Jeff Randall and meaningless percentages

Jeff Randall has a piece in the Telegraph today entitled "Hypocrites, lightweights and clones – can't Labour do better?" where he rips into the Labour leadership contenders. I am not going to comment on the entire piece and indeed he does make some interesting points. However the details in the fifth paragraph are not among them:

At the last election, David Miliband's share of his constituency vote fell by 8.8 per cent, Andy Burnham's was down by 6.5 per cent, and Ed Miliband's by 3.8 per cent. Even in seats where Labour could put up mannequins with red rosettes and still win, these would-be champions managed to go backwards. Ed Balls, whose constituency had its boundaries redrawn, suffered a fall of 8.4 per cent and just scraped in. Only Diane Abbott, defending Hackney North, was able to increase her share of the vote (by 6 per cent).

So the strong implication being that those contenders whose percentage share of the vote dropped in their own seats are not worthy of the leadership of their party.

Perhaps Jeff should have checked his historical facts though. In 1970 when the Conservatives won the general election, in the Finchley constituency Margaret Thatcher managed to get 53.8% of the vote. But by the first election in 1974 when the Conservatives lost power, her share of the vote had dropped to 43.7%. So by Randall's own yardstick, the most electorally successful Conservative Prime Minister of the 20th century lost over 10% of the vote in her seat just a year before she became leader (in the election where her party lost power) and then went on to win the general election in 1979. That's a bigger drop than any of the current Labour leadership contenders.

In other words, use of these percentages is utterly meaningless as a predictor of how successful a putative leader will be.

PS: Thanks to Greg Stone and David Boothroyd for helping me find the Finchley data.

Jeff Randall gets it Spot On

Jeff Randall's piece today in the Telegraph seems to me to sum up one of the main problems today with political discourse in the UK today. It is an excellent article about why people in public life rarely tell the whole truth about things or even attempt to answer questions put to them. It also covers some occasions when politicians have tried to step outside the narrow bounds they set for themselves and end up commiting a "gaffe".

This state of affairs has concerned me for quite a while now. Peter Oborne's latest book The Triumph of the Political Class covers this subject matter and related topics in great detail and is a very good read for political junkies like me!

I have lost count of the number of times I have been willing politicians when they are being interviewed to answer the question, engage with the issue, resist the opportunity to distort or make cheap partisan points and been left disappointed. It is just part and parcel of the usual discourse unfortunately.

A good example of this is what happened with Andrew Lansley a couple of weeks ago (Randall makes reference to this in his piece). He made some comments which were in response to claims that the recession could be bad for people's mental health. His comments were pertaining to the potential upside of a recession and that there is evidence that because people tighten their belts they tend to eat more healthily and drink and smoke less. That is exactly the sort of interesting and sensible observation that ordinary people would be interested. I certainly was and I thought it enhanced the debate about the current situation. However there was an outcry stirred up mainly by Labour politicians and others in the media about how heartless this was and how "TEH TORIES THINK TEH RECESSION IS GOOD FOR US!!!11". Complete lack of any attempt to engage with the substance of what Lansley was saying and just an opportunity for cheap political point scoring. Pathetic. Tom Watson MP's comment on his blog is typical of the sort of reaction I am referring to.

Once it became clear that the media narrative considered it a "gaffe" Lansley was forced by David Cameron to apologise for his remarks. Probably the next time Lansley has an original and interesting insight into some issue of the day he will keep it to himself. And the homogenisation continues as the standard of political debate in this country step by step gets a little bit poorer.

*Edited to correct a couple of mistakes.