On the high wire with Boris

Now that the Olympics are underway in London, they provide an irresistible opportunity for the advancement of its Mayor. Boris Johnson having been re-elected in May (at 51.5% of the vote on a 38% turnout), his supporters are staking out claims while the going is good. For example, before the games started Iain Martin provided the cover story for the July/August Standpoint, I came, I saw, I’ll conquer, Boris Johnson covets supreme power, and told us that “… we should take the Conservative clown prince seriously”. And “To some in the Conservative Party he is a scheming charlatan with no policies. To others his star power could be worth harnessing”. But it was Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, who stirred it up yesterday in an article headlined As donors stampede to back Boris, the PM can only watch.

Brogan’s article didn’t say much that was new: the Conservatives now think they are unlikely to win the next election, George Osborne is a write-off, “… the normal rules of politics do not apply to Boris”. But there were a few sentences which made it of real interest:

I hear, [Boris Johnson] met Rupert Murdoch recently to discuss how his candidacy might be promoted, and has invited the media tycoon to join him at the Olympics. It is said that Mr Murdoch wants to get rid of Mr Cameron. Westminster has noted the Sun’s growing enthusiasm for Boris, and how it contrasts with the vitriol the newspaper now reserves for Messrs Cameron and Osborne.

A few sceptics alighted on the “It is said that”. No-one, as far as I know, has picked up the text of the URL for the article, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100173707/boris-is-unstoppable-and-now-murdoch-wants-him-to-lead-the-tory-party/, which suggests that the original headline was rather more pointed than the one the Telegraph finally ran with. Indeed, Brogan later ran an emollient blog piece Whatever it brings, the reshuffle is just part of a wider recovery programme for David Cameron. Although this morning, for obvious reasons, he took the opportunity to tweet:
 

And then blogged again for the Telegraph: David Cameron's Olympics torment, reporting from the beach volleyball in Horse Guards:

… The beach volleyball MC has a line of patter he deploys several times a night. "We've just had a call. It seems the Prime Minister is trying to get an early night and wants less noise. What do we say to that?" Cue a roar of mockery and plenty of boos. … Every night then the PM is being mocked, and there's no sign of that political bounce he might have hoped for. For Boris, certainly. … But the Prime Minister must be wondering whether any Olympic gold will come his way.

All good fun and it helps fill the papers and websites, as did the Michael Gove love-in for a while back in February. More seriously, YouGov asked people in early May (during the London mayoral election) and again on 31July/1 August what the impact of Boris Johnson’s taking Cameron’s place would be on their voting. In May there was no significant difference: Con/Lab/LD/Other moved from 32/40/10/15 to 32/41/11/15. Now, during the Olympiad, the effect is significant: from 34/40/10/17 to 37/38/10/14. But when asked the normal straightforward voting intention question (and presumably unprompted with the leaders’ names), the same sample of voters yielded 32/43/10/15!

Examining the YouGov data it can be seen that the current movement towards Boris is: among women, but not significant among men; among the over 40s, but not under; among C2DEs, not ABCs. Just as interesting is the polling carried out for Lord Ashcroft later in May, extracted below:

Of course, Boris Johnson is in the happy position of being popular but subject to little critical scrutiny. If he were to become an MP again, let alone party leader, various aspects of his life might become better-known, and at the same time he would have to relaunch himself as a serious character capable of providing answers with real content to questions about the economy, or Iran, or the future energy needs of the UK, or Trident replacement, or a load of other difficult issues. The public’s evaluation of him as a possible future Prime Minister may not be as tolerant as it is to London’s Mayor during an Olympics which seems to be going well. Perhaps the last words should be from today’s The Times (£), reporting on a slight mishap:

Getting stuck on a zip wire, while clutching two Union Jacks and shouting “get me a ladder”, was, it turns out, one of [the relatively few things Boris Johnson could have done yesterday to make the national papers]. The Mayor of London was suspended about six metres up for five minutes as he tried out a 320 metre (1,050ft) zip line at Victoria Park yesterday afternoon. The wire apparently sagged so much as he sailed along that he lost momentum about 20m from the end. … As the incident trended on Twitter, David Cameron summed it up perfectly. Speaking at a health policy summit, he said: “If any other politician anywhere in the world got stuck on a zip wire it would be a disaster. For Boris it’s a triumph. He defies all forms of gravity.”

Perhaps the Conservatives will go into the next election with Boris and take the risk of “lost momentum about 20m from the end”.

UPDATE 3 AUGUST

In the press the Boris coverage  continues, amplified because of the Olympics and probably approaching its peak.  Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian today is in the incredulous-but-not prepared-to-rule-it-out camp.  Philip Collins in The Times is totally unconvinced:

None of this [the Olympics fun] means that Mr Johnson is a credible Prime Minister. The only way back to popularity for the Tory party is for David Cameron to improve his personal best, not to pretend that there is any prospect of salvation from the Olympic Village idiot.

