Clegg on Cameron: “I’m unimpressed.”

We have been for tea and sticky buns in the tippety-toppety corner of the House of Commons (up in the guttering just by the gargoyles) with the Cleggster again. This event was brought to us courtesy of the awesome organisational powers of Millennium Elephant (very impressive for a fluffy toy) and I’m going to write up most of our very enjoyable chat tomorrow (they’re getting more informal the better we get at them, which is pleasing). But I’ll make one note now on Nick Clegg’s assessment of David Cameron, in the light of this unexpected treat in the Times.

Well, Nick’s not impressed. More in sorrow than in anger, perhaps - this is allegedly the Prime Minister in waiting, after all. It’s rather reassuring to hear at first hand that the man one thinks of as being a 2-dimensional PR tosser, constrained from formulating decent policy by both his party and his own daft cocksureness, also comes across much like that in real life.

It’s also interesting to hear a leader thoughtfully dissect another man’s failings away from the bearpit of PMQs. Brown and Cameron seem to take the opposite stance - scream and jabber at each other like outraged teenagers (with apologies to teenagers everywhere) in the House but largely decline to comment on each other when they’re having lunch with the press, preferring to maintain the communal delusion that the two big parties actually still stand for two opposing “ideologies” and it is the method, and not the man, that will deliver the [insert suitable unarguable warm fuzzy word here] Britain needs.

Clegg dispatched Cameron as follows. On civil liberties? Cameron is Janus-faced - against ID cards but he wants to scrap the Human Rights Act? On foreign policy? Living in the wrong decade. On tax? Taking a tremendous risk by foregrounding the 10p band because sooner or later people are going to realise that he has no alternative policy. He has, of course, stated that he will restore the 10p band, but given that other spending commitments are being reined in with Scroogelike insistence by Shouty Plonker HQ, my suspicion is that they’re desperately hoping no-one asks them where the money will come from, and why, if they’re able to do this, they can’t promise to cut taxes across the board.

Our own 10p commitment, of course, is costed and has been for nine months; the only fault I could find with Nick’s performance at PMQs today was that he missed a golden opportunity, when Brown claimed that the Liberal [sic] party had no plans to reinstate the 10p band, to reply OH YES WE DO! Except we’d make it a 0p BAND! Here’s the costed summary - put that in your calculator and smoke it! Tcoh, why won’t he see sense and let me script his questions? Nick holds what he calls an old-fashioned belief that “ideas will out”. So do I, and I don’t think it’s old-fashioned, I think it’s so old that it’s on the cusp of becoming new again - although I could wish we were milking it a little more in our national campaigns (of which more tomorrow).

Nick also agreed with Laurence Boyce, whose question had prompted the discussion, that Cameron will be in dangerous waters with his party the moment he shows any sign of not being able to deliver. Even if we can’t probe the deep divisions in the Conservative party and expose the wormy reality behind that fluffy looking blue oak tree, it will all come out in the wash sooner or later. The loopier element of the Tories tolerate Cameron because they know in their barking heart of barking hearts that only he can make them palatable to the electorate. But they won’t maintain that truce for very long if he starts failing to fulfil his only purpose. They’ll kick him if he falters, and they’ll also kick him if they’re in a tight spot - like government, for example?

Nick also had an interesting reading of Cameron’s comments following their electoral successes on Thursday - he reckons Their Dave sees the electoral success as a double-edged sword, because it has lulled the old guard of the Tories into thinking they don’t have to change or make any further effort of any kind for government to simply fall back into their lap.

And lo! from the Times sketch comes this superb Davism which seems to underline everything Nick set out tonight about cockiness, about lack of substance and about being out of touch:

Yes, I am wealthy. I have a very well-paid job and so does my wife. But I drive my own car, I fill it up at the pumps and when diesel hits 121.9p, which I paid outside Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago, it really struck me that this whole tank is costing me £10 to £15 more than previously.

Ironic really. Another part of our discussion focussed on how the media were never, ever going to like us and the best we can do is ignore them and reach the electorate in other ways.  Which really means we ought to take this unusual bit of Dave-bashing with a pinch of salt as well. But make hay while the Sun shines, I say.

 

Elementary Logic #107

In the days running up to the local elections there was an excellent reminder, if it were needed, that Tory logic is very much of the push-me-pull-you* variety.

