We are now seeing how the Tories prize loyalty above all else

Yesterday's manoeuvrings within the Tory party are some of the most bizarre I have ever witnessed in all my time following politics.

For Michael Gove who had been seen as one of Boris Johnson's key allies and a likely future Chancellor under a Johnson premiership to suddenly abandon his colleague, denounce him and announce he would be standing himself was extraordinary to watch. Then Boris, showman to the end made a speech peppered with references to Julius Caesar's Brutus and where in its denouement he withdrew from the leadership race using the carefully calculated phrase we have seen repeated on all media outlets: "..in view of the circumstances in parliament that person cannot be me.".*

It is becoming clear that Gove is now himself a busted flush having first brought down David Cameron's premiership (along with Johnson) and then latterly turned on Johnson and brought down his leadership ambitions too. There are lots of Tory MPs shocked by this behaviour and although politics is a dirty business I think there are now simply too many who will not want to be seen to reward this sort of behaviour. It's possible now that Gove doesn't even make it to the final ballot of members. He may even, if reports today are accurate withdraw from the race and throw his weight behind Theresa May who is now the clear front-runner and very likely to be the next Prime Minister.

Nothing is certain but May is 4/11 with Betfair with Gove at 19/2. For the rest of this post I am going to assume that Theresa May will now win.

Because in reality that fits the pattern of almost all the Tory leadership campaigns that I have witnessed as an adult. Right through from the one that followed the fall of Margaret Thatcher.

In 1990 Geoffrey Howe dropped his bombshell as he resigned from Thatcher's cabinet and Michael Heseltine responded to his clarion call that "The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties, with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long." by challenging Thatcher for the leadership directly. As we all know his bid failed and instead the hitherto ultra-loyal John Major who had rapidly risen through the ranks to have recently become Chancellor of the Exchequer won the crown**. Heseltine was widely seen as having been punished for his disloyalty. This is despite the fact that the majority of Tory MPs knew that Thatcher was finished anyway, they did not want to reward Heseltine for having been the one to actually bring her down.

In 1997 after the Tories lost the general election the subsequent winner was William Hague. He had been very loyal to John Major all throughout his travails in the 1990s and was appointed to the cabinet after John Redwood had quit in 1995 order to challenge Major. He was seen as a trustworthy pair of hands to guide the Conservative Party through a difficult time. Redwood was eliminated in the second ballot, another victim of the Tory Party's dislike of disloyalty.

In 2001 the story was a little bit different and deviated from the norm in that the winner in the end was Iain Duncan Smith who himself had been a serial rebel in the 1990s against John Major's government. Duncan Smith was actually the beneficiary of the fact that he ended up in the final ballot against Ken Clarke who as a Europhile was wildly out of touch with the Tory membership who by now had the final say when the MPs had whittled the field down to two. This aberration however was short lived as the party rapidly realised they had made a mistake selecting Duncan Smith not least because it was very difficult for him to credibly demand loyalty from his parliamentary party after all the times he had failed to do the same thing himself under Major. So in 2003 without even a leadership election the Tories got rid of Duncan Smith through some back-room shenanigans and replaced him with Michael Howard the former Home Secretary who himself had been (publicly) loyal to Major in government thus ending the experiment of allowing a former rebel to lead them.

2005 saw another loyalist David Cameron push through the field to emerge victorious. Cameron in fact is the epitome of a loyal party member having devoted much of his life to working in the engine room of the Tory Party before he became an MP first in Central Office and then as a special adviser to Norman Lamont and Michael Howard. Indeed he and George Osborne used to help out prepping John Major for PMQs during the 1990s.

And so to the current leadership contest 11 years on. Given the history of how the Tory party selects its leaders and the disaster that befell it the one time it deviated from this norm and selected someone who was widely seen as disloyal it is looking like once again that rather than the showboating politicians and/or the ones who have been willing to publicly betray the party leadership it will be the quiet, unassuming but publicly loyal Theresa May who will win the ultimate prize.

