth-based Isos housing association - who basically invited me to root around their business for six months and draw my own conclusions about what they do and why they do it.

The Durham discussion was chaired by John Tomaney, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at UCL. My co-panellists were James Meek and Lynsey Hanley.

James Meek is an acclaimed novelist and contributing editor to the London Review of Books, whose new book Private Island is the outcome of a series of investigations he made, mainly for the LRB, into the steady selling-off of the UK's public resources since the Thatcher era. His chapter on housing is derived from an LRB article entitled Where Will We Live? and it recounts and laments what could be called the privatisation of council housing. Lynsey Hanley writes mainly for the Guardian and in 2007 she authored a fine book called Estates: An Intimate History, inspired by her experiences of growing up on the massive Wood estate in Birmingham and, later, making home on another problematic estate in East London.

Hanley's book also attempts – just as James Meek and I have attempted in our respective efforts – to recount a history of social housing in the UK, and in her version there is a melancholy and aggrieved feel, a sense that good intentions and high ideals behind the cause of subsidised housing were betrayed by a push for brute numbers, a subsequent plummet in quality, and a steadily etched stigma upon social housing as a ‘residualised’ tenure of last resort. In Durham Hanley spoke feelingly about how social housing has been looked down upon, how the injuries of class end up inscribed on the unkempt bricks and mortar of the stock, also in the minds of the tenants.

James Meek set out some of the arguments of his LRB piece, noting, inter alia: how the UK’s supply system of housing (a tripartite arrangement of developable land, planning permission and volume house-builders) is not set up or incentivised to meet real housing need; how central government funds for housing associations have steadily shrunk over the last forty years; and how housing associations have got much larger, though not necessarily better, since receiving large-scale stock transfers from councils - a process begun under the Thatcher government and accelerated under Tony Blair. Meek cited the recent calamity of the Cosmopolitan housing association as a warning of how a landlord's failure to meet its loan agreements could put its tenants' homes at risk; and he also raised the spectre of larger (mainly southern) associations perhaps seeing no bar to self-financing and so turning to pure for-profit development.

As for my contribution to the debate – well, it’s all there in my book, really: I reprised my own opinions and arguments. I ought to say, though, that in chatting to James Meek beforehand he told me that he felt I had misrepresented his argument, especially so in this passage from the book:

For Meek, one suspects, housing associations are the spawn of original sin. They just shouldn’t have got the position that they obtained. Having done so, one might, if sympathetic, call them the victims of their own success. But Meek seems to want them quietly put down.

It’s a fact that nowhere does Meek say he wants to see the back of housing associations; and since I don’t have the power of reading his mind, it was needlessly quarrelsome of me to imply otherwise. My error, probably, was to conflate some of his concerns and contentions with those of assorted other parties, without proper discrimination.

What I said to the Durham audience was that in my research for the book I quite quickly felt jaundiced by arguments emanating from some quarters of local government, certain journalists, and from within the Labour Party, to the effect that local councils make the best social landlords, and that housing associations are a poor second or substitute - essentially for the reason of their not being councils, tainted by association with the policies of Thatcher and Blair, and with borrowed money and bond issues.

In the last century local councils did create social housing in the UK as we know it. But post-war council housing did not solve the housing problems of Britain's poor: these were carefully allotted homes for working people in an age of full employment. Moreover, a council house was a state-furnished product that had no incentive for any sort of improvement, and unsurprisingly it didn’t get any. If you think council housing is better for being democratically accountable, somehow answerable to the people, you need to take at least an occasional dip into Private Eye’s 'Rotten Boroughs', also to remember that social rental is a minority tenure with strictly limited ballot-box clout.

You could say, in spite of the foregoing, that council housing is still a better idea than the public/private model of the housing association. One may second James Meek's argument in the LRB which builds to a defence of the principle of ‘public responsibility for meeting basic needs’ and 'the ideal of social housing supported from general taxation on the better-off, the ideal that it is not only the prosperous who matter.’ But if one adheres to that, one must then say what is to be done about  our current housing crisis, our absolute need for new homes, right now. Even Labour has promised no new funds for housing after 2015, only re-prioritising within capital budgets. And no party now seeking your vote intends once in government to borrow an extra £5 billion annually so that the state can build 500,000 houses with it.

