"Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

The rodent-toothed ambition of Boris Johnson and nihilism of Dominic Cummings have laid bare the uselessness of Britain’s constitution.

In a way we should be grateful to them.

For it’s no use having a political system built on gentlemen’s agreements if the participants aren’t gentlemen.

The monarchy and the BBC have proved powerless - just ask the Queen or Andrew Neil. Only John Bercow’s courage and love of the limelight has kept the government in check these past few months and now he has gone,

"Who cares for you?" said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

It seems that all those Liberals who banged on about the need for a written constitution were right.

The choice we face is Liberalism or barbarism.

So farewell then Andrew Neil and This Week

It was announced today that Andrew Neil is giving up presenting This Week and the BBC is taking the opportunity to scrap the programme.

There was a time when I never missed This Week. The problem, as a confirmed hater of Question Time, was how to fill the 20 minutes between Newsnight ended and it began.

Then I got older and realised that I could go to bed and watch it on iPlayer the next day.

Then I gave up watching it at all.

There were always too many "funny" items that weren't funny - step forward Kevin Maguire and Quentin Letts.

But Andrew Neil is a better broadcaster than the Dimblebys added to John Humphrys and multiplied several times over.

OK so he has run with the hare and hunted with the hounds too much recently, but at his best he is peerless. The BBC should have made better use of him.

I remember, in the days when he was seen as a meritocrat from a humble background, Neil's forensic politeness forcing from Michael Gove the admission that his adoptive parents had paid for him to attend one of Scotland's most expensive private schools.

And This Week could be brilliant. I remember a riveting discussion of alcoholism with Shirley Williams and Rosie Boycott on the evening of the day that Charles Kennedy resigned as Liberal Democrat leader.

I used to grumble about its late-night slot, but maybe the BBC should have made a virtue of it and made it open ended - something along the lines of Channel 4's old After Dark.

If you keep politicians up late enough and lubricate them with Blue Nun, they start to tell the truth.

Six of the Best 805

Brexiteers who look to Donald Trump for help will be disappointed. Dana Allin explains why.

Oliver Stanton has some sensible ideas from improving the Liberal Democrats' online presence.

"A shorter overall running time and a focus on producing even smaller bits of content risks robbing viewers of some of the current programme’s interrogative depth. Save for the various Sunday shows British TV is not running over with dedicated political interview programming, and [Andrew] Neil is one of the best in the business." Henry Hill is rightly critical of the BBC's decision to scrap the Daily Politics and Sunday Politics.

Neal Ascherson contributes a characteristically brilliant review of Katherine Verdery account of her time in Ceauşescu’s Romania: "The crowning mercy of human relations is that we don’t know what other people are really thinking about us. They – those others – decide what redacted selection we are offered. But to read one’s police file is – suddenly – to have the curtain pulled open. The self you think you know becomes a mask, concealing a devious somebody else whose relationships are mere espionage fakes."

Helen Day introduces a Canterbury exhibition of the other work of the artists who illustrated Ladybird Books. We get to meet the real Peter and Jane too.

Have a look round Shrewsbury's last watchtower with Chris Schurke. I want to live there.

The men in sandals come for Tim Farron

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Tim Farron more than doubled the Liberal Democrat membership and presided over an increase in the number of Lib Dem MPs at last week's general election.

But that was not enough for those anonymous "Lib Dem sources".

Understand some Lib Dems inc Paddick went to see Tim Farron to ask him to go. He initially said no.

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) June 14, 2017

I am sorry to see Tim go. I think he did as well as could be expected in the near impossible circumstances in which he won the leadership.

The election campaign came too soon for him, with the result that a lot of voters did not know who he was. But with the exception of interview with Andrew Neil, he did well.

The Lib Dems' problems, as shown by the fall of our vote last week, run deep. We need some hard thinking about what the party is for and where our future lies. A leadership election is as likely to distract from that as aid it.

Tim's statement today was perhaps the worst thing he has done as leader.

No doubt it was true that:

“To be a political leader – especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 – and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”

But I would suggest this shows the problem with the rather sectarian Evangelical Christianity that Tim favours. Charles Kennedy being a Catholic never seemed to worry him or anyone else.

Maybe it also reveals a problem with modern liberalism. It is not enough for people to tolerate the currently approved progressive view: you have to embrace it or you are no liberal.

Nick Cohen says behind a paywall somewhere that, while we say we are fed up with indentikit PPE-and-think-tank politicians, the truth is that anyone who departs from model is hounded for it.

