And the nominees are...

I'm not overwhelmed by the list of MPs who have thus far declared they wish to be candidates for the leadership election. So here's a trio of others who might wish to buy a hat and then find a ring to throw it into:

Gloria de Piero - age 42, MP since 2010, born in Bradford, social science degree from University of Westminster. Former presenter on GMTV, having previously worked on big, serious political programmes. The attempt to find someone who 'connects' with voters and understands the concept of 'aspirations' surely takes us to a 'working-class, free-school-meal girl from Bradford' who's done well for herself. Particularly with all that media experience.

John Mann - age 55, MP since 2001, born in Leeds, economics degree from Manchester University. Spent several years on the Treasury Select Committee. Would have fitted into a pre-Tony Blair version of the Labour Party in a solid, moral sort of way. Mann is awkward: in 2005 he denounced Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire Labour donor, for pay and conditions in his Kazakhstan mines. Also very active in criticising the abuse of parliamentary expenses.

Ben Bradshaw - age 54, MP since 1997, born in London, German degree from Sussex University. Had a (not very distinguished) government career, including health minster and a short stint as culture secretary. Too Blairite to stand a chance in winning the leadership and too London to win over the electorate. But he's included here because he's by far the best-dressed MP of any party, and that really should count for something in an age of appearances. He's also good-looking enough to play a doctor in a daytime soap opera.

The pressure of being a candidate

The abrupt withdrawal of Chuka Umunna from the Labour leadership race, 'citing the impact the increased level of attention would have on himself and those close to him', brings to mind an earlier case.

Four decades back, the defeat of Edward Heath's Conservative Party in two elections in 1974 prompted talk of a change in leadership. There was an obvious candidate, but it turned out he couldn't take the heat. The following account is extracted from my book Crisis? What Crisis?:

‘He will have to go’ was the Daily Mail’s verdict on Edward Heath after he lost his second general election in a row, and his third in total, and Keith Joseph was the right’s front-runner in the succession stakes, an intelligent, if awkward, man who had already distanced himself from the failures of the past and who offered a clear, determined direction forward.

And then he threw it away. His first post-election speech was in Edgbaston, not far from the site of the ‘rivers of blood’, and it proved almost as significant as its predecessor in the outrage it provoked.

Joseph had long been concerned with what he referred to as ‘cycles of deprivation’, the way in which the stratum of society that would later be termed the underclass was becoming self-perpetuating, dependent on state benefits for generation after generation. ‘A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up,’ he now declared. ‘Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness, which are more important than riches.’

And, in the phrase that damned him, he warned that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’. It was that ‘human stock’ that provided his enemies with the rope with which to hang him.

Was this not, they asked, a call for eugenics, redolent of the policies of Nazi Germany? Not only that, but his argument was unashamedly based on class. He talked of problems in the socio-economic groups four and five, prompting Labour MP Renee Short to leap to the defence of their impugned honour, claiming that ‘it is not those in the fourth and fifth groups who patronize call girls’, a remark that perhaps revealed more about her knowledge of society than about society itself.

Stripped of its emotive phrasing, Joseph’s Edgbaston speech identified an issue that was to become of ever greater significance to policy-makers over the coming decades. But his message was lost amidst the noise, partly at least because he had nothing to offer those on the right, who might otherwise support him, save remedies that they distrusted. 

‘The trouble was,’ wrote Margaret Thatcher, his closest ally in the shadow cabinet, ‘that the only short-term answer suggested by Keith for the social problems he outlined was making contraceptives more widely available – and that tended to drive away those who might have been attracted by his larger moral message.’ The birth control pill was still then seen as a totem of the permissive society of the 1960s, and Joseph’s pragmatic endorsement of it (he had made it available nationally on the NHS) failed to resonate with his natural constituency. 

Caught between the pill and the pillory, he was assailed on all sides. ‘It’s great fun to see somebody else getting into hot water over a speech,’ chuckled Enoch Powell. ‘I almost wondered if the River Tiber was beginning to roll again.’ 