UPDATE 4 AUGUST

Contrasting views today from Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph and Janan Ganesh, newly arrived at the Financial Times. Moore, when editor of the Telegraph, employed Boris Johnson, so his opinion should be insightful.  He prefers ‘post-modern’ to the ‘postmodern’ I used here in the same context a few days ago:

As you could tell from the London Olympic opening ceremony, we now have a post-modern public culture. We are ironical, eclectic, genre-subverting, fusion-cooking, mixing up Chelsea Pensioners and lesbian kisses. We are high-brow and low-brow at the same time. The only politician who “gets” any of this is Boris. He can mix Virgil and James Bond, a posh accent and street cred, conservative politics and a liberal spirit. Mr Cameron is the moderniser, but Boris is the post-moderniser.  

To the many – possibly including myself – who would prefer our politics plainer, all this may seem footling. What has it got to do with righting our ghastly economic wrongs? Very little, perhaps. Boris Johnson’s instinctive, freedom-loving, anti-statist optimism is attractive, but certainly does not amount to a policy. Besides, the fashion for writing off Mr Cameron has gone far further than the facts warrant. … All I would say, though, is that conventional politics is now failing more comprehensively than at any time since the 1930s, and that Boris Johnson is the only unconventional politician in the field.

Ganesh does not mince his words in the FT (£), arguing:

If a Johnson ascendancy is improbable in the near future, it is far from certain in the long run either. By the time Mr Cameron does depart, the field of potential replacements will be rather more crammed than it is now. Michael Gove, the reforming education secretary, is coming to be seen as the government’s biggest success story. ...

By far the biggest threat to Mr Johnson, however, is not any other individual. It is the pitiless scrutiny that comes with national politics, a realm so much more demanding than London’s relatively weak mayoralty that it barely makes sense to describe Mr Cameron and Mr Johnson as being in the same line of work.  

… Winning in London is not the same as winning in Bolton West, Birmingham Edgbaston or many of the other seats that the Tories failed to secure in 2010. Running City Hall is not the same as running a state that occupies half of gross domestic product. Mr Johnson is brilliant, magnetic, optimistic and cosmopolitan, and he knows how to use a bully pulpit. He is, in short, perfect for the job he already has.

  Surely Ganesh is aware of the Peter Principle by which people tend to rise above their level of competence?  Perhaps this only applies to advancement in organisational  hierarchies rather than the greasy pole ascended by politicians.  Ganesh, by the way, has a biography of George Osborne coming out in October.

UPDATE 5 AUGUST

This story is obviously going to be long-distance!  Today Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, writing in the Observer, regards him as far from perfect in his current job:

While his stint as mayor has undoubtedly been brilliant for Project Boris, it is far from clear that London has equally benefited. The capital has some of the highest public transport fares in the world, yet offers an unreliable service. Its police force has undergone its worst internal crisis for a generation, with the mayor burning through three commissioners in as many years. The Boris Bike hire scheme, while popular, is a financial swamp costing more than £100m; we are in danger of breaching EU rules on pollution; the cycling death rate is rising; there are disturbing trends in some areas of crime. Does this qualify him to become prime minister in times like these?  

Boris Johnson is unparalleled in politics in terms of self-promotion and even occasionally cheering us up. He is hugely clever and politically astute. But after more than four years as mayor, he has yet to prove himself in action, let alone as a contender to be prime minister.

She also regards Johnson as lacking in team spirit and offers a biographer’s insight into his personality:

And yet for all his apparent friendliness, Johnson is rarely a friend. In fact, although many might describe themselves as a pal, they are usually mistaken. As a critic once observed, as with Lord Palmerston, Johnson "does not have friends, merely interests". Indeed, when questioned, these self-professed "friends" often admit that they have seen the mayor socially perhaps only a couple of times in the past few years. Those who are no longer "useful" have not seen him at all.  

Most admit they have rarely if ever conducted a lengthy conversation with Johnson; he is not one to share a pint at the pub or a club with a mate, for instance, and also only likes to run alone. One former female aide recalls how she dreaded car journeys with him as conversation would either be painfully stilted or simply non-existent. At gatherings, it has been his habit to avoid "one to ones" and escape the embarrassing intimacy of such encounters by constantly introducing people to someone else. Even at private dinner parties, senior Tories say he will offer to make a speech to avoid the agony of cosy two-way chats at the table and the possibility of direct questions. He prefers to be in "transmit" mode rather than "receive". It is as if he erects the highest walls around himself to avoid any of us really getting to know him.

