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.

US money will drag leading Conservatives further to the right

Embed from Getty Images

Suella Braverman has made £60,000 on the international speaking circuit, says the Guardian. Reading between the lines of its report, this money was made over the last parliamentary year.

Braverman is not taking part in the current Conservative leadership election, but for most of that year she will have been intending to do so. And she will certainly have her eye on the contest after this one.

And if such a lacklustre figure can earn this figure, think how much must be on offer to the few remaining big beasts of her party.

If you're not sure, the Guardian helpfully spells it out:

Boris Johnson in, 2023 declared an income of £4.8m within the first six months of leaving No 10, including an advance payment of £2.5m for an unspecified number of speeches.

Most of this money is American, and a study of Twitter tells us what the American right wants to hear about Britain at the moment. It's that we are ruled by mullahs and all live in fear of arrest for saying the wrong thing.

If you're old and worldly like me, you may say that saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another is one of the most important political arts. But it has become much harder in the age of the net and social media.

But the temptation to tell American audiences what they want to hear, and to earn the big bucks that this will bring, is will prove hard to resist.

Heard back in Britain, such sentiments will sound extreme, even unpatriotic. to most voters. And so the Tories' shift to the unelectable right will continue.

The Joy of Six 1119

"'It's time​ for the police to stop virtue-signalling and start catching robbers and burglars,'’ the home secretary, Suella Braverman, said at the Conservative Party Conference last autumn. 'More PCs, less PC.' It’s not surprising that the government’s most committed culture warrior would use her speech to launch an attack on wokery. What’s strange is that anyone could think that the main problem with the British police is a surfeit of political correctness." Daniel Trilling reviews two books on the problems facing British policing.

Heidi Siegmund Cuda explores how Russia joined forces with our own anti-vaxxers to wage biological warfare by proxy against the West: "In this undeclared cognitive warfare - where the human mind is the battlefield - a global pandemic becomes weaponised and too many people have no inoculations against disinformation."

The UK government’s attempt to frighten people into protecting themselves against Covid was at odds with the scientific advice it was receiving, say Stephen Reicher et al.

"Something sinister is going on with cuteness. Over the last five years, we’ve seen the sudden appearance of cute Facial ID Recognition surveillance, cute government health messaging, cute military propaganda, cute identity wars and even cute robotic elder care." Ewan Morrison on the rise of cute authoritarianism.

John Grindrod on the conundrum that is the green belt: "within it lie some of the most curious buildings in Britain, ghosts of long-lost ways of life, thwarted plans and the secrets of a nation running out of places to hide them."

"Without doubt Steve Winwood stole the show with Ginger a close second.  Winwood sang every song (he wrote most of them, too) and his keyboards dominated throughout."  Stuart Penney was at Blind Faith's Hyde Park debut and he remembers it.

Gavin Williamson emerges as new contender to be the first minister to leave Sunak's cabinet

Those with money on Suella Braverman will have been brought up short by this story in the Guardian:

Gavin Williamson is facing a complaint that he sent "vile" and "threatening" messages to former chief whip Wendy Morton, raising questions over Rishi Sunak’s decision to reappoint the twice-sacked Tory.

Morton is believed to have made a formal complaint to the Conservative party over claims of Williamson’s behaviour to her in the final days of Liz Truss’s government. 

A source told Tortoise Media that Morton had passed on "vile and threatening messages" she had received during the time she was chief whip, which she considered had a misogynistic undertone.

Serious punters will be aware that Williamson has form.

Williamson has been sacked twice. Theresa May forced him to step down as defence secretary after an inquiry into a leak from the national security council, raising security fears, and Boris Johnson ousted him from cabinet over his handling of the exam fiasco when he was education secretary.

The Guardian, however, quotes him as saying he "strongly refutes [sic] these allegations".

Williamson was brought back by Boris Johnson and then Sunak as a reward for helping with their successful leadership campaigns.

Read more on Tortoise Media (scroll down to find this story).

Photo by GaborfromHungary at Morguefile.com

Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will haunt the Tories for years to come

Embed from Getty Images

If Rishi Sunak was meant to offer a fresh start, then his first cabinet was deeply disappointing. There was little sign of a cabinet of all the talents, made possible by the soothing of old enmities, beyond the return of Michael Gove.

In fact it's hard not to be depressed at many of the names he brought back or kept on yesterday: Gavin Williamson, Suella Braverman, Dominic Raab, Thérèse Coffey.

If you try to come up with a list of four more encouraging names, you are likely to come up with something like: David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart.

Trouble is, none of that four is still in the Commons. All were among the 21 Conservative MPs who lost the whip in September 2019 for, in effect, voting against a no-deal Brexit.

Gauke  and Grieve stood as Independents in the general election later that year, while the other two did not defend their seats under any label.

It's clear that Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will continue to hurt his party for years to come, and not just because it cannot spare people of that talent.

If the Conservative Party is to have a future that does not involve a permanent shift to being the English Nationalist Party, then at some point the moderates are going to have to fight back.

And if they are going to do so, those moderates and the party as a whole will need a leader - a Tory version of Neil Kinnock, if you will.

It's possible to imagine that such a figure can be found among the four names I chose. It's much harder to imagine he or she is to be found in Sunak's new cabinet.