UNLOOKED-FOR PROMOTIONS

I’m truly sad that Alan Johnson felt the need to leave front-line politics. This was done, as some outlets are beginning to explore in lip-smacking detail, in order for him to try to save his marriage. I hope that, if and when he sorts that out, he can return. Johnson is too likeable and reliable a man to be spared.

At least his departure was unforeseen, is not the result of a clamour, does not damage Labour or its leader and has been smoothly and swiftly covered. Compare and contrast today’s resignation, after months of resistance, by David Cameron’s media advisor Andy Coulson, increasingly mired in the phone-tapping scandal at his former home, the Murdoch press.

Alan Johnson: leaving the shadow cabinet to pursue a career in rock

But it’s as odd that Ed Miliband has replaced Alan Johnson with Ed Balls as it was that Miliband overlooked Balls’ claim to be shadow Chancellor in the first place. If Miliband thought Balls’ economic arguments were at odds with his own when he constructed his first shadow team, what can have changed in the four short months since? What’s more, moving Balls from shadowing the Home Office, means that Miliband felt it necessary to reshuffle all his candidates for the “three great offices of state”, so Yvette Cooper (Mrs Balls) moves over from shadowing the Foreign Office and Douglas Alexander steps into her shoes from Work and Pensions. Alexander has been a great success since the general election. It would have been simpler to move him into Johnson’s role.

It is argued that Cooper was wasted and/or sidelined as shadow Foreign Secretary. I have certainly argued on these pages before that of all shadow posts, that one is the least powerful. I would not have put Cooper there in the first place. Now Alexander’s articulate, street-smart style will be less available for arguing the domestic issues that will preoccupy this parliament.

Ed and Yvette Balls shadowing economy and home

Commentators like to pretend that Ed Balls is Gordon Brown to Ed Miliband’s Tony Blair and that enmity will take root between the leader and the economics spokesman. Such parallels as may be found do not take us very far. Both Miliband and Balls were protégées of Brown but both have put distance between themselves and Brown’s policies, though on different issues and in different ways. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that there could be any kind of a Granita pact for Balls to invoke when he thinks Miliband has been leader long enough.

What will change most is the dynamic of relations between government and opposition. Theresa May’s brief will give Cooper something immediate and palpable to get her teeth into. Douglas Alexander will be a good foil for William Hague. And where Cameron and George Osborne could scoff, not always without malice, at Alan Johnson’s feel for the economy (or rather lack of it), they won’t dare do that with Ed Balls. Indeed, I imagine Osborne will be waking up in a muck sweat at least every morning between now and the end of the debate on his next budget.

Miliband and Alexander apparently declining to give up their seats on the tube to Westminster

The trick – and it will be a trick for both Balls and Miliband – will be for the Labour team not to let any disparity between the two men’s economic instincts be detected by the government because Cameron will miss no opportunity to try to suggest that the opposition is divided. That Miliband initially shrank from letting Balls loose on Osborne will need to be parlayed into yesterday’s news rather more decisively than Labour has so far managed to shrug off the daily claim that all of the coalition’s unpopular policies are the fault of Labour’s irresponsibility.

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This week’s ruling in the Bristol County Court by Judge Rutherford in favour of a gay couple who sued the owners of a Cornish hotel for excluding them as guests was a rare and enormously welcome landmark. Peter and Hazelmary Bull describe themselves as “devout Christians” and claim that their exclusion policy relates to marital status only and not to sexual orientation. Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy contended that as civil partners they were entitled to be allowed to share a room. The judge agreed.

Preddy and Hall: not married enough for acceptance

A spokesman for the Equality and Human Rights Commission said that “when Mr and Mrs Bull chose to open their home as a hotel, their private home became a commercial enterprise. The decision [of the court] means that community standards, not private ones, must be upheld”.

Being in thrall to supernatural superstition does not render bigotry any more acceptable or respectable than does the indulging of racial hatred. To deny accommodation to paying guests on the grounds that they have not celebrated a Christian marriage is as morally bankrupt as to deny them for being black or Jewish. The Bulls were justly found guilty of discrimination in this case.

