Why the Lib Dem fuel duty cut would not reduce petrol prices

I don'r recall any debate about it within the party, but it's now Liberal Democrat policy to cut fuel duty by 10p. This, we claim, would bring down prices at the pump by 12p per litre.

But I don't believe it would.

Petrol prices at the pump have gone up because the US attack on Iran has led to less crude oil coming on to the world market. This has increased wholesale prices.

The Liberal Democrat fuel duty cut would do nothing about situation in the Gulf, so no more oil wuold be available for refining.

What it would do is give motorists a bit more cash to spend. And in the absence of any increase in the supply of petrol, that cash would bid up prices at the pump more or less by the amount of the duty cut.

You should add ceteris paribus after any statement about the economy, if only to make yourself sound learned, but I can't see any flaws in this argument.

I feel a certain nostalgia for the years the days when the Lib Dem front bench included Vince Cable, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Steve Webb. We need to have something more substantial to say about the economy than this.

The real Oliver Twist - with a note on the 2007 Liberal Democrat leadership contest

Literary characters are usually created from a wide range of sources, but I can claim to have worked with the model for someone in Malcolm Bradbury's Eating People is Wrong. 

And on the Guardian website today Nicholas Blincoe advances the claim that Oliver Twist was based on his ancestor Robert Blincoe.

Robert Blincoe became famous on the 1830s after publishing his autobiography, A Memoir of Robert Blincoe. It told of a childhood spent in a workhouse and as a worker in a cotton mill from the age of seven.

Nicholas Blincoe writes:

Robert Blincoe’s memoir has remained in print since the late 1960s and the claim that it is the source for Oliver Twist has become well established. There is solid textual evidence for it. The workhouse chapters that open each book introduce the same events in the same order, ending with a dramatic confrontation with the local chimneysweeps. 

I discovered that the 1828 edition of the memoir had been published on Fleet Street, out of a bookshop that Dickens passed daily, running between his shorthand shifts at a courtroom near St Paul’s and his night shifts at parliament, where he worked for a rival to Hansard. Dickens was employed there when Doherty’s work was debated, and when Robert appeared as a witness at a parliamentary inquiry.

Now he has published a book called Oliver Twist & Me, which has been described as: "A fascinating family and social history and a savage indictment of the role of child slavery in the growth of the Industrial Revolution."

When I saw the name Nicholas Blincoe, some faint blogging bells rang. Sure enough, I found that he had written an article for the Guardian website during the 2007 Liberal Democrat leadership election in which he attacked Chris Huhne while declaring himself a member of Nick Clegg's campaign team.

I find that I wrote at the time:

The silliest point occurs where Blincoe accuses Huhne of being posh. This is a childish insult at the best of times, but in a contest where both candidates attended the same public school it is simply ludicrous.

Get me. But you have heard James Graham on the subject.

Anyway, the Clegg campaign disowned Blincoe - apparently he had given Clegg some advice on arts policy in the past - and their man went on to win the election.

It was all a long time ago and, as someone who is so obsessed with Oliver Twist that he's published two book chapters on it, I like what Blincoe has to say about the book today:

Thinking of Robert’s memoir as a group effort has made me reassess Dickens’s work. In the period around publication of Oliver Twist, he created his own legend as the great singular author. 

But his writing continues to hold such power because it blossomed into a multiverse thanks to contributions that came later, like Oliver!. Dickens lives not because he is unique, but because he has become part of a collective endeavour. God bless us, everyone.

In fact, I think I shall buy Oliver Twist & Me.

"Morals more akin to the Mafia": Chris Huhne on the methods of the Murdoch empire

Chris Huhne says the public documents in the cases brought by three former Liberal Democrat ministers - Vince Cable, Norman Lamb and Huhne himself - show that phone-hacking was directed by News Group executives who had no journalistic role.

This hacking, claims Huhne in an article for Byline Times, had two objectives:

The first was to target political figures who were perceived to be unsympathetic to News and Murdoch in order to smooth the way for achieving the boss's is objectives. 

