Paul Marshall: From SDP researcher to right-wing media mogul

The new London Review of Books has a substantial article by Peter Geoghegan on SDP researcher turned right-wing media mogul Paul Marshall.

It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.

Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. 

Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. 

Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) 

It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.

As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.

Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.

It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.

Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:

In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it

After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.

None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.

Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.

But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.

The Rest is Unprintable: Mark Oaten and Lembit Opik have their own podcast

Of course they do. Every former politician now has a podcast.

And, no, I've not listened to it.

If you want to - and it's your right in a free country - you will find the pair of them on YouTube.

Looking back at Simon Titley's writings for Liberator

The new issue of Liberator was posted on the magazine website this morning. You can download it free of charge from there - it's Liberator 422.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary, which I'll start posting here tomorrow, it includes an article by me on Simon Titley and his writings. The photo here was taken during our lunch in Melton Mowbray.

Does a decade make a difference?

Simon Titley was fond of claiming that he joined the Liberator editorial collective in the 1980s because it was the only way of ensuring that his articles were pasted down in the correct order. Whatever the truth of that, his individual take on politics soon became central to the magazine. He was well informed about machinations inside the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats, interested in new thinking from well beyond those parties and aware of the continuing importance of social class in British politics, when a more common view among his fellow Liberals and Lib Dems was that, yes, class existed, but it was rather bad manners to mention it.

Now that, incredibly, it is approaching ten years since Simon’s death, this seems a good time to look back at some of his contributions to the magazine. You can find a collection of them on the magazine’s website and I’ll give the issue number of those I mention so you can read more for yourself.

Let’s start with a characteristic article. In Liberator 351 Simon looked at Liberals’ fondness for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and asked what they mean to us in concrete terms. He begins by quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of being held in solitary confinement by the Nazi regime as a teenager and how he had found himself feeling “a visceral desire not to be hemmed in, neither by the personal power of men, nor by the anonymous power of organisations”.

It is that feeling, Simon goes on to say, that Liberal Democrat talk of ‘freedom’ consistently fails to convey:

It is because the Liberal Democrats have such difficulty talking about freedom in meaningful terms that I have been regularly referring to the concept of ‘agency’ in my writing. By ‘agency’, I mean the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them. I define freedom in these terms because it is better to think of freedom as a practical ability than as a theoretical abstraction. Unfortunately, ‘agency’ is jargon in some professional circles but I shall stick with it because it encapsulates the meaning I seek better than any other word I can think of.

Defining freedom in these terms forces us to realise the extent to which the maldistribution of power is at the root of most of our political ills. It also forces us to realise the relationship between exercising freedom and wellbeing. We can then incorporate freedom as an integral part of our policies across the board, rather than tack it on as an afterthought or omit it altogether.

An insistence on agency also counteracts the classical liberal argument that market forces are the only legitimate means by which people may exercise power.

This emphasis on the importance of the lived experience of abstract ideas can also be found in an article about social class that Simon contributed to Liberator 345. In this case the experience was his own:

Rarely have I encountered worse snobbery than within the Liberal Democrats. The symptoms are wearily familiar; the snide put-downs, the supercilious smirks, the casual discounting of one’s skills or arguments. The low point came when a ‘fellow’ party member once addressed me as “your sort”.

My own experience is more benign. If I transgress the unwritten rules in something I write online, then I’m generally told a particular comment “is unworthy of me”, with the implication that I pass muster the rest of the time. I’ll admit the speed with which public school and Oxbridge ranks close is impressive, but it tells us much about why British society is the way it is.

Sometimes Simon chose less ostensibly political subjects. Here he is in Liberator 331 on the tyranny of ‘cool’, and in particular the British middle-class take on the concept, which gives us:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: ‘sad’, ‘trainspotter’, ‘anorak’, ‘anal’ or ‘get a life’.

