The Joy of Six 1477

Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

Pointless offers a warning to Change UK

Embed from Getty Images

Change UK - or the Tiggers, as I still think of them - announced their Euro candidates today.

There are some names I recognise, notably the former Conservative cabinet minister Stephen Dorrell.

I note, however, that he is standing in the West Midlands rather than the East Midlands, where he was an MP for 36 years.

With Dorrell and a few other people we politicos have heard of - Rachel Johnson, Gavin Esler - the Tiggers must be feeling pleased with themselves.

But they should not feel too pleased.

Last year I pointed out how little most people know about politics:

Pointless is almost a mirror image of Family Fortunes, which rewarded contestants for being average not for being clever. 

Yet there are two subjects where Pointless contestants generally know little and find the thought they might know something to be so unreasonable as to be amusing. 

One is British politics and the other is geography.

After I had posted that, "the admirable Alwyn Turner" sent me the link to a post he had written in 2013.

It was about a round in Pointless that year where 100 people had been asked to name as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010:

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. 

Then came: Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100 

Ed Balls -13 out of 100 

David Miliband - 12 out of 100 

Jack Straw - 7 out of 100 

Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100 

Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100 

David Blunkett - 4 out of 100 

Clare Short - 2 out of 100 

Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100 

Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

So, as I say, the Tiggers should not feel to pleased with themselves tonight.

Incidentally, this second post was quoted without attribution on the Today programme by a Leading Political Commentator, who unfollowed me on Twitter when I pointed this out.

But I'm not bitter.

Chapter and verse from Pointless on how little interest most people take in politics

Embed from Getty Images

A couple of days ago I wrote that the television quiz Pointless reminds us how little most people know about politics.

After I had done so, the admirable Alwyn Turner sent me the link to a post he wrote back in 2013 making the same point:

An edition of the TV game show Pointless this week had a round based on 100 people naming as many politicians as they could remember who had served in the Labour cabinets of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. That is, any cabinet member between 1997 and 2010 ...

It's not a scientifically selected sample, but even so the results suggest just how completely uninterested in politics the public are.

Top of the list was John Prescott, named by just 15 out of the 100 people. Then came:

Ed Miliband - 13 out of 100
Ed Balls - 13 out of 100
David Miliband - 12 out of 100
Jack Straw - 7 out of 100
Alistair Darling - 7 out of 100
Peter Mandelson - 4 out of 100
David Blunkett - 4 out of 100
Clare Short - 2 out of 100
Mo Mowlam - 1 out of 100
Margaret Beckett - 1 out of 100 

We never found out whether my nominee, Ivor Richard, made it into the pointless category, because there were simply too many names to go through. But amongst those who rated not a single mention were: Andrew Adonis, Andy Burnham, Jack Cunningham, Charlie Falconer, Patricia Hewitt, Derry Irvine, Donald Dewar, Frank Dobson, Geoff Hoon, Margaret Jay, Alan Milburn and James Purnell.

Alwyn rounded off his post by quoting from Pamela Hansford Johnson's 1962 novel An Error of Judgement:

"Could it really be that I am the only person in the world bored stiff, bored pallid, by politics?" a character asks, and is immediately put straight by another: "'No, we all are, those of us who aren't politicians. That's why we're the prey of the silly men, the posturing men. They don't get bored, not ever. We are the victims of their professional excitement."

Being Jacob Rees-Mogg is a full-time occupation

Embed from Getty Images

The thing about really posh people is that they make it look effortless. Think of Prince William or David Cameron.

True, Cameron's inner Flashman could soon appear if he was thwarted, but Prince William probably does not even think of himself in this way. It just comes naturally to him.

At the other end of the spectrum are those for whom being posh is hard work. They make everything a little bit too obvious.

Take Boris Johnson. He was plucked from the same North London primary school the Miliband brothers attended and sent to prep school and then Eton. 

You feel that he has been trying a little too hard to fit in ever since.

It was good to have an allusion to Shakespeare when he announced he would not be a candidate for the leadership. The pause and self-satisfied smile while he waited for everyone to notice were less admirable.

The point of this post is to suggest that Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Johnson and not a Cameron.

From taking his nanny canvassing to turning up at a conference fringe meeting with a framed photograph of Margaret Thatcher, he has made it obvious that he is desperate for his aristocratic eccentricity to be noticed.

In fact, being Jacob Rees-Mogg is a full-time occupation.

All this reminds me of a story from the days when Princess Michael of Kent - "Princess Pushy" - was a fixture in the columns of the tabloids.

The Queen, so the story goes, was reading a list of all the Princess's titles.

"Oh dear," she said, "she sounds much too grand for us."

