Mr Quist has a thoughtful post up about the Conservative and Labour approaches to internet campaigning – thoughtful as much for his assessment of the Guardian’s “analysis” as anything else.

He concludes thusly:

It can be done, though. You can have excellent local websites in those constituencies. You can use the Internet as an additional tool to engage people locally. You can knock on people’s doors, get their email addresses and mobile phone numbers and then communicate with them quickly and easily. You can use local Facebook groups to reach a younger bunch of people.

That’s almost certainly the stuff that really works. It isn’t massively expensive, but it’s hard work and – whisper it – actually involves meeting people face to face and not just coming up with something really cool in your bedroom or office.

Broadly speaking, I’m in agreement with the tone of this. I’m a cynical friend of technology, and I think we (and probably the other parties) devote too much energy to doing web 2.0 stuff “because we can” rather than because there’s any evidence it works. Experimentation with no hope of return is the stuff of progress, of course, but that doesn’t mean that every cost-benefit analysis has to be thrown out of the window.

If only thirty-two people are joining every Facebook group you set up, and it’s the same thirty-two people, and one of them’s your little sister, it’s probably time to start saving even the slight energies required to set up Facebook groups. It just leaves bits of tat all over the internet, and enough tat, I reckon, can actually have an adverse effect on your party’s overall image. I get annoyed by the thousands of Facebook invitations to join groups with the format “So-and-so for Such-and-such a place” and I’m supposed to be a Lib Dem. What these people’s mates think of all this virtual clutter is anybody’s guess. If there was a virtual recycling box on Facebook, most political group invitations would go straight into it in much the same way most leaflets go into meatspace recycling boxes.

But I digress. In its essentials, Mr Q’s call is a familiar one. One hears it, with a greater or lesser degree of exasperation attached, from everyone who regularly hits the doorsteps. Less of this mucking about in your bedroom creating cool stuff, and more actual wear and tear on your shoes. Now, I’m a great believer in the sort of bone-deep expertise long-term campaigners have garnered. Some people can call elections correctly to within ten votes, and it’s probably not a bad idea to listen to them. Furthermore, it just makes sense to me that human contact is a better investment of time than online contact. The kind of balance between shoe-leather and modem that Costigan is advocating makes sense.

It’s in good company too. It finds support in something Karin Robinson, of Obama’s European campaigning team, said at the Lib Dem Voice fringe meeting in Harrogate. She said that they were very careful not to make the websites too good. They had to leave the user wanting something more, something s/he had to go out and knock on doors or join in social events to get.

So yeah, of course it all makes sense. But as any student of statistics knows far better than me, lots of things “make sense” and even “stand to reason” which nonetheless turn out to be totally untrue when you plot them on a graph. This is especially so when there might be variables at work you know nothing about – and what could be more variable than political campaigning? People’s political choices are affected by inputs as far apart as twenty seconds of a politician on TV, a duff bit of local officialdom (whether or not it actually relates to a political group) and the weather on polling day. And yes, even stuff they’ve read on the internet (which I reckon is far more likely to be informal opinion than official party bumf, but again, that’s only what makes sense to me).

We all know this, and yet from talking to some campaigners, you’d think certain techniques have the proven status of hard science. Nowhere is this clearer than in talking to advocates of negative campaigning. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had it asserted to me that “negative campaigning works” with no attempt at back-up whatsoever. Works in comparison to what? The same election taking place in a different dimension on the other side of a wormhole with positive campaigning going on in it? You can’t institute a monopoly and then announce that it works perfectly.

There’s no winning with these people, either. If we win an election where their principles were put into play, it must be because of the negative campaigning. If we lose, it’s because we didn’t do enough negative campaigning. Heads I win, tails you lose. It’s so bananas that I am starting to nurse the horrid suspicion that many of the people who assert that negative campaigning works probably just like doing it.

It’s assertions like this that need, desperately need, to be tested as scientifically as possible against alternatives. And yes, doorstep campaigning does need to be tested against internet campaigning in order for the synthesis between them to be better understood. We can’t afford to spare people’s feelings from either camp. I mentioned cost-benefit analysis. No-one, to my knowledge, has ever come up with a set of roughly reliable equations that states any of the following:

• x numbers of doors knocked on in month prior to election = x number of votes
• x numbers of leaflets in month prior to election = x number of votes
• x numbers of garden boards in month prior to election = x number of votes
• some combination of the above that reflects their impact upon each other, beyond my tiny mathematical ken
• all the above repeated, but for terms of three months, six months and a year prior to the election

Why don’t we have a national picture of this knowledge? Partly, it’s difficult to garner, certainly for national elections, because it doesn’t take account of ward targetting. The above equations for one particular ward in a seat may render vastly different answers from the same equations for another ward – but the results at the ballot box won’t be attributable to any particular ward. In local elections, of course, it is possible to separate out results by ward, and see what effect your activity has had there. But people vote differently in local elections.

Perhaps a better way of putting it would be, why aren’t we even trying to acquire this knowledge? Why aren’t we doing more with all the canvassing data and leafleting data local parties undoubtedly collect? Because until we do, and until (harder still) we develop equivalent equations which translate online campaigning activity into votes, then frankly the assertion that on-the-ground campaigning is more effective than internet campaigning remains just that, an assertion. As does the eminently sensible-sounding assertion that what we need is a balance between the two.

We need the beginnings of those equations. Yes, campaigning is an art, and there’s still room for endless art on top of them, but the number of significant campaigning decisions in front of us now are such that we simply can’t afford to charge off down the wrong path. If we do that, we’ll have no way of recognising the mistake we’ve made.  We won’t have anything to compare our performance against. We’ll stay stuck in the “Heads I win, tails you lose” pattern of proof-by-assertion that characterises all discussions on this subject at the moment.

We need a set of proofs, a set of principles, as scientific as possible, and applicable from region to ward-level, to be the foundation of the post-Rennard campaigning era. Assertion won’t cut it any more.

