Nick Clegg at Deputy PMQs

Nick Clegg was good at Deputy Prime Minister's Questions today.

And David Cameron sat on the bench next to him, beaming like a proud dad.

David Laws's resignation: a national own goal

So unelected media can hold the elected government to ransom whenever it chooses, by skewering a minister on a technicality.

If they can do it to Laws, they'll find a way of doing it to every other Cabinet minister when it suits them.

Newspapermen are out to sell newspapers. The government has a country to run -- our country, in fact, and it's in all our interests that we have the best people available to do it.

David Laws was manifestly not corrupt.

We as a nation have shot ourselves in the foot here, by delivering up the head of David Laws on a platter to the Daily Telegraph.

The newspaper may take a profit.  But the nation will pay the price for losing the services of a talented minister.

Liam Fox in Afghanistan

"We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country."

So says Liam Fox, the new coalition's Defence Secretary, in an interview with The Times.


OK, so he didn't actually say that Afghanistan is a 13th-century country. But it certainly looks like that's what he thinks. This is troubling.

Con Coughlin, himself no purveyor of politicalcorrectnessgonemaaaad, puts it like this:

Liam Fox ...  managed to be gratuitously offensive to his Afghan hosts while totally undermining one of the pillars of the Nato campaign ... a classic exercise of putting a ministerial foot in an over-eager mouth. I don’t care whether or not Dr Fox was quoting Afghan President Hamid Karzai: it was an ill-judged remark, and one that immediately raises questions about his suitability for this most challenging of ministerial briefs.

We can only agree.

Cameron - Merkel press conference in Berlin

British prime minister David Cameron and German chancellor Angela Merkel hold a press conference in Berlin:

Britain's written constitution?

Look at this: "Chapter 6: Elections and Government formation (DRAFT)". 

A more self-effacing title it would be hard to imagine. But read it, and you'll see that this document amounts, more or less, to a written constitution for the United Kingdom. 

All of a sudden, Britain's famously unwritten constitution has been written down - penned quietly, without political debate or public consultation, by a single, unelected official, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell.

Nothing much has changed, and nobody much has noticed. A very British revolution.

Coalition agreement for stability and reform

Some light reading for the weekend.

• Coalition agreement for stability and reform (pdf), published by the Cabinet Office.

• The new Ministerial Code, with a forward by David Cameron:

In everything we do – the policies we develop and how we implement them, the speeches we give, the meetings we hold – we must remember that we are not masters but servants. Though the British people have been disappointed in their politicians, they still expect the highest standards of conduct. We must not let them down.

We must be different in how we think and how we behave. We must be different from what has gone before us. Careful with public money. Transparent about what we do and how we do it. Determined to act in the national interest, above improper influence. Mindful of our duty. Above all, grateful for our chance to change our country.

Reminiscent of Tony Blair's ill-fated "we have got to be whiter than white to rebuild trust" speech?

• The Cabinet Committee System, including membership of the Coalition Committee and the Coalition Operation and Strategic Planning Group.

Cameron Sarkozy press conference in Paris

New British prime minister David Cameron goes to Paris to meet French president Nicholas Sarkozy.

Here's their press conference:

Full transcript at Number 10 website.

Video - in French:



And in English:

Lord Mandelson resigns

Peter Mandelson's previous two resignations from the Labour front bench made big bangs.

This time, he's gone again, and there's not even been a whimper. His departure yesterday from the Labour shadow cabinet went almost completely unreported by the BBC and the broadcast media.

Our friendly visiting alien might assume that there's a reason for that. Keep the resignation hush-hush, so no-one will be all that surprised when he pops up again as a minister in the new coalition government. The transition will look almost seamlessly silky-smooth, something that would please the Dark Lord greatly.

(Lord Adonis has gone quietly too - keep your eyes on the Department for Transport ministerial team page, he might just be putting in a re-appearance.)

Matt's election cartoons: Clegg'n'Cameron's march to power, in pictures

The complete set of Matt cartoons covering the general election for the Daily Telegraph is online here.

e.g.

Billboard: Samantha Cameron Expecting

Passer-by: If there's a hung parliament Nick Clegg will get to choose the baby's name.

