Those we have loved: Lib Dem leavers

Compared to the Labour and Conservative Parties, there are fewer Liberal Democrats of note retiring voluntarily, but there are some. To start with, completing a triumvirate of departing leaders, Gordon Brown and William Hague are joined on the post office queue for pensions by Menzies 'Ming' Campbell.

Of course, Ming's stint as leader was less successful than that of Hague: he wasn't even allowed to contest a general election, being knifed by his colleagues in 2007 after just nineteen months.

A bit like the Lib Dem equivalent of Iain Duncan Smith, then, except that Smith never beat O.J. Simpson in a sprint race. Mind you, Campbell wasn't given reform of the benefit system as a consolation prize following his political assassination. As they used to say in Grimsby, what you lose on the hake, you gain on the herring.

Also leaving are Alan Beith and Malcolm Bruce, who both seem to have been around for ever, having been first elected in 1973 and 1983 respectively. They were like the boring, elder statesmen of the party (the men in grey sandals) though Bruce did once impress with an outbreak of honesty: 'A lot of people who vote for us vote for negative reasons,' he told the 1994 conference; 'what David Penhaligon used to call the "stuff 'em all vote".'

Regrettably for the Lib Dems, they can no longer count on the stuff 'em all vote.

I'll be sorry to see the last of David Heath, MP for Somerton and Frome since 1997. He shares his name with an American wrestler (you may be familiar with his character, Gangrel), and he always looked as though he might be a bit handy at the grappling game himself, somewhat in the tradition of Big Pat Roach:

Rather confusingly, for a while in the 1990s Heath was the parliamentary consultant for the WWF, though in his case it was the World Wildlife Fund.

And finally - inevitably - there's Sarah Teather, who took Ken Livingstone's old seat of Brent East in a 2003 by-election and has hung on to it, and its successor constituency Brent Central, ever since. (Good luck to the Lib Dems in keeping hold of that one.)

Despite twelve years in parliament, including a brief stint in government, she will surely be best remembered for her Strictly Come Dancing routine that wowed the party faithful in 2011:

Those we have loved: Tory leavers

Looking through the list of Conservative MPs who are leaving Parliament voluntarily at this election, there are few really big names, but a fair number of second-rankers, people who seem to have been around for a very long time without quite impinging on public consciousness.

Top of the list are the former leader William Hague and Malcolm Rifkind, who was once talked of a possible leader. Indeed, had he not been out of Parliament between 1997 and 2005, he might well have succeeded Hague.

In Rifkind's case, of course, he's not really leaving voluntarily; his starring role in a recent Channel 4 sting operation pretty much forced his hand. It's all a bit ignominious for a man who, in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, was secretary of state successively for Scotland, transport and defence, before ending up as foreign secretary.

'You know that life has changed,' he reflected, in the wake of losing cabinet office, 'when you climb into the back of a car and it doesn't go anywhere.'

Also being pushed out is Andrew Lansley. For five years he was shadow health secretary, busily devising a set of reforms that he then implemented when he got the real job. At which point everyone threw their hands up in horror and disbelief, and he was promptly sacked. Presumably he'll now go on to make vast sums of money.

Less controversial are the trio of Stephen Dorrell, David Willetts and Francis Maude, who have between them, spent 86 years in the Commons. They're the kind of MPs who all served in government, but were more likely to appear on Any Questions than on Question Time; their names sound vaguely familiar to voters without conjuring up any definite image.

Dorrell was once culture minister, in which capacity he won over the Cannes Film Festival with his tribute to that 'distinguished Frenchman' Jeanne Moreau. His finest moment, though, came in the 1997 election campaign when he broke with party policy on the single currency, and later had to apologise. 'My thought process was blurred at that precise moment,' he explained. 'I had the government line. The truth is I couldn't remember precisely at the right moment precisely what the formula was.'

Willetts was nicknamed 'Two Brains' in tribute to his alleged intellectual powers, though I preferred to think of him as 'Two Puffs', following his comments in 2000: 'I was once offered cannabis at university,' he revealed. 'I had two puffs. I didn't like it and I have never had any experience of drugs since.'

And Maude was one of those Tories who lost his seat in the 1992 election. He subsequently came back, but few noticed.

'I am famous for being a nonentity,' he once said. 'I didn't come into politics to be on the cover of Hello!' And indeed he hasn't been. So that's worked out just fine.

Then there's George Young, who spent over forty years as an MP, including stints as leader of the house and government chief whip. Despite which, he's best known for appearing on a British Rail poster alongside Jimmy Savile, and for his description of the homeless as: 'The sort of people you step on when you come out of the opera.'