Their Dave was around and about in Manchester (a digression: did anyone else pick up on the cringeworthy Cathy Newman segment on C4 news when Their Dave, on being asked to speculate on how the elections would go for the Tories ”in his wildest dreams?” replied “Well, hur-hur, not all my wildest dreams are about local elections, Cathy.” Hgaggaaaaaaaah! Gnnnaaaaaaah! Ick! Gn! Make it go away!) busy putting paid to the totally unfair perception (perish the thought!) that he was a Notting Hill namby-pamby. Having thus reassured the denizens, he contined to discuss local problems and suggest solutions.

People are desperately worried about crime, about antisocial behaviour, about what is happening on our streets. Conservative councils will clear your streets and have a zero tolerance policy because we know that clean streets are safe streets… If you get rid of the litter and the graffiti you can get rid of the vandalism and the yobbery that spoils so many of our town and city centres

I would, in all seriousness** welcome any reading Tory who wants to have a go at explaining this chain of causality. Because, I mean, what? Picking up litter will solve all the problems of disaffected youth? Cleaning graffiti off walls will actually lower rates of mugging and burglary? Try as Dave might to disassociate himself from the charge of being a Notting Hill lightweight, it betrays itself in his thinking. The pretty wedding cake streets of Notting Hill are of course extremely clean and extremely safe, but those two mutually exclusive facts proceed from a third fact - they’re rich. Only someone totally wrapped up in their culture could fail to appreciate this as a root cause.

What escapes Their Dave at some quite fundamental level, I reckon, is that the culprits actually live in these areas. Perhaps he thinks they get bussed in at night from some out-of-town anti-social behaviour megastore? As long as certain factors drive people to what Labour has taught us to call, without even mid-air quotation marks any more, anti-social behaviour, they will practise it, on this wall or the next. But the Tory solution recognises no such painfully obvious reality. Move’em on, bang’em up, kick’em out, and Surrey house prices and Victoria sponge competitions will surely follow.

It’s faintly unnerving, how certain they are about this sort of thing on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. You know how nutters think with total seriousness that, say, traffic lights are causing rain to fall and Theresa May is controlling them through the television set? (They’re quite wrong about this, of course; it’s Jacqui Smith). To witness Tory policy-making in action is often like watching a whole bunch of them wearing suits and talking to journalists. One of them would just be a lone nutter, but collectively their skewed world-view has a spurious mass-certitude about it. They really don’t see why the whole world can’t be just like Notting Hill.

* In the sense that it tries to go in two directions as if they were one direction, rather than in the sense that it has two heads, is covered in fur and goes around braying a lot…

** Though not so serious that I won’t throw custard pies at you and go “ner-ner-ner, you’ve gone all YELLOW!”

 

London. Oh.

I see that Jo A has womanfully collated a list of fretful blogging reactions to our London results thus saving me a lot of gloomy scrolling. I hope opposition bloggers are watching this. The London results are dire for the Lib Dems, and we are all saying so - is it at all possible that you might give us an incy-wincy break and believe us when we also say the the country-wide results were really rather good?

Fairly bloody, ain’t it - 11% of the assembly vote, less than 10% of the mayoral vote. No spinning that one. But I fall somewhere between the two positions being demonstrated on the LDV thread - self-critical despair on the one hand and ultra-philosophical acceptance of the roundabout of political life on the other.

It is pretty dire, but there is an explanation, and it’s not simply that Brian got squeezed by two media giants, although that’s part of it. Paul Walter points out that as a liberal party we can hardly start questioning the electorate for turning out in high numbers - up to 50% in some boroughs - with the “wrong” kind of votes. That’s what Labour does when voters don’t show due appreciation of its Glorious Wisdom. As far as that goes I agree. But I do have an inkling about which bits of the electorate constituted that very high turnout across London, and how that might have affected our vote share.

On Thursday I directed someone to the polling station and asked them how they were going to vote (keeping my clipboard well out of sight, of course). “Oh Ken, I think,” she said. Well, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it. But it wasn’t until several hours afterwards that I realised what she meant by this - she didn’t really have much notion that any other elections were happening at all. Once she got in there, on being presented with not one bit of paper, but three, she probably filled in the others as well (and, I like to think, gave us a shout on the Assembly in thanks for the terribly nice and helpful woman who directed her to the polling station).

Normally, London Assembly elections are associated with the mayoral election - they don’t take place in its media-mighty shadow, like they did this time. Most people reading the London Metro of a morning could be forgiven for thinking that a mayoral election was the only thing happening on 1 May in the whole country, let alone London. So as far as they were concerned, they were voting for a London mayor only. And Brian was so obviously on the squeeze that many of the 12-14% or so of polled Londoners who said they would give him first preference stayed at home on 1st May. With the result that our Assembly vote share went down as well, because many of the people who wanted to give Brian first preference would probably have voted Lib Dem on the Assembly ballot papers too.