UPDATE 2: Interesting – seems former Times Online editor Peter Bale (now at MSN) is none too impressed by his erstwhile colleagues either. Mind you, he seems to have an actual history of proper journalism.

UPDATE: Here’s a funny thing. Girl With a One Track Mind, who knows what it’s like to be shat on by the Times, has just twittered as follows:

The Times have gagged journo Patrick Foster, so neither he, nor I, will be appearing on @richardpbacon’s R5Live show tonight. #NightJack

So, they’ve outed an anonymous blogger “in the public interest” even though doing so will make it immeasurably more likely that the crimes he wrote about will be identifiable, and now they’ve suddenly realised what a bunch of unpalatable, judgementless lowlives they look, and they’re gagging their own performing monkey? A bit late for shame isn’t it? Cowards.

By way of an addendum to Nightjack’s sad screwing over at the hands of Rupert Murdoch’s little creatures yesterday, I notice this fun comment in the threads at Mr Dale’s:

Patrick Foster, the Times journalist that did the research is a total cock. Knew him at Oxford and he was a smug, smarmy git. Someone ought to do some digging about his past…

Ha! that’ll be some ancient nonsense, I thought. College emnities, power struggles on the JCR sub-committee type of thing. One would be a fool to take any notice of an anonymous undergrad-days foe – imagine if we were all judged by what our university contemporaries said about us?

So naturally I went straight off to google him and found a couple of things of slight interest. None of it anything like as shadowy as the intelligence that Old Holborn has received, but it helps to build a picture nonetheless. First there was the student scrape from the “I”m going to be a GWATE BIG PWOPER journalist when I gwow up” school of investigative reporting, in which he and a friend hacked into the Oxford computer server in order to write about it, and then acted all righteous indignant when the University dared to mind and rusticated them for a term.

Reading between the lines (and remembering what a lot of insufferable pricks we were at Oxford) I gather he became a sort of hero-for-a-day of journalistic enquiry, defended and lauded even by the Cherwell (deadly rival to the Oxford Student, where Foster wrote). Old buffers who make students cap and gown up for disciplinary hearings are a ridiculously easy foil for anyone who wants to paint themselves as a rebel. Even when the old buffers happen to be right.

Any fellow student who wondered why, if Foster was that passionately concerned about the university’s server  security, he hadn’t contacted the IT department and demonstrated his findings in private rather than writing it up for the student newspaper would have been swiftly shouted down as a freedom of speech denier and a crony of the old buffers. There’s nothing the upper middle class young like more than a good faux-revolution.

Still, his student  career need not detain us further here, although this weary missive on the Oxford Student letters page, about another piece by Foster, might prompt a smile of pre-cognition:

…did we really need to read every bit of those documents point-bypoint? I understand that Patrick Foster, the journalist in question, had done his research well, but did we really need to know every minor detail he had come across? Was this the action of a journalist with a bit of an ego problem, or perhaps just a slow news week, I wonder?

But no, the really interesting piece was this one.

On trail of the men behind million voices who oppose road pricing

Patrick Foster  17 Feb 2007

They have been behind one of the most successful recent public mobilisation campaigns.

Since Peter Roberts of the Association of British Drivers (ABD) posted a petition to scrap the Government’s road-pricing policy on the No 10 website, it has amassed more than 1.5 million signatures. But those behind the group, which claims to be the “voice of the driver”, are rather quiet about explaining their other operations.

One is a scientist who insists on using a pseudonym and believes that global warming is a sham. Another doesn’t own a car and runs a PR firm whose clients include a number of public environmental bodies.

It’s rather difficult to know when to stop copying and pasting. It’s not really a story, just a series of unconnected and largely unshady facts produced with the proud flourish of a toddler showing its mummy a successfully potty-bound poo. It goes on to “expose” in more detail the fact that, er, one of the ABD directors believes that global warming is a  sham and er, another doesn’t own a car and runs a PR firm whose clients include public environmental bodies. That’s about it, really. What this is supposed to prove that is worthy of the cringingly self-congratulatory headline is anybody’s guess.

But stay – there is a little more to this. The main point of labouring the global-warming-sham thing seems to be that the director in question uses another name for ABD purposes because he’s an environmental consultant in his day job, and fears he’d lose business if his views became known to his clients.

So Foster outs him anyway, ABD director name and environmental consultant name in the same sentence. While quoting the contents of a phone call  – which I very much doubt was expressly on the record – with the group’s founder as follows:

“The only problem for Bernard is that because he operates as an environmental consultancy he’s been threatened with business being taken away from him because of his views on climate change. His customers believe it could affect their business adversely. He will probably want to be quoted not under his own name for that reason.”

Tough cookies on Bernard, apparently. Foster even produces with a totally straight face a tragi-comic email quote from the poor sod whose professional life he has just blown open:

“I value my family’s privacy and my right to unassailed family life extremely highly.”

Of course, it’s not remotely relevant to a public interest discussion of the ABD, or a debate about road pricing, to undermine this Bernard fellow’s career in this pointlessly spiteful manner. Private hypocrisy is just that – private, and a cross for the individual concerned to bear. But Foster did it anyway.

It’s an interesting journalistic decision, this, because the only remotely controversial ABD director turns out to be buried in the  very last paragraph of the article, a guy who works in marketing for Landrover and, on being called by Foster, denied he had any connection to the car firm. (At work. Duh.) An ABD director who denies being a marketing guy from Landrover? Surely that’s your lead angle, right? Car industry spin boss denies using ABD as front type-of-thing. Practically writes itself. And yet Foster left it alone, and went after the hapless Bernard instead.

So what is it about the specific act of exposing someone else’s privacy that attracts Foster? Their privacy, as opposed to their wrongdoing? What is it that leads him to prefer that as a centrepiece of a story when there’s actually a more important story containing actual deceit buried at the bottom of the column? The parallels with Nightjack are inescapable. Is Foster excited by being the cause of embarrassment and humiliation, perhaps? Does he get off on causing small misfortunes to small people? (Small to him, at least, as a journalistic young gun, but the effects will likely remain with his middle-aged targets for the rest of their lives.)

