Keeping the faith

March 2, 2010 — admin

Time for a decisive, DC - what's it to be?

It all seems as though it could go terribly wrong after a YouGov poll found that the PM was on course to claim another five years in power, something unimaginable even four weeks ago. DC gave his speech on Sunday in Brighton to a generally good reception but couldn’t avoid a look about him that was rather too close to someone living out their nightmares. I thought it was a solid speech and nothing more – designed to steady the ship and motivate the crew rather than inspire a nation through new discovery. But I remain confident that Cameron the performer will outshine either of his rivals whenever he gets the chance.

What he needs to start to do is give people a reason to vote Conservative – something I’ve been telling the party locally for a number of months now. Gordon Brown remains our biggest asset and I have no doubt that whatever the polls say, he will not win the election. But that doesn’t mean a Conservative victory – as the Times put it, it is isn’t that people don’t think DC is capable of being a good PM, it is that they don’t understand why he wants to do the job.

I know that DC feels the desire to reform our country, he is deeply interested in social justice, cares hugely about health and education and wants to address Britain’s copious social problems. He wants to foster an economy that allows people to reach their potential and steer a dignified course on the world stage. Why? Because it’s the British Way – fair play, compassion, reward for the successful and support for the struggling. I think the term “patriotic duty” was taken out of context by the press but it wasn’t the most wise; I know what he meant but I’m not sure it was the best way to express it. He needs to express it how the man on the street would ie the country at the moment is in a mess – unfair and injust after 13 years of Labour failure. DC wants to be the person to put that right.

But we need to spell out in practical terms what the Direction of Travel is and how that’s done. And we need to give people some reasons to vote Conservative as opposed to reasons to vote against Gordon. I think DC’s policy of attacking the PM has reached its optimum effectiveness and has now started to decline. I want to see less barracking and more focus on what a Tory government will deliver. Cllr Richard Lowe, an emminent Tweeter, collated the following:

1. A cut in net immigration of 75%

2. No more early release for convicted criminals

3. A two year freeze in council tax

4. The abolition of inheritance tax for all families except millionaires

5. Cutting politics with 10% cut in the number of MPs and 5% cut in pay

 6. Headteachers to be put in charge of school discipline

7. Restoring the link between the basic state pension and earnings

8. New laws that will give householders more rights against burglars

9. The budget deficit cut in half by 2014 so future generations don’t live in debt

10. Abolition of Labour’s expensive ID cards

I’m more comfortable with some things than others on that list but politics isn’t an all-or-nothing craft. These would be 10 reasons that if nothing else explain to a public fed up of waiting what the Conservatives stand for. And most of them represent current policy - not that you’d think it from our reticence in coming forward. So come on DC, let’s hear about them and let’s have a bit of fearlessness. Ignore those who say that we are losing support because we’ve gone to the left and keep to the centre ground. Stop bashing Gordon – tempting though it is – and start selling yourself, selling the party and its promises and selling a Conservative Britain as a place that has voted for change and is fairer for all.

I don’t believe that Labour will win the election, the polling in key marginals is still heavily in our favour. But we must show some mettle, some work ethic and a willingness to let people into our confidence if we are to finally summit the mountain we have struggled for so long to conquer.

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Direction of Travel

February 20, 2010 — admin

Come on David, it's not rocket science!

Last night was Woking Constituency Conservative Association’s annual general meeting at which Humfrey Malins gave his farewell speech and Jonathan Lord the first of what we hope will be many. During his speech, Jonathan talked about many interesting things, including references to helping the poorest in society that I think it does well for the grass roots to hear.

One of the subjects he touched on was this idea that the Conservative Party has no policies. I firmly believe that this is a message that Labour spinners, aided by the BBC, Grauniad and others are determined to repeat over and over for our consumption – that DC is a salesman with nothing to sell except the art of selling itself. A Blair mark two. Jonathan argued, quite rightly, that there are many examples of Conservative policy out there and that in-depth policy details are not the norm before a general election; Margaret Thatcher didn’t have them in 1979, nor Tony Blair in 1997. What the country understood about these two Leaders of the Opposition, Jonathan said, was their direction of travel.

Cllr Mike Smith asked Jonathan what it was that bound these policies together, the central message to activists and candidates to sell on the doorstep. He, along with others including myself, don’t yet get the sense of an overarching theme to Conservative policy that defines a direction of travel.

