The Politics of the Upturned Swan

Many good performers or organisations are likened to a swan – the visible parts serenely gliding along, while underneath there is a frantic thrashing of flailing legs.

British politics at the moment is like a swan turned upside down. The country is actually relatively becalmed, but there is rather a lot of frantic thrashing going on in public.

The economy is growing slowly - not booming or collapsing. The stock market has finally regained a level it last saw years ago. There is no imminent election. No MPs have defected from one party to another during this parliament. Only two seats have changed hands at by-elections – one won and one lost by the Labour Party. The same three major parties have shared the role of government for the last century. The coalition is now into its fourth year. The major parties all agree, more or less, on education, HS2, green issues and the deficit. Crime is falling.

UKIP achieved an opinion poll rating of 22%, but this is less than half the level achieved by the SDP in 1981 and two-thirds of the level the Lib Dems reached in 2010. Europe is an optional obsession – nothing HAS to change and even if it does, it will not even start to happen for another four years. Only 7% of voters say that same-sex marriage will affect how they vote - and they are split with just over half of the 7% being in favour.

A stranger to British politics would ask what all the fuss is about. Actually, what is it all about?

Ukip at 22%. Calm down, Dear. It’s an Opinion Poll

Ukip’s opinion poll rating has reached 22% in the latest survey published today. How exciting is that? What does this mean?

It means that (give or take 3%) the equivalent of 22% of people told the pollsters that they would vote for Ukip, if there was an election tomorrow. Unfortunately for Ukip, the party cannot cash this in, as there is no election tomorrow.

But, are the figures believable? Opinion polls do pretty much do what they say on the tin. We can trust the pollsters accurately to have reported what people told them. In the same way, we can trust the 2001 Census to have accurately reported that 390,000 people said that their religion was Jedi.

Even allowing for a few people jumping on bandwagons or having a laugh, this does sound like a pretty impressive poll rating for a new party. That is, until you see that in December 1981 the newly-formed SDP managed to clock up an opinion poll rating of 50.5% in a Gallup poll – and they were up against Margaret Thatcher as Conservative leader.

So how well did the SDP do at turning this opinion poll rating into seats in parliament? The party was led by the Gang of Four, all respected former cabinet ministers - Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers - who had a well thought-out set of policies. The SDP agreed a comprehensive national electoral pact with the Liberals and it managed to attract 29 sitting MPs who defected into the party (28 from Labour and one Conservative). Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams fought by-elections and won.

When the next election arrived in 1983, the SDP won six seats – holding five of the 30 seats it was defending and winning one new one.

In the end the SDP split. Most of its members joined with the Liberals, to form the Liberal Democrats, who incidentally had an opinion poll rating of 34%, just before the last election in 2010.

So how excited should we be? That is entirely up to you, depending on your point of view. I should declare my personal interest. I was one of the 50.5%, who got quite excited in 1981. Personally, I will get excited again when we see a poll rating of 51% or more, as then we will be in record-breaking territory.

I also have to declare a schoolboy rivalry. My old school (St Dunstan's in Catford) just never managed to turn out a consistent product, having produced Labour MP Chuka Umunna, Conservative peer Michael Grade and me. Whereas, our rivals down the road at Dulwich College managed to produce Nigel Farage AND Bob Monkhouse.

Which way is the wind of defections blowing?

Monitoring individual political defections gives us a view of which way the political wind is blowing.

Historically more MPs defect for better career prospects, than over policy. On average, defection is a career-enhancing move, with defectors more likely than loyalists to be given ministerial office or a peerage.

With the current state of the parties, the prospects for ministerial office after the next election are unusually equally spread among the parties. There is no obviously sinking ship and no obvious favourite to win the next election, unlike the situation in 1997, 2001 and 2005. Another coalition is a distinct possibility (estimated by David Butler to be a least 50% likely).  It would be a gamble for any ambitious MP to jump ship in the hope of landing in another party, where the prospects for office could confidently be predicted to be better. So far, there have been no defections of MPs during this parliament and the uncertainties for the future are likely to keep a dampener on defections for ambitions’ sake, until after the next election

Some MPs do defect over policy disagreements. This is rarer and also, on average, less satisfactory for the defector in the long run. Some Conservative MPs might be tempted to jump ship to Ukip, but it would be a huge leap in the dark to join a party with no MPs, at a time when the policies of all the parties, particularly over Europe, are still fluid.