On December 14th, The Guardian quoted Mrs Bull thus: “we accept that the Bible is the holy living word of God and we endeavour to follow that”. The Book of Exodus decrees that “whosoever doeth any work on the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” [31:15, not my italics]. That is quite a severe sanction, you might think, and not to be lightly ignored. I have studied the hotel's website in vain for any evidence that it is closed on a Sunday. How are rational people to guess which particular cherries the devout will be picking from their holy scriptures?

The Bulls: no room at the inn

It’s just as well that William Hague has not had occasion to travel into Cornwall lately.

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I am reading for the first time Trollope’s masterly novel of 1864, The Small House at Allington, in the Penguin Classics edition. Bethinking myself (as Trollope might put it) that, 550 pages in and with some one hundred to go, it was safe to do so, I happened to glance at the blurb on the back of the edition and damn if the upshot of the main story wasn’t there revealed. Why do publishers do this? One certainly doesn’t read a great book solely for the working out of the plot but, at least on first acquaintance, this aspect is apt to give much pleasure. I could not go so far as to say that the completion of my reading has been spoiled for me, but I much regret being denied the satisfaction of discovery at the author’s chosen pace.

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.

A SHADOW of the MAN HE WAS

We shall learn tomorrow afternoon whether David Miliband intends to serve on his brother’s shadow cabinet team or leave front-line politics, perhaps for good. “Why would he not stand?” you ask. “Isn’t Ed begging him to do so?” Well, of course, Ed is bound to do so for form’s sake. But in many ways, it would make his task a lot clearer, if not necessarily a lot easier, if his elder brother did walk away.

The first and most pressing matter is that of the Shadow Chancellor’s identity. Before one speculates, one must of course make assumptions about who will be standing for election to the Labour front bench – the composition of the leading team is always decided by the parliamentary party when Labour is in opposition – and who of those will prevail. It’s safe to calculate that, provided they stand, all of the following will be elected: David Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, Alan Johnson, Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper, John Denham, Douglas Alexander and Peter Hain. I’m sure Diane Abbott will get in too. Jack Straw and Alistair Darling have already announced their intention to stand down and Harriet Harman, as Deputy Leader (she has not had to face re-election at this conference), is an ex officio member. That leaves another nine places to be filled. At the time of writing, more than forty names have been put forward. Six seats are reserved for women candidates.

"luv u, bro"

During the leadership campaign, Ed Balls made a cogent case – usually implicit but latterly explicit – for himself to be Shadow Chancellor. He is prepared, as no other Labour politician seems to be, to reconsider the deficit reduction target set by the former Chancellor and retiring shadow Alistair Darling. He has also played a strong hand in debate with his present opposite number, Michael Gove the Education Secretary. In his initial address to conference after being elected leader, Ed Miliband paid particularly warm tribute to both Balls and Andy Burnham, suggesting that both have reason to hope for important posts.

Miliband is reported to have offered his brother the shadow chancellorship. David Miliband is not a trained economist. Balls is, and so is his wife Yvette Cooper, another candidate to shadow George Osborne. Moreover, David’s instinct is to cleave to Darling’s caution. But Ed Miliband would be far better advised to mount a strong opposition to the coalition government’s autumn programme of cuts. Even if the Labour stance is – as far as the notion has meaning – “wrong” in economic terms, it is strategically more urgent for the party to position itself where it can be seen as supporting those who will be impoverished as a result of the spending review rather than appearing as merely a paler version of the government by lying somewhere along a continuum of parties ranged against those whose only unequivocal support is the trades unions.

Ed Miliband: the message writ small

The International Monetary Fund yesterday endorsed Osborne’s policy thus far. Naturally, Osborne has trumpeted this support and is fully entitled to do so. But the IMF is not the holy see. It is only one judgment on government policy. And the IMF is not a government, does not have a welfare state to oversee, does not have to balance fiscal policy with social policy and indeed against electability. Put another way, the IMF’s interest is purely monetary. A government’s must also be political, strategic and even moral.

So if I were Ed Miliband, I would discount Ed Balls’ compelling claim on Labour’s economic policy only if I were absolutely sure that a) I wanted to pursue a different but at least equally convincing route to that of Balls; and b) that I will not, by denying a shrewd and combative operator like Balls, be storing up factional trouble for the future. The Tory press would love Balls to be the face of Labour’s attack against the spending review and the refrain of “Two Red Eds” would be trotted out at every verse end. But a confident leader can ride that and, once the electorate’s anger with the cuts is roused, be in position to represent it in parliament and spearhead it on the streets.