The second was to gather intelligence from the heart of government in order to further News's objectives, in particular, the purchase of the 61 per cent of Sky - BSkyB - that the Murdoch's family did not own. Murdoch wanted to stop ministers referring the bid for a time-consuming review - and possible veto - by the competition authorities.

The reason this is so important is because is because it is about using illegal information gathering for corporate purposes is such as spying and getting rid of opponents and obstacles.

Read the full article on Byline Times. It will 

Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb sue Sun and News of the World publisher over phone hacking

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Claiming an exclusive, the Guardian reports that three senior Liberal Democrat politicians, Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb, are

suing the publisher of the Sun and the defunct News of the World, claiming that their phones were hacked for stories or to “exert political influence”, including when Rupert Murdoch was seeking approval for a takeover of BSkyB.

Journalists working at Murdoch’s newspapers are said to have unlawfully targeted the former business secretary Vince Cable as well as Chris Huhne, a former energy and climate change secretary, and Norman Lamb, a whip and sometime adviser to the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

The purpose of the attempts to access the men’s voicemail messages during their time in coalition with the Conservatives and to carry out other “unlawful information gathering” had been to source stories about them in order to “sell newspapers”, but to also influence political events, according to the claims lodged at the high court, which have been denied.

The report goes on to say that Vince Cable claims that between 27 July 2004 and 31 December 2011, a total of 383 calls were made by journalists at the Wapping headquarters of the Sun and News of the World, "the overwhelming majority of which he will infer were made for the purposes of unlawfully intercepting his voicemail messages".

Norman Lamb on his time as a minister... and Danny Alexander

Norman Lamb has been interviewed by the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflect series.

You can see a short clip from it above and read the full transcript on the IfG website. (The interview took place in March 2020.)

As the Liberal Democrats could find themselves part of a coalition government after the next election, it's important that we learn from our unhappy experience between 2010 and 2015. So this interview makes useful reading.

But it may not make happy reading for Danny Alexander, who does not come out of it well.

Here, for instance, is Norman Lamb talking about his role as Nick Clegg's parliamentary private secretary, which he took on after the offer of a ministerial role was clumsily withdrawn:

I found it to be a fairly hollow role. I was involved in central discussions and I became part of the core team around Nick, but I was also conscious that the power lay with Nick and Danny - Nick primarily went to Danny and not anyone else - which caused, I think, some frustration amongst many people. A lot of people felt that Danny wasn't necessarily the best influence on Nick, and I still feel that strongly.

And when asked by the interviewer to expand on this point, Lamb says:

I think that Danny was hopeless on the health reforms, he passed it all and didn’t really understand the issues, in my view. In my view, the great sadness was David Laws falling early as the chief secretary .... The caricature of David was as right wing, as a sort of Tory in disguise, but actually, internally, he wasn’t. He was the one who was fighting against ending the indexing of benefits, he was fighting for a real terms increase in education spend and a real value to the pupil premium. 

His fall from the Treasury meant that we lost an intellectually coherent Liberal in the Treasury. We ended up with someone who was trying to convince Tories that he could be trusted doing this vital role of chief secretary to the Treasury. It was a case of overcompensating, which you quite often see.

That overcompensation was pretty much official Liberal Democrat strategy after 2010 - you can learn that from an article written by Nick Clegg's then political adviser, Richard Reeves, in 2012.

Reeves thought the Liberal Democrats had first to prove they were mature enough to be in government, but it is hard to imagine any other party burdening itself with this demand when it had just won a share of power through the ballot box.

A better model, Norman Lamb suggests, was that offered by Norman Baker as a transport minister. Lamb recalls that Philip Hammond (then the transport secretary) complaining to him that Baker was difficult to work with and did not comply with the protocols:

Norman, who I’ve got a lot of time for, was a press junkie who was just going off and actually doing what he ought to be doing, I think getting the message out there about what a Lib Dem minister was achieving. 

Lamb goes on to add:

The interesting thing was that the two of them ended up getting on quite well in transport and having a degree of mutual respect, I think because they were both assiduous - I think the dynamic ended up working quite well.

So next time we Liberal Democrats find ourselves in coalition, we need to have more confidence in ourselves and in the approach to the country's problems that we have just fought an election on.

