Sunak should not resign as Tory leader after he loses the election

He has not, God knows, been much of a leader, and it's not even certain that he will be returned for Richmond and Northallerton next week, but Rishi Sunak should not resign the Conservative leadership if he loses the election.

Martin Kettle makes the point in the Guardian today:

He should wait until at least after the autumn party conference before making any announcement, to allow the Tories some time for reflection and, if possible, to change the leadership election process. 

And Kettle links to a whole article on the subject that he wrote back in March:

Many Tory MPs seem to take it as read that Sunak, if he loses office, will do the same thing.

He should not do so. Instead Sunak should stay on as Conservative leader if he loses the election. He should prepare the ground for staying on with trusted colleagues. He should then stand at the Downing Street lectern and say responsible leaders do not just jump ship. He should say it is his duty to see the party through a period of necessary reflection. He could even say what Callaghan told Labour MPs in 1979: “There is no vacancy for my job.”

But he needs to have a plan for what he can bring to opposition as well as a plan to then leave later. Here, Michael Howard could be the model. Howard stayed five months after losing the 2005 election before resigning. This had important consequences. The leadership election process was rethought, though not as radically as Howard wanted, and the shadow cabinet was reshaped. This allowed younger faces to catch the spotlight. The result was the election of David Cameron.

The first weeks of a new government can set the tone of a whole parliament. In 2010, because Gordon Brown resigned his party's leadership immediately after leaving Downing Street, Labour had no one to challenge the growing narrative that it had "maxed out the nation's credit card". It was still having this claim hung around its neck at the 2015 general election.

So the Tories need to remain in the debate following their coming defeat and not spend all their energies on a leadership election.

But all this sounds far too sensible for the modern Conservative Party, so expect an immediate resignation with civil war to follow.

Michael Howard is an alien

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How do we account for his desire to launch a war with Spain, that strange accent and his belief that prison works?

I have vague memories of writing a column for Liberal Democrat News back in 1997 about an alien spacecraft being sighted over Michael Howard's Kent home.

And it seems those memories are accurate.

A Guardian article from 2010 says:

But the opening of the latest batch of Britain's own "X-files" today reveals that the RAF in March 1997 did mount an inquiry into reports from six members of the public, including two firefighters, of a large, triangular "humming" object in the sky above his Folkestone home during his last months as home secretary. 

The Ministry of Defence file reports that witnesses said the UFO hovered for several minutes above a field before shooting off in a flash of light. Sophie Wadleigh, 25, from Hythe, told the Folkestone Herald: "It was so peculiar, it all felt really odd and I heard this humming noise. As I looked across the field I saw a large triangular shaped flying craft hovering about 300 feet off the ground." 

The MoD file includes a report from Chris Rolfe, of the East Kent UFO monitoring group, which says he believes it could have been looking for the former home secretary, as it was not interested in Wadleigh: "This … has left me wondering if its purpose had something to do with Mr Howard."

I think Mr Rolfe may have been on to something.

Boris Johnson and the collapse of British power

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So Boris Johnson is the new foreign secretary.

Our relations with other countries are now in the hands of a man who, only a couple of weeks ago, destroyed his own chances of becoming the Conservatives' leader with one undiplomatic newspaper column.

And he has previous.

In 2004 Johnson was ordered by his leader Michael Howard to go to Liverpool and apologise to the people of the city after he marked the murder of Ken Bigley by running an article in the Spectator that said of them:

"They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it."

In 2006 he had to apologise to the people of Papua New Guinea after likening to his colleagues in the Tory party:

"For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing."

In 2007 he described Portsmouth as

"a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs."

And in 2008 he apologised for a column he had written in 2002 that referred to black people as "piccaninnies" and talked about their "watermelon smiles". During that same mayoral campaign he was also embarrassed by some of the racist columns by Taki that he had published in the Spectator.

The appointment of Boris Johnson is a confirmation that Britain is no longer a world power.

What international relations are left to us will be handled by David Davis, who is a grown up, as we attempt to withdraw from the European Union.

Johnson will merely go around the world exuding what he imagines to be upper-class charm. He will go down well with the sort of people who enjoy Richard Curtis films.

When the foreign secretary gig falls through - and I would not put money on its lasting too long - he will probably turn to playing the English butler in a situation comedy on American television.

