Michael White's Blog, page 47

Nigel Farage is reaching for respectability – watch out!

Last month the Ukip leader wanted to welcome Syrian refugees, now he's ridiculing the party's rank-and-file: the general election manoeuvring has begun

As he loftily distances himself from those he dismisses as the "Walter Mittys'' in Ukip's activist ranks, Nigel Farage is getting more interesting. I think he is succumbing to the allure of prospective office, what the late Frank Johnson (Simon Hoggart's only equal in the ranks of recent parliamentary sketchwriters) once called "the black stocking-tops of power." Farage likes what he has so far only glimpsed from his bar stool.

Perhaps he has also been daydreaming of that moment in the small hours of Friday 8 May 2015 when another inconclusive general election result raises the possibility of a minority government or another combination of parties in coalition. He cheekily talks of Ukip holding the balance of power at Westminster and doing a deal with a Conservative party led by a Gove or a Boris Johnson amid jubilation among the oligarchs of Fleet St. I think that is a likely fantasy too, as I will explain later.

He dislikes David Cameron and George Osborne – a feeling which is mutual. No deal there then if the Tories fall short of a majority despite the best efforts of the Two Eds and Vince Cable, who was also being "interesting" about economic strategy on Tuesday – perhaps for similar reasons.

But it is Dave who is now polite about Tory-to-Ukip voters – he was on Radio 4's Today programme on Monday – whom he once called "fruitcakes", whereas Nigel now calls the same people Walter Mittys.

What is going on? Today's Mitty jibe is not the first time Farage has made such a comparison. He's too smart not to know some of his candidates, councillors and activists are always going to be a problem. Remember the ridicule councillor David Silvester drew down on Ukip for suggesting that recent floods were a judgment of God on gay marriage?

The difference is that today's "Wrong kind of people are in Ukip" headline is the lead story in the Times – the kind of metropolitan newspaper that until recently looked down its nose on Ukip as the kind of lower middle-class activist base barely tolerated as a necessary component of the Tory party. That verdict was mean then and mean now. (And the Guardian was just as bad.)

All parties contain fruitcakes and Walter Mittys, but in my experience Ukip's are jollier ones than some of the thin-lipped, authoritarian puritans full of ideological zeal whom you find in most parties. Would I trust most of them to run anything more complicated than a small business? No. But most don't want to. They just want to quit Europe and go back to their all-white favourite pub, close the curtains and have a few drinks.

But Farage, the London metals-trader (City-type, not Del Boy) who gave it all up to become an MEP in 1999, has always been more ambitious than that. Like that other panacea politician Alex Salmond – whom he also despises ("where's Scottish independence inside the EU?" he asks) but resembles – he's a smart populist who makes it up as he goes along and refuses to be embarrassed for long when he hits himself in the face with a custard pie.

Only last month he said that of course Britain should take its share of Syrian refugees. It's economic migrants, from eastern Europe and far beyond, we should control more effectively after years of letting in too many. It offended some Ukip-types, but they may no longer be his primary audience as Ukip's share of opinion polls consolidates. This was a high-minded appeal to fairness and the wider view of our common humanity.

Only last week he dismissed the eccentricity of Ukip's 2010 election manifesto – he couldn't remember most of it and disowned it. His manifesto for the important EU elections this May? Not ready yet, he explained. He's not going to be pinned down. He's right about that too. Ukip's manifesto launch in 2010 was a riotous shambles, as most Ukip launches are. Fruitcakery apart, it's hard to be too alarmed by a protest party that can make you laugh so easily.

But Farage's efforts to make the party look and sound more respectable than it is carries risks. He says today that up to one-third of Ukip's support now comes from hacked-off ex-Labour voters. I believe him. He also tells the Times that bankers' bonuses – we can't and shouldn't interfere, nor should Brussels – aren't the problem, overpaid public sector workers and (wait for it) thinktank staff are.

It's hardly the best note to appeal to voters fed up with the Two Eds, is it? Or even those lower middle-class small business-types who have deserted the Tories for Ukip because they feel let down by Cameron (who was sucking up to them this week again). The more Farage tries to sound respectable the less brightly his "sod the lot of them" appeal shines.

It's a risk he might overcome, he's smart, but a risk all the same. Like all small parties, including the Rennard-riven Lib Dems, Ukip is prone to factional splits, often personality-driven rivalries dressed up as principle. It's had its share and I must admit I'm currently without a good dissident source there.

In any case, we always end up in the same place when looking at the coming election, uncertain though its outcome remains. Unless Ukip makes a major breakthrough on May 7 2015 – the EU elections that it might win don't really count, which is why Ukip does so well in them – its success is certain to damage the Tories more than Labour. Sensible Tory voters know that. Most will draw back in the knowledge that a defeated Tory MP contributes to an Ed Miliband premiership which they don't want.

So perhaps Farage isn't looking to cut a deal with a post-Cameron regime in 2015, but to harry, humiliate and horrify the Cameroons even more successfully than Ukip and its fellow-travellers on the Tory backbenches ("useful idiots" was Lenin's description of such people) are already doing.

Cameron's appeasement strategy has failed so far. Might he be forced out of weakness to sue for peace? The hope must be some sort of understanding, some sort of pact at local level that would give both rival rightwing parties some synergy.

After all, it's more or less what has been tried before; the "coupon election" of November 1918 being the most successful Lib-Con deal, though it all ended in tears in 1922 and fatally split the old Liberal party. It was tried by the Liberals and breakaway SDP in the 1980s (with only modest success) and by Eurosceptic Tories and plutocrat Jimmy (father of Zac) Goldsmith's Referendum party in the 90s (ditto).

But it never stops them trying. Watch that Farage.