Some of these traits are associated with only children and it has been said that an only child is a special case of the first-born child. The last first-born child to become British Prime Minister was Edward Heath, a statistical curiosity discussed with handedness in a previous post. The Sunday Times (£) covers the story so far and adds some polling of its own:

A poll by YouGov for The Sunday Times today suggests he has some way to go. Asked who they would most like to see replace Cameron if he stepped down before the next election, 24% backed Johnson, ahead of William Hague, the foreign secretary, on 14%, David Davis on 6% and George Osborne, the chancellor, on 3%. Yet such change might make little difference to the party’s electoral fortunes: while 19% said this would make them more likely to vote Tory, 17% said it would not.

They also look at possible routes to the top:

– David Cameron fails to win a majority in 2015 and Tory MPs are desperate for Boris, the king across the water. Cameron hangs on as leader for a few months to allow an orderly transition. An obliging MP is persuaded to give up his seat quickly and Johnson returns to the Commons via a by-election. He wins the ensuing leadership contest. 

– Cameron narrowly wins the election but announces he won’t serve a full term. He stays on until 2017 or 2018, giving Johnson plenty of time to finish his term as mayor, get back into parliament and win the fight to succeed him. 

– Johnson stands in 2015 — despite having said before there is no chance of his doing so — insisting he can be both an MP and mayor. This puts him in a position to make an eventual move on No 10 whatever the election result.

Is Blair reaping as he sowed?

A biblical quotation seems appropriate for a man of faith like Tony Blair:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. Galatians 6:7

but if you are one of those people who think Blair should be indicted as an Iraq war criminal, this post is probably not what you are looking for.

On 2 May 1997, a few days before his 44th birthday, Tony Blair became the youngest Prime Minister since the 42 year old Lord Liverpool in 1812 (a record which passed to David Cameron in 2010). Another record of sorts was also set that day and is still held by Blair’s immediate predecessor, John Major, who had lost the election at the age of 54. Before Major the only Prime Ministers in the 20th century to have left office for good below the age of 60 were Anthony Eden, in 1956 in poor health, and Lloyd George in 1922, both 59. Those of us who were part of Britain’s post-war bulge (ie born between 1946 and 1948 as explained in a previous post) could only look on bewildered in 1997 as power passed from a man older than us (much older in his outlook) to a younger man, born in 1953. In fact the only ‘one of us’ to feature significantly in politics since 1997 has been that great survivor Jack Straw, who was born in August 1946 and was present in all the Blair and Brown cabinets until 2010.

In 1995 Blair famously told his party conference that Britain was “a young country” and on 19 September 1996 published the seemingly now-forgotten New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country. The book certainly doesn’t get a mention in Alastair Campbell’s diaries, but a part of the entry for that exact date is worth noting. Campbell had sat in on an interview in which the subject of Blair’s mother’s sudden death when he was 22 had come up:

I said to him afterwards I’d never realised he was so close to his mum because he had never really opened up like that before, even in private. He said she was a wonderful woman and he still felt guided by her. … He said the thing his mother’s death had given him above all was a sense of urgency, the feeling that life is short, it can be cut even shorter, and you can pack in as much as you can while you’re here, and try to make a difference.

Last week there was a surge of media coverage for Blair, possibly carefully co-ordinated, ostensibly to mark the fifth anniversary of his leaving Downing Street. I’ve already mentioned his 24 June appearance on BBC1’s mid-market The Andrew Marr Show and this was followed three days later by guest editorship of the London Evening Standard (given away free but directed at white collar Londoners) and then on 30 June by a lengthy interview in the up-market FT magazine. The changes in style are quite amusing, from globally-concerned rock star semi-inarticulacy on Marr:

No it's absolutely not true - and, by the way, they did have their point of view. I mean this is why … The notion that cabinet never discussed this issue is absurd. I understand why people disagree over it, but it‟s not a matter of … There is no great … You know they’ve gone over this so many times. There is no great hidden conspiracy about this. It was a decision. Now some people agree with it, some people disagree with it. I think when you look at the Middle East today, I think again in the broad sweep of history people will take rather a different view of it.

to measured senior global statesman-speak for Lionel Barber in the FT:

“The rationale for Europe today is not peace; it is power. The rationale for Europe today is that [we are] in a geopolitical landscape that is rapidly changing, in which even a country the size of Germany, let alone France or the UK or Italy, is a fraction of the size of what are going to be the main geopolitical players. We can’t afford to be left on our own. We need the collective strength to advance individual interests.”

But the message from all three sessions was that Blair wants a big job:

ANDREW MARR: (over) Yes. But in domestic/European terms, another big job in it for you?  