Simon Hughes on the Tory and Labour arms race on prisons

#456631330 / gettyimages.com

Speaking to a CentreForum and Prison Reform Trust event today Simon Hughes said:

The sad reality is that the political consensus needed for real reform remains the victim of an arms race between the two largest parties on who can sound toughest on law and order. 

Michael Howard’s 1993 declaration that ‘prison works’, contrary to all the evidence in so many cases of course, became an ideology which was then enthusiastically embraced by Labour Home and Justice Secretaries including Jack Straw, David Blunkett and John Reid. 

That misguided consensus has been directly responsible for a near doubling of the prison population: from about 44,000 in the early 1990s to the 84,656 people in prison at the end of last week.

You can read the whole speech on Simon's own website.

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.

Plane Crazy: The case against the expansion of Lydd Airport

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.

Calder on Air: Jeremy Paxman is Steerforth

My column from today's Liberal Democrat News. I am told my set was working beautifully in the repair shop earlier this week. I shall pick it up from the shop tomorrow. Perhaps it just needed a holiday.

Asking the Questions

Calder on Air should have appeared last week, but I wasn’t well and then my television set fell ill too. For a couple of days I put up with the blue faces and purple grass, reasoning that I must have OD’d on Day Nurse, but in the end I realised something was wrong and sent it back for repair.

Living without a TV not the radical step it was when I did it for several years back in the 1990s. These days you can watch on line, catch up with the BBC iPlayer or a DVD into your computer. But I did take the opportunity to think a little more widely about television and politics.

******
Wealthy, arrogant, members of powerful dynasties... It is not the politicians we should worry about these days so much as the interviewers.

Take the biggest cheese of them all: Jeremy Paxman. Politicians are not brought before him to have their views examined: they are there to suffer a form of ritual contempt. Forget any ideas of a sustained line of questioning designed to probe and elucidate his interviewees’ views. What he offers is sneering, snarling and attempts to catch his victims off guard.

Paxo acts as a channel for our hatred of the political class. It is all great fun, but contempt for democratically elected politicians is not the mark of a mature democracy. It is the stock in trade of fascists or, to be less melodramatic, of fruitcakes like UKIP in Britain or the Tea Party in America.

And there are alternatives. For better or worse, the days when Brian Walden on Weekend World could act like a kindly but irascible professor faced with a bright student are long gone. They are part of that lost era when a Marxist Play for Today could gain 14 million viewers – chiefly because there was little else to watch.
But some people do it better even now. For all his silly guests and references to Blue Nun, Andrew Neil can be a devastating interviewer. I once heard him, with forensic politeness, draw from Michael Gove the fact that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of the most expensive private schools in Scotland.

This mattered because in those days Gove was widely assumed to be a state-educated moth among the Brideshead butterflies of the Cameron front bench. After this interview I saw him in a new light – even if, unfashionably for a Liberal Democrat, I am still an enthusiast for his ‘free schools’.

Jeremy Paxman, by contrast is most famous for asking Michael Howard the same question 14 times. And he still didn’t get an answer.

******

The Genius of British Art (Channel 4) has been a good series, and Howard Jacobsen’s essay on Victorian art and sexuality was valuable in helping to overturn the absurd view of the 19th century that many still have. The Victorians did not cover piano legs because they found them shocking: that was a joke they told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

But if there is a worse factual programme this year than Janet Street Porter’s discussion of modern British art I hope I do not have the misfortune to watch it. All we learnt in the course of an hour was a) she enjoys hanging out with famous people and b) cannot talk for more than 30 seconds without blatantly contradicting herself.

******

Being without a television has driven me back to my bookshelves, and I have found a literary equivalent of Jeremy Paxman. He is Steerforth from David Copperfield.

Having learnt from the innocent young hero that one of the masters at Salem House has a mother in the poor house, Steerforth uses the information to publicly humiliate him and secure his dismissal.

No doubt that made him as popular with his fellow pupils as Paxo is with viewers. But I am with Tommy Traddles, the conscience of the novel: “Shame, J. Steerforth! Too bad!”

Michael Howard and the UFO

I see this story has made the morning papers. See the Guardian for an example.

May I respectfully point out that I discussed it in October 2008 and indeed mentioned it in Liberal Democrat News many years before that?

Liberal England: First for news about politicians encountering aliens.

And then there was Calder's Comfort Farm:

Just now I returned from the village to find an alien seated at my kitchen table. It held the morning’s newspapers in its tentacles and was studying them intently.

