Cutting the Mustard
The Labour leadership keeps suggesting that the 'right wing' press has it in for Ed Miliband and that he is much more popular within his own party and the country at large.
But here's an article from The Telegraph which bursts that particular bubble, as one of the senior figures from the last Labour Government, Charles Clarke, spells out why he thinks Ed Miliband is failing to 'cut the mustard' with the voters.
For good measure Clarke also says that as a part-time MP, Gordon Brown should stand down which I find rather honest and refreshing, I have to say.
Ed Miliband will lose election to Tories, Charles Clarke says
Ed Miliband has fewer qualities than Neil Kinnock and will lose the 2015 General Election, Charles Clarke warns
Charles Clarke, left, says that Ed Miliband, right, is failing to appeal to voters because he has an "assembly of odd policies" Photo: Reuters/PA
By Steven Swinford - The Telegraph
The Tories are on course to win an overall majority at the next election because Ed Miliband is a worse leader than Neil Kinnock, a former Labour Home Secretary has warned.
Charles Clarke said that Labour has "no narrative" and Ed Miliband is failing to appeal to voters because he has an "assembly of odd policies".
Mr Clarke also criticised Mr Miliband for failing to "set out clearly" how he would control the deficit and said Labour is unlikely to regain public trust in its ability to handle the economy.
The comment from one of Labour's "big beasts" are likely to be seized on by the Conservatives who have consistently lagged behind in the polls.
Mr Clarke told Huffington Post: "I think the most likely outcome is a Tory overall majority. You've got to set out an overall account of what it is. And I don't think we have an account and I think that's Ed's biggest challenge.
Charles Clarke, left, says that Ed Miliband, right, is failing to appeal to voters because he has an "assembly of odd policies" Photo: Reuters/PA
By Steven Swinford - The Telegraph
The Tories are on course to win an overall majority at the next election because Ed Miliband is a worse leader than Neil Kinnock, a former Labour Home Secretary has warned.
Charles Clarke said that Labour has "no narrative" and Ed Miliband is failing to appeal to voters because he has an "assembly of odd policies".
Mr Clarke also criticised Mr Miliband for failing to "set out clearly" how he would control the deficit and said Labour is unlikely to regain public trust in its ability to handle the economy.
The comment from one of Labour's "big beasts" are likely to be seized on by the Conservatives who have consistently lagged behind in the polls.
Mr Clarke told Huffington Post: "I think the most likely outcome is a Tory overall majority. You've got to set out an overall account of what it is. And I don't think we have an account and I think that's Ed's biggest challenge.
"[He has got to] Set out a clear statement of what Labour would actually do. Give people a reason to vote Labour. not an assembly of odd policies like the electricity freeze or whatever. [He] lacks an overall story."
Mr Clarke, who served as Neil Kinnock's chief of staff in the 1987 and 1992 General Elections, said the former Labour leader has "far more qualities" than Mr Miliband.
He said: "Neil has far, far more qualities than Ed Miliband as a leader. Neil was a fantastic leader and brought Labour back towards victory."
However, he suggested that Mr Miliband still has the abilities he needs to become Prime Minister. He said: "I think he has a problem with the population, undoubtedly. He is an intelligent man, he'd be a good prime minister. I don't myself think he's geeky. I think those are offensive-type descriptions. I don't go along with all that stuff."
He criticised both Mr Miliband and Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, for apologising for the influx of Eastern Europeans under Labour.
Her said: "One of my restraints over the last three or four years has been to not attack particularly Yvette and Ed Miliband on what I think are ignorant and ill-informed statements about what happened in this whole process."
Mr Clarke said that Tony Blair, who he served under, has been "damaged" by the amount of money he has made since returning to office but he could still return to British politics.
He said: "Were he a Labour MP, I think he'd have every chance of being elected leader of the Labour Party, which is quite extraordinary, and were he elected leader of the Labour Party, I think he'd have every chance of being elected prime minister, which is also extraordinary."
He added that Gordon Brown, the former Labour leader, should quit the Commons because he doesn't spend enough time there. He said: "He's an elected member of parliament. If he doesn't want to be an MP he should stand down."
Gordon Brown Mark II (6 April 2013)
John Rentoul had an excellent article in The Independent the other day - and hit the nail on the head with his analysis of what a Labour Government under Ed Miliband would mean.
Now I would like to have a reason to vote Labour again, but the following killer quote sums up the key problem I have:
“Labour – its front bench and back rooms alike – is now led by people who spent a decade believing that Tony Blair was a problem and Gordon Brown was the answer.”
A timely piece and - to my mind - JR's assessment of the political outlook is entirely fair.
The Ed Miliband experiment has been tried before. Remember Gordon Brown?
The Tories have gone out of their way to tell us they don’t really want to win the next election. Alas for them, this increases the chances of a Labour government.