And we need to make sure  we have someone at the treasury with the intellectual equipment and confidence to stand up for themselves.

In 2010 our front bench had as much expertise on economics, if not more, as those of the two larger parties. Think Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, David Laws and Steve Webb. We should have drawn on that pool of talent and used Danny Alexander's talents differently.

You can explore all the Ministers Reflect interviews on the Institute for Government website.

Is social class the elephant in the Liberal Democrat room?

One of the best things about our party is that we are so sensitive to the many reasons that people can suffer discrimination.

Yet I cannot recall any Liberal Democrat blogger or tweeter noting that, after two consecutive Lib Dem leaders educated in state schools, this year saw a contest in which both candidates has been privately educated.

Is social class the elephant in the Liberal Democrat room?

At least 2020 did not see a contest where the two candidates had been to the same expensive school. This happened when Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne disputed the party leadership in 2007.

Ed Davey and Layla Moran: It's déjà vu all over again

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Calder's Sixth Law of Politics holds that all Lib Dem leadership elections are reruns of the Liberal Party leadership contest between David Steel and John Pardoe in 1976.

As I once blogged:

You could argue that the 1976 contest set a pattern for later Liberal and Liberal Democrat leadership elections.

One candidate (Steel) was orthodox, sensible and just a little dull. The other (Pardoe) was more charismatic, more open to new ideas and just a little unreliable in his judgement.

So in later contests Paddy Ashdown was a Pardoe and Alan Beith was a Steel. And Chris Huhne was a Pardoe and Ming Campbell and then Nick Clegg were Steels.

Not all contests have obeyed my law as clearly, but this time it is spot on. It's clear that Ed Davey is the Steel and Layla Moran is the Pardoe.

For me, Ed is being a bit too much of a Steel for his own good, but I shall not be declaring my support for either candidate until I have seen more of the campaign. I have urged the same course of action on other Lib Dem members.

In case you are curious, you can find all seven of my Laws of Politics in a recent post on this blog.

I shall be voting for Ed Davey

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Andrew Rawnsley, while recognising what an important figure the winner may turn out to be, complains that the current contest for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats is "as exciting as a bowl of tofu":

The audience in a lecture theatre at the London School of Economics asks thoughtful questions. The rivals, taking it in turn to answer, are unfailingly courteous towards each other. 

There is no shouting, interrupting or name-calling. I have heard ruder conversations between nuns. 

When one contestant speaks, the other spends a lot of time nodding along in agreement. They even smile at each other’s tepid jokes.

I have suggested in the past that the customary niceness of our leadership contests may not serve the party well.

In 2015 neither Tim Farron's views on gay sex, which were to hamper us at the 2017 general election, nor Norman Lamb's views on Europe, which might well have proved more of a burden, were subject to scrutiny.

And back in 2007, Nick Clegg was outraged when Chris Huhne pointed out that he held views on public spending that were at odds with those of the bulk of Lib Dem members.

That turned out to be very important in 2010.

The niceness and lack of disagreement this time has made it hard to decide between Ed Davey and Jo Swinson. But I have made up my mind to vote for Ed.

The reason is that I am clearer about what I would be getting from his leadership. The emphasis on the environment and belief in the Lib Dems as standard-bearers for Liberalism speaks to me and has been laid out in some detail.

Jo, by contrast, speaks of "a liberal movement" and says we must "transform the economy so it works for people and the planet".

The former may well mean no more than the handful of local pacts I supported in a post the other day, but I fear it may mean a grand strategy that falls flat. Call it David Steel Syndrome.

And the latter could appeal to me, but I have little idea of what it would mean in practice. How would party policy have to change to make it a reality? I have tried to find out but I don't know.

Jo Swinson's campaign has operated at a level of abstractness that worries me. If you want to see the difference between the two candidates, take a look at the questions Liberator put to them.

One asked if, in the event of Brexit taking place, we should become the party of "back in" the EU.

Ed said yes. Jo told us how important it is we fight Brexit, almost got round to saying yes, but then went back to telling us how important it is that we fight Brexit.