But unlike Powell, Joseph was ill-equipped for the media onslaught that ensued. ‘Ever since I made that speech the press have been outside the house,’ he told Thatcher. ‘They have been merciless.’ And, he added, he was no longer prepared to challenge Heath for the leadership of the party; he felt unable to put himself and his family under that kind of pressure permanently.

The challenge for the next Labour leader (in 1992)

The general election last week is widely said to be reminiscent of 1992. So what were the papers saying at the same stage back then, eight days after John Major's shock result, when the Labour Party was looking for a new leader?

This is how The Times started its editorial on 17 April 1992:

Can Labour Win? and Must Labour Lose? were the titles of two bleak books published in 1960, after Labour had lost three elections in a row. Now the same questions are being asked after a run of four defeats.

In language that might well sound familiar, the editorial continued:

Labour has failed to respond to the changing aspirations of the British. In the 1980s the Conservative achievement was to make those born working class feel comfortable about wanting to move up in society. Britain may not yet be as socially fluid as America, but the class system is no longer frozen in ice.

And it concludes:

Whoever wins the Labour leadership election must prepare his party for the next general election by recognising that the world has changed. The politics of envy have lost their potency. Labour need not lose, but it has to find new friends all over the country, and across all social classes and income groups, before it can win.

What actually happened, of course, is that Labour chose John Smith. At the time he was considered to be on the right of Labour, though his enthusiasm for higher taxes was partially blamed for losing the 1992 election.

In today's world, that belief in public spending would have him condemned as a left-wing extremist. So too would the trade union support he enjoyed; asked why he hadn't joined the SDP during the Great Schism of the 1980s, he replied: 'I am comfortable with the unions.' And his Scottishness would be regarded with some suspicion.

I'm not sure that any of this represented a response to 'the changing aspirations of the British'. Nonetheless, Black Wednesday came along a few months later, and by the time Smith died in 1994, he had a 20 per cent lead in the polls over the Tories.

Revealed: those British values in full

The new government has wasted no time in announcing that it's going to crack down on 'extremism'. Yesterday David Cameron said that it's time to end a culture of 'passive tolerance', in which people have been allowed to think that: 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.'

Now, we're told, the state should become more interventionist in its promotion of 'British values'.

We've been here before, of course. Back in 2011 Cameron made a speech on exactly the same lines: 'Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism.'

It would appear from this that Cameron really has no idea what the phrase 'passive tolerance' means. Maybe his advisers think they've coined it themselves, and are seeking to echo 'passive smoking', in the same way that 'muscular liberalism' echoes 'muscular Christianity'.

But what are these British values that we need to defend with such non-passive muscularity? The following definitions and checklists of Britishness are all quoted in Richard Weight's magnificent book Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 (available in paperback).

Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, said in 1945 that his films tried to promote: 'Britain as a leader in social reform, in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of social liberties; Britain as a patron and parent of great writing, painting and music; Britain as a questing explorer, adventurer and trader; Britain as a the home of great industry and craftsmanship; Britain as a mighty military power standing alone and undaunted against terrifying aggression.'

The Festival of Britain programme in 1951 celebrated: 'the fight for religious and civil freedom [and] the idea of parliamentary government; the love of sport and the home; the love of nature and travel; pride in craftsmanship and British eccentricity and humour.'

T.S. Eliot in 1948 suggested: 'Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections and the music of Elgar.'

Will Cameron's government's initiatives defend these values? No, of course they won't. Social liberties? Civil freedom? Eccentricity? Never heard such nonsense.

Anyway, the truth is that our values are not in the gift of government. We decide them for ourselves.

Yesterday's News Today: Ed Miliband in 2010

I was looking through some old newspapers yesterday, and stumbled across the Guardian's coverage of Ed Miliband's debut as Labour leader in 2010.

You'll remember that Miliband was elected at the start of the conference week that September, and that a couple of days later he made his first big speech in his new role. The paper invited various figures to comment on the speech:

Tony Benn: 'I supported him for leader, and he's justified my every hope.'

Roy Hattersley: 'Ed Miliband made the speech which, for years, I have wanted a Labour leader to make.'

