Go Home and Prepare for Government

I wrote this piece for another website but I'm adding it here, dedicated to my friend Adam, in thanks for his appreciation. :-)

There is a famous moment in Liberal Party history –perhaps some people reading this will remember it? –when David Steel, a former leader, roused the troops at the end of his conference speech, telling them to loud applause that they should “go back to their constituencies and prepare for government.”

This was a time when David Owen and the Social Democrats, fellow travellers with the Liberals in pre-merger days, were on the up and up; this was a time when the Labour Party was in disarray; it was a time when Margaret Thatcher was facing some of her toughest challenges. It was 1981. What happened? The Falklands happened, the general election of 1983 happened, Margaret Thatcher cruised to one of her greatest victories, and poor David Dee and David Dum never got their snouts anywhere near the trough of office.

It’s been something of a burden the party has had to carry over the years, a stick to beat the poor dears with, an indication of just how pompously self-inflated they could become, what a joke they are, this ‘David Steel moment’. So, no matter what their present expectations, one is unlikely to hear Nick Clegg or any senior member of his party offer such a stupid hostage to fortune. But, hold on just a moment; have I’ve got news for you – this campaign has produced its very own David Steel moment, and appropriately enough it comes from Scotland.

There Alistair Carmichael, the party’s Scottish affairs spokesman, said that it was “increasingly likely” that the Liberal Democrats would either be the largest party in a coalition or they would win an outright majority, and all on the basis of a telly debate!

The Lib Dems are surfing on the top of the wave; they are the irresistible force, moving forward by rapid stages. Their time has come; they’re set to win their first election since 1910. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls – go home and prepare for government!

Everybody loves a winner
So nobody loved me;
'Lady Peaceful,' 'Lady Happy,'
That's what I long to be
All the odds are in my favour
Something's bound to begin
It's got to happen, happen sometime
Maybe this time I'll win

Saying no to Smiler Brown

Did you watch Dr Who on Saturday? I’m an avid fan and I think the new Doctor is such a dream; I just love languid, laid-back men! The episode itself was called The Beast Below. Let me just sketch a brief outline.

The Doctor with Amy Pond, his new assistant, arrives in a future where Britain is a wandering spaceship. On landing he and Amy find a community dominated by some grotesque smiling puppets. At five year intervals people have the right to go into a voting both, presided over by a smiler, places where they are shown a video tape of the realities of Spaceship UK. Then they are given a choice: press a protest button or press a forget button. But the message is so awful that people invariably push the forget button. “Every five years”, the Doctor said, “people chose to forget what they have learned-democracy in action.”

My dear Doctor, touché! My goodness, is there a Conservative resistance cell deep within the bowels of the socialist BBC, I have to ask? A grotesque smiling face asking all of us to forget everything that has happened since the last election, could there be any better metaphor for the present realities of Spaceship UK?

But I’m a rebel; I always have been. I chose the protest button as an angry scowl appears on the face of the puppet. And what do I see? Unbelievable levels of fiscal irresponsibility by a smiler who was Chancellor and who is now Prime Minister. I see a man who created a kind of South Sea Bubble economy, recalling the great financial crisis of the eighteenth century. I see a man who sent more and more soldiers to places like Iraq and Afghanistan, while starving them of the equipment necessary to perform the task they had been given.

I see a man who allowed immigration to get out of control, to the point where the cultural cohesion of this country is in danger. I see a man who presided over one of the most venal and corrupt Parliaments in our history, again with eighteenth century parallels, and immediately went into denial when the truth came out, not having the courage to begin a proper cleansing of the Augean Stables.

I see a man responsible for ever greater moral turpitude in the standards of public life, surrounding himself with aides whose favoured method of dealing with opposition and perceived enemies is the vilest forms of character assassination. I see man who surrendered more and more of our national sovereignty to a corrupt European oligarchy, a practice that at one time would have been defined as treason. The list could go on and on.

Yes, I press the protest button; I will press the protest button on 6 May. Some truths have to be confronted, and confronted with courage.

Battling Bercow

The Rotten Parliament is gone, one hopes never to rise again. But there is one man standing for re-election who seems to me to be a living reminder of its existence, of everything that was wrong with that wretched assembly. He is John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons.

Standing for re-election in his Buckingham constituency he will by convention be unopposed by the other main parties. It’s rather a pity because I would like to see a genuine Conservative stand against this man. It’s no secret that he is widely detested in the Party, no secret that he was elected as Speaker in a game of farcical one-upmanship by Labour MPs at a time when Parliament needed, more urgently than any time in its past history, a figure of determination, courage and stature, someone who could face the expenses crisis head-on and rise above it. It needed a giant; it got Little Bercow.

