Is the Daily Telegraph changing sides?

Where do you go if you want to read a stinging rebuke of this Government? Most of us would probably automatically turn to the Guardian or the Indy, but recent months have seen a torrent of invective delivered from writers at the Daily Telegraph of all places.

The last 48 hours are a classic case in point. First Ed West, journalist and social commentator with a right leaning bent, laid into Cameron comparing him to Ted Heath no less. In Tory-land there is no lower blow than this!

Apparently, Ed, who is widely regarded as a ‘one-to-watch’ up and coming political commentator, says Cameron will lose the 2015 General Election (he’s willing to put money on it) as he refuses to come up with a coherent policy on all manner of issues from immigration through to crime.

Within minutes of Ed’s rant, James Delingpole, another up and comer, laid into Dave & Co quoting the following. “The problem is that policy is being run by two public school boys who don’t know what it’s like to go to the supermarket and have to put things back on the shelves because they can’t afford it for their children’s lunchboxes. What’s worse, they don’t care either.”

As James noted, this quote doesn’t come from Vince Cable, as you might expect, but from Nadine Dorries, Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire.

It gets worse for Dave. Yesterday, one of the big commentator beasts, namely Peter Oborne piled in. Whilst making a number of brilliant points (the Coalition won’t last until 2015 is the key one) he comes out in support of Vince Cable and against George Osborne.

“The fact is,” he says, “Mr Cable has a reasonably worked-out and coherent grasp of political economy, whether one agrees with it or not, and Mr Osborne does not. A large number of Tories want Mr Cable out. They are very stupid.”

So what is going on? I was fortunate to chat with Mike Foster, former Labour MP for Worcester last night and his feeling is that the Conservative Party remains furious at Cameron for not winning the last Election outright and forcing them into a coalition.

True or not (I think it is true just to get off the fence for a moment) this sort of coverage (and many of the comments posted underneath which are in broad agreement with the writers) spell trouble for Project Cameron. Not least because the latest polls show the Labour Party has a steadily widening lead in the polls.

A Belated Blog on Child Benefit

I have only myself to blame for not being up to speed and offering the blogosphere my thoughts on the child benefit fiasco that was unveiled by the Tories last week in Birmingham. Unfortunately holidays and yet another bug passed to me by my ever generous 15 month-old son left me unable to get to a computer.

As an aside, what a fantastic advert for Birmingham the whole thing was. I tuned in one evening to the sight Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail being interviewed by the BBC alongside a Venetian-looking canal, bathed in autumn sunshine, with a jazz band clearly audible in the background!

Anyway, onto more mundane matters, namely child benefit. The Government has been accused of being unfair, which is probably true, but it is interesting to try and work out how it got itself into this mess.

The problem with making cuts to child benefit is that the easiest method to do it is via the PAYE system, but the fairest method is to means-test.

The problem with means-testing is that it involves calculating a combined husband and wife ‘household’ income which cannot be processed through the current PAYE system, which only takes into account individual income. To properly means-test the Inland Revenue would have to send us all a form, which we would then send back and a calculation would be made upon which our child benefit would be paid.

However, as we have found with tax credits, circumstances change in that individuals get pay rises or lose their jobs, babies are born, people fall ill or are injured at work and on and on. This means that on top of the workload to calculate millions of child benefit tax codes, there would also need to be a constant revision of the codes which takes manpower, usually in the form of civil servants and large call centres.

My gut feeling is that Dave and his cronies sat around and came up with this plan but then had to work out how to make it work. At some point somebody will have pointed out that to means-test would mean hiring thousands of public sector workers which would leave all but a small percentage of the actual saving intact.

It won’t be the last time the Government comes up against this sort of obstacle. Cameron has already talked about the possibility of thousands of public sector jobs being lost as we try and rebalance the deficit. However, those salaries will not flow straight down to the Treasury’s bottom line. As Sir John Gieve, former deputy governor of the Bank of England, pointed out before the General Election, job losses have to be paid for by unemployment benefit, retraining, increases in other benefits, not to mention beefing up Job Centre Plus.

The Autumn Spending Review may be brutal, we can only hope that the Government has identified real savings not paper ones and it won’t have to come back for a second bite when it finds a few months down the line that it hasn’t saved enough first time around.

Triumph of the Wets

The full implications of what David Cameron might be attempting may only now be dawning on our professional political classes. At 8pm last night John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, was sounding positively bullish, calling on Labour to mobilise for another General Election, confident in the fact that a Tory/LibDem coalition could not possibly last. By 8.30pm I suspect Labour was feeling far less sanguine when news began to leak of a fixed-term Parliament which could be a massive game changer.

Cameron and Clegg are now bound in political marriage, for better or worse. There will be no cutting and running here when times get tough or when the polls show that the Conservatives can get a majority in the House if they call another election.

It is possible that familiarity could lead to contempt, but it could also lead to a new long-standing Centrist coalition which could effectively lock the Labour Party out of power for a generation. Of course, in order to be centrist and moderate the Conservative Party will have to move to the centre which brings me to my second point.

Michael Heseltine on BBC News 24 last night used a term which I have not heard in decades, namely ‘One Nation Conservatism’. I suspect this is where Cameron has wanted to be all along, slightly right of centre, following in the footsteps of Rab Butler, Alec Douglas Home, Ian Macleod and, dare I say it, Ted Heath (pictured above) - a political position which dominated the 1950s and 60s for the Conservatives. It has taken political expediency and a lust for power to convince his party to take its first steps to follow him.

One Nation Conservatism is the left wing of the Conservative Party, standing for fairness and consensus in society which Thatcher famously denied existed (“there’s no such thing as society, only individuals”). She famously labeled them “wets”, the only Prime Minister in living memory to give such a derogatory term to members of her own party.

Cameron is now in position to banish, within his own party and crucially in the minds of the electorate the spectre of Thatcherism, confining it to its rightful place in the history of Conservatism as an aberration fuelled by circumstance and three General Election victories brought on by militant trade unionism (1979), a horrendously split Labour Party and a war (1983) and the combination of all three and an artificial economic boom for her last victory (1987).

In many ways Labour was right, the Conservative Party hasn’t changed. The nightmare for them is that Cameron is about to.