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Lord Ashcroft’s place in the sun
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Chris Riddell on Lord Ashcroft’s living arrangements
Why I’ve gone from porn to politics | Anna Arrowsmith
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I started making pornography for women because there was a need. And now I want to do something about the need for more female MPs
I’m Anna Arrowsmith, the Liberal Democrat PPC for Gravesend or, as many will know me, Anna Span, the UK’s first female porn director. Take your pick.
Since news of my selection broke on Thursday, many people have asked me why I want to be an MP. The answer is: for exactly the same reason I decided to start making pornography for women more than 12 years ago. Someone had to do it and it didn’t look like anyone else was going to – at least not with the drive, enthusiasm and determination that I could offer. The unfortunate truth is that there are far too few female MPs in this country compared to the rest of the world.
Did you know that Rwanda has the highest number of female MPs of all countries at 53%? Imagine living in a country with a female majority! Well, here I am again thinking that another male-dominated field needs challenging.
Back in 1998 I was in the final year of my degree, studying film at Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design. I had decided to write my dissertation on what fundamental changes would need to be made to mainstream pornography in order for it to be enjoyed by women. I called it Towards a New Pornography, intending it to sound like a manifesto, more for my own amusement than anything else. Then came lesson one in the British psyche. Even the so-called experimental filmmaker lecturers at this outstanding college were actually conservative with a small ‘c’.
My adverts for performers to appear in my graduation film were defaced and torn down by members of staff and my final film was refused a public airing “for fear of upsetting people’s grandparents”, according to the head of the department. All this for a film where the sex was actually simulated due to lead actor issues.
Twelve years later I have won many awards, including Indie Porn Pioneer at the international Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto and best director for two years in the UK.
I have fought long and hard for women’s right to sexual expression and consumption, as well as for freedom of speech. I have long since felt vindicated about my choices back at college and know my pro-sex feminist argument is based on sound principles and logic.
So why don’t I stay in my industry and continue to reap the rewards of my efforts? Because I am the type of person who needs a challenge. I achieved much in my last career and now I want to broaden my campaign to other pressing issues such as why this or previous governments don’t think they have a responsibility to give young people something productive and engaging to do with their spare time. I lived on a council estate in Bermondsey and saw first hand why the kids were taking drugs, fighting and committing crimes.
They are simply bored. I want to campaign to give young people in Gravesham the help they deserve.
To do this I have to fight yet another old man’s club – only this time without the dirty raincoats. Some won’t like it; they’ll assume that my selection means the world is going to hell. I’ve been here before; last time I changed my industry for ever.
That, among other issues, is why I am making the transition from porn to Parliament.
Watch this space; I’ve got a lot of – for want of a better word – balls.
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More money makes society miserable, warns report
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Economics experts argue that Britain’s thirst for status symbols harms our well-being
The national belt-tightening expected to follow next month’s budget could prove to be of more benefit to the nation’s sense of well-being than if wealth levels were to soar, according to a new study.
Complex economic formulas developed by two professors of economics, Curtis Eaton and Mukesh Eswaran, and published in the current edition of the Economic Journal, suggest that greater affluence can seriously damage a nation’s health. Based on their mathematical modelling, the economists advance the theory that once a country reaches a reasonable standard of living there is little further benefit to be had from increasing the wealth of its population. Indeed, it could make people feel worse off.
They believe their work shows that, as a nation becomes wealthier, consumption shifts increasingly to buying status symbols with no intrinsic value – such as lavish jewellery, designer clothes and luxury cars. But they warn: “These goods represent a ‘zero-sum game’ for society: they satisfy the owners, making them appear wealthy, but everyone else is left feeling worse off.”
Their work owes much to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who in 1899 coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen argued that people seek status through conspicuous consumption, which derives its value not from the intrinsic worth of what is consumed but from the fact that it permits people to attempt to set themselves apart from others. As the economy grows, people increasingly choose status symbols or “Veblen goods” over other goods.
“Those with above-average wealth consume Veblen goods with a positive impact on their happiness,” the authors write. “But those with below-average wealth simply cannot afford these goods, so they have a negative impact on their happiness. This is known as ‘Veblen competition’. As average wealth rises, people grow richer but not happier.”
The pair believe their research helps to explain why empirical studies show that levels of happiness and feelings of community in affluent countries have stagnated, despite growth in real incomes.