Ed Miliband is quite likely to be prime minister in two years and one month.
This is not because he deserves to be, but because the Conservatives lack the discipline to stop him. Winning by default creates problems, as Labour discovered in 1974. Someone who was active in the party at the time advised me to remember “what happens when a Labour Party consisting of former ministers who have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing come to power after a Tory interlude government, which after a strong, interesting start just froze up”.
It wasn’t that the voters thought Edward Heath was wrong to challenge the power of the trade unions; it was just that they thought he had made a mess of it, and that the other lot couldn’t be worse.
That could be the situation in 2015. I still think that, if it comes to a choice between David Cameron and Ed Miliband as prime minister, the voters will prefer the incumbent. A ComRes poll for The Independent on Sunday last month found that Cameron was three points ahead of his party in “favourability” rating, while Miliband was nine points behind his. But party identity still matters. People think the Labour Party, whoever leads it, is more likely to protect their jobs.
The thing that has changed over the past year or so, however, has been that the Conservative Party has gone out of its way to tell us that it doesn’t really want to win. Its leaders made the huge error of cutting the top rate of income tax, which made them seem insincere in claiming that we were “all in it together”. And its followers decided it was more fun to talk about leaving the EU or the European Convention on Human Rights or to speculate about Boris Johnson taking over or why the Chancellor wasn’t cutting spending even further, than about an economy that is creating jobs.
So we have to take Prime Minister Miliband seriously. And we have to take seriously the likelihood that his government will be a disaster. It is not just the parallel with 1974, or even the much-cited example of what has happened in France since last year. François Hollande, whose election was hailed by Miliband as evidence that, in these straitened times, the left is finally answering the public mood, has become more unpopular even faster than the other François, Mitterrand, did when he tried “socialism in one country” in 1981.
There is another historical parallel that is even more relevant. And that is what happened here in 2007. The Brownites thought that all they had to do was to change the face at the top and make the Labour Party feel good about itself again. This rediscovery of authenticity would inspire a grateful nation, a nation that had been confused for 10 years by Labour people forced to say things in which they didn’t believe.
As Janan Ganesh, the Financial Times columnist and biographer of George Osborne, pointed out yesterday: “Labour – its front bench and back rooms alike – is now led by people who spent a decade believing that Tony Blair was a problem and Gordon Brown was the answer.” This was a problem in 2007. When they took over, they had no sense of direction, except to tack a little to the left, which is what they had been doing for years to ensure Brown’s succession.
But it will be even more of a problem in 2015 – because Miliband was in charge of the policy preparation when Brown took over, and in charge of writing the manifesto for 2010, which was so weak it had to be rewritten at the last moment. And he has done nothing to prepare for government this time either, except to say that Labour would have cut slightly less in the past but that it cannot say anything about the future.
A telling example, in an interview with Mark Ferguson, editor of LabourList, over the weekend, is Miliband’s promise to replace tuition fees with a graduate tax. “We’re definitely looking at it. I think there’s been some work going on at IPPR looking at the options, too.” Miliband pointed out that Labour had suggested cutting the maximum tuition fee to £6,000 from £9,000 a year, and said: “We’re looking at all of these issues for the manifesto, and what can be done.” But we know what happened the last time the Brownites tried to design a graduate tax: Brown opposed tuition fees, promising to come up with an alternative, and, when he did, it was blown away as unworkable by Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary. There are genuine problems with financing it by a tax rather than an enforceable debt, as Nick Clegg discovered to his cost.
Yet these are the people and their vague wish lists of nice Swedeny policies who control the party. And they don’t even do that very well. No one notices when an opposition party is divided, but on the day before the Budget last month, 40 Labour MPs rebelled against Miliband when he asked them to make a tough choice on cutting benefits for people who refuse to take part in work experience or training. This was the policy of the Labour government but, because of a fuss over some badly designed unpaid-work schemes, many of Miliband’s Brownite MPs, including John Healey and Nick Brown, defied the whip to vote against it.
The rebels were supported by Len McCluskey, the leader of Unite, the union which backed Ed Miliband over his brother, which might explain why the Labour leader’s response was mildness itself: “As for the colleagues who took a different view, I understand why they were angry about what the Tories had done, but I felt we took the right decision and I still feel we took the right decision.”
The other thing Ed Miliband said in his weekend interview was: “It is about doing politics differently.” Well, his brother tried that, but it turned out that doing politics the same was more effective. That’s why the Brownites are trying to do it the same, while pretending that it is different. Perhaps the economy will pick up, in which case this won’t matter. But I feel that the worst outcome of the next election would be for Labour to win it so ill-prepared.