The crux, really, is that a lot of wise heads want to see councils build houses for rent again. This time, though, unlike in 1945 or 1968, councils will need to borrow the funds to build, against their future rental incomes and assets. In other words, they will have to get up to speed with what housing associations have been doing for the last 25 years, using basically the same kinds of skills, savvy, and funding. It’s quite understandable that campaigners of today might want to see social housing reinstated in the public sector and flying free of what some consider the all-too-worldly pull of big developers and private finance. But if those campaigners honestly survey the work that needs doing then they ought to see that housing associations remain best placed to lead the effort – with, of course, local councils working in comradely partnership.

Political dilemmas: even harder than you may think

One reason this blog fell into disuse in the autumn of 2010 was that I had formerly employed it to pontificate quite a bit about politics. But it’s not been a good last few years for politics... and I’ve lost a bit of fight for the subject (for which, inter alia, I like to blame Ed Miliband.) That said, in the autumn of 2010 I also got onto Twitter, and became accustomed every morning to reading political opinions, long and short, with which I agreed, and found to be more robustly and eloquently expressed than my own. (And I didn't even have to pay for them - talk about a guilty pleasure.)

The stuff I don’t agree with, meanwhile, I find I mostly haven’t the will to tackle. I was a bit nettled last week, though, by this New Statesman piece from Rafael Behr – and not, you understand, solely on account of the gruesome photo that tops it off.

It gets underway well enough, seeming to be a piece on Labour ‘recoiling from the whole spectacle of government on a shoestring’ – a problem on which Hopi Sen has been doing some hard thinking for a while. Behr further ventures that the British public ‘do seem grimly reconciled to the idea that politics, which used to be about favours bestowed from the Exchequer, is now about pain selectively inflicted’ – a debatable point, but one that Janan Ganesh also makes quite a lot.

However this is what Behr’s piece winds round to (with my emphases):

"There is a caricature of Labour’s public-sector debate that pits the frugal, reforming idolators of Tony Blair against spendthrift, reactionary disciples of Brown. The distinction is increasingly meaningless. Orthodox Blairites are a rare and neutered breed and even they accept that Balls, for all that the Tories paint him as Brownism incarnate, is wedded to budget discipline. The real tension is both subtler and more profound. It is between the need to defend Labour’s legacy of investment in public services and the impulse to imagine different ways of effecting social change. It is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the abstract principle that government can be the citizen’s friend while also attacking the current government as a menace to society. It is the battle between Brown and Blue shades of Labour which remains unresolved, because Ed Miliband is personally steeped in both."

You could nearly imagine Miliband a brooding colossus, astride two great clashing ideas... In fact what Behr describes at the end there is not a ‘dilemma’, not by any definition. A dilemma is a choice between two more or less equally undesirable options: it’s what politics is mostly made out of. But for Labour it is a perfectly pleasant and natural thing – the usual day’s work – to offer itself as the citizen’s good angel, while pointing out that the other lot all have horns on their heads.

I suppose if you accept Ed Ball’s conversion to fiscal toughness, and also feel that his 5-point plan for growth is what the Coalition really should have been doing since 2010, then you could also take a view that Labour has progressed from its recent and rather backward stint in government (and from its nominal leader in that ‘moment’) and is now in ‘profound’ contemplation, even if only about new ways to keep on saying the things it's always liked to say. But if the unfinished Thoughts of Chairman Brown and the pamphlets of Blue Labour are really all that Ed Miliband has to mull over for inspiration then I can't see that this current version of The Party is engaged in any kind of dialectical process at all.

Sean Penn et al give it back to Bill Clinton

Hollywood, politics, and charitable work & donation: they certainly all do mix, whether or not you care for the theory and/or the practice. The Democrats, traditionally, have enjoyed the support of a classier, artier, wittier showbusiness crowd than have the GOP - in public, at least. The artistes who have come out in this video on behalf of ex-President Clinton's Foundation are comedic performers in the main, but there among them is Sean Penn, who has - to be fair - a certain amount of form in the knockabout tradition, and whose JP/HRO organisation for post-earthquake relief and reconstruction in Haiti have been generously assisted by the Foundation's purse. This is a fun 5 minutes, for sure. Those who recall Tony Blair's cameo in a 2007 Catherine Tate TV special may reflect that in the final comic pay-off Clinton exhibits a remarkably similar ease and apparent sense of timing in front of a camera, even alongside a professional and double-Oscar-winning mummer (not, in this instance, Sean...)