Nigel FarageUK Independence party (Ukip)General election 2015Michael White
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That 50p tax rate? Better to be smart than make empty gestures

Lucky old Dave – he has the Two Eds working tirelessly on his behalf to keep the leaky coalition boat afloat

Listening to a post-Davos David Cameron hammering home his economic message ("Our long-term plan is working") on Radio 4's Today programme, I wondered what positive impact his words and tone might be having on any disaffected, lower middle class Tory voters who might be listening to the PM. Not much, I fear.

Cameron's style is conversational, reasonable in tone, his message on the welcome economic recovery not especially clear, devoid of an inspiring slogan or soundbite that my imaginary Tory-to-Ukip voter might repeat when he or she chats with colleagues later in the day at work. Being interviewed by Today's economic techie, Evan Davis, doesn't help, but it's Cameron's job to make the conversational weather.

There was a "lol" moment when Davis drew attention to the reputable Institute for Fiscal Studies (that's the thinktank which doesn't bad mouth Ofsted chiefs at the behest of Gove-ite zealots) conclusion that, despite signs of recovery, real wages will still be lower in 2015 than they were in 2010. "I'll leave the statisticians to argue this out," replied Dave. There's nothing to argue, spluttered Davis, with a chuckle. It's obviously true.

From Syria to wages via those avoidable floods on the Somerset Levels, what Cameron fails to convey is any sense of passionate conviction, genuine (Thatcher) or contrived (Blair), let alone that he is master of events (always contrived, but it's worth the effort to sound confident). So his well-bred civility also sounded hollow when he sought to address the concerns of this week's anti-immigration rebels on his own backbenches.

We're doing what we can, he assured them. The likes of Nigel Mills, who wants to keep on excluding Romanians –clever Dominic Raab who wants to curb foreign criminals access to "human rights" rackets is a different matter – are unlikely to be appeased. As in John Major's middle years in the 1990s, Cameron's regime has lost a lot of authority, a lot of shine.

Lucky old Dave, then, because he has the Two Eds working tirelessly on his behalf to try and keep the leaky coalition boat afloat. At the weekend, Ed Balls chipped in with a promise to restore Alistair Darling's post-recession 50p income tax band on incomes north of £150,000 – the one George Osborne clipped to 45% – and all hell broke out in the City and oligarch-owned newspapers whose owners tend to live abroad for tax purposes.

I know all the arguments about fairness – you can watch Ed B do his stuff on Sunday's Marr show here – and the need to make the rich bear their share of the burden. And yes, 70% of voters support the policy, which is hardly surprising because it won't cost them anything. The top 1% of earners already pay 25% of all income tax, the top 10% more than half.

Yes, the top 1% can afford to pay more, but, unlike those of us on PAYE, they have a considerable degree of control over their income streams and, therefore, choice as to how much income tax they pay. Some are noble and quietly pay up, others are greedy and stupid, in the grip of the delusion that yes, you can take it with you if the Treasury and ex-wives can be conned. (I suspect the self-employed are not the sort of people who attack the rich on Twitter because they too have choices, but that's another story.)

So the challenge to Ed Miliband and Ed Balls is to be smarter in their dealings with the rich, as it is in their handling of the banks. For example, legislating to provide us all with the right to a personal banking number – like a mobile phone or national insurance number – would break the stranglehold of the big monopoly banks better than trying to cap their market share, as Ed Mil promises to do if elected in 2015.

People are afraid to change banks because their services are often so bad they fear a switch will create more chaos. It's an odd form of customer loyalty (Yes, Barclays, I mean you) a bit like a Mafia protection racket, but it works as the government's new switching rules do not – not yet anyway. A number that allowed you, mobile-phone-style, to switch your account easily might do better.

Where was I? Ah, yes, the Two Eds. The weekend outrage in the City, in industry and the Tory press, all dominated but overpaid, risk-averse types who are playing with other people's money, not their own, is predictable, but it does not make the Eds right simply to be bad-mouthed by a few lowlifes in suits. How much money will the 50p gesture raise? It's a gamble, hard to say, reply experts at the IFS and elsewhere.

Much better to tackle wealth and land holdings (today's Guardian editorial gets that bit right) to squeeze wayward corporations that do not remotely pay their share on UK-earned profits (including those phonily shipped to Dublin) than to indulge in gesture politics. Addressing the north-south-east divide – it's back again today – in plausible terms would help too. Stop equivocating on the HS2 projects for starters.

Balls's assertion yesterday that the 50p tax move would only be temporary until the deficit is tamed (Pitt said the same about income tax in the 1790s) makes matters worse. Miliband has said he wants it to be permanent, so not much stability in that: the monied classes can safely sit it out while the comrades sort out the confusion, much as they deferred bonuses and other options during the Brown-Cameron transition.

If it's electorally popular dividing lines the Two Eds seek there is another promising one they might examine. Ed Mil occasionally stumbles into it when he speaks of ethical capitalism. It is between the rich and the super-rich. Ah, you may not realise it, but income inequality becomes screamingly vertical within the famous 1% which the Occupy movement ( where are they?) so denounced, as well as between the 1% and the 99%.

The 0.1% have the really serious money, much of it not the fruit of entrepreneurial hard work or genius which produces useful things and employs people, but the product of nepotism, assorted rackets (some even legal), rent collection, monopoly and wind farms.

In her interesting book Plutocrats (I bought a remaindered copy over Christmas and here's a review), Chrystia Freeland of the FT – who has interviewed lots of self-pitying rich people – argues that the self-made rich believe in meritocracy and dislike the nepotistic rackets visible from Wall St to Beijing via the Cayman Islands. There's a place to get in with your crowbars, Eds? You need some of the rich back inside Labour's big tent, they're not all reactionaries, but they don't much care for STOOPID.

So cheer up. All is not lost in the stupidity stakes. One reason why Cameron may have sounded subdued on the airwaves today is that he faces two revolts this week on the immigration bill from his own side. As for Europe, a far smaller issue in the minds of most voters, all polls suggest, that the Euro-kamikazes of the Tory right are heading towards the decks of HMS Dave with undimmed fervour.