This lack of detail in Jo's answers throws me back on looking at her personality, and that has never quite appealed to me as much as obviously does to some people in the party.

In fact, I find the attitude of some of her supporters online rather grating, though it would be wrong to let that affect how I vote.

I voted for Jackie Ballard as Lib Dem leader back in 1999 and looked forward to voting for Layla Moran this time, so I am sorry not to be voting for a woman.

But it's Ed Davey for me. Better the angel you know.

Is Jo Swinson the Steel and Layla Moran the Pardoe?

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A few years ago I floated a theory about Liberal Party and Liberal Democrat leadership elections: the are all reruns of the 1976 contest between David Steel and John Pardoe:

One candidate (Steel) was orthodox, sensible and just a little dull. The other (Pardoe) was more charismatic, more open to new ideas and just a little unreliable in his judgement. 

So in later contests Paddy Ashdown was a Pardoe and Alan Beith was a Steel. And Chris Huhne was a Pardoe and Ming Campbell and then Nick Clegg were Steels.

I even tried to apply this rule to Liberal history, with Asquith being the Steel and Lloyd George the Pardoe.

Andrew Hickey, in a tweet today, kindly suggested this distinction was a more enlightening way of analysing Lib Dem internal debates than the concepts of left and right.

He also said he wouldn't compare anyone to Steel at the moment, for obvious reasons, but I am not so discerning.

So what of the forthcoming Lib Dem leadership contest?

My feeling, looking at the expected front runners  is that Jo Swinson is the Steel and Layla Moran the Pardoe.

For what it is worth, I always vote for the Pardoe and the Steel usually wins.

Lembit Opik: “I have been asked to stand for the Estonian Presidency"

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In what the Mirror credibly labels an "Exclusive", Lembit Opik claims that he's been asked by multiple parties to stand as the President of Estonia, despite never having lived there:

Opik claims he is the second best-known Estonian in the World after the 83-year old classical composer Arvo Part.

Part and a part you might say, if you had less tact than me.

Lembit tells the Mirror every time he appears on Estonian television, people ask when he is going to move there. He says:

"I’m interested in Estonian politics because I’ve invested a lot of time in helping the Estonian political system develop. Former members of my family have also been involved in politics in Estonia so there’s a natural fit there."

One former member of Lembit's family who was involved is Estonian politics is great uncle Oskar, who was a member of the puppet Nazi government that ruled the country between 1941 and 1944.

The only substantial account of his career I can find is in the Daily Mail, which treated it as a piece of whataboutery after Chris Huhne had condemned David Cameron's decision - in retrospect, a disaster for his party and country - to pull the Conservatives out of the mainstream Conservative group in the European parliament.

Anyway, the article tells us that:

A post-war Estonian investigation into crimes against humanity named Oskar Opik as one of eight officials who ‘share responsibility with the German authorities, by virtue of their office, for all criminal actions carried out in Estonia, and beyond its borders by military units or police battalions raised with their consent during the period of the German occupation’. 

He and the other directors were ‘responsible by virtue of the positions they held, for having given orders which resulted in crimes against humanity’. 

Oskar Opik always denied having any jurisdiction over political prisoners. But the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity stated that ‘the directorate’s autonomy, in particular, enabled them to maintain police structures that co-operated with the Germans in rounding up and killing Estonian Jews and Roma, and in seeking out and killing Estonians deemed to be opponents of the occupiers’. 

Not being a public-school Stalinist like Seumas Milne, I can recognise that, contested by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, Estonia was in an impossible position. But this historical baggage is unlikely to be helpful if Lembit really does have serious political ambitions there.

But, beyond that, Estonia is now faced with a serious threat from Putin's Russia. Putting it politely as one can, I doubt that a man who contrived to lose Montgomeryshire for the Liberals is the man the country needs to keep it safe.

Forget “the Lib Dem family”: Let’s have proper leadership elections

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The first Liberal Party leadership election I followed was the one between David Steel and John Pardoe in 1976.

I can recall two incidents from the campaign, the first of them being that Steel’s camp suggested Pardoe wore a wig. (Years later someone from that era told me there might have been something in it.)