The Most Recent Riots of 2011

Of all the persuasive things I read in July perhaps the one that took up most solid residence among my mental furnishings was a 'tweet' by the excellent PatrickOsgood, Assistant Editor at Oil & Gas Middle East magazine: “We're screwed, right? By ‘we’ I mean flabby westerners in advanced economies...”
To wit: earlier this month I spent a week’s family holiday abroad, a proportion of which was spent watching BBCNews24, aghast, and debating the usefulness of plastic bullets in situations of violent mass public disorder... A friend with whose family we were sharing the holiday watched these bulletins alongside me with a special set of concerns – he being a producer for the BBC 10 O’Clock News, thus a keen-eyed judge of how well ‘the firm’ was doing in its coverage.
For me there was the special unease of goggling from afar at conflagration and mayhem in parts of North London (N17 and N22) where I used to live – contentedly in the main, among good people, if always feeling fairly rueful about the patches of public deprivation/squalor, and very often nervy/annoyed about the unnecessary levels of edginess on the street courtesy of young males whose chief ambition in life seemed to be making themselves look quite nasty. Still, as an impotent riot-watcher I had the consolation that my current manor (N8) was being spared too much shattering of shop windows. Instead it was Tottenham and Wood Green where the workless class of England smashed and grabbed armfuls of branded sportswear made in China and Vietnam.
I must admit, one of my most insistent feelings in watching the reportage and mulling over it was: fings ain’t what they used to be. To be precise, what I was seeing didn’t strike me as having the full-force ramifications of the Thatcher-era riots of 1981 that I remember, in Brixton, Southall, Toxteth, Moss Side et cetera. In 2011 I simply couldn’t see the point of summoning a Lord Scarman to pick over this wreckage: it just wasn’t an impressive sort of uprising. And by the time one heard the first reports of a millionaire’s daughter in court for nicking – it felt like a 'disenfranchised class'-type analysis wasn’t going to stay on its feet for long.
Arriving home again on Wednesday August 10 I found the heat had abated: the cab driver at Stansted presented me with the Sun, its front cover a mosaic of CCTV-busted rioters, the inner pages given over to a chorus of popular revulsion. Sixteen thousand additional police officers appeared to have worked the trick and laid down the law. (I understand David Cameron, unlike his Home Secretary, had been all for wheeling in the army. Good job cooler heads prevailed - I admit I was one who briefly got into a tizzy of what sort of force might be needed to dampen the rioters' ardour.)
That Wednesday night I watched the father of Haroon Jahan on the news, and burst into tears, as I suspect did others. His remarkable dignity and eloquence seemed to sum up a noticeably prevalent message: for shame. Meanwhile online I found (via Norman Geras) that Kenan Malik had said quite quickly most of what I’d been thinking. (I also endorse pretty much all of what’s written here by Will Davies at his Potlatch blog.)
In a mood of dubious nostalgia I did allow myself a glance back the other day at Alexander Cockburn’s long essay ‘The Underclass’, published by the Village Voice in January 1982, subsequently collected in Cockburn’s Corruptions of Empire (Verso), and dominated by an interview with Darcus Howe, who was then billed as ‘editor of Race Today.’ Interestingly Howe spoke witheringly of a Britain ‘saturated with the concept of welfare’, a placebo that black Britain had come to see as ‘no cure for the cancer’ – the cancer being the threat of ‘permanent unemployment.’ Cockburn ended pointedly with this interpretation of events in the Manchester vicinity by Howe: ‘Whites from Withenshawe (sic), blacks from Moss Side, no prearranged plan. They gather. There is a shout, “On to Moss Side police station.’ That gives you some indication. You must have a convergence of interests in order for that to happen...’ The question, of course, is what those interests can be defined as, and what they amount to. But in any case on the occasion of the Riots of August 2011 I’ve yet to hear or read a resolute class analysis akin to Howe’s of 1981 (or rather, yet to hear or read one that wasn’t outstandingly foolish.)
Finally, what to make of Tony Blair’s contribution to the post-mortem (‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’)? Very well made, I’d say, and firmly on the side of ‘decent law-abiding’ people who don’t want their homes and livelihoods wrecked by reprehensible gang-bangers. But this reflective passage is, for me, ‘the money’:
“I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up. I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west...”
Ah yes, the fading of the West, which is where (with Patrick Osgood) we came in.
Oh, and finally (2): Blair is quite right to express irritation at sections of the media given to “a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally.” In particular one of the most irritating things about the (generally Blair-hating) tenor of left-liberal England is where it joins hands with the most reactionary right in heeding the sermons of Peter Oborne, the churchy Sherborne Tory who is very good at sounding morally vexed by everybody living outside his parish. Oborne lacks even that one highly redeeming feature of Toryism: namely its departure from the Spartan Left in seeing Man not as some perfectable socio-political unit in a grand Utopian project but, rather, as a fallen creature of whom we must simply try to make the best that we can. Still, Socialist Worker and Daily Mail meet over drinks in their shared capacity to get disgusted by the slightest traits of their fellow men and women, and that is one party from which I’ll always run a mile.