Cameron's successive acts of Eurosceptic appeasement have failed to impress them, as Martin Kettle – and others – point out. And don't forget, Nigel "Make it Up as I Go Along" Farage is aligned for practical purposes on Labour's side – a much bigger threat to the Conservatives than to Eddery, as the Ukip leader is uneasily aware. Ed for PM, Nige?

So, recovery or not (Larry Elliott entertains sensible reservations here), a very strange general election looms in 2015. Anything could happen, but avoiding being stupid will always help.

David CameronTax and spendingLiberal-Conservative coalitionGeorge OsborneMichael White
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Conflict averse – but we still need armed forces that work

UK is reluctant to engage in foreign wars and mismanaged military interventions are to blame

One of the many enthralling books I'll never write is called The Politics of Diaspora. I thought of it again today when I read the Guardian's level-headed report that multicultural Britain is increasingly reluctant to engage in overseas military interventions, especially those that go badly.

The impact of the global diaspora living here, all those newcomers from different parts of the world, are part of that trend which is worrying defence planners, according to Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill's report. Many come from once-colonised places and Muslims are particularly sensitive to what they detect (sometimes wrongly) as a bias towards interventions that kill other Muslims.

Like Balti curry, it's an instance of the law of unintended consequences. But it's also quite a big leap from conflict aversion to Seumas Milne's proposal today that, since British troops are finally withdrawing from Germany almost 70 years after the death of Hitler, we should consider asking the Americans to go home from East Anglia (and GCHQ?) too. Gosh, whose hand do we expect to hold if the political weather turns nasty? François Hollande's? His are already full (of women).

But Ministry of Defence concerns and familiar neutralist arguments (remember the Rapacki plan are part of a wider secular trend in our society that is growing I was about to write "post-imperial" trends there and that's certainly one reason in play. But disdain for costly foreign wars that spilled British – and foreign blood – were often unpopular in the imperial era too, as they are in below-the-line comments in the Guardian.

The Crimean and Boer wars attracted huge criticism in Queen Victoria's reign – both self-interested protest about higher taxes and the more idealistic kind. The centenary of 1914, a not wholly futile conflict, will fuel public disaffection, as it should. What a slaughter, what a waste!

So it's understandable that people feel the money could and should be better spent on schools, roads and hospitals, that the research funds should go to life-saving and enhancing discoveries, not to an even nastier version of the M16 rifle or the Challenger tank. I once heard Jesse Jackson aske a campaign audience how many of them owned a VCR (video machines were once our DVDs) and how many owned cruise missiles? When he got the inevitable answer, this ever-witty man explained: "That's it, you see. The Taiwanese make the VCRs, while we [the US] make the cruise missiles."

All true, but I never got the impression that the Rev Jackson was ever anything other than an American patriot and certainly not a pacifist. But the economic case against what Tony Blair famously hailed "liberal interventionism" – here's Blair's under-reported Chicago speech from April 1999 – get stronger as the UK economy weakens in comparison to the rising states of Asia, Africa and South America.

Mismanagement of some interventions serves to intensify what I think are primarily "quiet life" reactions. That's a cousin of isolationism, also related to "stop the world" insularity, but not the same. British citizens voluntarily give lots of money to charities fighting war, famine, flood and disease in many parts of the world. The diaspora – people living here, but also expatriate or emigrated Brits abroad – helps heighten our awareness when we know the Indonesian in the pub has lost family members to an earthquake.

But what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq can't cheer anyone up. The case for intervention was oversold, the remedies over-simplified, the implementation often woefully fitful or inept. At the time I accepted the case for sticking with the US as the least worst option in both instances – I still think it was – but the results, though still unfolding, have produced much misery as well as some benefit for both benighted countries.

The Chilcot report will – one day – pile on the confusion without ever providing the smoking gun for which Blair's enemies dig as fervently and futilely as he once searched for WMD in Iraq.

After Europe's shameful failure ("the hour of Europe has come", ho ho) to stop the bloodshed in Croatia and Bosnia of the 90s, the intervention in Kosovo – to protect Muslims, if you recall – was more effective, as was Britain's micro-intervention in Sierra Leone. Libya is a shambles, but would have been one, probably worse, if Anglo-French warplanes had not intervened to help prevent a massacre.

No Blair-ish intervention in Egypt where the over-hyped Arab spring revolt of 2011 has run through a series of authoritarian and bloody solutions and is now back under military control. Syria – where the vote of British MPs kyboshed David Cameron's plans to join Barack Obama in curbing the Assad regime – that's going very badly too, though I can't see the regime lasting despite its current Russian-backed success.

So Syrians are paying the price for everyone's mistakes over the past decade. That was predictable too. We can shrug our shoulders and say: "Well, we didn't make it worse," but doing nothing probably did. Anglo-French neutrality, as General Franco discovered in the savage civil war (1936-39) he launched against the hapless Spanish republic, can be quite handy. And it didn't do France and Britain much good either, did it?

That's my point really. Whitehall's military planners are struggling to recruit an officer class from among ethnic minorities (Sikh martial traditions must be a promising starting point?) just as most police forces do, a shameful failure though it isn't easy (check out Fleet Street). At the same time they are downsizing the armed forces, whose reputation for competence, both tactically in the field and strategically in government, has been sullied.

Ex-US defence secretary, Bob Gates, is taking pot shots at us, some well aimed, others just to help flog his memoirs, I expect. Gates is a respected figure, but your lot ain't perfect either, Bob. Rarely has a global military hegemony of the kind promised Washington by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) been so inconsequentially frittered away. The world of a rising China and disaffected Russia is distinctly multi-polar again. For all his potential in 2009 Professor Obama is not a leader foreigners trust. Whoever succeeds him, the US has almost certainly peaked. A Chinese astronaut will land first on Mars.