Foreign Secretary and friend: those were the days

So why not simply keep David Miliband as Shadow Foreign Secretary? It places him in a policy area that would provoke less media speculation about fraternal disagreement. But the fact is that, to be brutally candid, Shadow Foreign Secretary is a non-job. Having been Foreign Secretary for real for three years, David Miliband knows that better than anyone. The broad strokes of foreign policy are inevitably painted by the Prime Minister, the one who deals directly with fellow first ministers, presidents and, in some cases, monarchs and emperors. Leaders who begin to see their foreign ministers as potentially over-mighty are apt to move them back into domestic concerns. Tony Blair did this to Robin Cook and, from his point of view, was justified when, as Leader of the House, Cook resigned from the government over the imminent invasion of Iraq. Had Cook still been Foreign Secretary in 2003, matters might have panned out differently – more difficult for Blair, certainly. (I imagine Cook would be very content at Ed Miliband’s elevation).

The foreign secretaryship is a very high-powered function of diplomacy. But it is impossible to act at all meaningfully as a diplomat unless you meet people and, moreover, people who are the ones making international decisions (i.e. your opposite numbers). Shadow Foreign Secretaries don’t do that because they are not in power. Looking back on foreign affairs spokesmen in previous shadow cabinets, it’s striking how often the opposition leader of the day has put someone “out of the way” in the role.

Ed ponders his shadow cabinet options

Every Shadow Foreign Secretary in the last half-century who also served as Foreign Secretary in government was either about to do so or had just done so (like Miliband) and was awaiting new shadow dispensations. The one exception is Francis Pym, a previous Shadow Foreign Secretary to whom Margaret Thatcher reluctantly turned in government when Peter Carrington abruptly resigned at the height of the Falklands War. Otherwise, it’s striking how often the Shadow Foreign Secretary was someone who obviously wouldn’t get the role in government: Alf Robens, Nye Bevan, Christopher Soames, Geoffrey Rippon, John Davies, Peter Shore, Gerald Kaufman, Jack Cunningham, John Maples, Francis Maude. Liam Fox was William Hague’s predecessor as Shadow Foreign Secretary and has developed such a scratchy relationship with his leader in government that he may well be lucky to survive Cameron’s first reshuffle as Defence Secretary.

Shadowing the Foreign Office offers few opportunities to make policy, largely because the shadow is uniquely out of the loop on what the government is doing. That is certainly one of the reasons why there is almost always broad consensus between government and opposition parties on foreign affairs, save when those affairs are dividing government – Suez and various matters concerning the EU, for instance. A still-ambitious elder brother twiddling his thumbs over his foreign brief might be fatally tempted into putting more than his two-penn’orth into domestic policy discussions.

The Glenn Miller Band: one of the results of putting 'Miliband' in Google Images

The only other possibility, then, would be for David Miliband to shadow Theresa May at the Home Office. That would work. Home affairs can be a notorious bear trap, tempting its exponents into much more repressive policy than they or anyone else thought they might espouse. Miliband’s mettle would be tested and at least he would have a proper job to do. But to accommodate him, Ed Miliband would have to demote Alan Johnson, Home Secretary in government until the election and a well-respected fellow. Johnson wouldn’t suit foreign affairs and the shadow leadership of the House (as high-profile as consolation prizes come) surely must be reserved for Harriet Harman after her gracious and sure-footed stint as acting leader.

Then there is Andy Burnham to consider. He has made a lot of his Health brief and might be persuaded that letting him develop it further is a just reward. But if discernible promotion is his desire, the Home Office would clearly fill the bill. So Ed Miliband has no shortage of urgent claimants on shadowing the three high offices of state – the Exchequer, the FO and the Home Office – and anything less for his brother would certainly be deemed an insult. It seems that, from Ed Miliband’s viewpoint as well as from that of Davld’s very publicly aggrieved wife, it would be best if the elder brother left the stage. And my guess is that he will.

NUTT’s in “MAY NOT” ROW

While I was away in London last week, the most interestingly developing story was that of the sacking by Home Secretary Alan Johnson of Professor David Nutt. A psychiatrist and long-time researcher into alcohol and drug abuse, Nutt was chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The ACMD – no longer 31-strong since others have resigned in sympathy – is an NGO made up of scientists and other experts in the field.