Rees-Mogg is Princess Pushy and not the Queen, you might say.

Cleverball, surfball and New Labour grandees

View image | gettyimages.com

London 1958: Boys play cleverball in the street

Last night David Miliband mystified the nation. Interviewed on Newsnight about the refugee crisis he said:

I don't think this is about hardball or softball, it is about cleverball.

Yet Miliband 1 is not the first New Labour grandee to invent a new sport.

In December 1997 Peter Mandelson told a puzzled House of Commons:

The contents of the millennium experience, the dome, will attract people of all ages, although I suspect that playing surfball, the 21st century sport, will have an especial appeal to young people.

If you visited the Millennium Dome and don't recall being offered the chance to play surfball, that is because it never existed.

The following June he had to tell the House:

The serious play zone, to which the hon. Gentleman refers, will include explanations of the world of sport and games in the 21st century. It will cover the sort of 21st century game for which the term "surfball" was an illustrative title.

But maybe cleverball does exist. Not only is there the photograph above, but it may still be known in North London back gardens.

Could it be that the Miliband brothers played it when young and that David always won? Could it be that this provoked such resentment in Ed that he later stood against him for the Labour leadership.

If so, the game of cleverball may haunt Labour for years to come.

Thanks to @AmIRightSir for reminding me of the name of Mandy's sport. Follow him at once.

Lord Bonkers advised Labour against having Gordon Brown as leader

If I am unable to sleep, I turn to the diaries of Lord Bonkers - they usually do the job quite quickly.

Every now and then, however, I come across something that brings me up short. Like this from 2006.

Saturday 

It is hard not to sympathise with the New Party’s MPs: Blair has clearly gone barking mad – his public protestations of love for a chimpanzee, all those foreign wars, his plans to send children to the Jack Straw Memorial Reform School, Dungeness, before they are born – but their constitution makes it impossible to get rid of him. 

We Liberal Democrats recently had leadership problems of our own, but Kennedy’s fondness for drink never put the country in peril. Yes, he might fall asleep in meetings, sing raucous Highland ballads or try to kiss Alan Beith, but life was still more restful than under his predecessor, Paddy Ashplant, and – dash it all – I am rather fond of old Beith myself. 

A word of advice to the New Party: if you do succeed in tipping Blair out of the window, don’t replace him with that dour Brown fellow. Try someone younger and fresher like Tony Benn’s charming daughter Hilary or one of the Millipede brothers.

Six of the Best 360

Mark Pack writes on rediscovering and modernising community politics.

Labour was lazy in the South Shields by-election, but Strange Thoughts says it was the electoral system that was to blame: "Where was the incentive for Miliband to spend time and energy building a top notch campaign machine when he knew that his re-election was guaranteed? His energies would be much better spent elsewhere."

"The stand-off in Ankara about the future of a public park that is about to be handed over to developers has been treated by the media for what it says about the Turkish government and its relations with ordinary people. What the story really demonstrates is the vital importance of green spaces in people's lives." The Real Blog reminds us that all regimes try to develop poor people's parks.

"Not content with having his own private uniformed police force patrolling the streets of Newham, Sir Robin Wales has now set up his own Internet monitoring group." Read more on Forestgate.net.

Edwardian Promenade looks at the resurgence of interest in spiritualism during and immediately after the First World War.

Greene King has been accused of "cultural vandalism" over its rebranding of pub signs, reports Gizmodo.

Six of the Best 338

So Sam Said... says: "The Miliband Problem, for me, is the fact that our politics has been professionalised and has become a game. Are David and Ed really agitators for their own constituents, or are they just pawns in a wider party political powerplay? The fact that David could resign half way through his time as MP to go and work abroad suggests a real disconnect."

Awale Olad from the Migrants' Rights Network asks if Liberal Democrat members are losing their grip on defining the party's policy.

"My God. I have never seen anything like it." Wartime Housewife attended the Bottle Kicking and Hare Scrambling at Hallaton on Easter Monday - my photo is borrowed from her post.

The Silly Mid Off wishes Dermot Reeve a happy birthday: "There remains a great study to be written of that Warwickshire team. Paul Smith, Keith Piper and Reeve all admitted to taking recreational drugs while at the club, while Reeve and Lara refused to shake hands a decade after the West Indian’s annus mirabilis. It was not just his own side that Reeve riled; Curtly Ambrose once bowled two beamers at him in retaliation for a perceived slight."

"At the recent public meeting to discuss the Geffrye Museum‘s development plans financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Museum Director David Dewing told the audience that he had 'no interest in the culture of the Labouring Classes,' justifying the demolition of The Marquis of Lansdowne, which stood upon the corner of Geffrye St since 1839, as a building of “no historic significance." Spitalfields Life proves him wrong.

