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Head-boy Dave – perfect modern man

It was good to hear Matthew Parris trying to get some perspective into the MPs’ allowances row on Radio 4 this morning.

He pointed out that what Douglas Hogg claimed for his moat cleaning – £2000 – was far less than the £20,000 or so a year which many MPs claim in mortgage interest payments on properties from which they will make huge capital gains.

Of course Matthew was too fastidious to name head boy David Cameron by name as someone who will rake in hundreds of thousands in profit from his taxpayer funded mortgage, but it’s a fair point.

It’s true that moats, manure, duck houses etc grate more with the public because while a mortgage for a second home might be necessary for an MP’s duties, a moat or Heathcote-Amerys £380 worth of manure ain’t. You just don’t need a castle or a herbaceous border stretching to the horizon to do the job.

More to the point, people identify these things with remote Tory grandees – an image that Cameron is keen to ditch. Perhaps it shows Cameron as the perfect man for our aspirational times: making loads of dosh from your property for no effort and preferably using someone else’s money is apparently fine.

Phillip Oppenheim

News from the front

I spent a very pleasant day canvassing for Jonathan Sheppard who is standing for the county in Worksop Nottinghamshire and my old chairman, Jack Brown, also standing for the county in Derbyshire.

Both the areas we worked were traditional Labour strongholds. I saw not a single red and yellow poster. The only sign of life from the reds was a dodgy old geezer in a crumpled mac, looking like a retired paedo, with a mucky plastic bag of leaflets who scuttled shiftily off as soon as he saw us.

Somewhat different from the glad, confident morn back in May 1997 when Labour election workers were instructed to get themselves up on general election day in smart dark blue blazers, ties for the men and neat little betty-business-centre suits for the ladies – with red rose buttonholes for both – all designed to reassure the voters that Labour really had changed.

And they were awesomely efficient. A few days before the ’97 election, trained Labour polling teams disguised as canvassers from a consumer company were bussed from key marginal to key marginal to get accurate readings. At the first sign of any embarrassment – such as the Labour councillor in my area who was found to have used council phones to call gay chat lines – media damage containment teams wheeled into action, whisking the poor little chap off to some safe house.

But I digress. This time round, most of the punters said they were sick of everyone and wouldn’t vote. There was visceral loathing of Labour, but no great enthusiasm for Cameron and the Tories either.

Much as Dave has modelled himself on Blair, he so far has failed to capture a narrative in the way that Blair convinced people pre-‘97 he would combine the hard head of Conservatism with the soft heart of Labour. One old boy working on his motor bike told me that we needed Maggie back – he had always voted Tory but would go for the BNP this time. Ominous, that.

My prediction: turnout plumbing the depth; Labour wipeout.

Phillip Oppenheim

Follow the real money

I wonder if it was the £1,040 bill for that glamorous photoshoot of Julie Kirkbride which ultimately did for her. Presumably she claimed for it on her office costs allowance, though this is the sort of thing that MPs can now legally claim for on their new £10,000 a year communications allowance – which the Conservatives have wisely promised to scrap.

My point is that that the estimates of how much MPs may have fraudulently claimed run up to around £2m. A lot of dosh, until you remember that taxpayer funding for the main parties has risen by 450% in real terms since 1997 to more than £60m a year.

The response of the government to the Cash for Peerages scandal (seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?) was to commission a review of party funding under a reliable old patsy civil-servant, Hayden-Phillips, which – surprise – recommended a further £20-25m of our money to go to the main political parties whether we support them or not.

Makes the pennies spent on moats, manure and yes, even the tens of thousands of pounds spent on mortgages – including Cameron’s – seem relatively insignificant.

Phillip Oppenheim

More women?

In the wake of Julie’s resignation, the commentariat have been predictably going on about how we need more women in politics. Bollocks. We need more good people in politics. Gender, race, religion, sexual preference, which football team you support etc etc should be a complete irrelevance.

Phillip Oppenheim

The Tragic Couple

I once dubbed Andrew Mackay and Julie Kirkbride “The Holiday Couple” in the Sunday Times. It was just after 1997 and he was Tory Northern Ireland spokesman – except that he and the missus spent rather a lot of the parliamentary session on the beach, causing Mackay to miss a key Northern Ireland debate.

I’ve also written scathingly recently about Andrew Mackay. But however unwise Julie was in apparently taking her husband’s advice on her claims, and however poorly she handled the media, there was still something very ugly in the way that the press have pursued someone who is the mother of a young child.

Julie, remember, went out with Stephen Milligan, the Tory MP who died in tragic and bizarre circumstances in 1994. Stephen was a great bloke, highly intelligent and thoroughly decent.

I got to know Julie through Stephen. She was also, ironically, then a Telegraph Lobby correspondent – and, with her trademark leather miniskirts, a great adornment to the Palace of Westminster. Julie and Steve were a golden couple, until his death. I was always surprised when she later hooked up with Mackay, but I suppose they, too, were golden couple of sorts – silver, maybe.

So much as we may despise what Mackay and Julie apparently got up to, there is something terribly tragic about what has happened. It must be good for the process if those who put themselves above us get knocked down now and again. But it does get a bit ugly at times.

Phillip Oppenheim

We’re all reformers now, aren’t we?

So David Cameron wants to reform parliament. Nice timing, Dave. Sort of fashionable issue right now, no?

And they are all at it. There was Jack Straw, too, joining Alan Johnson in wanking on about proportional representation. Note how Labour politicians tend to major on PR, which could just prevent a Tory majority in the Commons.

Sorry, Jack, you played the PR game before 1997 when you thought you might need Lib Dem help. Then you shafted them when you got your majority. You’ve had 12 years to reform parliament and deliver the “democratic” Lords which you promised in 1997. What you’ve given us is us a handful of hereditary peers electing themselves, Labour donors buying peerages for record sums and an emasculated Commons.