I suspect Tim's rise and fall shows the truth of that.

No one knows anything about politics – here are my 12 hot takes on the general election result

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More and more, I feel that William Goldman’s view of the film business

"Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."

also applies to politics.

Plenty of political bloggers offer hot takes, but they generally turn out to be wrong.

I was more circumspect during the election campaign, offering two modest predictions that turned out to be correct.

The Liberal Democrats did have a good chance of winning Bath and the Conservatives did fail to gain Leicester West.

Still, though you wouldn’t think it sometimes, Liberal England is meant to be a political bog. So here are a dozen thoughts on the general election and its aftermath.

1. What I got badly wrong about the election

Like most commentators, I was convinced that Jeremy Corbyn would crash and burn when he was exposed to the scrutiny of a general election campaign. But it turned out that his chilling with the military wing of Irish Republicanism was too long ago to interest most voters.

More than that, he came over as human when set against the wooden Theresa May. He even overcame his hatred of journalists (remember that grim, silent walk the night he was elected?) to give some good interviews.

Labour’s success means that the people who declined to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet will now make themselves available. This will mean more credible people appearing for Labour on television (sorry, Richard Burgon) and that any talk of a new centre party is dead (sorry, Lord Mandelson).

2. What I got right about British politics

For years I have believed (or clung to the belief) that if the Conservatives moved to the right to chase Ukip’s vote they would alienate their more moderate supporters. And that is more or less what happened. I find that immensely reassuring for the future of the country.

3. Jeremy Corbyn has been good for political debate

For years British general elections have been fought on a narrow strip of territory. They supported the free market and supported public services (though not too much). Jeremy Corbyn has changed all that. I doubt the costings in his manifesto: in fact it reminded me of the Labourism that foundered in the 1970s, but that is also too long ago to interest most voters.

What his manifesto did do was offer voters the hope that things could be different. He has opened up territory that other politicians may one day occupy.

4. The DUP blinks in the unaccustomed sunlight

When Liberal Democrats joined the cabinet one was forced to resign within weeks and another ended up in prison. DUP MPs are not nor going to become ministers, but they may well find the sudden media interest in them and their MPs equally uncomfortable.

I also suspect that the alliance with them will end in tears for the Conservatives too.

5. "I am the ghost of your tuition fees decision"

The decision to support the introduction of tuition fees under the Coalition continues to haunt the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg in particular. As the surge of support for Labour among young voters yesterday showed, the really damaging thing about the decision is not merely that it undermined trust in us. The real problem was that it was politically obtuse.  How can a liberal party expect to flourish without the support of educated young voters?

6. Time to be honest about the level of Liberal Democrat support

After half a dozen results had been declared last night I was moved to tweet what no one else in my timeline was saying: those results were uniformly awful for the Liberal Democrats. I am delighted that we won a dozen seats – that was far better than I feared we might do – but we have to face the fact that in seats where we do not campaign, the Liberal Democrat vote is vanishingly small.

And even in seats where we had the MP a few years ago or where we have traditionally recorded a respectable second place, that vote is now disappointingly low. (I am thinking of Ludlow and Harborough, seats I know well.)

Yet the same patterns has been true of local elections for years now, and it has also passed unremarked. There are some great gains – greeted with #libdemfightback – but where we do not campaign hardly anyone votes for us now.

We need to talk about this problem as a first step to addressing it.

7. Tim Farron: The boy done goodish

Leaving aside his interview with Andrew Neil (the two have always had a scratchy relationship and Tim appeared poorly briefed for Neil’s easily predictable lines of attack), Tim did pretty well. He was always telling people that he came from Preston and had four children, but then the election came too soon for him with the result that few people knew who he was. It is natural that he should try to tell them.

Calling for a change of leader can be a way of avoiding deeper thought about the party’s purpose and direction. And then there are those who are convinced that a front-line politician must have a Southern, public school and Oxbridge background…

8. Theresa May: You have to laugh

Has there even been a less credible British prime minister? Quite what Theresa May stands for, wants to achieve or why she considers herself fitted for the job remain a mystery.

Her credibility has gone, most importantly to her own party. That means that her colleagues will be politicking for the contest to succeed her and every time something goes wrong there will be press speculation about her being replaced.

My guess is that we will start to hear stories about her brave struggle with her health problems and she will be gone sooner rather than later.

