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 soft man of Brexit? Steve Baker goes on holiday during the election campaign

Steve Baker, who had a majority of 4214 over Labour in his Wycombe constituency in 2019, has flown off to Crete for a holiday, despite the general election.

The Mirror reports:

Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker defiantly told The Mirror that he had continued with his holiday plans despite Rishi Sunak calling a snap election. He said that before he booked his break, he and fellow MPs were assured by the PM that it would be ok to head off to the beach this week.

Baker has also complained that Sunak's National Service policy was sprung on ministers and MPs by special advisers without being properly discussed.

But let's stay with his holiday because it gives me an excuse to quote one of my favourite passages from one of my favourite political memoirs.

Here's Julian Critchley in his A Bag of Boiled Sweets:

David James, who retired from Parliament as Member for Dorset North in 1979, was dotty. His reputation for eccentricity dated from 1964 when as Tory MP for Brighton, Kemptown, he lost his seat to Labour by seven votes. 

When, a few days after Alec Douglas-Home's defeat (and my own at Rochester), I went to Conservative Central Office to interview the then chairman of the party John Hare, I murmured some words of sympathy. We had, after all, just lost a general election after thirteen years in office.

"It's all that silly bugger David James's fault," cried Hare. "The fool spent most of the three-week campaign in Scotland looking for the Loch Ness Monster." Indeed, he had, and the tabloid press had been full of it. 

The papers claimed that every so often a cable would arrive from some godforsaken Scottish village addressed to the Kemptown Tory agent "Have almost found the Monster. Hope all goes well with the campaign."

The Brexit revolution continues to devour its children - now it's Steve Baker

Steve Baker didn't just want Brexit: he wants the European Union to be "wholly torn down".

But that is no longer enough for the revolutionaries who have taken over the Conservative Party.

Hence this denunciation on The Conservative Woman blog:

Baker blames his critics for misunderstanding him, but is sounding more like a Labour frontbencher than the sensible Tory backbencher we thought him to be.

It is indeed odd that he positions himself as the champion of the white working classes yet at the same time lambasts them for being ‘racists’ and not realising how very ‘privileged’ they are. Baker epitomises disjointed thinking by championing causes which help these dispossessed Britons yet simultaneously insults them with spurious denunciations of racism.

He is tearing up all of his good work. He can’t position himself as a ‘moderate’ yet partake in race-baiting. Baker may think he is a unifying force but he is being divisive. Thanks to the government’s fear campaign and economic damage Britons are worried and scared. They don’t deserve to be harangued like this by Baker or anyone else.

Prioritising feelings about racism above evidence, as Baker has done, feeds the fragile, childish identity politics zealots, for whom emotion rules all and reaching the highest echelons of victimhood is a legitimate, and lucrative, goal. Is this why Baker now resembles the contemporary Tory, a post-liberal Puritan masquerading as a conservative, seeking publicity while insulting his core voters? Or is his recent woke awakening a way to distract from the fact that he capitulates and then grovels at the first opportunity when confronted by the government?

With its championing of the working class and its opposition to any curtailment of liberty, even because of the Covid-19 pandemic, The Conservative Woman has more in common with Class War than it does with the traditions of the Conservative Party.

Steve Baker called for the European Union to be "wholly torn down"

You may have heard Steve Baker, the new minster at the Brexit department, interviewed by Nick Robinson on the Today programme this morning.

He used the new government line about listening to people and then proceeded to rubbish every view from other organisations that Nick Robinson put to him.

It was a masterly piece of interviewing, proving once again that a sustained line of questioning is far more deadly than bluster and bullying. (Are you listening, Paxman and Humphrys?)

But we should not have been surprised at Baker's unwillingness to listen. Here he is in 2007 calling for the European Union to be "wholly torn down".

If the government is serious about Brexit it needs the most skilled diplomats you can imagine.

Instead, it has appointed a team of ideologues and clowns.