That's number 44. There are 48 in all, each one a gem. Go have a chuckle.

Lib-Con Coalition agreement: highlights

Here are our 50 highlights from the government programme announced today by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

We've not included the headline items - you can read about them elsewhere.

These are the little nuggets you might have missed. We've picked them because they made us say one of the following things:

1. Thank goodness! About time too! Freedom and fairness live to fight another day.
2. Wow, a Conservative government is doing that?
3. OK that's just plain weird.

We'll leave it to you to decide which policies elicited which responses. The wording of the policies given here is copied directly from the coalition document. We have resisted the urge to intersperse comments, at least until the very end.

Civil Liberties:

• We will restore rights to non-violent protest.
• We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

Crime and Policing:

• We will ban the sale of alcohol below cost price.
• We will review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed.

Culture, Olympics, Media & Sport

• We will cut red tape to encourage the performance of more live music.

Defence:

• Support for ex-Service personnel to study at university.
• A new programme, ‘Troops for Teachers’, to recruit ex-Service personnel into the teaching profession.
• Extra support for veteran mental health needs.

Energy and Climate Change:

• We will refuse permission for additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted.
• We will reduce central government carbon emissions by 10% within 12 months.
• We will encourage community-owned renewable energy schemes where local people benefit from the power produced. We will also allow communities that host renewable energy projects to keep the additional business rates they generate.

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

• We will launch a national tree planting campaign.
• We will end the testing of household products on animals and work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research.
• We will investigate measures to help with fuel costs in remote rural areas, starting with pilot schemes.

Equalities:

• Internships for underrepresented minorities in every Whitehall department.
• We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution.

Europe:

• We will amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that the use of any passerelle would require primary legislation.
• We will press for the European Parliament to have only one seat, in Brussels.
• We support the further enlargement of the EU.

Families and Children:

• We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve.
• We will investigate a new approach to helping families with multiple problems.
• We will review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels.
• We will take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

Foreign Affairs:

• We will work to establish a new ‘special relationship’ with India.
• We support reform of the UN Security Council, including permanent seats for Japan, India, Germany, Brazil and African representation.

Government Transparency:

• We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale.
• We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury.
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

Jobs and Welfare:

• We will develop local Work Clubs – places where unemployed people can gather to exchange skills, find opportunities, make contacts and provide mutual support.

Justice:

• We will introduce a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ that will pay independent providers to reduce reoffending.
• We will change the law so that historical convictions for consensual gay sex with over16s will be treated as spent and will not show up on criminal records checks.
• We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants.

NHS:

• We will give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards, within NHS prices. This includes independent, voluntary and community sector providers.

Political Reform:

• We will establish a commission to consider the ‘West Lothian question’.
• We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targeted at seats which have not changed hands for many years.
• We will ensure that any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament.
• We will give residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue.

Public Health:

• We will ensure greater access to talking therapies to reduce long-term costs for the NHS.

Schools:

• We will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget by reductions in spending elsewhere.
• We will give anonymity to teachers accused by pupils and take other measures to protect against false accusations.
• We will reform league tables so that schools are able to focus on, and demonstrate, the progress of children of all abilities.

Social Action:

• We will give public sector workers a new right to form employee-owned co-operatives and bid to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them to deliver better services.
• We will take a range of measures to encourage charitable giving and philanthropy.

Social Care and Disability:

• We will reform Access to Work, so disabled people can apply for jobs with funding already secured for any adaptations and equipment they will need.

Taxation:

• We will seek ways of taxing non-business capital gains at rates similar or close to those applied to income, with generous exemptions for entrepreneurial business activities.

Transport:

• We will mandate a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
• Our vision is of a truly national high speed rail network for the whole of Britain. Given financial constraints, we will have to achieve this in phases.

Oh, and just in case all of the above sounds too good to be true - it is too good to be true! The small print is in large print, on the back page. Here it comes:

Postamble:

• The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Oh well. It was nice to dream.

Coalition agreement: how being in government does strange things to you

Look at this:

It's an extract from the document called "The Coalition: our programme for government" published today by the new Tory-Lib Dem coalition. (Download pdf file here.)

