You see some funny things on Facebook, such as this recent gift to the Leader of the Liberal Democrats:

If you squint your eyes, it looks just like a member of the Bullingdon Club.

Clearly a Dyke-shaped poisoned chalice wasn’t on offer.

No-one appears to have used that headline yet, which I’m frankly amazed by, so I thought I’d better get in quick.

Overall, this latest incident does rather confirm some of the points I was making last week about the nature of the London Mayor and the GLA. These institutions lack any kind of civic culture, we are struggling to invent one 8 years after the event, and it is a mistake to think that ‘celebrity’ candidates are going to solve the problem.

But what a nasty, undemocratic, bullying idea of the Tories. I’m delighted it appears to have backfired on them. I’m sure they are attempting to spin this as the Lib Dems playing party politics while they are trying to work constructively in the interests of Londoners, but nothing could be further from the truth. As a party we would never be able to recover from being the Conservative’s mini-me. We have a genuine dilemma of who to stand, but the most anonymous face-slapping moron would be preferable to a joint candidate. Far from beating him, an Anyone-But-Ken candidate would be likely to bolster him - one only needs to cast one’s mind back to 2000 to recall that Labour tried that and got bitten in the arse.

Ultimately, there may be only one way of defeating Ken Livingstone: wait until he’s too old to keep going and enjoy the fact that Labour will end up struggling to find a candidate as much as everyone else. In the meantime, old fashioned party (and non-party) politics will have to do. Anyone got a monkey suit? It worked in Hartlepool.

Iain Dale wounded me last night by implying that I spend too much time taking the piss out of him and seldom point out where we agree. Well, when it comes to things like Lords Reform, I tend to keep blog posts to a minimum on areas which are to do with my day job (partly out of a desire to compartmentalise and keep the two seperate, partly out of a desire not to sound like a one-trick pony), and when I do link to his site, it tends to be in response to some criticism or other he has made about the Lib Dems. But, in the interests of not being open to the accusation of mindless tribalism, I will just say that I agree that the recent Tory PEB outclasses its Labour equivalent by quite some margin.

It isn’t that there is anything particularly clever about the Tory one: with the right editing you could make just as successful PEB with almost any other politician. But while it is, of course, all presentation and style made to look like substance, it is done with a certain amount of panache.

There was no reason, for instance, for the Tories to tackle the BNP in the ad, but it was good positioning for them to do so. The way Cameron answered the question about the slave trade, was again quite a clever piece of positioning. This was all about presenting people with the image of David Cameron as a man who doesn’t necessarily tell you what you want him to say, to counter his caricature as a bandwagon jumper. It’s all rubbish of course, but it is quite effective rubbish.

The Labour ad, by contrast, is just rubbish. After 10 years, is a long stream of random questions good enough? We want answers: Labour can only say ‘we’re listening.’ It is appalling. The ‘reveal’ with Blair and Brown in the back of the cab is excrutiating. The scene with half the cabinet answering telephones lacked any credibility whatsoever.

To an extent, during this inter-regnum period, there isn’t very much Labour can say except that they’re listening. The problem is, they’ve been stuck in this holding pattern for three years now and it has grown beyond stale. The whole transition from Blair to Brown has, at every stage, been done on Blair’s terms and for all his harrumphing, Brown has simply let him.

This makes it all the more incredible that Brown is now launching a book called ‘Courage‘. A series of 8 portraits of people Brown finds inspiring, this is a progression from the nonsense we had earlier in the year with Brown making comparisons between himself and Gandhi. Every one of his eight ‘heroes’ unquestionably demonstrated courage in their lives; what is less clear is how Brown can claim to have emulated them.

What is striking from his list, is what easy choices they all are. Every single one of them is unimpeachable; secular saints for a modern age. A more charitable man than me would be pleased that a future leader of the country has taken the time to write a book about them. The cynic in me however is all too aware that he is, by extension, seeking to have some of their magic fairy dust rub off on him. So much for the ‘death of celebrity culture‘. I’ve seen dogs on heat rubbing up against men’s trouser legs make for more edifying spectacles. This isn’t courage: this is vicarious courage.