Anecdotal, yes, but it accounts for our low figures without excusing them (we didn’t work hard enough to get people out to vote, presumably), and also explains why the Green vote share remained contrastingly buoyant, and in the mayoral results crept up one point from the steady 2% held throughout the contest. The Green voters never expected their candidate to be a mayoral front-runner. They voted on 1 May to (continue to) prove a point, not in the hope of challenging the top two.

It strikes me that we’re in a sort of puberty stage of political parties (no, really, stay with me). We’re too big and successful now to be regarded as the plucky little underdog, and attract the grumpy protest vote. That role now belongs to the Greens. People don’t see us as anti-establishment any more, purely by dint of our size and vote share, and the fact that they’ve decided to see our leader as an establishment leader who doesn’t “live up” to establishment standards, rather than the oddball anti-establishment leader he actually is, good teeth and an enthusiasm for hiking and tennis notwithstanding. Our size and popularity attracts the other parties’ fear, hence all the ludicrous unfairness and name-calling on the Beeb and throughout the media.

But, while we’re now definitely in the secondary school playground, we’re not strong enough to challenge the big boys, who bully us in the apparent hope that we’ll dwindle and lose heart. We’re in a peculiarly hellish sort of limbo, neither one thing or the other. Presumably the only thing to do when confronted with a set of results like this is to stick with it, not let the bastards grind us down and keep applying the clearasil. No, I have no idea how that translates into an actual strategy, wot am I, Lawd Rennard?

 

The Fall and Rise of Mr PikeBishop

Having stormed City Hall and taken over the BBC, we in the People’s Republic are looking forward to a swift descent back to anonymity, hopefully with some new loyal citizens (a puppy for every new reader!). Already the stats graph has stopped shaking like a maxed-out Geiger counter, which is actually quite a relief. We are not quite sure we can take ourselves seriously as a blogging commentator. Somehow it was all a great deal simpler in the good old days when we were wittering on about Anglo-Norman linguistics, the distressing fall-out from the Incident With The Broken Chair or tax, tax and a little more tax, with occasionally the odd mention of the Liberal Democrats.

But credit to the Beeb for contributing to the flossy excitement of political blogging. I suppose. Like most online innovation, the huge amount of white noise surrounding political blogging will probably resolve itself into a couple of clear signals a few years down the line. The majority of ideas, innovations, participation exercises, collaborations, interactive experiments, publicity paraphernalia and other self-regarding bollocks produced by the political parties and those who lobby for them will become dead wood - as, of course, will the majority of blogs and hub-sites operating now, including quite probably this one. One or two interesting and useful contributions to the field of political behaviour will remain.

Meanwhile, a little story about New Media And Old that may reassure us in the crazy boom years. Mr PikeBishop is a name bloggers will know (self-absorbed? nous?). For anyone who doesn’t keep their intellect wrapped around their own sphinctre, his real name is Frank Fisher. Frank was an opinionated crotchety libertarian with a acid-sharp knack of cutting people’s heads clean off in conversation, and a tendency to object to all categorisations including this one. One day, he discovered Comment is Free and a whole new world opened up. Suddenly there were hundreds of terminally stupid people ripe for a neck-tickle with a blunt axe! He didn’t even have to leave the house and go out looking for arguments at bus stops! Frank became Mr PikeBishop, and administered merciless opinionated crotchety libertarian medicine across the political spectrum.

Now, the Guardian ancien regime in those days still believed that its readers were sitting cross-legged at the foot of its Tree of Ineffable Wisdom and gazing up into the boughs with an expression of starlit wonder. They were somewhat disconcerted to discover that a real, live, breathing audience with opinions and pet topics of its own existed on the other end of the newspaper distribution chain saying things like “This is shit, this is”, and the person of Mr PikeBishop represented this alarming new fact so well that he won the popular vote Big Blogger competition of 2006, presumably to the organ’s total dismay.

Mr PikeBishop single-handedly gives the lie to the general assumption (that of, you know, The Wizards) that political blogging and online comment is a Macbook-glossy world of young hipsters with soft-yet-cool brains ready to receive the imprint of this or that party allegiance. Mostly it’s just the same crusty, hairy, peculiar blighters who were already arguing about politics in pubs or at bus-stops, ’cept with a computer in front of them.