Jenni Russell: 'The party has chosen the right man. David Miliband could not have spoken like this.'

Seumas Milne: 'This is a long way ahead of Brown, let alone Blair. It also reflects the mainstream centre of public opinion.'

Polly Toynbee: 'Here was a fresh tone of honesty and authenticity ... This was grownup politics.'

Derek Simpson: 'His clear support for the vital role of trade unions is welcome. It has been too long since we heard a Labour leader speak in those terms.'

Anne Perkins: 'warm words, priorities that any progressive would welcome, and no convincing narrative to show what he wanted to do with them.'

Norman Tebbit: 'He had been well rubbed down with snake oil.'

Martin Kettle: 'a political ecumenism which indicates that Miliband's Labour would be seriously open to a centre-left coalition if and when the chance comes.'

Elsewhere, the Independent ran a similar, though less impressive, feature, with comments from Jim Murphy: 'He ensured Labour would remain in the mainstream... He is a serious, deep politician.' And from Dave Prentis: 'These first steps towards refreshing the party are a giant leap towards reconnecting with voters.'

To add to the picture, here's Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror: 'His freshness allowed him to pose as the optimist without appearing to be silly.' While the Sun reported Ken Livingstone: 'It was excellent. The only leader's speech in thirty years when I've agreed with every word.'

And some other newspaper comment. The Daily Telegraph leader concluded: 'Labour may yet rue the day they picked the younger Miliband.'

Daniel Finkelstein wrote in The Times: 'The more this week that Mr Miliband has said that he gets it, the less I have believed that he does. The more he said he "understood" voter concerns (rather than shared them) the more I wondered whether he really does.'

Finally back to the Guardian, this is Deborah Orr, writing two days on: 'The first time I watched Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour conference on Tuesday I felt soothed, even grateful. I'd waited a long time to hear a Labour leader say such things after all. Then every time I saw a clip of the speech, that clip seemed slightly absurd... New Labour was a tragedy. New Generation Labour, I'm afraid, seems farcical to me already.'

The priest and the pronoun

Like everyone who reads the Guardian website, I try to avoid the writings of certain contributors, safe in the knowledge that they're just trying to annoy me. In my case it's primarily Jonathan Jones and Giles Fraser. And then last night - for reasons I can't fathom - I found I'd clicked on a piece by Fraser for the first time in months.

He hasn't got any better in the interim. He still annoys me. And he still specialises in the kind of hand-wringing smugness that helped to drive the congregations out of the Church of England.

Writing on Friday, in the immediate aftermath of the election, he says he's 'ashamed to be English', to be living in a country 'that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us'. And he wonders: 'Did we just vote for our own narrow concerns and sod the rest?'

Obviously no one's fooled for a second by that 'we'. This is no mea culpa. Readers are expected to understand that the fault lies with others; Fraser, and all decent-minded folk, are motivated solely by concern for 'the most vulnerable people' in our society.

This is part of an all-too-common narrative that anyone who didn't vote for an approved 'progressive' party was merely 'tick[ing] the box of our own self-interest'. (Again, that fraudulent first-person pronoun.) Apparently 'we' sold out the poor on the promise of a mess of pottage some way down the road.

By the same token, I suppose, one could argue that those in receipt of benefits, or those employed by the state, might have voted Labour in the expectation that their income would thus be better protected. They were sufficiently selfish that they demanded others pay higher taxes on their behalf.

Both positions are nonsense, of course. When casting a vote, most people (I believe) find that self-interest co-exists with other considerations, including an assessment of which of the limited alternatives on offer might be in the national interest.

And last week around half of those who voted in the United Kingdom opted for the Conservative Party or for Ukip, parties with whom Fraser has little sympathy, and of which he has little understanding.

One would have to be very arrogant indeed to conclude that - unlike oneself - those voters don't care about anyone else. It may well be that they believe 'the most vulnerable' can be better helped in a wealthy country than in a poor one, and therefore opted against parties who they felt would harm the economy. Even if you think their judgement is wrong, that doesn't mean it was made in bad faith.