“Shall I take you to my leader?” I asked.

It shook its heads. “I don’t think I’ll bother.”

Michael Howard and the Lydd UFO

The news that the captain of an Alitalia airliner reported a close encounter with a brown missile-shaped UFO over the Kent town of Lydd in 1991 reminds me of another incident.

As The Why Files reports the story:

Very early on the morning of 8th March, 1997, Sarah Hall, a journalist with the Folkestone Herald, was driving home when her attention was caught by a large triangular object hovering over the village of Burmarsh in Kent (U.K.).

Observing the object from about 300 yards, Sarah described it:

“It was just this huge triangular thing, which was a lot bigger than an aeroplane but there was no way I could have mistaken it for an aeroplane or anything like that. It had lights all around the outside and this disc attached to the back and a big light on the front.”

As Sarah stopped her car the object “literally shot off”.

The plot thickens:

Euro M.P. Mark Watts did try unsuccessfully to obtain further information relating to the Burmarsh incident and a year was almost to pass before the next major chapter in this story was to take place.

Jerry Anderson went to Waterstones book shop in Canterbury where Tim Good was giving a talk about his new book. Afterwards a man approached Jerry enquiring if he had investigated the Burmarsh Incident. The man went on to explain that he was a neighbour of Michael Howard’s and that he and his wife had been awoken in the early hours of 8th March 1997 by a commotion coming from the politician’s house.

He described how there were a lot of people running round and shouting and that they were under the impression that armed police guards were present. All of this was accompanied by a helicopter hovering overhead and a searchlight scanning the area.

This searchlight, however, was not scanning the ground but was pointing upwards scanning the skies.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying Michael Howard is an alien. But shouldn't he come forward and clear up the confusion once and for all?

So on message it hurts

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Waste not

I fear for Hazel Blears. The other day she admitted to doubts about the government’s anti-terrorist legislation: “In my deepest, darkest moments I do struggle with some of this.” When one of Stalin’s henchmen caught himself thinking like that, it was not long before he arrived at a Politburo meeting to find there was no chair for him.

It would be sad to see Hazel Blears exiled, if only for her place in cinema history. She can be seen, in kilt skirt and bunches, in the kitchen sink classic A Taste of Honey. Her brother sings “The Big Ship Sails On The Ally Ally O” – as children did in those days.

But if Blears is sent to the New Labour equivalent of Siberia, they will still have Andy Burnham. He is so on message it hurts.

After the government’s Lords defeat on Monday, he claimed it would be “foolish in the extreme” to reveal how much the identity card scheme would cost. There was no need: KPMG had approved it. And besides: “We can’t just put all the figures out in the public domain because that may lead us not to get the best deal for the taxpayer.”

The people’s representative cannot be shown figures the accountants have seen. And the way to ensure efficient government is to hide it from public scrutiny. You can see why Burnham will never be sent to Siberia.

Meanwhile, the public has to make do with rubbish like the Cabinet Office publication Transformational Government Enabled by Technology. The title is bad, but it’s worse if you open it:

“Government will create an holistic approach to identity management, based on a suite of identity management solutions that enable the public and private sectors to manage risk and provide cost-effective services….”

New Labour used to know better. In the Lords on Monday, Andrew Phillips quoted what Tony Blair said in 1995 when Michael Howard tried to introduce a similar scheme:

“Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demands, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local communities.”

Mr Blair was right in 1995, and he would be even more right today when the waste runs into billions.

Sit back to enjoy the fun

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News. "You'll get letters," said the editor.

Teasing Tony

A Tory leader has finally worked out how to discomfort Tony Blair at prime minister’s questions. You agree with him.

For eight long years the Conservatives tried to persuade us that, deep down, Blair is a dangerous Bolshevik. Remember those Demon Eyes posters? They did not work for a simple reason. He isn’t.

Michael Gove gave the correct Tory estimation of Tony Blair when he was just a Times commentator. He wrote: “I can't fight my feelings any more: I love Tony ... as a rightwing polemicist, all I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, ‘What's not to like?’”

Which is why last Wednesday Michael Howard told Blair not to waste his time abusing those across the chamber who agree with him on education. He should worry about his own backbenches. They don’t.

The Independent’s Simon Carr has been urging this strategy on the Tory front bench for years. Praise Blair for enacting good Conservative measures and then sit back to enjoy the fun.

