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Allegra Stratton
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Gordon Brown misses his Rosebud moment as publisher shelves study
Mar 13th
Suzie Mackenzie shadowed PM for most of his period in No 10 but believed her book should also cover election
An in-depth and intimate study of Gordon Brown during the past two and a half years was this week shelved by its publishers, Bloomsbury.
After shadowing the prime minister for most of his period in No 10, the journalist Suzie Mackenzie told the publishers this week she would not be handing in the manuscript to meet their March deadline and Bloomsbury terminated the lucrative contract.
Mackenzie had been due to publish before the general election, but she said she had always told the publishers she believed the book should include time spent with the prime minister during this year’s election.
Mackenzie told the Guardian: “I had said all along I didn’t think it should be published before June because the book should include the election and that’s what happened. That deadline just didn’t feel right. No 10 staff were always extremely helpful.”
A No 10 aide, alluding to the childhood sledge which was key to Citizen Kane’s character, said: “It is very sad. We know she had extraordinary material. Really good stuff about his mother and father and maybe a ‘Rosebud’ moment.”
Mackenzie was picked by Downing Street to write the book after writing an interview with Brown for the Guardian in 2004, which they felt was an accurate representation of his character. She was afforded intimate access and travelled with the prime minister through all the tribulations of his premiership, including the negotiations in the run up to the G20 summit and as world leaders grappled with the economic downturn.
In their spring catalogue the publishers said Mackenzie’s work was going to be the most “definitive” account of the prime minister.
“Mackenzie does not aim to judge his success as prime minister – or, not only that. Instead she produces an extraordinary , multi-faceted portrait of the growth – political, intellectual, psychological – of Britain’s most intriguing politician.”
After Mackenzie indicated she was not going to be able to meet the March deadline, Bloomsbury were said to be further concerned when her material appeared to have been plundered by the publication of Andrew Rawnsley’s book, The End of the Party, and the prime minister appearing on Piers Morgan’s ITV chat show.
Downing Street has already been in touch with Mackenzie to ask what she intends to do with the material and she is reported to have said she has no plans until after the election.
Two weeks ago Mackenzie went public with a recording of Brown’s foreign policy adviser Stewart Wood, which supported Rawnsley’s allegation – at that time being rubbished by Downing Street – that Brown intimidated staff. Mackenzie’s recording featured Wood saying Brown has once pushed him aside on the stairs inside No 10.
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Nick Clegg interview: ‘Brown’s in denial – almost delusional’
Mar 12th
Lib Dem leader says journalists need to look beyond hung parliament, as it will be clear who voters want
Ask Nick Clegg who he will back in the event of a hung parliament, and he dismisses it. That, he says, is the kind of inside baseball question that political journalists obsess about, but real people don’t.
Earlier this week, he set out this position to journalists filming an hour-long documentary about Clegg, the real man. But as soon as the cameras stopped rolling, a fellow passenger on the same train piped up unhelpfully: “So, who will you back then?”
Inside and outside Westminster, people are looking to Clegg because, with the opinion polls proving volatile, the Lib Dem leader may have to choose one way or the other. But it’s a poisoned chalice – if he errs to the right, his left-wing grass roots will punish him, and if he sways left, critics of Gordon Brown within the party will be aghast.
Clegg doesn’t seem so sure that it will be as close as the polls suggest. “I don’t believe for a minute that there is going to be a photo finish – it will be quite clear who the voters want. That’s the mandate. I personally think these constitutional niceties will be swept aside if it’s obvious that there’s one party that enjoys a mandate, if not an actual majority, from the British people.”
Instead, he hopes so many will vote Lib Dem he won’t have to chose either way: “If people constantly frighten themselves to thinking that the only possibility is two old answers to every problem – the red team or the blue team – then we won’t allow politics to change in the way I think people’s voting behaviour suggests people want it to change: more plural, more diverse, not stuffed in to this old duopoly.
“It’s not romantic, it is much more heartfelt than that. The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it’s completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.
