Why the Tories should be wary of consulting their grassroots

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Tomorrow the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) is gathering in Bournemouth. 

This new party group was set up after the party's MPs decided they could no longer stomach supporting Boris Johnson as leader and prime minister. 

A report in the Guardian says its organisers deny it's a 'Johnson revivalist group', but that report also says almost every speaker at the event is a noted Johnson supporter.

The CDO website gives the group's aim:

Our mission is to strengthen party democracy by ensuring the Conservative Party is representative of the membership and fairly represents their views.

And says its vision is to:

Re-enfranchise Conservative Party members to be the masters of their own democratic destiny.

If I wanted the Conservatives to stay in power, I would be worried about this.

And not just because the Conservative membership are the people who elected Iain Duncan Smith as the party's leader and Liz Truss as the nation's prime minster.

I would be worried because even consulting the party's councillors was enough to finish Margaret Thatcher.

Her original proposal was to phase in the Poll Tax over 10 years. I saw what happened at my first full council meeting here in Harborough when we agreed our response to the government consultation.

As I later recalled on the Guardian website:

Conservative members didn't want it phased in over 10 years: they wanted it at once. You could see the pound signs in their eyes as they calculated how much they and their neighbours would save.

So, like Tory-run councils across the country, we told Whitehall we wanted the Poll Tax brought in at once.

Which it was. With hilarious consequences.

Blame George Osborne for Universal Credit not Iain Duncan Smith

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My Twitter feed is exploding with outrage at Iain Duncan Smith's knighthood. Why should the architect of the hated Universal Credit be honoured?

But that outrage has been turned on the wrong target.

Universal Credit, which takes six benefits to which working-age people may be eligible and merges them into one payment, has long been advocated by welfare experts.

The problem lies not with the system but on the government's unwillingness to provide enough funds to make it work humanely.

Remember that IDS resigned from the cabinet over this issue in 2016.

Here is part of his resignation letter:

Throughout these years, because of the perilous public finances we inherited from the last Labour administration, difficult cuts have been necessary. I have found some of these cuts easier to justify than others but aware of the economic situation and determined to be a team player I have accepted their necessity. 

You are aware that I believe the cuts would have been even fairer to younger families and people of working age if we had been willing to reduce some of the benefits given to better-off pensioners but I have attempted to work within the constraints that you and the chancellor set. 

I have for some time and rather reluctantly come to believe that the latest changes to benefits to the disabled and the context in which they've been made are a compromise too far. While they are defensible in narrow terms, given the continuing deficit, they are not defensible in the way they were placed within a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers. They should have instead been part of a wider process to engage others in finding the best way to better focus resources on those most in need. 

I am unable to watch passively whilst certain policies are enacted in order to meet the fiscal self imposed restraints that I believe are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest. 

Too often my team and I have been pressured in the immediate run up to a budget or fiscal event to deliver yet more reductions to the working age benefit bill. There has been too much emphasis on money saving exercises and not enough awareness from the Treasury, in particular, that the government's vision of a new welfare-to-work system could not be repeatedly salami-sliced. 

It is therefore with enormous regret that I have decided to resign. 

It is George Osborne who should be the target of Twitter's outrage tonight.

Back to St Wistan's, Wistow

Seven years ago I wrote:

St Wistan's, Wistow, has Norman fabric but a pleasing Georgian interior, complete with box pews and plain glass.

I was back there yesterday, and my appreciation of church architecture must have come on because I was positively excited by the Norman arch above. It reminded me of those I saw at Breedon on the Hill.

That Georgian interior now includes a tablet in honour of someone I served on Harborough District Council with: Sir Timothy Brooks.

I wrote about him 10 years ago (note the connection to Iain Duncan Smith).

The Economist has endorsed the Liberal Democrats - and the Tories should be worried

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I must begin by apologising to Stephen Tall for stealing his headline, but I have had it in mind to write a post on these lines from some time.

And today's news that the Economist has endorsed the Liberal Democrats has prompted me to do it.

The endorsement is grudging:

Many moderate Conservative and Labour MPs could join a new liberal centre party—just as parts of the left and right have recently in France. So consider a vote for the Lib Dems as a down-payment for the future. Our hope is that they become one element of a party of the radical centre, essential for a thriving, prosperous Britain.

But the fact that it has been made at all shows how far the Conservatives are estranging themselves from their usual business supporters.

Rather than aiming to satisfy those supporters, the party's leaders are flattering their own backwoods on Europe.

As I wrote in March:

I remember a Labour-supporting friend who was in North Devon during the 1979 general election campaign speaking with something close to awe of the acres of good suiting on the platform at the Conservatives' meetings. 

But the party does not look like or feel like that today. 

