Michael White's Blog, page 49

Nuclear Nicky Morgan packs a punch at Treasury questions in the Commons

MPs have a nose for ministers on the rise – and in her second outing the economic secretary gave a combative performance

As blood sports go, politics can be heartless. And the Nelson Mandela effect can't be expected to last a whole 24 hours. So normal services resumed on Tuesday and MPs scented weakness in Ed Balls and Iain Duncan Smith, two established figures who, they sense, may be on the slide. They showed no mercy.

The Commons also has a nose for MPs on the rise. Up and coming female MPs are especially interesting because the colleagues measure them by the formidable standards of Margaret Thatcher – or Barbara Castle if you prefer. Who could be the next Margaret Thatcher, apart from you, Theresa May? And you, Esther McVey, the Scouse Barbara Castle?

First up at Treasury question time was a new contender, Nicky Morgan, MP for Loughborough since 2010, a mere 41 and economic secretary in George Osborne's team since 7 October. She packs a punch at only her second ministerial outing. Wham! Pow! Stop, You're Hurting! All that Labour MPs Julie Hilling and Clive Efford had done was ask about real average earnings growth since the 2010 election (there wasn't any).

Yes, earnings fell "owing to the previous government's financial legacy", replied Morgan. But the fall since 2010 is the second biggest in the G20, ventured Hilling. Not surprising, "we've had the biggest recession in 100 years", Morgan snapped back. Wham! Pow! Again! Did millionaire pay rises after the budget explain why average earnings rose faster than inflation only in April, asked Efford? Higher wages require higher productivity, countered Gradgrind Morgan. But we've also cut income tax for the poor, she added (for bankers too).

It was fierce, true believer stuff and carried on through the six questions Morgan was there to answer. Osborne was away in Brussels, so Danny Alexander, trousered most of the good ones, leaving David Gauke and Sajid Javid to share the rest. But they were like a tray of blancmange compared with Nuclear Nicky. When backbenchers landed telling blows about reform of pubcos (a Thatcher legacy disaster), she accused them of being "churlish". Asked about cross-border petrol smuggling in Ireland, she changed tone and got all thoughtful.

Was it a Thatcher moment, the kind that MPs witnessed late in 1961 when young Margaret (also a lawyer and 36) first got a break as junior pensions minister? Not quite, but a good start. All the while, Ed Balls (46) just sat there. Bellowing Tory MPs gave him a hard time last week and Fleet Street tips him for demotion. Is he bothered? Probably, but does not show it. Nor did he leap straight into the driving seat, as F1 stars are meant to do after a crash.

The shadow chancellor waited a full 50 minutes before asking Alexander whether Osborne or the Institute for Fiscal Studies was right about average incomes? Cue for dismissive roars. Danny tried to be mean, but his heart's not in it. Next time they'll unleash Nuclear Nicky.

She'll have to be quick. Rachel Reeves, Labour's latest rising woman, an economist and 33, later used IDS as a punchbag for the shambolic failures of his ambitious benefits reform known as universal credit. Barbara Castle might grudgingly have been impressed. As for IDS, Tory MPs know he means well, Labour MPs know he's not up to it. And no one does ungracious as ungraciously as he does.

House of CommonsEd BallsGeorge OsborneMichael White
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Nelson Mandela's death prompts Tory act of contrition

David Cameron said all the right things as Westminster paid tribute. But it was Ed Miliband who hit the right note

Thin but visible, a layer of irony hung over yesterday's parliamentary tributes to Nelson Mandela as Britain's political class rushed forward to touch the fallen hero's garment, as if to say: "We'd like to be him, on our best day." Bill Clinton once said just that.

Everyone was aware that South Africa's former colonial power had been complicit in apartheid's creation as well as its destruction, a record like that of no other legislature in the world.

A generation ago, Margaret Thatcher had dismissed him as a terrorist leader and a Tory youth organisation had worn "Hang Nelson Mandela" T-shirts. None were visible on potbellied nostalgics yesterday. But how not to turn a wake into a punch-up?

Mandela-esque restraint was the answer. Speaker Bercow, ex-head of the offending youth organisation, had made it easier by admitting he had been on the wrong side. So did David Cameron, who took an apartheid-sponsored freebie south at the not-so-tender age of 23, but paid a handsome tribute. If reflected glory was part of the day's calculation, so was contrition.

The prime minister can rise to big occasions, but did not do so here. Cameron said all the right things about this "towering figure" who reminded us all that "progress is not just handed down as a gift but won through struggle" – not normally an Etonian sentiment. Yet he rattled through it as if he had a helicopter to catch. When he described the brutality of the old regime, someone cried: "You went there."

Cameron ignored Dennis Skinner's bait and paid the first of many tributes to Peter Hain, the only MP present who had faced serious personal danger in the anti-apartheid cause. Ed Miliband was much more in his comfort zone. He spoke more slowly and more sensitively about Mandela's sacrifice ("a son unable to attend his mother's funeral, a father unable to attend his son's"), and got the first laugh: Mandela's practice of introducing himself as "an unemployed pensioner with a criminal record."

"I am not a saint: I am a sinner who keeps on trying," he had also said. You could almost feel MPs wishing they could say things like that in the constituency and not be laughed at over their 11% pay rise.

Even Gordon Brown's rare intervention was touched by Mandela's special grace. Apart from Hain, he was the one who had known the hero best. There were too many "I's" and "my's", but they shared a passion to eradicate child poverty. Brown spoke of Mandela's courage ( he has a morbid interest in it), and of his belief that we are all equal (except Blairites, obviously), so that Mandela had once rung the Queen for a favour: "Hullo, Elizabeth, How's the duke?"