9. Mourning the loss of Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg’s defeat was a loss to the Liberal Democrats and a loss to political debate generally. I like Nick and hope he will stick around in some role, but I wonder if, deep down, he was more suited to being a technocrat than a politician. I remember a review of his book Politics: Between the Extremes by James Kirkup:

"Politics is about arguments, about persuading people, by fair means or foul, to lend you their votes and their permission to rule. And this is what baffles Clegg."

10. Ukip is not dead yet

When we have finished laughing at the self-immolation of Paul Nuttall, remember that there may be a by-election in South Thanet one day and that Nigel Farage could be Ukip’s candidate and could win it. The party has fallen apart and reassembled itself several times over the past 20 years. It could easily happen again.

11. No Liberal Democrat MPs in Wales

If you can hear a rumbling sound from the direction of Llanystumdwy, it is Lloyd George turning in his grave. There are no Liberal MPs left in Wales.

12. The power of the press

Some have argued that this election represents the triumph of social media and that the newspapers have lost their hold over voters. I was always sceptical that they had such a hold. Generally speaking, Rupert Murdoch backed politicians because they were going to win: they didn’t win because he backed them.

Andrew Neil makes Grant Shapps squirm on Conservative election expenses

"You knew nothing about this?" asks @afneil about Tory election spending claims

"No" says @grantshapps #bbcdp https://t.co/1yXp8VOYkC

— DailySunday Politics (@daily_politics) May 4, 2016

From today's Daily Politics.

Michael Crick and Andrew Neil on Conservative election expenses

"Something has to be done by the beginning of June" @MichaelLCrick tells @afneil on possible #battlebus prosecutions https://t.co/qmwyu9R6Kz

— DailySunday Politics (@daily_politics) April 21, 2016

Following the new revelations on Channel 4 News last night, Michael Crick appeared on today's Daily Politics.

Tim Farron: Too bad, too good

The Liberal Democrat blogosphere has been strangely quiet about Tim Farron's appearance on Sunday Politics.

Taking into account that it is harder to be interviewed down the line and that Andrew Neil seems to enjoy needling Tim, it was still a poor performance.

In particular, Tim must have known he would be challenged during the leadership contest on his record on equal marriage.

He really should have worked out a reply that did not lead to his having to apologise to Peter Tatchell.

If Tim has changed his mind on the question then he should say so. There is no shame in changing your mind.

In fact, given that equal marriage was not even on the horizon 20 years ago and is now so widely supported, pretty much everyone has changed his or her mind on the question.

On a happier note, Tim's speech to the Gladstone Club was very good:

We’ve fallen into a style of fighting elections which relied on identifying ourselves as the main challenger to whoever held the seat, and then mobilising local grievances to convince the voters that we were on their side, whatever they thought and whether or not they were remotely Liberal in their beliefs. 

"What we actually stood for and believed was almost irrelevant, except during atypical periods such as the war in Iraq – with the result that while the electorate began to recognise a few things we were against – the Iraq war, tuition fees, cuts in local services – they hadn’t the faintest clue of what we were for."

I don't know what Tim's solution is, but as a definition of the problem we face this is spot on.

Ed Davey hit by Daily Politics sign on live TV

David Frost's tips on political interviews

I was sorry to hear of the death of Sir David Frost today, if only because he was one of the increasingly few public figures who had been there all my life.

And it is appropriate that Andrew Neil should be in this clip too. When he wants to be, he is Britain's best political interviewer because he has learnt Frost's lesson that being polite and friendly is far more likely to win admissions from the interviewee than are bluster and interruptions.

Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys please note.

Calder on Air: Come Dine With Me, Service and Andrew Neil

My column from today's Liberal Democrat News.

TV Torment

Our relationship with television has changed. When I first attended Liberal Assemblies in the 1980s, most delegates, when approached by a camera crew, would feel intimidated and back away. At modern Liberal Democrat Conferences everyone is able to give a polished sound bite on demand.

It has changed more than that. Embarrassing Bodies invites us to believe there are numerous people, too bashful to visit their doctor, who are nevertheless prepared to display their naughty bits on evening television.

A different ordeal is suffered by contestants on Come Dine With Me (Channel 4): their homes, cooking and characters are dissected by the snide voice over of Dave Lamb. Yet there is no shortage of people to appear on the show, and last week one of them was Alex Foster, a councillor from Nottingham and one of the editorial team that runs the blog Liberal Democrat Voice.

