Wednesday 7th July

It is generally advisable to avoid groups of colleagues discoursing on the topic of Speaker Bercow, that is if you don’t want to end up drenched in spit or passive-smoking bile. Even I though, tolerant, and, above all respectful towards the occupant of the chair, am growing weary of Mr Speaker’s arch little lectures on good behaviour, especially at prime minister’s questions. There were more of these today.

I have never subscribed to Bercow’s theory that the public don’t like the verbal violence on display at PMQs. On the contrary, I think they enjoy immensely watching MPs being insulted – even if it’s only by other MPs – and ratings for the weekly punch-up are, I suspect, a lot higher than for, say, questions to the honourable member representing the Church Commissioners, where Bercow’s desired mood of the sarcophagus tends to prevail.

Today all the zest and atmosphere was sucked out of the occasion.  If Bercow wants to behave like a primary school teacher that is his affair. However, I don’t think it is realistic for him to expect us to spend the half an hour between 12 and 1230 on a Wednesday afternoon with our heads down on the desk, having a little nap.  

Monday 5th July

Nick Clegg came to the chamber today to conquer the central injustice of our democracy:  a system for returning MPs to Parliament that doesn’t return enough Liberal Democrats. Quite what the optimum number of Lib Dems our struggling nation needs, no one has ever been able to agree. The late Lord Jenkins wrote a very long report on the subject – this was before he died of course – in which he tried through several thousand rococo paragraphs to reconcile the lofty constraints of fairness and proportionality with the overwhelming imperative of electing to Parliament more MPs who thought like Lord Jenkins.  Eventually the whole oeuvre collapsed beneath the weight of its own pomposity.  It was never heard from again; and shortly afterwards the same was true of Lord Jenkins.

But while Lord Jenkins was built for artistic impression, his modern heir, Master Clegg, goes for speed and effect.  And times  have changed. No one, I think, attacked the “alternative vote” system itself during an hour and a quarter of questioning, other than on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough. Defending first-past-the-post is today what defending the hereditary Lords was a decade or so ago – an impossibly feudal point of view held to by only the most ludicrous old fossils.

This is not to say that Clegg got an easy ride.  He had to field plenty of self-interested anger from Labour about so-called “gerrymandering” of constituencies, this referring to his parallel proposal of lopping the size of the Commons by 50 seats and making all the constituencies roughly the same size. One of their side posited this as a major crime against mathematics, the logic of this argument escaping me, though I seem to remember facing the same charge during my teenage fumblings with quadratic equations.  It’s all humbug in any case: we all know the status quo favours Labour and if it didn’t the political history of the last 13 years would have been very different.

Likewise we heard a lot of the 3.5 million missing from the electoral resigster, Labour indignation on that subject being in direct proportion to their conviction that these were their voters that had gone missing.  They may well be right, but Clegg was right as well to point out that if the Labour government hadn’t had the wit to stack the voting system even more in its own favour when it had the chance, it was mildly ridiculous to expect their political opponents to do it for them.

Another, more subtle though no less lunatic, argument, was that with fewer MPs there should be fewer ministers to make the game fair. A lot of nodding at this: backbenchers generally hold to the view that having fewer ministers is a good thing, up to the point when it dawns upon them (usually about two years in) that this means fewer opportunities for preferment.  Again I don’t see the logic: holding government to account is not a physical requirement of getting the requisite numbers together to be able to wrestle ministers to the ground.

Clegg told us nicely that having 50 fewer MPs would save the country £12 million (we are thus, I calculate, each of us a £240,000 annual drain upon the Exchequer) and thrift was a major theme of his announcement.  We are apparently going to be another £17 million better off as a result of the enlightened decision to hold the AV referendum on the same day as next year’s local voting, though Mr Clegg’s enemies on the Tory side (there are many) think that this is more likely a cunning ruse, in the words of Bernard Jenkin,  to “artificially inflate” the turnout.

Conservatives who are in fact against the very idea of changing the system used the referendum date issue as their proxy means of attack. The ideal Bernardesque policy would be to hold the referendum next year on 29 February, but he didn’t quite say this. Gavin Barwell meanwhile, a new bug from Croydon, fretted that there would be insufficient incentive in his patch for people to vote in the referendum without the huge added attraction of electing the local council on the same day.