But it was Miliband who put his finger on two crucial points. One was that the anti-apartheid cause was not always a popular cause. The other was that Westminster does not usually adjourn its sessions for foreign leaders, only for its own.

This is true. The Commons adjourned for JFK in November 1963 after a mere 3,585 words of tribute. But the charismatic president was murdered in his prime (46, not 95) and retired amid universal approbation.

Mandela deserves the honour because the great African stood for historic truth without rancour, for justice, toleration and respect for human dignity, Miliband explained. Was he a Gandhi or a Gorbachev, MPs wondered. Peter Hain evoked the Tolpuddle Martyrs, though a better bet is surely Abraham Lincoln, the greatest public official of the 19th century, who also suffered privately behind a kindly facade.

If Sir Malcolm Rifkind dared point out that Mandela had briefly endorsed the "armed struggle", Hain used his VIP status to repudiate the Tories' "craven indulgence" of apartheid. His stricture was gentle and was accepted – as Mandela would have wished.

Not that virtue was all on one side. Among anti-apartheid unsung foot soldiers is the veteran Tory MP Alistair Burt, who said: "My parents were convinced I had become a communist. Now, like many of my colleagues, they are merely uncertain."

Nelson MandelaPeter HainDavid CameronGordon BrownEd MilibandMichael White
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The best politics books of 2013

From the back streets to the Bullingdon Club, to the voting fiddle that helped Margaret Thatcher on her way - great stories from the year's finest political books

The British political book that most moved me this year is not a political book at all. Former home secretary, Alan Johnson's This Boy (Bantam) is an often harrowing memoir of his impoverished 1950s childhood at the northern fringe of Notting Hill, which, though not as grand as it is today, still represented two utterly different worlds divided by a few streets.

Alan's dad was a charming wastrel, Steve "Ginger" Johnson, a womanising pub pianist who blew his chance of a musical career and left the chores and cost of raising a family to Lily, his scouser wife. Too poor to accept her 11‑plus place, she worked herself to death in the Rachmanite-slum-landlord mean streets of W10, a place of outside loos and candles, of always being cold and hungry, of hiding from the rent man and getting false teeth because they're cheaper.

That Johnson survived all this to become a cabinet minister able to tell the tale with style and humour – but no glib political conclusions – is thanks to his formidable sister Linda. Just three years older than Alan, she was always the family's adult. When the offer of a council flat came two weeks after their mum's death, Linda had the gall to turn it down (too nasty and damp) while insisting to Mr Pepper, the social worker, that she be allowed to raise Alan. Linda was 16 and Mr Pepper took a gamble on her. Would he be allowed to now?

When congratulating the author in a Westminster corridor I said: "You must include a footnote in the paperback edition telling us what later happened to Linda." Johnson replied: "My publisher has asked for a second volume, it will be in there." Excellent. It will make a better underdog's case for Labour than most manifestos.

The political book, also a two-volume job, that most impressed me in 2013 did so unexpectedly. Charles Moore was one of the original Young Fogies of the 1980s, a precocious editor or the Spectator, later of the Daily Telegraph, a highbrow Etonian in thrall to much of what Margaret Thatcher came to represent. How could be write other than a sycophantic authorised biography of her, so many of us at Westminster assumed? Yet his first volume, Not for Turning (Allen Lane), which takes her career as far as the Falklands war of 1982, is a triumph. Moore admires his subject, but he is not afraid of her or unwilling to address her failings. He has also got hold of a lot of previously unavailable material, notably the gossipy letters that young Margaret Roberts (never a diary writer) sent to her older sister, Muriel, during their impressionable teens. Margaret even plays Madame Merle to Muriel's Isabel Archer, palming off a discarded lover (no sex, Moore stresses) who became Muriel's husband. There is a lot about handbags and frocks, but not about the war that Thatcher managed to avoid by getting into Oxford early. She rarely gave much credit to luck, but Moore discovered just how lucky she was to win her nomination ("Tories Choose Beauty") in Finchley in 1958: the agent was so impressed that he fiddled the result so that the male winner lost. Without that fiddle, which won her vital ministerial experience before 1964, there would have probably been no Thatcherism.

Journalist authors need sources and need to keep them sweet. So Matthew d'Ancona, another clever Tory hack, albeit more liberal in outlook, had a more delicate task than Moore, writing In It Together (Viking) about the current government while relying on some very good sources. Clearly George Osborne is more highly valued than "Needy Nick" Clegg or IDS – definitely not All Souls material. So the chancellor's abandonment of most of the goals he set himself in 2010 does not get the attention it deserves. D'Ancona is a graceful writer and has some revealing stories to tell. He has written a good book, but a courtier's book and a tactical one. It will become better when heavily revised or rewritten in due course.

The book that shocked me most was Damian McBride's Power Trip (Biteback), the behind-the-scenes tale of his career as a Gordon Brown apparatchik. McBride is clever and hard-working (despite the booze); his book reads like a selective confession to a Catholic priest. He leaked to make Tony Blair look greedy and lazy, to stitch up Gordon's rivals and the Tories too when he had the time, cheerfully rifling the government's policy hamper to further his goals. I thought I knew a lot about this world. I was naive, but remain grateful for my ignorance. McBride debauched the system because he believed Brown would be a great PM. As usual, alas, the feral press emerges badly from his account.