There is another downside. As people yearn for more status symbols they have less time or inclination for helping others. This, the authors argue, damages “community and trust”, which are vital to an economy because they ensure the smooth running of society. They conclude: “Conspicuous consumption can have an impact not only on people’s well-being but also on the growth prospects of the economy.” The theory may go some way to explaining the public backlash against the louche lifestyles of the UK’s footballers, bankers and politicians.
It fits into a debate within economics about how to measure a nation’s true wealth. Many economists believe they need to focus more on measuring happiness. The belief that a focus on individual wealth creation can be divisive has spread around the worlds of politics, psychology and science. Clinical psychologist Oliver James has argued that there is an epidemic of “affluenza” throughout the developed world, with attempts “to keep up with the Joneses” triggering huge increases in depression and anxiety.
Last year a bestselling book by two epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, suggested that Britain and America were the countries with the widest gulfs between rich and poor in the developed world, and as a result had the most health and social problems.
Nevertheless, Eaton and Eswaran, from the universities of Calgary and British Columbia respectively, do not believe the developed world’s obsession with wealth shows any signs of abating. The pair predict that “it is likely that conspicuous consumption will become worse as time progresses”.
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Catherine Bennett | Talk to us about politics, not your lovely home life
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The Cameron and Brown personality parade misses the point that voters care about issues, not character
Recently, on a day when no cameras were looking and he was surrounded by political nonentities, mainly mothers, an off-duty David Cameron was amazingly haughty to a friend of mine. Maybe it was just an off-day. Or maybe, what with all the nation’s mums to think about over, a stressy Mr Cameron had important political things on his mind. What do mums feel about Lily Allen? Would they like him to drink Guinness or bitter? Enjoy gardening or football? Shopping-wise, which out of Primark and Marks & Spencer do mums think more appropriate for a national leader? Examined by Titchmarsh, he came out for the latter.
Lucky Gordon Brown: though pressed on his retail experience by an insistent Piers Morgan, he was never forced to admit to a supermarket preference. But the prime minister confessed, and a cutaway to smiling Sarah Brown confirmed that this was a positive anecdote, that he once accompanied his wife to a supermarket, but stayed in the car.
Admittedly, it’s unlikely she would have stood up and added that they were not, at the time, on speaking terms. We just have to take Brown’s uxoriousness on trust, like his grumpiness-denial and a claim that he once drank “half-a-dozen” pints a night. Are there any witnesses to this excess? The more political parties urge us to go out and vote on the basis of their leader’s characters, the more, if they want to avoid complicity, broadcasters might want to think about testing these auto-eulogies for accuracy.
Does Cameron really play darts? Does Brown, yet more implausibly, never throw anything more substantial than newspapers, and “wake up in the morning thinking what I can do to help people looking for jobs”? Stringent investigation of these claims could provide fabulous light entertainment. Although, inexplicably, waterboarding has yet to feature on daytime television, Jeremy Kyle routinely uses a lie detector to expose disingenuousness, even though all that is generally at stake, for survivors, is not a position at the helm of government, but a chance to “save your relationship”. Once Brown and Cameron were wired up they could even be asked a few supplementaries, about banking regulation, or the size of coming cuts.
Last week, invoking the more urgent electoral issue of himself, Brown gave voters a few tips for personality assessment. “It is for other people to judge,” he said, “but I believe that character is not about telling people what they want to hear but about telling them what they need to know.” And another hint, to help the public succeed where generations of divorcees have failed: “For better or for worse, with me what you see is what you get.” But like a Cretan, who thinks it worth adding, “just ask my wife” to the line “all Cretans are liars”, Brown accepts that the public might, occasionally, feel the need for corroboration.
Over to Sarah Brown. “What you see is what you get with him,” she said, in response to the bullying stories. A comment which only confirms, like an earlier line, “I know he wakes up every morning thinking…”, that here is a couple so close that their “mirroring” has reached the exemplary, automatic stage.
Even so, it’s worth noting Mrs Brown was not speaking under oath. Here is a loyal spouse who stands to be evicted, if she is disbelieved, then rehoused in Kirkcaldy; albeit with support from Naomi Campbell. Nor, perhaps, should the cautious voter believe in Samantha Cameron’s purported diffidence about Number 10, on the basis that she is already a rich baronet’s daughter and a big name in the world of handbags. She still wants to win enough to deploy her children and, in tonight’s profile of Cameron by Trevor McDonald, to throw down this gauntlet about her own Mr Wonderful: “He’s always been incredibly strong, and kind, and supportive.” How do we know this is true? Because the rules of all-political Mr and Mrs now require that candidates provide character references for the wives, as well as themselves.
