Michael White's Blog, page 45

BBC's Lord Hall banks on baby boomers as the audience to cherish

Decision to shut BBC3 but keep BBC4 reflects fact that postwar 'Generation Wealth' will pay for quality and young people won't

Who's right then? The indignant young people accusing the BBC suits of "cultural elitism" for proposing to put all of BBC3's output online to help save £100m a year? Or the boring old BBC director general, Lord (Tony) Hall, 63, who is responsible for this dastardly decision? A breakfast seminar I attended on Thursday suggests the old buffers might be on to something in saving (so far) the oldies' channel BBC4.

The event was called Generation Wealth and it was a pitch organised by the Immediate Media Company – it runs magazines like Radio Times, Gardener's World and Top Gear – to explain to advertisers and media types a crucial bit of counter-intuitive research. By appearance the breakfast audience was mostly 20s to 30s, but you can't tell any more: that's the point.

The morning's message is that older consumers – the post-1946 boomer generation now in their 50s and 60s – not only have most of the disposable wealth and income in this country (we knew that, yes?) but also remain far more adventurous in their outlook and choices than those who are coming after them. That goes for holiday destinations, for culture and even for tech, research done by Enders Analysis and YouGov claimed to show.

I won't bore you with the details of assorted PowerPoint projections ("all power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely", as Lord Acton meant to say), just a few eye-openers which might explain why Lord Hall, himself a boomer, might be following the right money in putting the youth channel BBC3 online – which is where young consumers tend to view it anyway.

Basically the over-45s have 81% of the nation's wealth (that's mainly property and pensions, I assume), 70% of disposable income (the kids are leaving home if they can) and – surprise – are responsible for 61% of consumer expenditure. Claire Enders, a very engaging talker, said the average age in this country would hit 40 some time in 2014.

Don't panic, kids. She also said that oldies were "all like Mick Jagger now" (fitter and more active than they expected to be and much more so than their parents), but that Britain's population was growing faster than any in the EU, partly through immigration, partly through optimistic breeding habits.

Her message, reinforced by the seminar partners, is that advertisers who are over-focused on young consumers and new media platforms – smartphones and tablets – may be missing a trick. Traditional printed media ("Bill Gates said in 1994: 'There won't be any newspapers in 2000.' Ha ha," Enders recalled) has proved more resilient than predicted and, in any case, older people are in the forefront as early adopters of new technology. The boomers have always been rebellious and trendy – and they still are.

So wise sales strategists should not pander to stereotypes but embrace "age-neutral marketing" which doesn't make assumptions that put off "Generation Wealth" – the 9.1 million consumers with most of the wonga and a determination to spend some of it.

In promoting photos of footballers' thighs, said someone, BT may be missing a market which is willing to pay top dollar for quality, as young people won't (or can't afford to).

So Hall and his fellow suits may be making a shrewd calculation in deciding that the older audience attracted to BBC4 (it's the channel I mostly watch myself now, often on iPlayer) is one to cherish if he has to make a tough choice, not the 16- to 34-year-olds who are BBC3's target audience.

Perhaps a popular campaign will save the on-air channel, as happened to Radio 6 Music and the BBC's Asian Network. The Beeb-bashing newspapers will play dirty either way.

My complaint about the sort of pitch I heard on Thursday is twofold – one, that it makes blithe and confident predictions about the future which are as likely to prove as accurate as clever Bill Gates was in 1994.

We don't really know what the UK's population will be in 2041 or if the over-45s will stay relatively prosperous. Remember the wealth gap is as acute within generations as between them.

So plenty of older people are still poor – and unpredictable twists like a property or bond market crash could change everything. How will quantitative easing (QE), the vital programme of monetary relaxation which has staved off a Great Depression, pan out in the long run?

In fending off deflation have we primed the economy for inflation which would wipe out both savings and debt? It would create an inter-generational transfer greatly to the advantage of the young and indebted (and happened in the 70s).

My other objection is the way an event like this treats young and old alike merely as consumers of goods and services, brands and products, rather than as rounded citizens with wider interests and obligations.

That leads me to another point not mentioned on Thursday, namely that old people still vote at twice the rate of the young, who are "kidiots" for not doing so as I sometimes say. It helps explains why the oldies keep their free bus passes – and why oldie Lord Hall plans to keep their TV channel.

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Salmond makes good case for Scottish independence I am not convinced | Michael White

Scotland's first minister is a class act but it is wise to remember that nationalism is usually a form of panacea politics

I opened Wednesday's Fleet St newspapers in search of reports of Alex Salmond's big pro-independence speech in London on Tuesday night. It was an upbeat vision of what he invoked as "Scotland's Hour", which will help counter the excessive influence of the British state's "dark star" – a problem that affects all our lives wherever we live. It's a good speech, which you might want to read here.

I'll identify that dark star in a moment. Here's a clue: I searched the London press in vain. In fairness the Scottish papers I consulted online didn't make much of it either, though they are obsessed with the independence question – endless articles day after day when I was last there in the autumn. Perhaps Salmond has made the same speech a dozen times at home already.

By way of contrast, Fleet St has only begun to take a keener interest in the 18 September referendum since David Cameron and his ministers finally joined the no campaign by setting out the downside risk, as Scotland's first minister rarely does. That's good. The more I read the more complex the apparently simple yes/no choice is. What Salmond deplores as "bluff and bluster" from "the Westminster elite" is evident on both sides.

I wasn't invited to the New Statesman lecture that Salmond was giving – apparently well received – though I did join a very civilised discussion afterwards on STV, which is ITV in Scotland.