None of which means we can pull the duvet over our heads. Military planning is a bit like lots of planning – energy supply, for example – you have to plan long-term and to include lots of seemingly remote possibilities. And don't expect short-sighted newspapers or most politicians to be any help. The Daily Express had a banner across page one every day assuring readers there would be "no war in Europe, this year or next" almost until the day one started in 1939. Leftwingers putting woolly faith in collective security at the League of Nations (sound familiar?) were just as evasive. Fortunately for them all, Neville Chamberlain took the blame.

In 2014 we still have to plan for military contingencies, which include – as Seumas Milne says – out-of-Nato theatre operations, the kind of alternative to the cold war standoff that provided the rationale for Nato when Soviet tanks rolled home across central Europe. But the trouble with Nato is not that it's too strong, too expansionist, too ambitious. It is that it's politically enfeebled and that – to the growing dismay of the Americans – it's European wing is militarily enfeebled and politically quasi-pacifist.

Understandable when the eurozone is flatlining, you may say. Correct. And when US-led interventions have proved so inept and unpopular. But Europe has never got remotely close to standing on its own feet militarily since 1945, even French attempts at breakouts (from de Gaulle onward) have been more political cosmetics – and comic – than serious. The mood in Germany since 1945 has been very pacific, I think we can see why, the mood similar in France probably since 1918, again for obvious reasons made clear in the collapse of 1940. Er, that's about it really.

So we need to think smarter and better than we have done lately (Liam Fox's defence review was a toe-curler), but not to imagine that someone else will always look after us or that rising global powers will end up behaving any better than the declining one did in the past. Some of them are closer to home than you may think and quite cross. The European Union on the other hand, decayed but still rich, must be one of the tastiest undefended empires in history.

MilitaryMinistry of DefenceForeign policyMichael White
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Lord Rennard case overshadows more serious issues of sexual politics

The hysterical language and media furore over the harassment allegations reveal a damaging lack of proportion

What does the revelation that the late Labour minister and good guy Malcolm Wicks saved child benefit from a Labour government cut in 1976 have to do with the row over Lord Rennard's refusal to apologise to female Lib Dem activists whom he is alleged to have harassed?

On the face of it, not a lot, I grant you. Catch up with Andrew Sparrow's live blog for the latest developments in a fast-moving micro-drama.

But first, take a closer look at the grainy photo of the government frontbench in 1976 which was used to illustrate an extract from Wicks's posthumous memoirs (he died of cancer in 2012) in which he confessed to being the civil servant who leaked evidence of high-level chicanery in Jim Callaghan's team. In doing so, the then Home Office policy analyst shamed the cabinet into saving an important welfare reform for women that had been threatened with the chop.

The detail which symbolises the link is actually Shirley Williams, then education secretary and now a Lib Dem peer, and still formidable after 50 years in politics. It happens that the 83-year-old is one of the peers who has enraged the four complainants and their supporters by backing Rennard. It is his declared intention to resume his place in the Lords later on Monday after protracted investigations (police as well as party) found no substantial charges that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt.

We'll come back to the Rennard case. But child benefit is more important, and so is the context. In that 1976 photo we can only see three female MPs among more than 50 men. Williams sits between Merlyn Rees and Eric Varley, two along from the new prime minister, Jim Callaghan, and his chancellor, Denis Healey.

I may well have been upstairs in the press gallery that day, a long-haired newcomer on the Guardian's political team. But I can't recognise the female MP in the row behind them, her face is turned away (Shirley Summerskill perhaps?). But two rows behind Callaghan, elegant as always, is the redoubtable Barbara Castle, champion of the new child benefit – it was then only payable to women, not men – and recently sacked as social security secretary by Sunny Jim, an old enemy from their battle over trade union reform.

That year, 1976, was when Britain had to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund to cover its budget shortfall, a grim year of higher taxes and spending cuts. As David Brindle's Guardian report makes clear, Callaghan hoped to save money by axing Castle's reform (she also pushed through the Equal Pay Act), invoking the dismay of Labour MPs (not true) and of bloke-ish union bosses (only too true) to justify such a retrograde step. Frank Field, then recipient of the leak – but not then an MP himself – tells the story here.

With hindsight, the old black-and-white world of male-breadwinner households was coming to an end, along with much else. Old-style manufacturing jobs were under pressure from globalisation, and the new wave of female graduates, raised on feminist literature, were also having an impact on the world of middle-class jobs. Though never a sister, Margaret Thatcher was a symbol, both of female leadership and of the coming market-led revolution which – for good and bad – is with us still. The old Trades Union Congress cart horse was one victim among many. Today's TUC has its first woman general secretary in Frances O'Grady.

My, how that would have pleased Castle, who died in 2002 and was, to my mind, the only other female politician of our times tough enough to have been the Labour Thatcher. I should say here that Bernard Ingham, who was press officer to both and admired both, thinks Thatcher the better man (as we used to say in 1976). Callaghan once quipped at PMQs: "She's the only man among them."

Fast forward to today, when three of the most powerful job in the world – German chancellor, head of the IMF and chair of the US Federal Reserve – are all held by women and, in our domestic affairs, there are 147 female MPs out of 650, up to the rank of home secretary. Not enough, perhaps, but a qualitative and quantitative change of great significance since 1976, when there were just 27.

So old folk like Williams (and me) feel unsettled when some of the allegations about "the intellectual sexist culture and endemic sleazy culture" of contemporary Westminster being made – by Nick Clegg's ex-aide, Bridget Harris – about the Rennard affair and beyond. "Nothing's changed for women in 50 years," I heard an ex-MP, now a peer, say at a women's event in the Commons last year.

Preposterous nonsense! As a fellow panellist that day, I got cross. Westminster has been greatly feminised since the 70s, not least by family-friendly working hours, which often empties the building by 8pm, though not at the Lords end, where they still meet later and often sit later, despite advancing years.