Osborne's narrow choices, and ours

I look at David Cameron and see someone who strikes me as passable. This is mainly – and, I concede, a tad worryingly – on account of his dignified, principled bearing on occasions when he has handled matters related to HM Armed Forces: most strikingly, the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and, last week, the issue of deployment of British forces over Libya to enforce UN 1973.
The Libya question, it’s been widely noted, proposes more strongly than ever that Cameron is the ‘heir to Blair’. – a perilous mantle to hold, but you would count on Cameron not to be fazed by it. Even now one hears familiar critiques of his character – that he is a glib and shallow PR man, an aloof and pampered toff, merely Thatcher’s bastard offspring, i.e. one of the ‘same old Tories’, to use the lumbering terms of Labour’s current and hopeless leader. At times it seems to me that observers might as well resort to the analytical method of Harry and Paul’s old club buffers in this celebrated sketch.

Of course, Cameron is patently not a politician who could have been slotted (even by time machine) into one of Thatcher’s 1980s cabinets; and while he is undoubtedly several leagues more posh than me he looks (from my myopia-ridden remove) to be one who mixes well and without condescension (other than in his ripostes to the aforementioned Hopeless Labour Leader, who doesn’t even ‘speak human’ on what I’ve heard, for all that his fan club boasted otherwise those 7 long months ago.)
What does Cameron believe in? To quote from Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka, I think ‘he believes in himself.’ That, too, can be dangerous, a vulnerably Blair-esque distinction. But it certainly suggests someone who will not run into any of the nervous-wreck hazards of leadership, i.e. unlike the excruciating personal style of the now-invisible man whom Cameron replaced.
Approving Cameron to that degree, I find it easier to speak of all the things that are disagreeable about George Osborne, whom I doubt mixes well at all and, worse (as Martin Kettle argues here) seems to be trapped in some hellish mirror-image homage to the wiles of Gordon Brown. John Rentoul did no messing in describing Osborne's Budget speech of yesterday as “the most appallingly crafted, third-rate peroration of any parliamentary set piece I have had the misfortune to witness.”
You can probably trust the view of a Tory who trashes the first routinely scheduled Budget of a Conservative chancellor in 14 years: thus Fraser Nelson, today poring over the Office for Budget Responsibility's report, seeing no authentic pro-growth measures, only creeping inflation, steadily ahead of wages, until possibly mid-2013. (“Result: real wage falls, real drop in living standards and real misery.”) Nelson is avowedly a hardcore tax-cutter and deficit-slasher, believing too that the former aids the latter, and he criticises Osborne for insufficient zeal on the controversial issue of The Cuts (“In 2011-12, the estimated bill for debt interest will be £48.6 billion — a staggering £4.7 billion more than the estimate in the November forecast.”) This may be in part why John Rentoul, however scornful of Osborne's presentation, concludes that “overall, the Cameron-Osborne judgement on public finances seems more right than the Miliband-Balls one, so far as that can be defined.” Or as Martin Wolf puts it in the FT, "The UK is caught between a chancellor who insists his policies are perfect now and a shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who insists that policy was perfect under Labour" - or, at least, Labour under the glorious leadership of Balls' padrone, Brown.
This week Rentoul quoted with permission a plaintive letter he'd had from one Darren Canning, a Labour member and campaigner:
“I keep hearing how a new generation is in charge of Labour now and keep wondering if there is any place left in it for me... All we have had to say is ‘Vote for us, we’re not Tories.’ It isn’t enough to get excited about... I am pulling out of active campaigning and am seriously thinking of leaving the party altogether. At least then I will be free to defend the last 13 years without constantly being accused of being ‘disloyal’. I am writing to you asking for counsel, is there a place for those who still value the New Labour project in this new Labour party or is it time to take a break?”
On one level you have to say, tough-mindedly, that there is no point whining about where Labour's internal convulsions have taken it, because it's hardly unprecedented, and there's hardly anywhere else to go. But to sound a tad less brusque - I do approve the Canning analysis.