TONY BLAIR: Well you know I‟ve always said I'm a public service person first, so I‟d have been happy carrying on as Prime Minister, I‟d have been happy taking the European job as President of the European Union. But you know if I'm not doing that, I'm going to make a difference in a different way. I think here you know where I can contribute, I will. If people want to listen, that's fine. If they don't, that's also fine.

Sarah Sands (editor of the Evening Standard) wrote:

Blair has said that he would like to do a big job in public life again, but when I try him on a job description, he looks wry, and reminds me that he was prime minister for 10 years: “What I can do is contribute to the debate, whether it is Europe or the Arab Spring or areas to do with economy and public service reform here.”  

Okay, I say. Let’s go for the obvious one. If you were offered another term as prime minister would you take it? “Yes, sure, but it’s not likely to happen is it, so…”

And with the FT's editor in the magazine:

Barber: “So what’s your route back?”  

Blair: “I don’t know exactly.”  

Barber: “But you want it. It’s clearly something that you feel ready [for].”  

Blair: “Yes, I feel I’ve got something to say. If people want to listen, that’s great, and if they don’t, that’s their choice … I would want to emphasise how fast the world around us is changing and how incredibly dangerous it is for us to think we can stand still.”

Well, we’ll see what turns up for him. One suggestion came from Jane Merrick in the Independent on Sunday the next day:

However The IoS understands that one job Mr Blair may be offered is director general of the World Trade Organisation, a post that comes up next year. The current holder, Pascal Lamy, is French and has served two four-year terms, and diplomatic sources have hinted that a British candidate would be in a good position to get the job. Even David Cameron is understood not to be opposed to Mr Blair's possible candidature.

The last sentence probably says it all, and anyway back in March the Guardian thought this was a job for Peter Mandelson.

Sands and Blair at the Evening Standard

Why all this exposure now? As a first guess Blair will be 60 next May and perhaps he takes such milestones seriously. After all, in 2007 he made sure that he stayed PM until 27 June – if he’d gone before 10 June he would have left office younger than Major. Also, there must come a point when the goldmine of prestigious and lucrative appearances as a speaker approaches exhaustion. It’s even possible that his JP Morgan advisory role (£2.5million a year the FT reckons) will come to an end eventually – surely not a contract which expired at 60?

If I sound a bit jaundiced about Blair entering his seventh decade, it’s probably because of the effect that his cult of youth had on the public sector’s attitude towards its older employees. Within a few years of New Labour’s taking office many of the 50-and-overs were getting the message that their faces no longer fitted. Any lingering ambitions for promotion were soon replaced by early retirement being a far more likely prospect. At the same time policy and strategy units were being set up in Downing Street and elsewhere setting the tone with staff whose principal qualification seemed to be that of being younger than Blair. And of course some of the SPADs of that period and type are now sitting on the Shadow front bench.

Subsequently the escalating pension bill has led to substantial increases in the pensionable age across the public sector. And although addressing age discrimination certainly wasn’t a New Labour priority, it eventually came under regulation in 2006 and appeared in the Equality Act 2010. But, if Blair is now feeling that his age is, quite unfairly, catching up with him (bus pass and fuel allowances due in 2013 - if they haven’t been abolished) and doesn’t care much for it, some of us might be forgiven for thinking that he might be reaping a little of what he sowed. But Blair, like Campbell, lives in an irony-free zone.

UPDATE 24 JULY

Tony Blair was interviewed for the Daily Telegraph on 24 July by Charles Moore. Moore explains that:

The Westminster Faith Debates, chaired by his former home secretary Charles Clarke, will close with a conversation tonight between Mr Blair, the Archbishop of Canterbury and me. The subject is religion and society.

and most of the interview has a religious theme, although Blair seems readier to talk about religions than his own Roman Catholic beliefs. Moore concluded with:

It has been a lively conversation, but I detect in him something like Britain’s famous problem of having lost an empire, but not yet found a role.  

At 59, he’s still young for a man in his position. He has been out of the game for five years, and now, you can see, he wants to get back in. ''Since I left office, I have learnt a huge amount, especially about what is happening in Europe and the world. Sometimes it’s quite shocking to me: how useful would this knowledge have been!’’  

He thinks, I suspect, that he’d be a better prime minister now than he was before. ''I’d like to find a form of intervening in debates.’’ How? By getting elected again? ''I don’t think that’s possible.’’ A peerage? A wonderful look of amused contempt suffuses his tanned face. Something in Europe, perhaps? ''I would have taken the job [the presidency of the European Council] if they had offered it to me, but they didn’t.’’  

Europe, he says, is ''opening up’’. I thought it was closing down, I say. Tony Blair grins. ''Well, what is happening now is not sustainable.” There are ''big, big questions here, involving the political reconstruction of Europe. The single currency will break up unless we stop it.’’ And on that exciting note, the man who would like the job is gone.