The phenomenon of ‘cool’ has been examined thoroughly in a pioneering book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins. Cool is essentially about narcissism and ironic detachment. Its modern origins can be traced to American black culture of the 1940s, when young black men adopted a defiant posture as a means of defence. It was then picked up by rebellious white icons of the 50s such as James Dean. During the 60s, ‘cool’ began to be exploited by advertisers as a means of selling consumer goods and in the 70s it moved from the counter-culture into the mainstream. But while ‘cool’ people today affect an air of rebellion, in reality they are conforming to commercially-driven norms.

Because he moved back to Lincoln a couple of years before he died, I was able to meet Simon three times in the East Midlands before he fell ill. Our last meeting was at a very Titleyesque event – the Melton Mowbray Food Festival – and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew him that one of his last articles for this magazine (Liberator 354) was concerned with the decline of the dinner party, suggesting that a turn taken by some television cookery programmes might be in part to blame:

The BBC’s Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this”) promotes the mistaken idea that, for any dinner party host, nothing less than Michelin-starred restaurant standards will do. It makes people feel ashamed to offer a homespun casserole, even though that is much more practical for a domestic dinner party than Masterchefs labour-intensive, chefy food. Another disincentive is provided by Channel 4’s ‘Come Dine With Me’, which creates the impression that the average dinner party consists of incompetent cooking shared with a bunch of arseholes.

If you want to see Simon’s approach to politics summed up in a single piece of writing, then I recommend ‘Really Facing the Future’ (Liberator 349), which he wrote with another of the party’s original thinkers, David Boyle. It was written in response to ‘Facing the Future’, a paper from the Liberal Democrats that had failed to live up to its title. David and Simon described their article as:

an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo. 

Liberal Democrats believe the opposite is true. The justification for the party’s existence is to think radically, to force the political establishment to recognise the real world, and to put radical change into effect. If the party does not do that, it will find that people lose interest and the supply of committed activists begins to dry up.

The Simon Titley articles I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed the machinations of those on the right of the Liberal Democrats who saw political success much as Jeffrey Archer’s novels see success in business. To them, it was the result, not of new thinking and hard work, but of a clever trick, a new alliance or a bit of clever positioning. As many of these people work in public relations, as Simon did himself, he knew whereof he wrote.

So his review of Mark Oaten’s forgotten memoir Screwing Up gives us a pretty brutal portrait of the author:

Oaten … appears to have no fundamental political values but merely jumps from one bandwagon to another. In the 1980s, he joined the SDP but can justify his choice only in terms of it not being Labour or Conservative. In the 1990s, he was an überchampion of the Blairite ‘Project’ but can justify this only in terms of admiring Paddy Ashdown’s leadership. In the 2000s, he became defender of the classical liberal flame when he founded Liberal Future and the Peel Group, but can justify this only in terms of opposing the ‘nanny state’ (having presumably taken the opposite view in the SDP). In a Guardian interview on 8 January 2005, he admitted “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago” (i.e. nearly five years after being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP).

But Simon also discusses the book’s strange failure to mention Paul Marshall or Gavin Grant, who were important backers of Oaten’s varied projects. He also reminds us of the name of the Guardian journalist who penned a succession of articles which questioned the competence of various Liberal Democrat MPs while praising Oaten as a ‘rising star’. Who can have briefed her?

Simon also contributed a telling account in Liberator 339 of the reaction of some to the outbreak of Cleggmania that followed the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election campaign:

As Lib Dem opinion poll ratings soared, one cheerleader for the right-wing cabal running the campaign wrote on Facebook: “So... 26-34% in the polls, almost all the boost down to media skills and leadership not leaflets and target seats... I’ve got to ask... anyone missing Rennard...?” The complete collapse of the ‘surge’ to 23% on polling day, just 1% more than the party won in 2005, suggests there was no basis for such conceit.

To end, let’s go back to 2001 and the very first article by Simon on the magazine’s website (issue 277). Not for the last time, we find him asking why Liberals are so fond of apologising for being Liberal:

Liberals are often pilloried as timid and petty-minded. We sit on the fence and wring our hands. When we rebel, it is through self-indulgent individualism (for example, calling ourselves ‘Jedi Knights’ on the census forms) rather than confronting what matters. 