Bookhugger column: On Jonathan Powell's 'New Machiavelli'

My second Bookhugger column of the month is now posted here, and with that out of the way I hope to read no more studies of British government between 1997-2007, at least not before my dotage... I should say I wrote and filed said column before the resignation of Alan Johnson and the appointment of Ed Balls, so... well, you can imagine my mood.

Blair/Hitchens & 'the heart of a heartless world...'

The public debate staged in Toronto last night between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens on the issue of whether religion is 'a force for good in the world' appears to have been won quite decisively by Hitchens. The New Statesman kindly offers a transcript in 3 parts. I consider these to be The Best Bits:
BLAIR:
- "What I say to you is at least, look, what we shouldn't do is end up in a situation where we say, we've got six hospices here, one suicide bomber there - how does it all equalise out? That's not a very productive way of arguing this..."
- [On what is 'the point' of religion] "Stimulating the impulse to do good, disciplining the propensity to be selfish and bad."
- "...if you are a person of faith, it's part of your character, it defines you in many ways as a human being. It doesn't do the policy answers, I am afraid. So as I used to say to people, you don't go into church and look heavenward and say to God, 'Right, next year, the minimum wage, is it £6.50 or £7...?' Unfortunately, he doesn't tell you the answer. And even on the major decisions that are to do with war and peace that I've taken, they were decisions based on policy, and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions, but they were taken because I genuinely believed them to be right."
HITCHENS
- "Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things."
- "The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women…Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has."
- "...there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you."
And gentlemen, thank you.

Dublin's the Place...

Tony Blair and I both were in Dublin on business at the tail of last week, but I should say that our paths never crossed; nor did I have to face eggs and shoes thrown at me in public, unlike the ex-PM and memoirist. While over there I did overhear some Irish Robespierre-type interviewed on the radio news, bullishly making known his intention to protest Blair's presence on local soil, based on this pilgrim's own belief that war criminals, liars and scoundrels have no place, no prayer and no mission in Ireland.

With all due respect to (and personal fond regard for) Eire, the Irish, and the proper instinct to fight against evil, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to make so rash a claim as this chap, not in the full and harsh light of Irish history. To take only one instance: in Dublin’s Fairview Park, close to where I was lodging, I happened to pass this civic statue (pictured) of Sean Russell, the former IRA quartermaster who opened up the organisation’s contacts with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, out of what looks to be ‘physical force’ ideological idiocy (exploiting ‘England’s difficulty’ and all that) rather than any active enthusiasm for the jackboot. Still, the fight against imperialism seems often to entail that one must make a lesser-evil choice between empires. I know that self-styled Trots plus some of the broader church of Not-in-my-Namers think themselves the true-blood scourges of all known and existing nastiness, i.e. for all the Good against all the Bad, be it Right or be it Left – but it’s only their fundamental estrangement from reality and its pains that enables the taking of such high/mighty positions.
My actual business in Dublin concerned current plans for a second and revised edition of my Sean Penn: His Life and Times, first/last published in 2004-05. Since Mr Penn has been around the Liffey shooting a section of his work on Paolo Sorrentino’s new film This Must Be The Place, I was very fortunately able to grab a little time with him on- and off-set to talk over his recent endeavours and roll some tape toward the updating of the book. As for This Must Be The Place, it’s a very exciting prospect – would have been so just on paper for the teaming of Penn with the maestro writer-director of Il Divo. But the bits and pieces of filming I witnessed encouraged me to believe this will be cinema that is highly original, unclassifiable and very, very special.