Simon Heffer was in fine form in last Saturday’s Daily Telegraph, aiming both barrels at this ridiculous man. And as he quite rightly says the voters of Buckingham, those who want a genuine conservative, do have a choice. There are those on the fringes who are mounting a challenge to Bercow, but the one with the best chance would seem to be Nigel Farage, the Euro MP and former leader of UKIP. “I am in no doubt that the people of Buckingham”, Heffer wrote, “not least to perform the public service of removing the smear of Bercow from British politics, should vote for Mr Farage.”

Well, yes, I would vote for him if I lived in the constituency. It’s certainly one of the results that I will be looking out for on election night itself. After all, this might very well be the 2010 version of the Martin Bell moment, the moment when the man in the white suit dislodged Neil Hamilton at Tatton. And Farage would have the added virtue of not being Martin Bell! Not so much Mr White Goes to Westminster, more Mr Blue goes to Westminster. Blue, because he has embraced traditional conservative policies that I feel sure will go down well with many of the local people, especially when set against Little Bercow, a symptom of all that has been wrong with our politics over the past few years.

Fire up the Quattro

In a new propaganda poster Labour has depicted David Cameron as Gene Hunt, the TV detective played by Philip Glenister in Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes. There he is, Dave himself, a tough, rakish-looking guy, wearing snakeskin boats and sitting on top of his Audi Quattro, the car made famous by the series, all beside a slogan saying Don’t let him take Britain back to the Eighties.

Labour really has lost the plot. First the howler over their national insurance jobs tax and now this, this wonderful gift to the Tory Party, a propagandist’s dream! The poster itself was designed by one Jacob Quagliozzi, a twenty-four year old Labour supporter from St Albans, who came out top in a competition organised by Saatchi and Saatchi, the party’s advertising agency. It’s being launched by David Miliband, that geek Banana Man himself, who says that it will be a “powerful reminder of the damage which the Tories did to Britain in the 80s”

What rot; it will be nothing of the kind! The Tories are so pleased by this altogether flattering image of their leader that they have produced the very same poster with a different slogan –Fire up the Quattro. It’s time for a change. Why, have they done this? Well, anyone who is familiar with the show – as Millie Banana clearly is not - will know exactly why.

Gene Hunt, you see, is a no-nonsense, tough-as-all-hell, get things done kind of cop as one can imagine. More than that, he is a walking, talking rebuttal to all forms of fashionable political correctness. He gets results by breaking the rules, cutting through all bureaucracy and established procedure. He is the kind of guy who may not go down all that well at an Islington dinner party, but if one were in a tight spot one could wish for no better companion. He is the type of guy who is completely out of place in New Labour Britain, completely out of place in the elf ‘n’ safety and 'yuman rights culture that has been thrust upon us from the dinner tables of Islington.

To give Cameron this image shows just how out of touch Labour is with the people of this country, just how out of touch it is with popular culture. It makes David look super cool, and who would have thought that possible! Conservative bloggers have responded with a Gordon Brown version, not at all flattering, showing him in some really naff clothes beside a really naff car, all under the caption Back to debt, decline and the 1970s with Gordon Brown.

Well done, Jacob; the cheque’s in the post!

The Once and Future King

We have been here before in the cycles of our history, the fag end of yet another Labour government, ever deeper into incompetence and mismanagement, ever deeper into debt. It has been proved time and again that these people are simply not fit for government; they never will be. They left the country in a mess in 1951, in 1970 and again in1979, but this is nothing compared with the horrendous mess that will be left by Brown and co.

Indeed, though still months short of a general election, it is doubtful if we have a ‘government’ any longer in the meaningful sense of the term, people who are willing and able to face up to the problems of the nation, the very real problems before us. No, we do not have a government, we have a party machine determined to hold on to power at all hazards, no matter the damage that is caused.

We have a Prime Minister, if we can call him that, the most ludicrously incompetent in our history, fiddling like Nero, pretending that the debt crisis, the horrendous debt crisis that he is responsible for, can be met with ‘efficiency savings’. He will by these means, save £3 billion, while a Golden Palace is spun out of the £655 billion that remains. Oh, what palliative treatment we will need when Nero is finally driven protesting from the stage and the New Labour circus is over. What an artist will die in Brown. What an artist indeed.

A new style of leadership is needed, a new form of government, altogether more sober and more realistic. What better model than Henry VII, the first Tudor, the five hundredth anniversary of whose death came this year? His reign had none of the drama of Henry VIII; none of the frustrated promise of Edward VI; none of the tragedy of Bloody Mary and none of the glory of Elizabeth. No, but he was still the smartest and shrewdest of them all. A careful manager, a founder of the modern English state, a believer in financial responsibility and political stability, a man who recognised that military adventures, adventures beyond our capacity, were bad for business, bad for security and bad for stability. Yes, a smart man, a shrewd man, a careful man. Altogether the best example for the difficult times ahead.