If they stick with it, we shall enter a new world. It won’t quite be Israel, where the prime minister is forming his own party. But Tony Blair’s education measures will probably go through with Tory support and in the teeth of much Labour opposition.

Which will leave the Liberal Democrats with some thinking to do. We shall walk through the No lobbies alongside the Labour rebels. Why not? We are not New Labour.

But we are not Old Labour either. And we should not sound like them.

A skilled and confident teaching profession must be central to our education policy. But too often the teachers’ voice, as heard through their unions, is the reverse. It is endlessly negative, opposing every government imitative – good, bad or lunatic. At its worst it is full of teenage nihilism. It’s not fair. I hate you. You’re not my dad.

This negativity has infected Old Labour with fatalism. There are good schools and bad schools, good students and bad students, and you can’t do much about it. Hence their interest in allocating school places by ballot.

We should be different. We need to talk about quality, innovation and choice, whatever the structures we favour to deliver them. In short, we need to sound more Liberal.

The week after the week before

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

Pause for Thought

It has been the week after the week before. On Monday the Commons heard prime ministerial statements on the G8 summit and the London bombings. Then his opponents were unusually complimentary.

Michael Howard paid tribute to the “calm, resolute and statesmanlike” way the government had responded to the bombings. Charles Kennedy said Tony Blair was “to be congratulated on what was, for the best and happiest of reasons as well as for the most dreadful, an extraordinary week”.

Blair was certainly doing his best to sound statesmanlike. He did not use his choking-back-the-tears voice that leaves you wishing there were a grown up in charge. Instead it was his slow delivery. with. very. long. pauses.

I once heard a tape of a Blair speech in this style with all the pauses edited out. It still made sense. If anything it sounded better. But his approach seemed fitting on Monday even if it was odd to hear the prime minister talking about “our way of life”.

If anything has defined the New Labour project over the years it has been an impatience with the British way of life. Tradition is suspect and everyone and everything has to be modernised.

This attempt at modernisation went on after Blair’s statements with the third reading of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Or the Muslim Voters (Reclaiming for Labour) Bill as it should be called.

This is one of those proposed laws that gets less impressive the more it is examined. In countries where such legislation has been enacted, it is chiefly used by warring religious groups to take each other to court.

To avoid this the government now says the attorney general will have to approve every prosecution. “Pass this law and we promise not to use it very often” is an argument no legislature should fall for. Ours has.

Monday also saw questions on culture, media and sport. And it was clear what the next seven years are going to be like. Already getting the 2012 Olympics has become a government achievement. And the games will be used as an argument in support of every backbench obsession, no matter how loopy.

We are going to pay a heavy price for the fun of upsetting M. Chirac.

The last Election Points

Next week my Liberal Democrat News column will spontaneously regenerate to become House Points again.

Lessons to learn

It’s post mortem time. To begin with Labour, a lot of people have got overexcited. A majority of 67 is more than comfortable by historic standards and Tony Blair is not going anywhere in a hurry. He will be around to thwart Gordon Brown a few times yet. And if Brown ever does become prime minister, many will find the experience less enjoyable than they expected.

Across the Commons, the Tories cannot agree on a strategy. Should they skip a generation? They tried that and got William Hague. Should they ask their members? They tried that and got Iain Duncan Smith. Should they go for a safe pair of hands? They tried that and got Michael Howard.

It seems to be coming down to a contest between David Davis and Liam Fox, with the sensible people left in the party searching desperately for a candidate who might have wider appeal. And the bookies report a surge of support for William Hague. Watch this space.

The Tory crisis is as much about strategy as leadership, and the Liberal Democrats have a lot of strategic thinking to do too. We are promised a review of policy, but it is important that we first understand what is wrong with the current system.

The problem is not that Conference asserts itself and passes policies the leadership does not want. It is that Conference will support almost anything that is put in front of it. We do sometimes seem to take our policies as a job lot from pressure groups. That is why we find ourselves supporting bans on fairground goldfish or wanting to criminalise a single parental smack. But this does not happen at Conference. It happens long before on the working parties that Federal Policy Committee appoints.

And when we get good policy, we don’t use it. The report on public services by Chris Huhne’s group was the best work the party has done for years. Yet its emphasis on local decision making hardly featured in the campaign.

We need to think about what it is that Liberal Democrats believe and who we speak for. The months after a general election are the one time a party gets to do this. When we have done it will be easier to make good policy.