Hitchens unbowed, never being boring

The other night I watched an interview posted online at the Charlie Rose talk-show website, wherein the masterful conversationalist Rose (we have no-one quite like him in this country, strangely) talks to Christopher Hitchens partly about his recent memoir but mainly about his recently diagnosed cancer of the oesophagus, for which he’s receiving chemotherapy, looking as drained by the ordeal as one would expect, but remaining as thoughtful, articulate and incisive as ever was. He's reading the letters of Saul Bellow, who once wrote that awareness of death is the dark backing a mirror needs in order that it truly reflect.
The interview is full of good meat, but I think many will find special interest, given Hitchens’ history of invective against phoney, cowardly, sinister and corrupt politicians, in his response to the question of which political figures, if any, he has admired. I daresay if Rosa Luxemburg had ever attained democratically-elected office he’d have talked about her, but in any case his pick was Tony Blair. The moment comes at 37:14 in the link above.
I remember once hearing Blair as PM, circa 2006, getting one of those famous ‘grillings’ from John Humphrys on the Today programme, and thinking to myself, ‘Christ, you need to pack this in...’ But Mr Humphrys is still in that job, and indeed several others, giving out in the amusedly irritable manner for which, clearly, he’s loved by many. It seems that Humphrys also writes a weekly-or-so column for YouGov on a big issue of the moment, and the other day it was Tony Blair’s donation to the British Legion. Weirdly Humphrys seems as keen as others in the BBC to quote in seriousness the risible views of those clapped-out old SWPers who believed that public opposition to the ousting of Saddam Hussein was the mass-radical 'anti-imperial' moment they'd waited all their lives for. The trope of these columns, which YouGov presumably asked for, is to conclude with a long list of opinion-poll style questions. These are those asked in respect of Blair:
“Do you think Mr Blair’s gesture is a genuinely selfless gift or do you think it is self-serving? Do you think the reputation he has gained since leaving office for being too interested in money is fair or not? Do you think he should feel guilty or not about the money he has made? Should he feel guilty or not about his decision to invade Iraq? Did he deceive the country or not? Do you think he has a criminal charge to answer or not? What do you make of the ‘blood money’ charge? Should the case of David Kelly’s death be reopened? And will you be buying Tony Blair’s memoirs?”
For what it’s worth, my answers are: Nothing in life is selfless, but it is a huge gift, likely given for complex motives, the merits of it obvious; He’s as interested in making money as the rest of us; As before; No feeling human escapes remorse over any part in the loss of innocent life; Blair clearly believed, like David Kelly, that some WMD capacity remained; No, can't see it; Bereaved parents of servicemen and women are, very obviously and profoundly, more than entitled to this opinion, though some hold it more impressively than others; No, still looks like suicide to me; and Yes, unless it's bought for me.

Waking up to the ConDemNation

A dear and erudite friend texted me this morning with his customary wit and wisdom: 'I haven’t felt that sick seeing those two public school ****s standing in that garden since sometime around 1989… Cromwell would be ****ing outraged.'

True, and I do like to feel a bit of loathing and fury myself, it’s good for the soul in the right measure. And yet, over the whole comical Con/Lib business I think I could keep my shirt on - were it not for this outrageous fixed-term stitch-up. 2015 before we get a chance to return a verdict on these jokers? Unless there’s a 55% no confidence vote? C’mon you Con/Lib ****s - you're having a laugh. Jack Straw called in right on this morning’s R4 Today: "completely undemocratic and totally unworkable."
"Let's say this rule was passed where you require 55 per cent of the Commons vote to have an election. What if 51 per cent of the Commons was against any confidence in the government and was refusing to pass legislation? You then get into the extraordinary position where parliament could not be dissolved...but government would be completely unworkable."

To my mind Jack Straw hit quite a vein of form in the latter years of New Labour, and he writes well in today’s Times about the present and future dilemmas:

"Our overall result was not good — the second-lowest share of our postwar vote. But expectations had been so low that there is real relief that we did better than anyone expected even three weeks ago, when polls put us in the low 20s, below the Liberal Democrats. Palpable relief, too, among so many colleagues in marginal seats who never expected to be back… Above all, relief that we have to stand on our own, sort out our future without being engulfed in the miasma of a coalition deal with the Lib Dems… [A]lliances are not, in the end, a matter of calculus but of chemistry. It doesn’t work between Labour (new or old) and the Liberal Democrats... So what of our future?... First Labour must take the lead in defining its record, and in honouring Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. If we don’t, our opponents will seek to do so in a pejorative way… Second, we must avoid the visceral divisions that followed our 1979 defeat, putting us out of power for 18 years… Third, we must look carefully at the message of the election. It was broadly good in Scotland and Wales, not bad in conurbations and towns such as mine, but in what the psephologist Peter Kellner describes as the motorway corridors in England, it was far from good. Getting back the vote of “decent hard-working families” is imperative... The good news is that all of the potential candidates get this…"

I hope so, Jack, I really do.