Just read that bit we've highlighted again. We've spread it out and put it in large type to make it easier to digest the full weirdness of it:

We will introduce a 
new 
mechanism
 to prevent 
the proliferation of 
unnecessary 
new 
criminal offences.

Good grief. A mechanism? You'd think that unnecessary new criminal offences are capable of spontaneous self-generation.

A simpler way to "prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences" would be to follow this simple two-step plan:

1. Don't dream up unnecessary new criminal offences.
2. Don't pass laws to create unnecessary new criminal offences.

We think that would work. Just stay at home on the days which you'd originally scheduled to spend dreaming up unnecessary new criminal offences.

Seriously guys. Take the day off. Take the kids to the beach. Do some DIY. Whatever. You could even try doing something useful. Just don't go into the office and dream up unnecessary new criminal offences. Do you think you could handle that?

This two-step plan, which we are happy to offer to the government free of charge, would be cheap to implement. By a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate, we think it would cost approximately £0 per year. 

A mechanism, on the other hand, sounds like it comes with a quango attached. 

Look out for SAPPUNCO (the Statutory Authority for the Prevention of the Proliferation of Unnecessary New Criminal Offences), complete with a staff of 120 and an annual budget of £27 million.

Coalition press conference - trouble at t'Home Office?

Once each minister (Nick Clegg, Theresa May, Vince Cable, George Osborne, David Cameron) had delivered their set-pieces, the prime minister took questions from the press pack.

As part of Cameron's inclusive style of government, he farmed out the task of answering to his ministers - both Tory and Lib Dem - when the questions touched on their areas of departmental responsibility.

With one exception: Theresa May. There was an immigration question - clear Home Office territory - but Cameron fielded it himself and didn't invite May to comment.

Possible reasons?

1. Cameron and May are so close that he knows he can speak for her.
   OR
2. Cameron and May are not close enough and he doesn't trust her to speak for him.
   OR
3. Immigration policy is still too woolly to be given a straight answer (still no real clarity on how the immigration "cap" is to be set), so Cameron preferred to dead-bat the question and move on.

Nick Clegg launches full coalition agreement

Better choice of background today, as Nick Clegg makes a speech giving the details of the new Lib Dem - Conservative coalition agreement:

Well done, the stage managers, for taking on board the comments we made yesterday...

Remember yesterday, with the distracting cars whizzing around?

Trees make better backgrounds. They don't move so fast.

UPDATE: You can now watch the press launch online below:

Diane Abbott runs for Labour leadership

You heard it here second: Diane Abbott has joined the race for the Labour party leadership.

Our money says she's the one to watch.

"End the War on Motorists" - a response from more enlightened times

More on Philip Hammond's promise to "end the war on motorists", which we mentioned briefly the other day.

It has been drawn to our attention that the late, great Beachcomber had robust opinions on motorists:

O fractious monster, is it not enough that whole villages are being demolished and towns replanned to please you? For you the countryside is littered with hideous garages, and the cities become car-parks. Yours is the freedom to drench the air with the stink from your machine, and to harry the pedestrian with impunity. For you are the abominable lamp-standards erected, with their ghoulish light. For your gratification landscapes are reshaped, hedges torn out, quiet valleys desecrated, woods cut down, winding lanes straightened and broadened. What more do you want, arch-fool of the world, and pest of every common man?

Will Caroline Lucas be similarly forthright? We can only hope so.

John Humphrys and Theresa May on BBC Today: an Aesopian take

We've finally had enough of John Humphrys' interviews on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

At his best he can be a thoughtful and knowledgeable journalist.

But as an interviewer: stop it, John.

His interview this morning of Theresa May is just the latest example of his counter-productive interviewing technique in action.

1. It's annoying to listen to. It should be the politicians who make us shout at our radios. But these days, more often than not, it's Humphrys.
2. It is poisonous to good, open political discussion because it makes interviewees determined to say nothing at all rather than say something that will later be paraded as a trumped-up "gaffe"*.

Remember Aesop's fable of the Sun and the Wind?