Economically, what he seemed to be saying was two-fold: that the 300-year union with England held Scotland back in the 20th century (after two mutually profitable ones, he forgot to add); and that the London economic and cultural magnet – the "dark star" attraction in Prof Tony Travers' phrase – damages the other UK regions, too.

As if we didn't know that. But the first minister argues that they too could benefit from a counter-magnetic force – "a northern light to redress the influence of the dark star, rebalancing the economic centre of gravity of these islands", he explained. Since part of the Salmond pitch is that everyone will gain from a painless and harmonious divorce, he was careful to praise modern London as a great global success story.

These are all good points about which we agonise every day, and have done since incipient globalisation began to hollow out the heavy industrial base of northern Britain in the 60s and Lord Hailsham, the then regional minister, first donned his flat cap in Newcastle.

It's a gamble, of course, one in which the no camp offers the solid but uninspiring choice between familiar, known risks and institutions, and Alex Salmond offers a leap in the dark. Becoming more like Norway again – whoops, the new Viking exhibition is in London's British Museum, don't you know? – sounds good with that sovereign oil fund, but it wasn't too long past when Ireland's Celtic Tiger was Salmond's role model. Hmm.

Here's a quick sample of this week's debate in Scotland, much of it highly partisan. One expert backs Salmond's breezy insistence that George Osborne's currency warning is bluff. Another, the respected IFS, suggests that Scotland would need austerity to adjust to independence and that ex-oil economist Salmond has been a bit optimistic about future oil and gas revenues on which so many of his upbeat statistics (they all massage the figures, I'm afraid) depend.

And so on. Here's a coalition Tory warning that Scotland would have to make major negotiating concessions to England to meet in 2016 independence deadline. Here's a rival SNP spine-chiller, that Scottish education "subsidises" the wider British economy by £30bn a year because of all those Scots who head south to earn a better living.

Population is a problem for Scotland and provided the only downbeat passage of last night's speech. In 100 years Scotland's population grew by 10% from 4.8 million to 5.3 million, while England's grew by 60%. Edinburgh has enjoyed modest success (under both ruling parties, Salmond gracefully conceded) since devolution, but will have to do much more under independence to attract incomers.

Fair enough, but scope for friction there too, I suspect. English policies have made the situation worse, he says, though Scotland has always retained control of its own education system, once widely rated as superior to the south's.

And here we get to the crucial pitch at the heart of Tuesday night's speech, made to a left-leaning audience, whose magazine has just produced a Scottish special edition; namely that progressive Britain can applaud a Scots breakaway because it will create a rival model to what he dismisses as grasping, divisive policies imposed against Scotland's will – from the poll tax to the bedroom tax.

No, England won't become more rightwing as a result, he assured his listeners, clearly aware he was on thin ice: Labour governments dependent on Scots votes have ruled for only 26 months at Westminster since 1945, briefly in 1964-66 and again in 1974. So that's OK then,

Alex, who after all was so leftwing in his SNP youth that the party briefly kicked him out. But it's Labour votes he wants – Scots Labour votes in and around Glasgow – if he is to have any chance of beating the no camp in September.

All in all, Salmond makes a potent case, and does it well. Ed Miliband's vision of social democracy is yet to take hold, the Blair-Brown model is widely discredited thanks to the bankers' bust.

But I hold to the view that in an increasingly interdependent world nationalism is usually a form of panacea politics, which invests too much faith in the chimera of sovereignty whether it is preached in Scotland, Ukraine or by Eurosceptic Tories and Ukip's Nigel Farage, who ape Salmond's challenge – substitute "Brussels elite" for "London elite" – at Westminster.

They all invite us to believe that everything would be easier if we could only be free of international obligations – not free of the benefits, of course, but free of the costs and the constraints.

It's a fantasy but a potent one, simple and apparently pain-free. No wonder Salmond and Farage dislike each other; they are competing for a similar sort of vote, keen to cry "bully", "diktat" or "elitist" whenever someone injects a note of complexity into the debate.

But there's no doubt which panacea populist can make the better speech. Farage's Ukip conference speech was a lazy appeal to prejudice. But that man Salmond is a class act, the rascal.

Scottish independenceScottish politicsScotlandAlex SalmondScottish National party (SNP)Nigel FarageMichael White
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Quiz: Former drug addict or working class hero - who is your ideal politician?

A YouGov poll confirms what many suspected: that those MPs who have never worked outside politics rankle with voters. By comparison, doing drugs in youth is a far lesser offence. Take this quiz of politicians' values to find your perfect MP

Michael White

Was 12 Years a Slave the best film of the year? I hope not | Michael White

I am delighted Steve McQueen's serious and beautifully filmed movie was recognised at the Oscars but I found it oddly bloodless in spirit

12 Years a Slave is a remarkable film and I share the widespread delight that it won recognition at the Oscars in Hollywood, especially when there was always a risk that an enjoyable bit of immoral trash like The Wolf of Wall Street might have done some business at its high-minded expense.

But best film of the year? I hope not. It's a political film with a political message for our times – slavery isn't over when there are an estimated 21 million slaves today, so Steve McQueen reminded his audience on Sunday night. But Casablanca was a very political film too, plenty are, but dialogue, plot, character made them better movies.

By the time we first glimpse 33-year-old carpenter, Solomon Northup, author of a moving 1853 memoir and hero (as played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) of the film – it was not the only such memoir as Sarah Churchwell explains here – living an idealised life with his family as free American citizens in Saratoga, New York, the viewer may already feel uneasy.

Repeatedly, scenes in the film serve to show how beautifully it is visually composed – McQueen is a Turner prize winner, after all, and his eye compared to Goya's. But such a bloody film in theme is oddly bloodless in spirit and lack of raw emotional power. Critics have been divided from wildly enthusiastic – and here – to merely respectful here and here.