Crying All the Way to the Chip Shop goes through his Dad's records and lights upon "Arc of a Diver" by Steve Winwood.

The International Rescue Committee - David Miliband's new employer

This synopsis of Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee, and the CIA by Eric Thomas Chester casts an interesting light on David Miliband's new employer:

This book tells the story of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest nonsectarian refugee relief agency in the world. Founded in the 1930s by socialist militants, the IRC attracted the support of renowned progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. 

But by the 1950s it had been absorbed into the American foreign policy establishment. Throughout the Cold War, the IRC was deeply involved in the volatile confrontations between the two superpowers and participated in an array of sensitive clandestine operations. The IRC thus evolved from a small organization of committed activists to a global operation functioning as one link in the CIA's covert network.

Read more at questia.

David Miliband to leave parliament immediately

From the Daily Mirror site this evening:

David Miliband is to stun Parliament by stepping down as an MP tomorrow to take up a “dream job” in New York. 

The former Foreign Secretary - and brother of Labour leader Ed - intends to make the shock announcement tomorrow morning. 

The Mirror understands he intends to step down with immediate effect, triggering a by-election in May.

The report goes on to say that Miliband is to join the charity International Rescue. This was the organisation made famous by Thunderbirds.

Assuming this is not an early April fool story, the Mirror must mean the International Rescue Committee.

The nonsense of Labour's welfare policy

I am with the Liberal Democrat MPs who rebelled over the one per cent cap of benefit increases after yesterday's debate.

As Caroline Lucas said:

The Secretary of State brandishes the figure of a 20 per cent increase in benefits in the past five years. In cash terms, jobseeker’s allowance has gone up from just £59.15 in 2007 to £71 in 2012. In other words, in each of those past years JSA has gone up by just £2.50.

And as David Miliband said of the politics behind this move:

The truth is that this rancid Bill is not about affordability; it reeks of the politics of dividing lines that the current Government spent so much time denouncing when they were in opposition in the dog days of the Brown Administration. It says a lot that within two years they have had to resort to that dividing-line politics. We know the style: you invent your own enemy, you spin your campaign to a friendly newspaper editor, you “frame” the debate. But the enemy within in is not the unemployed; the enemy within is unemployment.

But what really struck me about the debate was this complaint from Liam Byrne:

Some 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will be hit by this Bill.

But why are such people receiving money from the government at all? A common complaint about welfare systems is that they use public money to subsidise bad employers, but here the government is using it to subsidise a perfectly reasonable employer - itself.

Worse than that, the last Labour government had no great appetite for making the rich pay tax. And even if a government does have that ambition, it turns out to be rather hard to do.

The result is that the tax credits for soldiers, nurses and teachers have to be financed by people in reasonably but not highly paid jobs. People like soldiers, nurses and teachers, in fact.

In other words, the whole system is a complicated way of leaving people pretty much where you found them.

The Coalition has the right idea in cutting tax rates for lower paid workers and reducing the reach of the tax credit system. They should use some of the money they have saved to protect the poorest of all from inflation.

Boris Johnson: Will his ambitions be left hanging on a zip wire?

If it had happened to any other politician we would be laughing at him. It is a mark of Boris Johnson's unique political qualities that instead we are laughing with him.

But will those qualities ever take him to the leadership of the Conservative Party?

Benedict Brogan sounds like a Boris believer, but tells us that:

Westminster is divided between those who now believe him to be unstoppable, and those who can’t stop laughing at the idea that he is being taken seriously as an alternative prime minister.

Steve Richards says:

There is only one Tory leadership contest Boris could win and that would follow the next general election if Cameron failed again to secure an overall majority. I have spoken to Tory MPs who are certain that in such circumstances, there would be a challenge to Cameron. Some believe Cameron would resign. In order to win, Boris would need to be in the Commons after the next election and to fight a contest against the background of a fatally damaged Cameron brand. And yet in order to get to the Commons, Boris would seem like an over-ambitious, disloyal leader-in-waiting, and that would make him far less attractive than he is at the moment.

But Richards surely overstates his case. Yes, to get close to the Conservative leadership Johnson will have to make himself less attractive than he is now, but that is inevitable. As mayor of London in Olympic year he is close to appearing above party politics, but that is never going to last whatever happens. So he may as well further his ambitions while he becomes less popular.

There are, I judge, two factors that may stand between Johnson and the leadership of his party - or between him and No. 10 if he achieves that goal.

The first is his bumbling style. Though we are frequently told Boris Johnson is brilliant, but I cannot recall hearing him complete a coherent sentence. It is hard to see this as an appealing quality in a potential prime minister, so he would have to change his act.