Vote Liberal: Get Liberal

Here is today's Election Points column from the estimable Liberal Democrat News.

Gone to the blogs

When Labour supporters run out of arguments why you should support their party, there is one they fall back on. Put crudely, it runs “Vote Lib Dem, get Tory”.

It has cropped up in recent columns by Johann Hari, Polly Toynbee and Nick Cohen. As a website I saw the other day said, it is the equivalent of Squealer in Animal Farm telling everyone that if they did not support Comrade Napoleon they would have Farmer Jones back.

Thanks to a posting on Nick Barlow’s blog What You Can Get Away With (www.nickbarlow.com/blog), we know that this argument is nonsense.

A ‘blog’, in case you are wondering, is a weblog. A website where individuals record their thoughts and experiences. Political blogs provide a rich source of debate and new arguments – just the sort of explosion in publishing it was hoped computers would bring about. A good starting point is the digest of blogs by Liberal Democrat supporters at www.libdemblogs.co.uk.

Anyway, what Nick shows is that no amount of Labour supporters switching to the Liberal Democrats will lead to a Conservative government. Assuming that the Tory vote stays the same, a 5 per cent swing from Labour to the Lib Dems would still see a comfortable majority for Blair. And a 10 per cent swing would bring about a majority Labour government too.

Not even a 15 per cent swing would see Michael Howard in Downing Street. Nick calculates that it would produce 280 Labour MPs, 230 Tories and 107 Lib Dems. And if we got an even bigger swing from Labour it would start winning us Tory seats too.

In short, no amount of Labour supporters switching to us will produce a Tory government. The truth is “Vote Lib Dem, get Lib Dem”.

******

We have a little time before the snooker, so here are a couple of thoughts for the second half of the campaign.

First, as a tribute to Donald James Kennedy, Anon.’s observation that “politicians are like nappies – they should be changed regularly and for the same reason”.

Second, Winston Churchill on Stanley Baldwin: “He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened”.

You may just feel that has some contemporary resonance.

The dog whistle strategy

Here is Friday's Election Points from Liberal Democrat News. Sorry for the delay in posting - I have been in Shropshire. I even saw the offices of the Shropshire Star!

Whistling in the wind

The Conservatives are fighting this election on what insiders call “dog whistle” issues. In other words, their campaign concentrates on subjects that tickle the Tories’ core voters but leave the rest of us cold. This approach is the brainchild of Lynton Crosby, the Australian strategist hired by Michael Howard. (He’s one economic migrant the Tories do approve of.)

So when you read a speech by Howard you have to work out what diehard Tories will hear him saying. It can be very different. Let’s try a few sentences from the launch of the Tory manifesto on Monday.

Of course, we have moved on.
Don’t worry, we haven’t moved on.

People are realistic about tax.
I want tax cuts and more public spending. And I want you to repay the national debt too.

People long for more police on the streets, to enforce respect, discipline and the law.
We fight for liberty and then people go and do exactly as they please.

People long for their children to be taught in disciplined schools.
When I was a boy we got six of the best every day. Made me what I am.

Cleaner hospitals.
Matron. Hattie Jacques. Bed baths. Nurse, the screens!

Surely it's not that hard for an island nation to control its borders?
The doctor’s as black as your hat and my Women’s Weekly smells of curry.

Will the dog whistle strategy work? Of course not. The idea that the Conservatives lost in 2001 because William Hague did not appeal strongly enough to traditional Tory voters is ludicrous. It’s like saying that Michael Foot lost in 1983 because he wasn’t enough of a socialist.

After a brief attempt to win back the middle ground (involving a baseball cap and the Notting Hill Carnival) Hague did nothing but appeal to traditional voters. He flattered their every prejudice, even telling them that, under Labour, Britain would become “a foreign country”.

The only wonder is that Michael Howard has found ways of being even more right wing than Hague. What the Tories should do, of course, is tell their core voters a few home truths and try to appeal to voters beyond this increasingly narrow enclave.

As long as they follow their present strategy we Liberal Democrats have little to fear.

Tory confusion over education

Michael Howard, reports the BBC, has pledged to put phonics at the heart of teaching in schools:

Mr Howard said repeated studies had shown that the system of phonics, where children are taught words through the sounds that form them, was the best method for teaching language

It would be interesting to know how he squares this promise with the speech that he made on 24 March 2005 setting out his vision of "The Britain I believe in":

Just as parents know best what is right for their children, so professionals have the clearest vision of what is right for our schools and hospitals.