The Tories have discovered ideology and, even more, they have discovered grievance. They are less the party of people with an interest in maintaining the status quo than the party of people who believe they have been cheated. 

The culprits vary - immigrants, experts, the European Union, latte-drinkers, refugees, the BBC - but the feeling is widespread. 

Only radical action, those members and activists believe, can remove the hurt and see justice done.

The last time there was an outbreak of this feeling in the Conservative Party was after their crushing defeat by Tony Blair's Labour in 1997.

Rather than elect Kenneth Clarke to busk it and keep them cheerful while they worked out what the hell they were going to do, Tory members elected first William Hague and then Iain Duncan Smith as leader because they liked their right-wing views.

And the time before that was over Europe under John Major.

But I am reminded of an earlier incident, which I wrote about for Comment is Free some years ago:

I was a newly elected Liberal Alliance councillor back in 1986 when the Thatcher government began consulting over the introduction of the poll tax. 

Conservative members didn't want it phased in over 10 years: they wanted it at once. You could see the pound signs in their eyes as they calculated how much they and their neighbours would save.

If it had been phased in over a decade then the poll tax might well have stuck. But Margaret Thatcher made the mistake of listening to her own backwoods, and doing so ended her premiership.

From all of which I conclude that the Conservative Party's estrangement from the Economist will end it tears.

Was Andrea Leadsom really a City high-flyer?

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When leadership candidates appear from almost nowhere, it is often an idea to cast a sceptical eye over their CVs.

Iain Duncan Smith, for instance, originally claimed that he had attended the University of Perugia in Italy. A Newsnight investigation revealed that this was a considerable exaggeration.

Now some people are questioning the picture that Andrea Leadsom has allowed to be painted of herself. Was she really a City high-flyer before she turned to politics?

Robert Stephens politely suggests she was not:

Her job at Barclays/BZW 1993-1997 was a largely administrative one, “Financial Institutions Director” meaning the maintenance of contractual relationships with other banks. 

Her job as Managing Director of De Putron Fund Management,1997-1999 seems to have involved setting up the onshore shell of her brother-in-law’s offshore investment company. 

But her job at Perpetual/Invesco Perpetual, 1999-2009, is particularly worthy of closer inspection. I was a fellow employee throughout her time there. Last week, at my prompting, she corrected her CV with Wikipedia and Who’s Who, changing her title from the obviously incorrect Chief Investment Officer to the titles of Senior Investment Officer and Head of Corporate Governance. 

Her actual job was to work (sometimes part-time) on "special projects", mostly for the Chief Investment Officer. These included for example negotiating pay terms for senior fund managers. Towards the end of her time, she advised on a couple of governance issues. 

As I understand it she had no-one reporting to her in either role, so the words Senior and Head are, one might say, superfluous.

The Iain Duncan Smiths sing "This Balanced Plan"

Genius!

Thanks to @paulwaugh

Kenneth Clarke should have become Conservative leader in 1997

Kenneth Clarke stood down today after a remarkable 42 years in front-bench politics.

If the Conservative Party had known its own best interests, he would have become its leader after the landslide defeat of 1997. Clarke would have busked it and kept the Tories' spirits up while they worked out how the hell they were going to fight back against Tony Blair and New Labour.

Instead, the party's members chose leaders whom they saw as true Thatcherites - William Hague and then Iain Duncan Smith. Eventually the MPs felt obliged to take control by nominating Michael Howard as the sole candidate for leader after the collapse of IDS.

The party began its recovery under Howard, but if Clarke, a figure far more likely to appeal to the wider public, had been made leader in 1997, that recovery would surely have come sooner.

And if Clarke had become leader, William Hague would have been spared the premature exposure that blighted his career. Without it, he might well have become prime minister by now.

Were Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms doomed from the start?

Iain Duncan Smith will face the Commons welfare and pensions committee over the problems with the introduction of his universal credit later today. Like most such occasions, it will probably prove a damp squib. The format of the meetings and the inadequacy of individual MPs' questioning mean witnesses are rarely forced into a damaging admissions.

But IDS's reform are in trouble. And, thinking about why that might be, I was reminded of an interview Vince Cable gave to a group of Liberal Democrat bloggers  in 2007.

Writing it up for my House Points column in the party newspaper, I described Vince's view of Gordon Brown:

Brown is in love with the power of the state and blind to its limitations. So schemes like tax credits begin with the best of intentions but founder on the inflexibility of bureaucracy and the complexity of people’s lives.

And maybe that is the problem with IDS too.

The universal credit is an appealing idea - John Pardoe always talked about bringing the tax and benefit systems together when he was the Liberal Party's economic spokesman in the 1970s - but maybe it too cannot cope with the inflexibility and complexity of our lives.