We have only ourselves to blame for acquiring this reputation. Why are Liberals so embarrassed? Why do we lack the courage of our convictions? One of the main reasons is our faith that everyone is reasonable like us. All we have to do is sit round the table and eventually we can reach agreement. If only that were so. In fact there will always be many people, probably a majority, who are not Liberals, who will never be Liberals, and whom we must confront. Beyond that, however, are groups so violent in their hostility that to tolerate their behaviour is to invite our own demise.

The contempt for Jedi Knights is an authentic Titley touch, but beyond that, I don’t know whether to be depressed or lost in admiration that his words are needed just as much today as they were all those years ago.

Mark Oaten is a council candidate in South Gloucestershire

Mark Oaten, the former Liberal Democrat MP, is standing for the council in South Gloucestershire next week. He is in one of our two candidates in the Conservative-hold Severn Vale ward.

In 1997 he won the Winchester constituency for the Lib Dems. The contest held on general election day, which he won with a majority of 2, was declared void by the Election Court. Oaten won the resultant by-election with a majority of 21,556, gaining 68 per cent of the vote.

He was involved with the think-tank Liberal Future and the Orange Book, which led to his being seen as one of the people determined to shift the party to the right - see the archive of the writings of the late great Simon Titley on the Liberator website.

Oaten was briefly a candidate for the leadership of the Lib Dems in 2006, following Charles Kennedy's resignation, and then resigned from the front bench amid sexual scandal. He did not defend Winchester in 2010.

Enough history. I wish Mark - and all Lib Dem candidates - the best of fortune on Thursday.

Mark Oaten has left the Liberal Democrats

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Mark Oaten, who was Liberal Democrat for Winchester between 1997 and 2010, has left the party.

We know this from a report in the Hampshire Chronicle and because he has tweeted the letter he received from Great George Street confirming his resignation.

Oaten, who now works as the chief executive of the trade body for the fur industry, even stood for the leadership of the party in 2006. He had to abandon the contest once the press took an interest in his private life.

He tells the Chronicle

“I have resigned from the party so I can take time to see what happens next in British politics. I hope that there will be change. The old parties need to reform or perhaps a new party will emerge and provide a better alternative. 

“I have not been involved in politics for eight years but I hope that in the future I can re engage and become more involved - but at the moment I could not support any party."

Is that a come-and-get-me aimed at a possible new centre party?

Anyway, I am sorry to see him leave, if only because his success in gaining Winchester is such a happy memory for Lib Dems.

At the 1997 general election Mark Oaten beat the sitting Conservative by two votes. A re-run of the contest was ordered by the courts and he won by 21,556 votes.

Liberal Democrats will not challenge the North East Fife result

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The Scottish Liberal Democrats have decided against mounting a legal challenger to result in North East Fife last week.

There the SNP held on to the seat by 2 votes after three recounts. The Lib Dems had been ahead until the last recount.

BBC News quotes Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems:

"Many people have asked us to challenge the result in court. 

"We have given this careful consideration and, despite legal advice that we would have grounds to challenge the result, it has been decided not to go to court. 

"We have decided there is insufficient evidence to justify a lengthy and expensive legal challenge. It would be expensive for us, expensive to the taxpayer and an inconvenience to the voters, so we could not sanction that without sufficient evidence to warrant it."

Somewhere behind this decision, I suspect, it the memory of what happened in Winchester 1997.

There the Lib Dems' Mark Oaten won by 2 votes. The Conservatives challenged the result and another contest was called.

Oaten won it with a majority of 21,556.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My old friend Rising Star

A second day in the US with Lords Bonkers. Today he meets an old friend who once featured prominently in these diaries.

My old friend Rising Star

It seems the Red Indian influence remains strong in New Rutland to this day. Who should I meet when I arrived in Gladstone, the state capital, but my old friend Rising Star, at one time the Liberal Democrat MP for Winchester?