If the tawdry stuff whispered in Old Holborn’s craggy ear is anything like true, then an interesting, if icky, psychological pattern about the need to expose and humiliate others for self-congratulation purposes begins to emerge from Mr Foster’s oeuvre.

The many commenters to his ABD piece are not inclined to be so subtle however. They have the context of time and place. This is a typical one:

What an abysmal article. A million and a half citizens of this country sign an electronic petition opposing road charging and the best the times can do is to criticize the ABD.

The level it reached is well illustrated in its criticizing Mark McArthur-Christie [one of the directors] for choosing a motorcycle rather than a car. Since when did choice become a reason for ridicule? Motorcyclists are taxpayers too.

How about reminding the politicians they are there to serve the people of this country? What about reminding Blair that this wasn’t in his election manifesto? How about being a journalist instead of a copy writer for Downing Street?

Government  stooge? Perhaps. Other commenters liken the piece to Downing Street’s tactics of turning the glare of publicity on to individuals involved in movements they don’t much like.

But it’s just as likely, in my view, that Foster needs no political affiliation to  make him want to emulate Alistair Campbell’s darkest tactics on a ludicrously small scale. It’s quite possible, looking at his career in the round, that he enjoys it. Doubtless that’s why he was so suited to covering the unedifying Oxford Poetry Professor business. Funny, I never really did sort out who the baddie was in that whole affair. Probably, I now realise, because it wasn’t who I was being made to think it was.

So there we have it. Nothing worse than shabby in Foster’s past that I can detect. No conspiracy, just a sadly reasonable legal judgement prompted by a totally unreasonable but unsurprising editorial decision. Fuelled by a person who, apparently, exposes and humiliates people for his own kicks, and so lends himself to being flattered and used by the Murdoch gang.  That’s what it takes to fell one honest man.

Why no blogging, you ask? Ah, citizens, I am an old, weary Head of State and the Republic grows dilapidated [waves jewelled hand feebly].

It is not just that more mundane things are preoccupying me, although they are. I have kept the Republic open for business through far more tumultuous periods than this (e.g. the great British Gas Crisis of 2007, the protracted Relocation Question of 2003-ongoing and numerous beer shortages). And it is not just my nagging half-sense, a notion-ette if you will, that the Lib Dem blogosphere has slipped a notch or two towards unpleasantness in recent weeks.

It is this: that there comes a time when the Sparrow of Opinion, having flown into the Great Hall of Blogging through the Window of Inspiration, must fly out again into the Night of Doing Something Else, as the Venerable Bede nearly said. I have said all that needs to be said, my best tales are all told that can be told here. Oh! better to close the gates on the Republic now before they rust where they stand. For see! how the vines creep over the columns and the beetles scuttle unashamed in the cracks of the marble floors, note how the crumpled leaves drift against the wainscot, and the skeletons of small hapless mammals clog up the-

Wait. What in the name of my fast petrifying arse is this?

Richard Horton had obtained a temporary injunction against the Times after a reporter discovered he was the officer behind the NightJack blog, which attracted hundreds of thousands of followers to its behind-the-scenes commentary on policing.

Horton, a detective constable with the Lancashire constabulary, prevented the Times from revealing his identity after arguing the paper would be putting him at risk of disciplinary action for disclosing confidential information about prosecutions within the force.

However, in a landmark judgment Mr Justice Eady overturned the injunction, stating that Horton, whose blog at one time had around 500,000 readers a week, had “no reasonable expectation of privacy“.

“I do not accept that it is part of the court’s function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police disciplinary regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors,” Eady added.

Five hours after reading that for the first time, I am still open-mouthed at the horror of it. Not Orwell himself could have dreamt of such a shitty betrayal of human decency, on the part of both judge and journalist.

Let’s remind ourselves of what Nightjack is really all about (or was, before his exposed blog got taken down). Imagine a grey, faceless, doorless monolith, labelled “public services” (not too difficult, is it). Now look back down the years and years in which we, the hapless public whose services they allegedly were, had only the faintest, scariest clues about what was really going on in there.

Occasionally we would find ourselves rushed inside those grey walls on trolleys, or cuffed and bound in the back of vans, forced to wait in corridors and in queues and on lists for answers and explanations and operations that sometimes  just never came, clutching pieces of paper we could not hope to understand. Whenever we go into that place, whether we’re ill, imprisoned, victimised or under 16, we are at our most vulnerable and least observant. For years, none of us really knew how the system worked. And, let’s be brutally honest about this, some people have died as a result of that.

Oh, we told each other cautionary tales about the queues and the automated voices and the inefficiencies and the grinding injustices. And occasionally, the more intelligent journalists with more old-school editors would break into the monolith for a while and hang about taking down notes which they would then test against the publicly available figures. But that sort of journalism takes time and resources for what may, ultimately, be a less than thrilling headline. It was rare that the doors of the monolith were prised open. We didn’t really know, as a society, what was going on in there.

Then the internet came. Suddenly the doors in the monolith started opening – from the inside. Out it all poured, and still does, reams and reams of information, observation and the driest horror stories you’ll ever read from doctors, nurses, policemen, magistrates, carers, teachers, cleaners. The monolith was revealed to be not a faceless structure at all but a structure with a million faces, a swarming mound of people who were – shock horreur – just like us. They are us, and we are them. And the blogosphere allowed us all to make that connection with each other, and grope towards an understanding of how our public services have got to where they are. What is the monolith for? What are its merits and evils? Can we change it? Is it really hopeless? On a good day, at least, Nightjack thought it wasn’t hopeless.

We, The People, we were getting somewhere. And all this could be achieved, via the anonymity of cyberspace, without anyone risking their jobs, or the censure of their colleagues.