None of which will shock learned professors such as Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, who have compiled a notable indictment of modern British politics and administration in The Blunders of Our Governments (Oneworld) from pensions misselling to the Millennium Dome – the O2 arena to you – via Thatcher's poll tax, hubristic and fatal. This exercise is offered as a welcome antidote to traditional establishment complacency on which both distinguished authors dined so long, a splendid dipping-into volume to feed fashionable public distain for the fragile art of politics. As King and Crewe (the very names evoke the British class hierarchy) admit, they have not been able to compare the UK's performance with other countries' blunders, so it will not appeal to Ukip voters. Nor was it written for them, though it may assist the Farage insurgency.

Tony Benn's final volume of diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (Hutchinson), may help too. Many readers will find these diaries delightful, a reflection of their own loathing for Blair, their disappointment with Brown's betrayals, their distaste for the capitalism that has given so many of them comfortable lives. Others will find fresh evidence of a man who is at best a holy innocent, seemingly unable to distinguish between the merits of Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson, at worst a self-absorbed old hypocrite who contributed much to Labour's decline as a political force. I am in the second camp. Benn still lives a life of great privilege (not far from Alan Johnson's slum) where strangers rush to pay his restaurant bills, hoteliers let him smoke and even policemen smile when his car breaks down outside the Ministry of Justice.

Former Benn acolyte Michael Meacher, an MP for 43 years, offers his own remedies for Britain's fragile condition in The State We Need (Biteback), a conscious echo of Will Hutton's well-known volume. There is much to be said for Meacher's bleak diagnosis of a money-driven, spiritually desolate culture running on unsustainable principles and practices, though his supposedly non-partisan remedies read like a return to the dirigiste ambitions of his fiery youth, with supervisory boards and regulators on every corner. Such attempts to implement them gave Meacher's fellow-Manichean Thatcher her opportunity to reverse the social democratic gains of 1945. The much-admired German model has moved her way too.

Harry Mount's The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson (Bloomsbury) contains more wit than wisdom, but Mayor Johnson is wiser about what makes human society tick than Meacher, deplorably superficial though much of his off-the-cuff cleverness is. He is also much more aware of his privileged life than is the patrician Benn, less egotistical and much better/funnier at having his plum cake and eating it. "Bogus self-deprecation" is the hallmark of Boris's style, notes Mount in a witty introduction of his own, which also points out that the mayor has a Frenchman's sense of shame about his own misconduct – none at all. Thus Mount is vaguely ashamed to have belonged to the hooligan Bullingdon Club at Oxford, but Boris cries "Buller, Buller, Buller" when they meet.

Let us make a vain attempt to spoil Boris's day by giving someone else the last word. Mount quotes Charles Moore quoting David Niven on Errol Flynn. "You always knew where you were with Errol Flynn. He always let you down." Will Boris's offer to the British people, what Meacher would despairingly dismiss as "bread and circuses", let us down in due course? Or is this the best we can hope for – to chuckle in the gathering gloom?

PoliticsMargaret ThatcherAlan JohnsonDamian McBrideTony BennBoris JohnsonMichael White
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Michael Gove can't resist a slice of Pisa point-scoring | Michael White

Education secretary uses patter of annuity salesman to blame Labour for UK's indifferent showing in OECD league tables

Labour's Tristram Hunt was so determined to rise above petty party point-scoring when discussing the OECD's educational league tables on Tuesday that he waited until the last sentence of his oration before mentioning Boris Johnson's thoughtful venture into eugenics. Or "unpleasant whiff of eugenics," as Tris loftily described the London mayor's analysis of Britain's 2% super-elite and 16% layer of also-rans.

Apart from that, petty point-scoring was all the rage as Michael Gove unveiled the OECD's verdict on the four home countries. They're all a bit average (Labour-run Wales is especially average) and must do better if they are ever to catch up with elite Asian education systems like those of Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and (nowadays) Eton. Closer to home Tuesday's results sounded a bit like the European Championship – England beaten at home by Poland as well as Germany, Wales struggling, all weak on vital subjects such as maths, physics and penalty shoot-outs.

In his cocky 2% way the education secretary means well and tries to be good. In rare reflective moments he knows that no one country has all the answers and that humility is best. After all, as Hunt was even keener to mention than von Boris's gaffe, Sweden – Gove's 2008 free schools pin-up – has since gone straight down the OECD tubes. It is now the Wales of Scandinavia while England is saddled with free school mania, last year's fad.

But Gove just can't resist putting the petty-pointed boot in. He does so with the confident patter of a door-to-door annuity salesman. Labour's 13 wasted years are to blame for our indifferent showing in the worldwide study known as "Pisa tests" he kept telling the customers. He was especially harsh on Labour's craven subservience to swivel-eyed teachers' unions, the people who condemn kids to work down coal mines which have closed. Hard to believe that Gove was once a union militant himself.

Strange to report too, Labour deserves no credit on Planet Gove for what the minister called "the best generation of young teachers ever in our schools." Even Hunt, a blond demigod of good 2% family who would be spared in any Boris euthanasia plan, spotted that one. Jolly unfair, he said. "The secretary of state cannot have it both ways." Oh yes he could, and did. So did knuckle-dragging Tory fundamentalists, some of whose families have not seen the inside of a state school for generations.

Hunt got a riff going about the Lib Dems joining Labour to stop the scandalous hire of unqualified teachers. He conjured up an updated vision of Evelyn Waugh's Llanabba school (yes, it's in Wales), run by a dodgy Dr Fagan, awash with paedophile teachers and innocent, unqualified Paul Pennyfeather, a victim of Bullingdon Club bullies, probably led by von Boris.