John Rentoul is chief political commentator for ‘The Independent on Sunday’
Blatant Sexism (3 December 2013)
Here's an interesting story from the Mirror newspaper which is having a go a Nadine Dorries MP for employing her daughter as a personal secretary on a £35,000 salary - despite the fact she lives almost 100 miles away.
Now I think the Mirror has a fair point, but I also think the paper is guilty of blatant hypocrisy and sexism - because why single out Nadine Dorries when there is a much worse example right under their journalists noses.
Step forward Gordon Brown MP - the former Labour leader and Prime Minister - who spends a lot of his time out of the country at the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University, which means that he is clearly unable to attend to the duties of his day job at the House of Commons.
I looked up the distance from London to Abu Dhabi and it's approximately 3398 miles - yet this doesn't seem to concern the Labour supporting Mirror in the same way.
But it should.
Tory MP Nadine Dorries threatens to 'nail Sunday Mirror reporter's testicles to the floor using own front teeth'
She was answering a question about how her daughter could work as her £35,000-a-year secretary when she lives nearly 100 miles away
Threat: Nadine Dorries lashed out on Twitter
Barcroft
Tory MP Nadine Dorries yesterday threatened to nail a Sunday Mirror reporter’s testicles to the floor – for asking how her daughter could work as her secretary when she lived nearly 100 miles away.
The controversial MP claims up to £35,000 a year of taxpayers’ money to employ Jennifer, 26, under House of Commons guidelines.
They allow for “secretarial support” at an MP’s Westminster or constituency office.
But when we told 56-year-old Ms Dorries we had discovered Jennifer lived in a Cotswolds village 96 miles from her mother’s desk in London and 89 from her Mid-Bedfordshire base in Shefford, before emailing a statement she took to Twitter to vent her spleen.
In an extraordinary outburst, she tweeted: “Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor… using your own front teeth. Do you get that?”
The rant came after the Sunday Mirror revealed last week how her business partner Andy Rayment also runs a business with a glamour model.
Our latest revelations are based on details in official Parliamentary records that show Jennifer is her mother’s “senior secretary” - a position that often calls for face-to-face meetings with constituents.
On Thursday Jennifer was at home taking her dog for a stroll in Willersey, Worcestershire.
Barcroft
Tory MP Nadine Dorries yesterday threatened to nail a Sunday Mirror reporter’s testicles to the floor – for asking how her daughter could work as her secretary when she lived nearly 100 miles away.
The controversial MP claims up to £35,000 a year of taxpayers’ money to employ Jennifer, 26, under House of Commons guidelines.
They allow for “secretarial support” at an MP’s Westminster or constituency office.
But when we told 56-year-old Ms Dorries we had discovered Jennifer lived in a Cotswolds village 96 miles from her mother’s desk in London and 89 from her Mid-Bedfordshire base in Shefford, before emailing a statement she took to Twitter to vent her spleen.
In an extraordinary outburst, she tweeted: “Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor… using your own front teeth. Do you get that?”
The rant came after the Sunday Mirror revealed last week how her business partner Andy Rayment also runs a business with a glamour model.
Our latest revelations are based on details in official Parliamentary records that show Jennifer is her mother’s “senior secretary” - a position that often calls for face-to-face meetings with constituents.
On Thursday Jennifer was at home taking her dog for a stroll in Willersey, Worcestershire.
Office job: Jennifer takes dog for a walk
Sunday Mirror
A Commons official said: “It’s hard to see how she can deal with an MP’s electorate in the most efficient way when she lives nowhere near Parliament or the constituency.”
Jennifer is the second of Ms Dorries’ three daughters to work for her mum at taxpayers’ expense.
Her eldest, Philippa, earned up to £45,000 a year as her office manager.
When a storm broke in September about Jennifer’s job, Ms Dorries claimed she provided “value for money”.
Ms Dorries last night claimed her daughter did the 89-mile journey from her home to the constituency office in 80 minutes.
The AA’s online route planner says the fastest route is two hours, 12 minutes.
The MP said: “Jennifer’s main place of work is in the constituency, where she stays for some of each week.
“Her journey time is 1hr 20 mins. She does not claim from the staff travel allowance and covers all her own travel costs.
"Her journey time is less than mine from Bedfordshire to Westminster which is 1hr 30mins, as it is for all of my constituents who commute to London.
“I do not claim travel expenses and cover my own travel costs.
"I find your interest in both myself, out of 650 MPs, my daughters and their private business is questionable, irrelevant, bordering on harassment and rather creepy.”
Sunday Mirror
A Commons official said: “It’s hard to see how she can deal with an MP’s electorate in the most efficient way when she lives nowhere near Parliament or the constituency.”
Jennifer is the second of Ms Dorries’ three daughters to work for her mum at taxpayers’ expense.
Her eldest, Philippa, earned up to £45,000 a year as her office manager.