Clare Short & the BBC: Endless Love

I guess on the whole I've been able to live in peace with 13 years of New Labour - there have been peaks and nadirs, to be frank - but it does still irk me that Clare Short ever got to sit at a cabinet table; and this solely, like Prescott, because Blair thought he was playing nice, palliating that useless/sanctimonious side of the Party in which he privately had no interest. Well, good work there, Tone - you wound up letting Short become the public face of the pseudo-sacred principle of 'cabinet government', i.e. the utterly unpersuasive voice that won't shut up ought by definition to be heeded. Having somehow attained the status of Minister, Clare Short was not going to be ignored - and her being her, who could expect otherwise?
Stolidly populist, Short has been the most easily quoted critic of the decision to topple Saddam. But her performance when it came to giving up that ministerial office is all one needs to know about her political gifts. (As the Telegraph heard one minister say, "better to have her as an unprincipled laughing stock rather than a principled martyr.") As for the value of her purported service to the cause of the Left, George Monbiot made a rather stark case for the prosecution back in 2003, in the Guardian, no less.
And yet, and yet... our state broadcaster takes Short very seriously, for what one supposes are personal reasons. Nicholas Witchell of the BBC has been awfully keen that we know who gets applause from the discerning gallery at Chilcot, and today we understand that Short finally gave those people just what they wanted to hear and more. It was truly painful to watch even the slightest fragment of her 'It's My Turn' efforts as played on the news bulletins - that scarf gaily trailing from her neck, those awful, chatty dismissals of top people and major matters to whom and to which she should never have been in the remotest proximity. Jim Pickard in the FT and Paul Waugh in the Standard have got the tone just about right in their reporting.

The Chilcot Inquiry: if you are so drawn to it...

An increasingly nervy, impulsive, hair-trigger atmosphere surrounds the Chilcot Inquiry and reportage of same, as the media and the ticket-possessing public await Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday. The last few days have offered rich pickings on the legal aspect of the matter. I should say that it used to be one of my (innumerable) gripes against New Labour that there were far too many bloody lawyers sat round its top table. But then I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed these people were any good at being lawyers. (Cherie Blair has her claims in this department, of course, but nobody ever elected her, perhaps to her chagrin.)
What an assured legal performance we have had, though, from Jack Straw! Not just in his testimony to Chilcott but in the documents under discussion, such as his 6-page rejoinder to Lord Goldsmith. The BBC, who nurse a private and wholly personal wound over Iraq, are currently headlining that Straw is ‘defiant over ignored legal advice’ on the illegality of the war, which is, I suppose, one way of saying that Straw considered one piece of advice from the Attorney General to be more salient than another (differing) one from the FO’s man.
Similarly it seems to be headline news to some outlets that Lord Goldsmith ‘changed his mind’ on illegality, or that he had admitted such - something we were aware of, also of Goldsmith’s reasons for same, many moons and Inquiries ago; just as we know the unshakeable anti-war line that he only reviewed his options once the Yanks leaned on him. At any rate Goldsmith put it this way today: the question to his mind was ‘‘Which side of the argument do you want to be on?’ And I took the view I would prefer to be on the side of the argument that a second resolution wasn't necessary.’ That’s politics. As Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard has it, more sceptically than would I:
‘I'm sure many will seize on 'Goldsmith's Law' as proof of his wrong-headed approach to the law: make up your mind first where you want to end up and then design your verdict accordingly. Not exactly what some expect of an Attorney General. But maybe that's unfair, maybe he was simply reflecting the political realities of the consequence of his decision…’
Yesterday the principled Elizabeth Wilmshurst said her piece in cool and calm fashion, and Nick Witchell on the BBC 10 O’Clock News made sure we were told that members of the public in the hearing room applauded the end of her testimony. Not to defame these spectators en masse but I suspect a fair few of them are the sort who have made BBC1’s Question Time such a drizzle of loud nonsense whenever Iraq is discussed.
Ms Wilmshurst also got in her shot at Mr Straw and his ‘ignoring’ of the Foreign Office legal view: ‘He’s not an international lawyer.’ So, by implication, he lacks that rigour, that basis on such an universally esteemed and binding body of case law? Sure, Ms Wilmhurst and Sir Michael Wood may have been more fastidiously following the letter of law in making sure their opinions genuflected toward the legally clear primacy of that peculiar body called the UN Security Council - for all that this was to defer to the polluted world of politics. If only the membership of said Council were as pure and rigorous in their legal assessment of a case as Wilmhurst and Wood! But then maybe the proud French former imperium, the wounded and bristling Russian imperium, and the quietly confident Chinese imperium were all entirely principled and law-abiding in their considered opinion that the tyrant Saddam Hussein would not be overthrown by any imperial warmongering US/UK-led coalition, at least not on their watch. Or as Kafka's thuggish doorkeeper tells the Man from the Country who seeks admission to The Law: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful...'
The illustration above comes from the online petition site Ban Blair Baiting.