It was a good try but Gove kept insisting there are fewer Paul Pennyfeathers in our schools than in 2010, just more of them in free schools. He also had fun urging Labour MPs who he identified as Blairites, such as Luciana Berger, to stick to their fallen leader's vision for academic excellence, which Brownite counter-revolutionaries had overthrown. Labour Wales is an object lesson in what not to do, said the ex-militant Scot. It was shameless, but enjoyable.

Being Gove he sidestepped suggestions that, after almost four years in office, he might bear some responsibility for our disappointing Pisa. The OECD says it's far too soon, he explained. That's not what you told me after four years in your job, said David Blunkett.

But nothing stops Gove for long. When Tory Peter Bone quoted a headteacher saying the secretary of state "is a dreadful person and absolutely hopeless" but has the right policies, he took it as a compliment. I can never be as popular as you, he told Bone. Pisas all round.

SchoolsPrimary schoolsSecondary schoolsOECDGlobal economyMichael GoveEducation policyMichael White
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Boris the clever cornflake gets his IQ in a twist | Michael White

London mayor is playing with fire in badly judged appeal to dubious intelligence of London's Gordon Gekko species

In highlighting the extremes of IQ to be found in human societies, including our own, has Boris Johnson boisterously just done a Keith Joseph to his own career? Or to recast the question more topically, has the London mayor done what Mitt Romney did during the 2012 presidential campaign in writing off 47% of the American people as welfare bums?

We are talking about clever people here; three clever ones, a fellow of All Souls in the late Joseph, a self-made multimillionaire in Romney and a highly talented £250,000-a-year columnist who has Britain's largest directly elected mandate in his spare time. Boris may still have a political future. The other two were so clever they screwed up as only clever types can. Something lets them down. Call it common sense.

"Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech" isthe headline on Nick Watt's Guardian story on Thursday. "Boris stakes claim as Thatcher's heir with policy shopping list," says the Times, indicating by its caution that the paper has a crush on the mayor.

"Boris: some people's IQ is too low for them to compete," shouts the Mail, whose own readers it complacently assumes are not in that category.

As you may have heard by now, Boris's message was complex. He wants "the Gordon Gekkos of London" – a reference to the 80s zeitgeist film Wall Street – to do more for the city and especially for its poor. But he also wants more grammar schools and argues that it is the spirit of envy that spurs on economic activity, that it is pointless and impossible to seek economic equality.

We can just about recognise that line of argument, though Thursday's Guardian coincidentally highlights the downside of the acquisitive urge too. There's the bloke so bright that he threw a hard drive containing £4m worth of Bitcoins on a rubbish tip. There's the Lawson/Saatchi staff trial, with its talk of millions and of cocaine binges, not to mention the sordid murder of Carole Waugh.

Money, it's a bitch, eh? And Larry Elliott also has an article detailing research that suggests we don't get happier with incomes per head above £22,000 which is, theoretically at least, about the UK average – though averages always flatter.

Where Boris has lit his own blue touchpaper is this passage, as reported by Watt and others.

In highly provocative remarks, Johnson mocked the 16% "of our species" with an IQ below 85 as he called for more to be done to help the 2% of the population who have an IQ above 130.
"Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% …" he said as he departed from the text of his speech to ask whether anyone in his City audience had a low IQ. To muted laughter he asked: "Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands." He then resumed his speech to talk about the 2% who have an IQ above 130."

He then resumed his thesis that in a competitive society "the harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top".

I think we can work out that colourful phrase too. It's a recipe for inequality, one which evokes Scott Fitzgerald's more delicate imagery of the days – he meant the Roaring 20s – when many blooms were pruned in order to produce one perfect rose. Boris wants his perfect roses to stump up more to help the less fortunate.

Except, of course, the sacrifice of buds didn't produce perfect roses. It produced more people like Tom and Daisy Buchanan – the epitome of the idle rich who people The Great Gatsby – than it did the hard-working rich, aware of their social responsibilities. We admire Bill and Melinda Gates giving away their billions, Warren Buffett too (there is a class war on, says Buffett. My class, the rich, is waging it and we're winning), but they are a minority.

Ditto Britain. The gallant rich are outnumbered by the others, they always are – and the rest of us know it. We can count, even with our lower IQs. Boris must vaguely know this, but being as clever as he is – a scholarship boy to Eton, a degree in classics at Oxford (four of his five siblings read Oxbridge classics) – he wings it, makes his Thatcher memorial lecture at the Thatcher-founded Centre for Policy Studies in much the same way he dashes off most of his Telegraph columns: quickly, but with great panache.

Which takes us back to Keith Joseph's Preston speech on eugenics, made in September 1974 shortly before Ted Heath lost that year's second election to Labour's Harold Wilson and opened the road to the little-known Margaret Thatcher. Joseph's remarks about curbing the fecundity of the poor and stupid ruled him out as a potential Tory leader, though everyone knew he was cleverer than Margaret. She had the temperament and stamina he lacked.

What Mayor Boris was trying to tell Big Cornflakes like himself was that London needs them in a globalised economy like the one now being created, but it needs them to behave better. On current evidence – subterranean basements the size of cathedrals being hewn beneath the capital's bigger homes and tax avoided on a massive scale by some corporations and business – the mayor is uttering a forlorn hope.

That is what makes his populist appeal – it included a swing at east European migrants and a plug for his doomed, anachronistic estuary airport project – so badly judged. Those lucky enough to belong to the 2% elite – as judged by imperfect IQ tests, of course – are sensible when they lead lives of quiet discretion and taste, engaging in good works too, rather than flaunting their wealth and good fortune. Many did not earn it and many are not actually so clever; they have been lucky in their actions or their birth.