Dave guarantees, in Samantha, “an amazing woman, a working mum, a very successful career woman” – so a leetle bit more modern, maybe, than Gordon’s “beautiful, elegant, compassionate, dignified” Sarah. Whom he proposed to on a beach. And loves ever so, Piers: it “just grows and grows”. Will he be sure to tell us if it stops? “I’m an open book as far as people are concerned,” Brown says. “Anything they want to know, I’m happy.” Actually, politics aside, it’s hard to think of anything he’s left out. Most of us probably know more about Sarah Brown’s proposal of marriage than we do about our own mother’s.
Presumably, given there has never been disclosure on this level, that the media did not demand it and that no one in their right mind would volunteer such intimacies, Brown and Cameron’s advisers believe that a public hardened by tales of Prescottian bulimia and Mrs Blair’s neglected Dutch cap will respond only to enhanced levels of authenticity stimulus. Heath’s yacht, Mrs Thatcher’s larder and Kinnock’s Welsh idyll have given way to a televised account of his baby’s final moments by Brown, a father who thereby enters an almost obscene contest for public sympathy with his rival, another bereaved father.
On each side, the strategy looks as risky as it is undignified. Their particular brands of insincerity – agonising awkwardness in Brown’s case, supreme smarm in Cameron’s, phony WAG stuff from both – could easily be the strongest impressions created by protracted exposure. More important, this belief in the electoral power of character may be misplaced.
Evidently Brown and his manipulators have evidence, or instincts, that tell them the contrary, but there are doubts about the significance of leaders’ characters in elections, even in an age when it is common to argue that presidential politics and a celebrity-obsessed media have increased their impact. And it is not, anyway, as if charismatic politicians are new. Winston Churchill was a celebrity, and he was rejected. So was Neil Kinnock, even though he was more appealing than John Major. Look at Berlusconi’s behaviour, and you could even argue that voters don’t pay as much attention to character as they should.
Concluding a 2002 study, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections, the psephologist Prof Anthony King said the conventional political wisdom on character is wrong. Research, he wrote, “indicates that relatively few voters are swayed by candidates’ personal characteristics”. So Brown musn’t worry about being snubbed by Match of the Day.
“Far more important,” King writes, “are voters’ long-standing party loyalties, their views on issues, and their judgments of how well or badly presidents and parties have performed – or will perform – in office.” Ah. Maybe, given the economic tumult Mr Brown has just prophesied, it is a bit early to give up on football. Any port in a storm.
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Lehman’s advisers were guard dogs that didn’t bark
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By their silence, the failed bank’s lawyers and accountants gave highly questionable practices a sheen of respectability
It’s good to know we still lead the world in something. “Business services” is often cited as one of Britain’s proudest export industries, and last week’s postmortem on the collapse of Lehman Brothers from the US “examiner” brought some formidable examples of its recent triumphs.
“Magic circle” City law firm Linklaters gave the thumbs-up to “Repo 105″, the complex manoeuvre that allowed the ailing Lehman to book short-term loans from other banks as “sales”, effectively disguising billions of dollars of assets, sometimes conveniently just as the end of a quarter approached. Herbert McDade, the man known inside the bank as its “balance sheet tsar”, described the instruments in an email as “another drug we’re on”.
(And, having opined that “Repo 105″ was legal, at least under UK law, Linklaters is advising PWC on the Lehman administration.)
Auditor Ernst and Young is even more firmly in the examiner’s sights. He says it was “professionally negligent” in passing the Repo 105 arrangements, which will be music to the ears of the many creditors and shareholders itching to take class-action cases against anyone they might be able to blame for the firm’s catastrophic bankruptcy.
The examiner also reports that senior Lehman banker Matthew Lee sounded the alarm about “accounting improprieties” in the summer of 2008, referring specifically to $50bn of repo arrangements, but Ernst and Young “took virtually no action to investigate”.
Of course, Linklaters and Ernst and Young will say they were only following the rules, but auditors and lawyers are professionals and they gave Lehman’s highly questionable practices a sheen of respectability.
Lehman’s chief Dick Fuld could not have spun this web of self-delusion without having a team of advisers on his side. After Enron’s collapse led to the annihilation of its auditor Arthur Andersen, the industry was meant to have been transformed. It’s about time lawyers and accountants were subject to the same searching scrutiny as ratings agencies, regulators and the banks themselves.