“All I’m saying is that for people who think they are of a progressive turn of mind, the least progressive thing to do is to cling to old certainties.”
So for a man who would seek to float butterfly-like above the hoi polloi of politics, there’s the possibility we may see him in coalition with another of the political leaders about whom he is currently very rude – a recipe for very old fashioned political enmity.
On Brown, he is withering: “It’s very difficult, to be honest, to invest much hope or faith with a man who couldn’t even maintain relations with his own colleagues, let alone rebuild trust in the country at large.
“I mean this is a man who seems to repel most people who worked closest with him in his own party. I know Gordon has persuaded himself that this recession has nothing to do with him. It is the biggest sleight of hand in modern British politics. Talk about living in denial. It’s almost delusional.”
Cameron and Osborne are “flakey” – but since being mean clearly isn’t his natural habitat, and these guys could be his colleagues in two months, shouldn’t he tone it down? “Am I going to soften my language and views that Gordon Brown is personally responsible for a lot of the economical anxiety and heartache in this country? No.”
In this week before the Liberal Democrats’ last party conference before the general election, Clegg has taken part in a slew of media appearances. The exposure allowed for greater scrutiny, which reveals a party desperately trying to chart a course through the middle, to appeal to both Tory and Labour voters.
They have four conditions from which they will not deviate: a pupil premium for poor children; a pledge to raise the personal tax threshold to £10,000; reform of the City; and reform of the political system.
But are they chimeric and difficult to pin down, with different slants put on policies for different political audiences? In an interview with the Spectator Clegg says their tax allowance rise is something Nigel Lawson could be proud of, while in this interview he spent 13 minutes arguing vociferously against research by the Fabian society that shows this policy to be regressive.
Not contradictory, but different in emphasis – in an interview with this newspaper six months ago Clegg said there would be “savage” cuts, today he tells us there will be a new tax on banks.
Even if Clegg’s ideas are proving changeable, the party faithful will ensure he remains a yellow rather than a scarlet or blue pimpernel – any decision that affects party independence will have to be agreed by three-quarters of their MPs.
Meanwhile, Clegg continues to ask us to lift our eyes above the hanging parliament. “This election is part of a big transition from rigid 20th century duopoly,” Clegg says, “to something different. We don’t know what that is, but it’s already different, that’s the point.”
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No new taxes or VAT rise in budget, says Treasury minister Liam Byrne
Mar 11th
Government could have windfall of £5bn to spend if unemployment benefit costs less than forecast and tax on bankers raises more
The government will not be raising new taxes, including VAT, in the last budget before the general election, the chief secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, said today.
Byrne also shed light on internal discussions over how the chancellor, Alistair Darling, plans to spend an expected windfall, if payment of unemployment benefits is lower than expected and receipts from the one-off tax on bankers come in higher – the “automatic stabilisers”.
Last autumn’s pre-budget report had predicted borrowing for this year would be £178bn but the British Chambers of Commerce is now forecasting it may be £163bn.
Speaking on BBC2’s Daily Politics, Byrne said: “I can tell you this is not going to be a big give-away budget”. But he acknowledged that healthier automatic stabilisers were complicating government thinking about the scale of departmental spending cuts it could announce.
Byrne said: “If unemployment does go down then we might get a windfall of £5bn that you can either use to pay down debt, or put into public spending. To give you a sense of this, £5bn is bigger than the budgets of at least five government departments.”
Explaining why he did not think there would new tax rises, Byrne expressly ruled out a rise in VAT to 20% – something which the Conservatives have not dismissed. Byrne said there would be no new tax increases and, asked if he would increase VAT to 20%, said: “We don’t see a need to [raise VAT] and that’s because we’ve made difficult decisions on national insurance, that have not been hugely popular.”
The comments were among the first by Treasury ministers after Gordon Brown announced the date of the budget for the last week of March, six weeks before the probable date of a general election.