UPDATE 30 JULY

In the Guardian on 27 July Simon Jenkins took a very dim view of the possibility of Tony Blair’s reentry to British political life. He also referenced an interview that Blair gave to CNN's Christiane Amanpour on 17 July which includes the following:

AMANPOUR: Is there more public office in view for Tony Blair? Everybody’s talking about how you’re positioning yourself to make a comeback.
BLAIR: I’m not really. It’s just that people ask you the question in a way that says, you know, rule it out, and I kind of think, well, why should I? But that’s not the same as planning to do it. You know what I mean? So I - I’m a public service person. You know, I would have liked staying as prime minister. I would have taken the European job had it been offered me. So that’s my preference. But I’m also enjoying the life I’ve got and doing lots of things and you know, I kind of let the future take care of itself.
AMANPOUR: You didn’t want to step down?
BLAIR: It was - you know, it became very difficult for me to stay, other than a lot of damage to my party, but also probably to my country. So I decided to go. And I’d done it ten years, you know, it’s a long time.
AMANPOUR: Sounds like you’re keeping the door open, though.
BLAIR: It's literally - I mean, maybe I should just shut it, but I just kind of think, “Why?” I mean, you know, the - so, look, I've still got plenty of ideas and energy. But I can't see anything happening on the horizon. I'm not planning or plotting or scheming.

The Blue Angel: Talking up Gove again

Not quite what Marlene Dietrich sang* in The Blue Angel:



but it seems to be the tune coming from the UK commentariat. For example, Toby Young, in the first Sun on Sunday on 26 February:

… Up until now, the only other senior Conservative identified as a potential successor to Cameron is George Osborne and all the talk has been of a Boris v Osborne bun fight in the next Parliament. But could Michael Gove be emerging as a dark horse candidate? We learned on Friday that more than 300 volunteer groups have applied to set up free schools next year, adding to the 96 that have already been approved.
… It's precisely because the policy has been such a success that Michael Gove is now being talked about as a future Prime Minister. Of course, it won't do him any favours with his Cabinet colleagues – he might as well paint a big fat target on his back. …
… in a three-way contest between Boris, Osborne and Gove, my money would be on Gove.

The day before, Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph had heaped praise on Gove (“a highly intelligent and resilient man”) and his education reforms, but had made only a very oblique comment on his political prospects:

Mr Gove offers an attractive combination – complete loyalty to the Cameron modernisation, but a Thatcher-era conviction politics as well. It is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, in the present Cabinet, it is virtually unique.

Anyway, Young wasn’t right to say “Up until now”. Another Gove enthusiast, John Rentoul in the Independent, seems to think that a Bagehot article last summer in The Economist marked the start. It was, apparently, written by Janan Ganesh, familiar to some from BBC1’s Sunday Politics. But August is a difficult time for commentators to find something to write about, and “what if the PM went under a bus” is a long-established column-filler. As August, so early January, but, nonetheless, Rentoul sees Patrick O’Flynn’s piece in the Daily Express, Michael Gove has suddenly become the heir apparent to David Cameron, as another straw in the wind.

Since then the wind has turned into a gale. Iain Martin headlined an interview with Gove for Standpoint magazine, Will Michael Gove Go All the Way to No 10?, and then, on 22 February, followed it up with a post for his blog, The Rise of the Iron Laddie Can Gove get to Number 10? (Ironically, Private Eye had made the same pun about Cameron nearly a month earlier: Issue 1306 page 22). At the same time, John Rentoul blogged Michael Gove could be prime minister, describing Iain Martin’s post as “a superb write-up”. Another Rentoul post, surrealistically titled Why Gove must be reincarnated as an olive, followed on 26 February, together with his column in the Independent on Sunday. The latter took a slightly less hyperbolic view, drawing attention to the deficiencies of the other leading Conservative members of the Cabinet, and concluding that:

Compared with all these, Michael Gove is the most successful minister.

A clue to his appeal to Rentoul (Blair’s biographer) follows:

In a virtuoso speech to the parliamentary press gallery last week, without notes, he said he was proud to be a Blairite, a species that could survive only in the hothouse of government, and which was "now extinct in the wild – that is, in the Parliamentary Labour Party".
Against all that, he has one weakness. He is not a retail politician on television. But if he goes on doing a good job of government, that is the kind of perception that can be turned round, and his peculiarities of manner could become strengths of "a character".

and Rentoul concluded:

… The other day I suggested that Gove should be moved to sort out the disaster of NHS reform. But that may not be the limit of what he can achieve.

