Westminster

The other day Pete mentioned David Cameron’s desire to bring in outsiders to staff his government ministries, making it a Tory version of Gordon’s so-called Government Of All the Talents. One can see why this must be an appealling notion. You might share it if you were charged with assembling a government from the parliamentary Conservative party. Christ, you might think, they sent me this? Bricks without straw also ran. Now Benedict Brogan says that the Tories are thiking of creating as many as 40 new Conservative peers to stack the House of Lords with reliable Cameron votes. Again, one can see why he would want to do so even

This time, perhaps even the lawyers have gone too far. It’s hard to recall, even in the long history of appalling gagging orders, a more disgraceful injunction than this: The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights. Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found. The Guardian is also forbidden

For some time since I came of voting age I took the view that it was more important to vote (when I bothered to vote) for the party, not the man (or woman). A lot of people, perhaps even a majority of the electorate, think this way. But I  now think I was wrong and they are wrong too. Voting for the party, regardless of the inadequacies of your local candidate, is easy. Taking the time to learn which of your local constituency candidates most deserves your support takes, well, effort. But I think that effort is worthwhile. The expenses scandal may have brought some welcome clarity to this view.

The kerfuffle over Lord Ashcroft’s purchase* of a majority stake in PoliticsHome is not something, I suspect, that mch interests anyone beyond the Westminster village. That said, I think Hopi Sen has the best take on this midget-brouhaha: The result of these expert polls was usually a story like “Westminster insiders think Clegg needs to up his game” a day after something bad happened to Nick Clegg, or “Westminster insiders think Cameron is struggling to convince” a day after a poll comes out showing Cameron struggling to convince. Well great. Now we know MPs and journalists read the newspapers and watch TV. Now, you might think this is all just

Like James, I enjoyed Mark Lawson’s column this morning. Then I would, wouldn’t I? I’ve written before about the fatuous desire to graft* American political arrangements onto our own political structure. Lawson is right to suggest that the political and media class’s obsession with The West Wing is all rather depressing. Now, like plenty of other people, I liked the West Wing, even if, in my experience, the more one knew about how Washington actually works the more preposterous the show became. Our pols, however, don’t seem to have grasped that it’s a fantasy and not to be taken seriously. In a sense, Aaron Sorkin offered a dangerous fantasy too:

Via Tom Harris, I see that the new Speaker is contemplating “modernising” the House of Commons by dropping the convention that MPs refer to one another as the “Honourable Member” and “Right Honourable” and so on. If John Bercow thinks this will do anything to help the public understand the supposedly arcane and baffling Westminster world then he’s utterly mistaken. More importantly, it suggests that, in this instance at least, his understanding of the problems afflicting Westminster is sadly shallow and even juvenile. The Scottish Parliament – working on the assumption that any Westminster convention was foegeyish and “out of touch” – decided that there was no need for such

James makes a droll case for Labour holding an open, national, primary to select the party’s next leader. As I say, it’s an entertaining notion, though it’s not clear that Tory or Lib Dem voters have any real right to choose Gordon Brown’s successor. Still, the idea of primaries seems to be on everyone’s mind lately. All in the name of “reconnecting” politicians and voters. But the argument for primaries basically comes down to one thing: that’s how they do it in the United States. Since much of the British political and media class finds American presidential elections much more exciting and interesting than anything that happens on our own

This may seem a peculiar thing to say after weeks of anger from the public and self-laceration among MPs, but I’m not talking about the fall-out from the expenses scandal. I was in Westminster for the first time in ages the other day to attend a meeting about Bangladesh in the Lords. I can’t remember the number of the committee room now and I could certainly never locate it again. The Commons (or was it Lords?) staff were very helpful in helping me find it, although stricltly speaking they allowed me down a stretch of corrridor and down a staircase that was out-of-bounds. At the end of it I felt

Boss Man d’Ancona asks us to consider what we would think and what we would do were we Labour MPs. A scary thought, I know but that’s the point of the exercise. For myself, I like to think I’d agree with Tom Harris. That is, if I were a Labour backbencher I’d be very concerned about my employment prospects and would welcome pretty much Anyone But Gordon as leader. How much worse could any alternative leader be? But if I were a member of the cabinet and someone who had leadership ambitions myself, I might see matters rather differently and conclude that while Labour would certainly be well-served by a

Now that the Tories have reopened their candidate selection process, there are going to be plenty of candidates wondering how best to take advantage of their opponents’ extravagant expense claims. The intricacies of capital gains tax and “flipping” second homes are all very entertaining, but liable to become bogged down in legalese. Not so, by comparison, the hefty £400 MPs could claim for food each month. A friend sees this as an opportunity not to be wasted and emails me his advice to would-be MPs to: Spend £400 in a branch of Greggs – which will get you approx 100 steak bakes, 200 sausage rolls, 100 scotch pies and 100

Nadine Dorries is at the end of her tether: Does the DT [Daily Telegraph] have an agenda other than the desire to perform a public service? Why would they expose this fiasco at the start of an election campaign if the priority was not to destabilise the main political parties and to drive votes towards the minority parties? Really, this presumes that newspapers are vastly more cunning than tends to be the case. The Telegraph is motivated by something rather quaintly old-fashioned: a story. Like anything else in the paper this is designed to serve two ideas: make money and b) inform the public. Just occasionally (oh, happy day!), it’s

Amidst the public riot over parliamentarians’ expenses, the story of Hazel Blears remains oddly fascinating. And story is the operative word, given that she appears to be the sole cabinet minister singled out for opprobrium despite the fact that several of her colleagues have enjoyed equally shady and profitable dealings with the Fees Office. Since she’s had the gall to criticise the Prime Minister you can see why Downing Street is Chipmunk Hunting, making it clear that her actions were “unacceptable” and all the rest of it. But if Blears is guilty – or guilty enough to be forced out of the cabinet – then surely Alastair Darling and Geoff

Danny Finkelstein’s column in the Times today is very interesting if, perhaps, also a little too neat. On the other hand, I kinda hope he’s right. Large centralised political parties were created because of the existence of the mass media. To make any political impact, an idea or an individual had to find a spot in the limited shelf space provided by the big media giants. This prompted individuals to organise themselves into tight, uniform groupings with a professional staff shaping their message for media outlets. As the mass media became stronger, so did whipping. From this relationship between the media and politicians arose our current form of closed politics.

Like Bagehot I think this one of most entertaining – and revealing – reactions to the revelations of the Great Expenses Swindle of 2009: The latest batch of expenses details revealed by the Telegraph included the fact that Peterborough MP Stewart Jackson had made a claim of £304.10 for the upkeep of a swimming pool. In response he said: “The pool came with the house and I needed to know how to run it. Once I was shown that one time, there were no more claims. I take care of the pool myself. I believe this represents ‘value for money’ for the taxpayer.” Priceless, if you know what I mean.