And now a newspaper has ruined the career of one of them. Because they want a good headline, and probably because they’re jealous of his audience reach and of the unstoppable advance of new media in general. They have ruined. His. Career. And this is not a man highly placed in public service, mark you. Not a man caught out in any wrongdoing. Just a man who wrote down what he thought.

The  Times piece itself (like Mr Dale, I aren’t linking) is positively scary:

In April Mr Horton was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing, but the judges were not aware that he was revealing confidential details about cases, some involving sex offences against children, that could be traced back to genuine prosecutions.

Excuse me? What kind of doublethink does a human mind have to be capable of to seek to safeguard the identity of victims and witnesses in criminal prosecution cases by revealing the name of the policeman who worked on them?

The article goes on to piously recite Nightjack’s crimes as follows. In fact the whole article is in the “Crime” section – the “Thought” is silent, presumably:

His blog, which gave a behind-the-scenes insight into frontline policing, included strong views on social and political issues, including matters of “public controversy,” the judge said.

The officer also criticised and ridiculed “a number of senior politicians” and advised members of the public under police investigation to “complain about every officer . . . show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it.”

Criticised and ridiculed senior politicians? How very dare he! And how dare he talk about controversial public matters, he a mere public servant!

The Times have put a picture of him alongside their article too. Just to show they can hack Facebook like anybody else.

When Nightjack won the Orwell Prize we all chuckled about how much Orwell would have appreciated having a secret policeman win a prize with his name on it. The final twist in the tale is sinister beyond a liberal’s wildest nightmares.

Harriet Harman has been on C4 news this evening defending Gordon Brown against the charge that he doesn’t take women in the cabinet seriously. People who are more emotionally involved with the fortunes of the Labour party and the feminist movement than I am will probably find that quite head-in-hands distressing. Harriet Harman, champion of, er, all women who are Harriet Harman, staring at a record of 12 years’ failure and saying blithely that there was “more work to be done”.

The charge was levelled initially by the departed Minister for Europe Caroline Flint, who wrote to Brown as follows.

Several of the women attending cabinet – myself included – have been treated by you as little more than female window dressing. I am not willing to attend cabinet in a peripheral capacity any longer.

This has been greeted by some scorn by left-wing commentators. Martin Kettle reckons it “says more about Flint than it does about Brown” and Andrew Sparrow remarks caustically, “Yes, that’s the same Caroline Flint who posed for a magazine fashion shoot last month.”

It’s funny he should say that, because I remember that shoot and the accompanying interview, which appeared in the Observer on 10 May, and I remember it because it seemed so very oddly timed. Not, I should add, that there would be anything odd about interviewing the Minister for Europe a month before the European elections. But for the Life and Style section? It was such a fluffy piece that even Flint’s customary froideur could not spike it up. Dead parents, tears, the trials of single motherhood, all delivered with elegant, sparing, non-yukky writing. A stone (if it could read) would have read sympathetically. I did.

I noticed it because it seemed to me to arrive on the very pivot of the fortnight when Labour’s fortunes started to plummet irreversibly. (I say that with hindsight, of course. At the time it merely seemed like Labour’s worst week ever.) The Telegraph’s expenses season was still fresh news, and the resultant anger, now hardened into a much colder sort of fury, was  then at its peak. The paper was just starting to turn its fire on the cabinet, and on some of the most outrageous claims. Margaret Moran’s dry rot had been outed the previous day, as had Barbara Follett’s security patrols and Keith Vaz’s whatever-slimy-business-it-was Keith Vaz was up to.

The parliamentary authorities had just called the police to investigate the leak, marking the beginning of the “they don’t get it” meme which has only barely abated a month later. A Populus poll that day put Labour on a turgid 26 following on from a BPIX 23 the previous day, and the following week four polls would give them an even more appalling range of 20-23.

In two other opinion pieces in the same Observer, the former chairman of the Public Standards Committee described Jacqui Smith’s housing arrangements as “near-fraudulent”, and Andrew Rawnsley wrote an opinion piece about expenses that rivalled anything produced by the Telegraph for sheer rage. He mentioned seven Labour figures in disparagement, and no Tories. Oh, and some prison officers, not to be left out of the fun, piled in on attacking the government by expressing outrage at the imminent privatisation of six prisons.

And there, in the middle of this, is Caroline Flint on a couch in a red satin dress.

Now, I’m not normally one for conspiracy theories, and I wouldn’t piss on Caroline “throw ‘em out” Flint if she was on fire and I’d just drunk five pints of weak tea. But I thought at the time, is this a blind? The Observer also tried to scare us with the Tories (”rich people!”) that day, and Jon Cruddas put on the  scary BNP glove puppet for the Letters page. Is it, I wondered, a total coincidence that under all these dire headlines for Labour appears a pretty picture of an attractive and mostly sane Labour minister talking about Her Life As A Woman and wearing high street dresses? In a tame paper (as it was then. What a  difference a month makes)? It comes across slightly, I thought, as window-dressing.

Well, we’ll never know why that particular article appeared on that particular day. Flint’s “window-dressing” barb is specifically linked to cabinet meetings in her letter. And maybe one shouldn’t take the reference to the number of  times she has been pressured to “go in front of the cameras” to defend the government too literally.

But, well, it would explain the oddity of the photo shoot and the virulence of her resignation letter, wouldn’t it.

Minty-fresh new(ish) party member Mark Thompson asked this very question about Charlotte Gore a few days ago, oddly enough. But this morning he has a considerable claim to that position himself.

Here’s Polly Toynbee in the Guardian writing about – yes – the need for full constitutional reform:

Here’s interesting evidence: research by a political blogger about the correlation between greed in MPs and the safety of their seats. Of the 94 implicated so far, there were nearly three times more in the top quarter of safest seats than in the bottom quarter of most marginal constituencies. Seats where parties can run a donkey in a red or blue rosette breed complacency and tempt corruption. Nefarious practices thrive in any dark corners of politics unchecked by scrutiny or competition. Time for a constitutional revolution.

This is fabulous work. A few well-placed emails obviously go a long way. Three cheers and a People’s Republican Guard of Honour for Mark Reckons!