From 1971 (when it was enacted) until 2007, the Misuse of Drugs Act had always followed the ACMD’s recommendations in the way recreational drugs were classified. Indeed, in 2004, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett followed ACMD advice and downgraded cannabis to Class C, carrying lesser sentences for possession and dealing. The so-called drugs czar, Keith Hellawell, disagreed and accordingly resigned. But since Gordon Brown became PM, the ACMD has been sidelined. Former dope-smoker Jacqui Smith restored cannabis to Class B (the then chair of the ACMD, Sir Michael Rawlins, immediately stood down). Then, in February, she overruled the ACMD’s recommendation on ecstasy.

Last month, Prof Nutt wrote a paper, Estimating Drug Harms, for the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at his academic base, King’s College London. The newspapers picked up on the press release, particularly Nutt’s personal reclassification of various addictive substances, including alcohol and tobacco. That he ranked these respectively fifth and ninth – as against amphetamine at eighth, cannabis eleventh and LSD fourteenth – got the commentators steamed up. It was also brought to the attention of Johnson who duly sacked Nutt by email.

I couldn’t find Nutt’s full list anywhere in the press, so finally called up the CCJS document which you can read here:

http://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/estimatingdrugharms.html

And here is the table Nutt constructed to reflect his view of the comparative harm that various substances cause:



To read this chart, I suggest copying it onto your desktop and then zooming in

Since his sacking, Nutt has been very visible and very voluble. Clearly he senses a ministry that may be confidently kicked when it is down. He has said that the Brown government has “systematically undermined” the work of the ACMD; that politicians “distort” and “devalue” research evidence (and in this he includes those opposition politicians like Ann Widdecombe and shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling who have supported Johnson’s action); that ministers drastically overlook the “time-bomb of alcohol”. An ally, former ACMD secretary Jeremy Sare, referred to “pesky irritants like scientific evidence”. Those who will lambast the government with any material they can get have written scornfully of successive Home Secretaries’ self-trumpeted desire for “science-based” decisions that are then disregarded.

If only to be not on the same side as the likes of Melanie Phillips, one would not be attacking David Nutt. But the issues are not clear-cut. Defending his decision, Alan Johnson wrote to The Guardian that Nutt “cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy”. On the face of it, that seems reasonable enough. But Johnson also described Nutt’s “horse-riding analogy” – Nutt had earlier pointed out that a hundred people a year die in incidents while on horseback, as against thirty linked to ecstasy – as “a political rather than a scientific point”. Well, so is Johnson’s earlier thrust.

It is understandable if advisers feel angry and frustrated when their advice is not taken. Equally, ministers have to administrate and make policy choices and they cannot be hidebound by the apolitical advice of non-political analysts. How helpful is it for Nutt to compare drugs that are illegal with drugs that are not and are deeply embedded in the culture? If ministers were going to act on all recreational drugs – including nicotine and alcohol – in an equal manner, they would not want to start from where we are. The gradual marginalising of cigarette smoking has been highly controversial and, in some quarters (think David Hockney), very unpopular. What politician would be rash enough to embark on such a path with booze?

But then it seems absurd to many that cannabis, ranked by ministerial fiat as Class B, can attract five years in jail and/or an unlimited fine for, as Nutt puts it, possession of sufficient for one joint. In practice, no one, I would suggest, gets five year for such insignificant possession. But, as a matter of good public policy, the statute book should not be packed with penalties that are never going to be handed down.

And experience and anecdotal evidence supports Nutt’s contention that cannabis is “significantly less harmful than alcohol”. Take into account accidents and incidents and fights that have arisen out of drunkenness, along with the liver disease that is rapidly growing in our booze-sodden culture, and alcohol clearly has many more victims than other – perhaps all other – addictive substances on Nutt’s list.

Do we want recreational drugs decriminalised? Which companies would start to dominate the capital investment in such a new free market? What kind of a culture would develop in Britain if many or all recreational substances were decriminalised before other countries followed suit?

On the other hand, the illicit drug market is a notably nasty one, dominated by laundered money and brutal gangs. Many people who think they are snorting coke are imbibing no such thing. What does it do to your body to ingest Harpic or some other noxious chemical? How damaging is skunk? Maybe a proper commercial trade in these drugs would clean them up.