We went for a firewater and he told me that he had given up politics and returned to the trade of his forefathers: he is dealing in animal skins ("Um nice little earner.") When I asked him what he had made from afar of the travails of our party he replied with characteristic sagacity: "Heap big trouble."

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

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Do you know New Rutland?

Eight years in eight posts

Memes were all the rage in the early days of blogging, but they seem to have died out. Which is a shame, as they were one way new bloggers could tell us something about themselves and feel they were joining the club.

So well done to Caron's Musings for starting a new meme - Five Years in Five Posts - looking at what she was writing at roughly this time of year over the last five years. Already Jennie Rigg, a certain fluffy elephant and Nicholas Whyte have taken up the challenge.

As I have been blogging for far too long, my version will be Eight Years in Eight Posts. Wherever possible I have chosen a post from 15 May itself...

15 May 2011. I celebrated 12-year-old Chris Whitehead's actions in going to school in a skirt to protest against not being allowed to wear shorts and took the opportunity to reproduce a few paragraphs from an essay on children's rights I wrote in 2006.

15 May 2010. I took readers to see the Clegg family pyramid in the Ukraine.

15 May 2009. In a House Points column for Liberal Democrat news I argued that Michael Martin was the worst Speaker in modern times.

15 May 2008. The leader of the Labour group on Sefton District Council won my Overblown Claim of the Week award.

15 May 2007. A short post sent you to information about the 11 people known to have been killed by earthquakes in Britain.

15 May 2006. In a post entitled "A lion has eaten our Oaten" I documented another stage in the decline of the then Lib Dem MP for Winchester.

15 May 2005. I pointed out how little Labour's banning of fox hunting had been raised on the doorstep during the recent general election campaign - even in Market Harborough.

16 May 2004. A news story about a Thameslink train driver who caused two terror alerts when he mistook a didgeridoo for a grenade launcher caught my attention.

Thanks to Caron for the idea. I think it has caught this blog's concerns and eccentricities rather well.

Winchester sex clinic puffin found dead

The puffin who featured in yesterday's Headline of the Day has died.

BBC News quotes someone from a wildlife rescue centre as saying: ""I guess it is fair to assume that something must have been wrong with him to cause him to come down in Winchester in the first place."

I am not sure that follows.

Perhaps it wished to see the cathedral or was researching a biography of Mark Oaten, only to be taken suddenly ill?

GUEST POST How Edward Stourton misunderstood The Orange Book

Simon Titley is a member of the Liberator Collective.

When is an analysis not an analysis? When it’s the latest edition of Radio 4’s ‘Analysis’ programme, titled ‘The Orange Book: Clegg’s Political Lemon?’ and presented by Edward Stourton. It was a disappointing attempt to analyse the influence the The Orange Book has had over the Liberal Democrats. (If you haven’t heard it yet, listen online here).

The programme demonstrated a fault common to most media reports of the inner workings of political parties; London-based journalists just don’t get it. The ‘Westminster Village’ is their comfort zone. It is where political elites propose and dispose. The political grassroots, on the other hand, is a diffuse, messy and confusing world. It is more difficult to comprehend and report, which is why the media resort to simple, hand-me-down narratives.

The template was cast by Labour’s internecine warfare in the 1980s between Neil Kinnock and the Militant tendency. Most members of all mainstream parties bear no resemblance to Militant, but why let the truth get in the way of a good story? The media has framed the debate about internal party politics in terms of a wise and all-knowing elite confronting a backward and unruly membership.

This frame is exploited by each of the party’s elites, who monopolise the language of modernity and maturity to denigrate their own members. Recall how Charles Kennedy, in the wake of the 2005 general election, blamed the Liberal Democrats’ disappointing result on “embarrassing policies introduced by grassroots activists”.

It is in this light that Radio 4’s programme should be seen. David Laws’s central claim – that the Orange Book had served both to ‘modernise’ the Liberal Democrats and to make them fit for government – was accepted without question because it suits the media frame.