It is not just the lovely clothes the Northups wear, but a lack of contextual information that might guide the unwary about how slavery operated in the America of 1841: the battle between slave and free states; freedom roads heading north; kidnappers like Northup's assailants heading south with "runaways", real or not. Steven Spielberg's earnest Lincoln, with which it has been compared, makes the same mistake: lack of context meant you needed a degree in the period (I have one) to understand all that was going on.

So I went to see 12 Years with a slightly heavy heart, knowing I would have to do my duty by McQueen without enjoying the experience very much or emerging with any sense of redemptive possibilities.

If Gone with the Wind, which cleaned up (eight statues) at the 1940 Oscars, sentimentalised the "peculiar institution" of pre-1865 slavery in the southern United States, so did 12 Years, albeit mostly in the opposite direction. Sentimentality – combined with scenes of excessively lingering brutality – are among the great cinema vices of our times, especially among directors who purport to be grim realists. As so often in this film a lot of people suffering extremes of degradation just look too well fed and well dressed. If the goal is squalor, let's do squalor properly.

When Northup's book was first published, its credibility was attacked by the usual suspects of the day, but it apparently stood up pretty well to the fact-checkers – here's an account that says it's much better than Taratino's Django Unchained, according to historian Henry Louis Gates. It was made into a PBS TV film as long ago as 1984. Even so, we learn, McQueen and his writer, John Ridley, felt the need to embellish the text to reinforce their point.

Does it matter that a slaver bent on rape during the voyage down river to the New Orleans slave market stabs to death a black prisoner who tries to stop him? It's not in the book. Though 12 Years is pretty good about the economics of slavery – slaves are property, they must earn their investment because they were purchased on credit – the incident jars. You do not throw $1,000-worth of property at 1841 prices over the side of the boat simply because he has annoyed you.

Nor is the film's destruction of Northup's great solace, his violin, which he does in great distress, in the book. Yet Northup's own music – as distinct from a hammy score – is one of the film's conspicuous omissions: we never see the man making music for himself, an act that helped sustain him through a nightmare-ish ordeal.

The film's depiction of relationships between classes, genders and spouses, as well as between races, also seemed a little out of kilter, too informal, too candid, too egalitarian; in other words, too modern. Would Northup's kidnappers have wined and dined their victim quite so handsomely in Washington before doping him? I doubt it and, besides, the hick, sweaty, southern city of DC is said to have boasted only a couple of restaurants with tablecloths until well after world war two.

For my taste McQueen lingers too long on scenes of brutal floggings and assaults (though the sex is not tastelessly explicit), which may be what white viewers need to be reminded of – except excessively explicit violence is a staple of many modern films, where the old saying that "less is more" has long been forgotten.

Analysts also say that William Ford, the slave owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch (who has slavery issues in the family closet), has also been rendered less sympathetic on screen than he was in the book. Maybe. He does save Northup – slave name "Platt" – from a lynching in the film, too.

But what convinced me that the film diminished itself needlessly was in its depiction of Christianity simply as a hypocritical instrument of suppression, the Bible routinely cited as justification for enslavement in sermons to the enslaved. It was all that, but it was also much more. Almost unheard in the background of 12 Years a Slave was the Christian-driven abolitionist movement that would, within a decade of Northup's book (he disappears from history, perhaps to Canada), plunge the United States into a four-year civil war whose savagery matched 1914-18, though no one realised until too late.

The Christianity that helped to enslave also helped to liberate. To assert otherwise is a bit modern, too. So notwithstanding producer Brad Pitt's cameo role as a Canadian abolitionist, the film's morals were, well, a bit black and white. Good luck at the box office, Steve McQueen, but don't expect to overtake Gravity's success now that it's won seven Oscars to your team's three.

Apart from its great special effects, I didn't think much of Gravity either. But Gravity is gorgeously inconsequential; it doesn't matter. McQueen's is a serious film, which does matter. But best film of the year? That smacks of piety in Tinseltown.

Steve McQueenOscarsAwards and prizesOscars 2014SlaveryMichael White
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Politics Weekly podcast: Ukraine, IRA letters and the Daily Mail v Harriet Harman

The crisis in Ukraine continues this week amid a power vacuum, a currency crash and the manoeuvrings and military incursions of its neighbours.

Kiev has requested the attention of the UN security council as Russian forces amass in the largely pro-Moscow and historically Russian region of Crimea.

Joining Tom Clark in the studio are the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding, political columnist Michael White and political diarist Hugh Muir.

Also this week: the collapse of the trial of a suspected former IRA killer has led to a judicial inquiry and the near resignation of Northern Ireland's first minister. The suspect – John Downey – was able to produce a letter from the British government that amounted to a "get out of jail free" card dating from the peace talks during Tony Blair's time as prime minister.

Plus: the Daily Mail, which last year branded Ed Miliband's father Ralph "the man who hated Britain", has been campaigning to extract an apology from senior Labour figures who worked at the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s. The NCCL, it transpires, allowed a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange to gain affiliate status. Several of its members were later convicted of sex offences. Has the row done lasting damage to Labour?

Leave your thoughts below.

Tom ClarkMichael WhiteHugh MuirPhil MaynardLuke Harding

President Reagan exonerated in Irangate scandal: From the archive, 27 February 1987

The Tower Commission finds that the President had not been told enough about the affair to cover it up

For the first time since his struggling days in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan was virtually written out of a major script yesterday. He was the tall handsome one who opened the door for the big stars, smiled gamely and then proceeded to fluff the few lines he had before fleeing the scene.