It would have been more interesting, and more revealing, if Brown had attempted to defend more controversial figures, people who weren’t necessarily saints but who shared his values. Gordon Brown on Lloyd George would have told us far more than hagiography about Aung San Suu Kyi (whose inclusion in any case begs the question: what has Gordon Brown, as one of the most powerful men in the world, done to advance her cause?). What about Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson? What about Thatcher? These must be people that Brown admires as he and the party of which he is a key architect have been so influenced by them. Sticking with people who lead blameless lives is as patronising to the public as Tony Blair chumming up with Noel Gallagher 10 years ago. Using them as political fig leaves in this way is somewhat offensive. Did anyone ask if they minded being co-opted in this way?

By publishing this book, now, Brown shows that he is anything but courageous. Having spent 13 years hiding in the shadow of Tony Blair, his first instinct is to reach out and hide behind eight more people. All this and we are still none the wiser about what will be in his first Queen’s Speech. Make no mistake: Labour is in deep trouble.

Oh dear, oh dear. It was all going so well.

I wasn’t at party conference and was having a nice lazy lie in when Ming’s speech was going on, but I’ve been following how the BBC’s line on his “five tests” for Gordon Brown has been developing. And it ain’t good.

Ming began his leadership by pledging that there would be no feverish talk of ‘deals’ while he was leader, yet he seems to be the one doing the talking, first in his interview with the Times last week, and now with this speech.

To be fair, as far as I can see the problem with the speech was not the content but the spin, but why are we setting Gordon Brown tests at all?

Curiously, Kennedy had a lot of flaws but he feverish talk of coalitions was something he managed to put a lid on under his leadership. Ming, of course, has form: in the late 90s he was part of the triumvirate that Earl Russell called MÖO - three MPs who had allegedly told Paddy they would defect if he pulled out the Labour-Lib Dem joint cabinet committee (the M stood for Ming of course; you can probably work out the other two). Of course, there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and curiously a lot of the people most gung ho about a coalition with Labour at that time seem to now be maneuvering towards formal coalition with the Tories. Some third party politicians are the political equivalents of Anna Nicole Smith: obsessed with finding a sugar daddy with whom to get hitched, it doesn’t really matter who, because of the perceived riches that will follow.

I don’t consider Ming in that category; his support for working with Labour was always much more (like Paddy) about some Grimond-style realignment of the left rather than a desire for his bum to be in a Daimler. I’ve found it interesting to observe an increasing number of people in the party are now looking for reasons to form a coalition with Labour, less out of a desire for some broad progressive consensus and more out of a fear of the Conservatives, and I suspect it was an individual with similar views to this who gave the BBC the line about Ming wanting to jump in bed with Gordon.

The fear is well founded: one only needs to skim through the Tory blogging community to find that there are plenty of people out there who regard themselves as hardcore Cameroonies but whose personal politics are somewhat closer to Edward Leigh’s. They may pay lip service to the rhetoric, but it is all the means to an end. New Tories may counter that people said the same thing about New Labour in the 90s, but for me the change in Labour back then was much more sincere. The nasty hard left that had dominated Labour in the 70s and early 80s was never really integral to the traditional Labour Party. By contrast, even though Cameron now embraces cuddly concepts such as hugging hoodies and huskies, his power base lies in the Tory right. Norman Lamont and Michael Howard are his political forebears, not Ken Clarke or Malcolm Rifkind. It is that fact that has allowed Cameron to do what he has done, but we can be forgiven therefore for believing it is a strategic shift rather than a practical one.

Cameron’s big test will be the publication of all these policy reviews, many of which will almost certainly be contradictory, some of which (particularly the Quality of Life one) are likely to demand the party goes off in a direction it is unlikely to be comfortable with. I remain of the opinion that much of the sheen will come off at that point: maybe not enough to prevent Labour losing their majority but enough to deny the Tories one themselves.