Government should trust and support teachers in their mission to pass on the best of what has been thought and written to the next generation.

It seems that the Tories will only "trust and support" teachers who do what they are told.

How to benefit from research findings while allowing room for individual judgement is a problem for all parties. The Tory approach is to say whatever a particular audience wishes to hear and pretend there is no problem at all.

Speaking for myself, I doubt that phonics are the be all and end all of reading. My mother taught me to read from the Ladybird keywords books (with the original illustrations,* mark you), which used a strictly look-and-say method. It never did me any harm.

* "When Peter and Jane first appeared in the early sixties, Jane was dressed in pretty dresses with hair ribbons, and Peter had short trousers. Peter did boys things, and Jane did girlish things.

Now ten years later, Ladybird were getting attacked by people who were saying that they were too middle class, that boys no longer wore shorts, they wore jeans. Girls no longer had hair ribbons, they wore jeans, and we had to spend a fortune on altering all the illustrations to bring Peter and Jane up to date. The alterations to Ladybird represented a social document showing exactly what had happened."

(From an interview with former Ladybird employee George Towers.)

Michael Howard on immigration

The policies the Tories are putting forward on immigration prove two things. The first is that they do not expect to win the forthcoming general election. The second is that Conservatism, as a coherent political philosophy, is just about dead in Britain. Let me explain.

In order to put into place the annual limit on people granted asylum he proposes, Howard - by his own admission - would have to withdraw from the 1951 United Nations Convention on refugees. Equally, the BBC reports, a spokesman for European Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini has said that the plans would contravene EU asylum policy and the UK could not simply refuse to hear an asylum case.

No doubt it would break many other treaties too. This is not a sign that Britain is now ruled from Brussels or by the UN. It is a sign that. Unless it is North Korea or Hoxha's Albania, then any nation will have taken on numerous reciprocal obligations with other nations that it cannot wish away over night.

Michael Howard is aware of this, of course. Which suggests that his policy is not designed to be put into practice in a few months' time by a Conservative government after the next general election, but is intended to rally the core vote and limit the scale of his defeat.

He should be careful though. Benjamin Netanyahu, much to his surprise, was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1996 on a just such a manifesto and his premiership was a failure as a result.

Then there is the death of Conservatism as a philosophy in Britain. If Conservatives really do believe in the family, the centrality religion and the preservation of established authority, then they should be enjoying an enthusiastic reception for their views from many immigrant communities and renewing themselves from the same source.

As it is, the Conservatives seem to have nothing to say to those communities. This confirms the impression that the Tory Party exists to enable the wealthy to stay wealthy and to pander to the less attractive prejudices of their dwindling membership.

And, as I never miss an opportunity to point out, it is all Mrs Thatcher's fault.

Michael Howard and purple sheets

Continuing David Hemmings week, this report from the Daily Telegraph of his death last year reveals that Michael Howard is a great admirer of Blow-Up and sleeps in purple sheets.

Do the Tories have a death wish?

Michael Howard has told the Liverpool Daily Post that:

I would love to win seats in Liverpool and other big cities in the north, but we
can win the General Election without doing that.

Any sensible strategy for Conservative recovery must involve an attempt to expand the party's appeal beyond the older residents of the Home Counties. Yet here Howard seems to be envisaging, not just gaining seats, but winning the next election without making significant advances in the North.

The obvious explanation is that the Tories have lost their collective marbles. But there are two other possibilities.

One is that they are gambling on an even lower next time and reason that in such circumstances mobilising their core vote will be enough to bring them victory. While it might win back some seats for them in the South-East, it is hard to see this strategy gaining them enough seats to overturn Labour's huge majority.

The second possibility is that this concentration on the core vote is a defensive strategy aimed at stemming the further advance of the Liberal Democrats.

The question then is whether the Lib Dem analysis is right. We believe that society is becoming more liberal and that the Tories' core vote is shrinking. And if that core vote is shrinking then there are fewer and fewer seats where a reliance upon it will be enough.

The irony is that, if only the Conservatives could find it in them to reach out to, say, ethnic minority communities, they would find many people whose values are instinctively conservative.

Yet the more the leadership flatters the core vote and its dislike of foreigners, the less they are likely to attract new supporters.