The prime minister has been accused of toying with expensive giveaways in the budget to smooth Labour’s general election campaign, and it has been reported that the prime minister disagreed with Darling on this issue.
Within government there is debate about whether any surplus in the public finances should go towards the fiscal deficit or investing in public spending commitments.
Darling also warned not to expect a giveaway. “I don’t think anyone’s expecting some sort of Christmas-tree of a budget,” he said. “They’re not going to get anything like that. What you’re going to get is a sensible budget, a budget for the times in which we live, a budget for the future of the country.”
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Nick Clegg praises Margaret Thatcher’s legacy
Mar 11th
Liberal Democrat leader’s eagerness to court economically liberal voices will concern grassroots activists
The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg today praises Margaret Thatcher and says her desire to take on vested interests must be replicated in Britain.
In an interview with the Spectator, Clegg says he has come to view Thatcher’s victory over the unions as “immensely significant” and goes further than the Conservative party in courting economic liberalism, by saying he would end the structural deficit with 100% spending cuts, as opposed to the 80% cuts the Conservatives have proposed.
The government plans the most significant increase in taxes – one third tax rises and two-thirds cuts.
Although Clegg’s pitch is to attract Conservative voters away from what he describes as the “flakey” Cameron-Osborne leadership, it will also be seen as a declaration of the kind of economic liberalism that may inform him, should he have to negotiate with the Conservatives in a hung parliament.
Opinion polls occasionally indicate that no party will get an overall majority. Clegg has ruled out a formal coalition, but it is thought that if the new government follows Clegg’s Treasury spokesman Vince Cable’s advice on when to end the fiscal stimulus – which the Tories would like to act on as soon as they enter government, but the current government thinks should be delayed until 2011 – the Lib Dems will not vote down the post-election budget of whichever party is in power.
The Liberal Democrat leader’s eagerness to court economically liberal voices will concern the majority of his grassroots activists, a day ahead of their spring party conference, and Clegg may feel the force of their opposition.
Those on his party’s left, who outnumber the liberal voices, are privately threatening rebellion or resignation if their leader supports a Conservative budget – expected within 50 days of a general election, if the Tories win power.
In the interview, Clegg also describes how he would constrain the behaviour of banks, something Tory grassroots are less in favour of.
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Pressure group Compass invites ideas on rebuilding Labour
Mar 10th
With general election looming, questionnaire seeks views on how Labour party should renew itself
The first signs of Labour looking beyond the general election have emerged as the pressure group Compass launches a vast canvassing exercise to solicit ideas on how to rebuild the party.
Compass will today dispatch a questionnaire to 40,000 email addresses kept on its own database, and also to a much wider network, including Facebook, as the group attempts to reach out for views on how the party should renew itself.
The group, which styles itself as a left-of-centre pressure group, believes that popular schemes for root-and-branch reform – informed by answers to its questionnaire, Transforming Labour – must play a part in the post-election debate. Since 1997 the Labour party has lost more half its members, the numbers dropping from 400,000 to 170,000.
The general secretary of Compass, Gavin Hayes, said: “We are asking these questions now, so the day after the election we can hit the ground running and ensure that a fourth term Labour government is the most successful in the party’s history.”
The 29 questions in the survey raise the possibility of a future Labour leader being chosen by the open primary method, involving non-party members, rather than Labour MPs, activists and unions alone. The survey will also ask for opinions on whether or not parliamentary candidates should be chosen in the same way.
Other reforming options include Labour leaders being required to face formal re-election each year, and policy referendums if at least 5% of Labour party members voted for such a ballot.
The questionnaire also asks whether Labour should adopt some of innovations of the US president, Barack Obama, such as the standard membership fee being abolished and replaced with a prospective member’s donation.
The questions asked by Compass make clear the wish to develop Labour from being a “political machine for elections” into an organisation along the lines of the community groups’ coalition London Citizens.
“Labour could learn a lot from the way London Citizens allow their key activists in a local area to democratically decide the organisation’s campaign priorities,” says the document. The Compass project begins with the survey, sent out today; it will be collected by 5 April, then published as a blueprint for reform, after the general election.
