A grim day for David Laws but also the relationship between the media and government

When the PM decided to make his big, open and comprehensive offer to the Liberal Democrats, it was done because he recognised the necessity in forming a strong government in the wake of an ultimately indecisive election. He knew that the British public didn’t want to be at the polls again in October, he knew that the country couldn’t afford – and probably wouldn’t accept – Labour being kept in power and that in order to form the only coalition government that could claim a mandate he would have to talk seriously, sensibly and flexibly to a party between whose activists there has at times existed a genuine hatred.

No matter – that quite rightly has been placed aside in order to get the best people into government. And if you look at the excellent line-up of the cabinet – the PM and NC working together, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and others, you understand that the sacrifices both parties have made in their hearts and minds have been worth it.

David Laws has, for me, been the stand-out performer of the coalition. His handling of the announcement of the £6.2bn cuts last week was first-rate both in the house and in front of the media. His boss George Osborne was there with him but said very little and one hopes was watching carefully to see how it should be done. The point is it doesn’t matter whether he’s Lib Dem or Tory; if he’s got a mandate from the electorate and can do the job, the country needs him in place.

Enter the Daily Telegraph, whose view of the country is somewhat different. For them, the agenda is foxhunting, family values, favourable taxes and flag-waving. They don’t care much for Lib Dems – especially ones with secret gay lovers – and they’re not bothered about keeping the coalition together if it forces an election that could redress the result of May 6. Don’t get me wrong – I’m really disappointed that we didn’t secure an outright majority; but it was the failure to gain winnable Labour seats – not Lib Dem ones – that cost us victory.

The way in which the Telegraph has dealt with the David Laws story is bullying, immoral and reckless. What David Laws did was unquestionably wrong, although one can understand (just) why he did it. The money that he was taking from the taxpayer to pay his lover as landlord fell foul of regulations in 2006 that money could no longer be paid to “spouses” as “rent” (the fact it ever could be is bewildering). Had David Laws then not continued the payment, the question of why would have been asked – forcing him to reveal details of his private life.

Trouble is that £40,000 is a lot of money and he doesn’t need it any more than the PM. It creates the impression that a man asking the nation to make terrifying cuts across public and private fields is being less than austere with his own arrangements. For that reason, once the story became public, he has done the right thing in resigning – a very sad consequence of unjust parliamentary procedures in the first instance and social judgement in the second.

But for the Telegraph, there is no such mitigation. This angry, reactionary and backwards publication is an embarrassment to Conservatism and the nation it so very proudly wants to tell everyone it embodies. It represents exactly the kind of sneering, snobbish and bigoted values that the public reacted against in 1997 and brought Tony Blair into our lives. Why it felt it could not reveal the facts about David Laws during the original story is anyone’s guess and there is a rancid stench of spite and homophobia running through the decision to break it now – just as David Laws reaches the peak of his political career and achieves the platform to display his talents.

Who knows what’s behind it - there are of course powerful factions with an interest in removing a star in the making who wears the “wrong” colours (or the “right” colours in the “wrong” way) in both their political and private life. What amazes and disgusts me is that they, whoever they are, would choose to run so contrary to the national interest by fashioning the demise of potentially a key figure in the recovery and rebuilding of our economy.

The lowest nadir for UK journalism since the Sun decided it was in the public interest to publish topless pictures of the Countess of Wessex a few days before her wedding; and to trump the Sun on classlessness takes some doing.

A sad tail: BA's staff and pensions have become more powerful than it's airline function

I’ve never been very good on aeroplanes, as my family will attest. I don’t how it came about but I have suffered a deep-rooted fear of flying for as long as I can remember and it’s got worse as I’ve got older. The one airline that I felt some degree of safety on, some gamut of re-assurance with, was British Airways. Not sure why, it was just familiar, consistent – there didn’t seem to be any nasty surprises and it had (and still has) an excellent safety record.

It is fair to say that during the last 10 years it has become something quite different to what it was. The level of service is meagre and customers are generally treated as a bit of a nuisance in an airline run by and for the convenience of BA staff. It is quite a tragedy to see such a great institution indulge itself into oblivion – but that is the way it is going. The cabin crew decision to strike over Christmas is the latest two-fingered salute to the paying British public – and possibly the greatest since Gerald Ratner insulted his clientele by admitting his products were “crap”.

It could also go down – at 92.4% as Unite leaders keep telling us - as the most decisive corporate suicide note in history.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a strike-breaking Tory. I believe people have the right to withhold their Labour – more than that, I believe it is an essential buffer between extreme grievance and revolution. But I don’t understand what this strike is for – cabin staff are not taking a pay cut, they are not being made redundant, they are not even working extra hours (although they may have to do more in those hours; but at the moment, who doesn’t?) It seems to me that this grotesque posturing is more about Len McLuskey and his place in the Unite union than any genuine grievance cabin staff have. They earn twice as much at BA than elsewhere – senior staff earn more than £50k for goodness’ sake – and if you like flying, I would have thought that being cabin crew is a great job.

I have nothing against BA staff - a lot of them are great people and without the special attention of one or two, it is no exaggeration to say that there are some flights that I just wouldn’t have got on. BA management too seems hell-bent on learning absolutely nothing from past experience.

But there are some very pertinent letter in the Daily Telegraph that sum everything up nicely. If the cabin crew strike over Christmas, they may all be out of a job within six months because BA could quite easily fold and a government bail-out would be tricky – can we really argue that a flag-carrying airline is as important as the banking system? And if the unions win their battle, how else is the company going to cut costs to pull itself back from losses of £400million?