It was not a performance which audiences will remember. Perhaps that was what the President was hoping, but if so he will be disappointed. No sooner was his back turned that the three stars of the Tower Commission acquitted him of an Irangate cover-up on the discreet but unmistakable grounds that the old gentleman had not been told enough to cover it up. Not so much Watergate as snoozegate.

Like all the best nights at the opera, the curtain-up was preceded by undignified conduct among ticket-holders necessitated by the importance of getting seats in the briefing room in the Old Executive Office Building. It houses less important staff next door to the better known property burned down by British contras in 1814.

The queue for copies of the report inside the White House press room was unprecedented - "and I've been here since '52," one old hand said. Even grandees of the big television networks joined the sprint across the grounds and into the lift, copies in hand.

Inside the cinema-like forum, all was concentrated silence punctuated by an occasional profanity or a murmur of "My God, North lied all along" from the readers. Until 11 o'clock sharp. With a "Ladies and gentlemen, the members of the President's review board," the inaptly named former Senator Tower (he is a rotund five foot five) led in his fellow-candidates for the Pulitzer Prize. He called them Ed and Brent, for the style remains Republican Informal, even if the policies nowadays are imperial baroque.

In his dark blue suits and grey ties, Mr Tower looks like a Tory lawyer and remains a Reagan loyalist. But after 25 years in Washington, the Texan is not rich and still carries his State Express 555s in a $10 cigarette case. Here he was about to damn his leader with elaborate southern courtesies.

Mr Tower was to speak of the President being a "big picture" man whose staff should have adapted to his style. This is true. Big pictures, preferably on celluloid, have been Mr Reagan's strength. Big words have been the problem.

But the gnomic all-purpose general, Ed Scowcroft, proved wrong in saying we could not expect the President to change. The chief executive promised on nationwide television to break the habits of a lifetime and read a 304-page work of non-fiction.

"Their work is far too important for instant analysis," declared the convert from a career anchored in the light fiction of Zane Grey, Ollie North and the intelligence reports of Bill Casey. After barely a minute and a "now, John I am sure there will be a few questions for you," the boss fled.

The trio then proceeded to give brief resumes of the good bits and take the first of millions of questions - until 12 o'clock precisely. John, Brent and Ed were circumspect about illegalities, admitted to nothing more than semantic disagreements among themselves ("a lengthy debate on split infinities") and were charitable towards the laid-back habits and memory of King Ronald the First and Last.

But it was damning enough. At 11.28, Mr Tower responded to a challenge on presidential infallibility with the words: "yes, the President made mistakes. That is very plain English." Meanwhile the trio had politely damned everyone of consequence in the upper tier of government - except Vice President Bush whose name was overlooked until 11.53. His luck may not last.

Ronald ReaganUS politicsIranNicaraguaAmericasMichael White
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Peter Mandelson's backing for Ed Balls is all for the aid of the party | Michael White

The oleaginous peer is a Labour partisan who wants it to win, even if it requires burying the hatchet with an enemy

So Peter Mandelson has given what sounds like warm approval to his old foe and Brownite tormentor, shadow chancellor Ed Balls, at a Labour fundraising dinner. What's more, he has let the fact be known. As someone once said on hearing that a rival had died, "I wonder what he meant by that?"

Three points are always worth making when inspecting most Mandelson manoeuvres, except those involving himself where he is often less sure-footed, perhaps because he lacks a Mandelson to advise him.

One is that it will not have been an impulsive gesture but a calculation. Two is that the former spin doctor turned much-sacked-and-restored cabinet minister is a man of power. It follows that Mandelson must have read the polls and his own thoughts before deciding that there is a real prospect that Ed Miliband can win the 2015 election and make Balls his Treasury chief. That is interesting, flattering even, since the political class on all sides seems unconvinced on this matter – despite the real hurdles to re-election that face David Cameron next year.

Perhaps Mandelson simply does not want any blame to come his way if things go wrong for the younger generation, as they did for Neil Kinnock in Mandelson's own political teens, though not for his contemporary, Tony Blair, the man he famously backed over Gordon Brown to become party leader when John Smith died in 1994.

That explanation is too cynical and Mandelson is less of a cynic than his many detractors routinely say. Yes he did remark that New Labour had no objection to people getting "filthy rich", but he added the rarely quoted coda "as long as they pay their taxes". It makes a big difference to the sentiment. You would not catch many current cabinet members saying it with conviction. No, not you, Vince, we know you mean it.

Which takes us to the third, less obvious point about Mandelson, whom Gordon Brown undermined for years and vetoed for a (third) return to Blair's cabinet before bringing him back in desperation in 2008. Whatever his faults, he is a through-and-through Labour partisan who wants his party to win elections.

Balls is clever and energetic, someone who "understands the modern economy" and the need to focus "laser-like" (a very Mandelson flourish, that) on the challenges of wealth creation as a prior requirement to fairer wealth distribution in society.

Why should Balls not, as an ex-FT journalist and City minister, whose younger brother Andrew is a major bond investor whose recent bonus from Pimco was a reported £4.5m, understand how the modern economy works? Why should Mandelson not understand too, when he runs Global Counsel PLC, a consultancy firm whose praises I recently heard a smart Tory sing – just as Whitehall officials praised Mandelson as a minister who gets things done.

Mutual forgiveness is a wonderful thing. It may be mutually expedient, it may not last, though it probably will. But Mandelson's goodwill is worth having. It's much better than his ill-will. And if there's a coalition to be negotiated, who better than the silky peer to sidle up to those Lib Dems.