It is often argued that taking cannabis inevitably “leads on” to hard drugs. I always thought this fallacious. The connection between dope and heroin is simply that they are apt to be offered by the same suppliers because they are both illegal. If cannabis is downgraded, it is in practice psychologically and physically separated from coke and crack and the rest. It cannot be insignificant that, while cannabis was classified as C rather than B, its use among teenagers declined, according to the government’s own figures.

So the whole issue is complicated and prone to the taking of none-too-consistent positions. Nutt told The Observer that he thought the ACMD could well become “unviable”. There have been some resignations among its members but rather fewer than Nutt would probably have hoped for. As the days pass, his martyrdom will be forgotten and Alan Johnson will get on with his other tasks until the election. There are, one feels sure, very few votes in drugs policy.

But there are some interesting ideological ramifications, or so it seems to me. In very broad terms, the left has always favoured regulation, the use of law and governmental powers to protect the vulnerable and keep the rich and powerful in their place. In its extreme form, that becomes state dictatorship and oppressive interference in private matters. The right clings to the free market, deregulation, getting government out of people’s lives, even where some go unsupported to the wall. In its extreme form, this becomes a breakdown of law and the spread of pre-revolutionary anarchy.

Paradoxically, right-wingers are more likely to advocate fierce rules for others, particularly concerning their private lives (sex and drugs, for instance). And people on the left tend to be those who want less regulation in some fields, notably those of recreational drugs (which left-wingers perhaps are more liable to use) and, say, the internet which left-leaning rather than right-leaning libertarians are given to look upon as romantically free and outlawish.

With its stern, son-of-the-manse puritanism (small ‘p’), the Brown government not only wants more regulation of drugs and the internet, it also is almost as deregulatory in instinct, when it comes to capitalism, as the Tories. All of which goes to reinforce the opinion that most of us former Labour-voters have entertained about successive Blair and Brown governments: that (with a few exceptions) it’s been much like living under Thatcher and Major.

LABOUR PAINS

The Right Hon the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and Lord President of the Council, has got lost in the post. As my regular readers will know, I am no fan of the way Royal Mail is presently run – my dispute with its managers about “guaranteed delivery” continues – but I am even less a fan of privatisation, either in part or whole. Mandelson blamed “market conditions” for the government’s withdrawal of its attempt to sell off about a third of the national postal operation but that is clearly not the whole of the story.

The unpopularity of (part-)privatisation within the Labour Party clearly played its part. The government may well only have managed to get the legislation through the Commons with opposition support. Peter Mandelson knows how damaging that would have been. He may come off as a meritocrat and pragmatist, inured from the electoral battle by his unelected membership of the upper house, but his roots are firmly in the party. Herbert Morrison, a legendary figure to anyone over 60 with any feel for British politics, was Mandelson’s maternal grandfather. Young Peter left the party for a time over the Vietnam War and, more than thirty years ago, was part of a Labour movement delegation to Cuba along with Arthur Scargill. The Blairite fixer who played such a central role in making Labour look electable again is a man whose nose for both strategy and tactics is still sensitive.

But it’s a pity that the government isn’t better at pre-empting the charge, levelled by both opposition and media, of a climb-down. The new Home Secretary Alan Johnson, another minister with an astute sense of what the party will wear, has effectively killed off the long campaign for mandatory ID cards. But this too is widely seen as a defeat for Labour in general and Gordon Brown in particular. Why is it not within the wit of Downing Street spin doctors to present these adjustments as a response to a different charge routinely made against this government: that it doesn’t listen?

It is at such levels of impression made upon the voters that elections are won and lost. On both these matters, the government is made to look weak. Mandelson’s shadow in the Commons, Kenneth Clarke, will certainly not become First Secretary of State if David Cameron gives him a cabinet post in any Tory administration, but Clarke easily and confidently dismissed the whole government in his scorn for the bitter pill that Mandelson was swallowing. Clarke has a great facility for appearing on top of his brief and yet affable and clubbable at the same time. He scores his points in the same way that any chap would while standing in the bar at the local cricket match. Brown’s advisors ought to pay attention.

The frontman of choice for Brown since his reshuffle has been Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Byrne is the sort of man the cut of whose jib would, if you took a free newspaper from him, make you still check your change. Ken Clarke may very well lie as comprehensively as Byrne appears to do but it never occurs to me that Clarke is lying whereas I wouldn’t believe Byrne even if he told me that the economy was in a worse state than the government had anticipated. With spokesmen like this, Brown doesn’t need enemies.