When a storm broke in September about Jennifer’s job, Ms Dorries claimed she provided “value for money”.
Ms Dorries last night claimed her daughter did the 89-mile journey from her home to the constituency office in 80 minutes.
The AA’s online route planner says the fastest route is two hours, 12 minutes.
The MP said: “Jennifer’s main place of work is in the constituency, where she stays for some of each week.
“Her journey time is 1hr 20 mins. She does not claim from the staff travel allowance and covers all her own travel costs.
"Her journey time is less than mine from Bedfordshire to Westminster which is 1hr 30mins, as it is for all of my constituents who commute to London.
“I do not claim travel expenses and cover my own travel costs.
"I find your interest in both myself, out of 650 MPs, my daughters and their private business is questionable, irrelevant, bordering on harassment and rather creepy.”
Rampant Sexism (12 November 2012)
Rampant Sexism
The Conservative MP for Mid-Befordshire - Nadine Dorries - swans off from the House of Commons for up to 30 days to take part in a celebrity TV programme - which is made in some remote part of Australia.
Result - she gets 'pelters' from all quarters and deservedly so - including from the Deputy Labour Leader - Harriet Harman - while standing in at Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs).
Ms Harman famous for her support of equalities issues even made a lame joke at Nadine's expense - something about the Tory MP having to deal with all kinds of snakes and toads - before she even arrived in the jungle.
So why is the row in the House of Commons so sexist?
Because lots of other MPs swan off when it suits them - including Harriet's Labour colleague and former Prime Minister - Gordon Brown.
Except Gordon is away from his day job for much more time than Nadine Dorries - 70 days a year (every year) in one job alone - at the New York University in Abu Dhabi, for example.
Yet no one says a word - or makes jokes at Prime Minister's Questions.
Maybe they'll start doing so now.
I certainly hope so because it would be a breath of fresh air - and thoroughly deserved.
Gissa Job (16 July 2012)
I read the other day that Gordon Brown - the sometime Labour MP for Cowdenbeath and Kircaldy - has added yet another string to his bow.
Apparently the former Prime Minister is to become a global envoy for the United Nations.
A position which will, of course, compete for Gordon's time along with his paid role as a 'Distinguished Global Leader in Residence' - at the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University - where he is required to spend 70 days a year.
And his time spent on other charitable works on behalf of 'The Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown' - which I have commented upon previously.
Now I have no problem with Gordon Brown spending lots of time out of the country.
But what I don't understand is why he doesn't just resign his seat as an MP - and give someone else the chance of doing a proper full-time day job? Particularly at a time of such high unemployment.
According to press reports Gordon's heart is just not into being a Westminster MP - and since losing the 2010 general election he has apparently taken part in just two parliamentary debates - and only 15 per cent of the votes.
So surely it's time for Gordon to do the right thing - and step aside.
The Conservative MP for Mid-Befordshire - Nadine Dorries - swans off from the House of Commons for up to 30 days to take part in a celebrity TV programme - which is made in some remote part of Australia.
Result - she gets 'pelters' from all quarters and deservedly so - including from the Deputy Labour Leader - Harriet Harman - while standing in at Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs).
Ms Harman famous for her support of equalities issues even made a lame joke at Nadine's expense - something about the Tory MP having to deal with all kinds of snakes and toads - before she even arrived in the jungle.
So why is the row in the House of Commons so sexist?
Because lots of other MPs swan off when it suits them - including Harriet's Labour colleague and former Prime Minister - Gordon Brown.
Except Gordon is away from his day job for much more time than Nadine Dorries - 70 days a year (every year) in one job alone - at the New York University in Abu Dhabi, for example.
Yet no one says a word - or makes jokes at Prime Minister's Questions.
Maybe they'll start doing so now.
I certainly hope so because it would be a breath of fresh air - and thoroughly deserved.
Gissa Job (16 July 2012)
I read the other day that Gordon Brown - the sometime Labour MP for Cowdenbeath and Kircaldy - has added yet another string to his bow.
Apparently the former Prime Minister is to become a global envoy for the United Nations.
A position which will, of course, compete for Gordon's time along with his paid role as a 'Distinguished Global Leader in Residence' - at the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University - where he is required to spend 70 days a year.
And his time spent on other charitable works on behalf of 'The Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown' - which I have commented upon previously.
Now I have no problem with Gordon Brown spending lots of time out of the country.
But what I don't understand is why he doesn't just resign his seat as an MP - and give someone else the chance of doing a proper full-time day job? Particularly at a time of such high unemployment.
According to press reports Gordon's heart is just not into being a Westminster MP - and since losing the 2010 general election he has apparently taken part in just two parliamentary debates - and only 15 per cent of the votes.
So surely it's time for Gordon to do the right thing - and step aside.