The second is that the Steel-supporting Clement Freud (MP, panel-show contestant and rapist) produced a quotation from A.A. Milne to describe Pardoe’s campaigning style:

With one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully. "Have I won?"

Steel, incidentally, would be Rabbit, with the posse of advisers, assistants and minor Commonwealth dignitaries that used to accompany him being his equivalent of the Friends and Relations.

The point of all this is to remind my fellow Liberal Democrats that our leadership elections are not always very enlightening.

So while it would have been to see someone stand against Vince Cable last summer, there is no guarantee it would have led to the debate about our future that those keenest on a contest wanted to see.

Because I can think of two contested Lib Dem leadership elections where the debate that was ducked.
Let me first take you back to 2007 and the contest between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.

The most noteworthy event of the campaign was an joint appearance on BBC1’s The Politics Show on Sunday morning where a briefing from Huhne’s camp was produced by the interviewer. It was headed “Calamity Clegg” and listed instances where Clegg had endorsed cuts in public spending.
I blogged about it at the time:

Clearly, the headline "Calamity Clegg" was a huge misjudgement on someone's part - and adopting the American "flip-flop" charge was silly and vulgar - but surely we are allowed to discuss policy in a leadership campaign? 

Nick Clegg began this one by pledging to take the party out of its comfort zone, but has since failed to give us much idea of what that might involve. He can hardly complain if another candidate starts to speculate on his intentions as a result. 

And dismissing any attempt to debate policy as creating "synthetic differences ... [which] our opponents will use against us" is just silly.

As the ensuing years were to show, Nick Clegg was less wedded to high levels of public spending than the bulk of the party – just look at the cuts in local government funding the Coalition brought in if you doubt me.

This disagreement over public spending should have been at the heart of the contesnt, but there was a widespread attitude withln the party that it was poor taste of Huhne to raise it at all.

Fast forward to 2015 and Tim Farron vs Norman Lamb.

The idea that Farron’s Evangelical variety of Christianity might prove a difficulty for him as leader was in the air, but for the most part it was raised obliquely.

Lamb put a lot of emphasis on his support for the ‘right to die’ because, I suggested at the time, it was an issue where most Lib Dem members agreed him but one where Farron’s beliefs would make it hard for him to do so.

If Lamb had raised Farron’s religion more directly, I doubt his action would have been well received within the party. Certainly, when some of Lamb’s supporters engaged in what sounded like negative push-polling, it was an embarrassment to him.

The result was that Farron’s religion was not discussed and the suggestion it might prove a handicap to him as leader was never broached.

It looks to me as though we Lib Dems are too scared of rocking the boat to have really informative leadership elections.

Some like to talk of the “Lib Dem family,” but in my experience happy families are those that can have lively discussions, even rows, and make their peace afterwards.

We Lib Dems, by contrast, resemble an unhappy family where everyone is sat around the dining table on their best behaviour and terrified of saying the wrong thing.

The children of Sussex spinners of the 1970s: 2. Theo Barclay

A little idle googling last October led to the discovery that Giles Cheatle, a left-arm spinner who played for Sussex in the 1970s, has a daughter. And that daughter, Lauren Cheatle, is a promising left-arm seamer and a member of the Australian women's squad.

The post about them has a lovely photograph of her in action.

In a charity shop on Saturday I picked up a copy of John Barclay's Lost in the Long Grass.

Barclay played in the same Sussex side as Cheatle as an opening batsman and off spinner. He later became the club's captain, though Cheatle had left for Surrey by then.

A little more googling revealed that Barclay is the father of the Theo Barclay who has just published Fighters And Quitters: Great Political Resignations:

Each chapter focuses on a different episode, from the former minister who faked his own death in the 1970s to Geoffrey Howe's perfectly executed plot to topple the Prime Minister in the 1990s and Chris Huhne's swift journey from despatch box to jail cell in the 2010s.

You can watch Theo Barclay talking about the book on a recent edition of The Daily Politics - the item starts at 53.00.