Nor do people vote for the totality of a party's programme. Many, perhaps millions, who voted Conservative will have done so despite disagreeing with proposed cuts to disability benefits. Just as many, perhaps millions, will have voted Labour despite disagreeing with their promise to 'control immigration'.

Why am I bothering with Fraser, the kind of Christian who believes that the existence of charity is an indictment of society?

Well, because I've had a couple of people tell me that my post-election pieces on this blog are unnecessarily harsh on Labour and the Greens, and unreasonably positive about the Conservatives and Ukip. Which may be true but, unlike Fraser, I'm not interested in seeking comfort by denouncing all those who stray beyond the 'progressive' pale.

The truth is that the Left lost very badly last week, and the Right won. Even if you put together the Labour and the SNP votes, they still didn't reach the total cast for the Conservatives. That needs examining and, if possible, explaining. And in pursuit of that, one should strive for objectivity, rather than settle for accusations.

To misquote Karl Marx: Some historians have tried to change the world in various ways; the point is to understand it.

David Cameron: chillaxing to victory

In 2005, following a third successive election defeat, the Conservative Party staged a beauty contest for those who wished to succeed Michael Howard as leader. Up until that morning, the front-runner had been David Davis, but by the time all five candidates had made their 20-minute speeches, he'd been overtaken by David Cameron.

Amongst those who had their minds changed was me. I rated Davis highly at this stage, largely on the strength of a gig he did with Tony Benn at the Royal Albert Hall in 2002. Benn was then at the peak of his popularity as a lovable elder statesman, and for a Conservative to have the nerve to go head-to-head with him in front of an audience that was guaranteed to be 99 per cent anti-Tory showed, I thought, considerable bottle and self-confidence. He was also very good on the night.

Unfortunately he wasn't very good at that 2005 conference, while Cameron was brilliant. Maybe - I've often had cause to think in the last ten years - I was dazzled by a smoke-and-mirrors act, but my immediate response was to predict to the person with whom I was watching on TV that Cameron would win the leadership and would go on to win the next two general elections.

As I say, maybe I was caught up in the heat of the moment. In the final poll, the party members voted for Cameron over Davis in a ratio of two to one, but come 2010 the country did not. He failed to win the election, despite facing only a badly wounded Gordon Brown, a man whose most noteworthy contribution to the campaign was to insult a supporter for her alleged bigotry.

Now, however, Cameron has actually won an election, and I feel my original judgement was sort of vindicated.

This has been a spectacular victory, though not quite as wondrous as some are claiming. The Conservatives' share of the vote went up, but turnout was still poor and Cameron persuaded just 24.4 per cent of the registered electorate to vote for him. This was, however, better than the 23.5 per cent he achieved last time round (itself an improvement on Labour's 21.6 per cent in 2005).

So I wanted to make a couple of points about Cameron.

The first is something that I explored at greater length in an article on the twenty-first anniversary of Black Wednesday. This is a photograph of Norman Lamont, then chancellor of the exchequer, announcing Britain's humiliating withdrawal from the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992:

And there, off to one side, is his 25-year-old adviser and speech writer, David Cameron.

Cameron, I wrote, 'witnessed at close quarters the spectacular implosion of a party that once believed it was predestined to power'. I suggested that this is perhaps why he always seems so relaxed in a crisis. Similarly George Osborne, who was at Douglas Hogg's side in the BSE disaster of 1996. These people had experienced such dreadful political depths in their early years that very little was going to faze them.

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, on the other hand were New Labour advisers in the 1990s, at a time when the party was already coasting into government. They had no such baptism of fire.

When Cameron became leader in 2005, it was clear that his job was, in the cliché of the time, to 'decontaminate the Tory brand'. The early efforts were clumsy and gimmicky: hugging hoodies and huskies, demonstrating his green credentials by installing a windmill on his roof and cycling to work (followed by a car, carrying his papers).

Then he got blown off course by the bankers' recession. No longer, it appeared, was sunshine going to win the day. The concept of the Big Society withered on the vine (though it's actually very good and the Labour Party should take it back).