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Conservative defector condemns party’s ‘vile letter’ and hostility towards Europe
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MEP Edward McMillan-Scott accuses Tories of euro-scepticism and ‘double standards’ for expelling him while only suspending Lord Archer
The former leader of the Tories in Europe launches a scathing attack on David Cameron’s Conservatives today, accusing them of “visceral euroscepticism”, “twisted” thinking and bullying tactics that forced him out of the party.
Edward McMillan-Scott, who defected to the Liberal Democrats on Friday, has also accused the Tories of “extraordinary double standards” for expelling him permanently, having only suspended Lord Archer, who was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury in 2001.
Writing in today’s Observer, McMillan-Scott, who remains a vice-president of the European parliament, says the Tories unleashed a “campaign of vilification” against him after he claimed that Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP who now leads their centre-right group in the EU, had an antisemitic, homophobic and racist track record.
A strong pro-European and member of the Tory party for 43 years, McMillan-Scott gives voice to years of frustration at the party’s hostile attitudes to the EU under present and past leaders, including William Hague.
In his outspoken attack on the party over its handling of his expulsion, McMillan-Scott says he has been smeared by Tory press officers who have tried to claim he is the one who holds antisemitic views.
He adds that they have distorted facts about his defection and claims that the party produced no documents to support its case when he appealed against expulsion. “I am not bitter, but they are twisted. It is not a nice party now,” he writes.
He accuses Cameron of tolerating eurosceptics who depart from the party line while persecuting him, a pro-European, for daring to express sincerely held doubts about the leadership credentials of a controversial fellow MEP.
“David Cameron shields his europhobes,” he writes. “No murmur was made when last weekend Lord Tebbit in effect encouraged Conservatives to vote Ukip in the general election against the Speaker, John Bercow. The dog whistle is really at a lower pitch: that Ukip supporters know that there is a real home for them, back in the Conservative party.”
Last night, speaking from the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Birmingham, McMillan-Scott said the party had shown “massive double standards” by expelling him while suspending Jeffrey Archer for five years.
When the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, mentioned McMillan-Scott’s name at a rally on Friday night there was a huge roar from activists. Yesterday he was seated in the front row for a question-and-answer session, so Clegg could welcome him.
The row over McMillan-Scott blew up last year when he stood as vice-president of the European parliament against Kaminski, who was Hague’s choice. Following McMillan-Scott’s stand, Timothy Kirkhope, leader of the Conservative MEPs, withdrew the party whip.
On 15 September, without any prior notification, McMillan-Scott was expelled from the Conservative party after 25 years as an MEP, four years as leader of the MEPs and three years on the party’s board.
• Hague is also likely to come under fire if he declines an invitation to appear this Thursday before a parliamentary committee investigating the granting of a peerage to Lord Ashcroft .
The three Tory members of the public administration committee – David Burrowes, Ian Liddell-Grainger and Charles Walker – have already said that they will not attend the one-off meeting, at which confidential Cabinet Office records relating to the decision to grant Ashcroft a peerage in 2000 will be discussed.
But the event is now in danger of running into farce. Ashcroft, a “non-dom” who does not pay UK tax on his overseas earnings, is unlikely to appear in person and Hague, too, looks doubtful.
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Recovery yields Alistair Darling a £12bn budget windfall
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Chancellor will cite state investment in jobs as key to lower-than-expected unemployment
Alistair Darling will claim next week that government action to protect jobs has saved around £12bn, as Labour uses the pre-election budget to spell out key economic dividing lines with the Tories.
In what is expected to be the most political budget in decades, the chancellor will cite government investment in jobs programmes as a major reason why unemployment has turned out to be dramatically lower than economists predicted. Last year’s budget anticipated that the level of unemployment, based on National Audit Office assessments of independent forecasts, would be 2.09 million people in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2.44 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. By December’s pre-budget report (PBR), however, the government had revised the forecasts to 1.72 million for 2009 and 1.91 million for 2010, saying that this would save up to £10bn over five years from lower unemployment benefits alone.
Since then, the Observer has established that Darling’s officials have cut the forecasts still further. The latest projections for unemployment are for it to hit 1.72 million in the final quarter of this year and 1.75 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 – a further 200,000 lower than in the PBR plans, potentially freeing up an extra £1bn-£2bn.
The work and pensions secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “In the 80s and 90s unemployment continued to rise even after the recession ended, because the government failed to put the necessary support and training in place and keep it there as the economy returned to growth.” She claimed that the Conservatives would cut back investment in jobs programmes and “put the economy at risk, even though the clear evidence shows helping people back to work saves money for the future too”.