I’m not entirely persuaded that the Lord Mandelson is much of a vote-winner either. I’m very willing to believe that he deserves his high reputation for competence in management, diplomacy, administration, foresight and the black arts. But that doesn’t translate into the common touch. I suspect he does have one skill that, in the cliché, characterises gay men: that he’s good with old ladies. I dare say Baroness Thatcher rather likes him, as she liked Norman St John Stevas, whom Mandelson somewhat resembles in manner. But I doubt it plays well on the council estates where everyone believes Neil Kinnock’s shameless joke that Mandelson, while in a Hartlepool chip shop, pointed to the mushy peas and said he’d have some of that guacamole. A story like that doesn’t have to be true; the truth lies in the fact that it is told at all.

Mandelson’s elevation to the position of First Secretary of State was widely derided and the title scorned as if it were some kind of nasty unconstitutional innovation. In fact the title has been bestowed on a number of senior cabinet ministers as far back as Rab Butler and as recently as John Prescott. Having been elected deputy leader of the party by the party, Harriet Harman might have reason to feel peeved that Mandelson has been elevated to the position prima facie of deputy prime minister. But as neither of them is likely ever to rise to the top job, it hardly signifies. What they should all be concentrating on is doing everything to ensure that Gordon Brown is still prime minister in twelve months’ time. Getting rid of unpopular policies is a start. Finding ways to make a virtue of a U-turn would be better. Not introducing hard-to-sell policies in the first place would be best of all.

SIT DOWN, YOU’RE ROCKING the BOAT

It’s a pity that so few in the Westminster village evidently have much historical perspective. Almost every government of my lifetime has suffered, to some degree or other, the mid-term blues. Despite the catastrophe for Eden of the Suez Crisis in 1956, it took Labour another eight years to win a general election. Before the Falklands War, you would have got long odds on Thatcher gaining a second term. Labour was supposed to win the 1992 election right up to the count – indeed the BBC proclaimed Neil Kinnock prime minister on the basis of exit polls – but the Major government came back from the dead. In 2000, William Hague was thought for a time to be well placed to capitalise on Blair’s then unpopularity. As it turned out Hague was the first Tory leader since Austen Chamberlain not to become prime minister, his successor Iain Duncan Smith was the second and his successor Michael Howard the third. Conversely, I still can picture the double page spread in The Observer the Sunday before the Tories won in 1970: “The agony of Edward Heath” was its headline. Save in Zimbabwe, no election result is a foregone conclusion; no poll counts except the actual vote.

My point is that This Too Will Pass. For Labour backbenchers – both perpetual ones and those newly relegated from the front bench – to run around like recently beheaded chickens is the merest folly. How the government’s foes, from Cameron to Salmond, must rub their hands with glee. All the Tories need do is watch. Opposition could not be easier.

The media has decided that Labour cannot possibly win the next election, whether it comes in 2009 or 2010. Nobody notes that just a year ago, the picture was very different. In an ICM poll, the results of which were published on September 19th 2007, Labour was supported by 40% against the Conservatives’ 32% and 20% for the Liberal Democrats. Gordon Brown’s approval ratings among voters of all party allegiances was +32, David Cameron’s was +25 and Sir Menzies Campbell’s was –5; their respective ratings among their own party followers were +73, +25 and +48. Only a fool would propose to anticipate where such ratings will be in mid-September 2009.

Yet Labour MPs – not excluding, if so-called ‘private briefings’ given to journalists have any merit and I always doubt that they do, actual ministers – are queuing up to hurl their own careers and the prospects for their party onto the pyre by telling anyone who will listen that Gordon Brown has to go. And what, in god’s name, do they imagine will be gained by that? Who presently in the house, let alone the cabinet, has the charisma or the credibility to transform the government’s fortunes?

The sad fact that these hysterics cannot grasp is that the government’s present unpopularity rests largely on the economy’s downturn. If David Cameron or Tony Blair or Ming Campbell or Nick Clegg or Ann Widdecombe or Jade Goody or David Beckham were presently prime minister, the polls would still not favour the government. All the ministers who might remotely be likely to stand if there were a leadership contest know this. In the present circumstances, being in government is a bed of nails. Only a masochist would gladly take over at number 10.