There is almost certainly a lesson in here for future aspirant Tory leaders. Keep your head down, get on with the job and no matter what you might really think, always, always swear absolute loyalty to your leader.

It's the Tory way.


*As an aside this debacle shows how wrong I was when I wrote the other day that it was most likely to be Boris Johnson who won the leadership. I should have adhered more closely to what history tells us myself! I'll be more careful in future for sure.

**It's worth noting that Major was able to "have his cake and eat it" when it came to Thatcher's nomination for the first round of the leadership ballot. Thatcher's team had wanted Major's signature on her nomination papers as he was Chancellor and that would add weight to her bid. But Major did not sign her papers as at the time he was under anaesthetic having dental surgery. Hence he was able to both profess loyalty and simultaneously not dirty his hands by directly backing her. This contributed to his success in the second round and will perhaps go down as the luckiest dental problem in political history.

House of Comments - Episode 92 - Down in the Flood

Episode 92 of the House of Comments podcast "Down in the Flood" is out. Emma myself and our new third co-host Nick Denys discuss the newly released revelations about the miners' strike, the debate around Romanian and Bulgarian immigration, the recent floods and the politics of the Environment Agency and flood defences funding, the latest Lord Ashcroft "Mega Poll" and they make their political predictions for the coming year.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 92 - Down in the Flood’ on Audioboo

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us. We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

"We need a fresh start and my party is the only way. Despite the evidence."

So essentially says Jon Trickett in the Guardian today. His thesis is that we are close to another major political turning point in 2015 rather like the one that started with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. He also thinks that Labour (the party he has been a member of for 30+ years) is the only one that can bring about this change.

Here are a couple of snippets:

...when a country arrives at a turning point, as we clearly had, the direction that it takes is not pre-determined. 

Thatcher had understood all of this too. As we now know, it was she who ended the interregnum into which the country had fallen. 

She broke with the Attlee consensus and created a new settlement that has endured (albeit modified by New Labour) ever since. Thus it was possible for Tony Blair to say – in his comments immediately in the aftermath of Thatcher's death – that: "I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them."

And then further down:

Both the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are hopelessly compromised by their period in office. The Tory modernisation project has been jettisoned partly due to the threat from Ukip, and the Lib Dems have irrevocably embraced divisive neoliberal economic and social reform (such as the NHS reforms). 

Therefore, if there is going to be a government that will usher in a fresh start for Britain it will be the Labour party.

I don't necessarily disagree with Jon's broad thesis. I think something does need to change quite radically in our body politic. I wouldn't be at at all surprised if in decades to come the next few years is seen as another historical pivot point.

But it takes a certain kind of willful blindness to look at the evidence of how all three main parties have bought into the post 1979 Thatcherite consensus including essentially Labour (with a bit of tinkering around the edges) for 13 of those years with massive majorities when they could have forced a change in direction and decide the only party that can effect change is Labour.

If they couldn't do it between 1997 and 2010 why is he so certain they can now?

If we are to see a new political consensus it is likely to require the backing of people across the political spectrum and also from outside. This sort of blinkered tribal thinking will not help us get there.

House of Comments - Episode 54 - We need to talk about Margaret

Episode 54 of the House of Comments podcast "We need to talk about Margaret" was recorded yesterday and is out today. This week I was joined by libertarian blogger Mark Wallace of Crash Bang Wallace to discuss the impact and legacy of Margaret Thatcher in the wake of her death last week. We cover a fair bit of ground including her rise to power, her early days, the miners' strike, the Falklands war, the Poll Tax, the culture of selfishness some say she fostered and finally her fall from power, her legacy and the shadow she casts across contemporary politics. We also tackle the question of just what balance she struck between pragmatism and ideology.

There were a couple of sound problems during the recording so please forgive the odd blip!

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here (note - this is a new feed so if you used to subscribe to the old feed a couple of years ago you'll need to do so again).

Other podcasting software e.g. for Android can be pointed here to subscribe.

You can download the mp3 for the latest episode directly from here.