Playing to the gallery seems to have paid off, with conservativehome’s Left Watch in the form of Paul Goodman leaping to Gove’s defence, The Left's next target is Michael Gove, after an article in the Guardian, also on 27 February, by David Leigh: The schools crusade that links Michael Gove to Rupert Murdoch, "The education secretary has close ties to Rupert Murdoch and would be a key figure if he attempts to move into the UK schools market".

Most people recognise Murdoch’s astuteness about the possibilities of innovation, and would want his advocacy of new technology in the classroom to be considered, but the teachers among the Guardian’s readership may be less enthused.  Whether Gove is wise to have got as close to Murdoch as the article suggests is another matter. Then, as David Davis’ article, Crony Capitalism, in the current Prospect Magazine shows, this has been habitual behaviour at the top of the British political class.  Goodman concludes:

Guardian and New Statesman journalists would be asleep on the job were they not criticising Tory Cabinet Ministers. So this is not a complaint but an observation. It is also, in its way, a warning. Gove is currently what the Australians called "a tall poppy". While Andrew Lansley trudges on with his health bill, the Education Secretary seems to soar skywards. There is no shortage of those who would like bring him down.

And by later in the day things had been cooled down a bit, with Fraser Nelson on the Spectator Coffee House explaining that Gove had told him in 2008 “I’d never run for leader”, and Tim Montgomerie, back on conservativehome’s ToryDiary, assuring his readers that “Michael Gove rules out leadership bid, concluding he doesn't have "right sort of character" for the job”. Apparently Gove was going to give a major speech on 1 March “on social mobility. However, he cancelled it because of the growing leadership chatter. He didn’t want this.” according to “his closest adviser”.

Rentoul went so far as to put a meme on Twitter, #MG4PM, but it seems to be a long way from trending and we will just have to wait and see whether Gove-mania gets a second wind. The man himself may well be left wondering if, with friends like these, he needs enemies. In the meantime, it might be worth rereading Bagehot/Ganesh’s conclusion about Gove:

The last politician to mix conservatism and cosmopolitanism so vividly was Michael Portillo, the former Tory minister who, neatly, was the subject of a sympathetic biography by Mr Gove in 1995.  That book was called “The Future of the Right”; there are some who see Mr Gove as the inheritor of that mantle. They worry that other candidates to lead the Tories one day, such as Mr Osborne and Mr Johnson, share with Mr Cameron a patrician incomprehension of the striving classes. But Mr Gove forswears any such ambition. Even if he did not, his conspicuous intellectualism and uncompromising worldview might count against him. Some politicians are just too interesting to reach the very top.

Harking back to a post here last August on birth order in top politicians, it may be worth remembering that the the last first-born child to lead his party to win a general election was Harold Wilson in 1974. According to the Economist: “Mr Gove was adopted when he was four months old. All he knows about the woman who bore him is that she was a student.” It isn’t clear whether there was an older child in the family. Gove worked as a journalist, which might help explain the enthusiasm of the commentators for one of their own.  But as far as I can tell, the last PM to have been seriously engaged in journalism was Winston Churchill!

More seriously, it’s worth considering one of the points made by Toby Young:

I'm a big believer in free schools, having led the efforts of a group of parents and teachers to set one up last year. The distinctive characteristics of our school – strong discipline, small class sizes and traditional subjects – have proved a winning formula, with more than 2,000 parents applying for our next 120 places. It's precisely because the policy has been such a success that Michael Gove is now being talked about as a future Prime Minister.

Well, up to a point Lord Copper. The fatal problem with the grammar schools was their 35% or less participation rate. Of course this didn’t mean 65% disappointment – some parents wouldn’t have been concerned and anyway didn’t “apply” in Young’s sense. But his data suggests that there will be over 1880 disappointed applicant parents, ie about 95%. Raising large-scale expectations which can’t be met might be regarded as a risky undertaking for any politician, even one so "highly intelligent and resilient".

*In Josef von Sternberg’s first talkie, Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), Marlene Dietrich plays Lola-Lola, a cabaret singer at the eponymous nightclub who causes the downfall of a hitherto respected schoolmaster at the local gymnasium (academy).  A plot which is very unlikely to appeal to the Education Secretary.  In the English version of the film, The Blue Angel (1930), Dietrich sings:

Falling in love again
Never wanted to
What am I to do?
Can't help it
etc

ADDENDUM 4 March 2012

Now here’s a strange thing in the form of a Tweet on 3 March from John Rentoul. I will use the method the Modern Language Association recommends for citing a tweet:

Rentoul, John (JohnRentoul). “"Being somewhat peculiar myself, I sympathise with people who are a little bit odd" Toby Young http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100106034/yet-another-attempt-to-smear-michael-gove-by-his-nemesis-on-the-ft/” 3 March 2012, 5:19 p.m. Tweet.