You may gather from all this that I have a sneaking admiration for Mr PikeBishop, as most CiFers do, even the ones still carrying their heads around in a tupperware box. So imagine my delight on election day when I see this post from Mr PB on a particularly foaming anti-Boris piece from Zoe Williams:

Well I wasn’t going to vote today - not being in the Smoke and not having anyone to vote for - and as usual was going to draw a cock on my ballot paper, this time with “Gordon Brown” written along the shaft, but Zoe, you have inspired me. It would only take a 3% swing to the crappy Libdems to unseat the Labour councillors who hold my ward; obviously I’m no libdem, but I saw one of their candidates the other day, posting materials on a sunday morning, he at least looked keen and the thing is… I now realise I have a reason to vote. So Zoe, I shall be voting libdem at around 6 this evening, on my way home from work, just to annoy you.

Chin chin

Mr PB, Mr PB! I said. Thank you!

Don’t thank me, he said, because I hate you and everything you stand for.

Well, yes. Sadly, I fear this is the last time we’re going to attract Mr PikeBishop’s cock drawing vote. Particularly if he sees I’ve screwed a blog post out of it. But the point is, old-fashioned Rennardism scored a tiny babystep victory here.

Part of the reason Labour tanked on Thursday is because, anecdotally, they’ve lost their activist base. The leaflet-pushers and door-knockers are either pissed off after ten years of being ignored by the central party, horrified by policies like the axing of the 10p band which appear to undercut everything they believe in, or they’ve gone on to better things (and lost them). The kind of attrition that has worked itself out in the cabinet since 1997 leaving us under the yoke of the present sorry bunch of losers is just as applicable at the bottom of the hierarchy - and a hierarchy is exactly what it is. I’m not an uncritical fan of leafletting, despite actually rather enjoying the process itself. But a keen sprig with a bunch of leaflets in the right place at the right time clearly worked its magic on Mr PB.

However, lest the leaflet fanciers among us get too complacent we should remember it can also go horribly wrong, as this exclusive photograph taken in Picton ward in Liverpool at 7am on Thursday morning demonstrates:

 

It appears that the Labour activist who got there before our lot ignored the warning on the upper notice, with the resultant crucifxion as shown on the lower notice.

We, er, won Picton.

 

BBC Elections 2008 live blog

14.00

I’ll bow to your wisdom, commenters, and carry on with this post, since you are. Hey, I might never bother creating a new post again.

First, apple lodges for the blogging hiatus in the wee hours, I have no particular excuse to offer other than a corresponding hiatus in my energy levels, despite the “finger food” (always a sinister phrase), and a slow-up in the flow of information. Had I been more myself (i.e., blogging while wrapped in a blanket and eating a chocolate bar for breakfast, like wot I am now doing) I would have churned out some more reflective stuff in that period. That’s what you get when you put rank amateurs like me on the tellybox.

I am, however hugely chuffed about your contributions, and I’m sorry I couldn’t mention more of them (the whole experience was a lot more fraught than it was probably made to look by the lovely Emily M) but checking in on this thread every now and then helped keep me sane. Sincere apologies to Adrian Sanders (I am particularly pleased about the Exeter majority, it being a place dear to my heart) and Bernard Salmon whose extremely valuable comments got stuck in spam and I only released them at 4am this morning. Annoying, I would obviously have made a lot more of them. That’s bloggin’.

We’ve got Sheffield! Just seen it come up on the Beeb’s tickertape. Re Liverpoo-el, on reflection I could probably have done without that defection - rather as a couple of people below have said. Whatever the details were, it’s going to be milked for all it’s worth by the (Labour mouthpiece) Liverpool Echo over the next year. We made a great fight of it anyway - one seat off a majority in Labour’s key target seat? I’d have been happy with that.

But then, we’re not Liverpool Lib Dems. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to see all your ongoing plans and work go up in smoke, especially in the name of “No Overall Control”. I rather trust that they had some good reasons for seeking a cobbled together majority. It may, {she hoped}, be that they’re on the verge of cracking the finance problem (which has, basically, arisen because of the City of Culture thing; anything like that is always going to be an expensive fiasco whatever the cultural benefits, and the ruling party is always going to get it in the neck). If they can turn things around over the next year, they’ll have deserved their relative success.