It’s desperately needed if DC is to win a convincing rather than narrow victory. And it’s not rocket science. The concept that binds our policies together is three-fold; self-empowerment, opportunity and the fulfillment of aspiration. The credibility gap that the Conservative Party has is linking its support for the wealthy and Middle England, the encouragement of entrepreneurship and businesses and the rolling back of inheritance tax with its desire to help the poorest in society achieve a better life.

Our problem is that we only ever talk about one of these at a time. The first allows our opponents to claim we are the party of the few, not the many. The second provokes a reaction among grass roots that the party is abandoning its core voters. But these two flanks of the spectrum are inextricably linked and go hand-in-hand.

We want to allow people who have been succesful the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their success. We want the prospect of that enjoyment to be an aspiration that creates excellence in its pursuit. We believe that leaving an estate to the next generation is a self-empowerment that begets striving for success. And we will fight for the right of the well-off to enjoy their lives – as long as they pay a fair share to those less fortunate. The successful business creates employment, tax revenue and generates investment in this country – it is also key to our recovery from this dreadful recession.

Similarly, while I am not entirely comfortable with DC’s phrase Broken Britain, there are parts of Britain that don’t work. In some areas, people have poor life chances and little hope of being anything other than a criminal or lifelong welfare recipient. We have to show these people when they are young that we believe in them. We have to demonstrate through community policing, social services and educational opportunities that with hard work and self-belief, anything is possible. And we have to be serious about it, knowing that it is in society’s interests that we address this problem.

In between these extremes, there are countless other examples of people who want the government to help them achieve their aspirations through the tax system, employment regulations, adult education, public sector reforms and so on.  I’m not big on small government - the government should be there to help the people who elect it. I’m big on enabling government - a government that leaves people alone when they are doing well and picks them up when they need help.

But we need to hear more from DC and the party about the link between the two things above. We are not the party of the few,  nor are we the party of the many; we must be the party of everyone.

I believe that with the economy being how it is, voters will forgive a lack of specific, concrete promises. But they will not forgive a listlessness, a lack of direction. Now it is for DC to elucidate the various Conservative policies that are out there in these strategic terms – it is not only voters who need to hear it but his own party too.

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Cadbury cremed by bad law

February 2, 2010 — admin

I’ve always been partial to Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and for the past two weeks, I’ve been buying boxes and bringing them into the office, exhorting my colleagues to “eat them while they are still British”. Alas, no more. At 1pm today, the iconic British company became the plaything of an American conglomerate whose trademark cheese products are, astonishingly, even less related to actual cheese than Creme Eggs are to eggs.

PM has been busy lately, launching a attempted decapitation strategy on DC yesterday in a speech filled with more chutzpah than a New York second-hand car dealership. Now he’s been to meet the Kraft CEO, who’s not averse to audacity herself on the evidence of this takeover, he is sagely warning that he’ll be looking for more detailed assurances in the coming months. I don’t think that’s going to worry Irene Rosenfeld much – she’s only 4% short of the shares she needs to take Cadburyoff the stock exchange altogether.

And what PM is less keen to let you know is that it was Labour, through the Companies Act 2006 that effectively removed the right of government to protect our long-established businesses from takeover. The act implemented the EU’s Takeover and Transparency Obligations Directives, which harmonise takeover law throughout the EU and prevent company boards from doing anything to frustrate takeover bids. But surprisingly, it’s not the EU’s fault.

Despite the obvious agenda of EU member states to fix takeover legislation to favour their own subsidised corporate environment (ever wondered why so many German, French and Spanish firms can afford to buy British companies and infrastructure?) the directive did leave EU governments free to restrict takeoever law in their states. Labour didn’t take that opportunity and so the government is now in a very weak position to do anything about Kraft or dictate terms to it once Cadbury is bought.

There’s nothing intrisically bad about large British companies getting taken over. It puts money into shareholders’ pockets and since many shareholders are pension schemes, it helps to boost flagging pension values. Certainly Kraft has chosen to pay well over the odds for Cadbury. But it is important that we have British companies continuing to develop and emerge on the global market as players.

And with little or no protection from foreign predators, that is less, not more, likely to happen.