The sensible ones – there are many, but they are out of fashion from here to New York and on to Beijing – know this. Successful idiots think it's just because they're so smart. Saps. The rest of us are unimpressed and may resent the mayor's avowedly elitist world view because – as Buffett will confirm – it's not true. Buffett once said he'd given his children enough money to "allow them to do anything, but not to do nothing" with their lives. There speaks real wisdom.

If the starting rise in global inequality continues at its recent pace, my hunch is that the reaction – already visible in populist movements everywhere – will not produce socialism and equality (that's been tried extensively and proved Boris not entirely wrong), but the bogus egalitarianism of rightwing populism whose rhetoric purports to tackle the excesses of the rich, but actually colludes with it.

You can see some of that in the populist forays with which the Cameroon Tories experiment, as you sometimes could with Blair and Brown. Nigel Farage of Ukip, himself a former City metal dealer, offers a version. So does Alex Salmond, currently Britain's most successful populist, a friend/courtier of self-styled outsider Rupert Murdoch and of Donald Trump.

Watch out, Boris. You are playing with fire – fire that may be tempted to burn down Eton just to prove it's on the people's side.

Boris JohnsonConservativesBankingPovertyWarren BuffettLondonMichael White
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Misty-eyed minister's misplaced lament for mythical lost decades of consensus

Badgered Owen Paterson regales House of Commons with entertaining but inaccurate picture of the 50s, 60s and 70s

Thatcherite cabinet minister Owen Paterson, got misty-eyed on Thursday as he contemplated the 50s, 60s and 70s, a golden era when the sun always shone on August bank holidays, and Labour embraced bipartisan policies instead of the petty point-scoring which disfigures today's politics.

Come again? The 50s may have had soppy Butskellite economics and full employment, but they also had Suez, Empire loyalists and Ban the Bomb.

The 60s fought over hanging, abortion, nationalisation and sex, straight and gay. The 70s was a throng of bipartisan types like Enoch Powell, Tony Benn, Keith Joseph, Michael Foot, Arthur Scargill and Denis Thatcher.

When it ended with 1979's counter-revolution, future environment secretary Paterson (b. 1956) was a youthful spear carrier.

Admittedly, Farmer Paterson's nostalgia was confined to the lost consensus over how best to tackle the £100m-a-year problem of bovine TB.

It once included the cross-party necessity of shooting, sometimes gassing, Mr Toad's reclusive friend, Mr Badger.

"What is that smell hanging over the Wild Wood, Ratty?" "They have gassed Mr Badger, Toad. And Mole is missing. Get out your washerwoman's disguise and head for Bristol."

There was real anger in Paterson's voice as he listed the cattle slaughtered because of TB infection, 305,268 in the past decade, another 22,512 between January and August.

Why can't we just follow the science like Australia, New Zealand and the Irish? They all have TB under control, he groaned.

You would not have guessed from his tone that the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act was passed under John Major – or "because Ed Miliband's Co-op friend, The Rev Paul Flowers, lobbied John Major," as David Cameron is putting it this week.

Nor that the scientific community is divided on the efficacy of this year's pilot cull. TV's St Francis of Assisi, David Attenborough, is against it. The usually-robust Daily Mail is wobbling like a Lib Dem.

Labour was sterner. If Paterson is pro-cull, they must be anti. "Why are you culling badgers on farms without cattle?" asked Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East). Because badgers move around and shit on other farms, explained Paterson, a countryman among townies.

It was a measure of how much everything has moved on since the "Never had it so often" 50s that few of Thursday's topics would have made much sense to our parents.

There were complaints about floods. "But surely no one would build houses on flood plains," dad would have expostulated.

Hearing MPs complain about air pollution cutting six months off the average life, dad would have observed "Killer air? What next! A little smog never hurt anyone."

As for women bishops, a hot topic during questions to the church commissioners, what could Sir Tony Baldry, the church's pointman in the Commons, mean when he promised legislation, now that the Anglican Synod has voted 378 to 8 in favour?

"They couldn't possibly mean female women, could they?" They could and they did. Labour secularists tried to hitch it to their own pet topics until Baldry explained the theology: even some women still believe men should be on top.

In another sign that the struggling church is trying to move with modern times, Sir Tony confirmed that "Archbishop Justin" is keen to see parishes supporting credit unions to keep the needy safe from loan sharks. Why did this news seem less reassuring than it might have done last week? Ah yes.

It must be that the very thought of the Co-op's Rev Paul Flowers running a credit union is unsettling.

Or, as David Cameron would put it: "Ed Miliband's friend, Paul Flowers, milking the poor so he can fund Ed Balls and buy himself charlie." It would never have happened in the 50s. Not much. And you could get change from 10 bob too.

Owen PatersonHouse of CommonsMichael White
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Cameron's crack at Labour's liaisons

David Cameron was as keen to talk about Nick Boles as Ed Miliband was to discuss Crystal Methodist Paul Flowers

By Tuesday, even Nick Clegg had caught up with Tory HQ's Labour-baiting script and was abusing Unite's Len McCluskey. But who needs a respectable trade union apparatchik when they can have the Co-op's Crystal Methodist banker, Paul Flowers, to wrap round Ed Miliband's neck?

At the start of PMQs, it took no longer than David Cameron needed to eulogise another soldier killed in Afghanistan before the barrage began. Backbencher Steve Brine obligingly deplored the "nightmare" whereby such a dozy cleric had ever become chairman of a bank. Could the PM investigate?

Clearly young Brine has been asleep since 2008's bank crash, which revealed that assorted Moonies, Tory card sharps and Doctor Who fans had chaired much bigger banks where they failed to spot risks that cost taxpayers billions. Cameron obviously overlooked it, too.