Gove has been in an argument with the Information Commissioner about the release of emails under the Freedom of Information Act, following a story in the Financial Times on 20 September 2011. Their education correspondent, Christopher Cook, was the subject of Young’s post on his Daily Telegraph blog (as Rentoul’s Tweet) later that day. A month earlier Cook had written a profile of Young in the Lunch with the FT series. Young’s comment quoted by Rentoul was about Cook, (not Gove!) and his blog ended:

I met Cook at last year's Conservative Party Conference, an encounter that led to him penning a profile of me in the FT. I have to confess, I find his weird, stalker-ish obsession with Michael Gove almost endearing. Being somewhat peculiar myself, I sympathise with people who are a little bit odd. But his journalism should be taken with a large dose of salt.

Something Young wrote interested me:

Cook abandoned his fledgeling political career soon afterwards, joining the FT in 2008, but he remains close to Willetts and worked on The Pinch, his book about the baby boom generation published in 2010.

because David Willett's The Pinch was the subject of a post here last year.

Phyllida Lloyd’s 'The Iron Lady'

Much has been said and written about this film since the start of the publicity onslaught in the UK in mid-November. In support there seem to have been numerous private screenings for the movers and shakers before general release to the rest of us on 6 January. Months ago there had been a private MORI screening in Guildford (where Thatcher’s England endures presumably, though “Susan” from Farnham wasn’t struck). Unsurprisingly then, even before seeing The Iron Lady, I wondered what I could possibly add in this post, but here goes.

Firstly, there are three Margaret Thatchers in this film, summarised in the table below. 

The film is structured so that Roberts and Maggie are accessed through flashbacks triggered by Lady T’s finally disposing of Dennis’s (her late husband) clothes. There are too many flashbacks and there’s too much of Jim Broadbent’s jokey reincarnation of Dennis. My guess is that the Margaret Thatchers we see on the screen are divided about 45% Lady T, 35% Maggie and 20% Roberts.

The young Margaret is played competently by Alexandra Roach, but the Roberts period was dramatized well-enough quite recently in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, with Andrea Riseborough in the lead role. (Riseborough is shortly to appear as Wallis Simpson in W.E.). The Roberts’ grocery in the film appears to have been the only one where ration coupons were not required during the war.

Streep’s performance has been praised mightily and certainly her Maggie and Lady T were a tour de force of both acting and of makeup, costume and prosthetics. Oddly enough I found Lady T more convincing. Perhaps this is because only a few hundred people at most know Margaret Thatcher at 85 at first hand. Streep’s acting, particularly the voice and posture, seems highly credible to the rest of us, but we lack any benchmark. This puts her Lady T in the same category for most people as her turn as Julia Child in Julie and Julia. However, Maggie appeared regularly on television for over 11 years, and colour broadcasting had begun in the UK at the time she first entered the Cabinet. Those of us above a certain age watched her often in the years up to 1990. Also, during the Maggie period, she must have met thousands of people, including me. I thought, admittedly unlike some who worked closely with Thatcher, that Streep’s Maggie was very good but at times not quite on the button. However, I doubt if anyone else will ever do better than Streep.

The Maggie episodes include contemporary news footage leading, for example, to the sudden appearance on screen of a larger than life (and almost school boyish) Peter Allen. Despite this nod to realism, the Maggie parts of the story are also the most operatic and demand the greatest extension of artistic licence. For example, Prime Ministers do not march around Parliament with the rest of the Cabinet in their wake, like mediaeval courtiers trailing behind their Prince. But I have had a problem with differentiating dramatization and documentary when it concerns recent events. So I couldn’t help but be amused when Jonathan Powell, reviewing the papers on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show on 4 December, told us:

… my brother worked for Mrs Thatcher for eight years and she would cook him breakfast most mornings in the flat in Number 10 and he certainly would vouch that she would never have revealed herself in her decolletage to another man, absolutely not …

For nerds like me, the BBC is sitting on a pile of documentaries about the Maggie years made by Michael Cockerell and others and, according to the FT (£), their archive is being digitised for us to watch on a micropayment basis. So I shouldn’t complain about a film drama departing from the strictly factual. However, I found things became irritatingly detached from reality in the House of Commons scenes in The Iron Lady. While these provided ample employment opportunities for male members of Equity over 50, the Commons during the Maggie period was not exclusively for men with one exception. The chart below shows that Thatcher was not alone in Parliament in her time (1 of 25 women when she arrived, 60 when she left), that things improved under New Labour, and how much further there still is to go, as there are only 144 at present (including 82 Labour and 49 Conservative).
 

