A RATHER SUSCEPTIBLE SHADOW CHANCELLOR?

Alan Johnson as shadow Chancellor: hands up those who saw that coming. Not Johnson himself, evidently. He has no departmental background in economics, only (as many have been quick to point out) in spending. His genial joke – that his first move would be to “pick up a primer, Economics for Beginners” – was a heedless error that will come back to haunt the opposition as coalition members twit him with it at every opportunity.

Alan Johnson is confident with one ...

What was Ed Miliband thinking? Too much, I venture. In making Johnson his choice (the positive part of the decision), he was certainly seeking to offer a contrast with the present Chancellor. This working class meritocrat has, at 60, seen some of the real world first hand and proved himself steady under fire in the latter years of Labour government. Some of his hitherto apparent niceness got rubbed off in his last government post as Home Secretary, where his stance on security, surveillance, police and drugs put him in the anti-progressive line of David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid. But along with his abiding amiability and self-deprecation, his ordinary-Joe image will draw attention to the 39 year-old George Osborne’s moneyed self-confidence and complete lack of any common touch. Johnson was also the first former minister to declare in favour of the leadership bid of David Miliband. In appointing him, leader Ed could hardly do more to appear properly conciliatory and collegiate.

... can get to two ...

The negative part of the decision was to exclude Mr & Mrs E Balls, not just from shadowing the Treasury but from any position the primary focus of which is economic. This indicates two threads: that Miliband intends to avoid any possibility of replicating the long war of attrition between Tony Blair as PM and Gordon Brown as Chancellor (a war now enshrined in legend whatever the truth of it) by handing economic policy to an ambitious factionalist and proven rival; and that he has no wish to pursue the Ballsian line of rewriting Alistair Darling’s economic policy.

... but three defeats him

It is intriguing that the three candidates who topped the shadow cabinet poll were, in order: Yvette Cooper, John Healey, the former housing minister, and Balls. All three were keen Ballsites in the leadership campaign. Miliband has made Healey shadow health secretary, safely away from economic policy. Cooper has the high-profile non-job (see earlier posting) of shadow Foreign Secretary. Balls will make a good fist of shadowing the Home Office and you can bet that Theresa May will not be sleeping easy this weekend.

Time will tell how far Miliband’s choice on economic policy is a missed opportunity. But with each day deepening the impression that Osborne and David Cameron – let alone the coalition government as a whole – have not wholly thought through the policies to address the deficit, Labour could have set to work to craft a distinctive and credible economic policy. Ed Balls – and by inference Yvette Cooper too, his wife also being an economist who long worked in the Treasury – had already begun the process of repositioning Darling’s approach as the centrepiece of his own leadership bid. There is a real danger now that the coalition will find itself forced to admit defeat in its attempt to eradicate the deficit before the next general election and that Labour will have accepted so many of the government’s measures that it will deprive itself of the widest ground on which to oppose Cameron’s re-election. Its position will be analogous to that of the Tories on the war against Iraq. I suspect that events are going to make Ed Balls’ proposals look more and more on-the-nose and Labour less and less smart in not pursuing them.

The government is running into trouble. How could they not have anticipated the nature and degree of the outrage that the announcement about child benefit provoked? Or if, as one or two commentators have suggested, Osborne did indeed see that reaction coming, why did he invite it ahead of the spending review rather than burying it among all the bad news that the big announcement will undoubtedly bring? The impression Cameron promptly gave of rowing back from the commitment and improvising ways of restoring some of the lost benefit looked merely amateurish.

And then how could they have imagined that ruthlessly culling quangos and other public bodies would simply be a clean and brutally efficient operation, inflicting pain only on the staffs of those organisations? Did it occur to no one that the functions performed by these bodies might be highly desirable and, in some cases, indispensable and that laying off well-remunerated people can be a costly business in at least the short term?

There are increasing indications that one or two ministers will not be able in all conscience to offer the demanded 25 percent cut in costs; Jeremy Hunt is not the only conscience-free member of the government, but he may not be in a large majority. One or two voices – Chris Huhne’s is the latest – have suggested gently that a goalpost or two might turn out to be moveable.

If Cameron is obliged to eat at least a side order of his words, it will not only be the Labour Party that is crowing. And ministerial contradictions and miscalculations are welcome in another way. They cannot credibly be blamed on the Labour government. An urgent task for Alan Johnson is to nail the history rewrite – in danger of being established by the coalition as generally accepted history – that the global recession was caused by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s policies over the last thirteen years and nothing at all to do with the policies of the banks, the greed of the private sector or the sub-prime mortgage disaster. Tory supporters already appear to believe that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Labour cabinet ministers who lost their seats at the general election.

The shadow cabinet certainly has an unfamiliar look. The obligation on Labour MPs to elect a minimum of six women candidates has propelled into the front line a number of women whose names mean nothing outside Westminster and the lobby. Indeed, Wikipedia is, at the time of writing, in the process of bringing its pages up to speed on the new women and only the last named of these new shadow cabinet members – Mary Creagh, Maria Eagle, Anne McKechin and Meg Hillier – has a facial likeness posted there. Maria Eagle is rather less well known than her twin Angela, partly because the latter has served longer in front line politics, partly because she was the first out lesbian in the house. The four newbies take as their respective portfolios rural affairs, transport, Scotland and energy. Angela Eagle takes over as shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury from Liam Byrne who, having come last of those elected, is demoted to shadow the cabinet office.

Mary Creagh

Maria, the less blonde Eagle twin

Anne McKechin

and Meg Hillier

Should we deprecate the tokenism – if that is what it is – that elevates women at the expense of men of known talent: Stephen Twigg, David Lammy, Chris Bryant, Stephen Timms, Vernon Coaker, Chris Leslie, Gareth Thomas? Is it really of importance that women achieve some semblance of parity with men in the conduct of government? And is it useful and just to try to achieve it by manipulating eligibility for election? Some argue that no right ever won is as sure and satisfying if conceded by a benevolent dictatorship as when extracted by sustained guerrilla warfare. Anyway, who is to say that women are drawn to politicking and legislating and managing public affairs in such numbers as are men? And if they are not, is it because men and women broadly have distinct instincts and priorities or perhaps is it simply because the ascendancy of men has made the heights of politics an uncomfortable place for women to operate? I’m sure that the likes of Lady Astor, Margaret Bondfield and Ellen Wilkinson would have scoffed at quotas and all-women shortlists. But at the same time, all of them were constantly being undermined by male members and found that their sex was a daily issue.

Looking at the alphabetical list of those elected on Friday, before Miliband had dispensed their roles, I was struck by the fact that all the surnames came from the top half of the alphabet. Someone had a Guardian letter published about this today. My suspicion was that there are so many new members entitled to vote who know nothing of most of the candidates that they ticked names largely at random and ran out of votes before getting into the latter half of the ballot paper. In fact, however, it was a curious fluke of the field that only six of the 49 candidates possessed surnames beginning with a letter later than M. From among them, Miliband has preferred the unelected Shaun Woodward for his old portfolio of Northern Ireland, along with the also defeated Peter Hain shadowing his former role as Welsh Secretary. The only member of the late cabinet left with no front bench role is Ben Bradshaw. Rather sadly, Diane Abbott failed to get elected too. It remains to be seen whether Ed Miliband offers her a desirable second-rank post.

Will Miliband’s be a team to fight and frighten the coalition? I hope so because it’s vitally necessary. But I feel less than sanguine so far.