Of course, a cynic would point out that it makes sense for Polly et al to suddenly start seeing the point of electoral reform. Their beloved party is, after all, about to be crucified in the First Past The Post system. Since the government has proven itself incapable time and again of doing anything either right or popular, electoral reform is the only way left of reducing the coming Tory majority now. Expect to see more Labour affiliates weighing in on this one over the coming weeks. And Tory commentators finding lots of terribly good reasons why it’s a bad idea.

Here’s what should have happened (well, actually, what should have happened is that the Lib Dems should have collectively published their expenses months ago, but in the absence of that…) and in what order:

1. Clegg to apologise  and arrange for all affected MPs to make reparations – tick.

2. Clegg to commit party to return second home capital gains to  taxpayer – tick.

3. Clegg to follow Cameron in committing to all MPs publishing expenses online from today onwards, starting asap - STILL OUTSTANDING

4. As a result of (3), Clegg to call on Cameron to follow him with regard to step (2).

5. a. Chris Rennard to prove to satisfaction of all that he does live in Eastbourne as his main residence, or, failing that

b. Clegg to sack him immediately from post and consider, possibly by involving the party as a whole, whether he should retain the whip – STILL OUTSTANDING.

6. This resolved, Clegg to call for the Speaker to resign – tick.

7. Clegg to follow up this call by calling for full constitutional reform – tick.

You see, I hope, my difficulty with what has happened in the last few days. This has the basic shape of the strongest narrative yet created by the Liberal Democrats – the best chance we’ll ever have to push the total constitutional and electoral reform the system so desperately needs as a popular issue. Preliminary examination of the figures over at Mark Reckons suggest that there may be a correlation between the safeness of a seat and the likelihood that the incumbent is up to no good. Well, that’s not difficult to explain.

Clegg has, this morning, become the first politician in modern history not only to call for the sacking of the Speaker, but for a written constitution. The former is a gambit that paves the way for the latter, and the latter has the potential to be little less than a revolution. If Clegg can make this work over the next few days, we are in “we dare not fail” territory. But a couple of critical steps in my little list are still missing.

Those missing steps happen to be the ones that matter most to Ordinary People, as distinct from the political la-la land occupied by the Westminster Village, the media and the blogosphere. Ordinary People couldn’t give a flying damn what happens to some old bloke in a black lace dress. Ordinary People want apologies, humiliation, revenge, reparation and the delivery of anything – anything – that might remain unconfessed. Only then might they be prepared to listen – until then, even the most startlingly radical proposals, even the most iconoclastic of bold moves will only be greeted like more of the same.

If the missing steps are taken, then I believe there’s no limit to what we can do, now that Clegg has seized the media agenda by calling on the Speaker to resign. Any Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells who has pledged their vote to UKIP this week may not care overmuch for the nuances of parliamentary convention, but they must surely to see the merits in sweeping away the current electoral system in favour of the one that’s going to enable minority parties to do even better.

If Clegg won’t prioritise step 3, the Federal Executive  meeting on Monday must force it on his attention. And Clegg must work out what to do about Chris Rennard. Because if he really is, as the evidence suggests, living  in London and claiming he lives in Eastbourne, then it’s not a question of if he has to be defenestrated, but when. All Clegg will get to choose is the when. If he can carry the reform torch as full-bloodedly as his actions today suggest, then it would be a crying shame if he trips up on a Rennard-shaped revelation just as he’s starting to get the point across.

The rewards if Clegg can get this right are potentially enormous, not so much for the party per se, which is as mired in the scandal as the other two, as for democracy itself. This is as it should be. Labour and the Tories will always block attempts at root and branch parliamentary reform because they benefit from the status quo – we know that. It was always going to have to be us, whether we expected to profit by it in the polls or not. And the cause for reform will never have popular opinion there for the taking like this again.

The other day, I re-watched one of my favourite childhood films.

I was reminded of it by this tweet from Labour blogger Sadie Smith.

Fortunately, Sadie is, of course, completely and utterly wrong. It’s wonderful – probably still the best war film I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of them. It doesn’t have the scale of Apocalypse Now, the pathos of The Great Escape or the special effects of many modern efforts, but it has an intimacy, a suspense and a set-piece scariness which thrilled me to bits as a child.

I still feel echoes of that now, like when the Zulus crest the hill for the first time, tiny black dots against the veldt sky, to the shiver of violin strings, and the camera ranges along the hill to show more… and more… and more of them. In fact the photography throughout is just masterful. You can taste the agoraphobia and the fear – you are there, on that plain with the 24th Foot, behind a few feet of mealie bags, waiting.

Stretcher-bearers!

It stars Michael Caine in his breakthrough role, the wonderful Nigel Green whose Colour Sergeant Bourne (above left) will live in your pub quote memory for ever (”No com-edians, please.”) and the vastly under-rated James Booth as the devilishly exciting (well, I was six and he said “bloody!”) Private Henry Hook. It has a wonderful ensemble supporting cast of ordinary gentle-voiced Welshmen and Londoners with sideburns that really do look as if they’ve been shipped out from the valleys and dock wharves of nineteenth-century Britain. More marvellous yet (I only discovered this quite recently) it has the real descendant of the Zulu king of the day, Cetewayo, playing the role of his ancestor and leading his own people, in full traditional ceremonial dress, in the battle scenes.

And it has the great Jack Hawkins, roaring across the screen like a biblical allegory – which he is – in the role of the missionary Otto Witt, treating peace with the aid of his daughter, the only female speaking part in the film. The daughter Margareta, who seemed to me unimaginably beautiful then and still does, was yet another way into the film for my six-year-old self. Yes I wanted to be raffish Henry Hook, capable Sergeant Bourne, and strong, silent Lieutenant Chard, I could feel the fearful lump in the throat of Private Cole and hold my breath as I broke out of the hospital with Hook, 612 Williams, 593 Jones and 716 Jones, yards ahead of our pursuers. And I could also feel Margareta’s discomfort as she, a nineteenth-century pastor’s daughter, sat among six-foot half-naked warriors with assegais, watching a mass marriage tribal dance. Still physically vulnerable myself, I felt  every pounding of her heart as the war cries started to go up over her head.