The invasion of Iraq, and the plain truth

Tony Blair's remark to CNN - concerning the current Chilcot inquiry and the rightness or wrongness of the Coalition invasion of Iraq - that he is 'happy to go through it all again', is likely to divide Blair's admirers and detractors as cleanly as a meat cleaver.
That division was never better exemplified in my eyes than by disparate columns last week from Sir Simon Jenkins in, I think, the Guardian, and John Rentoul in the Independent. Jenkins' sub-editor rather than Jenkins himself was presumably responsible for the headline 'We want Blair's head. But Chilcot won't give it to us.' (The Guardian is very good at speaking as 'We.') But Jenkins himself must be solely responsible for the following:
"We know the truth. The report can be written in a sentence. Tony Blair went to war in Iraq because he lacked the guts to stand up to George Bush, say the invasion was not justified by facts or law, and refuse to join him in Baghdad. Despite being told to his face by Hans Blix that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he deceived the cabinet and parliament and took his nation to war."
Now, quickly, compare with Rentoul on the same day:
"Everything important is known, with the kind of disclosure of official documents in the Hutton inquiry that would normally have taken 30 years or longer... in 2001 the British Government concluded that regime change in Iraq lacked a legal basis... the British view was always that regime change was inadequate legal basis for military intervention; that was why the legal basis was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with UN disarmament resolutions."
In the gulf between these positions you will never see a meeting, and so like many I don't see the point of the Chilcot inquiry, which looks indeed to be rehashing old ground that was long ago sown with dragon's teeth and harvested bitterly.

"We've got to get rid of Brown..."

Not my words, those, but my old student newspaper editor Peter Hyman's on tonight's Newsnight - a show that has an increasingly ragged, tendentious, feckless air to it in these bunker days that we're living through. Hyman surely reflects a Blairite consensus that would include, inter alia, the likes of his fellow former PM-speechwriter Phil Collins, John Rentoul with his AJ4PM campaign, and the retiring Stephen Byers MP of North Tyneside. But the midnight hour is nigh - can anyone be found among the Parliamentary Labour Party with sufficient backbone for the bloody work being proposed?
How bad could it be for Labour if the Party is electorally annihilated on Brown's watch? If he leads then he will lose, for sure - but how ruinously? One shudders a little at the thought of the floating voter weighing his feelings on another 5 years of Gordon's doughty individual conscience. And could Brown stick around after defeat and play a Michael Howard-like role in helping the team find a new young winning captain? Doesn't seem remotely likely, does it? No, the odds suggest he'd be off in high dudgeon as of May 31, still believing he was right, while Cameron got the removers round. By that measure, yes, Brown should take the bullet now, for all of our sakes.
Like John Rentoul I admired Blair more by the end of his premiership than at the start, when I found it hard to look at him, never mind listen. In that 'final act' swansong period of Blair's he made the stunning observation that, in respect of the century-old split in Labour's origins between proletarian ILP and namby-pamby Fabian, he felt himself to be naturally amidst the party of the former. That he could say this, whether or not he believed it, was part of my creeping regard for him.
His admirers are generally a less breathtaking lot. Last week as I watched Sally Keeble MP on Newsnight effectively warning Brown not to (further) estrange the middle-class Mumsnet crowd over the axing of subsidised childcare for kids of 2-years-plus, I felt ancient, decrepit hackles rising. Be it said, mine is one of those households very, very glad of said subsidy. But is it really, in Sally Keeble's eyes, the moral last ditch of a Labour government? Is it even worthy of consideration as an 'untouchable' in this, the moment of enforced cutbacks in government spending? At any rate, it's got the New Labour ultras rolling their eyes in O tempora fashion. I don't know if I want to sit beside those guys 'n' gals anyhow, and I'm not sure how many of them are really concerned about whether (as some surely hope) the green leather benches can be remuneratively traded for the boardroom. But since it's not my livelihood at stake here, I freely declare from my swivel chair, 'Yep, you've got to get rid of Brown.'