Labour MP Jon Cruddas said that transforming Labour was crucial to the future of the centre-left. He added that Labour must develop a clear sense of direction, become internally democratic, and “put much greater trust in its grassroots”.
Hayes said that many grassroots members “simply don’t feel listened to enough, don’t feel engaged with, or believe they do not have a big enough stake in decision-making … this must urgently change”.
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Conservative adviser pushes for Whitehall ‘living wage’
Mar 8th
Head of strategy at loggerheads with party over plan to help lowliest workers in government departments
David Cameron’s head of strategy is losing a battle that would see the Conservative party introduce a higher minimum wage across Whitehall, the Guardian has learned. Steve Hilton wants his party to announce a higher rate, the so-called “living wage” of £7.60 – which is £1.80 more than the minimum wage – for low paid workers employed as cleaners and catering staff across government departments in London if the Tories win the election.
Hilton, one of the leading modernisers around Cameron, has cast it as a first step towards bringing in the new rate more widely across the country as he pushes for policies that prove the Conservatives will represent the less well-off. The move would have brought Whitehall into line with Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty, and with Barack Obama who last week announced he wanted a living wage paid in all government procurement contracts.
However Hilton, one of Cameron’s most trusted advisers, appears to have been defeated by his colleagues after he told London Citizens – the group campaigning for a living wage – last month that Cameron would announce the policy four days later at a press conference hosted by them. The event was cancelled and not rescheduled.
Hilton’s Conservative colleagues have reservations on timing and more profound objections, arguing the introduction of a higher rate of pay is unaffordable during the economic downturn.
London Citizens says the government should start by using its procurement policy to award contracts to companies paying a living wage, eventually putting pressure on more private companies to follow suit. The new higher wage should not supersede the statutory minimum wage but instead become a mark of best practice. As well as City Hall, HSBC, KPMG and Barclays have been persuaded by the group to pay a living wage. While Labour’s grassroots would be upset if the Tories made overtures to low paid workers, the government is less anxious.
The business secretary, Lord Mandelson, was aware the Tories were planning to push for a Whitehall living wage since Cameron was due to make his announcement two weeks ago, but did not rush out any policy of his own.
Ed Miliband, in charge of writing Labour’s manifesto, had already commissioned the Treasury to cost a wage increase across Whitehall. The government is critical of Hilton’s chosen type of living wage, believing it to be a Londoncentric low pay policy. However, officials working on the policy also believe a national public sector living wage to be unaffordable, “running to billions of pounds”. The Treasury is instead working on how the principle of a living wage could be used to help the poorest workers. A London Citizens spokesman said: “Because of what Boris did in London, the fire brigade, for instance, now have to pay their cleaning staff a bit more but it’s had a great effect on the private sector and if national government can do the same then who knows what effect it will have on firms across the country.
“If you could get Tesco to pay its staff a living wage then the Treasury would save a lot of money. You wouldn’t have to pay out so much in tax credits because people who worked for them would have a better basic rate of pay.”
The move would have been a daring example of political repositioning as the Tories try to cast themselves as the “heirs to Blair”. The introduction of the minimum wage was one of the first acts of New Labour, coming into force in 1999. It was opposed by the Conservatives.
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Robert Mugabe backs David Cameron’s Conservatives
Mar 4th
Zimbabwe’s president declares Conservatives are bold and know how to relate to others whereas Blair and Brown run away
It has been a difficult few weeks for the Tories – the Ashcroft affair, talk of splits, erratic poll numbers and doubts over their economic policy. But at last they can enjoy some good news: no lesser global statesman than Robert Mugabe has offered David Cameron his endorsement.
“We have always related better with the British through the Conservatives than Labour,” Zimbabwe’s president said today. “Conservatives are bold, [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown run away when they see me, but not these fools, they know how to relate to others.”