Outside the chamber, John Prescott has come straight out and said that people should vote against AV in the referendum because it would be a vote against the coalition.  I suspect that his may be the view that grows: by next year the coalition will  be desperately unpopular and a furious electorate all too glad of the chance – even in Croydon – of putting their X where it hurts their rulers most.  I wonder even whether this isn’t Dave’s cunning plan after all. There is, after all, no evidence of him having another one.

Sunday 4th July

It’s a political cliche I know, but of the 20 or so “ordinary people”  processed through my constituency surgery this weekend, not one of them had arrived to petition me in favour of a change to the voting system.  This is a relief as much as anything, since the time-honoured argument one uses to counter-attack these nutters – that PR is the mosquito bearing the virus that is coalition government, hitherto believed to be an affliction as sought after by the average British citizen as an outbreak of gastric flu – no longer applies.  And since the clever boys and girls of Central Office haven’t got round yet to dishing out a new “line to take” for we dumb backwoodsmen, one would feel terribly exposed. Nor is my Association’s political committee much use in these matters. The last time I tried to initiate a discussion on “AV”, we got 20 minutes of nostalgic ululation about how complicated television remote controls had become these days.

Instinctively I am against the “alternative vote” system, if only because the word “alternative‘ conjures up in my reactionary breast every kind of fight reflex I can muster. Alternative voting is much like alternative energy: an idea loved by liberals, that doesn’t work.  I speak as somebody who, even in the night-mantled plebiscite of May 1997, collected over half the local vote, so that I don’t suppose I would have too much personally to fear if they started dicking around with the ballot paper.  I am aware of the arguments – meriticious arguments – against the current winner-takes-all methodology, but there are plenty of good arguments against France, and it still exists. The simple, one might almost say primitive, act of sticking an “X” against the oaf you want to win seems so much more heroic than dividing your emotions among a long list of people you have never heard of and who, in all probability, you end up ranking in order of the first letter of their surname.  That we would end up with a House of Commons full of people who sound as if they are taxi companies is another (and one might say clinching) argument against the alternative vote.

But it looks as if we are to have a vote on voting reform next May, another little gift from Dave to Nick to keep their political sex-life active.  Dave won’t be joining the clamour for AV, but whether he will actively clamour against remains to be seen.  David Davis meanwhile is leading the revolt against the referendum: I make this the fourteenth revolt that Davis is said to be heading since the “coalition” came into being.

What will be very interesting is to see which way the socialists will jump. After all, they were the ones who had a referendum on alternative voting in their manifesto.  On the other hand, they are the party with by far the biggest vested interest in the status quo and their desire to see both the “coalition”, and more importantly, the Liberal Democrats get shafted may get the better of them.

Thursday 1st July

I wasn’t in the chamber for health questions on Tuesday. It looks as if was sleeping with Mike White of the Guardian since I see from his account that he claims to have been snoozing in the library at the same time too. Mike and I have an open relationship. When we sleep together, we do it in a public place.

Anyway I wasn’t there because I rarely am for health – all that shroud-waving, jargon and statistics – but now it seems as if I missed the most entertaining moment of the Parliament so far when Simon Burns, the rather florid re-cycled health minister, called John Bercow a “sanctimonious, stupid, dwarf”.  This is rather unfair to Bercow, who certainly isn’t stupid, nor is he technically a dwarf and if he has erred in the matter it was to marry a very tall woman so that when the two of them are photographed together, Bercow lurks permanently beneath the canopy created by the underside of his wife’s bosom. This may be pleasurable, especially in the summer months, but is hardly a dignified spot where to find the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Burns hates Bercow with that nuclear loathing that former whips reserve for former recusants in their charge, though that is hardly a reason for a minister of the crown to go insulting the office of the Speaker by making obscene gestures in the direction of its tiny occupant.  I most enjoyed his apology, not to Bercow, but to other dwarves who (so says their trade union, an organisation called Walking with Giants) might have been upset by being likened to Bercow.  There is, so far as I can discern, no organisation called Walking with Hypocrites, representing the world’s prigs and phoneys, but Burns probably ought to add in an appology to them as well for his use of the word sanctimonious.

Talking of florid, I am seriously worried about my Parliamentary neighbour Edward Leigh, whose shrieking, scorched complexion makes Burns look albino. He spoke in the budget debate on Tuesday in a light cream suit so that he resembled nothing so much as a volcano erupting above an island beach in the South Pacific.  The pipes may be cumersome to move around, but Leigh is badly in need of a cooling system, like they have in nuclear power stations.