But forget all of them. Instead let's celebrate Peter Tapsell, first elected in 1959 and now retiring after more than fifty years in the Commons. During that time he has made no impact on the public whatsoever, which is a shame, because he's had his moments.

When Michael Heseltine challenged Margaret Thatcher for the Tory leadership, Tapsell's was one of the two names on the nomination paper. He identified early on the arrogant folly of Blair's wars, describing the bombing of Serbia in 1999 as 'historically ignorant, politically inept and internationally illegal'. And in 2005, a full ten years ago, he came clean on his performance as an MP: 'I'm so old I hardly know what I'm doing anyway.'

The normal thing with departing MPs is to recall Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure. But that assessment presupposes that there was anything but failure in the first place. More appropriate might be Rupert Murdoch's comment on Stephen Dorrell in 1995: 'Who's he?'

Those we have loved: Labour leavers

It's at this stage of a election campaign that my thoughts turn to the dear departed. There are two categories of MPs who don't return to the Commons after a general election: those who have decided to step down, and those who've been kicked out on their ear by the electorate.

We'll have to wait to see who falls into the latter category, but looking through the list of the voluntary redundancies, it is striking how many big (or biggish) names are leaving from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

At the top of the list is obviously Gordon Brown, accompanied by a clutch of former cabinet ministers: David Blunkett, Alistair Darling, Jack Straw, Tessa Jowell, Hazel Blears, Frank Dobson and Peter Hain. (The latter was the man on whom I once placed a bet that he would become Labour leader.)

Oh yes, and there's Bob Ainsworth, remembered as the defence secretary who was humiliated by Joanna Lumley into treating retired Gurkhas a little bit better. (Many would pay good money to be humiliated by Joanna Lumley.)

Then there some less elevated but still significant figures - Glenda Jackson (my original choice for London mayor), 'Red' Dawn Primarolo, Nick Raynsford, Joan Ruddock and my own favourite Austin Mitchell, whose book Four Years in the Death of the Labour Party is still the best account of the 1983 election campaign.

This is a hell of a lot of experience that's being lost, particularly in the event that Labour form the next government. Not that any of these would have served in such an administration, but it doesn't do any harm to have some people in the vicinity who've knocked around a bit. And, more widely, there's a loss to the Commons more generally.

That's in the world of politics, of course. Outside, the truth is that hardly anyone has noticed any of this lot, as a 2013 episode of Pointless made clear; asked to name cabinet ministers who served under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, only seven in a hundred people named Straw, seven Darling and four Blunkett.

But mostly I wanted to take this opportunity to note the passing of Shaun Woodward, sometime secretary of state for Northern Ireland and one of the oddities of modern politics.

He was the Conservative Party's director of communications during the shock election victory of 1992, and was briefly a Tory MP for Witney, though he was sacked from the frontbench for supporting the repeal of Section 28. He then re-emerged as a Labour MP for the safe seat of St Helens South, despite attracting much mockery when the story got out that he retained the services of a butler.

His successor as MP for Witney was David Cameron who paid tribute to his predecessor in his maiden speech in 2001. 'He remains a constituent and a most significant local employer, not least in the area of domestic service,' Cameron said on that occasion. 'We are in fact quite close neighbours and on a clear day, from the hill behind my cottage, I can almost see some of the glittering spires of his great house.'

I think this makes Woodward the only Labour MP to be derided by Cameron for being too posh. We may not see his like again.

...like the leaving of it

Seven days from now, we may well be getting the first resignation of a party leader. Presumably the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party of England and Wales will stick with their incumbent leaders, but for the others, nothing is certain. Quite possibly Nigel Farage and/or Nick Clegg will fail to be elected in the first place, while either David Cameron or Ed Miliband - whichever doesn't get to be prime minister - won't be long for the leadership.

As an object lesson in how not to leave the job of party leader, you'd have to go a long way to beat Gordon Brown.

Following the indecisive result of the general election in 2010, he hung around in Downing Street for a few days - as he was constitutionally bound to do, since he was still prime minister - but then abruptly walked out, a few hours before the deal between Cameron and Clegg was concluded: and on that he was constitutionally wrong.

The real problem, though, was what followed. Brown resigned the Labour leadership and sulked off to Scotland, leaving Harriet Harman to mind the shop for the next few months while the long process of choosing a new leader played itself out. It was during that period that the narrative of the financial crash and crisis was firmly fixed in the public consciousness by the coalition government.