The second is the Eton factor. It is possible that the Conservatives or the wider electorate will have had enough of posh boys by the time the next election comes. The irony is that, for all his Bertie Wooster act, Johnson was not born to this world - his effortless superiority has involved a great deal of hard work. Read Sonia Purnell's excellent Just Boris and you will learn that he attended the same North London state primary school as the Miliband brothers.

Boris Johnson, quite arguably, has better liberal and modernising credentials than David Cameron, but I am not convinced that, having embraced him as a comedy toff, voters would be prepared to recognise that at an election.

My Boris Johnson prize quiz closes this evening

A reminder that, to mark his re-election as Mayor of London, Liberal England is offering you the chance to win a Boris Johnson finger puppet.

Many thanks to Rubbish for their generosity in donating this prize for Liberal England’s latest quiz.

To win the puppet and have BoJo on the end of your finger as often as you want, just email me the answers to the following five questions:

1. Which magazine did Boris Johnson edit between 1999 and 2005?
2. Which Westminster constituency did he sit for between 2001 and 2008?
3. What did Johnson call "an inverted pyramid of piffle"?
4. Which city did he describe as "too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs"?
5. Which London Borough of Camden primary school did both Boris Johnson and the Miliband brothers attend?

This quiz closes at 6 p.m. on Friday 11 May 2012 - that's this evening!

The winner will be drawn from the correct entries received at a glittering ceremony at Bonkers Hall.

Win your very own Boris Johnson finger puppet!

To mark his re-election as Mayor of London, Liberal England offers you the chance to win a Boris Johnson finger puppet.

Many thanks to Rubbish for their generosity in donating this prize for Liberal England’s latest quiz.

To win the puppet and have BoJo on the end of your finger as often as you want, just email me the answers to the following five questions:

1. Which magazine did Boris Johnson edit between 1999 and 2005?

2. Which Westminster constituency did he sit for between 2001 and 2008?

3. What did Johnson call "an inverted pyramid of piffle"?

4. Which city did he describe as "too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs"?

5. Which London Borough of Camden primary school did both Boris Johnson and the Miliband brothers attend?

This quiz closes at 6 p.m. on Friday 11 May 2012. The winner will be drawn from the correct entries received at a glittering ceremony at Bonkers Hall.

Chris Huhne: David Miliband lost because he was honest about the scale of the deficit

Calder on Air: Debut of a new column

After writing House Points for more than 10 years it was time for a change. Writing a weekly column can be a bit of a treadmill, and I was beginning to run out of.

So instead I shall be writing fortnightly about television and other broadcast media. You can see the logic: for the most part the creatures who inhabit this world are more objectionable – and powerful – than anyone you find at Westminster.

To sell this idea to the editor I had to promise to cover the heavyweight current affairs shows. But I suspect that in the long run it may be the less overtly political programmes that cast light on the way we live today.

Calder on Air

Does he sound like a prime minister? That’s what anxious Labour supporters were asking themselves when, against a background of Manchester rooftops, Ed Miliband was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show (BBC1).

The news was mixed. Yes, he sounds like a prime minister – or at least like several former Labour leaders – but not with the encouraging results.

From Neil Kinnock came the ritual mention of public sector employees ("nurses, local government workers").

From Gordon Brown came the unwillingness to admit the seriousness of the problem posed by the deficit.

And from Tony Blair came a blizzard of dropped t’s: “think abou',” “se' of proposals,” “any par' of the country”. The set must have knee deep in them by the time he had finished, like drifts of popcorn cartons in a multiplex.

Marr’s interrogation began and ended with a probing of Miliband’s relationship with his brother. This was not a line of questioning that David Cameron had to face when he beat David Davis or Nick Clegg when he beat Chris Huhne.

If this is what is in store, it will be better for the Labour Party if David Miliband does go off to Harvard to sulk. It will be better for the rest of us too. If I hear Ed express his love for David once more, I shall do something violent to my television – which will make writing this column difficult.

Besides, so similar are they that many Labour members had to attend three hustings before they were convinced there really was more than one Miliband.

The pair recall the sixties comedians Mike and Bernie Winters playing the Glasgow Empire. Mike came on first and his patter was not going down well. When Bernie started playing with the curtains and then stuck his gurning face round them, a voice called out “Oh my God! There’s two of them.”

Rather than stoking fraternal rivalry, a better line of questioning for Marr to have explored would have been Ed Miliband’s championing of the “pressed” middle classes. The new Labour leader is surely on to something here, but isn’t it the 13 years his party spent in power that have done the pressing?