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BBC – Broadly Bashing Cameron

January 27, 2010 — admin

In the dark - Broadcasting House seems to have its own view on economics

Apparently two separate blog entries in lightning succession trying to make hay out of the Hatfield House meetings clearly wasn’t enough for Nick Robinson, who surely won’t still be BBC Political Editor by the end of the year. The fact that no other media saw fit to run with this story in a big way shows how isolated he is, how drawn into the Labour spin trap.

We now have another blog post on Tory cuts that tries to have it all ways – saying the Conservatives will cut and if they don’t painting that as a U-turn and another slight on DC. He then helps perpetuate the myth that government spending boosts growth and will therefore aid a recovery. Government spending doesn’t boost growth - it creates its own growth, which then disappears once the subsidy is withdrawn. The UK would still be in recession without the Car Scrappage Scheme – with that scheme over, the car industry can expect a significant downturn in the months ahead.

Today, the Labour group on the LGA announced it would push for a 1% pay increase for the least well paid rather than exercise restraint. Again, the money that goes into propping up more and more public sector wages is a massive ongoing subsidy and one that cannot be withdrawn now it has been enacted without devastating unemployment. The reduction of the public sector headcount must be a target of a Conservative government because it is not healthy for our economy, society or democracy for such a large proportion of the population to be employed by the government.

But now so many are, reducing that number is a hugely painful and expensive thing to do. We mustn’t make the same mistake with the economy by using more government money to prop it up – it needs to be nurtured and kicked into a recovery of its own and the only way to do that is to reduce our debt. Yesterday Bill Gross told investors across the world to avoid the UK because of our huge debts, weak currency and fragile recovery. Like George Osborne, he sees that debt reduction – preferably quickly – is the only way to restore confidence, maintain our credit rating and keep interest rates down.

It’s all very well pumping money into the economy – even if it doesn’t actually promote sustainable growth. But if people’s mortgage rates go from 2.5% up to 6% within 12 months, it isn’t going to leave them with much money to aid the recovery; in fact, many of them will be worse off than they were while we were in recession.

So the BBC needs to stop chucking the last dice all over the place in support of Labour and start understanding that more borrowing and spending in the short-term is going to make the problem far, far worse. If they leave everything as it is, we will fingernail into a slow and drawn out recovery process during which many people will be worse off than they have been for the past two years.

Only by committing to reduce the deficit can we carry the confidence of the markets, which are the real force behind recovery. We need to cut public spending while keeping as many people as possible employed, to raise taxes for those that can afford it most and keep interest rates down while selling on as much of our debt as we can. It’s not going to be easy.

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Lurch to the right

January 25, 2010 — admin

DC has plenty to think about - but voters still don't want Gordon Brown as PM

There’s no mystery as to why the Conservative lead in the polls has narrowed. In fact, reading PR Week this morning, it was quite refreshing to see Alex Hilton spelling it out for any reading Conservatives who may not have realised yet. And if we look at the polls, we don’t really see any massive increase in Labour’s polling – they are steady at just under 30% – but a decline in support for the Conservatives.

The tipping point was the Lisbon Treaty being ratified by President Klaus of the Czech Republic. For the first time, DC and his team looked like they’d been caught out – like they had thought that the wily old Klaus would hold out for them and they didn’t look as though they had really thought through what would happen next. Or perhaps they underestimated the level of opinion within the Tory grass roots and had expected them just to swallow the whole debate being kicked into the long grass.

In reality, there wasn’t much alternative, as I argued at the time. A referendum on the treaty is a totally pointless waste of time and the activists’ posturing on it just that. But the question of whether to put Tory grass roots ahead of country as a whole was a particularly poignant one for him because voters see that question as the benchmark as to what kind of PM he will be. In the end, he chose neither and pleased neither.

Since then, we’ve had some cracking grass roots-pleasing policies. Punishing people for not being married is one. For goodness’ sake, we’ve had 13 long years of a government telling us how to live – from the beef we can eat to detention without trial, people want a Conservative government that will leave them alone, not tell them they’ve got to march to the Register Office or else. Marriage doesn’t automatically equal childhood bliss as we’ve seen in Edlington; please DC, just let it go.

Next we’ve had the Tories arguing about strengthening the law to allow people to defend their homes. The simply fact is that we have to have some kind of trust in the rule of law and the police to distinguish us from the animals. You are already entitled to use reasonable force – which may include deadly force – to defend yourself and your loved ones in your own home; there is no for any further “clarification” of this fact. By banging on about it, Chris Grayling and everyone risk succinct exposure by the legal profession.