Wednesday 30th June

Halfway through her questioning stint today, Harpie started going on about the “abject misery” of unemployment, which was a jolt because up until that point it looked as if she was having the most tremendous fun with the subject.  All because the Guardian had got hold of some leaked Treasury papers which apparently show that 1.3 million jobs are going down the swanny in the next five years because of the Budget. This sounds very grim until you read on to about paragraph eight of the report, where it says that that very same Budget will create 2.5 million jobs in the private sector. So that really, instead of moaning about abject misery and calling for a general strike, which is what the unions are up to, we should add job-creating genius to the many other epithets currently being showered upon Boy George Osborne.

Anyway there was the employment prodigy sitting next to Dave at PMQs today, while Harpie started dishing it out.  I am not entirely sure I believe the 2.5 million figure and Dave doesn’t either because he never once referred to it.  One gets the impression that he trusts the Treasury’s numbers, leaked or otherwise, rather less than he would a set of economic forecasts prepared by the Teletubbies, especially now he has the Office of Budget Responsibility to give him cover.

The OBR is nothing if not promiscuous in its product, and has released yet more numbers this morning which show how and why they think that unemployment will fall for every year of the Parliament. These figured richly in the prime minister’s replies. The OBR incidentally puts the number of private sector jobs on their way at only two million – so already we have a discrepancy of a quarter with what the Treasury is supposed to calculate as the job-creating potential of the Budget.

The prime minister sounded fairly smug behind his numbers, not for the first time giving the impression that they mattered to him as debating points, but told us nothing about he thinks the country ought to run. Harpie whirled away for her full six, getting nowhere, and as soon as she was spent the PM was free to download some japery about a set of “peace pods” that her then government department had commissioned in the age of avarice, at great public expense.

Next to bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland, Harriet’s pods may well have made only a modest contribution to the budget deficit, but Tory policy favours war pods and we were thus invited to ridicule this hippy idea. Which, of course we did. Unfortunately, someone then remarked, sotto voce,  that peace pods sounds remarkably like where convicted murderers will be sent instead of maximum security prison cells under Ken Clarke’s enlightened new penal policies.

This is the latest Alice in Wonderland twist to the new politics. Labour backbenchers like George Howarth stand up and argue for throwing the key away, while we on the blue benches stand foursquare behind rehabilitation and “intelligent sentencing”. Hug a hoodie is one thing, but cuddle a convict may be pushing us too far.

Tuesday 29th June

Just two of the Hare Krishnas peeled off to vote against the VAT increase yesterday – Portsmouth’s Mike Hancock and Colchester’s Bob Russell  – not nearly enough to give even the laziest hack an excuse to write about cracks in the coalition. With the latest opinion polls though showing support for the Krishnas dropping away towards single figures, one wonders how long they can sustain their fragile faith.  The Lib Dems’ plight is rather like that of a military band suddenly finding itself posted to the front-line. After years of playing only a decorative role in politics, here they are now with real people shooting at them with real bullets. Only two deserters so far; but watch that number rise.

I’ve come across another hagiographic piece on George Osborne, this one by his old understrapper Paul Goodman, now reincarnated as a commentator for ConservativeHome.  If I were the Chancellor I’d be wary of all my chums plugging me so hard.  It isn’t only in the dictionary that humbug and humiliation lie just across the hallway from hubris.

Amid all the plaudits, Goodman might just care to remember a couple of essential correctives about Osborne’s record. Firstly, it wasn’t until it started pissing down economically in 2008 that the Boy noticed the roof needed fixing. Up until that point he had pursued an economic policy almost indistinguishable from Gordon Brown’s. We all remember “sharing the proceeds of growth”. Until the crisis hit, Osborne was neither a tax cutter nor a deficit hawk.

And secondly while Dave can, legitimately, claim to have made the Conservative Party electable again, all the polling evidence suggested that it was Osborne who was keeping the brake applied in the guard’s van.

Friday 25th June

Back to Lincs last night just in time to catch the remains of This Week where Diane Abbott was re-stated on the uncomfy couch, put there this time to be grilled by Andrew Neil, Britain’s foremost interrogator. The question, if it was ever raised, of what to do with Portillo  during this encounter was never satisfactorily answered, with the result that he spent the whole 10 minutes leering at Abbott with a rictus smirk that made it look as if his brain was using an arthritic carrier pigeon to get messages through to his face.  Neil promises to mete out the same to the other Labour leadership hopefuls in their turn, though whether each one will have to endure Portillo simultaneously gurning at them from a distance of under four inches who knows.