The Campbell/Clegg pact in the 2006 Lib Dem leadership contest

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Mark Pack's latest Liberal Democrat Newswire (not yet in the newletter's archive) recalls the 2007 leadership election between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne.

As it reminds us, Huhne might well have won if the pile of postal votes that arrived late had been counted.

Mark describes the two contenders:

The pair had been close friends and fellow MEPs; both were elected to Parliament for the first time in 2005. 

Strains in their friendship had surfaced when Chris Huhne had a tilt at the party leadership in 2006 after Charles Kennedy had stood down; Menzies Campbell had won, while Nick Clegg had sat the contest out. 

A year and a half later, Clegg and Huhne were direct opponents.

Blogging about Sarah Teather, I once recalled the 2006 contest:

At the first hustings ... she and Nick Clegg went everywhere together, apparently both unwilling to let Ming Campbell out of their sight - young cardinals bigging up an elderly candidate for Pope.

As Ming's leadership was not a success and rarely looked like being a success, this showed poor judgement on Nick's part. As I said at the time, he should have stood in that 2006 contest.

That post also reminds us that there was something of a pact between Nick and Ming at the time.

In the midst of the campaign, Ming told the Daily Telegraph that Nick would at some stage be "a very powerful candidate for the leadership".

As I said sternly in that post, "the next-leadership-but-one is not in Ming's gift".

It all seems a long time ago, but history tends to get rewritten if those who were around at the time do not write it down.

Six of the Best 753

It is 10 years since Nick Clegg narrowly gained the leadership of the Liberal Democrats. Jen Yockney speculates on what might have happened if Chris Huhne had won instead.

Justin Gest asks what lesson can be learnt from the victory of the progressive Democrat Steve Bullock in the Montana gubernatorial race.

Nakul Krishna looks at the work of the philosopher Philippa Foot: "Like other philosophers before and since, Foot’s achievement consisted in pointing us in a better direction. Instead of looking to logic or language for answers, she suggested that we look to 'the reality that surrounds man'."

The Victorians would prop up their dead and photograph them as part of family groups. Right? Wrong, says Sonya Vatomsky.

"For many coming to New York City, the available entry is the Port Authority Bus Terminal ... However, if a traveler seeks the charm of a grand entrance, they will be greatly disappointed ... As one Yelp! reviewer put it: 'If I die and go to hell, I think it might resemble this.'" Margaret McCormick on "a hall of unfathomable nightmares".

"Over 50 years ago football had it’s own quiz show. Quiz Ball ran for just six series but is recalled fondly by those who remember it." Vince Cooper will tell you all about it.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: A warning to Labour after Stoke

See? Razor-sharp analysis. The old boy is not such a buffer as some suppose. 

Friday

Home from Stoke-on-Trent where I have been helping in the by-election. I have nothing against the good people of Copeland, but a chap doesn’t want to glow in the dark, what?

Besides, I had promised Cook I would buy a replacement pie dish for the Wedgwood one that good broken on the night we celebrated Sarah Olney’s victory in the Richmond Park by-election.

I am afraid that Ukip’s candidate was something of a dud: no one believed his claims to have been the first Briton in space (as every schoolboy used to know, it was Raymond Baxter). Let me, however, give the Labour Party the benefit of my long experience.

I recall we Liberal Democrats got terribly excited when we held Eastleigh after poor Huhne was dragged off to Dartmoor. Yet, as I pointed out at the time, the Tories and Ukippers helpfully split the reactionary vote between them. Not only that: the Tory candidate was so bad that she was sent off to Patagonia halfway through the campaign.

I was saddened, but not surprised, when we lost the seat at the following general election. The parallels with the result in Stoke-on-Trent are all too clear.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Staring back at Theresa May
• Donald Trump was born in Stornoway
• Jeremy Corbyn was recruited by the Conservatives at prep school
• Hand-in-hand with Hitler

Ignore Polly Toynbee by all means, but what lessons should the Lib Dems learn from the Coalition years?

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Polly Toynbee has an article in today's Guardian whose headline tells you all you need to know:

Why I can’t forgive Nick Clegg and his party of useful idiots

Those of us who remember Polly Toynbee from the SDP - and even from David Owen's Continuing SDP - find it hard to take her entirely seriously in Tribune-of-the-People mode. We Liberals called them "the Soggies" for a reason.