A programme called ‘Analysis’ ought to, well, analyse. But this episode lacked depth and was notable more for the salient information it left out than for what it included. The Orange Book was described as a “putsch” but there was no analysis of who was behind it. The book was credited to David Laws but there was no mention of his co-editor, hedge-fund millionaire Paul Marshall, who bankrolled the project.

There was no mention of Mark Oaten, who played a key role in the genesis of the Orange Book. And there was no mention of the various ginger groups set up in the early 2000s (such as Liberal Future and the Peel Group), which accompanied the emergence of this right-wing trend.

The programme presented the Orange Book as a coherent project. There was no mention of the infighting that broke out among the book’s authors at the time of publication in 2004. The authors had agreed that each would circulate their drafts to the others before the book went to press. But David Laws infuriated some of his fellow authors by not circulating his chapter (which controversially proposed a system of social insurance).

Then, to avoid more trouble during the September 2004 party conference, Charles Kennedy ordered Laws to cancel his planned book launch event. Meanwhile, Mark Oaten disowned his chapter completely, claiming it had been written by a research assistant and that he hadn’t even read it.

More importantly, the programme failed to analyse where the Orange Book project is going. There was no mention of the role of Paul Marshall’s CentreForum think tank and its Coalition 2.0 exercise, which is now the focus of the right-wingers’ strategy. The plan appears to be to lock the Liberal Democrats into a longer-term pact with the Tories. If the right’s coalition exit strategy is not to exit, one might have thought this was worth a mention.

There was no exploration of the lack of democratic legitimacy of the Orange Bookers’ rise to power. At no stage has the party ever been formally asked whether it wanted an ideological shift from social liberalism to classical liberalism. The right-wingers have pursued their goals almost wholly through extra-constitutional means. The avoidance of open debate suggests they lack confidence in their ability to win any arguments.

There was no analysis of why the current right-wing trend emerged when it did, around the time of Charles Kennedy’s election as Liberal Democrat leader in 1999. Most of the people in what we call ‘the right wing’ are ideological shape-shifters, who were social democratic and pro-merger in the 1980s, then Blairite and pro-Project in the 1990s.

Kennedy’s election effectively put an end to ‘The Project’ (Paddy Ashdown’s plan to bind the Liberal Democrats to Labour), which Labour’s landslide in 1997 had made redundant in any case. The right therefore needed an alternative ideological flag of convenience. To the extent that the right’s attachment to neoliberalism is sincere, the programme failed to challenge David Laws (or anyone else) about the continuing validity of neoliberalism after the recent financial crisis has thoroughly discredited that ideology.

The programme took the Orange Book on its own terms as a serious political tract. But the book turns out to be mostly a rag-bag of half-baked ideas. Since few people have bothered to read it, the actual content is not that important. Instead, the book’s role has been more symbolic – as a rallying point for the right and a lightning rod for left-wing opposition.

The claim that the 2007 leadership election campaign was between “two Orange Bookers” is questionable. Both candidates wrote a chapter in the Orange Book but both chapters were about international policy and not economic liberalism. The leadership election was notable for the avoidance of any ideological debate. The programme didn’t enquire why Nick Clegg effectively hid his right-wing aims until after he became leader. His consequent lack of a mandate to steer the party rightwards wasn’t explored.

In its report of the social liberal reaction, the programme failed to mention the response to the Orange Book, Reinventing the State. The casual listener would have been left with the impression that only the right wing is doing any thinking. Also, social liberalism and social democracy were conflated throughout the programme. Those of us who remember the era of the merger, when there was mutual hostility between the SDP and the Liberal left, know differently!

This is probably why the programme failed to notice one significant (and unintended) effect the Orange Book had on the Liberal Democrats, which was to end the taboo on ideological argument that had existed within the party since the merger.

The programme’s claim that the coalition wouldn’t have happened without the Orange Book is rubbish. A coalition with the Tories was the Orange Bookers’ wet dream. Ironically, it happened despite the Orange Book rather than because of it. One year before the 2010 general election, right-wingers succeeded in toppling Chris Rennard as the party’s chief executive and election campaign head. Nick Clegg installed a team of right-wingers to run the campaign but they made a complete hash of it, with a net loss of seats.