Women MPs as percentage of total, 1918-2010

Among the column inches which this film has generated, I thought Boris Johnson’s views were interesting “… [the] writer and director (neither of whom, I guess, would call themselves ardent Thatcherites) …” until he turned his piece into an excuse for City axe-grinding; Matthew Parris in The Times (£) is worth a read, despite his irritating self-references to “Mrs Thatcher’s clerk”; Tom Harris, after he saw the film tweeted “dearie me”, but then blogged his fuller opinion; Tim Robey in the Telegraph explained that someone seems to have had an expensive change of heart about the music - fallout from the MORI session perhaps? Charles Moore, being Thatcher’s official biographer, has to be read, and he made the point as others have done that

:… there can be no doubt that it is calculatedly unkind to take a real, living person and portray that person as demented, which this film does. Either such a portrayal is false and therefore indefensible, or it is true, in which case the poor victim cannot answer back. The making of the film is therefore exploitative, and it is bound to hurt anyone close to her, above all, her family. In this straightforward, moral sense, the film should not have been made in Lady Thatcher’s lifetime.

The right to privacy of a public figure once retired into private life, whatever their mental health, doesn’t seem to be up for discussion, however. Surely there is a debate to be had about the border between legitimate ‘public interest’ and ‘what the public might find interesting’ and might pay to see as a film? It is perhaps worth noting that Carol Thatcher, who has written articles about Lady Thatcher, appears in the film, but her twin, Mark, who as far as I know has never spoken or written about his mother, does not.

David Owen (a former neurologist) observed in the Independent that:

While neither factually nor medically correct in every detail, this film could achieve something important and enduring: acceptance that dementia, however it presents itself, is rarely an indication of a poorly functioning brain in earlier life.

and argued that ‘Hubris Syndrome’ is the psychological frailty which undermines leaders. My pet theory is that Prime Ministers, because of the stresses of the job (eg PMQs, the oversized and hyperventilating UK media, sub-standard personal accommodation in Downing Street, too much travel induced by the UK’s view of its world role) age in office at about 18 months a calendar year, making Thatcher about 92, not 86 (see Table below).

*6 months added for every year as Prime Minister

Professor Steven Fielding blogged some astute comments, in particular in noting the similarity of the plot to that of the late Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly Deeply:

In that 1990 British-made movie Juliet Stephenson plays Nina, a widow who refuses to come to terms with her loss. As a result her dead husband, played by Alan Rickman, keeps appearing until she realises that she has to move on and starts a relationship with another man. That Michael Maloney plays Stevenson's new love interest and is also Thatcher's doctor in The Iron Lady might have helped jog my memory.

David Cameron, (perhaps with an eye to the female C1/C2 over-30 demographic taken with Streep’s performance in Mamma Mia - just kidding), told the BBC:

It's a fantastic piece of acting by Meryl Streep, but you can't help wondering, why do we have to have this film right now. It is a film much more about ageing and elements of dementia rather than about an amazing prime minister. My sense was a great piece of acting, a staggering piece of acting, but a film I wish they could have made another day.

According to The People on 15 January Lady Thatcher watched a DVD of the film “with close friend Lord Bell at her home in Dulwich, south London.” They quoted a source as saying:

By all ­accounts she was left quite emotional as she watched her life story. She actually spoke of being ‘pleasantly surprised’ by what she had seen ­although emotions do ­appear to have got the better of her as she recalled her real-life response to events shown in the film.

However, on 21 January the FT (£) reported Lord Bell as saying that he:

has no plans to see [The Iron Lady] as it will not “make any difference to her legacy”.

And finally two things not, as far as I know, reported in the UK press. Firstly, The Iron Lady had its world premiere in Beijing on 19 November at the first U.S.-China Forum on The Arts and Culture. Maggie as a medium for the exercise of US soft power – perhaps they should have called it The Ironic Lady.  Secondly, the aria, sung by Callas, background music in the film as Maggie finally leaves Downing Street, is Casta Diva from Bellini's Norma and, of course, it was John and Norma Major who were about to move in.

Streep-Maggie, Lady Thatcher, Meryl Streep

Note: Data from Women in Parliament and Government, Feargal McGuinness, House of Commons Library Standard Note SN/SG/1250, 5 January 2012.

ADDENDUM 16 JANUARY

I'm giving this film an Anticipointment Index of 4 (out of 5 at worst). This reflects that it had a very high level of hype but was redeemed for its failings by Streep's performance.

ADDENDUM 23 JANUARY

Benedict Brogan (of the Daily Telegraph) in his daily email this morning reported

Conor Burns, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West, and Lady Thatcher’s chief representative in Parliament, tweets an update on her progress: “Lovely visit with Lady T this evening. Good chat about defence, Falklands and Welfare Bill. In great spirit”. Good to hear.