Or you can listen to the embedded episode below here:

listen to ‘Episode 54 - We need to talk about Margaret’ on Audioboo

If you are a political blogger and wish to be considered as a future guest please drop me an e-mail at markreckons@live.co.uk.

Any feedback welcomed in the comments below.


PS: A big thanks to Audioboo for hosting the podcast for us and especially to Audioboo's James O'Malley who has helped us out getting relaunched. James is also editor of The Pod Delusion podcast which is about "interesting things" and is well worth a listen too! We would also like to thank Kevin MacLeod from Incompetech.com for our theme music.

There should not be a minute's silence for Thatcher at football matches

There are reports that at football matches at the weekend there is to be a minutes silence to remember Margaret Thatcher.

This strikes me as a strange and somewhat foolhardy move. Strange because I do not recall any such thing being done for Wilson or Callaghan or Heath or Macmillan (all former PMs who have died within my living memory). Foolhardy because Thatcher was such a polarising figure that although there will doubtless be a fair few in each crowd who liked her and are happy to pay their respects there will also be a significant number who do not wish to. Some of those may just not attend the match. But it is likely that a good number will attend and it will only take a few of them to make noise during the silence for it to be ruined.

If that does happen then of course the headlines will be all about how "DISRESPECTFUL FANS DISRUPT THATCHER SILENCE" even though it will probably only be a small number of people.

It's all so unnecessary. Just don't have a silence for such a controversial figure in a place where there are tens of thousands of people.

Three good things that Margaret Thatcher did

With the news yesterday of the death of Margaret Thatcher there has been much comment in the media and on social media regarding her life, her time in office and her legacy. Some of it measured, much of it polarised in one camp or another.

My view of her legacy is mixed. I grew up in a family and extended family who hated her, her politics and what she stood for. So that was my background. But as I have learned more over the years and read various biographies of the time (not least her own) I have come to a more nuanced view. I still think she did a fair bit of harm but there was some good too.

In the weeks, months and years to come there will be plenty of time to look critically at her legacy but in the febrile atmosphere of the next few days following her death and in advance of the funeral I would rather stay away from that.

Instead, here are three things that I think are positive results of her time in office:

1. Privatisation of the telecoms industry. At the time there was a feeling on the left that privatising state owned services like British Telecom was "selling off the family silver". But the fact that it could take weeks or months to get a phone line installed when it was owned and run by the General Post Office and the woeful lack of any sort of competition meant that the industry was stagnating. Allowing the market in took what appeared to be a natural monopoly and opened it up to market forces which allowed innovation and competition to hugely improve the available services. It's not perfect of course but I am certain it is much much better than what would have happened had it have been state owned. It is very telling that no serious politician these days would ever dream of suggesting that this industry be taken back into state ownership. Unlike some of the other privatisations the success of this one is accepted across the political spectrum. On a personal level this policy directly affected me. For the first 6 years of my career after graduating I worked for telecoms companies writing and testing software for exchanges and later mobile systems. I suspect my career would have taken a very different path had there not been such an open telecoms market in 1995.
2. Some of the reforms of Trade Unions. The fact that votes to go out on strike could be executed via a show of hands rather than a secret ballot was an absurd legacy of a bygone era and left the system open to potential intimidation. Also the fact that members who did not back  the majority decision could be disciplined was bizarre and needed to be reformed. The closed shop system was also an unfair imposition on individual rights and was rightly abolished. It is again telling that the Labour party in government did not do much to roll back any of the Thatcher union reforms. They tacitly accepted that many of them were long overdue. It is another legacy of the Thatcher years that has stuck and changed the political centre of gravity probably permanently.
3. She broke the glass ceiling. It's easy to forget that she was the first and so far only female Prime Minister. The joke that she was more masculine than many of her contemporaries and predecessors/successors obscures that fact. She showed that with skill and determination women can achieve the highest elected office in the land. She inspired successive generations of women across all political parties. For this alone she would have remained an important historical figure even without all the other reasons.

I am sure I will return to this subject repeatedly in the future but for now RIP Margaret Thatcher.

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.