Peter MandelsonEd BallsEd MilibandGordon BrownLabourMichael White
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PMQs: those bellowing MPs are lonely and want to be loved | Michael White

Much of the hubbub is there to compensate for reduced ideological differences among MPs but there is another reason

Ed Miliband is again saying that he wants to make prime minister's question time less shouty and confrontational. We know that David Cameron regrets the "Punch and Judy" character of the occasion. The pair meet again at noon for their weekly Wednesday showdown. Are we holding our breath? No.

At the weekend the Labour leader said the problem is "easier to state, harder to execute". David Cameron has made that discovery too but also finds it easier to punch below the belt when he gets hot and flustered. Their backbenchers egg them on like football fans.

What has gone wrong? I have a theory. PMQs used to be so gentle a century ago, as I once explored here, but has evolved to fit changing times. The exchange was formalised as a twice-weekly 15-minute session on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at 3.15 as recently as 1961, unilaterally consolidated into a single 30-minute session on Wednesdays at noon by Tony Blair in the wake of his 1997 landslide.

It saved Blair a lot of prep work, having to learn the problems in departments across Whitehall. Although for Margaret Thatcher it was a usual habit, which she exploited with her usual energetic eye for detail. Woe betide a minister whose briefing notes were judged inadequate. But Blair's move also reduced accountability, though he denied it.

The move was typical of his ignorance of and disdain for tradition and the machinery of government, as some of us protested at the time. But in fairness to Blair – someone has to try – the rot had long since set in. It was Harold Wilson, opposition leader in the scandal-hit twilight Tory years of 1963-64, who realised how his quick mind and wit could be used PMQs to undermine old school PM, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

There was no radio or TV feed then. But word got around and helped Wilson win, albeit narrowly, in 1964. As PM (1976-79) Jim Callaghan used his vast experience to patronise Thatcher rather well. But he lost and she soon acquired ascendancy. The next PM-in-waiting to make it a bully pulpit was Blair himself. He abused John Major (1994-7) in ways decent Major has not forgiven. He's a good hater.

In the interval first radio, then TV, arrived raising the stakes. Rolling news channels with space to fill made PMQs more gladiatorial still. Social media piled on the pressure – I sometimes Tweet the event myself. Shame!

It was always a partisan occasion in my experience of watching it on and off for nearly 40 years now. But it's got worse at a time when it shouldn't have done so. Why not? Because the great mid-century ideological battles between socialism and capitalism (well into the 70s lots of sensible people thought Soviet Russia had cracked it) have largely been settled in capitalism's favour. The issues now are managerial and regulatory – how to save markets from their own built-in propensity to blow up.

At the same time the newly elected 2010 parliament represented a bigger break with the past than any in modern times – 227 MPs, or one-third of the 650 total, were new members.

They were determined to raise parliament's game after decades of over-mighty governments with impregnable majorities, not to mention expunge the expenses shame.

More women (22%), more ethnic minority MPs (4%), slightly younger and (so we all agreed) of better quality on both sides. Yet they are now the bellowing chorus which polls report that voters find distasteful. Why so?

My theory is twofold. One that the noise is there to compensate for reduced ideological difference. Yes, Iain Duncan Smith is attacking the benefits system in ways that Labour's Rachel Reeves would not. But no one doubts that a Miliband government would have to make tough choices too. Even Ed Balls said so again this week. We live in a world where technocratic elites make most choices – good and bad – on our behalf until they stumble and get kicked out.

Secondly, I suspect the villain of the piece is another Labour reform, so-called "family friendly hours", coupled with the coalition's inability and/or reluctance to keep the Commons busy with legislation in the collective arena of the chamber itself. Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do, but only on Wednesdays at noon – the one moment when the chamber is certain to be full.

Family-friendly hours? As the Commons leader from 2001 to 2003 Robin Cook, not famously family-friendly in his private life, pushed through reforms which finally shifted sitting time decisively towards daylight hours. Select committees can meet at 9.30, the house sits at the same time on Thursdays – not to push through more debate and bills, but to allow MPs to get back to their demanding constituencies on Thursday evenings.

There are pluses in all this; fewer MPs actually die in office these days, that's why there are so few byelections. There are virtually no late-night sittings except – paradoxically – in the elderly, unelected Lords.

MPs are less tired, they have more time to hold ministers or bankers to account effectively in their committees. Some are good at it (not all, I realise). Speaker Bercow deserves credit he rarely gets for modernising reforms and forcing ministers to justify themselves to backbenchers.

But the loss is there too. And one loss is a sense of collegiate identity as parliamentarians in a non-party sense. In daylight hours MPs are usually busy and at night they no longer hang around. The great Palace of Westminster can be eerily deserted by 8 o'clock (except at the Lords end), as it never used to be.

Eating or drinking together, chatting and exchanging ideas is important in any organisation. That's why those major Silicon Valley tech firms locate the loos in their fancy new offices in places which force their clever staff to pass each other's desks and even talk on the way for a pee.

"Face time" remains a critical form of engagement, it now seems to be agreed. But from what I hear from old hands at Westminster it doesn't happen enough among them now: everyone is too busy trying to be busy even though the legislative programme is notably light because the coalition partners can't agree what to do.

A good thing too, you may say. But polarisation is bad for us all, as the US Congress constantly shows. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan laments in his memoirs about the fact that Democrats and Republicans no longer attend each other's parties and children's weddings, as they did in his youth in Washington of the Ford era (1974-77). It makes the give-and-take compromises so necessary to politics harder to achieve.

Westminster does not yet have a Tea Party problem to compound the difficulty, though plenty of pretty simplistic rightwingers see the state as an enemy, the British state as well as Brussels. Their sense of righteous isolation is probably enhanced by the new arrangements and lack of collegiate spirit.