Joan Ryan, who resigned as vice-chairman of the party at the end of last week, told a BBC reporter: “lots of people are saying, you know, we need now to have this debate”. What debate? David Davis resigned and prompted a by-election because he wanted a national debate on the eroding of civil freedoms. Did you miss that debate? So did I. There are certain individual policies – ID cards, detention of terror suspects – that do not command the full support of the Labour party and when they come before the house they are hotly and exhaustively debated. Otherwise, the cabinet is as united on policy as any since World War II.

So what is the debate about? Well of course it’s about personalities. On Any Questions this weekend, Tony Benn was gallantly arguing yet again that the debate ought to be about issues, not personalities. But the fact is that Benn’s argument was lost years ago. The media is not interested in issues or policy but ‘stars’ and, because the media is powerful, even professionals pay it heed and begin to believe what it says. The media has decided that Brown’s fall from grace is a good story. Consequently, Brown almost never gets any coverage, either broadcast or print, that does not begin from the premise that there is “more trouble” for the prime minister. If Brown slashed everyone’s taxes, took Britain out of the European Union and gave the electorate a referendum on, inter alia, capital punishment, ID cards, smoking in public places, immigration, troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the weather in summer, the media would still find a way to present it as “trouble” for Brown.

His worst trouble is the inward-looking, easily swayed nature of politicians today. In his big speech at the party conference, the PM will need to make it clear that he isn’t stepping down this side of an election in any circumstances save unforeseen illness; that if backbenchers care to run their version of Sir Anthony Meyer against him (the so-articulate Joan Ryan perhaps) they are welcome to try but that she and they should expect to lose the whip; that nobody this side of the horizon has any better ideas about getting through the downturn and changing the leader will not change the ideas; that all this hysteria only makes the party look like an amateur rabble instead of a mature political movement; that the media is not the government’s friend and those feeding it tittle-tattle off the record do very much more harm than good and indeed give the media cover under which to make up stories and claim they reflect reality; that he has earned backbench loyalty by being the most successful Chancellor in a century and that he expects to be able to draw on that credit now that the going is tough.

Pace Mr Benn, let’s talk personalities for a moment. I agree with Tam Dalyell, father of the last house, that Tony Blair was the worst prime minister of our lifetime. I rejoiced that the Tories chose a Blair Mark II to lead them, believing that the electorate would have had enough of “pretty straight sort of guy” spin. I omitted to note that the electorate never went off Blair sufficiently to vote him out of office, though, had they been given a chance to do so in 2010, who knows what the result would have been? Cameron has played his first years in opposition exactly as Blair played his, even repeatedly accusing the prime minister of “dithering”, a charge that fitted John Major far better than it does Gordon Brown.

It was Blair’s plausibility as much as any other quality that stuck in my craw and Cameron strikes me the same. These guys are snake-oil salesmen: Blair was a lawyer, Cameron a career politico. Brown is, I believe, much more grounded in reality. His forte is not being ingratiating. But that’s a harder sell in a sound-bite culture. America will elect McCain (I now feel sure) because the American electorate always prefers the genial guy over the earnest guy: Reagan over Carter and Mondale, Clinton over Bush Sr and Dole, Bush Jr over Gore and Kerry. It doesn't matter much if the laid-back guy is obviously a duffer. Sufficient numbers like to imagine having a beer with their president that they overwhelm those who contemplate with equanimity being nagged by their president. No need to make it more complicated, pundits.

Labour is a bit short of geniality. Maybe Brown is indeed doomed against Cameron but which of its top brass wouldn’t be? Ed Balls is probably as chirpy as any member of the government but the press hate him and he suffers from having spent so long as a super-loyal Brownite. Alan Johnson might be their best bet: bluff, twinkly enough and certainly a contrast to Cameron. But has he got a thick enough skin? Brown has this much going for him: he exhibits no iota of discomfort or pain or bewilderment at the daily onslaught he has to undergo, not in public anyway.

It may be that there is no way out for Labour, that the downturn will be politically fatal as it would be fatal for any party that had to deal with it. But these strident absolutes are folly: that Labour cannot win, that Brown must go. Anything can happen in politics and the party needs to keep its nerve and present a united front so that the government can have the best shot at coming through the crisis unscathed.