And there is a dishonesty at the heart of her argument. When she writes:

The Lib Dems swallowed the story that the country needed a boiling down of every function of the state to its bare bones. They were useful idiots for what was always an ideological project

she ignores the fact that Labour fought the 2010 general election promising spending cuts that would be "tougher and deeper" than those implemented by Margaret Thatcher.

In other words, most of the cuts made by the Coalition would have been made by a Labour government too.

But I don't suppose you would make yourself popular with Guardian readers if you reminded them of that.

Even if we can set Toynbee's article to one side, we Liberal Democrats do need to decide the lessons we should learn from the Coalition years. Because I liked seeing us in power and I want to see it again.

So let me suggest three lessons - no doubt there are many others.

First we need to be more politically astute. Even if we are in coalition with another party, its members are not our friends and do not wish to see us prosper.

And I think Nick Clegg now recognises this. As he said in Saturday's major interview with Simon Hattenstone: "I did not cater for the Tories' brazen ruthlessness."

Second, we need a distinct Liberal Democrat approach to economics. One of the problems with the Coalition was that we had four considerable economists - Cable, Huhne, Laws and Webb - on our front bench, yet we ended up with Danny Alexander at the Treasury.

David Laws might have had the intellectual heft to challenge George Osborne (whether he would have wanted to is a separate), but with Danny as chief secretary that was never likely to happen.

We fell too easily into saying that Labour had "overspent on its credit card" - or rather, we said that but had little interesting to add to it.

Third, we need a clearer idea of who the voters we want to appeal to are. The problem with imposing tuition fees was not just that we broke a pledge we should never have signed: it was that we let down the group that should be part of the core vote for a Liberal party: the educated young.

David Howarth's thoughts on this - and the lessons of coalition in general - are worth studying.

One thing I would say in Nick Clegg's defence is that these problems - a certain naivety about power; a lack of economic identity; a failure to decide who we are trying to appeal to - existed in the Liberal Democrats long before he joined.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Reviewing David Laws’ memoirs

Friday

A breeze stirs the May blossom, inspiring me to prop open the French windows in the Library. I settle down to review David Laws’ memoir of his time in government for the High Leicestershire Radical and am embarrassed by my inability to find the volume. Only after I have led my staff in a systematic search do I find it propping open those windows.

I find the book has three heroes: Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and, above all, Laws himself. (Poor Huhne and High-Voltage Cable, who must be admitted to know how many beans make five, do not get a look in.)

Still, one has to admire the mordant wit of Jonny Oates, as quoted by Laws: “Your constituents will be mad if they do not re-elect you, Danny. And if they don’t, we should ask for all that money back that has been sprayed around your area – the extra ski lifts and the gold-lined roads.” Except that, if you have been to Badenoch lately, you will know that Oates was speaking no more than the truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Freddie and Fiona at Remain
• The jellyfish of the Lakeland fells

Schools are being nationalised so they can be privatised

As Stephen Tall rightly says, the announcement in the Budget that all schools will be obliged to become academies amounts to the nationalisation of education.

And as John Elledge shows, that nationalisation includes the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation.

What is going on?

I think I put my finger on it back in 2007 when I reviewed Reinventing the State - the social liberal riposte to the Orange Book - for the Guardian.

I suggested that Liberal Democrat activists would:

appreciate the way Huhne's vision of a rich diversity of local provision contrasts with the Tory idea of popular schools taking over the rest: "It's been a good half for the school: the match with Harrow was won, and St Custard's was purchased through a leveraged buy out."

That sounds like me attributing my own eccentric enthusiasms to the party as a whole, and I have forgotten what became of the idea of popular schools taking over the rest.

But it was clear back in 2007 that the Conservatives believes schools should be run as much like private companies as possible.

Hence the recent emphasis on chains of academies. Hence the Budget's removal of parent governors as part of its nationalisation of schools.

What I fear will come next is the gradual privatisation of what the Treasury has nationalised.