Coalition is a creature of circumstance. The Orange Bookers got what they wanted only because the election result left the Liberal Democrats with little viable choice, as the overwhelming vote at the special conference subsequently demonstrated. The Orange Bookers might have played a more significant role if the parliamentary arithmetic had been different, with an equal possibility of a coalition with either the Tories or Labour. Then, we would have seen a very nasty factional campaign to ensure the party went into coalition with the Tories and not Labour.

Radio 4’s programme was a sloppy piece of journalism. Given the importance of the Liberal Democrats as coalition partners, listeners deserved better. What conclusions might a better-made programme have reached?

First, it would have recognised that the Orange Book is a symptom and not a cause. The present phase of right-wing machinations began in the late 1990s and the book was just one product of this intrigue (albeit a high-profile one).

Second, the programme would have grasped that most of party’s leading right-wingers are ideological tarts who have regularly switched from one political fad to another. The ideology they profess at any given time is less about fundamental values, more about tactical positioning. For them, the strategy has always been to say “me too” to the political establishment’s flavour of the week, in the belief that conforming to orthodoxy will provide a short cut to power.

Sure, there are some true believers in neoliberal ideology, but they will be abandoned when it is expedient, just as the right eventually dumped the Jenkinsite social democrats in the mid-1990s.

The real divide within the Liberal Democrats has never really been about ideology. On one side is a self-appointed elite convinced that it knows best; that politics is all about the people at the top; that if we want to be “serious about power” then we must become more centralised and jettison party democracy; and that the job of party members is to shut up and deliver the leaflets.

And then there is the alternative view; that democracy is not about a passive choice between brands but about an active choice between competing values; and that politics is healthiest when it involves ordinary people, living similar lives to those amongst whom they campaign, empowering local people to take and use power.

The Orange Book was really just another exercise in elite manoeuvring. But if Edward Stourton had read Liberator instead of relying on inexperienced researchers, he would have known that already.

Simon Hughes is not Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats

Stephen Tall reminds us of an important but subtle distinction in a Comment is Free article on the Guardian website:

Simon's full title is Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Party in the House of Commons. (Navnit Dholakia is the party's "other deputy leader" representing Lib Dem peers in the Lords.) He is not, therefore, deputy leader of the party, though that is how he is styled in the media.

He does not say this to denigrate Simon, but to emphasise that his recent and well-founded concern about the Coalition's housing and social security proposals should be seen in a proper light.

Mind you, this is a distinction that the party has been happy to blur when it has suited it. As Stephen goes on to point out, we were happy to describe Vince Cable as our "deputy leader" when he was at the height of his popularity.

It also occurs to me that the Liberal Democrats have rather a lot of senior but slightly ill-defined positions. As well as a deputy leader the parliamentary party in the Commons also has a chair. And we are currently electing a new President of the party as a whole.

Do we need all these posts and are we clear what the role of each is?

Mentioning the chair of the parliamentary party reminds me that when Mark Oaten held this post he was always described in the press as "Chair of the Liberal Democrats". For some reason this confusion has not plagued later holders of the post.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Living with Mark Oaten

We have had my article on 20 years of Lord Bonkers (part 1 and part 2). Now it is time to pass another week at the Hall.

Monday

As a responsible landlord here on the Bonkers’ Hall Estate I never cease to be appalled by the low standards that pertain in the public sector. Yesterday evening I watched a documentary on the electric television about a family with six children living in a tower block in Barking, and watched it with manly tears in my eyes because those poor people had to contend with poverty, damp and a violent neighbourhood.

Worse than that, they had Mark Oaten living with them!

This morning I call the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and demand to speak to its Chief Executive. I am told he is “in a meeting”, whereupon I suggest with some force to the young lady at the other end of the line that he leaves this meeting and speaks to me forthwith. When he comes to the phone I demand that he send out the borough ratcatcher and have Oaten removed. As I write these lines, confirmation arrives from my spies in East London that this has indeed happened.