With 129 official results in it’s fairly certain we’ll finish in the low positives. I said yesterday I’d have been disappointed with less than 25% of the vote share, so our performance is solid from my point of view. Little to add to the excellent analysis at 4am this morning (no, really) by Andy H, in fact. Not at all surprised to see the Beeb et al insisting it’s a failure. Incidentally, Iain D (what a treasure trove of insider information that man is) mentioned to me that people generally get hit over the head with a big stick by the Beeb for “breaking the confidentiality of rehearsals” which was quite blatantly what I did for CiF yesterday. I will let you know if any sharp blows to the head occur. Happily, James Graham has now taken the nuttily hate-filled anti Lib Dem commenters off my hands over there. It really does puzzle me, the maniacal pin-sticking type vitriol that gets poured over us on CiF. It feels like wandering into the wrong paper. Why are they so upset?

In other nutter news, I see that Luke Akehurst’s fake blog stalker person has - if you can believe this - been into my Facebook account (innocently open to mostcomers), and copied a photo of me pretending to be Captain Jack Sparrow in the Balkans last year into his blog, and derived a number of less-than-sophisticated nautical metaphors therefrom. Hasn’t had the decency to link to me, sadly, and that compliment I hereby return.

Now, I really must call my mother.

2ND MAY

03.41

Liverpool… what can I say? Let joy be unconfined. Hopefully about to have a good ol’ fight with Luke about it on air.

Incidentally, someone on Iain’s blog earlier complained that Luke and I hadn’t linked to Iain tonight whereas he had linked to us. So here we are:

Luke!

Iain!

I do find the notion that we need to link to Iain rather quaint and charming. My hit rate today, my highest ever, has been less than a tenth of Ian’s on a normal day.

Well, the plug has been pulled and the wine is flowing. A good night. Until tomorrow!

02.49

Just managed to catch a clip of Ringmeister Jeremy Vine and his tragic animation. Now, I’m all for fun and frolics on political programmes. Well, actually, I’m not. But for the love of dear god. With the best will in the world - 25%, four points up on our poll position, we’ve overtaken Labour, we’re the second party in the country… and it’s a POOR PERFORMANCE? Much as I predicted earlier today. Ridiculous.

01.23

The spring rolls are congealed, the lip gloss has all but worn off, but give me more!

Great news!!! With multiple exclamation marks!!! We’ve held Eastleigh!!!

Er. No, not a great surprise, it being Chris Huhne’s seat an’ all. But we have apparently liquidated the last Tory from the council.

Curioser and curioser. We’ve lost three seats to Labour in Bolton… but made them up against the Tories in Stratford. Has the country up-ended itself? The canard about Tory resurgence in the south is now well and truly a dead duck.

My information here at City Hall (very useful having a whole press team hanging around nearby chatting) is that we’ll finish AHEAD of Labour. The figure 27% is being bandied about…

Snapshot: Iain is quoting yet another lascivious Tory commenter from his blog slurping at Emily and/or Clemency. Luke’s blog meanwhile is hosting an argument about George Galloway and the Iraq war. Kind of appropriate in both cases really.

00.45am Harmony in the South-West. Aaaah.

Mr Iain tells me there are two Con gains from Labour in Exeter which puts all three of us on a lovely even 12 seats apiece. Bad, though again not unexpected, news from Pendle - one Con gain from us there. Like Liverpool, it was always going to be a toughie.

At this point I am cautiously extremely happy. The official Beeb position is we’re net one councillor up after eighteen declarations (i.e. about an hour ago), and I haven’t heard anything from my little channels which varies that picture wildly. Given that we would be happy to lose anything under a hundred seats on the back of a great performance in 2004, it’s All Going According to Plan. Not all bad news in Liverpool though - we’re making gains in nearby Knowsley which has been hardcore Labour since the dawn of time. We’ve also taken a ward from Labour in Salford.

00.30am More from the gentle south

Lib Dems are now predicting a majority in Cheltenham (currently even stevens with the Tories) and the Woking news appears hopeful - more to follow.

The political internet continues to explode with indignation at the antics of Jeremy Vine. Let’s see if we can’t stick it to him an’ his graphics next camera shot we get…

00.24am Bizarre result of the night

The Tories hold Broxbourne, as expected, but Labour gain one seat from them to reach a grand total of 3 councillors. Broxbourne? In the middle of Hertfordshire? The SOUTH? What in the name of Champion the Wonder Horse is going on?

00.17am Just in from St Albans

We’re looking good, yellow people. Three wards held and one gain from Labour (only eight Labour councillors there to start with, so a relatively easy mop-up job). Full control beckons.