Williams put it her own way last spring when she praised Rennard's record as a skilful election strategist, recalled how tough it used to be for women, said she did not know the facts of the current case and urged him to apologise. That's also close to the conclusion of Alistair Webster QC's in-house investigation which has reopened the three-year drama.

I don't know precisely what Rennard is alleged to have done to the complainants, let alone whether he did. "Large, but unmenacing" would have been my verdict on him before all this blew up. What do I know?

But I would never have said that about Jimmy Savile or some of the other celebrities who have belatedly been making headlines. The failure of our investigative tabloids to nail Savile over all those years – despite their fearless self-image, they were scared of him or nobbled – still rankles. A pity that Lord Justice Leveson did not ask them why they and their police contacts failed so conspicuously.

The stalemate (at this writing) still prevails between Nick Clegg's latest demand that Rennard apologise before coming back into the party fold and Rennard's refusal on the grounds that he's done nothing to warrant one (and fears an admission would lead to civil legal action). Complicating things still further are the demands of his critics that Rennard be expelled or deprived of his peerage. It all suggests a damaging lack of proportion. Some of the language has been hysterical on both sides.

Is anyone suggesting that Rennard was ever much more than a bit creepy? I don't think so. The Lib Dem-baiting media is having a field day as an election looms. Surely what Harris dismissed as "a classic Lib-Dem fudge" is what the situation calls for. Go on m'lord, do what Clegg asks and apologise. Get it over with. Go on, critics, accept that whatever it was that happened, unpleasant though it may have been, it's not in the Savile league, not a matter for the Old Bailey.

Values change but Castle and her generation would have thought it all rather less important than the fights for equal pay, child benefit and much else. They're right too, especially when we look at the larger context of sexual politics in 2014. Homophobia remains a lethal fact of life in many parts of the world (including Berkshire?) and – as MPs reminded David Cameron only last week – slavery, female genital mutilation and other horrors are still widely inflicted on women, even in Britain. A clammy hand on the knee is not quite the same.

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Lord RennardLiberal DemocratsGenderWomen in politicsWomenHuman rightsMichael White
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Sex and the tale of two cities: Cameron appears before committee chair MPs

Prime minister at twice-yearly cross-examination by the liaison committee – no, not liaison in the Hollande sense

As interrogations go David Cameron's appearance before Westminster's backbench big cheeses was never likely to be the most arduous faced by a European head of government . Not while France's president, François Hollande, was engulfed in gossip about his tangled love life as he faced a Paris press conference. It is a form of public accountability long since abandoned by the tyrant of Downing Street except when travelling abroad and for cash.

How wrong can you get? One way or another, Cameron was quizzed for 45 minutes about sex whereas Hollande pulled rank on les hacks at the Elysée Palace and was allowed to plead privacy over ScooterGate, even when a reporter deployed the old security risk gambit against him. No wonder French unemployment is so high and high-minded Le Monde sells fewer copies than the Daily Beast.

The Tale of Two Cities contrast went much further than that. Hollande was flanked by rows of well-fed flunkeys and half the cabinet. Cameron arrived with three No 10 apparatchiks whom he consulted once, probably to justify their bus fares. He doesn't give great detail, Dave, but nor do most MPs. What he does give is great flattery, even when denying it. Bland phrases such as "there is more work to be done, but we are making progress" also flow smoothly from his lips.

The gig was Cameron's twice-yearly cross-examination by the Commons liaison committee. No, not liaison in the Hollande sense. Not a slighted mistress in sight, no actress either, not even Glenda Jackson. From the days when it was a shambolic ego-fest, the committee has raised its game. Only 12 MPs take part and confine themselves to two topics, topics in which they take an interest. No, not themselves, but – on Tuesday – energy policy and violence against women and girls.

Had any MPs got private interests to declare at the start of the session, asked Lib Dem chairman, Sir Alan Beith. The former lothario Tim Yeo cleared his throat. But no, the Tory chairman of the energy committee has energy interests, as did two others. Male MPs (nine of the 12) then plunged into weighty issues in which William Hague and Justine Greening are using "Britain's moral authority" to curb what Cameron conceded are some pretty foul practices.

If anyone had asked in Cameron's blokeish Bullingdon Club phase whether he could imagine being prime minister, the smoothie would probably have replied "there is more work to be done, but we are making progress." Had they asked if – as PM – he could imagine discussing female genital mutilation (FGM) in Britain or modern slavery in London, let alone for advice on cyber-bullying or sexting, he might have ordered another case of Bolly. His heroes, Winston and Margaret, never had to do this. But he was game and practical – "I'm a pragmatic person" – about what he could achieve at international level (90% of Egyptian women suffer FGM, he reminded them) or British squaddies could do in Afghanistan. He seemed faintly baffled about authority's failure to prosecute anyone about FGM in Britain.

Cultural barriers, MPs told him. The Labour Trappist Keith Vaz blamed the shortage of black and Asian authority figures. Dave, who has women trouble in his cabinet, sounded unconvinced.

When it came to energy, Cameron was, well, much more energetic, though still faintly baffled by the sheer complexity of those pesky prices. He slapped down chairman Yeo for suggesting the coalition's energy legacy might be power cuts.

Investment is pouring in and he had personally grilled power company bosses – " I looked them in the eye" – to obtain assurances that old plant can be dragged out of mothballs in an emergency.

It was a dull, worthy session but, if things go wrong, that sentence might just spell doom to his premiership one day. At roughly the same time in Paris, President Hollande was ducking questions about who exactly is his First Lady "out of respect for those involved", the old phoney. Yet François may still cling to power long after Dave is le toast.