Crocodile tears cascaded down those rosy cheeks. He promised an inquiry and appealed to anyone who knew the Rev's little weaknesses – I mean you, Edward Miliband – to tell the authorities. The jaw-dropping hypocrisy was magnificent, and Tory MPs loved it.

Never mind that the coalition encouraged Co-op bankers to expand while regulators slept, perhaps on the same sofa as Dave and Steve Brine. Were there not photos proving that the cokehead cleric and rent boy fiddler gave Labour money the Co-op couldn't afford? That he met Miliband at parties (though not – you can't have everything – with rent boys)?

At this point the Labour leader had two options: to remind the PM of some dodgy Tory (and fragrant Lib Dem) donors, or to raise the threat to childcare in Cameron country, Chipping Norton, currently white-collar crime centre of the south-East. He chose the latter. In fairness to Cameron, he defended his childcare policies until the strain proved too much and he likened Labour's childcare plans to "a night out with Rev Flowers".

Depraved clergymen are the stuff of British comedy, so they had to laugh. Mr Speaker had to calm them down. Miliband then blasted ministers with a sample of tainted Tory donors before playing his day's ace: Nick Boles. Had not the brainy Cameron groupie just denounced his own side as "the party of the rich"?

Cameron was as keen to talk about Boles as Miliband had been to discuss Crystal Methodism and whether or not John Wesley ever did stuff. He did not quite accuse the Labour leader of devouring lines of coke (and rent boys) with the entire Co-op board. Flowers had "trooped in and out of Downing Street", unfit and uninvestigated. Gross exaggeration, especially from a leader whose own unvetted No 10 intimates and Chipping Norton pals are currently sub judice. That's what Miliband must have meant when he called Dave's dodgy dozen "just the people I can talk about".

Cameron then fell back on Ed Balls, to whom Miliband had referred (actually, he hadn't) as a nightmare. "I told you so," said Dave. Miliband repeated Boles's fears that voters don't trust the Cameroons. Slow on the uptake, a Tory MP raised yesterday's pantomime villain, McCluskey. Dave obliged.

It was all in danger of getting sensible when Michael Meacher intervened. The steam-powered leftwinger had read somewhere that UK business investment lagged behind Mali and Paraguay. If you can believe that, you can believe anything. Meacher does. Cameron's contempt was understandable, but unwise. The MP sounded as if he'd been "out on the town with Rev Flowers and that mind-altering substances have taken effect", he joked.

At the session's end, MP Meacher solemnly protested that he had been accused of substance abuse. Angela ("Calm down, dear") Eagle cried "You're a bully", several times.

Cameron half apologised for his "light-hearted remark" and appealed for a cross-party sense of humour. Labour remained a cross party, though it well knows that Meacher has inhaled nothing more mind-altering than Tony Benn's diaries.

PMQsDavid CameronEd MilibandConservativesLabourHouse of CommonsMichael White
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Nick Clegg fits into role of Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham

The deputy prime minister behaved like the toff who spends most of the week worrying about the housemaids' love lives and trying to keep his butler from being hanged for murder (again)

The coalition succumbed to a severe outbreak of moderation on Tuesday, one which caught everyone by surprise. At this rate, ministers will be withdrawing their retrospective bedroom tax before the first inconsolable widow hurls herself under a Boris bike.

Nick Clegg set the day's tone. No surprise there. When challenged about stalled social mobility during the deputy prime minister's question time – the spin-off from his successful radio show – Clegg behaved like Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham, the toff who spends most of the week worrying about the housemaids' love lives and trying to keep his butler from being hanged for murder (again).

"I strongly agree that the more we can do to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds very early on in their lives, the more dramatic the difference," he told Tory Andrea Leadsom, playing Downton do-gooder, Isobel Crawley, to Earl Clegg for the day. Leadsom spoke of the need to promote "the emotional resilience of families" through early intervention. Lady Sybil Crawley, the one who was giving chauffeur Tom a seeing to in series one, could not have put it better.

Fortified by his own healthy dose of early emotional tutoring, Clegg spoke keenly of inspiring teachers, free schools, votes at 16 and classy internships not all being trousered up by posh boys like himself. It was an all-in-this-together fantasy of social solidarity which would have made George Osborne choke on his cigar.

When elderly leftie David Winnick insulted the DPM ("are Dave, George and you examples of social mobility?") we half-expected Clegg to cancel lunch at the Savoy and polish the old monster's shoes.

High-minded moderation from Clegg is one thing. In similar lofty vein, up popped the attorney general, saintly Dominic Grieve, insisting on impartial enforcement of the law as it is written, not as the backbench Daily Beast group of MPs would like it enforced. Gender-based abortion, the age of consent, the Tory-toxic Human Rights Act, Grieve dead-batted them all.

MPs only realised something special was afoot when Chris Grayling found himself forced to resist kamikaze demands from his spiritual soulmates on the Tory Euro-dyspeptic flank. The justice secretary had no choice. Led by their Grand Ayatollah, Bill Cash, they were insisting that he legislate against a threat he had just told them does not exist; namely that an airy-fairy document called the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) would ever pollute the pure stream of English law. Skip the boring legislation bit, added some broad-brush hooligans. Let's just leave the European Union.