Mugabe fell out with the British government when, under his land reforms, he encouraged Zimbabweans to seize the farms of British descendants. After Mugabe was accused of rigging the 2002 election, Blair imposed sanctions on the Zimbabwean leader and some of his associates, banning their travel ban and freezing bank accounts.
Today Brown restated the British government’s position telling the visiting South African president Jacob Zuma, involved in brokering Zimbabwe’s unity accord, that the sanctions would not be lifted
Speaking in Zimbabwe after hearing of Brown’s comments to Zuma, Mugabe said: “We have a better chance with David Cameron than with Brown.”Margaret Thatcher’s government presided over independence for then Rhodesia in 1980.
It is not the first time Mugabe has used harsh language, saying in 1999 that Blair was a “little man” for refusing to honour commitments made by Conservative governments to help fund Zimbabwe’s land reforms.
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Labour combats Lord Ashcroft millions with Obama-style funding
Mar 4th
David versus Goliath website asks for donations to help Labour candidates in marginal seats targeted by Tory billionaire
Labour MPs and candidates have set up an online campaign called David versus Goliath to encourage people to fund MPs and candidates in marginal seats that are up against the Tories’ “target seats fund” masterminded by Lord Ashcroft.
The MPs hope to appeal to the “British sense of fair play … to support candidates being drowned by the Ashcroft millions and other large Tory donors”.
The move has the backing of Labour HQ and typifies the Obama-style small-dollar electioneering being championed by former minister David Blunkett, who is running Labour’s fundraising campaign. In the last US presidential election, 3.1 million Americans donated an average of $86 (£57) each.
Blunkett believes Labour still needs to raise £10m to match the £18m cap on election spending that would see them draw even with the Tories.
But the activists behind David versus Goliath want to target their funds towards particular marginal constituencies.
The official role of Ashcroft in funding Tory candidates is not as obvious as in the runup to the 2005 election, when 24 of the party’s 33 gains were in seats shown to have received significant sums from the Conservative deputy chairman.
Ashcroft now works from within Tory HQ and his funds are a fraction of the total spent by the party. But many politicians standing against Conservative candidates say they recognise the Ashcroft campaign strategies: glossy brochures, DVDs and large-scale opinion polls coupled with direct mailings reflecting social attitudes revealed by polling.
Each day David versus Goliath will profile a candidate who has been targeted by what they believe to be Ashcroft-administered funds. The Labour candidate for Burton, Ruth Smeeth, is the first to be featured. Her Conservative counterpart, Andrew Griffiths, has been able to pay to have his car branded with the Tories’ logo.
Jessica Asato, the acting director of the Labour pressure group Progress, who is setting up the website, says: “We aren’t pretending we can match his millions, but we can try. What happened to the old-fashioned idea that elections are won by wearing out shoe leather, talking to voters on their doorstep?”
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Details of Ashcroft’s sophisticated target seat operation revealed | Allegra Stratton
Mar 3rd
Tories combining same sort of targeting Labour used in 1997 with extensive YouGov polling of groups as large as 10,000
The level of sophistication behind Lord Ashcroft’s “target seat operation” is revealed in an extensive article for Wired magazine, which includes the man once in charge of building up the Tories’ new media campaign, Francis Maude, saying he “isn’t sure” whether the technology will be ready in time for the election.
Ashcroft runs the Conservative party’s target seat operation, which the party hopes will secure them the necessary swings within constituencies they need to win even when the view of the whole country may suggest a narrower poll lead, which might result in a hung parliament.
Prospect journalist James Crabtree shows how Ashcroft has diagnosed the party’s targets. The Conservatives are using an updated form of Labour’s Excalibur machine which they used to get to power in 1997 — this one called Merlin — but now combining the targeting of Excalibur with extensive polling of groups as large as 10,000 done by YouGov enabling the party to rapidly produce pieces of literature to snare wavering groups of voters.