In other news, I hear one of Guido’s commenters says I look “quite tasty”. Of such august observations does political blogging consist. Just as well I have Iain here to safeguard my virtue.

00.06am Wonderful Winchester and Woeful Wiverpool

Bad is the news from Liverpool just now. Labour have taken three of our seats and we’ve lost another to one of the minor parties. Not wholly unexpected - Labour have thrown everything at Liverpool. More than a couple more losses and I’ll be worried.

But great news from Winchester - a Lib Dem hold, despite all the talk of Tory resurgence in the south east. Plainly the Dave deal has not been sealed.

11.59pm Tories romping away in the south, you say?

That’s what the papers keep telling me. Not at Sandgate in Folkestone & Hythe, it seems! The Lib Dems gain from the Conservatives with a vote share increased by 35.1%. Courtesy of, and congrats to, Tim Prater.

Poor Michael Portillo! No-one at the great big pretend BBC election party wants to talk to him. He’s tucked onto one of the supercool ergonomic sofas reading a book all by his little self…

11.44pm Early Tory gains…

Mr Iain is jubilant - the Tories have retained Tamworth and taken seats in Chorley and Swansea. I also learn from the estimable Mr Dale that the Boris staying on as MP for Henley story is “total rubbish” and I shouldn’t mention it on air or I shall live to regret it. Ooh, Iain, you tease! What do you think I should do, boys and girls?

Great Lib Dem news from Hull! We lost the council after a defection and needed one seat to retake control. And we’ve gained not one seat, but five…

11.01pm A question of milk… 

In the preparation for tonight we were all three asked, amongst other things, for our earliest political memory, and I chose Mrs Thatcher taking away my free school milk. Iain wondered how this could be. The original decision to stop school milk was made in the 1970s when Maggie was Ed Sec’y. But we did have free school milk at my primary school (c1983-1987) and it was taken away somewhere in the middle years. It tickles me to recall in this context that I lived in what was then the fifth safest Tory seat in the country (Epsom and Ewell). Did we healthy ruddy Tory children get extra calcium for the greater good?

Can anyone shed any light on this perplexing lactic mystery?

10.50pm Iain Dale-Luke Akehurst sandwich…

The Liberal Democrats are the centre of attention for once here on floor 9 at City Hall as I have managed to bag the central seat by the simple expedient of turning up early. Shock revelations already abound - Luke Akehurst only types with one finger! Overheard in make-up: ”so it’s 53-47 after second preferences”.  Nope, I don’t know which way round that was.

In further London news, there have been problems earlier in the day in several London boroughs with ballot paper illegalities, and Iain and Luke are talking across me right this moment about extraordinarily high turnouts across the city. 50% in Chingford and Wood Green, 49% in Hackney. Glad news. On the bus today, I directed a girl to the library, warning her it would be closed because it was the polling station. “I know,” she said, all wounded surprise, “I’m going to vote.” A warm glow! We rode on in companionable silence, perhaps the only two women under thirty in London to vote today… Any more out there?

 

I was Charles Kennedy’s stunt double

I wanted to be Vince Cable really, but I got into it after a while. At times I even caught myself attempting the accent. Other than my impersonation of a gingery Scotsman, today’s run-through at the Beeb alongside Iain Dale and Luke Akehurst (a pair of total pussycats! Can’t imagine what all the fuss is about) for the election programme was chiefly remarkable for three things:

First, THE TABLE! THE TABLE! THE BIG RED ROUND GLASS TABLE THEY HAVE ON NEWSNIGHT AND STUFF, I SAT AT IT, YEEEEAH! It’s got all smears and scratches on it. The floor’s a bit grubby as well.

Second was David Dimbleby pretending for interview purposes not to know that Lib Dem tax policy involves cutting the basic rate and raising the personal allowance, bless his specs. I always thought the media really were wilfully ignorant about us, but apparently they just pretend to be and frame their whole line of questioning accordingly. That’s all right then.

Thirdly, and despite number two, we’re going to look good on tv. That’s because our party talking head, as you will have gathered, is Charles Kennedy (I don’t impersonate him for the fun of it, you know, and certainly never in my own time). The Tories have George Osbourne. Labour has Tessa Jowell. And never has the phrase “enough said” been more apposite than it is now about to appear, fitted like a silencer onto the end of this paragraph. Enough said.