David CameronHouse of CommonsMichael White
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Original, waspish and witty to the last, Simon Hoggart dies aged 67

Westminster victims of Hoggart's anarchic and acerbic wit join countless readers in mourning Guardian's polymath sketchwriter

Simon Hoggart was an original. As I type "they don't make many like him" I can hear some politicians muttering "Thank goodness". But rather more inhabitants of the Westminster village, including victims of his anarchic and acerbic wit, will join countless readers in mourning the Guardian's polymath sketchwriter, who died on Sunday after a stoical 43–month struggle against his incurable pancreatic cancer.

It was only in December that complications arising from the disease in combination with another round of chemotherapy forced Hoggart to give up writing the Guardian's parliamentary sketch – which he had done for 20 years – as well as his popular Saturday column. His final article, a review of the year just ending, appeared on 19 December. It was a waspish summary in which he noted that, while Pope Francis "may have renounced his own infallibility," Margaret Thatcher never did.

In Simon's personal pantheon, more sentimental than he usually acknowledged, readers and his wider audiences always stood high.

When I first worked with him in the Commons press gallery during the turbulent 1970s, glued to his battered Imperial typewriter was a handwritten memo to himself. It read something like: "Always remember, you are not writing for your contacts, for MPs or civil servants, but for a clergyman in Norfolk, a busy housewife in Penge and – with luck – two or three other people."

Not that it was ever just "two or three" readers. After joining the Guardian straight from university in 1968, Hoggart quickly found a distinctive voice, serious but idiosyncratic, often disrespectful, always witty. He reported from the dangerous streets of Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, then moved to Westminster as a political correspondent, briefly the paper's sketchwriter after Norman Shrapnel's retirement.

After 12 years on the Observer, then not owned by the Guardian, including a stint in Washington, he would later return to the sketch in 1993. By then a regular on radio and TV, Hoggart chaired Radio 4's The News Quiz for 10 years before 2006. He also wrote about politics for Punch, and wine and TV for the Spectator. It helped that he wrote fast, often while talking and (he had a low boredom threshold) doing a crossword. He published 20 books and anthologies.

Though a resourceful news reporter and feature writer on five continents, one with an eye for telling detail, shrewd judgments (Alan Clark was "a philanderer obsessed with his own wife") and a vivid turn of phrase, he found his most comfortable niche as a humorous columnist.

It was what the readers wanted.Twenty years after his return to the sketch, David Cameron, the 10th prime minister he had known, joined the last Monday night's tributes after his death at the age of 67. "Simon was an acute and witty recorder of British politics and one of the pioneers of the art of sketchwriting, as well as a prolific author and broadcaster. Above all, he was also an extraordinarily nice man."

Yet in what would be his final sketch, on George Osborne's autumn statement, he likened the chancellor to Mr Micawber ("In America the president's aides are scratching their heads and wondering how they can create their own British miracle") and wrote of Cameron that "he smiled like the Cheshire Cat after a large sherry". Of Ed Balls's response Hoggart declared: "If he had pretended to be any angrier he would have been coughing up his own intestines."

On Monday Ed Miliband, himself much-mocked, called his tormentor "a brilliant and funny writer," and was echoed by Tony Blair, who spoke of "an outstanding commentator and writer with extraordinary wit, humour and insight".

But Hoggart, whose family background and childhood were rooted in the industrial north of England, was not a fan of New Labour. His dislike of New Labour ("if they ever invent a fat-free lard it would resemble a New Labour MP") made him treat Blair cynically, as a self-satisfied opportunist. "I sat in the front row for Tony Blair's [conference] speech. It was like the monsoon in a Somerset Maugham short story," he once wrote.

At Westminster, as in Northern Ireland, Simon did not take sides, he mocked the follies of them all. But his instinct – Lancashire-born, raised in Hull and Leicester, the son of the literary and cultural academic Richard Hoggart – was on the side of the underdog. He knew Margaret Thatcher had made some necessary reforms, but felt she was neither evil witch nor national saviour, merely increasingly mad and out of touch.

John Major's curious vocabulary and sentence structure he routinely ascribed to the then-PM having learned English as a second language in a British Council office in rural Nigeria.He had his favourites: Tory Michael Fabricant (Mickey Fab) with his "My Little Pony" blond wig; the large and booming Tory grandee Nicholas Soames, whom he saw as a bouncy castle; Sir Peter Tapsell, whose grandiloquent pronouncements he imagined were being taken down on vellum by monks with quill pens. But as a stickler for correct grammar and usage, Hoggart was less forgiving towards John Prescott.

His daily pyrotechnics during the parliamentary term and conference season – plus Saturday's diary of his week's doings – became all the more remarkable in mid-2010. Initially misdiagnosed, he was found to have a cancer on the pancreas which surgery could not remove.

From then on, life became a struggle for survival. Hoggart was determined to keep working and to maintain his social life despite debilitating bouts of chemotherapy. He kept quiet about his illness and few outside his family – Alyson and the couple's two children, Amy and Richard – knew why he would take an odd day off.

In December, his condition worsened steadily. Though he got home to his family in west London late on Christmas Day, Hoggart soon returned to the Royal Marsden hospital. Until the last few days visitors had found him sounding off, as usual, against favourite targets, the folly of politicians, publishers and privatised train companies, the pleasures of food and drink, the stupidity of manufacturers' safety warnings. He remained determined not to give up, nor to let his illness become widely known lest it detract from the laughter he always sought to generate. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor in chief, said: "Simon was a terrific reporter and columnist – and a great parliamentary sketchwriter. He wrote with mischief and a sometimes acid eye about the theatre of politics. But he wrote from a position of sophisticated knowledge and respect for parliament. A daily reading of his sketch told you things about the workings of Westminster which no news story could ever convey. He will be much missed by readers and his colleagues."

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With no election in sight, MPs are busy 'ganderflanking' – or messing about

Normally we would be speculating about an early election by now, but there's no such luck with the coalition's five-year deal

Cabinet ministers tried out a couple of Tory election slogans on Thursday. "If you want flood defences, vote Conservative," said the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, a touch optimistically. "Vote Tory and you are 10% more likely to go to prison than under Labour," suggested mournful Andrew Lansley. That sounded more like it. Yet the very thought is premature, mere "ganderflanking" as they say, so MPs learned later, in rural Wiltshire.