Now, it’s not that I’ve not seen it since I was six – no bank holiday weekend in Sidney Sussex TV room was complete without a Zulu-and-Haribo session – but watching that film after a couple of years spent in the political blogosphere is a very different experience. I realised how this film would look to the gender activism mindset I was barely aware of before the blogosphere. The only woman character is afraid, sometimes ineffectual, even subject to abuse at the hands of the men. Margareta has plenty of spirit at times, but she’s also priggish and in the end is simply overcome by brute strength. All is not lost, as she ends up being the means of her father’s salvation – but still the film is chockful of more appealing characters than her.

So why was I never offended, or troubled, or otherwise culturally damaged by this? Well, I had a bit of an odd upbringing culturally. I think it can be traced to the fact that my grandfather was born in 1910 and only had my father when he was forty. So my father’s upbringing was a little bit more Boy’s Own Paper, a bit more 1930s than perhaps was normal. And mine, in turn, was in some ways more 1960s than 1980s in terms of what I watched, what I read, what we talked about. Without being, particularly, a tomboy, I loved history and adventure and escapades and scrapes and exciting stories, on the page or in celluloid, and if there wasn’t any around I’d make up my own (and wars with My Little Ponies are a bit of a stretch, I can tell you; luckily I soon acquired a small brother who appeared to come with lots of Cowboy Playmobil and Pirate Lego and that was much easier).

In other words, all my favourite role models and stories from that time were to do with men and you know what? I think it has worked. It never occurred to me to differentiate the role models  I was offered on the basis gender, and in thirty years I realise I never have.

I loved Zulu, so I aspired to be brave and honourable. I loved the Goons and Spike Milligan’s War Diaries, so I aspired to be funny.  I loved reading war stories – biographies of Douglas Bader, various POW camp escape stories, Colditz – so I aspired to be ingenious and resourceful, and battle against odds. At eight or nine I read an old Josephine Tay novel, the Daughter of Time, and my love of medieval history was born, so I aspired to go to Oxford or Cambridge to study it, and I did, I went to both. My role models had never intimated  to me that I couldn’t aspire to do anything I wanted, and I didn’t know women weren’t supposed to get firsts, so I got a first. None of the usual barriers, none of the usual doubts that women are supposed to possess ever seemed to apply to me. I had a permanent psychological get out of jail free card.

What alchemy of genetics and nurture allowed me to absorb all these male influences and strive to match them, and often succeed, without my at any point being undermined by a great wash of hormonal self-doubt? The same wash that causes so many women to demand female role models before they, or their daughters, can do anything? We are constantly being told that politics needs more female role models. What is it about me that doesn’t need specifically female role models if so many others apparently do? I wish I knew. If I did, I could bottle it and sell it. Oh, I have self-doubt like everybody else, and went through the usual teenage angst like everybody else. But there’s nothing uniquely female about any of that.

I think background and schooling had a lot to do with it. The pure statistical fact of being born in Surrey, even if not to a wealthy family, immunises you to a lot of life’s woes, sad to say, and I went to an all-girls’ state school whose teaching and management was, in retrospect, little short of magnificent. And there were role models there too – a fantastic and lovely history teacher, the elegant headmistress and wooden boards in the hall full of the names of previous gels. And all that seemed to jumble itself up with Spike Milligan and Stalag Luft III just fine.

The funny thing is that the more I read about feminism, the more I recognise its earliest progenitors as twin souls of my own – writing liberal tracts, bashing windows in, reading papers to the Royal Society, flying the English Channel and running country estates without it ever crossing their minds that they needed anyone to show them how to do it. They didn’t need female role models – they got on with being them. They didn’t need a “safe space” for their activities or their debates – the world was their space. They grew up, interestingly, in exactly the age of over-confident empire whose frontier badlands are invoked by Zulu.

So now, lucky me, when I look at the Lib Dem parliamentary party, I get so many more role models to choose from. I want to be like Chris Huhne, because he’s a right fierce and effective wossname and I reckon I could do with being a little more like that. I want to be like Vince, because honestly who doesn’t? I want to be like Nick because he’s an eternal optimist and a tryer, and quitting too soon is one of my worst failings. I want to be like Steve Webb, because he’s clever and impassioned and reminds me of some of my tutors, I want to be like Lynne Featherstone because she’s just so capable and self-assured and glamorous and reminds me of CJ Cregg in the West Wing, I want to be like David Howarth because he’s brilliant and forensic, I want to be like Norman Baker because he’s One of the Good Guys and like John Hemmings because he is the King of all the Geeks.

It seems strange to me, the idea that I can only be inspired, or confirmed, or protected in any endeavour if someone else with the same genital configuration has already done it. The whole rich panoply of human courage, and kindness, and greatness to choose from, and you cut out the half that’s been, for various historical reasons, most active for the last several millenia? What on earth is wrong with women having men as role models? People of both genders have wonderful qualities and have achieved wonderful things and they’re all there for study and emulation. Isn’t the whole luxury of living in a post-feminist world that we can do this now?

If I ever have daughters, I’ll be showing them Zulu.

As some regular citizens may know, I relocated the Republic to Manchester a couple of months ago. As one of nature’s drifters peripatetics, I am having tremendous fun working out how I fit in here, what I like (the civilised scale of things, rent prices, access to countryside, food markets, trains) and what I don’t (surburban pubs, rain, buses, the lack of decent civic architecture in the centre).