Of course for all parties, this new found enthusiasm for reform is above all about diverting the public’s attention from their anger over MP’s allowances. I may be a bluff old cynic, but I don’t remember Cameron supporting reform in the past. His proposals also don’t really hit the spot.

Set-term parliaments is a minor issue. And sending texts to people interested in the progress of parliamentary bills? Oh, thanks Dave, that’s really great. And I’m sorry, I just can’t see any party in power allowing their MPs free votes on bill committees. Check out his words, too – “there should be much less whipping during the committee stages of a bill.” So less whipping, not no whipping from Dave.

Then there ‘s strengthening local government powers – easy line; harder in practice. The problem is that most local government money comes from central government and allowing them to keep post offices or railway stations open without having to pay for them is a recipe for unaccountability. Added to which, many local councillors are old dossers with nothing better to do, so the councils are run by semi-competent officers largely unemployable in the private sector. God knows, local government needs sorting out, but not on a whim and a Dave Cameron sound bite.

Cutting the number of MPs by 10% – another prescription currently being trotted out – is another irrelevance. And PR, by creating party lists of candidates, only increases the power of the parties.

No, two things above all would sort out the mess. First, we need an elected, but limited House of Lords, preferably with a special role to examine EU legislation. Second, we need to reverse of Blair’s reforms which made it harder for MPs to delay government legislation.

Strict limits on public funding of political parties would also be good – not the huge increases all the main parties are trying to slip through.

So here’s my prediction of the day. If Dave wins the next election, his ideas of the day will be quietly forgotten.

Phillip Oppenheim

Can PR save Labour?

Alan Johnson’s intervention goes well beyond his ambitions for the Labour leadership. He is articulating what many Labour MPs are whispering, namely that only proportional representation can save many of their seats and prevent a new Tory decade of government.

This fits nicely with Labour’s traditional opportunism on electoral reform. Before 1997, Blair strongly hinted to the Lib Dems that he would deliver PR after the election. At that point, Labour were still unsure that they would win by a big majority.

Blair thought he might need Lib Dem support and ran a massive grease-up operation with Lib Dem grandee Roy ‘Woy’ Jenkins, meeting Woy for cosy little private dinners and playing the puppy-eyed pupil to Jenkin’s mentor.

After the election, which of course delivered a stonking majority, Blair allowed Jenkins to chair an electoral reform commission which recommended reform. He then ignored the proposals and all talk of PR was quietly dropped. Funny that. No more cosy dinners with poor old Woy.

Now PR is back in fashion. There are, of course, a few little practicalities. Johnson proposes a referendum alongside the next general election – which would be a bit late for many of his colleagues. Brown could consider moving earlier. He has no mandate, of course, but could use the current crisis as a pretext for extraordinary action.

So would there be time before the next election to implement a new system? If Brown stuck to amalgamating existing constituencies into multi-member ones rather than redrawing the boundaries, he might just pull it off. But I doubt it.

Still, Brown would get the increasingly windy Lib Dems on board if he gave it a go – not to mention most of his own party, which would be a relatively novel experience. He must be kicking himself that that shiny little disk of MPs’ claims didn’t go walkabout a year earlier. Ah well.
Phillip Oppenheim

Death of a government

Deaths of governments seem to be presaged by weirdly iconic figures. For the Tories under John Major, it was Mohamed Al Fayed constantly popping up to condemn sleaze.

Ironically it was the very honourable refusal by that government to give the dodgy Fayed a British passport, rather than the eagerness of a couple of Tory MPs to grab his bags of cash, which ignited his righteous rage.

Now it appears to be the much more honourable Joanna Lumley who will long remain in mind’s eye of the British public as emblematic of the final, lingering, jerky death of the Brown regime.

On the surface, the story of Ms Lumley’s father being rescued from the Japanese by Gurkha Bahadar Pun and the faith kept by the daughter to the warrior nation is a great British narrative.

The government policy of allowing Gurkhas who served after 1997 to settle, but refusing the same right to pre’97 Gurkhas was always a mess. In addition, soldiers from Commonwealth countries who have fought for the UK do have settlement rights, but Nepal is not in the Commonwealth.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other equally deserving groups who do not get automatic settlement rights – Iraqi British army interpreters have been held up as one example. And allowing what are effectively mercenaries automatic rights of settlement is an odd precedent, though everyone acknowledges the very special qualities of this group.

Of course the decision should have been made calmly by a government in the light of experienced advice, not because an admittedly fragrant and articulate celebrity took up their cause. Let’s not forget that the PM refused to meet with the Gurkhas until La Lumley got involved.

Perhaps the Iraqi interpreters should get Susan Boyle to champion them. She’d get into No.10, no trouble. After all, she’s on the telly.

So this is where it ends. Government by celebrity. The epitaph of new Labour. Right decision, maybe. But wrong way to get there.

Phillip Oppenheim

Where there’s money, there’s muck

Talking of Al Fayed, there are interesting similarities between the Cash for Questions scandal which hit the end of the Major years and the current Cash for Muck etc affair.

Being paid to table parliamentary questions was not forbidden when Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith agreed to do so. It was in fact a common practice to table questions as part of a paid consultancy.

Hamilton and Smith’s error was to take the practice to its logical extreme by accepting cash payments to table individual questions. They could have argued that this was technically within the rules and payment by cheque or cash, what’s the difference in the end?

Ditto the current mob. Much of what they are now condemned for was within the rules, technically. Hence the thick air of hurt bemusement which surrounds the Palace of Westminster, if nowhere else.

Phillip Oppenheim