So when they all meet together for PMQs (I get the impression that attendance at departmental question time is slipping) it's the one big occasion of the week – like Saturday football. They bellow for their own side.

Miliband understands the importance of Britain's adversarial style of political debate, which springs from the law courts. But he also likes to quote Barack Obama as saying" "You can disagree without being disagreeable."

Fine, but Obama is not a good role model. He does not schmooze with his Congressional friends, let alone the Republican opposition whose acquiescence he needs to get things done.

He's a cool customer, who does not share drinks or slap backs easily. Obama doesn't do collegiate and it's a weakness. Come to think of it, the same charge is levelled against Cameron as a posh boy comfortable only with fellow-Etonians, not sharing baked beans in the MPs' cafeteria as Mrs T used to do (a bit). And Miliband too; he stands charged – "what's all this one nation stuff?" MPs ask – with being an out-of-touch Tufnell Park intellectual.

That's the trouble with PMQs, the hubbub is phoney, evidence of a compensating enthusiasm for their party leaders which MPs do not really feel. They feel lonely.

Is our hyper-critical 24/7 political culture creating robotic leaders, merely tough enough to withstand the heat and always too busy to talk? Are those bellowing backbenchers really saying: "Hey there, leader. I'm here. Talk to me"?

Everyone needs to be loved.

PMQsHouse of CommonsTony BlairMichael White
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Harriet Harman should have tackled the Daily Mail's smears sooner

The paper is a tenacious bully and there's no point in thinking it will go away

I was woken early today by a BBC outlet. The programme wanted to talk about the Daily Mail's smear campaign against Harriet Harman and her MP husband, Jack Dromey, over their tenuous links in the 70s to a nasty body called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). About time too, I thought. This one should have been sorted out weeks ago.

Tricky, isn't it? The Mail first had a crack at this topic before Christmas. Dromey, his future wife and Patricia Hewitt, who also went on to be a Labour cabinet minister, were all officers of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) – now Liberty, celebrating its 80th birthday this week – when PIE became one of the organisation's 1,000 affiliates.

This past week it has led the paper – all over page one – three times. Ukraine threatening Europe with a civil war or worse doesn't constitute a good enough news story, I guess. So it's a slow news week in editor Paul Dacre's world. You can read a sample here:

Mail online: But they still won't say sorry: Labour's Harman and Dromey finally break their silence

Mail online: Not one hint of remorse: Harman and Dromey's statements, and the Mail's replies

If that's not enough there's more here:

Mail online: Even Left demands answers from senior Labour trio over links to child sex group

And of course here:

Mail online: Quentin Letts on how the BBC has ignored the scandal

As a regular reader of the Mail – it drops on my mat every day – I thought it all mildly interesting to be reminded of the many follies of the 70s, one of which was a willingness by child molesters to take advantage of the "liberated' atmosphere to chance their arm and assert that kids were up for sexual relations with adults. But Harman and co were being targeted for political reasons, a hatchet job.

In the post-Savile era we are all aware of the way society took wrong turns, as it always does without realising its mistakes at the time, including now. That goes for all of us, from the Guardian to the Mail, via the consensual and cautious BBC. Only a few years earlier gay sex of any kind had been illegal. We've just apologised to the memory of Alan Turing, the once-in-a-century Bletchley Park computer scientist, whom society injected to cure his perverted sex drive after the poor man was caught cottaging. He killed himself.

The Mail gets lots of things right and lots wrong. What was its view of Turing or – in the Dacre era – the panicky Thatcher section 28 law? I haven't checked, but we can guess. Like Harman on Newsnight on Monday it rarely apologises except at the point of a lawyer's gun. Talking of which, where's its page two apologies column? Disappeared? I can't find it and I'm looking. So much for post-Leveson remorse, eh?

On the Harman and co allegations the Mail's a bit right, but mostly wrong. Labour's No 2 was national officer of the NCCL as a young lawyer after 1976 at a time when the PIE had affiliated. It remained so until 1983 when an NCCL campaign – spearheaded by Dromey, so his statement says – and criminal convictions against leading PIE figures saw it disaffiliated. NCCL had been infiltrated, they concluded. Neither Harman nor Dromey (Hewitt too, I assume, she was general secretary) were "apologists" for child sex, paedophilia or lowering the age of consent to 10.

The Mail says in response on Tuesday that it "never alleged you personally" supported such campaigns. Well, you could have fooled me, since the trio's youthful mugshots have been all over the paper for weeks. "Guilt by association," says Harman. So does the Mail. You should feel "most profound guilt", it says on Tuesday.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Has the Mail apologised for getting the MMR vaccine scare wrong? Not that I have noticed. It got battered baby syndrome noisily wrong for a long time too (then nimbly switched sides), failed to nail Jimmy Savile – all the Fleet Street tough guys were afraid of his lawyers – and is currently frightening readers over plans to harvest GP patient records for research. As usual it's a bit right (confidentiality is an issue), but mostly wrong. It has "at least four GPs" on its side.

But Harman is a serious tough guy too, just the kind of upper-middle-class feminist the paper hates. She won't apologise to Labour's historic enemy and on Newsnight accused it of hypocrisy – printing provocative pictures of women and young girls every day (sex for the over-70s was one feature on Monday), though you only get nipples showing when Dacre is on holiday. It's a compact paper for respectable folk, not a filthy tabloid!