I can’t get enough of making the rich pay, but it is hard to do. They employ sharp accountants, they travel about and when you do catch up with them you find there are not that many. If Labour’s ambitions to expand the reach of government yet wider are to be realised, it is these middle classes who are going to have to foot much of the bill.

Running about, playing with knives, getting his knees muddy... Yes, Gareth Malone had a whale of a time on Gareth Malone's Extraordinary School For Boys (BBC2). Judging by the improved reading scores revealed in the final episode, the boys he taught seemed thrived on the experience too.

Let’s hope the publicity this series has gained will encourage the dismantling of the panoptican of drilling and testing that has built up in primary education. It would benefit boys and girls. As the headteacher who agreed to let Malone lose on her pupils said, “the enjoyment has gone out of learning”.

David Miliband on Ed Miliband: "I diskard him"

David Miliband writes:

Gosh chiz this is miliband 2 my bro he is uterly wet and a weed it panes me to think I am of the same blud. He is always eating and cheeks everybode. You know when burnham sa there are fairies at the bottom of his garden miliband 2 sa there is a dirty old rubbish heap at the bottom of his then zoom away dive bombing sparows worms the skool dog and other poor dumb creatures. I diskard him.

David Miliband, brotherly rivalry and the nature of modern politics

I have never been able to get too excited about the Miliband brothers. Not until this evening did I grasp how much more impressive David than Ed - which probably explains why most Labour members and most Labour MPs voted for David rather than Ed.

This evening's coverage has also made it clear that David's resignation from the Labour front bench was inevitable. The media fixation on the brothers' relationship would have made life insufferable for both of them and dominated the coverage of Ed's leadership if he had tried to stay there.

That said, there is a lot to be said for the arguments of The Third Estate (if not for its spelling). This site points out that most defeated candidates for the Labour leadership have stayed on the front bench afterwards because they have a political agenda they wanted to pursue.

It then asks what it is that makes David Miliband different:

It is certainly not politics: after all any disagreements he has with Ed, pale in comparison to the gulfs that seperated Bevan from Gaitskell, and Healy from Foot. The brotherly aspect of it may be a factor, although Ed and David have had decades to get used to combining familial commitment with the mesy business of politics (could things really get worse than when they were in the opposing Blair and Brown camps?).

What does differentiate David from most previous runners-up is that he is a career politican par excellence. He did not come up through the trade union movement, nor did he ever have to prove his fealty and commitment to constituency party party members. After taking a job early on with the IPPR, he became an advisor to downing street before being parachuted in to a safe constiuency – a now well worn path.

For him politics has been a fairly continous journey up a career ladder. In the same way that people in blue-chip firms tend to reach a point at which they go up or get out, David, it appears, feels the same about Labour right now.

Why Labour does not appeal to Liberal Democrats

Nick Cohen has a good article in today's Observer (I learn over the web from my New York hotel bedroom) about the case of Paul Chambers:

Because of a joke, he has a criminal record and lost two jobs. The CPS is ruining his life – for no reason.

(Sunny Hundal on Liberal Conspiracy suggests that the rhetoric of journalists like Cohen has helped engender an atmosphere where it is possible for the state to get away with things like this, but we'll let that pass for now.)

Cohen concludes that:

I don't care what the polls say or how unpopular the coalition becomes – Labour must change the settled view of the majority of Britons that it is the party of politically correct jobsworths or it will never win another election.

I believe that is right. I also believe it shows how that David Miliband's pledge to win over 10,000 Liberal Democrats as Labour members by Christmas is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Neil Kinnock and the paranoid school of Labour politics

Neil Kinnock had his say on the Labour leadership election the other day. He accused David Miliband's supporters of spreading "bloody bile" about Ed Miliband.

It was a reminder, in two words, of just how awful Kinnock is.

First, there is his love of alliteration for the sake of it - a tendency of his that Spitting Image was making fun of 25 years ago.

Second, it is a ridiculous metaphor: unless the person in question is seriously ill, bile is not bloody.

Third, and most important, it displays the paranoid style of Labour politics at its worst.

One of the reasons that I did not join in with the eulogies for Michael Foot after his death was because of his rhetorical style, which he presumably adopted from Nye Bevan. Everything was "treachery" or a "betrayal". It was overblown, paranoid and rooted in a Marxist view of politics - you were either for your class or a traitor.

Neil Kinnock employed this style too. His misfortune was that he became Labour leader in an age when its philosophical underpinning was collapsing.

This style also look simply ridiculous on television. I remain convinced that one of the reasons that John Major upset the odds to win in 1992 was that the British people could not face the prospect of having to listen to Neil Kinnock for another five years.