Then DC had a pop at teachers and told them that they would need to be cleverer in future. I happen to agree with his view on this but saying such a thing was never likely to endear him to the NUT, BBC, or the many parents who are potential Tory voters that have a healthy respect for the teachers at their childrens’ school. There is an issue with teaching standards in this country but he’d have been better leaving it to Michael Gove to say so.

He’s also playing a risky game engaging the government over the raising of the UK Terror Threat to “severe”. The public do not like to see politicians making political capital of national security. Yes, DC means well but he needs to engage his PR brain a bit more to see how these things may be perceived. Is Andy Coulson on holiday?

DC’s greatest political achievement has been to drag a tired old party kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I and many others waited 10 years for someone to do it and it remains a great achievement – but it’s only a starting point. And with Lisbon, he has been a victim of circumstances trying to do the right thing – but hey, that’s politics. Now is the time for DC to be fitfully stubborn and stand his ground – the centre ground.

He must, must not allow the party to do what many of its activists want and move back to the right. He needs to focus back onto the left of politics – to talk the language of inclusion, of accessibility and of aspiration. He must ignore the threats of UKIPper defections – he needs to stay focussed on the mainstream of society, the probables, the Liberal waiverers, the people who are looking for him to uphold their vision of a small-c conservative society that celebrates success and achievement but makes this possible for everyone. I’ll fight and fight for the party forever – but I’ll feel a lot better about it if I hear more of this and less Monday Club rhetoric.

Labour won’t make it easy – they are focussing on Gordon Brown the statesman with the War on Terror, the Northern Ireland process, they are talking about banking bonuses again and tax will be an issue too. There are probably brighter economic figures to come. DC needs to stay strong, to regain confidence in his ability to be the Prime Minister of everyone, not just his own party.

The time for him to become PM is approaching fast and his margin of error is narrowing. It’s now or never and he needs to get a grip once more.

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Brazenly elitist

January 18, 2010 — admin

Hands up - DC has outflanked Labour on teaching

We were overdue a clever piece of PR from the Conservative Party and I’m delighted to see that the latest draft piece of the manifesto has prompted one. DC and his front bench have been open to the charge of “elitism” when it came to their educations and what a great idea for them to turn that notion on its head by saying that the education should be “brazenly elitist” about the quality of trainees entering the teaching profession.

Brilliant. Michael Gove’s team can turn a negative into a positive, the Labour response has been weak and it provides a great way to repel any future elitism jibes – yes, Conservatives should be elitist about education; we should let only the very best enter into the classroom to teach our children.

It’s long overdue. Several of my contempories during my first degree are now teachers – and very good ones too – but there are also others who went into it initially at least for the money received during training. Well, needs must I suppose but it would be good to think that teaching inspired people who were passionate about knowledge and about the importance of education.

I think the Conservative approach of brazen elitism in teaching standards is exactly what is needed – it changes the meaning of the word elitism to mean what it should mean; that every child in this country deserves an elite education. They won’t get that under Labour, which believes all children should have the same education.

But we need to go further and hand control of school administration, budgets and discipline back to governing bodies and the communities they serve. At the moment there are far too many visionary headteachers bound and gagged by government interference and far too many headteachers who don’t have a vision for their school because they don’t need to.

In addition, children are not the only ones who should be learning from school; often parents need support to support their children’s learning. I did my second degree with a former teacher – she said that every single problem she had ever, ever encountered with a child could be traced directly back home and that children’s performance at school was always a reflection of their life away from it.

It is easy to forget that while children enjoy the support of teachers, often there is no-one supporting parents and I’d like to see plans for widening education in many parts of the country to include the whole family, not just the children. From talks on how to support their kids, explaining about discipline to adult learning itself – this kind of long-term thinking won’t reap benefits for 15 years but it is necessary for us to think about if we truly want to get our society mobile again.

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We’re going to the chapel

January 17, 2010 — admin

Back in the spring of 2007, I watched Francis Maude give one of the most unimpressive performances on Question Time that I’ve ever seen. The background for this was the announcement that the Conservative Party intended to commit to the idea of rewarding married couples through the taxation system. His answers were defensive and and a little condescending and I held my head in my hands as the Conservative Party once again went back to basics.