This week Cooper is expected to announce that the government will subsidise another 7,000 jobs for young people, bringing the total created under the Future Jobs Fund to 117,000. The funding will pay for work at the national minimum wage, targeted at under-25s and people living in unemployment hotspots.
Last night Treasury sources insisted that most of the windfall savings from lower-than-expected unemployment would be used to cut the deficit, rather than for pre-election giveaways.
Darling believes the budget could spark a sell-off in government markets unless he stands by his pledge to halve the deficit within four years. Ministers believe that they have a credible plan to put the public finances back in order, through targeted investment in the economy, which they say will speed progress towards sustained growth; the introduction of tax rises such as the 50p rate for top earners (from this April) and national insurance rises from next April; and efficiency savings across government. But Darling is not expected to spell out any more details of specific departmental spending cuts so close to polling day.
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Can Katy Perry stop EMI going to America for a song?
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Billions of pounds of debt, the internet and piracy are crippling one of Britain’s most iconic firms
It is a tale of sex, debt and rock’n'roll that is unlikely to have a happy ending. When Guy Hands, a City financier with a penchant for fast food and an insatiable appetite for deal-making, came up with a plan to buy EMI, Britain’s flagship music company, using billions of pounds of borrowed money, many wondered how he could possibly make a decent return on his investment. As it has turned out, he couldn’t.
This weekend EMI’s new chairman Charles Allen, the former ITV chief executive hired by Hands last week to run the music arm of the company, is battling to ensure its independence, assembling a rescue plan for the company that signed the Beatles and became synonymous with the golden age of British pop.
Sources close to the company say Allen, a former accountant whose eclectic musical tastes encompass Lily Allen and Edith Piaf, is “rolling up his sleeves” and working to ensure the company does not breach the terms of its bank loans, but there is no doubt EMI is in peril. “It is a very, very big moment,” according to Claire Enders, founder of media consultancy Enders Analysis. “The next two or three months are critical for the future of EMI.”
Allen’s predecessor, Elio Leoni-Sceti, left suddenly last week just as the final touches were being put on a rescue package, prompting fears over the company’s future. The business is effectively being propped up by its past, surviving on the revenues generated by artists signed during a 30-year period when British music dominated the world.
The list of talent on EMI’s books reads like a roll call of rock royalty: David Bowie, Queen, Lennon and McCartney, the Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd. As an incubator of home-grown musical talent, the company is without equal and its position as one of the “big four” global record labels is a source of national pride; it exists to make money but EMI also safeguards the country’s status as a place where music that matters is made.
If EMI disappears or falls into foreign hands, many music industry figures worry that future generations of British acts may find it more difficult to find a worldwide audience. Jazz Summers, who manages former Verve vocalist Richard Ashcroft, who is signed to EMI, said: “If you look at their track record, they have broken more British acts in America than anyone else, and the same is true in other countries.”
EMI is in crisis because it is burdened with what sources close to the company describe as a “ludicrous” amount of debt, racked up after it was bought in 2007 by Hands’s private equity company Terra Firma. EMI Music currently has three artists in the top 15 of the album chart for the first time this century, including Blur vocalist Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz, and it is on course to make a profit of £200m this year, but a staggering three quarters of that will go on interest payments.
Hands borrowed heavily to fund the deal, using money provided by Terra Firma’s investors, and EMI’s valuable back catalogue, as collateral, but even then some questioned whether he was right to pay the amount he did for a business that was struggling to come to terms with downloads and a dramatic decline in physical music sales. The industry has lost between 30% and 50% of its revenues in the last five years, but the irony is that EMI is currently outperforming its peers, which include Sony BMG and Warner Music.
It had the biggest-selling album of 2008, Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, and reissued the Beatles digitally remastered back catalogue last year. Acts including Lily Allen and Katy Perry are selling well, but the way the company is structured means it cannot trade its way out of trouble.
Before the credit crunch, loans could be refinanced cheaply, but now EMI is struggling to meet its debt repayments in the wake of the severe economic downturn. It has been forced to cut costs dramatically, laying off close to 20% of its workforce. The company is now worth £450m, around a tenth of what Hands paid for it. Some big acts, including Radiohead, have already left, muttering that the money men simply didn’t understand the music business.