The contradictions of Mark Oaten

Two years ago I wrote about the contradictions of Mark Oaten's career.

How he attempted to convert the party to his "tough Liberalism" when he was the Lib Dem shadow home secretary and later claimed that he had wanted to close all prisons but could not get his colleagues' support.

How he declared himself to be a new kind of MP more interested in his constituency than Westminster and then went on to accept two of the most Westminster insider jobs going.

How he had been visibly ambitious to become Liberal Democrat leader all along, but proved laughably unprepared when he got the chance to stand for the postion.

I was reading Mark Oaten's memoirs in Waterstone's the other day (as you do) and came across two more examples.

He writes at length about the absurdity of the Commons and its stuffy procedures, then tells us two pages later that he became an associate editor of the stuffy House Magazine.

He complains that his critics saw the Peel Group, of which he was the prime mover, as an attempt to shift Liberal Democrat policy in a Conservative direction. Two pages later he admits that he seriously considered picking up the phone and telling David Cameron that he wanted to join the Tories.

Maybe we all seem equally contradictory to people who do not know us well. Certainly, we tend to forgive and even celebrate contradictions in our friends.

But I remain mystified by Mark Oaten, the trajectory of his career and what he hoped to achieve.

Mark Oaten's sex life was the most remarkable thing about him

I don't want to keep attacking Mark Oaten, but a myth about him is in danger of developing. It is fuelled both by Oaten himself and by his supporter Mark Littlewood.

Let us be clear. Mark Oaten was not a dangerous, exciting politician brought down by a straitlaced press and public opinion. He was probably overpromoted when he was made Lib Dem shadow home secretary and his performance while in the rule was neither particularly impressive nor particularly liberal.

As evidence I refer you to a post of mine from a couple of years ago. It reminds us that though Oaten was happy to talk about abolishing prisons after he had left office, while he was in the post he presented himself as the apostle of "tough liberalism".

An earlier posting of mine may help too. I do hope Mark and the other libertarians of Liberal Vision will agree there is no simple trade off between security and liberty.

Mark Oaten sells his soul...

...but doesn't get much for it.

Last month I complained that Mark Oaten had agreed that his memoirs should be published on the eve of the Liberal Democrat Conference.

At the same time it was announced that Oaten's publisher was looking for a serialisation deal.

Well, he found one. Sort of. A single extract appeared in today's Independent.

Which strongly suggests that Oaten didn't get much for it.

Mark Oaten does the dirty on the Liberal Democrats

When news broke that Mark Oaten was publishing a book we were told that it was to be published on 1 October.

Now, to no one's great surprise, we learn from the Portsmouth News that it will appear on 18 September, the eve of the Liberal Democrat Conference. The paper also says that his publisher is looking for a serialisation deal.

Screwing Up by Mark Oaten: Where's the dignity?

All over Britain there are Labour MPs with small majorities who know that they will lose their seats when the general election comes. Some have reacted to this by announcing that they will not fight again. Others are generally doing the decent thing by agreeing to fly the Labour flag at the election, while all the time putting out feelers about new employment afterwards.

One Liberal Democrat MP is combining the two approaches in a manner all his own. Step forward Mark Oaten.

Last year Oaten floated the idea that he might stand down before the general election and force a by-election in Winchester. As I suspected at the time, nothing further came of the idea.

Plan B turns out to be publishing a book. According to the Southern Daily Echo, Screwing Up will be published on 1 October. The newspaper quotes the release from the book's publisher Biteback:

This is the story of a man obsessed by retaining his youth, fearful of turning 40 and feeling a complete failure.

It’s the story of coping with media scandal, and of how he and his wife Belinda managed to save their marriage, as well as his own recent decision to leave politics for the unknown.

Screwing Up is not a political memoir but the deeply touching and human story of a man at his wits’ end, trying to cope with the onset of middle age.

Oh dear.