Yet for all that, I’m not one of those people who feel that the Lib Dems ought to be in any hurry to jump into bed with the devil we know (Labour). The public would rightly ask why we were propping up a tired government who we are much further apart politically now than when they first sought office. I’m sceptical about the desirability of us entering into coalition with either side. For all their shouting, both Labour and the Tories are far more similar politically than the Lib Dems are with either of them. Why should we be under any more of an obligation to form a coalition with one of them than they have to form one between them? Nothing is written in stone - just ask the Germans.

There is a lot of merit in the party staying out of any coalition. First past the post, in which a few random votes in the right places can have massive impacts on the number of seats each party gets is particularly unkind to third parties who take part in them. Worse, because the party has excelled in recent years at hoovering up anti votes against both the other parties, we have more or less made it impossible for us to go into a coalition on either side without paying a heavy political price. It isn’t the Promised Land that some people in the party think it is; it’s an opportunity to get well and truly shafted. The benefits would have to be pretty huge to outweigh the price, and yet paradoxically the party is unlikely to see them if it is seen to be too eager.

Campbell should have stuck with his far more useful rhetoric of maximum seats and maximum votes. There is a real danger that talk of coalition now will make it the key issue that the media decides is the Lib Dem ‘agenda’ (and what a surprise to learn that Mark Oaten looks set to make the matter worse). In some ways this is much better than the current one about our leadership woes, but it is a corrosive one. Ming should be working to shut down this debate. After this week he can no longer avoid the issue, so instead he should be ruling it out as far as he can, talking up the possibility of the Lib Dems remaining independent in the case of a hung parliament.

Ultimately though, even staying out of coalition can have a heavy political price - there is no ‘easy’ solution. If the party is to survive relatively intact over the next decade, it has to become much better at defining itself. This is make or break time: if the party manages to hold firm over the next decade it is likely to come out of it much stronger; it it doesn’t then the party will be set back for a couple of decade. Ming deserves credit for working to improve the party’s sense of identity, but feverish talk of coalition will only undermine it.

Grant Shapps is frequently cited as one of the Tories’ brightest of bright young hopes, but if this is anything to go by, I wouldn’t get too breathless just yet.

Access to IVF on the NHS is a lottery, with different areas adopting different rules, an MP says.

…

Mr Shapps, whose own three children were conceived through IVF, said that PCTs were, to some extent, “playing God” - deciding who had the right to a child and who did not, based largely on the state of the PCTs’ annual budgets and deficits.

He explained: “Couples are effectively being told that they cannot have a baby while their friends on the other side of the street, who might have a similar set of circumstances, are able to obtain three cycles of IVF provided for them by the NHS.”

All of this may well be so, but how exactly does this square with Gideon Osborne’s plea yesterday about being “disciplined and responsible with public money.” It might not be a nice thing for people wanting IVF to hear, but the cost of offering fertility treatment universally on demand would be exhorbitant. In a debate about spending priorities, it is always going to lose out.

The solution is not offering universal health care, but accountability over local health budgets: replacing a postcode lottery with postcode choice. I thought the Tories were headed in that direction, but Shapps has clearly undermined this if it is the case. These sorts of headlines put pressure on governments to tighten the reins, not loosen them.

And as for going on about ‘playing God’ - IVF - healthcare for that matter - IS playing God! IVF has created a world whereby infertility is literally a death sentence in poor countries (no children means no-one to look after you in old age), and largely avoidable in the West. Invoking theology is lazy, kneejerk populism that dismisses the no doubt very real ethical dilemmas that healthcare managers have to face on a daily basis.

In short, Shapps has added nothing to the public forum apart from his own name. It looks like crusading politics, but I doubt he would ever want a government to rise to his challenge.

Odd thing this facebook lark.