Why so? Because ever since the forged Zinoviev letter (purporting to link Labour with secret ties to red Moscow) helped destroy the first Labour government of 1923, the Mail has been gunning for its leaders. Around the time young Hattie joined the NCCL, the Mail published a Zinoviev-style bribery smear about nationalised British Leyland to embarrass the Callaghan government, a clumsily forged letter on page one.

In between it flirted with Hitler, as (almost) everyone knows. Another victim, Michael Foot, called it "the Forger's Gazette" until he died. Last year it smeared Ed Miliband – guilt by association again – when it called his dead father "The man who hated Britain". Actually there's a good piece to be written about Ralph Miliband, a Marxist intellectual who was more hostile to Labour reformism and more naive about Stalin's regime than he should have been – and for longer. But the Mail's ugly blast made the subject toxic. Voters sympathised with Miliband.

In other words it was counter-productive, as Mail campaigns often are. It's part of the pleasure of reading the paper each day. "You don't know what's going on unless you read the Mail," I tell my more priggish friends. Humourless (apart from the Hardcastle column), clever and energetic, why it even invests in expensive, risky journalism – it's one of several traits it shares with the Guardian, another of the Mail's pet hates.

In this case Harman has, overnight, finally come closer to the apology the Mail impudently demands. Today she said she "regretted" NCCL's PIE link while insisting it was all nothing to do with her. It's scary when the tabloids – whoops, compacts – come after you, but Harman should have addressed this sooner, just as Lord Smith, chair of the Environment Agency, should have gone down to flooded Somerset as soon as the Mail first came after him. It's a tenacious bully, no point in thinking it will go away.

Which leads me to an unsatisfactory aspect of the affair. Until Harman and Dromey issued their belated statements, and Miliband backed his deputy, most of the respectable media didn't touch the story with the proverbial barge pole. The Mail claims the story was never mentioned on any of the BBC's many paper reviews either, as it was on Sky. Alas, that's probably true.

Both omissions are a mistake. In my dotage I rarely do paper reviews nowadays, but did hundreds over a 30-year stint. Sometimes the producers (they seem bossier as well as younger now) would try to say "we can't mention that story about the Queen". Why not? "It's legally risky." No, it isn't. They just like to play safe.

On one occasion the BBC's then director, John Birt, was the subject of an embarrassing story involving money or sex. "We must do that, it's about the BBC," I said. " Oh no," said the BBC producer. "If I can't do it I won't go on. It would be too shaming," I replied. We did it and the heavens did not fall.

Someone should have tackled the Harman story. Probably someone did, on BBC Radio Cumbria or Farming Today. The Mail doesn't always get its allegations right.

Comments have not been turned on for this article. If you wish to comment please go to our Politics Live blog which is also covering the Harman story.

Harriet HarmanDaily MailPatricia HewittMichael White
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Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch: the deconstruction of a friendship

Even if untrue, rumours of Blair's alleged affair with Wendi Deng mean there is no fixing the former intimacy of the two godfathers

Tony Blair's friends and allies seem to accept the globe-trotting former prime minister's emphatic assurances that the press has got it wrong again. He did not have an affair with Rupert Murdoch's now-ex-wife Wendi Deng; instead he was a sympathetic intermediary and confidante in a troubled marriage.

Equally emphatic are Blair's long-standing enemies, and new ones in the Murdoch camp, who peddle the story over dinner. "Why did Blair betray a friend? Because he could," says one.

The anger is real and for Blair the feud could be ominous when next he runs into controversy, for instance, over the long-awaited Chilcot report on Iraq.

Apart from disputed details of solo meetings at Murdoch's Californian ranch and elsewhere (witnessed by staff) the closest things to evidence to have emerged so far are a misrouted Deng email and her breathless notes to herself, unearthed after the debacle.

"Oh shit, oh shit, whatever why I'm so missing Tony … he has such a good, body and really, really good legs …" says one note. They strike a curiously adolescent tone for a clever and ambitious woman of 44 with an MBA from Yale.

In any case the facts of the case – or lack of them – are not what is important. What matters is that apparently the 82-year-old Murdoch believes the allegations are true. As do loyal News Corp colleagues and the four children from his first two marriages who never warmed to Deng or her "equal shares" demand for her own two Murdoch daughters. As the attack dogs of rival media tycoons circle, insiders have been feeding them good steak.

Placing Deng's notes in the bumper Oscars edition of the high-gloss Vanity Fair magazine last week was the most savage hatchet job so far. Wendi is the main target of magazine writer, Mark Seal's, hatchet.

"Why is your business strategy in China so bad?" were the first words she uttered to Murdoch at a Star TV staff conference in Hong Kong in 1997. A bold pitch which both jolted and charmed the boss. Within two years she had married him.

Yet Deng's own pushy business strategy in China would eventually prove "counter-productive", Seal's sources told him. Deng could be charming, but also foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

As for the ungrateful Blair, Murdoch had "virtually put him in office" in 1997, the Vanity Fair article claimed, and "from 1997 to 2007 the two men virtually ran Great Britain". Such conceits can only have come from puffed-up Murdoch sources which have always overplayed their (admittedly) considerable importance.

Vanity Fair's attacks, personal and professional, would instantly ping round the world, damaging both Blair and Deng. Is there more to come? If so, what? And how much can they damage Blair's embattled reputation?

Insider accounts suggest Murdoch had already put up with quite a lot from his younger wife ("my greatest mistake") after they went their parallel ways several years ago, albeit often under the same roof. She gave him a sartorial makeover, but for once he couldn't keep up.

"Rupert would be going to the gym at 6am just as Wendi was coming in from a party," says one. When rumours of a liaison with Google's Eric Schmidt first surfaced, dismayed News Corp executives confided "Wendi's been Googled".