I am old-fashioned enough to be pleased that the Oaten's marriage has survived, but this is ridiculous. What is so terrible about turning 40? And, whatever our opponents say, being the Lib Dems' shadow home secretary hardly constitutes failure. Chris Huhne is visibly having a whale of a time in the role.

The newspaper also says:

The book, while offering an insight into the working life of a constituency MP, is also said to deal with former party leader Charles Kennedy’s battle with alcoholism.

Which rather gives the lie to Oaten's claim that:

I don’t intend to cause the party embarrassment by dragging up these issues.

If Oaten was really concerned about causing the party embarrassment then he would have waited until after the election before publishing it. But then, of course, any revelations it offers would be less marketable.

Suddenly, Neil and Christina Hamilton's appearance on Hole in the Wall does not look so undignified after all.

Lib Dem councillor sees alien in Winchester High Street

Issue 250 of Fortean Times carries the story of Adrian Hicks, a Liberal Democrat councillor from Winchester who claims to have seen an alien in the city's High Street one Saturday afternoon in late January or early February 2004.

The Southern Daily Echo quotes him as saying:

“I was near The Works bookshop when I saw this strange woman, a humanoid walking with a penguin-like gait. She had very large prominent eyes and was twirling her hands in a circular motion.

“She seemed friendly and totally at ease with us. She wasn’t scared, she was smiling, and seemed to be enjoying herself among us. She walked very slowly up the High Street. I remember she was very interested in the clock over Lloyds Bank. She was taking it all in.

“She was human enough to get away with it. Everybody’s heads were turning.”

According to the newspaper, Cllr Hicks, an orthopaedic technician in the A&E department at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital for some 35 years, remained silent about his experience for five years because he did not want it to jeopardise his chances of election to the city council.

Mark Oaten is 45.

Mark Oaten on his future plans

Mark Oaten has left a comment on politicalbetting.com following press reports that he may resign and force a by-election in Winchester before the next election.

I am not sure it tells us much about the chances of this happening, but it does come straight from the horse's mouth.

Mark writes:

I have never responded to blog sites before but i came accross this today- imagine what it is like to have 242 messages all about what you may do next- imagine what it is like to have the same old jokes and rubbish written about my private life. Yes i screwed up but if only you knew how wrong all the blogs and internet interprtaion was- it is amazing how people just run to a conclussion and then it becomes the truth within a few days. But you all hate me so much that there is little point trying to explain you will just add more hurtfull remarks.

i have not issued any statement to the press re job

i have ofcourse been planning for after the election- tricky as it could have been last november- imagine trying to get a new job but not sure when you will be free ?
i guess that these various meetings and chats are impossable to keep private and that it why it is in the press

it does me no good to have it all in the papers and i would like to just get on with being a mp and at the sametime prepare for the future.

i can say haveing read the 242 message- not a single one is close to the mark

i have kept martin tod, chris rennard, nick clegg and the tory candidate steve brine in the picture about all of this and done my best to be open about the future but its not easy given the amount of hate towards me and the desire some people have to cause trouble. Thankfuly people in winchester remain so nice and positive despite my mistakes- i wish the lib dem bloggers and others would show the same forgivness.

Mark Oaten to force Winchester by-election?

The Times reports:

David Cameron is preparing to avenge an historic by-election defeat after the Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten confirmed that he was considering leaving Parliament before the next general election.

Mr Oaten, 44, told The Times yesterday that he was talking to potential employers and could leave his Winchester constituency before the expected poll in 2010.

I am not sure that Mark Oaten's historic victory with a majority of 21,556 was a by-election. Wasn't it a rerun of the general election contest?

Anyway, The Times later says:

Contacted yesterday over rumours that he was preparing to depart, Mr Oaten confirmed that he had had meetings in America with a potential employer and said that he had been honest with his colleagues about the possibility that he might leave before the general election.

“There are lots of conversations going on, some involving stuff abroad, some on stuff in this country. I hope that I can leave at the general election but I have been frank about the fact that it might be before that,” he said.

We shall wait to see if anything comes of this before getting too excited or insulting Mr Oaten. Perhaps he just wants to be in the papers again?