Rarer still are defections as a result of personality clashes – only accounting for about 3% of defections. There are clashes within every party, but most MPs do not leave because of them.

Therefore, the likelihood of defections of MPs well before the next election is unusually small at the moment. However, election years do tend to produce spikes in defections, so 2015 could turn out to be a bumper year for defections. There is the prospect of a retiring MP making a protest resignation, just before the election, as Brian Sedgemore did in 2005, by defecting from Labour to the Lib Dems. In the current parliament a retiring Conservative, with nothing to lose, defecting to Ukip is a possibility.

Even without an ebb and flow of defecting MPs, we do still have other straws in the wind, to see the prevailing trend in the political climate. Local councillors are more numerous than MPs, are usually outside the glare of the media spotlight and may well be used to working across party boundaries in local council coalitions. Councillor defections happen almost weekly.

The prevailing trend immediately after the formation of the 2010 coalition was for an outflow of councillors from the LibDems to Labour. This drift has now pretty much stopped and recently there have been a few defections of councillors to the LibDems. The dominant trend in councillor defections at the moment is from the Conservatives to Ukip, a pattern which has been established for well over a year.

Are these defections local storms of protest, or signs of political climate change? If you don’t believe in atmospheric climate change, you probably won’t want to believe in my methods for measuring political climate change - but then again, you just might, if the wind is blowing in your direction.

How and when should the coalition end?

Nick Clegg and David Cameron’s press conference in the Rose Garden at 10 Downing Street was the image which characterised the start of the current coalition in May 2010. However, at that time many people believed that the government was unlikely to last the full parliamentary term. Now, past the halfway mark, most think that it probably will.

History is on the side of the coalition surviving to the end. The Lloyd George coalition lasted for six years, in war and peace, from 1916 to 1922. The National Government lasted nine years from 1931 to 1940 and the most recent example, Churchill’s all-party Second World War coalition, lasted five years from 1940 to 1945.

Assuming that it does last, how could the current coalition be brought to a neat conclusion, so that the parties do not end up fighting each other in an election campaign, while still in government together? The example of the Caretaker Government at the end of the last coalition in1945 offers a precedent.

Although Germany had been defeated, Labour leader Clement Attlee, was willing to continue in coalition with the Conservatives and Liberals until October 1945, when the new electoral register was due to be published. Churchill made a counter offer for the coalition to last just until victory over Japan was achieved, but the Labour Party decided instead to withdraw from the coalition in May. Churchill then formed a Caretaker Government of Conservative and allied Liberal National ministers for the two months leading up to an election in July, with the Liberal and Labour parties leaving to campaign on their own separate programmes.

Despite the rather different circumstances, the 1945 Caretaker Government could provide a useful model for 2015. If the Liberal Democrats parted company from the Conservatives before the election campaign started, the parties would be seen to be offering their own independent manifestos, without an unseemly squabble within the coalition. It could offer an advantage to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the campaign, as the Labour Party would find it difficult to attack a coalition that no longer existed. Voters could also more easily see that the Liberal Democrats were free to form a coalition with the Labour Party after the next election, if Labour became the largest party but without an overall majority.

There is another aspect of the Caretaker Government which David Cameron might find tempting. The departure of the 25 Liberal Democrat ministers would create openings in the cabinet and other ministerial ranks for more Conservatives to be rewarded with office, however brief. For an overlooked Conservative backbencher, two months in office might seem much better than none. It would give David Cameron some incentives which he could offer to calm some dissenting voices in his fractious party.

The Caretaker Government was slightly smaller than a normal administration, comprising 88 ministers (the 1945 Labour government had 99).  For 13 of its 88 members, the Caretaker Government gave them their only ministerial office. These ministers included the appropriately named, Ronnie Tree, son of Arthur Tree and Ethel Field, who was appointed as a junior minister in the Department of Town and Country Planning. Thelma Cazalet-Kier’s one term of ministerial office was as Parliamentary Secretary at the Department of Education in the Caretaker Government. She was one of two female ministers: the other being Florence Horsbrugh, who later went on to serve as Minister of Education in 1951.