Merlin allows the party to combine information about a local area gathered from canvass sheets with Mosaic — a subtle classification of voter groups developed by the research firm Experian, which gives a detailed breakdown of 65 consumer “tribes” such as “cafe bar professionals” and “high spending families”. Crabtree writes: “Those socio-demographic categories let candidates see who lives in their patch simply by typing in a postcode”.
“A poll might seek out the views of a Mosaic group — say, “overstetched young aspirers” — living in marginal seats in northern England. If this group proved sceptical about Conservative policies on policing, the party could respond, using Merlin, by sending a letter on Tory crime policy only to that group.”
The Tories are also planning to make the day of the general election “full hand-held integration”. Crabtree writes: “No more print-outs to take door to door or voter lists to review, just party workers keeping CCHQ [Conservative headquarters] updated in real time about voter turnout and key seat performances using dedicated BlackBerry-like devices.”
However on this, Maude — now the shadow Cabinet Office minister — admits he “isn’t sure” if such plans will be ready in time; Merlin’s rollout has been “difficult”.
“Some of those who have used it for campaigning say the otherwise powerful system suffers ‘operational stability’ issues (meaning sometimes it doesn’t work at all). Others worry that the party lacks the statistical know-how to make sense of its powerful tool. But on election day, it will still let the Tories target marginal voters in must-win seats more precisely than ever before.”
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Michael Ashcroft’s election masterplan
Mar 2nd
The target seat campaign fund is the brainchild of Lord Ashcroft, whose thinking is elucidated in his book on the 2005 election
In the 65 square miles of the rural constituency of Pendle in Lancashire, many homes are at the end of winding tracks, treacherous and time-consuming to traverse. Its Labour MP, Gordon Prentice, can hope to reach only some of Pendle’s 37,000 households for a chat about voting intentions. When there, he usually finds Tory colour brochures on the hall table, delivered second and sometimes first class.
The calling cards, displayed on his website, are in part paid for from a pot of money devoted to Tory candidates in marginal seats, set up to help them compete with incumbent MPs with a parliamentary £10,000 “communication allowance”.
Under the rules this is not to be used for political ends, but the Tories insist it frequently is. So a full-colour newspaper, Pendle Matters, was delivered by the Tories almost monthly in the run-up to Christmas.
A guardian.co.uk crowdsourcing exercise saw readers report receiving four-page wraparounds of their local newspaper touting their Tory candidate, and direct mail which if sent to a constituency the size of Prentice’s by second-class mail would cost more than £10,000.
The target seat campaign fund is the brainchild of Lord Ashcroft, whose thinking is elucidated in his book on the 2005 election, Smell the Coffee: A Wake-up Call for the Conservative Party.
Since there are rules on what can be spent in an election – but not in the months and years before 1 January of an election year, when an £18m cap comes in – Ashcroft writes that you win not on polling day but in the years running up to it.
The Tory peer has funnelled large amounts of money to marginal seats. In the 2005 general election, of the 36 Tory candidates who unseated Labour and Lib Dem MPs, 24 got funds from his company, Bearwood Corporate Services: £5,000 if up against a small majority (insultingly called an “easy gain”, according to Labour MP Martin Linton), or £25,000 for a “battleground seat”. All he is supposed to have wanted in return is that the candidate buy him dinner if elected.
Since 2005 the peer has moved from being a hole in the wall outside the party to one of many cashiers inside. David Cameron made him deputy chair. “All contributions, including my own, are given to the party’s central fund,” Ashcroft said in 2007. Candidates could “submit campaign proposals to a committee at Conservative HQ which I chair”.
Ashcroft and his firms have donated more than £6.8m since 2001, according to the Electoral Commission. But since 2005 the vast bulk has been to the central party, not local associations. “It went underground,” said Andy Slaughter, Labour MP for Hammersmith and Fulham. “In the last quarter the accounts show the local party got £15,000 from CCHQ, but how can I show how much is Ashcroft’s? I can look at their accounts, and look at how much he’s giving the party. But I can’t prove how much goes directly against me.
“But we reckon they spent tens of thousands in the six weeks before Christmas alone, all sorts of literature.”
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