The other day, a dark horse from my past Peter ‘Conservative Commentary‘ Cuthbertson contacted me on it, requesting me to be listed as a ‘friend’. I obligingly did so, including some basic data about how we know each other (dating history, that sort of thing), only to find he has now de-listed me.

What was all that about then, Cuthie? Think you can just love me and leave me, eh?

I feel so used…

I don’t really understand this new panic caused by a youth pointing his fingers at David Cameron. Who hasn’t been tempted to make finger gestures at the man?

The lad is clearly not bright, “The only drugs I do are weed and a bit of cocaine, but I don’t tell my mum about that,” perhaps not being the most sensible thing to say to a national newspaper with a circulation of millions. And if you were a teenage boy who lived on a housing estate and were called Florence, wouldn’t you feel you had something to prove?

Surely the key is to stop such boys from being given such girly names? If he was called Ryan Norris (or even Ryan Ryan), I suspect he would be an angel.

Plus, it should be pointed out that in Manchester, they give you an ASBO just for looking funny. It’s the Government’s best practice model for implementing an ‘effective’ Respect agenda. Doesn’t look like its working then.

This whole Blog Wars thing is all rather silly, but possibly the silliest aspect of it is hearing people from all parts of the political spectrum defend Guido as being non-partisan. This argument appears to rest on the basis that, from time to time, he slags off Tories as well as people from other parties.

Well, on that basis, Tharg knows what that makes me - I slag off Lib Dems all the time. And for that matter, I don’t attend half as many Lib Dem social events as Guido attends Tory ones. Yet strangely I don’t hear anyone claiming that I’m anything other than partisan.

And while he seems to be very keen to nail the Smith Institute, he doesn’t seem to have the same passion for exposing, say, the Policy Exchange for publishing research on Muslim social attitudes despite a relatively explicitly political agenda, or for that matter any of the other thinktanks currently “helping” the Tories with their current policy reviews (I’m not having a go at thinktanks here per se, lest I be accused of hypocrisy, merely suggesting that the Smith Institute “scandal” requires a bit of contextualising).

Ah, you say, but Guido occasionally writes posts slagging off thinktanks. He has an amusing picture of a chimp in a hat that goes alongside them and everything. But bemoaning an organisation and going after it are two different things.

I don’t have a problem with Guido having a partisan agenda - why shouldn’t he? But I do think people are foolish to buy into his “I hate everyone equally myth.” He may not love the modern Conservative Party, but it’s clear he’d rather have them in power and is working on that basis. Let’s at least be clear about that.

It has to be said, David Davis’ article today opposing detention without trial is good, liberal stuff. Just a few things:

• Is this the same David Davis who was on the radio last week claiming that the government should build a limitless number of new prisons (obviously, it isn’t the same David Davies who said much the same thing on the radio yesterday)?
• Why has he taken so long to make up his mind?
• If you were to write an article defending civil liberties, would you write admiringly a swivel eyed loon like the Archbishop of York, who has dedicated himself to fighting the very secular liberal democracy on which they are founded?

The problem with this article is not what it says, but the fact that it does match up with the person apparently saying it. As with the Tories’ newfound posturing on ID cards, David Davis has never opposed this before in principle, merely on detail. It doesn’t convince, and having read some of the liberal-sounding pronouncements of Messrs Blair & co before 1997, people would do well to subject Cameron’s little gang with a bit more scepticism.

UKIP seem to have got stuck in a one-step-forward, one-step-back grind. No sooner than it has been announced that their Plymouth branch have split asunder and formed their own breakaway faction (who, hilariously, call themselves the New Battle for Britain - you can hear their eyeballs squelching in their sockets as they swivel from here), than they gain two new members of the House of Lords from the Tories.

‘Twas ever thus with parties on the extreme fringes, and all does rather strengthen the case against them being a mainstream party. We may yet see two distinct Eurosceptic fringe parties fight the next European Elections, which paradoxically may see the Cameroonian Conservatives hemorrhage activists yet rally support.