Even back then, I knew that just as the original back to basics had started the decline of John Major’s government, so the new version – despite its different presentation – could seriously damage a future Conservative challenge; people don’t want to be told how to live. And now the issue is back in the news - not because it’s new but because given everything that has happened since St David’s Day 2007, Labour feels that the Conservatives are vulnerable on this issue – and they are dead right.

I’m not against marriage – heck, I’m getting married in June. I’m not even going to argue with the fact that marriage is a preferable institution from which to create a stable family unit. I’m not arguing that kids from married families statiscally don’t do better at school and stay out of trouble. Marriage is the most important building block of our society and we disregard it at our peril.

But marriage is not a magic wand – it is a means to an end. Marriages create stability, continuity and an environment of care, which is why it is so good at nurture and creating stable and balanced households. But it doesn’t have a monopoly on love, stability and care. There are plenty of co-habitees, single parents and same-sex relationships that provide exactly the same environment. Equally, there are plenty of marriages that provide very little in the way of any of these positive things.

My problem with the Conservative policy of rewarding marriage in the tax system is that it alienates people who don’t fall into this category, many through no fault of their own. The break-up of any marriage is always a tragic and deeply traumatic event, particularly when there are children involved. But it happens – sometimes people who fell in love with all good faith simply fall out of love, or fall more in love with someone else. It’s one of the most difficult things about being human – but being human is all that it is.

I feel very uncomfortable about levvying a financial penalty against those involved in such a sad chapter of their lives – even though to them it would no doubt pale into insignficance compared to everything else. To me, it smacks of kicking people while they are down, of turning our backs on them when they need support most and of keeping a whole lot of other people, many of whom will be relatively vulnerable, off a list of “the favoured” because they – for whatever reason – cannot or don’t wish to embrace a formal marriage arrangement.

I understand what the Conservative Party is trying to do here – but it’s all wrong. It allows our opponents to paint us as an exclusive party – as if we didn’t have enough trouble with that already. I seriously don’t want the Tory Party to be the party of the rich – I want it to be the party that leaves the rich alone, looks after the poor and increases mobility from poor to rich. But it’s difficult to get that inclusive idea across when you illustrate it with policies like this one.

And the party only has itself to blame. By trying, in the spring of 2007, to impose its grass roots’ preferred way of living, we have been overtaken by circumstances to a point where we are left with a policy that DC would probably reverse in an instant if he could – he’s already tried and then had to go back on himself - but can’t. Despite the recession, despite the sensitive issue that taxation policy has now become, he cannot go back on the marriage promise for fear of losing grass roots votes and another Lisbon-like U-turn. On one side his better judgement, on the other ConservativeHome and the Daily Mail. Rather him than me.

It’s what happens when you announce things three years ahead of an election. Okay, there’s nothing wrong with supporting marriage but I’ll bet that if DC could choose something now that he’d announced in 2007, it wouldn’t be this.

The Conservative Party must support people, not institutions if we wish to remain on the centre ground.

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Not so easy now

January 11, 2010 — admin

Reality bites - Nick Clegg has ditched some of his key promises

Writing in the Grauniad this morning, a smug Michael White claimed that DC’s appearance on the Andrew Marr Show had clarified nothing and that he had not been able to give firm promises on any of his draft manifesto commitments. Well, I can’t deny that DC is avoiding any more cast-iron guarantees but neither can Mr White deny that the reason he is doing so is because of the total and utter ruin to which the government his newspaper supports has brought the economy.

Furthermore, we know that the government is being deliberately obstructive of Conservative attempts to gain access to Treasury information – both to hide the extent of their failure and deny the opposition any advantage they may derive once in government. DC knows that things are bad but he isn’t sure how bad and until he knows he’s not making any promises. Is Mr White saying this isn’t sensible?

The Liberal Democrats have been busy making quite a bit of hay over that situation in the past. But now it turns out that they too have seen the absurdity of promising free elderly care and scrapping tuition fees when the money most obviously isn’t there to fund it. It’s not the first time they’ve decided they want to scrap some of their policies (Mansion Tax, anyone?) but at least Nick Clegg is shelving these because he can’t afford it, rather than because they are rubbish.

As ever with the Lib Dems though, they don’t have to be properly costed because they aren’t ever going to be enacted. But there comes a time when promising the earth just looks silly - even when you don’t necessarily know the details of the costs involved. Such a point has been reached and Nick Clegg is using the opportunity to launch his own austerity regime.