The “plane fact” is that unless BA cuts its costs without being seen to cut its quality, it’s future looks very bleak indeed. It’s time that its staff – all of them – brought their heads back down out of the clouds and understood the bigger picture. If they choose to bring the company crashing down around them for the sake of their own personal comfort, I don’t see how that is different behaviour from the bankers we’ve all been told to despise so much.

Update 17/12: It is difficult not to feel that poetic as well as judicial justice has been done today.

Could Gordon be gone by April?

There appear to be loudening whispers around Westminster at the moment that a March election could be on the cards. March 25 seems the most likely date for it if the PM wants to go early as it gives more time.

Evidence to suggest that this is at least an option being considered is increasingly stacking up. Firstly, there were the Labour Party staffing advertisements, which have been appearing in greater numbers recently. Secondly, it would offer the PM something of an advantage of surprise. It could also allow him to fight on the basis of Christmas-boosted economic figures and allow him to postpone the pre-Budget report until after an election.

It has certainly caught the minds of journalists at very high-placed political news outlets such as the Spectator, New Statesman and Daily Telegraph. Things don’t just pop into so many journalists’ minds at the same time on the same subject by chance – someone is briefing them. It could be Alistair Campbell, brought back to feed the PM with some snide one-liners about class war. Alternatively, it could be coming from the Conservative side, talking up a March election to get activists focussed and make Brown look scared if he waits until May.

It could be both but it’s certainly an interesting Phoney War. My own feeling is that the election will be on May 6 because Labour simply doesn’t have the money to run two separate campaigns. But then the PM could go on March 25, spend everything on the general election and leave the local elections to dangle – it’s not like Labour’s local government presence could get much worse anyway.

Polls at the moment seem to be narrowing slightly to Labour’s advantage – or more accurately, since the Labour vote is static – to the Conservatives’ disadvantage. A lot of that I think is the fall out from the Lisbon Treaty and Eurosceptics switching to UKIP. Hopefully, by the election time they will understand that a vote for Lord Pearson and his merry crew is a total waste of time and actually helps the PM stay on for another five years. I am confident that many of these UKIP waverers will stay within the Conservative Party but there is a huge amount of work ahead.

The most important thing is not the opinion poll figures but getting your supporters out to vote for you. If Labour thinks they have more chance of doing this in March, so be it.

Balls - politics comes before opportunity in education

For goodness’ sake – Ed Balls is at it again. I spent yesterday writing about Labour’s total misunderstanding over how resources fit into strategy and how all too often they have become the strategy.

Judging by today’s lead story in the Telegraph - can’t think where they got it from – he’s been chasing headlines again with the second plank of Labour’s confusing non-strategy, legislation. When there’s no strategy and resorces fail, Labour’s next instinct is to legislate. But without a strategy and resources, they usually end up legislating the unenforceable or ineffable.

A legal right to a good education is a total nonsense. It is impossible to legislate adequately for, to enforce and shows an alarming lack of faith in the comprehensive system to be necessary in the first place. On the other hand, a moral right to a good education is part of every government’s contract with its people. But to confuse the two is ludicrous and could be disastrous.

I can imagine left-wing organisations being formed to sue a Conservative government five years’ hence on the basis of this bill. A decent and effective education system available to all and free at the point of use is a vital cog in society and the supreme aspiration of any administration. But it’s impossible to eliminate altogether individual shortcomings and this silly piece of idiocy from Balls is a dangerous and malicious blight on the future education system, which may become less effective through fear of litigation.

The man is patently unfit to occupy such a great office of state and his department unfit for purpose if it believes this to be beneficial to young people. Shameful, shameful, shameful. And it still doesn’t address issues of underachievement in education.

It's all gone a bit wrong for Brown

Following America is what Labour has done best throughout its tenure – in Iraq, Kosovo, Iraq again, Afghanistan and finally Iraq yet again. On each occasion we’ve gone in with America and been the last ally to exit ahead of them. What a shame that the recession has not been a similar story.

We learn to today that the recession, which famously “started in America” is no longer there. Last week, we learned the British economy, which was “better placed to weather the financial storm” than ever before, it still in it. This was totally unexpected by the government, who had used its new-found comradeship with the Daily Telegraph to place an article that anticipated recovery. Er, that was a mistake.

Guido has a great account of what actually has been going on here.

The fact is that once again Gordon seems to have an entirely different view of the world from everyone else. Either his civil servants are so incompetent that they were unable to see the “shock” figures coming, or his Treasury officials are too scared to tell him the bad news.

Either way, the PM is still denying that there are tough times ahead when most of the rest of the country – who don’t have the benefit of access to dodgy Treasury estimates – have figured out that the party is over. I’m not altogether convinced with Conservative performance on the economy over the past 18 months – it’s been patchy to say the least.

But the reason it’s been patchy is becuase there are any number of traps for an opposition without access to proper information to fall into. By and large, DC has avoided falling into those and Gordon looks determined to hurl himself into them instead.

The idea that the Conservatives want to prolong a recession by ordering unecessary spending cuts is ridiculous. Either the cuts don’t need to be made – in which case why would you contrive to reduce the size of your economy? – or despite recovery, which just means growth, the cuts still need to be made because we are spending more than our income.

That’s the point. Gordon spent 10 years at the Treasury, so we can be sure he understands income and expenditure – but it’s an interesting example of how quickly economics goes out the window when political considerations start to dominate instead.