Abbott added evasiveness to her extensive repertoire of political shortcomings, consistently refusing to answer a simple question about whether to describe, as she did, West Indian mothers as being (apparently uniquely) willing to go the extra distance for their children (the extra distance in Diane’s case, being to the gates of a private school) was to express a racist sentiment. I cannot believe Abbott meant the comment to be racist – or rather I cannot believe she wants us to think she meant it to be racist – so why she declined to rebut the suggestion about eight times I can’t imagine. It no doubt explains why I am not in the running to lead the Labour Party.  “I have said all I have to say about this” she repeated, the Portillo grin hardening closer to geological eternity after each encore.

The Spectator meanwhile carries an extraordinary piece of PR work for Boy George, written by James Forsyth, the gist of which is that while Dave hangs about under Clegg’s moonlit bedroom-window, reciting sonnets, the oik next door is getting on with his master plan for taking over the Tory party, if not the world. On this analysis, the Budget is not an economic necessity but a work of political genius, akin (I kid you not) to that of Michelangelo, and designed with the sole purpose of eradicating Labour voters. “All through the Budget”, Forsyth writes, “you can see Osborne’s plan to make new little Tories”. With the ascendancy of the private over the public sector secure, these little Tories will deliver a handsome Conservative majority next time and  banish Clegg from the court of influence for ever. Cameron too maybe, though Forsyth is not so gauche as to write this.  Perhaps Dave could play Edward VIII to Clegg’s Wallis Simpson, and the pair of them live out a life of poignant retirement in Paris.

Cameron is on a plane to Canada where he will spend the weekend with the G8 and then the G20. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, his camp chooses to respond to this. There’s some briefing going on out there already against Liam Fox (Number 10 reportedly cross at how he defenestrated Sir Jock Stirrrup) and Duncan-Smith and Andrew Mitchell (both, in their different ways, rumoured to be struggling with their new departments). It would be delicious, wouldn’t it,  if the first real cracks in the coalition turn out to be not between Cameron and Clegg but Cameron and Osborne.

Thursday 24th June

Adjournment debates are always among the saddest spectacles of the Parliamentary week: the green benches shining in their emptiness; two or three colleagues with nothing better to do slumped listening to a junior minister, who probably does have something better to do – all those letters waiting for his important signature back in the office – reading out the official brief, the content of which is usually as much of a mystery to him as it is to his audience.

This week’s curtain-closer on English language schools was was well up there in the universal annals of ennui, the minister, James Brokenshire, a lad of 12 or 13 at a guess, galloping through a script that, if it were actually taught in one of these wretched institutions, would have them shut down under the trade descriptions legislation, never mind for dodgy visa appplications, which was the ostensible cause of the problem being debated.

Master Brokenshire, somewhat patronisingly I thought, predicted an immaculate parliamentary future for Conor Burns, the Bournemouth MP whose debate it was, before going on to ignore totally the points in Burns’ speech in his own pre-baked official reply.  They might just as well have exchanged letters, or lobbed packets of sausages at each other from either side of the River Ouse, for the level of human, let alone political, engagement that was engendered in the chamber.

Anyway I was tempted to ask whether I could use Gove’s legislation to set up one of these schools in my own constituency, which I would propose to call the John Prescott Academy, and then thought better of it. The Government’s policy, as far as I could determine from Brokenshire’s broken spiel, was to prevent foreigners from learning enough English to come and live here by making it too difficult for them to gain the necessary study visas, on account of their poor English. What Dave might call a double lock immigration strategy.

Besides, anyone resolute enough to hike all the way out to the middle of Lincolnshire to learn English would deserve permanent entry into the country on grounds of excess perseverance, even if they could speak no more of the language than Wayne Rooney.

Wednesday 23rd June

Aside from the usual wailing in the Guardian (fearful of their advertising revenue no doubt as the recruitment ads dry up), the press was largely solid this morning behind the Budget. Harpie at PMQs didn’t really know which way to go, and relied on some detailed stuff  about pensions from the Red Book, which Dave gave every impression of finding too monotonous to contemplate. He had a meals-on-wheels witticism prepared about the “unread book”, but frankly it seemed as if she was the one who had looked at the wretched thing and he had not.

Where was the venom though? Where was the rage?  Where is the Labour Party? Perhaps the raw-blooded bitterness we expect from them will erupt with their new leader, though judging from the slate of cardboard cut-outs in the contest, I doubt it.  It is hard to imagine David Milliband getting angry about much except his i-pad freezing. God help the party that clings to Diane Abbott for inspiration.