The Caretaker Government contained two future prime ministers, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, and the sons of three former premiers. The 6^th Earl of Rosebery, a former first class cricketer and son of the former Liberal prime minister, was Secretary of State for Scotland. Richard Law, son of Andrew Bonar Law, served as Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s boss at Education and Gwilym Lloyd George, son of former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, served as Minister for Fuel and Power. For Gwilym Lloyd George, still nominally a Liberal, the Caretaker Government provided a stepping stone in his defection to the Conservative Party, which was completed when he was elected as Conservative MP for Newcastle North in 1951. He went on to become Conservative Home Secretary in 1954.

Cabinet minutes show that the Caretaker Government dealt with issues ranging from the constitutional position of India to the illegal occupation of two houses in Brighton. Foreign affairs naturally dominated most of the agendas, as the war in Europe had only recently ended and Japan was still fighting. Clement Attlee, as Leader of the Opposition, was consulted on a list of uncontroversial legislation which would be enacted before the election and was shown papers on major issues of foreign affairs and strategy.

The most politically-sensitive issue during the Caretaker Government concerned whether the Conservative Party should make an announcement on progress towards setting up the National Health Service. A plan for the NHS had been outlined by the wartime coalition in a white paper in February 1944. The Conservative ministers were keen to show that they were working on the plans and did not want to be left open to accusations that their party would withhold or delay the introduction of the NHS. Aside from this, most of the other issues before the cabinet were short-term and managerial, rather than long term and strategic or political.

No reshuffle took place during the Caretaker Government’s term of office. Attendance at the, more-or-less weekly, cabinet meetings fluctuated. Many ministers, including Churchill, missed meetings because of official commitments, Anthony Eden was ill with a duodenal ulcer and the Home Secretary, Donald Somervell, was absent for a time after the death of his wife.

Overall, the 1945 Caretaker Government proved to be a useful firewall between an effective coalition and a divisive election campaign. The Labour Party won the 1945 election by a large margin, but the main reasons for this stemmed back well before the Caretaker Government. Attlee and the Labour ministers had proved themselves competent administrators of domestic policy during the war, the public wanted a brave new world and the Conservatives still carried the label of ‘Guilty Men’ over their role in pre-war appeasement.

Churchill did make a major blunder in the 1945 election campaign with his claim that the Labour Party would set up a form of gestapo if they were elected, but this self-inflicted problem did not cost him the election. Opinion polls, an innovation started during the war, suggested that the Conservative Party was on course to lose the election anyway.

Historians and commentators tend to overlook the 1945 Caretaker Government, but perhaps it is time to revisit it. For some politicians it was the highlight of their career.

The idea could be resurrected by David Cameron in the run up to the 2015 election. If it is, we could see another Rose Garden event to mark the end of the coalition in, say, March 2015 with a business-like handshake between Nick Clegg and David Cameron and an acknowledgement that they had managed to maintain a good working relationship, despite their political differences. The coalition would be finished. However, this time another might well be on the cards after the election.

Anniversary of 1962 Montgomeryshire by-election

Today is the anniversary of the Montgomeryshire by-election of 1962. It was caused by the death of Clement Davies, leader of the Liberal Party through its darkest years from 1945 to 1956. Clem assumed the leadership after his predecessor, Archie Sinclair lost his seat in the 1945 election, along with the chief whip, Percy Harris and the party's leading thinker, William Beveridge.

Clem Davies never had the full confidence of some of his parliamentary colleagues, particularly Megan Lloyd George, as he had become a Liberal National in 1931 and only rejoined the Liberals during the war. Davies had, however, played a significant behind the scenes role in Chamberlain's replacement by Churchill after the Norway Debate in May 1940, for which Churchill offered him a viscountcy, which he declined.