As John Elledge says,

Which schools have held out against academisation? They're disproportionately small (larger ones are more likely to be able to afford in house IT teams and so forth). They're disproportionately likely to be primaries (secondaries are larger). And they're disproportionately likely to be rated outstanding (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). 

And what type of schools are disproportionately likely to be small but outstanding primaries? Faith schools.

Taking on the churches my look a bridge to far even for George Osborne, but it is easy to imagine a campaign against small schools.

We will be told that they cannot offer the facilities and breadth of curriculum that our children deserve. Expect to hear the 'global race' invoked.

And what will become of these closed small schools? Just think of the prime building land they occupy in the centre of sought-after villages.

The forced application of a business ethos to education will result in narrowed educational provision and a diminished life in many communities, even if the schools stay in the public sector.

But is hard to resist the prediction that, at some point in the process, the Treasury will take the opportunity of cashing in and selling off schools to the private sector.

The Liberal Democrats made too much of the Eastleigh by-election

Liberal Democrat activists have remained remarkably cheerful despite our abysmal national opinion poll ratings and our failure to score even one per cent of the vote at the Rochester and Strood by-election in November.

The chief reason for this may be an earlier by-election in this parliament, Eastleigh, which we held in defiance of many predictions.

But I wonder if we did not make too much of Eastleigh. For the Liberal Democrat vote fell substantially - Mike Thornton received 32.1 per cent, against the 46.5 per cent Chris Huhne recorded at the 2010 general election.

The reason we held the seat despite this decline was that the Conservatives and Ukip split the anti Lib Dem vote almost evenly.

And we aided both by a spectacularly bad Conservative candidate and an inept campaign. Having chosen a right-wing headbanger to carry the Tory flag, their campaign slogan appeared to be:

"Ukip are right about everything but you mustn't vote for them."

Nor I am convinced that holding the seat despite our previous MP being jailed was such an achievement. I doubt that the thought of asking someone else to take your speeding points is particularly shocking to many votes - a theory that early coverage of the by-election rather supported.

Indeed, while I have been told many times over the years that Chris Huhne is unpopular with lots of Lib Dem activists, I have never come across any evidence to support this idea.

The reality was that he was a popular MP, the Liberal Democrat council was exceptionally well run, the constituency party was large and active, and that the national party put in an extraordinary effort.

Add all these factors together and it does not seem such a surprise that we held Eastleigh.

There are reasons for Liberal Democrats to be cheerful, notably the constituency polls that Lord Ashcroft published in the autumn of last year. Many of these show both the Liberal Democrat and Conservative votes declining and us holding on surprisingly easily in some seats,

And I am not worried that Nick Clegg will lose Sheffield Hallam. This is not so much that I believe Nick is immensely popular as because I cannot picture Labour winning a prosperous suburban seat like this.

But I think we may have been guilty, quite understandably given the avalanche of bad news over the past years, of making more of the Eastleigh by-election than it warrants.

Are all Liberal leadership contests Steel vs Pardoe?

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I was not a member of the Liberal Party in 1976 because there was no branch in Market Harborough to recruit me.

But I knew I was a Liberal and that my favourite MPs were David Penhaligon and John Pardoe. So when Pardoe stood against David Steel for the leadership of the party I knew whose side I was on.

And you could argue that the 1976 contest set a pattern for later Liberal and Liberal Democrat leadership elections.

One candidate (Steel) was orthodox, sensible and just a little dull. The other (Pardoe) was more charismatic, more open to new ideas and just a little unreliable in his judgement.

So in later contests Paddy Ashdown was a Pardoe and Alan Beith was a Steel. And Chris Huhne was a Pardoe and Ming Campbell and then Nick Clegg were Steels. In all these cases I voted for the Pardoe.

It doesn't always work: in 1999 there were five candidates. I suppose you could make a case for Charles Kennedy being a sort of Social Democrat Steel, but a clear Pardoe failed to emerge.

Can we project this pattern back into past? I don't know, but it tempting to see Asquith as a Steel and Lloyd George as a Pardoe.

And was Jo Grimond a Steel or a Pardoe? He seems to have combined the better qualities of both.