Iain Duncan Smith's finances: fantasy and reality

The Fantasy

"The honest truth is I don’t need any lessons from these people. I have worked hard all my life for what I’ve achieved and nobody has given me a damn penny. My earnings are what I live on."
Daily Mail, 3 April 2013

The Reality

The cabinet minister lives rent-free in the mansion at Swanbourne after he was ­allowed to move in by the previous owner, his father-in-law Baron Cottesloe.
Metro, 7 April 2013

Six of the Best 251

Congratulations to Lib Dem blogger Mark Cole on becoming Chairman of Ceredigion County Council.

Alex's Archives prepares to fight Iain Duncan Smith's reported intention to expand the government's mandatory work programme: "At the moment long-term unemployed people are likely to be out-competed for jobs by those who are recently unemployed and therefore job-ready. In a period of high unemployment beating unemployed people around the head with a stick may give some form of sadistic pleasure, but it is unlikely to do a great deal for either their self-worth or the unemployment statistics."

Ceasefire is rightly outraged that Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad, Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer and other UK citizens are facing the real prospect of extradition to the US for alleged crimes committed in the UK for which most have been detained for years without charge or evidence.

"Beleaguered Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt is in the midst of another 'omnishambles' which threatens to open David Cameron’s Government up to further accusations of cronyism and dodgy backstairs deals with lobbyists and Tory insiders," writes archaeology blogger Mortimer of the 'HMS Victory scandal'.

Whirled Peas sat through the Eurovision Song Contest so you didn't have to.

"So now I’m off to search eBay for some old editions of Enid Blyton tales — Dicks and Fannies and all." Free-Range Kids is against the bowdlerising of old children's books.

Peter Oborne on Conservative Home - the continuity IDS

Something else I was too busy to blog about last week was the attack on Conservative Home that Peter Oborne wrote in the Daily Telegraph:

The growth of the internet has encouraged the development of a monocultural community of young men (very few women) who are devoted users of Twitter, serial attenders of think-tank breakfasts and keen analysers of each and every political event. 

Conservative Home insists that it speaks for mainstream Conservatives, a claim that I used to be sympathetic to, but which is surely now only believed by BBC television and radio producers, and which needs to be exploded. 

The lives of most Tory supporters are too interesting, enjoyable and civically engaged for them to read it. The website, as its recent interventions demonstrate, represents a narrow, Right-wing faction. 

It is given to issuing “alternative manifestos”. It has just concluded a disloyal survey of 1,500 Tory party members in an attempt to find out which Conservative politician is favoured to succeed Mr Cameron. It wages a poorly judged campaign against the Tory chairman, Sayeeda Warsi. It was a supporter of the Downing Street director of communications, Andy Coulson, who has since been arrested.

I think there is a lot in this - and not just because I once exposed the campaign against Warsi myself. Certainly, when Oborne appeared on Newsnight with Conservative Home's editor Tim Montgomerie, Montgomerie did not defend his views so much as point out that Oborne had said similar things himself on many occasions.

The need to write frequently and to be controversial often leads columnists to contradict themselves - it is known in the professional literature as Simon Jenkins Syndrome. But that does not show that Oborne is wrong here.

Montgomerie, as Oborne points out, was Iain Duncan Smith's chief of staff while he was leader of the Conservative Party. And what Conservative Home is essentially trying to do is to persuade the Tories to return to the policies it put forward during the Hague and Duncan Smith years. It is for this reason that the website is known to some as the 'Continuity IDS'.

Yet these policies were surely one of the reasons that Tony Blair led such a charmed for so long as prime minister. For a while it looked as though the rule that governments become unpopular in the middle of their terms had been overturned.

At the heart of Conservative Home's self-confidence is the strange truth that the more extreme a person's views, the more certain he or she will be that the majority of voters share them. You could even call this Calder's Fourth Law of Politics - the first three are here.

Oborne is right, and I suspect that David Cameron shares his analysis. Which is why he takes little notice of Conservative Home's views.

Tory high command hits back at Conservative Home

Ouch!

"Tim's sole achievement in politics was to be chief of staff to the most unpopular leader in Conservative history, so forgive us if we don't take any lessons from him. He clearly wants to take the party back to the bad old days of constant infighting and no policy."

Mind you, I think Tim Montgomerie is right on this one.

Why the Barnsley Central by-election was bad for everyone

If you read the day's blog posts, whenever a political event takes place it turns out to have been good for everyone. Let me try to prove the opposite: that the result of the Barnsley Central by-election was bad for all three parties.