Normally by this stage in a parliament MPs and press would be happily wasting energy speculating about a spring election, what the key themes would be and where exactly gabby Oliver Letwin would be locked up for the duration this time. Would it be in April after a giveaway budget? No, this budget promises to be a takeaway one. On local election day, then? Certainly not – 22 May is also EU election day in 2014, a gift for Nigel Farage.

No sunny June either because the fun-hating coalition agreement stitched up a five-year fixed-term parliament deal to prevent Tories or Lib Dems jumping ship. So they are all stuck with each other until 7 May 2015, even though there isn't much legislation to keep them busy. Time hangs heavy which allows for ganderflanking – or "aimlessly messing about", so the Wiltshire Tory Robert Buckland explained mid-morning. Might the ancient rustic word be sanctioned for current political usage, the MP wondered.

As Speaker Bercow immediately twigged, this was a blatant bit of publicity-seeking, aimed at getting Buckland on to BBC Radio Wiltshire. Not that Bercow minds blatant self-promotion in principle, but he represents Buckinghamshire, so there was nothing in it for him. The expression was duly parked alongside "frit", a bit of rustic Lincolnshire which Margaret Thatcher once retrieved from her youth to hurl at Denis Healey.

But for once rusticism was not parked by the urban political class. The Paterson ministerial posse was harried about the threat to ancient woodlands (a new Barratt estate, anyone?), red tape for pigs, badger wars (not a black-and-white issue, badger culling), and killer sugar, the foodies' new health scare. There were also calls for a food crime unit.

This turned out to be nothing to do with people who put ketchup on their breakfast, with Nigella's high-calorie chocolate treats or even food banks, the ones targeted for daring robberies by food criminals. No, it is about what Tyneside's Mary Glindon called "the unscrupulous people" who defraud the public with dodgy food. Sainsbury's, Tesco, Morrisons, expect a knock at the door. The sugar police are also on your case. Yoghurt, it's the new cocaine.

Farmer Paterson is not a man given to doubt. Like IDS being tormented over his universal credit shambles, persecution only makes him stronger. When Labour's Phil Wilson recalled that

David Cameron is blaming the new year storms on climate change, climate-coolist Paterson deftly sidestepped the loyalty test like a cowpat on the carpet. "Practical measures," Dave and I agree on that, he craftily replied.

No ganderflanking there then. But there was more. Later, Anne McIntosh, the Thirsk and Malton Tory who chairs the environment committee, led a whole debate on rural affairs. Most MPs, townies all, fled. The public gallery was reduced to two voters, equivalent to the population of Powys. What they missed was mean-minded, a sustained attack on government incompetence, except that the victims are country folk from far beyond the home counties, so they don't count so much.

Low incomes, high taxes, poor services, expensive petrol and a bad-to-non-existence superslow broadband offer, they suffer quietly in Wales, Devon and Cornwall, Yorkshire too. Ms McIntosh made a dignified appeal for better treatment and was supported on all sides.

Then Labour's Albert Owen spoke and allowed himself a partisan boast. His constituency of Ynys Mon – or Anglesey – "is the most beautiful area of the UK," he ventured modestly. That got them going. In the melee there was even a bid for beautiful Macclesfield.

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Politics Weekly podcast: Mark Duggan inquest, the first world war and tributes to Simon Hoggart

In 2011 the shooting of Mark Duggan by the Metropolitan police triggered riots that spread across England. This week, an inquest jury concluded that though Duggan was unarmed when he was shot, he was lawfully killed. It prompted angry exchanges outside the Royal Courts of Justice and a call from Tottenham MP David Lammy for the police to explain their actions further.

Joining Tom Clark to discuss this: columnist Michael White, leader writer Anne Perkins and political diarist Hugh Muir.

Also this week: George Osborne used his first speech of the new year to remind voters that there would be no easing of austerity on his watch. He hinted at big new cuts to welfare spending if re-elected and said that 2014 would be a year of "hard truths". It was a speech that angered Nick Clegg who was already embroiled in a frank exchange of views with education secretary Michael Gove over the origins of the first world war - a subject leapt upon by Gove's opposite number Tristram Hunt, himself a professional historian.

Plus: we pay tribute to the Guardian's parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart who died this week at the age of 67.

Leave your thoughts below.

Tom ClarkMichael WhiteAnne PerkinsHugh MuirPhil Maynard

Should MPs appear on reality TV? | Sarah Wollaston and Michael White

MP Penny Mordaunt is following in the footsteps of Nadine Dorries and George Galloway by appearing on ITV's Splash!

Sarah Wollaston: 'She's using it to advantage her constituency'

I will be cheering on my colleague Penny Mordaunt as she takes to the high diving board for ITV's Splash!, especially as she will be combining that with fully representing her Portsmouth North constituency in parliament.

We so often hear complaints about boring MPs and demands for them to become better role models. Why should anyone object when one of them agrees to take on a physical challenge for charity? Mordaunt is, after all, donating her entire fee for the programme to support the restoration of her local Hilsea lido, as well as raising money for four armed forces charities. Mordaunt is the first and only female MP who is a Royal Naval reservist, having passed out from Dartmouth last year. We need more MPs with real-life experience in the policy areas where they help to shape decisions for the future.

How many of us in our 40s would be happy to don a swimming suit for the cameras, risk public derision and dive from a 10-metre platform? High diving takes real grit and Mordaunt has the bruises to prove it. Yes, these challenges also take time; many hours of dive training as well as a demanding programme of trampolining and fitness exercises, but she has achieved that alongside her role as an MP. If you want something done, ask a busy woman.