But more important than any of that was the incidental revelation of the meedja’s expectations for us. I gather, from reading between the (great big thick) lines, that if the Lib Dems attract much less than 30% of the vote tomorrow there will be cause for much pundit headshakery over the future of Nick Clegg (who, you know, once did it with some ladies too!)

Now, given that Lib Dem commenters themselves over at LDV are generally predicting in the range 22-26% (i.e., a modest to good advance on where we are in the polls), one can’t help feeling there’s a degree of, ah, nobbling going on here. The Tories, of course, need to advance 2-3% on their current polling position to look like serious election winners (arithmetically if not intellectually). Essentially the Beeb’s position tomorrow, so it appeared to me from today, will be that anything less than an advance of 10% on where the Lib Dems are in the polls can merrily be interpreted as abject failure. Good to know where you stand, I suppose.

Yeah, well, their leader did Do It With Ladies…

Maniacally bitter humour notwithstanding, may I remind you that YOUR REPUBLIC NEEDS YOU tomorrow night, loyal citizens! results! early indicators! rumours! shocks! tears! laughter! speculation! bar charts! wild guesses! songs! poems! prose contributions! photographs of amusingly shaped vegetables that look like Boris and Ken! - all are considered for publication. Email me, facebook me (details right) or comment below or at LDV. For now, Good Night And Good Luck.

 

People’s Republican State Television

Having mounted an armed coup against the treacherous enemy pigdogs of the People’s Republic carried out protracted negotiations with our most honourable and wise comrades in the media, we are delighted to announce our takeover of BBC One. The People’s Republic will be available in live televisual form for one night only on Thursday 1st May from 11.35pm onwards at each and every half-hour or thereabouts. Free pizza and beer will be available.*

Visit Lib Dem Voice for further details. In the meantime, a small competition:

What should the Head of State say/do when the presenter tries to suggest to her that the Cleggster’s interview with Piers Moron Morgan marked a great and terrible watershed in the history of the Liberal Democrat party and a turning point in the political mores of our times? (Answers should use no more than eighteen rude sweary words per square metre and should not assume the close proximity of the free pizza as this cannot be guaranteed, although reference to glasses of water is permitted).

*To me.

 

For THIS you get me out of bed…

We have been busy in the People’s Republic with internal affairs of state. Unfinished articles, undelivered leaflets and distinctly under-exercised flab litter the land. Some people even expect us to do some work! So we were working up a nice head of steam to finally blast away at the disgraceful 10p tax band business, now crowned with its final turd in the shape of the Prime Minister going on Channel 4 news last night to tell us everything’s all right AGAIN.

But there have been one too many bloody silly stories lately for me not to saddle up and hunt cretins through the marshes with a great big stick, I’m afraid. First, Piers Moron and his all-singing, all-dancing inane questions almost made me weep with total unconcern, and I was only prompted to care about the whole thing when it became clear that the underwear of a number of newspaper columnists and, hem hem, Tory commentators would be permanently soiled as a result of the incident. And now this student-in-joining-university-political-society-and-forgetting-twenty-years-later-shock-meltdown. For god’s sake. Even the commenters on Conservative Home are questioning whether this merits discussion.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that everyone who has ever been to Oxford or Cambridge immediately pointed out that most politicised students joined several societies, for the social contacts and the chance to hear the speakers. Leave aside also the fact that by no means a majority of the members of any affiliated association were also members of the party in question. Leave aside the fact that Clegg’s name appears on the list only for his First Year and that he would therefore have most probably joined at Freshers’ Fair, a whirligig of fierce competition for the innocent souls of the newly matriculated that leaves even the most single-minded signed up to things like the CU Underwater Frisbee Society, the CU Amoral Sciences Club, the Franco-British Student Alliance (who are they fighting? The Central European Society, perhaps), the CU Guild of Change Ringers, the CU Lindy Hoppers and, if you’re really unlucky, the CU Netball Team (geddit? Think about the merchandise…)

Further, leave aside the fact that it has taken Greg Hands his entire career since leaving the rather small college he and Clegg attended at the same time to notice that Clegg is, what do you know, something rather big in the Liberal Democrat party, and offer his revelation to an astonished world. Leave aside even the fact that plenty of alumni have also pointed out that the officers of these societies are none too bothered about having people’s actual permission before signing them up, and that the sheet of paper in question was marked with various runes by Hands at a time when he was trying to get elected as an officer and was therefore drumming up all the support he could - by fair means or foul, if my memory of these people serves.