And it seems particularly irksome that, just as I am settling in and getting to like the place, the government has decided to start throwing buckets of shit all over it. Is there anything, any corner of my modest little life that the Labour Party isn’t determined to cover in crap? They’ve overseen the housing bubble that forces me to continue as a feckless renter at an age when I am really starting to see the point of gardening, they’ve presided over the recession that has taken three quarters of my freelance work away, they took my precious 10p band off me, they’re freely murdering the pubs I like drinking in,  and as a continuation of that they’ve made absolutely everyone under thirty who likes a drink or two feel just a little bit like a stain on society. Well, fuck you very much. And that’s just how I feel. I haven’t even had to pay tuition fees, lose a job or be on the wrong end of a stop and search procedure.

But I digress. Manchester always seems to be first in line when real policy turds are being handed out at Whitehall. Congestion charge? We’ll try it in Manchester. Bizarre terror propaganda to be trialled in hairdressers? Hm, tricky, the south-east would never wear that, we’d have London up in arms – give it to Manchester. ID cards? Haha, let those Mancs have it, they swallow any old crap.

But there is at least some potential for this to backfire on the beleaguered government, horribly horribly. This Manchester ID cards trial, which begins in the autumn, is a “voluntary scheme”, for all love, which involves paying £30 to the government! Oh yeah, well, you’ve convinced me. Yes, it’s completely reasonable for a Minister who claimed her bath plug on expenses to sit in an office in London and decide that an entire city in the great big Not London area will be only too pleased to cough up thirty quid per head in the middle of a recession in order to make their identities slightly more vulnerable to theft. Of course!

Seriously, who in Whitehall decided that the best people to make that sort of imposition on were – saving your presences – a bunch of chippy northerners?

This is so not going to work. You know the old saying, “Tha can allus tell a Yorkshireman, but tha can’t tell ‘en much”? Well, the Greater Manchester version seems, on my acquaintance so far, to be subtly different, and more along the lines of “Yer want me to do wha’? Ah, jus’ sod off, yer fookin ponce.”

This is a population with a fierce civic pride and a radical political tradition as well as all the usual northern jumpiness about being ruled from London. That mix and the destruction to manufacturing meted out by Thatcher have traditionally made it a  Labour stronghold, which is presumably why it’s now first in line for the buckets-of-shit approach to policy piloting.

(Another probable rationale for using Manchester as a guinea pig that occurs to me – and I hope the  person who “strategised” this one rots in whatever hells may be – is that Manchester is almost unique outside London for having been on the receiving end of a terrorism incident within living memory. Do they think Mancunians will be more receptive to the “it stops terrorists” line?)

Anyway, that very same mix that made Manchester a Labour stronghold could just be the mix that spits the ID card scheme back in the government’s face. To date there are 77 comments on the Manchester Evening News item on the subject, two of which are in favour of ID cards. Elsewhere, the MEN repoorts that pilots at Manchester airport, who have been chosen as a special treat to be the compulsory guinea pigs, will boycott ID cards “with all legal means possible”.

It’s a great early sign, and there are others. The congestion charge was slung out without ceremony, Manchester No2ID has a particularly active branch  here with regular information stalls in the city centre and MEN often comes across as a very liberal newspaper.

Yet I am, to be honest, writing this in more a state of hope than of certainty. I don’t know this place well enough yet to take its cultural temperature accurately. We won’t get a referendum on this one – we’ll need to do more than just turn up and put the cross in the “No fookin way” box. A lot of people will have to be sufficiently committed to actively object, and spread the word about the problems ID cards represent.

I know damn well what Londoners would make of having this forced on them. But will the Mancs be up for it, really be  up for giving this the reception it deserves? Don’t tell me you’re going to let some bloody southerner be angrier than you…

When was Polly Toynbee granted the unique privilege of having comments disallowed on her Comment is Free pieces? I don’t read her often enough – is this a new thing? The only time I’ve ever seen comments disabled on a CiF piece was a recent example of Clegg’s, for legal reasons as it discussed the Barclays tax case.

I would have thought Polly would be comparatively safe from the baying hordes today too – partly because she’s written a good piece and partly because Peter Hain will surely draw all the fire with this desperate fear-the-BNP-and-vote-Labour effort.

Anyway, Polly is done with the nosepeg, it seems. She catalogues the failures of Gordon Brown and correctly identifies the rotten corrosion at the heart of the Labour party. She points out that Labour are too inert even to tackle Tory U-turns – without falling into that whiny “the Tories are worse” trap that gets more contemptible every time I hear it.

But she does have one last bullet in her gun:

This week a survey on the ConservativeHome website of likely new Tory MPs was an eye-opener. They are socially conservative, anti-environment, anti-Europe, anti-abortion, anti-gay adoption, pro-hunting and strongly in favour of the married couples’ allowance that redistributes tax to the middle class. Only 15% see the climate as ­important: terrorism matters much more. Most want to cut money for Scotland: a Tory win will trigger new support for independence. They are well to the right of their leader, even his tougher guise. Lord Ashcroft, who channels money to favoured marginals, has nurtured a nest of MPs more to his own liking.

Labour needs to make sure as few of these as possible reach the Commons.

I won’t trouble you with the details of the rest of that latter paragraph. You can fill in Pollyblanks well enough for yourself. Basically, she wants massive redistribution to take place, suddenly, in Labour’s hour of death – no more ID cards, no more winter fuel payments for wealthy over-60s (Polly gets one!). Identify the cuts that the Tories will, and make the wealth transfer that they won’t make. This is, apparently, a “Labour answer” as if for all the world Labour hasn’t been in power for the last twelve years and signally failing to do exactly that.

No-one, no-one at all now believes that this will happen. I don’t think Polly really believes it. Labour will not suddenly turn into a set of good guys, even if being the good guys is the obvious path to success – look at the Gurkhas. This government has a tin ear. It does bad things for the sake of it, even when they’re also the harder thing to do.

Polly’s aiming her gun at the wrong people.  What she needs to do is turn her one remaining bullet on the Labour party itself. If she really, really wants to have those young Ashcroftians stopped, and if Labour really, earnestly believes that their ascendancy would be that fatal for the country, then there’s only one thing to do.