Margaret Thatcher would have gone for this coalition

Various members of the Tory old guard such as Norman Tebbit have been railing against the coalition recently.

They can rail all they like but the glory days of the 1980s that they hark back to were very different from the 2010 situation that Cameron faced.

Margaret Thatcher had decent working majorities in all three of her general election victories. Even then though she demonstrated the sort of pragmatism needed to win and retain power. The 1979 manifesto was not exactly explicit about what she would do when she became Prime Minister and some of the radical steps she intended to take. She didn't want to frighten the horses before she had proven that she could be trusted with No 10. She also accommodated many of the Tory "wets" in her cabinet for a long time because she knew she needed to carry that wing of the party with her. As with all large political parties, it was a coalition in all but name.

I am certain that had Margaret Thatcher been faced with the election result that David Cameron had 2 weeks ago she would have pretty much done the same. She was all about getting and retaining power and the best way to have done that after the recent election was to make a serious offer to the Lib Dems. People like Norman Tebbit would not have liked it but if it was the difference between government or opposition he would have swallowed it.

Trying to compare the 2010 situation with the 1980s is like trying to compare apples with oranges.

Diane Abbott should not be dismissed so lightly

There has been much mirth on Twitter and elsewhere this morning at the news that Diane Abbott has decided to put herself forward as a candidate in the Labour leadership contest. It is clear that some see her as a joke candidate who has no hope of winning.

Perhaps we should first look to history though. Long serving female MP not given a chance by many in the commentariat throws her hat into the ring for a leadership bid. Sound familiar?

Margaret Thatcher was equally widely seen as not a credible candidate when she ran against Ted Heath for the Tory party leadership in 1975. Before a load of Tories jump down my throat for daring to compare the two, I know circumstances and personalities are very different but there are some striking similarities.

We can also look to much more recent history. In 2007, Harriet Harman was also seen as an unlikely winner in the Labour deputy leadership election. Indeed candidates like Alan Johnson, Peter Hain and Jon Cruddas were perceived as more likely to succeed. In the end, Harman won. It did go down to the last round of voting but that demonstrates how unpredictable Labour leadership contests can be - the leadership contest uses the same Alternative Vote method. If Abbott is the only really left wing candidate standing she could do much better than people are suggesting right now.

I would not put money on her winning. She is still clearly a long shot. However even just by being in the contest she will raise her profile and also ensure that some of the more left-wing issues that she cares about will be given a good airing. This is exactly what the Labour Party needs, to ensure that the debate at the highest level is as wide-ranging as possible.

Abbott's candidature really should not be so easily dismissed. It could make a big difference to how this contest plays out.

Should Early Day Motions be scrapped?

There is a campaign that started recently called "Scrap Early Day Motions" (website/blog here). They are campaigning to get rid of the House of Commons device for registering MPs feelings about issues altogether. They say:

They serve no purpose bar perhaps generating a little local publicity – but if you can’t generate publicity without some costly parliamentary motion you really aren’t doing your job are you!

So come on… who will get behind the call to get rid of Early Day Motions. At the time of writing there are 1757 EDMs (not counting amendments). If they due really cost circa £300 a go, that equates to a cost of £527,100.

Democracy will not be worse without these motions.

Lobbyists will have to try and influence properly and not try to persuade their clients that as an EDM has been tabled they are doing their jobs!

MPs can get local publicity without these costly meaningless motions!

I am a little ambivalent about this. Whilst I can see that it could be argued that they are a waste of money, at the same time I know it is a good way for campaigns to get a foothold. I know that some electoral reform campaigns have used the "Lobby your MP to sign EDM ..." to help gauge parliamentary support and give them more traction. I also notice from Wikipedia that the censure motion which led to the ejection of the James Callaghan Labour government had its origins in an Early Day Motion (no. 351 of 1978–79), put down on March 22, 1979, by Margaret Thatcher so they can obviously have a substantial effect on occasion.

Here is a link to parliament's EDM website where you can view current and historical motions.

I would be interested to hear what others think about this campaign.