I asked Alex about the experience. “Why did I apply? Because I like the show, and I was fascinated to see how it was made. I'm very glad I did it, and it was an extremely interesting experience.” But not all was as it seemed on screen. As Alex told the Nottingham Evening Post, guests were sometimes kept waiting in taxis for 90 minutes before making their entrance to the host’s house. “Then after the two courses, they would spend over an hour recording interviews before dessert.”

As the week’s winner (not Alex, I am afraid) told the Post: “The nights start at around 6 p.m. and the majority ... finished after 3 a.m. It was so tiring ... if I knew ... what I was in for I would never have let my friend submit my name.”

Alex found what many have found before him: that television is a reducing medium. If you are interviewed by a newspaper you can be surprised how long a piece they can make out of it, but it is not like that on screen. Alex was “amazed by how much did not make the final cut,” including a trip to a windmill to buy flour for his bread. And of 20 minutes filming him bell-ringing with his guests (a very Alex touch) “only about 10 seconds was shown.”

******

Stories like this make it safe to conclude that nothing on television is as it seems, but maybe there are exceptions. Michel Roux Jr’s Service (BBC2) came across as being about as real as reality television ever gets. On any other series, you suspect, Jamal would have been kept in because he was “feisty” and “made good television” – think of the way Alan Sugar kept Stuart Beggs in The Apprentice for so long – but Roux quickly divined that he had no wish to be a waiter and slung him out.

Service in terrible in Britain, says Roux. And as with many unfortunate phenomena here, class is behind it somewhere. As one of the other professionals in the series observed, in France being a waiter does not make you a servant – it is a profession.

And the programme did emphasise what a divided society we are. Some of the trainees, Roux said wonderingly at one point, had never been in a restaurant before. This reminded the viewer of another recent programme on the class divide, Andrew Neil’s Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain (BBC2). During it, Neil went back to his old school (the former Paisley Grammar) to talk to current students. What was most depressing was their assumption that a top universities like St Andrews were not for them.

You can blame lack of aspiration, but what is the cause of that lack? Neil’s own explanation for our widening class divide is hard to ignore: “Almost uniquely, Britain has developed a largely egalitarian non-selective state school system alongside an aggressive, highly selective private system. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the top jobs are once again falling into the lap of the latter.”

Andrew Neil on why a narrow elite runs Britain

Earlier this week I mentioned that Andrew Neil has a programme on BBC Two this evening (starting at 9 p.m.) asking why it is that the British political system is increasingly dominated by people who were privately educated.

He has also written an article on the subject for the BBC website:

The decline of the unions has clearly cut off one working-class route to Westminster. So has the decline of an affluent, aspiring working class, which seemed to disappear with the end of the Industrial Age.

But our education system must have something to do with it as well. Almost uniquely, Britain has developed a largely egalitarian non-selective state school system alongside an aggressive highly-selective private system. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the top jobs are once again falling into the lap of the latter.

So farewell then Andy Coulson

When the Guardian broke the News of the World phone-hacking story in July 2009 I wrote that it "could be a huge political scandal". So far that has to count as a bit of an overstatement, but the affair did for Andy Coulson today.

The case against him was always as I expressed it in that original post:

as Andrew Neil explained on Newsnight yesterday evening, it is inconceivable that Coulson would not have quizzed his reporters about their methods when they came to him with big stories.

An editor has to be able to judge the truth of a story and how defensible it would be in court. The way the story was come by is central to both these question.

If this affair, as appears to be happening, now comes to centre on relations between the News International and the police then it could still turn into a huge scandal.

In any case, I can claim to be more prophetic than Guido Fawkes, who has always argued that Coulson would survive. Try a post from 11 December of last year:

What has been a politically motivated attack by enemies of the Murdoch press was bound to fail without a smoking gun, however much they huffed and puffed.

Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain

It may annoy some recent commenters on this blog, but this is a potentially important and interesting programme. From the BBC Two website:

David Cameron and Nick Clegg seem made for each other: Eton and Oxford meets Westminster School and Cambridge. But does the return of public school boys to the top of our politics say something worrying about the decline of social mobility in Britain?

Andrew Neil goes on a journey from the Scottish council house he grew up in to the corridors of power to ask if we will ever again see a prime minister emerge from an ordinary background like his.

In this provocative film Andrew seeks to find out why politicians from all parties appear to be drawn from an ever smaller social pool - and why it matters to us all.

Posh and Posher - a silly title - is being shown next Wednesday, 26 January, at 9 p.m. on BBC Two.

Later: Read more on Andrew Neil's programme.

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.

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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!”