No, leave aside all that. Instead, consider Andrew Sparrow’s hair. No, don’t, that would be mean and personal (and yet it is so strangely fascinating…) Andrew Sparrow is plainly of the opinion that joining the CU Conservative Association is, in fact, exactly the same as joining the Conservative Party. No, really, he is! That’s what his headline says. If he sets the standards for journalistic enquiry in this matter, who is to say what actual question Nick Clegg’s office was asked which prompted his unequivocal denial?

If it was, “Were you a member of CUCA as a student?” then Nick may well have genuinely forgotten, but it was still a bit daft to be that definite.

If it was, “Were you a member of the Conservative Party as a student?” then, well, the answer would appear to be unequivocally 100% absolutely not.

Dirty trick or sloppy journalism? You decide. I’m off to put a few cretins’ heads on spikes.

 

Stop the gentrification, I want to get off!

Yesterday I fell off my chair. Or, not so much “off” as “through”. The chair broke, you collect. With hindsight this was not terribly surprising, not so much because I was sitting on it (don’t be so damn rude) as because the chair is about seventy years old and has seated several generations of skimbly pre-and post-war Mortimer forebears before playing host to my much better-nourished posterior.

In the People’s Republic we have always been peasantishly bad at throwing things away (as you might gather from the provenance of the chair) if there is any chance that sufficient duct tape and a funny little wiggling motion every time you pick it up/switch it on/put weight on it in future will rectify the problem. Accordingly, since the basic joinery of the chair is perfectly sound, I have temporarily knocked its warring components back together with a hammer, and am now sitting on it again, taking great care to ensure I don’t work too hard nor get too exercised on Comment is Free. But it is still going to need some sort of metal bracket nailing across the bottom of the frame, to brace the seat against the assault it will suffer tomorrow night when seven other drunken women come over for dinner.

Simple, I think, I’ll nip up the road to, er… Following the closure of Bond & White, the local DIY store, to make way for Planet-fricking-Organic, where the hell do you go in Muswell Hill to buy a hap’orth of nails, or whatever it is, and funny shaped bits of metal? Woolworths? Not for long, it seems. I miss Bond & White. Going in there was like stepping into a seventies sitcom and playing the part of Woman Customer. It was the only shop anywhere on the broadway or for quite some distance around that sold anything remotely hardware-related, and it seemed, to my inexpert eye, to stock everything. The nearest comparable range must have been in one of the giant chain stores on the north circular, which is useless if you haven’t got a car.

This isn’t a precious selfish rant about the death of the small shop - those are alive and well in most of London - nope, it’s a precious selfish rant about the death of the shop that sells, well, useful stuff that ordinary people need to make way for yet more luxury wankfestery. It’s a perfect illustration of the fact that markets are blind. They’ll correct, but they’ll correct to the advantage of those with most input into the market. So in a rich area, you get rich people’s shops, in a poor area you get poor people’s shops, and in mixed areas… you get rich people’s shops.

In other words, there’s no problem with being a small shop on Muswell Hill Broadway, but there is a problem with being a small shop that sells a packet of nails every six months to a girl with a broken chair on Muswell Hill Broadway. All the people who form your main customer base, because they own their own homes and are allowed to do shit to them, are the kind of people who will also have cars and are able to make the trip out to the cheaper chain stores on the north circ. No one, except people like me, comes to the Broadway to buy nails any more.

No, most people come to the Broadway to pick up a few bits at M&S, grab the Guardian from WHSmiths, buy a chicken brick from The Scullery for Lottie to take back to university, take a fancy to an adorable little £150 dress from Leila (and that’s just the men), moon over the cheese counter in Feast and pretend they are some sort of Chaucerian goodwife throwback and now, presumably, feel up the pre-packed mixed seeds and nuts (so knobbly!) at Planet Organic. When they want a nail knocked in, they call up an Eastern European migrant in Tottenham and ask him to come over and bring a nail with him.

London, darling, it’s been wonderful, but I’m leaving you.

 

Ze Prime Minister has trouble with ‘is Early Day Motion

Yes, much like the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I persist in finding Early Day Motions inherently amusing (by way of, possibly, mitigation I have just been watching ‘Allo ‘Allo clips on youtube.)

Douze points to Bob Russell for being the first Liberal Democrat MP to sign Greg Pope’s EDM calling for Darling, darling! (hahaha. Ehehe. Hm. Gets me every time) to review the abolition of the 10% tax band.

Either you know my views on this, or you’ve just arrived on this blog from outer space, or possibly Comment is Free. Get on ze blower to your MP immediately, and meet me back at ze cafe.