Clement Davies had a troubled personal life. He was an alcoholic and three of his four children had died in unrelated incidents, but all at the age of 24. The eldest son died in his office from an epileptic fit, his daughter was electrocuted by a high voltage overhead wire (deemed at the inquest to have been suicide) and the second son died in a military training accident on Salisbury Plain during the war. Only his youngest son, Stanley, survived into old age and was still alive when I researched his father's biography.

Clem worried that he would be the party's 'Omega' - the last of the line. He once described his position as Liberal leader as being one of almost 'supine weakness'. Nevertheless he held the party together for eleven dispiriting years, turning down Churchill's offer of a coalition and a cabinet seat for himself after the 1951 election.

In 1954 the Liberals came close to victory in the Inverness by-election and party membership started to recover. In 1956 Jo Grimond took over the leadership and was able to inject new dynamism into the party, which doubled its number of MPs to 12.

Clement Davies survived to the age of 78 and was still MP for Montgomeryshire at the time of his death. But, as Clem himself put it, the party 'refused to die'.

The winner of the 1962 by-election was Clement Davies’s Liberal successor, Emlyn Hooson, who wrote the foreword to my biography of Clem. Hooson held the seat until he was defeated in 1979. It was won back by Alex Carlile in 1983, who handed it on to Lembit Opik in 1997, who held it until his defeat in 2010.

‘Posh’ & ‘Pleb’ – the new Etiquette of Classist Insults

There is a historical pattern to classist insults. These days it is unacceptable to mock someone for their ethnic origin, religion, sexuality or disability. But it is still within the realms of social acceptability to ridicule someone on the grounds of their social class - but how much longer will this be tolerated?

Michael Heseltine was once derided by his Tory elders for having ‘bought his own furniture’. These days thousands of people stoically bear this social stigma as a badge of honour, as they queue up at Ikea. Conversely, Alan Clark was delighted to be called a real ‘toff’, even though his family were not landed aristocrats, instead having made their money from the textile industry – and they bought their own castle.

Until the First World War the elite really did run the country. Between 1914 and the1960s the working class acquired respect and cachet. But since then the middle classes seem to have gained the whip hand, to the extent that being seen as anything non-middle class is an insult. It is considered as reprehensible for cabinet ministers to be wealthy or ‘posh’ and taboo for anyone to be called a ‘pleb’.

Having personally been labelled over the years as ‘posh’ and as a ‘pleb’ (even before Plebgate made it popular), I am now anxiously waiting to complete the set, by being described as ‘bourgeois’ – but this seems quite out of fashion now!

Five days in May – and the 100 years leading up to it

Lord Andrew Adonis has been busy. Hot on the heels of his book Education, Education, Education, comes his new work Five Days in May, about the fraught negotiations to try and form a LibDem-Labour coalition in 2010, as an alternative to the current LibDem-Conservative government.

Andrew Adonis has also written the foreword to my latest book, which gives the back story to the 2010 coalition negotiations Defectors and the Liberal Party 1910 to 2010 – A Study of Inter-party Relations. I researched the relationships between the major political parties over the century leading up to election day 2010. In the light of what I found, the failure of the LibDem-Labour coalition talks was no surprise.

My research investigated all the MPs and former-MPs who defected to or from the Liberals/Liberal Democrats over a span of one hundred years. I analysed the timing and reasons for over 120 individual defections. Liberal defectors went in roughly equal numbers to the left and to the right. However, of those leaving the Liberals for the Labour Party, over half became dissatisfied or left their new home, whereas all those who went to the Conservatives remained happy in their new party. And this was despite the much closer policy positions of the Liberals and Labour Party.

Not only did my research reveal the differing levels of compatibility between the parties, it found that, given the same set of circumstances, some MPs are statistically more likely to defect than others. Those most prone to defect were male, wealthy, divorced, with a military background and those from a minority religion within their party. I statistically tested Paddy Ashdown’s theory that it is the ‘Toffs’ who are most likely to defect. He was right.

Andrew Adonis is now, very sensibly in view of the history, calling for preparations to be made well ahead of any possible Labour-LibDem coalition negotiations in May 2015, rather than leaving it to the last five days.