The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: "I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveller to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin." So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.

Let's translate this into the Today Programme:

John Humphrys and Evan Davis were disputing which was the stronger interviewer. Suddenly they saw a politician coming down the road, and the Davis said: "I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that politician to take off his cloak of lies shall be regarded as the stronger. You begin." So Davis retired behind a cloud, and Humphrys began to blow as hard as he could upon the politician. But the harder he blew the more closely did the politician wrap his cloak round him, till at last Humphrys had to give up in despair. Then Davis came out and shone in all his glory upon the politician, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.

Congratulations to Theresa May -- not a politician for whom we have an instinctive liking -- for standing up to Humphrys this morning.

 *Footnote: an Act of Parliament should be passed immediately, forbidding the use of the word "gaffe". Journalists would then be forced to think a little harder, and find a word or phrase which actually means something. They could choose from, for example:

• "honest mistake", 
• "change of mind", 
• "straight answer to a straight question", 
• "embarrassing faux pas that any of us could have made", 
• "slip of the tongue of no real consequence", 
• "an attempt at humour which, while perhaps not particularly amusing, could not have caused offence to anyone except the most determined professional offence-taker", 
• "outright duplicity", 
• "blatant deceit",

as appropriate.

Nick Clegg's speech

No-one seems to be telling us where Nick Clegg was when he delivered his speech on political reform.

All the news outlets seem content just to say that he made his "first major speech since being appointed deputy prime minister". Let's emphasise that: his first major speech since being appointed deputy prime minister. This should be a big moment.

But no-one tells us where. Who was in the audience? Was there even an audience?

Look at this screenshot from the BBC:

It looks like he's doing it in his front room. We're all in favour of cutting out the spin doctors, but this doesn't mean you can sack the entire back-stage staff.

Politics is theatre, and you can't run a theatre without stage managers. The actors can't do it on their own. Watch the clip. The passing traffic is more than just a distraction - it becomes more interesting than the speech itself.

Political reform is a nerdy, boring thing for most people. But it's important. It would help if the setting for the speech helped impart a bit of gravitas. Standing in a suburban bay window doesn't do the job.

What's going on? A visiting alien might think that Clegg is being deliberately humiliated by his master Cameron, though in this case our visiting alien would probably be wrong. (He's normally right.)

Who should sit in a reformed House of Lords?

Clegg and Cameron want to reform the House of Lords.

Where do we start? Do we pick an electoral system and then see what kind of Upper House that gives us?

Or should we decide what kind of Upper House we want, and then invent an electoral system that will give us what we want?

Here's who we think should be in a reformed Second Chamber*. Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

• scientists
• trade unionists
• engineers
• historians
• businessmen
• charity workers
• teachers
• doctors
• farmers
• nurses
• social workers
• bankers
• policemen
• volunteers
• fishermen
• philosophers
• inventors
• soldiers
• lawyers
• prison governors
• economists
• self-employed people
• artists
• diplomats
• journalists
• railwaymen
• town planners
• probation officers
• ordinary citizens

Of course, politicians being politicians, they'll want to add politicians to that list. And they'll justify it on the grounds that politicians have some special skills that would be needed in a House of Parliament.

Bollocks. Ordinary people will manage just fine. Just watch.

We don't need a government minister for paperclips in the Upper House. A handful of experts on paperclips would be welcome, though.

*There's a strong case to be made for abolishing the second chamber as a legislative organ altogether. But that's for another post.

Now that's what I call a good press

Listen to this: 

"He is fresh-faced, energetic, sincere, whole-hearted, well-mannered, public spirited, amiable, humorous, decent. That's how he appears, and there's no reason to doubt that it's what he's like. There's no reason to think he's fabricating any of it to make himself more attractive."

That's The Independent talking about David Cameron. Wouldya believe it? 

Stalin would have killed for PR like that.

Truly, people, we live in strange times.

Making something very clear

Who said this?

So I want to make something very clear today.

Will I ever join a Conservative government?

No.

I will never allow the Liberal Democrats to be a mere annex to another party's agenda.

You guessed it. It was Nick Clegg, in 2008.

Verily, the past is a foreign country.