For Lion & Unicorn: 10 years in the life of the Lib Dems

I've written another post for Lion & Unicorn. To celebrate its 10th year, the blog asked me to write about what the last decade has been like for the Liberal Democrats:

Swinson saw her party’s vote increase from 7.4 per cent of 2017 to 11.5 per cent, but its number of seats dropped from twelve to eleven, with none of the recent star recruits from Labour and the Conservatives (such as Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Sam Gyimah) managing to get re-elected in Lib Dem colours. 

And Swinson’s own East Dunbartonshire seat was one of the ones that were lost. In a striking illustration of the maxim that all politics is local, her defeat was attributed locally to her getting on the wrong side of an indoor bowls club in Milngavie.

Robert Jenrick: In the real world, If you lie about your CV you resign

Rachel Reeves and Jonathan Reynolds have been embarrassed in recent days by inaccuracies in their CVs on LinkedIn.

And these were perfectly valid stories for the media to investigate, even if what they have found looks to have been overhyped, at least in Reeves's case.

But one man was in no doubt that these stories were serious: step forward Robert Jenrick - you can see his tweet above.

Which makes this story from the Mirror rather amusing:

Ambitious Tory Robert Jenrick has been forced to correct his own CV - after accusing Labour politicians of embellishing theirs.

In a biography on his website, Mr Jenrick claims to have been "the joint youngest Cabinet Minister since the Second World War, tied with Harold Wilson and William Hague" when he was made Housing Secretary in 2019.

But he was 37 at the time he was elevated to the cabinet, while Wilson and Hague were 31 and 34 respectively when reaching Cabinet minister status.

Thanks to Peter Black for flagging it up.

The latest on the Labour Party and Hakluyt

Liberal England takes an interest in the "strategic advisory" firm Hakluyt, and its deepening relationship with Labour, for the recherché reason that it was co-founded by a son of the long-forgotten historical novelist Vaughan Wilkins.

Peter Geoghegan keeps us up to date with the latest news of Hakluyt and Labour in the London Review of Books:

Labour is said to have turned last September to another ‘strategic advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying. 

Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on Greenpeace activists on behalf of oil companies is supposedly a thing of the past. 

The company’s website looks more like that of a private bank than a corporate espionage outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board. 

‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told me. ‘It’s incredibly well connected. That’s how it can charge so much. Hakluyt wouldn’t get out of bed for less than a hundred grand.’ 

Its contact book is set to become even more valuable now Starmer has appointed its managing partner, Varun Chandra, a former investment banker who helped set up Tony Blair Associates, as his special adviser on business and investment (Chandra duly resigned from Hakluyt). He might well be joined in government by Olly Robbins, the former Brexit chief negotiator and a Hakluyt partner. Another Hakluyt executive is Tony Benn’s granddaughter Emily Benn.

The Honourable Emily Benn is the daughter of Stephen Benn, who became the third Viscount Stansgate upon the death of his father Tony Benn.

The Conservatives dropped Land of Hope and Glory and the Union Jack from their conference in 1998

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From the Independent, 18 September 1998

Land of Hope and Glory, the flying of the Union Jack and other overt shows of nationalism are to be dropped for the leader's speech at the Conservative Party conference.  

In a break with tradition by William Hague, the leader's speech is being brought forward a day, leaving the departing party chairman, Lord Parkinson, to wind up the conference the next day with the 84-piece Bournemouth youth orchestra playing the traditional Land of Hope and Glory and tunes from the four corners of the UK, including Scotland the Brave and Land of My Fathers.  

Officials said there would still be a rousing send-off for the party activists at the end of the conference, but it had been decided to make Mr Hague's speech a "more business-like" address, more in keeping with his McKinsey management consultant image.

You don't have to be a Marxist to agree that the Conservatives represent the interests of the wealthy but attempt to win over poorer voters by playing up 'culture war' issues.

Why then is the left determined to give the Tories the culture war they crave? 

The 'BBC to ban patriotic songs' story is a load of nonsense. But yesterday left-wing Twitter was full of people discussing how dreadful Land of Hope and Glory, Rule, Britannia and God Save the Queen are.

For myself, I can enjoy a song without endorsing all or even some of its implications. Which is just as well, considering how dodgy many Sixties classics are - take Keep on Running for a start.

That is why I have always defended the Liberal Democrat conference Glee Club against its critics. And I am happy to defend the Last Night of the Proms too, even though I rarely watch it.

Meanwhile, it is no surprise to discover that the Tories are as hypocritical on this issue as they are on many others.

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.

William Hague knew of Sir Peter Morrison's possible involvement in child abuse in North Wales

In July I wrote about Sir Peter Morrison and the rumours that circulated about him in the late 1980s.

Today's Daily Mail prints an extract from the new, expanded edition of Gyles Brandreth's Breaking the Code (which I mentioned a couple of days ago). Brandreth succeeded Morrison as Conservative MP for the City of Chester constituency.

Brandreth, as well as discussing his own experiences at prep school, writes:

The first, and only, official acknowledgement of my predecessor’s possible involvement in child abuse came my way in 1996, when William Hague, then Secretary of State for Wales, came up to me in the Commons to let me know that he had ordered an inquiry into allegations of child abuse in care homes in North Wales between 1974 and 1990 - and that Morrison’s name might feature in connection with the Bryn Estyn home in Wrexham, 12 miles from Chester.

As Brandreth says, nothing has been proved against Morrison. But Hague's warning does suggest these allegations were taken seriously in Conservative government circles.

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.

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.