Brown was badly damaged by then, but he should still have been capable of articulating an alternative view, of defending the economic growth figures bequeathed to the new government. He didn't do so. And the legacy of Brown's self-indulgence could be seen on Question Time last night, as Ed Miliband squirmed in the face of questions on Labour's economic record. The ground lost in 2010 has never been recovered.

Compare and contrast Michael Howard departure from the Conservative Party leadership in 2005. He announced immediately after losing the election that he would be standing down, but not for another six months, not till a new leader had been chosen. He then reshuffled his front-bench team and promoted George Osborne to shadow chancellor and David Cameron to shadow education secretary, thereby setting up the new generation to inherit the leadership. It worked perfectly (though Howard would probably have preferred Osborne).

It is possible in retrospect to conclude that Howard didn't ultimately do his party any favours in the short term, that David Davis would have been a sounder choice in 2005 and might well have won a majority in 2010. But even if one accepted this, Howard was at least doing what he genuinely believed was in his party's interests. Unlike Brown, who simply abandoned his party.

Who needs yesterday's papers?

Newspapers are starting to tell us who they think we should vote for, with the Financial Times and the Economist supporting a continuation of the coalition government, and the Sun (in England and Wales) endorsing the Conservative Party.

So it's a good time to remember that newspapers used to be important. This graph shows paper sales per household between 1950 and 2010:

Toynbee and the Labour Party

The thoughts of Philip Toynbee in The Spectator, 29 May 1959:

'The Radical who supports the Labour Party does not spend his time bemoaning the failure of the Labour Party to incorporate all his hopes. He would be willing to divide the party only on the most fundamental issues of principle. For though he is scrupulous about means, he tries to confront things as they are, and not as he would like them to be. Knowing that the best is unachievable, the Radical will put up, for the time being, with the better, or even the less bad, while continuing to campaign for his own beliefs.'

Who gets my vote: part 4

As I explore the outer reaches of the ballot paper that has been assembled for the Holborn & St Pancras constituency in which I live, I'm terribly excited to find that Natalie Bennett is not the only party leader standing. 

Because look, here's Vanessa Hudson of the Animal Welfare Party. She may not get invited onto the leaders' debates on television, but she's the big boss of the AWP. And she can call on the endorsement of 1960s model Celia Hammond. Unfortunately most of the policies that the party are putting forward relate to animals - apart from calling on the government to promote 'plant-based diets', there doesn't seem to be anything aimed at us humans.

The AWP is fielding candidates in a total of four constituencies, which is twice as many as the Socialist Equality Party. I'm not fully up to speed with developments in the world of Trotskyism, and the SEP is a new name to me. but - having checked - they turn out to be a rebranded version of the International Communist Party, who split from the Workers Revolutionary Party back in the 1980s.

They are also - as their leaflet boasts - the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Not the actual Fourth International, of course (in which we are represented by Socialist Resistance), nor the Fourth International (ICR) nor the Fourth International Posadist. And certainly not the International Trotskyist Committee for the Political Renegeneration of the Fourth International, the Liaison Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International or the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International. And, just while I'm clearing up these confusions, there is another rival International Committee of the Fourth International as well, but that's not the one that the SEP are part of. Don't be fooled by the name.

Despite all of which, their election leaflet insists: 'Only the SEP speaks for the working class.' But only in two constituencies, apparently. And one of them, happily, is mine, with a candidate named David O'Sullivan.

These are minor parties, though. Just six candidates between the two of them across the whole nation. Much more substantial is the list of 32 constituencies being contested by Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol. That's a statement of intent. Somewhat peculiarly, however, the central demand of CISTA is not the immediate legalisation of cannabis, but merely the setting up of a Royal Commission to look into drug laws. They want government drug policy to be 'evidence-based, cross-party, humane and non-partisan'.

I think they're underselling themselves. They're not even competing properly with the Green Party of England and Wales, whose manifesto promises 'Radical reform of our drug laws'. No mention there of a Royal Commission. And as Peter Lilley pointed out back in 2001: 'Royal Commissions are just a way of playing issues into the long grass.' He added: 'Perhaps appropriate for cannabis.'

Still, good luck to Shane O'Donnell of CISTA. If all the potheads in Camden could get themselves together to vote for him, he'd do alright.

And that's it. The English Democrats and the British National Party - both of whom fielded candidates last time - have abandoned us. And there are no independents like we had in 2010. Still, no doubt we'll survive somehow.