Obviously Grayling, the kind of cad whom Downton's dowager countess would have had horsewhipped, would love to have shown some Eurosceptic ankle, possibly a whole leg. But he is a cabinet minister and contented himself with hints of ankle and a bit of knee. He made lascivious remarks about what a Tory majority government would do to those human rights if it ever got the chance, but even Even Labour's Sadiq Khan praised Grayling's "calm, cool" manner, quite different to what he told the Daily Beast last week, he added. It was all very disappointing, so much so that conspiracy theorists like Kettering's Philip Hollobone were reduced to asking why no Lib Dem minister was present to support Grayling. Because my deputy is Lord McNally, Grayling explained gently.

Jeremy Hunt proved no more predatory in his day's urgent task. Following every health secretary since 1948 he is trying to discourage NHS nurses, the ones who didn't get enough of Earl Clegg's early resilience training, from torturing elderly patients at Stafford hospital and elsewhere. With reckless moderation Hunt lavished praise on NHS and staff all the same. The NHS is a "moral being", founded on a "noble ideal" and the "most loved British institution," he blubbed. An hour of cross-party hand-wringing followed. The man who once put the Hun into Hunt has turned into a cross between Barbara Castle and Downton's token Guardian reader, Matthew Crawley. And we know what happened to them.

Nick CleggHouse of CommonsLiberal DemocratsMichael White
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David Cameron puts cards on table in Sri Lanka summit blame game | Michael White

Union jibes are the Tory get-out-of-jail tactic for 2015, so well done the PM for managing to drag Len McCluskey into Sri Lanka

The prime minister achieved a personal first on Monday when he managed to drag the name of Len McCluskey into a statement on the Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka. Contrary to a joke in the current edition of Private Eye, the Unite union leader has not just been elected president of Zimbabwe after a campaign of fraud and intimidation. But David Cameron did it all the same.

The summit statement was yoked to a progress report on British aid to the typhoon-stricken Philippines. But some MPs preferred to focus on the stricken Commonwealth, shamed by its association with the blood-soaked regime in Colombo, they argued. But who to blame for that decision? Amid the day's many human tragedies, the PM bravely tackled this burning issue too.

He stuck it on Miliband-backer Gordon Brown's government. At the 2009 summit it accepted Sri Lanka as host in 2013, but now had the opportunist cheek to complain about it.

Ah, but no, countered Labour's leader, who was sporting his new mini-mullet haircut, the one which has set the fashion pages aflutter but not the voters. In 2009 Colombo had been blocked as a venue for the 2011 bash, but pencilled in for 2013, subject to human rights progress, the mulleted matinee idol explained. The decision could have been reversed in 2011.

So it was Dave's own fault? Certainly not. "If he knows anything about foreign affairs, and I doubt it because he barely gets out of Islington, he would know this is a consensus organisation," Cameron countered – a reference to the Commonwealth, not the coalition. Then came Dave's karate chop. "He cops out every time. Too weak to stand up to Len McCluskey, too weak to stand up to dictators abroad."

It was Flashman bluster, so Tory MPs loved it: the union bogey is their get-out-of-jail card for 2015.

Apart from that Cameron did quite well. It had been right to attend, to champion democratic values, free trade and the brave Tamils who had dared to speak out during Cameron's visit (even journalists had been heroic).

Some of the trip's critics gracefully conceded they had been wrong. And whenever an MP protested that Dave had failed to "take the lead" on climate change or LGBT rights, he said: "Obviously, it's quite difficult to take the lead if you don't go."

The question of whether the summit cup was half-full or half-empty had been preceded by a similar question about the state of the UK jobs market. Is it a foaming cup of cheer and rising employment totals, disabled widows whistling on their way to work in Poundland at Atos's kind suggestion, more orphans up chimneys than ever before, single mums on nightshifts?

Iain Duncan Smith and his scouse cheerleader, Esther McVey, certainly gave that impression – IDS in a tone of quiet depression, McVey as happy-clappy as if she was still on children's telly, her cup half-full of chardonnay.

Faced with a stream of only lightly-cooked government figures about falling jobless totals and rising numbers in work, Labour countered with sourness: failed targets, slow and unjust Atos rulings, IDS's department collapsing into Philippine disorder as Typhoon Iain takes its toll. The jobs cup half-full? Never. It is a half-empty tankard of flat Newcastle brown ale with a dead wasp and half a crisp floating on it.

In response IDS kept losing his rag. The Quiet Man noisily accused Labour's spokeswoman, Rachel Reeves, of being pathetic and told the unstoppable Chris Bryant, a Tory turned Blair-Brownite ("and now he says he's a socialist on his website"), of getting so excited "he'll jump out of his underpants if he's not careful". A sly jibe, that one.

Unfazed, McVey was finger-waggingly combative, but cheerful. Whose job can she being eyeing, Iain?

David CameronCommonwealth summitSri LankaConservativesLen McCluskeyTrade unionsHouse of CommonsMichael White
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Philippines' people power has been beset by disasters natural and man-made | Michael White

Typhoon Haiyan stirs memories of the struggles under the Marcos regime and a global image problem

For a short spell in the mid-80s I was the Guardian's political correspondent in the Philippines during the campaign to oust its dictatorial president, Ferdinand Marcos, whose hand I avoided shaking at a press conference in Manila's Malacañang Palace before his eventual fall. This often-unlucky society has been in my thoughts as typhoon Haiyan wreaked its havoc.

As countries go, the Philippines has an image problem abroad, many popular connotations being negative, a victim of assorted imperialist ambitions – Spanish, American, Japanese – and of natural disasters, earthquakes and volcanoes, hurricanes and tropical floods. All too often the word Filipino conjures up ideas of domestic service and subservience in distant lands.