Last week one of EMI’s biggest-selling groups, Pink Floyd, won a court action preventing the company from making tracks from their 1970s album Dark Side of the Moon available to download individually. That was widely portrayed as a victory for artistic integrity – the group want their masterpiece to be consumed from start to finish, as they originally intended – but it also illustrates the challenges the music industry faces in an era of huge upheaval, when illegal downloading is costing it dear and making money from talent discovered and developed at huge cost is more difficult than ever.
If Allen cannot persuade Terra Firma’s investors to stump up another £120m, EMI will be in breach of its loan terms, and its main creditor – US bank Citigroup – could seize control of the company. If it does so, Citigroup is likely to sell it to Warner Music, an American rival which was outbid by Hands for EMI three years ago. The situation is complicated by Terra Firma’s decision to sue Citigroup in New York, accusing it of forcing EMI towards administration so it can take possession of the company and make a profit from a quick sale, allegations that the bank denies.
Hands is a larger-than-life tax exile, a hero in the Square Mile whose reputation has been badly tarnished by the EMI debacle. He now concedes he overpaid for EMI, but his miscalculation means he could be about to hand a much-loved cultural institution into the keeping of the Americans.
At the end of last year Cadbury’s city shareholders agreed to sell the nation’s favourite chocolate company to Illinois-based Kraft. The prospect of another household name passing into foreign ownership, particularly a national champion in one of the few industries in which Britain still excels, is an unsettling one.
One senior music industry executive explained: “For British music, the fact that there was a very successful British company to sign for was hugely significant.” However, others say the temptation to indulge in flag-waving should be resisted. Enders said: “Britain is one of the places people come looking for talent and that won’t change. There are a lot of players in the market and advances paid to acts such as Florence and The Machine have gone up.”
If EMI does fall into the hands of an American rival, she added, it might ultimately safeguard its future. “It would be better for EMI to have less indebtedness. It will have much more firepower.”
EMI could survive. It is still lining up the sale of some prized assets. It was reported last month that the Abbey Road studios in London could be sold off. The company later insisted the studios should stay under its ownership and was working with “third parties” about funding a “revitalisation project”.
Raising the possibility that a part of the nation’s cultural heritage could be sold provides a graphic reminder of how the company’s huge debt is forcing it to make unpopular decisions.
It may not matter if British acts are no longer championed by a UK company as long as the country continues to produce talent and A&R men from overseas arrive here in search of the next Lily Allen or Amy Winehouse. “In the end the music business is the same as it ever was,” Enders said. “It’s about hits.”
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It’s Nick Clegg’s chance to shine, so he’d better not fluff his lines | Andrew Rawnsley
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The Lib Dems have a fabulous opportunity, but will need exceptional discipline during the campaign
In conversation with friends about the forthcoming televised election debates between the party leaders, Nick Clegg was heard to say: “I’d better not screw up.” That self-deprecation is an attractive side of his character. If Gordon Brown entertains for a moment the possibility that he might fall flat on his face before 10 million or more viewing voters, you can’t imagine him saying it out loud.
Nick Clegg is right to be nervous that he doesn’t fluff his chance to shine in the TV arc lights. This general election is a golden opportunity for him and his party. A whiskery government asks for a fourth term under a disliked prime minister who has presided over the deepest recession since 1945. An unconvincing Conservative party hasn’t persuaded the country that its air-brushed leader can be trusted with power. If not now for the Lib Dems, when?
The usual case made against them by their opponents is that they are a dilettante party. This time they can say that, when it came to two of the big calls of the last decade, they got it right and their larger rivals got it wrong. Labour and the Tories were united in supporting George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The Lib Dems opposed the war. Iraq is in a better place today than it was five years ago, but there’s no escaping the epic amounts of blood and treasure squandered because the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam was so calamitously mishandled. The Lib Dems can contend that they also displayed superior foresight at home. Labour and the Tories were as one in encouraging the reckless gamblers of high finance during the bubble years. The Lib Dems were the lonely and now vindicated voice which warned that the debt-fuelled boom would ultimately implode in a ruinous bust.
They can also argue – though it would be best for them not to be too sanctimonious about it – that their parliamentarians came out of the expenses scandal looking less mucky than either Labour or the Tories. Not a single Lib Dem MP has been found guilty of “flipping” to bilk the taxpayer for mortgage payments and home refurbishment while avoiding capital gains tax.
Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and other members of the leadership team have also worked hard to enhance their credibility in straitened economic times. They’ve abandoned the party’s tiresome old habit of offering wish lists of goodies to the voters by ditching as unaffordable previous promises to give free care to the elderly and to scrap immediately student tuition fees.