But the Blair story was different. Hell hath few furies like a mogul who feels cuckolded by a man he had come to see as a true friend. Some claim Blair was the excuse the tycoon had been waiting for before his classic counter-offensive, springing the divorce on his estranged wife in mid-2013. If so, it was certainly a powerful excuse.

In 1995, at the instigation of Peter Stothard, then editor of the Times, Blair was invited to address Murdoch's annual power-fest, that year's event being held on Hayman Island, off Queensland.

Keen to placate the Sun – Murdoch's baby and always under his direct, near-daily guidance, even now – which had savaged Neil Kinnock, Blair dismayed his party by accepting. He, his communications chief Alastair Campbell and his school chum turned Praetorian Guard, Anji Hunter, were feted ("we'd never flown first class") and Blair made a well-pitched speech – "enough for the News Corp lot, enough for the anti-Murdoch neuralgics" at home, Campbell confided to his diaries.Australia's Labour prime minister, Paul Keating, chaperoned them himself: never put up income tax, he warned "Bambi" Blair. And Murdoch is "a big bad bastard" who despises politicians ("they get in his way") unless you convince him you can be one too, he added.

The friendship that developed in the years that followed has been much-analysed. But on one point both sides of the Blair-Deng allegations row still agree. "They had very robust arguments on things like Europe and there were issues on which Tony never compromised with him. Murdoch was always more interested in foreign affairs than the domestic agenda," recalls one Blair aide who witnessed some sessions. "On Europe or press intrusion they would disagree. Sometimes Murdoch would persuade Tony on a point, sometimes Tony would persuade him," says another.

For Campbell, an old friend of Kinnock's, such dealings with Murdoch were a necessary evil, though Murdoch was complicated. As a chippy Australian pluotcrat he had an outsider's instinctive dislike of the British establishment. He was anti-gay (Deng softened that) and anti-racist (he has several mixed-race grandchildren). The romantic streak which made him a near-Marxist at Oxford never quite died. "He admires the Queen, but in his heart he's a republican, he'd like to be left wing," insists the insider.

It was the same Murdoch who pushed Blair hard to back George Bush in invading Iraq and repeatedly annoyed him by foolishly saying Britain's relationship with the EU should be like Switzerland's.

Without ever saying so at that stage, Blair would leave interviewers with the impression that he knew he was dealing with a "big, bad bastard"; it was just business.

But the relationship deepened. Murdoch had admired Margaret Thatcher, but she was older and a woman. With Blair it became matey. "They grew to like each other," says one Blairite. "He liked Tony Blair a lot," concedes a Murdoch journalist who did not share the boss's enthusiasm and attacked Blair in print.

So Murdoch approved "Traitor Blair" headlines in the Sun over Europe, but would also say "he's a friend of mine". In old age, and with most business battles won, the driven Murdoch was softening. Affection for Blair was dramatically demonstrated in 2010. Murdoch persuaded the globetrotter, now moderately rich in his own right, to become godfather to his daughter Grace, then eight, when she and her sister, Chloe, were baptised in the river Jordan with all guests dressed in white.

Blair was not in the Hello magazine photo spread, but Deng later revealed the detail to Vogue. "I think he felt that Murdoch really, really wanted him to do it; it was very personal," says one faintly astonished Blair lieutenant. "Rupert pressed very hard. Tony felt embarrassed," says another. "It was Wendi's idea," says a third.

Little wonder that Murdoch treated Blair's alleged adultery as different from other aspects of his wife's evolving party lifestyle. Though friends insist that Blair and his wife, Cherie, are a contented couple (despite long separations she works as a barrister, does charity work and has other interests) or that she would not tolerate affairs, rumours have inevitably become attached to him. Some are plain silly. "He likes women around him, he's rather flirty," explains a woman friend. When the Daily Mail staked out the Jerusalem home of an Israeli woman whom the Quartet's special representative was supposed to be seeing, it drew a blank.

Where the Blairs have proved vulnerable to critics is in their weakness for the lifestyle and comforts of the rich. ("Always over-impressed by money," says a friend from their early married days in Hackney). Blair stresses the need to fund and staff his philanthropic foundations, but his fondness for yachts, executive jets and Barbados holidays ("How much would I need to have a place like this?" he supposedly asked when staying at Cliff Richards' home), is more apparent.

That weakness allowed him to slip easily into the Murdoch world where, in his version to friends, he allowed an unhappy Deng to cry on his shoulder – "He's a nice guy. If a woman bursts into tears, he'll be nice to her" – but foolishly accepted invitations when Murdoch was absent.

He should have left, say friends, but didn't and we're no longer there to tell him not to be an idiot. He should have told Murdoch (who had been trying to help him raise money for good causes) when next they met, but didn't. In the loyalist version, the Murdoch girls burst in just as he was about to do so.

The most that Blair loyalists will concede is that Deng may have had a "bit of a crush" or been "infatuated" while he foolishly allowed himself to be compromised. Some fear that Murdoch's revenge will take a more tangible form when the Chilcot report finally overcomes hurdles to publication in late 2014 or 2015. Murdoch papers which backed the invasion of Iraq may turn on him, as others have done.

Others make light of that threat and point out that, whatever Murdoch's frequent guidance to his beloved Sun, he leaves broadsheet editors he trusts to do what they want. In a lecture in the City of London this week, Campbell told bankers that even they could overcome reputational damage. So can Blair.

But there is no fixing the former intimacy between the two godfathers. Murdoch doesn't take Blair's calls and Blair has stopped trying. "There's nothing Tony can do at the moment. Rupert won't see him, he just won't countenance it."

Tony BlairWendi DengRupert MurdochMichael White
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