Oborne in the Mail thinks the Budget was “deeply-responsible” and will also blow the coalition apart.  Maybe it will. The truth is  that you can’t judge this Budget today or tomorrow, but only over the next five years. As the wise old IFS says, its sets out to reverse completely all the spending rises of the Labour years; provides for  the deepest, severest retrenchment since the Second World War. It makes 1981 look life a soft-ball party.

Thus far, however, even Bob Russell seems to be back in his box and the line is holding.  My guess is that it will continue to hold through the summer and the cracks won’t start appearing until we get the results of the spending review nearer Christmas.  By then, at the current rate, we will have run out of Lib Dems of sufficient probity in any case.

One thing that worries me though in the IFS’ analysis: it points out that the Chancellor could have avoided hiking up VAT if he had chosen instead to get the extra tax revenue from the corporate sector. There were choices here about where to tax and where to cut and, arguably, the Government went for a less progressive target – VAT – in order to be softer on its friends in business.  Let’s see if the opposition get round to smashing up the Liberals over that one.

Tuesday 22nd June

There was an impressive amount of cheering and back-slapping on the Tory side after Boy George sat down this afternoon. Even some brief applause.  I am not entirely sure quite what we were so high-spirited about.  True, if we believe the Boy’s numbers, the deficit will be gone by the end of Parliament, and national debt on its way back down, but balancing the books is a little like Sunday observance. It is something one does out of solemn duty, not dancing down the street to church blowing a vuvuzela.  Later it transpired that the ratings agencies liked what they heard, and Britain can hold on to its triple A for a while longer yet, conditional on the axe actually striking and not just being waved menacingly in the air. We didn’t know that at the time.

The truth is that this was a pitiless budget that our constituents will hate. It may be a necessary – “unavoidable” was the way the Boy described it – purgative; it may set us on the road to becoming that happy-go-lucky economic powerhouse that is Canada; but in the short term they will hate it. And the “short-term” means for about five years or so.  Five years of cuts and moans and tears and letters. Never mind the age of austerity; this will be the Parliament of purgatory.

It was more of an extended groan than a shock. The copious softening up had done its work. It was like angina not a heart attack. VAT to 20%. We expected it.  Benefits cut. We expected it. 25% off every department’s budget, except the mollycoddled bureaucrats of health and the bean-eating aid-junkies of international affairs. We expected it.  The Redwoodites will be happy that, while capital gains tax is up,  it won’t rise so far or so fast as they feared.  None of us will be happy though when those departmental budgets are slashed – we won’t know the details of this until the Autumn – and the services shut down and the jobs go.

I wish I could conform to Labour’s stereotypical heartless Tory, dancing across the skulls of the vanquished public-sector class; but I can’t. I enjoy fulminating against the monstrous over-reach of the state as much as the next man; my blood-pressure rises as fast as anybody’s surveying the acres of Guardian newsprint dedicated to advertising public-sector non-jobs.  But our non-jobs are other people’s jobs for all that, other families‘ livelihoods, and I don’t much fancy the human cost of all this. So, no, I wasn’t cheering when the Boy sat down.  I think he did a good job, and I think, incidentally, that he is proving his critics wrong.  But it was not something to yelp about.

The only real reason to feel cheerful was the evident discomfort of the Hare Krishnas. Harpie and the gang went for them big time; really roughed them up. We could have snuck off to find a few social workers to slaughter and left them at it.  Labour are leaving us alone: as if attacking a Tory for cuts is as pointless as blaming a dog for p***ing against a lampost. The Lib Dems though: they’re the lamposts.

Several people commented that when the boy was on his feet, Dave was hidden behind him, so all you could see on camera were Clegg and Alexander, stiff upper lips, trying not to blub. Instead of running that footage on the evening news they should hand it over to You’ve Been Framed. Yes there were a couple of concessions to their soft little hearts, but the Lib Dems have been forced to swallow a lot of Tory medicine, notably the VAT hike, against which they campaigned vigorously in the general election.

A couple of them were flaking off – we heard a lot from Bob Russell on the news bulletins – but so far the line is holding. Even Simon Hughes being strong, like a not particularly close relative showing solidarity at a funeral. Interesting too that it should have been Vince Cable delegated to lead on this on the news shows, not Clegg or Alexander. The “Treasury poodle” as Harpie unkindly dubbed him, held up remarkably well.