Now to their handicaps. The first is that the Lib Dems can’t credibly claim that they have a chance of forming the next government. The second is that they can’t say who they would govern with in the event that the election produces a hung parliament – what they prefer to call, because it sounds less unstable, a “balanced parliament”.
That outcome could finally give the Lib Dems their long craved chance to shape government to their agenda. At the same time, the prospect of a hung parliament turns the election campaign into a minefield which they will have to safely traverse between here and polling day. Nick Clegg is enigmatic about precisely what he would do in the event that the election does not give a parliamentary majority to either David Cameron or Gordon Brown. I don’t blame the Lib Dem for his muteness on this subject. He is not Mystic Meg. A “photo finish” – in which Labour and the Tories have an equal claim on power – is just one of several possible scenarios. There is a variety of ways in which parliament could be hung and the Lib Dem leader has no more idea than anyone else what may confront him on 7 May.
His reluctance to spell out how he would jump is explicable for plenty of other reasons. To express a preference now would be to take a big risk that his party would split under him. Some of his most senior colleagues believe they would be crucified by much of the media and subsequently immolated by the voters if they try to sustain Gordon Brown in office after he had been rejected by the country. There is interest in the idea, first floated in this space some months ago, of sustaining a Labour government on condition that there was a new prime minister. Step forward, say, Alan Johnson with his long-term commitment to changing the voting system. But there are formidable obstacles in the way of such a deal – not least the likely reluctance of Gordon Brown to go gently into the night.
Many Lib Dems, a party instinctively on the centre-left, would be viscerally hostile to any sort of arrangement with the Conservatives. The Tories are flatly opposed to electoral reform, surely the sine qua non for the Lib Dems of doing a deal with anyone.
In the event of a hung parliament, an understanding which allowed orderly government – the passage of the budget and other key elements of business – looks a more likely outcome than a full-blown coalition. This is not least because the Lib Dems have cramped the ability of their leadership to deliver them quickly and smoothly into power with another party. Long ago, when his members became suspicious that Paddy Ashdown might do a deal over their heads with Tony Blair, the party imposed a complex “quadruple lock” which makes decisions dependent on bewildering permutations of votes by the party’s MPs, its federal executive, a special conference and a ballot of its members. How wonderfully Lib Dem to shackle their leader with more checks and balances than the constitution of the United States imposes on an American president.
Any hint from Nick Clegg that he has a preference between Gordon Brown and David Cameron would hand a massive gift to his opponents. Labour is already trying some elemental blackmail by telling voters that support for the Lib Dems could let in the Tories by the back door. The Tories are likewise trying to scare other voters with the idea that support for the Lib Dems could allow Gordon Brown to cling to office even if he has been clearly rejected by the country.
Nick Clegg’s current formula is to say that the party with the strongest support will have the “mandate” and the “moral right” to form a government “either on its own or with others”. What he has not spelt out is how he defines mandate. Does this mean the party with the greatest number of MPs or the party with the greatest share of the vote? That opacity is deliberate. If he says most votes, that will be taken as a wink that he leans towards the Tories. If he says most seats, that will be taken as a nudge that he is keener on Labour.
The Lib Dems will be intensely pressed during the campaign to jump off the fence, especially when opinion polls put us in hung parliament territory. It’s really not reasonable that the media treats this as a question to which only the Lib Dems owe an answer. It can equally well be asked of Gordon Brown or David Cameron what they will do to ensure stable government in the event that the country declines to give either of them a parliamentary majority. But there’s not much point Lib Dems moaning about that. They ought to be accustomed to life not being fair. They will need to demonstrate exceptional, not to say uncharacteristic, discipline if they are not to be impaled on this question. If his MPs start letting slip opposing preferences, Nick Clegg’s campaign will fall apart.
He has been trying to switch the emphasis to what he would demand in return for support in the hope of redirecting attention to his party’s policies. Today, in a speech to the Lib Dem spring conference, he will set “four tests” for Labour and the Conservatives: reforms to tax, schools, the City and parliament, including changes to the voting system. Some people, among them his own activists, will lament that global warming is not on his list of deal-breakers. Others, including his opponents, will ask why he has left off protecting the health service. This approach is not without its risks.
Most voters have a formed view about Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Their wives have also begun a toe-curling competition to win votes which is not much more edifying than had Sarah and Sam decided to settle it with a wet T-shirt contest.