As to the complaints that reality TV shows demean the role; it depends what you are doing. There is a world of difference between pretending to lap up milk while dressed as a cat and taking on a serious physical challenge. MPs often take on such feats of endurance for charity or simply to raise awareness of an issue – I hope to cycle the 100-mile RideLondon event in August to raise money for Mind – and television lends those causes a far higher profile.

Reality shows do engage with the public and local champions and role models like Mordaunt help to present the human side of politics and politicians.

• Sarah Wollaston is Conservative MP for Totnes

Michael White: 'It's a high-risk move that many MPs wouldn't take'

The majority of MPs think it's sheer madness to take part in a reality TV show. But most MPs are risk-averse, and rightly so. They lack that edge of boldness or danger that singles out a political star in the making – or in the process of burning out.

Politicians shudder at the thought of George Galloway being lured into a three-week rolling disaster on Channel 4's Big Brother in 2006 – the milk-licking incident is still popular on YouTube. Yet the then-MP for Bethnal Green and Bow survived the car crash, as he has so many. In 2014 he is MP for Bradford West.

Nadine Dorries was humiliated on the reality show I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here, being the first contestant to get sent home, with the wrath of David Cameron hanging over her. Like Galloway, she survives by being a mouthy populist whose outspokenness her constituents may admire more than despise.

But reality TV isn't for most MPs – and certainly not for those who have yet to establish a weighty reputation. Denis Healey could always pull funny faces, but he was a heavyweight chancellor. Lembit Opik, the exhibitionist Welsh Lib Dem, destroyed all credibility by making so many TV appearances. Jerry Hayes, a Tory barrister-MP with a show-off streak, dodged a bullet when asked to dress up as a penis by the comedian Mark Thomas. He slept on it and said no.

So flamboyant Penny Mordaunt, whose appearance on Splash! this month also represents a career gamble, is hedging her bet with a charity cut. The risk remains high, but worth it to an ambitious woman who once toyed with becoming the commuter candidate for London mayor. After all, the Tory who actually became London mayor is a 24/7 one-man, high-risk TV reality show and it hasn't done him too much harm.

• Michael White is assistant editor at the Guardian

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David Cameron emerges without a hair out of place after easy ride in Commons

Prime minister coasts through subdued PMQs without having to defend New Year honour given to supervisor of his side parting

It was MPs' first proper chance since Christmas to exercise the testosterone, yet PMQs was a subdued affair on Wednesday.

The rot set in during Welsh Question Time which preceded it. Normally a seething cauldron of Celtic intrigue, it was as gentle as a flock of sheep after the stun guns have done their work. Someone even called the Welsh secretary, David Jones, "a reasonable man".

And so it proceeded into David Cameron's weekly ordeal where the New Year's honour awarded to Lino Carbosiero, the prime minister's hairdresser, might easily have become a hot topic. "MBE for the man who shifted Dave's parting to the left!" Or "Gong for bloke who hid his bald spot! Cover up!."

Yet no one mentioned the crimper's MBE, let alone the cover-up. The bald spot remains visible, as popular a tourist attraction as Buck House or the London Eye.

Perhaps, like Fred Goodwin's knighthood, Lino will be required to give his gong back.

The sobering deaths of servicemen in Afghanistan and Norfolk hung over the session. And Labour's Paul Goggins, an unusually well-regarded MP, had died overnight.

He had been modest and warm, hardworking and collegiate. MPs rarely deploy such unparliamentary language against each other until they are safely dead. On Wednesday they did so in droves. It was touching.

All the same, business is business. Yet when Ed Miliband mildly asked the PM about flood prevention, he spoke as Mrs Noah might have done with Mr Noah over breakfast.

Were the emergency camel services a bit slow to arrive at the Ark, dear? Was the Old Testament Candle Co tardy in restoring power? Mr Noah told Mrs Noah they had all done well, but there were lessons to be learned for future apocalyptic deluges. Exposed bald spots should be moved to higher ground.

What, no knuckleduster, no blaming Labour for the floods? Had Flashman been expelled during the Christmas exeat? He had. As the pair stroked each other, rumour started seeping through the press gallery like the swollen river Severn. In response to public dismay over their "Punch and Judy" (copyright D Cameron) exchanges, Miliband had become the latest party leader to try to elevate the occasion. He had decided without consulting No 10. Yet Cameron took the emollient cue.

Like the footballing Christmas truce in 1914, it is unlikely to last. But while it did it was eerie.

From her section of the trench, Hackney's Diane Abbott threw a grenade about private landlords evicting benefit claimants. There was a partisan murmur until Cameron politely knocked the grenade back. Miliband raised the impact on poor communities of fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs). Cameron agreed. "If we work together, we can probably sort it out." Shocking!

When Miliband gently persisted, the PM gently detected a pattern of cleaning up problems left by Labour: 24-hour drinking, Blairite deregulation of betting, gaming and even banking, which he appears to regard as a separate industry with its own betting machines rigged by bank staff. Would Ed like "to input ideas" into a review? While the truce lasts, we all felt he would. Would they start singing Silent Night?

The session was not quite testosterone-free. Labour's Nick Smith protested about corporate tax-dodging. That's "a little unfair," the PM countered. The Flashman of old would have said: "We know where your kids go to school." he nastiest he got was to accuse Labour of a tax-and-spend relapse: back to the Brownite future.

In a testosterone mini-surge, he also called the SNP's Angus Robertson "the lackey of Alex Salmond" for demanding a Dave v Alex TV debate on McIndependence.

The last thing Scotland's no campaign wants is help from "a Tory toff from the home counties, even one with a fine haircut", interjected Labour's Ian Davidson.

What else could the new Dave do but agree? Ugly stuff, but at least Simon Hoggart was spared having to watch it.

PMQsHouse of CommonsNew Year honours listNew year honours list 2014Welsh politicsWalesDavid CameronFred GoodwinBankingRoyal Bank of ScotlandEd MilibandDiane AbbottScottish National party (SNP)Michael White
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