Which just leaves Labour. The Chancellor has promised cuts, the PM used the word once but thinks he got away with it and one half of the Labour party wants class war and investment and the other half wants the middle class vote and a pair of sharp scissors. It is clear that the government is in total disarray not about the economic policy needed – because both spending cuts and tax rises are coming without a doubt – but how to present this to voters.

The Conservatives went for honesty at their conference last year and it went down well at first but started to wobble once the government comms department got hold of it. The Lib Dems tried honesty, the party didn’t fancy it and so they went back to investment but now Nick Clegg has obviously put his foot down for the sake of credibility – as far as it goes, good on him.

But Labour – Labour is a complete and utter shambles with PM, Alistair Darling and Milipede pulling one way and Balls/Cooper the other. Most of the cabinet seem to have given up, obviously completely bemused with the whole situation and the shattering lack of leadership.

They didn’t go into politics for this. Hopefully, they’ll be put out of their misery before too long.

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Faint praise

January 6, 2010 — admin

Faint praise from the future powerbrokers

A decent performance at PMQs doesn’t mean much when your own party starts tearing into you a few minutes later. The PM is in real trouble at the moment, not because people love DC or because of the polls but because a large section of his own party have no confidence in him as their leader.

Worse, some of them are so convinced that the election is lost that they are prepared to challenge him – why would you do that if you thought there was a cat’s chance that you could win? The news channels have been doing this to death all afternoon and evening, although they have been successfully spun by the government into the “Ministers back Brown” line.

Actually, they’ve been doing no such thing. While Ed Balls and Alan Johnson did give clear messages of support, it is to note that others have not. The Chancellor satisfied himself with:

“As far as I’m concerned we should be concentrating on the business of government and getting through the recession. The PM and I met this afternoon and we discussed how we take forward economic policies to secure the recovery. I won’t be deflected from that.”

Not a ringing endorsement, then. Harriet Harman, ambitious deputy leader said she the Cabinet were “getting on with our jobs as ministers in a government that Gordon leads”. She might as well have added “for now” on the end of that statement. So too David Miliband who, despite not responding at all for ages, eventually chipped in with an account of his day, saying he “was working closely with the prime minister on foreign policy issues” and “supported the re-election campaign for a Labour government that he is leading”.

For now. And is that he Gordon Brown or he David Miliband?

Balls and Johnston aside, if I were Gordon Brown, I would be really worried. Clearly most of his cabinet are sticking with him for the sake of the election rather than the fact that they believe his leadership is right for Britain. How many of them seriously believe that he would make a better leader of the country than DC? Are they prepared to guarantee that they would support his continued leadership after the election? Or even if they won it?

Lobby journalists have been busy assuring us that most backbenchers support the PM – of course they do. Lobby rumours spread quickly and no-one wants to stick their necks out to leaky journos. I’d keep an eye on this one – it’s possible that at this very late stage the Labour party can’t be bothered to get rid of the PM. But if there were two years to run, he’d be gone. And it might happen yet.

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Which is it, Gordon?

January 5, 2010 — admin

The PM spent most of last year talking about how the Conservatives were going to cut their way out of recession. Now, with the publication of the first part of the Conservative manifesto, he has decided to try and say that we are planning to splurge our way out of it with a £34bn black hole.

Labour has form on dodgy dossiers - as we all know - and the compendium of lies that they released in response to the manifesto certainly fell into that category. But they succeeded in one way – the central message of the manifesto, the draft plans for the NHS, did not get an airing on the news. DC has to brush aside this silly question about how much of a promise is a promise and make sure that people know about our ideas and innovations for the future of the country.

As Stephanie Flanders points out, we should be mounting a two-pronged attack here – one with our own ideas and one with some serious hay-making about Labour’s own planned cuts. Where I think she is slightly off the mark is in saying that by talking about the nature of the promises rather than the content, the first day was a Labour success – DC made the point well that the promises are only tentative because of the economic mess Labour has bequeathed.

But he needs to start being more ruthless about ignoring journalists’ questions and getting his own message out. Tony Blair was a master of this art and it contributed a significant part of why he was able to seal the deal in way that DC has yet to. And Nick Robinson is as good a place as any to start.

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