Why it was bad for the Liberal Democrats

Sixth place in a Westminster by-election is not unprecedented for the Liberal Democrats. Discussing the Barnsley result on Twitter this morning, I was reminded by Ruaraidh Dobson that we finished sixth as recently as November 2009 in the Glasgow North East by-election.

Of course, sixth place in a seat where we finished second at the last general election is a different matter. But another tweet from Meral Ece put even this into perspective. She gave the votes cast in Barnsley at the 2009 Euro elections:

Labour 12594
UKIP 9544
BNP 8543
Tories 8045
Lib Dems 4434

In the light of that, and the absence of any attempt to encourage Lib Dem workers to go to Barnsley, the by-election result is not such a surprise.

The result reveals how much we are dependent upon favourable national publicity, hard work locally or both to get a decent result. This is not an encouraging conclusion for an ambitious Liberal Democrat, but it does suggest that our poor performance in Barnsley had less to do with the Coalition than many have assumed.

Add in the unpopularity of governing parties, which we used to take as a given but was perhaps forgotten as a result of Tony Blair's long honeymoon, and the result is almost as expected.

Why it was bad for Labour

This, I will admit, is a harder case to argue, but here I plead in aid Julian Astle (to whom I shall return one day soon). He wrote on his Daily Telegraph blog:

The people of Barnsley were answering two questions when they cast their ballots yesterday. First, and most obviously, whether they like or dislike the coalition government (made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, two parties they didn’t support in significant numbers even when in opposition). Second, whether they like or dislike what that government is currently doing (raising their taxes and cutting their benefits and services in the name of deficit reduction). Unsurprisingly, they decided they disliked both and voted accordingly.

But, as Julian argues, it is not the voters in safe Labour seats like Barnsley that decide general elections. So it is the Labour leadership who need to

look behind their 60 per cent vote share and ask whether it really tells them anything at all about how they, rather than the government, are doing, or indeed, what the people of the United Kingdom, rather than Barnsley, are thinking.

The correct conclusion is surely that it tells them very little, but the wider Labour Party may need some convincing of this.

Why it was bad for the Conservatives

A substantial section of David Cameron's party has never warmed to his leadership and remains convinced that the Tories would have won the last election with a more right-wing programme. To them, the Coalition with the Liberal Democrats is a humiliation. In their hearts they want to restore IDS or Michael Howard as leader, pull out of Europe and resume birching people.

Such Conservatives will have had their beliefs strengthened by seeing their party finish behind UKIP at Barnsley. The whispering against David Cameron will continue, and I suspect that he may be at least as vulnerable to a party revolution as Nick Clegg.

However, it is George Osborne who is likely to benefit from such a coup rather than IDS or Michael Howard.

Why it was bad for everyone

David Aaronovitch tweeted this morning:

The significance of Barnsley isn't the Libdem result (it HAS happened before) but that voters won't punish corruption, as we once expected.

Maybe, but I suspect that the electorate has come to the conclusion that the parties are all as bad as each other. Unfair, perhaps, but there it is.

Besides, as Eric Illsley has already proved, Labour can put up a donkey in Barnsley and still win.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends, the Conservatives

So what are our Conservative friends like? It has been what the young people call “a steep learning curve” for me as, until recently, I generally saw Tories from the saddle as we hunted them across the fields of Leicestershire and Rutland. I recall a good run a county councillor gave us until he went to earth near Billesdon Coplow...

Anyway, in the spirit of cross-party co-operation, I here offer pen portraits of a few of my new colleagues.

My older readers will recall that popular programme from the early days of the moving television, “Have a Go with Eric Pickles”. With his catchphrases “Are yer courting?” and “Give him the money, Barney”, Pickles soon became a household name. He disappeared from our screens amid persistent rumours that he had eaten one of the Dagenham Girl Pipers, but later resurfaced as MP for Brentwood and is now Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

George Osborne, a scion of the biscuit dynasty, made his first worker redundant at the age of 10. His parents must have been so proud.

A little bird told me that, had the Conservatives won an overall majority, then Nadine Dorries would have been prevailed upon to accept my Outer Space portfolio. I take it as a tribute to Nick Clegg’s skill as a negotiator that he was able to win the post for a Liberal Democrat.

Iain Duncan Smith is known as “the quiet man”. I am told that he intends to revolutionise the Social Security system in Britain, but am unable to hear a word he says.

In 1977, at the age of 8, William Hague brought the Conservative Conference to its feet with his peroration: “I hate Socialism and, besides, you lot will soon be dead anyway”. Thirty-three years later, now aged 87, he is Foreign Secretary. Isn’t it strange how things turn out?

“Do you know Theresa May?” a civil servant asked during one of my first visits to my new department. “No,” I replied, “but I am grateful for the tip.”

Earlier this week

Autumn has come to Rutland
At the first hint of an asteroid