By contrast, Nick Clegg has a very fuzzy profile with the public. If they’ve even heard of him, they don’t think they know him. If they know him, they don’t think they know him very well. The leaders’ debates will be his great opportunity to change that. He has won the same airtime as his opponents. The big two could have tried to insist that they got a larger share than the third man, but they feared that wouldn’t be tolerated by the broadcasters and wouldn’t be seen as fair by voters. So the Lib Dem leader has been given equal exposure and status with Gordon Brown and David Cameron which treats him as a candidate for prime minister even though he is not. This is a privilege neither Charles Kennedy nor Paddy Ashdown ever enjoyed. It is a fabulous opportunity for Nick Clegg. Yes, he really had better not screw up.
The End of the Party is the number one best-selling non-fiction hardback. To order signed copies of Andrew Rawnsley’s book for only £17, visit guardianbooks.co.uk or call 0845 606 4232.
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Edward McMillan-Scott: Standing up to extremism in Europe cost me my place with Tories
about 4 months ago - No comments
What the Conservatives say publicly about Europe is not what they really think, says the MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber
William Hague has been using positive words to describe the Conservative party’s future relations in government with our EU partners. I have been around the higher circles of the party for long enough to know that a visceral euroscepticism has been growing there since John Major’s day. I had a stand-up row with Hague when, while leader of the Tory MEPs, he tried to get me to back his “Never to the Euro” ticket.
It was chilling to hear the then party leader say to one very senior spokesman at an EU meeting some years ago: “We can say what we like here, but it will be different when we are in government.” I should have left then, instead of carrying on the pro-European fight from within.
David Cameron shields his europhobes. No murmur was made when last weekend Lord Tebbit in effect encouraged Conservatives to vote Ukip against the Speaker, John Bercow, in the general election. The dog whistle is really at a lower pitch: that Ukip supporters know that there is a real home for them, back in the Conservative party. Dan Hannan MEP plays the same game, even declaring that he had resigned his spokesmanship in Europe to campaign full-time for a referendum on EU in-or-out. No slapdown there, either; certainly no expulsion. But then he is a chum of Sam Cameron’s; they were at Marlborough College together.
My decision to join the Liberal Democrats this weekend was made easier by the vile letter the lawyers conducting my appeal against expulsion last year from the Conservative party received last weekend. They described it to me as “intemperate”, and advised me that, since the party refused to supply any documents about my expulsion, there was no hope of a fair final hearing next Thursday at Tory HQ. So I withdrew from the appeal and thereby resigned from the Conservative party I have served more or less faithfully for 43 years.
No doubt my successful stand for re-election last July as European parliament vice-president against the “official” candidate from Poland’s Law and Justice party, Michal Kaminski, put forward by Cameron’s controversial new group, caused him some discomfiture. But the campaign of vilification against me when I explained my reasons – that Kaminski had a recent antisemitic, homophobic and racist past – was so bizarre that it began to attract attention.
Indeed, Toby Helm in this newspaper was the most attentive. He had been present at the national commemoration in July 2001 of one of the most notorious massacres of the second world war in Nazi-occupied Poland. At Jedwabne in July 1941, more than 400 Jews were rounded up by their Polish neighbours and herded into a barn where they were burned.
At the time of the apology, Kaminski was the local MP and he made it his business to organise opposition to the commemoration. He denies this now, as he denies so much else of his easily discovered past, using the Nick Griffin defence: “If I said it then, I would not say it today.”
Last week Cameron was interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle and assured its readers that he would bear down hard on extremism in Britain. This sits uneasily with a man who propitiates it in Europe.
Conservative press officers hounded Labour over Damian McBride. The same pack have been repeatedly reported to me by journalists as using heavy tactics. One hapless Yorkshire Post journalist was called one week by six Tory boys demanding a right of reply for Kaminski. He coolly and properly said that, if he accepted that, he would also have to give space to Nick Griffin. The same team put it about that I was antisemitic because I once met Hamas – actually to tell them to stand for election. They are out again this weekend distorting the facts about my defection to the Lib Dems. I am not bitter, but they are twisted. It is not a nice party now.
A move to the Lib Dems is easier because I have known, liked and respected Nick Clegg for some years, whether as a key negotiator on trade while Sir Leon Brittan was EU commissioner or later as an MEP.
Most of my family are liberals and I am comfortable joining the Liberal family. From being a liberal Conservative I have become a conservative Liberal. And it is not a nasty party.
Edward McMillan-Scott is MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber and continues to sit as an independent vice-president of the European parliament
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