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

William Hague to address next month's Lib Dem Conference

Or so tomorrow's Daily Mail (I know, I know) reckons:

Tory sources suggest Mr Hague will give a 'witty' address, rather than focusing heavily on policy.

A source said: "It is potentially a rather tense occasion that could be difficult to handle. But William is brilliant at piercing that sort of tension with humour."

Yes, the Mail has more sources than [fill in the name of your favourite celebrity chef here, though it doesn't quite work.]

Oh, and:

LibDem Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander and education minister Sarah Teather are expected to attend the Tory conference in October, but will have low-key roles, such as acting as chairmen of a fringe meeting.

Later. A note reaches me from Cowley Street:

William Hague is not part of the conference agenda and I can confirm that he has not been asked to speak at the Liberal Democrat conference. No Conservative ministers have ever been approached to speak at our conference.

Fringe events are still being finalised, and it is of course possible that an independent group may have invited Mr Hague to speak at their Fringe event. But this is no different to any other year and it is common for MPs of all parties to attend these events.

Given that we are part of a coalition government with the Conservatives, it would be a good idea if one of their senior members did address our Conference. Too many Liberal Democrats seem apologetic or depressed about the fact that we are in government.

The coalition cabinet takes shape - Clegg, Cable, Laws, Ashdown named

PoliticsHome thinks it knows who will be in the new cabinet.

So far it has listed:

Prime Minister - David Cameron

Deputy Prime Minister - Nick Clegg (unconfirmed)

Chancellor of the Exchequer - George Osborne

Chief Secretary to the Treasury - Vince Cable

Foreign Secretary - William Hague

Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families - David Laws

Secretary of State for Work and Pensions - Philip Hammond (unconfirmed)

Secretary of State for Health - Andrew Lansley

Secretary of State for Defence - Lord Ashdown (unconfirmed)

Later. I don't how much this is worth. Already it has changed its mind and put Liam Fox at Defence.

Lord Ashcroft: The Tories sold themselves cheaply

The really damaging thing about the Ashcroft affair is not that the Tories have received substantial funding from someone who is not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes. It is that senior shadow cabinet members have spent years squirming to find words that disguise this fact but do not involve telling an outright lie.

Some examples:

William Hague: My conclusion having asked him is that he fulfilled the obligations that were imposed on him at the time that he became a peer.

Interviewer: So is he resident in the UK and paying taxes here?
Caroline Spelman: A donation has to be made by an individual who is, who pays, tax in the United Kingdom.

David Cameron: Lord Ashcroft's tax status is a matter between him and the Inland Revenue. What I can say and what he has said is that the undertakings he gave at the time of being made a peer are undertakings that he is meeting.

Sir George Young: It's an undertaking which he gave to another body, and that body has been asked for documents. I don't know what those documents contain. We have to wait for the freedom of information process to complete its course. I'm sorry, but I just can't shed any light on this.

All these quotation are taken from an article published in the Guardian last month.

And they bring the judgement of David Cameron and his senior colleagues into serious question. They make it look as though they have been bought - "like a banana republic," as Chris Huhne put it.

Conservative bloggers have defended the party's acceptance of money from Lord Ashcroft on the grounds that his funding has not been that significant. Here is Iain Dale, for instance:

Since David Cameron became leader, less than five per cent of cash and in-kind donations have come from Bearwood Corporate Services, a company in which Lord Ashcroft has an interest. Since Q1 2006, Bearwood has donated £4,131,995 in cash and in-kind out of a total £90,723,018 donated to the Conservative Party in the same period (Electoral Commission register).

But saying that you did not get that much for it is an odd way of defending yourself against the charge that you have sold your good name.

This whole affair can be put down to a combination of inexperience and arrogance, which may well prove to be the besetting sins of Cameron and his circle.

House Points: William Hague and Iraq

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

Turning Tories

There should be a public inquiry, of course. Not an inquiry into the Iraq war, but an inquiry into William Hague.

It could look at the effects of allowing children to take an interest in politics at too early an age and also at the effects of teenage binge drinking -- they can be almost as damaging.

But what it should really look at is Hague’s conduct over Iraq. When war was declared in 2003 he was all Churchillian cadences. Like almost all his fellow Conservatives, he was determined to prove himself even more pro-American than Tony Blair was. (Several knights of the shires ruptured themselves in the attempt.)

As Charles Kennedy has written: "The Tories were derisive of those of us arguing the alternative case; I recall being labelled "Charlie Chamberlain" both inside and outside Parliament."

But on Tuesday Hague led calls for privy councillors to conduct an inquiry into the decision to go to war. How does he face himself in the mirror when he shaves his scalp every morning?

Labour’s reasons for not holding an inquiry were unconvincing. They tried two arguments. The first was to concede that one will be appropriate at some point, but not while "important operations" are going on in Iraq. The second was to claim there have already been four inquiries. The contradiction between them did not trouble David Milliband. Perhaps he had not noticed it?

Besides, it is increasingly hard to see British troops in Basra as engaged in important operations. Any action there now is taken by the Iraqi armed forces and Iraqi police. The British presence is dictated by a political wish to please the Americans rather than military demands.

Earlier, when asked about demonstrations over Tibet, Milliband talked of the need for free passage of the Olympic torch through Britain.

The tradition of a world tour for the torch dates back as far as 2004, while our expectation that there will be a grand opening ceremony for the Olympics comes from the Berlin Games of 1936. There the it was designed by Hitler's architect Albert Speer, who had previously created similar effects for the 1934 Nuremberg rally.

You can see why the Games appeal so much to the dictators in Beijing.