Instead, the attempt to modernise the party seemed to consist of little more than the sudden, unpromised introduction of same-sex marriages. It didn't seem like very much - essentially a new name for civil partnerships - but actually it turned out to do the job really rather well.

Because the success of same-sex marriages lay not in the legislation itself, but in the way that it provoked a mass exodus from the party. Some constituency organisations claimed to have lost up to half their members as a result of the policy.

This was, most commentators agreed, disastrous for Cameron. But it wasn't. In one fell blow he'd cleared out large numbers of the 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', as he'd described Ukip back in 2006. Many of them, of course, went straight over to Ukip, giving that party a huge boost in membership and popularity.

Less noticed was the effect on the Conservative Party itself, now smaller but - from Cameron's perspective - much better looking. It has become difficult to denounce the Tories as racist, sexist, homophobic and still retain any credibility as a political observer. The party that embraced economic liberalism in the 1980s has accepted the social liberalism that spread across Britain in the 1990s.

The election results this week saw Cameron increase the Conservative share of the vote, largely at the expense of the Liberal Democrats. All those right-wing commentators like Simon Heffer and Charles Moore who had insisted that the Cameron project was misguided, that he shouldn't be trying to appeal to the liberal vote (sometimes even suggesting he form an electoral pact with Ukip) - they turned out to be completely wrong.

There are many other commentators for whom the Tory brand cannot ever be sufficiently decontaminated, but it turns out that he's done enough. Not enough for those in the long-derided 'metropolitan elite' of course, those who follow in the pioneering footsteps of the delegate to the 1982 SDP conference, excitedly proclaiming: 'There may be minorities we have not yet discovered.' But enough for the rest of the country.

The achievement of Tony Blair in the mid-1990s was to make the Labour Party a safe home for ex-Tory voters. If Cameron hasn't quite reciprocated that achievement, he has gone some way towards it. There were many disillusioned Liberal Democrats, and even some lifelong Labour supporters, who simply couldn't countenance Ed Miliband and who felt just about safe enough to turn to vote Conservative for the first time ever, despite grave reservations over Tory policy.

As all the polls showed, Cameron's ratings outstripped his party's; Miliband's trailed his.

The Left need to get used to the idea that Cameron and Osborne have changed the Conservative Party for good. A new line of attack is needed.

One final thought. There is much talk of this election resembling 1992 when John Major won a slender majority and then ran into trouble with his own party over Europe. And look what's coming next, say the columnists: it's a European referendum and history could repeat itself.

I think this unlikely. If Ukip had got, say, five MPs they might have formed a rival pole of attraction for Eurosceptic Tory members, and there might have been defections over the referendum arrangements. Then Cameron would have had trouble. That might still happen if there are a few by-elections that allow Ukip to boost their numbers, but I doubt it. And Douglas Carswell does not in himself constitute a rival pole of attraction.

In any event, Cameron is much more in tune with the mood of his party than Major was. He remembers all too well the damage that Europe did to the Tories in the 1990s. Most importantly, he doesn't face the same problem that afflicted his predecessor.

Because Major's real grief over Europe was not to be found amongst the 'bastards' on his own backbenches; it lay in the House of Lords. There lurked the malign influence of Margaret Thatcher, the deposed but still powerful ex-leader, constitutionally unable to keep herself from interfering, from stirring up trouble, from seeking to undermine her successor as he tried to get the Maastricht Treaty through Parliament.

As I wrote in my book A Classless Society:

Thatcher's behaviour during Major's premiership was even worse than that of Edward Heath during her own time in office. Heath had been unstinting in his disapproval as he remained stubbornly on the backbenches ('like a sulk made flesh,' in the words of journalist Edward Pearce), but he hadn't actively engaged in plotting against her. But then, as a minister told the BBC's John Cole: 'She was always criticising the government when she led it, so why expect her to change now?'

The EU referendum won't all be smooth sailing, but it'll be less choppy than Major's trip back from Maastricht. And easier than Cameron's rite of passage on Black Wednesday.