Yet the Filipinos I met during two stints there in 1986 were both friendly and brave. Digging through the cuttings I found an article I wrote quoting a Manila intellectual saying: "What I find inspiring in this country is the loss of fear." That's a familiar remark, isn't it? From Romania and Poland to Egypt and Libya when people decide they've had enough is moment when tyrants are toppled.

The Philippines are actually huge. An archipelago of 7,000 hot and mostly lush tropical islands east of the South China Sea, its population is now 98 million – at least a third bigger than in 1986 – and its current growth rate 6%. After reconquest and independence from the US in 1946 it was expected to become one of the early "Asian miracle" countries, but stalled under the Marcos kleptocracy, which began in 1965.

So the last 25 years have been better, albeit patchily, first under the late Corazon "Cory" Aquino, the gentle, amateur politician and revered "mother of democracy" whose son "NoyNoy" Aquino is currently the Philippine president struggling to cope with the latest natural disaster – and not doing very well. In the dynastic politics of Asia it was the regime's murder of Cory's husband, then opposition leader, Benigno Aquino Jnr, at Manila airport (now named after him) on return from self-imposed exile in 1983 that started the chain of events which toppled Marcos.

In the month I spent there in the runup to the 1986 elections, which Marcos conceded but then attempted to steal from Cory Aquino, I travelled extensively. In the north of Luzon, the main island, I visited Marcos's native village in Ilocos – with its well-paved roads and poshed-up birthplace (even the family well was on the first floor!). A man was painting a huge "Congratulation your Victory, President Marcos" banner, which was tactless the day before polling day. In the remote southern island of Mindanao (the world's deepest ocean floor takes its name from it), which is Muslim – the two great evangelising faiths clashed in the Philippines and Christianity won – I saw grim poverty which fuelled an insurrection never quite extinguished.

I didn't visit storm-struck Cebu, but did inspect vast sugar cane plantations on nearby Negros (11 March 1986) where families were struggling on 50p a day, not enough to buy the 3kg of rice six people need to get by without the salt and fish that augments it. Some talked of bloody revolution if Aquino's promised reforms did not deliver a better life. Many remain poor and disappointed, but it has not happened.

US forces have withdrawn from their two great bases at Clark and Subic Bay, corruption is said to be less, but still very present. Some 11 million Filipinos live and work abroad, their remittances an important part of the economy. In Hong Kong on a Sunday night one could – perhaps still can – here the high-pitched chatter of Filipino houseworkers enjoying their evening off with street picnics and gossip. "My mother looks after my children at home, as I will look after their children one day," one told me with simplicity and sadness.

There are 170 languages used in the Philippines (Tagalog the chief one), but none of them is Spanish, a surprise when I naively arrived there. "Four hundred years in a monastery, then 100 years in Hollywood," is how Filipinos described their "liberation" from Spain in 1898, the Spanish-American war whipped up by New York tabloids and immortalised in Citizen Kane. Catholicism, as practised by 90% of Filipinos, is Spain's chief legacy. But the elite's shared language is English.

It was the church's turning away from Marcos – later followed by opportunist generals and plutocrats from his crony capitalism – which finished him off. The splendidly named Cardinal Sin was a powerful voice for reform as the wind blew even the pro-crony Reagan administration into opposition. That and people power. From the roof of the Manila hotel – great colonial relic – I counted the vast protest demo below and (by breaking up the crowd into equal squares) reckoned it was close to the 1 million that the opposition claimed. Too big to break up except at great cost.

Marcos had been convicted of a political murder in his youth (overturned on appeal), but his regime was primarily a greedy one rather than bloodthirsty. He and his wife Imelda salted away billions which they never got to spend after being hustled out of the Malacañang at night by US forces and into exile in Hawaii. "Guns, goons and gold" was another slogan of the times and villagers (the flicker of TV sets inside thatched huts was a novelty to me) were clearly vulnerable to threats. Simon Winchester, Guardian turned Sunday Times, and I smuggled a man out of a village in our car boot to escape them.

I never got to hear Ferdinand and Imelda sing together, a favourite routine, though I waited with a vast crowd near one of Manila's famous rubbish tips and heard an evidently poor man assure me that, whatever Marcos's faults "our peso is stronger than the Mexican peseta" – a Thatcherite at heart. The couple did not arrive until 2am. After I had left. Nor did I see Imelda's 600 pairs of shoes when I returned to the Philippines on the night of Marcos's flight. As I struggled through the crowd towards the fallen Malacañang I felt my wallet disappear into the clutches of nimble fingers: that setback took most of the day.

But I remember the colourfully painted, scary taxis, "Jeepneys" after second world war US army jeeps, with affection, the cock-fighting and the smells less so. One morning Winchester – now a successful author -– swung by a downtown McDonald's (it had an evil drain outside) to pick up burgers for breakfast on the road. Being one of nature's democrats he offered a piece to our driver. "I will take it home to share with my family," he said of this exotic and expensive novelty.

And I will always be grateful for the political insight offered by an old man in central Luzon who stood on his head to prove to me he was very much alive and well. "I helped elect Marcos in the old days," he said before explaining all the reasons why it had gone wrong. Would Marcos steal the coming election, I asked? "He'll try," was the drift of his reply. "He won't succeed this time. They can burn down one town hall, but they can't burn down them all."

And so it proved to be – as it so often does when people power moves, though it often takes a lot longer than the few weeks it took between fraud and flight in 1986. Neither guns, goons nor even gold (the Fleet Street variety included) can hold out forever. No one can burn down all the town halls and keep on burning them.

PhilippinesTyphoon HaiyanNatural disasters and extreme weatherAsia PacificMichael White
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