I’m not given to sweeping loyalist statements, I hope, but some political atmospheres seem characterised by such huge, sky-high patterns that they’re impossible to ignore. With all our imperfections – and I’m far from happy with some areas of policy – the Lib Dems are now, quite clearly, the natural home of progressive politics (in itself not a phrase I use lightly). Labour voters, supporters, media commentators and even Labour MPs should get behind the Liberal Democrats, examine their programme for government critically, point out the flaws, trumpet the glories, recommend them to the nation and vote for them.

This is the only way Polly’s going to get the last laugh on the Ashcroft crew. Of course, it’s highly unlikely. But, to be honest, it’s now no less likely than the prospect of Labour morphing into a half-decent government.

The wider significance of the Liberal Democrat victory in the Gurkha debate yesterday is twofold.

Well, threefold. To get the bleeding obvious out of the way first, it’s another strangled warble in the painfully operatic death of Gordon Brown’s political career (y’know, the ones that never … quite … diiiiiiii-iiiiiiii-iiieeeeee!)

Secondly, it may come to be seen as a defining moment in Clegg’s leadership. No media source that I am aware of is denying him full credit for having taken up the Gurkhas’ cause as soon as he reached office. An otherwise generous David Cameron felt the need to interrupt Clegg yesterday during their joint press conference with La Lumley, halfway through Clegg’s perfectly articulate answer to a question which was put directly to him. That interruption is a telling sign of who was political top dog yesterday afternoon.

The most successful parliamentary moment in Clegg’s leadership so far may become particularly significant if this afternoon’s debate on MPs expenses – where he has also been leading the way, having been the first leader to moot the idea of a three-way meeting – turns out equally well for the two opposition parties.

A nice parallel in several ways is Paddy Ashdown’s championing of the Hong Kong citizens who applied for British passports in 1997. This was similarly a niche issue at first which slowly rose to top of the national discourse and established Paddy as someone who had Done the Right Thing. The Iraq war, of course, is another parallel – all three fitting enough for a party of internationalists.

But thirdly, and most significantly, the Gurkha debate constituted a sudden and spectacular meeting of minds between liberalism and the self-styled “moral majority”. Andrew Neil commented that he had never had such a flood of emails after PMQs, and all in support of the Gurkhas cause.

This is because, and let’s not shirk this issue, the Gurkhas hit on some rather old-school buttons. The moral majority like Gurkhas, they’re brave and love Britain etc. And the same moral majority has spent some years railing against excessive immigration of the undeserving. Suddenly they have a clear-cut case in front of them of the deserving being denied the right to immigrate. It enables them to affirm their support for all things British – or better still Anglophile – military and citizenly, while also denouncing all the “murderers and terrorists” whom they imagine to be spilling over the borders. As a fable, the story of the Gurkhas is about as neat and Middle England-flavoured as you can get. And Joanna Lumley was involved. No wonder the moral majority went wild for the Gurkhas.

But I’m not being dismissive of the moral majority (no, that was just good-natured joshing), because there was, under all the prejudiced persiflage, a strong moral conviction and it went like this: if them, why not them. If this, why not that. If the willingness to die for a country, why not the right to live in it. The kind of people who write into Andrew Neil might call that morality. We liberals usually call it fairness – Clegg departed from our usual touchy-feely inoffensive script yesterday in using the M-word.

Of course, our “fairness” and their “morality” are not quite the same. Our “if them, why not them” works equally in reverse, against the social tyrannies of the moral majority. Tomorrow we’ll find ourselves fighting an unpopular cause again. Evan Harris had it neatly summed up at a session during the Convention on Modern Liberty, when he challenged a Conservative panel on their happy claims to be liberals – “What about,” he said, “The people you don’t like?” Would this enthusiasm for localism, for social enterprise, and for freedom from government control, extend to all, he wanted to know? Or just to the approved causes, as now? Aren’t we just looking at a set of people with different approved causes in the Conservatives?

This is the question we need to keep asking them, perhaps all the more so after the co-operation on the Gurkhas. As can be clearly seen from their marriage tax proposals, Conservative social engineering is, basically, just Labour social engineering in old-fashioned clothes. I hold no faith whatsoever that they even begin to understand why Nick Clegg has championed the cause of the Gurkhas, for all that they cheered him on yesterday when he used the words “moral” and “decency”.

As Mill observed, sometimes  that which purports to be a fixed moral code amongst the moral majority is in fact a social tyranny, often highly specific to its time. “If them, why not them” is a principle that many who supported the Gurkhas’ cause can pick up and put down as it pleases them. Another time, their core “moral” message may be nothing more substantial than “I don’t think that’s very nice” or “It hasn’t always been done like that”. Dominic Grieve acknowledged this beautifully at the Convention when he said that what held the right back from full authoritarianism was the idea that “one’s grandfather might have disapproved”.

If that seems an oddly mutable thing to come out of the mouth of a decent man in an avowedly “moral” party, it’s because it is. And it comes as a bit of a shock to me, as someone who would sooner gnaw their own leg off rather than tell someone how to live, and gnaw their leg off sooner than have them tell me, that we liberals are actually the guardians of morality. Morality is not a set of social no-nos. Decency is not what the Daily Mail says is ok this week. True moral values are fixed, they are not subject to social or religious fashions, and they deal with all equally – did so even before the Enlightenment. The “if them, why not them” principle, and that other liberal stand-by, “do no harm”, are at the heart of most ancient moralistic religions.

So are other things, of course – but it’s interesting how followers of those religions have apparently been able to tell the difference without any trouble. We must presume that the many millions who call themselves Christians but who do not advocate the stoning to death of adulteresses and homosexuals are guided by something. They have successfully separated the abstract and eternal from the particular and timebound.

That separation is precisely what liberalism is all about, what Evan Harris was getting at during the Convention on Modern Liberty, and what Nick Clegg put across so successfully yesterday.

Maybe we need to follow Clegg’s lead, stop calling this thing we do as liberals “fairness” and call it by its older, proper name.