Red Princes and Princesses

The strange death in China last year of a British businessman, Neil Heywood, the arrest and trial of Gu Kailai for his murder, and now the disgrace of her husband Bo Xilai, have probably made people in the UK more aware of the dynastic nature of the Chinese Communist Party. In the US, China is analysed closely, and anyone looking to learn more about the ‘princelings’ should find Jeremy Page’s 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal informative. The WSJ interactive graphic shows Bo Xilai’s antecedents and also the elite positions now occupied by other children of Mao Zedong’s comrades.

Once a concept like princelings is established it travels and then gets transferred. The UK political blogger Guido Fawkes ran stories last month about Will Straw (son of Jack) “spending time in the Lancashire seat of Rossendale and Darwen” and Euan Blair (son of Tony and Cherie) apparently being interested in selection for the Labour seat of Coventry North West. But he was able to cap this shortly afterwards with news that Joe Dromey (son of Jack and Harriet née Harman) was “devoting a lot of time to work in the safe Labour seat of Lewisham Deptford”. This story was run under the headline The Red Princes: Third Dromey Trying to Get on the Gravy Train (left).

The Labour Party’s annual conference began at the end of September , so good timing for Guido and not surprising that Toby Young in the Sun on Sunday on 30 September came out with:

In case you’re in any doubt that Labour is the true party of inherited privilege, I give you the Wedgwood Benn dynasty. Tony Benn, that old socialist warhorse, was the son of Viscount Stansgate, a Labour Secretary of State, and his son, Hilary Benn, went on to serve in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. The latest addition to this fine, aristocratic line is Emily Benn, Tony’s granddaughter, who was selected to stand as the Labour candidate in East Worthing and Shoreham in 2007. To cap it all, this was when she was 17, before she was old enough to vote!

More accurately, although selected at 17, Emily Benn was old enough to vote by the time of the 2010 election in which she came third, behind the LibDems, and the Tory, Tim Loughton, who increased his majority.

Although Guido has, so far, only picked on our ‘Red Princes’, their Chinese analogues include Princesses, as Damien Ma reported in the Atlantic last year in Meet the Red Princesses and Princes: The Chinese Elite's Globe-Trotting Kids. No doubt some Red Princesses will be surfacing here before long – the Blairs have a daughter as well as another son, Nicky. And before the last election, Georgia Gould, daughter of the late Philip Gould, was reported to be interested in the Labour selection for Erith and Thamesmead shortly after graduation. According to the Daily Mail she had taken over as Chair of the Oxford University Labour Club from none other than Nicky Blair!

Of course, political dynasties are not uncommon among the Conservatives either, perhaps not quite so intertwined, but we can expect the Daily Mail and Guido to give them a miss. Damien Ma put his finger on something relevant though, when he concluded:

It is far from clear whether any of them [the Red Princesses and Princes] will have political aspirations in the future, and if they do, whether their experiences will decisively shape their world views. The average Chinese -- actually, average anybody -- would struggle to identify with what they represent or to determine whether they will be forces for change or stasis in China over the next decades.

Our political class certainly isn’t short of people from the PPE/researcher/adviser mould now.  Their clone-like offspring are likely to be at two removes from reality rather than one. In the 2020s, when they are all at each other’s throats as were their parents in the last decade, it should make for lively political reporting, if not good government. Let’s hope Leveson doesn’t stifle the Guidos before then. I would put my money on Straw Jr, who was accepted into the civil service fast-stream, no mean feat, and is at least prepared to take on a currently Tory-held seat rather than a safe Labour one, and also bet on Nicky Blair of whom we hear little - but remember the significance in British politics of birth order!

Of course, a reasonable conclusion is that there can’t be that many good graduate jobs around, if all that these wealthy and well-connected kids can aspire to is Parliament. Also, perhaps being an MP with a safe seat is far more congenial, by comparison with most paid work, than many of us plebs realise or the current incumbents care to let on. But the princes in particular should take heed of ‘famous father syndrome’ which can easily afflict those who follow in parental footsteps. One of the best-known sufferers was Randolph Churchill. When it became known that his surgically-excised growth was benign, Evelyn Waugh famously remarked that "It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the one part of Randolph which was not malignant and to remove it."

ADDENDUM 2 OCTOBER

In his Guardian Labour Conference Diary Michael White reported for 1 October:

Tony Blair's former press chief Alastair Campbell is "thinking about" standing for election at the next general election, he revealed yesterday. Asked on LBC radio whether he had ambitions to become an MP, he said: "All I'll say to you is I get a lot of people asking me, particularly when I'm up here, and I do think about it and I am thinking about it and I don't think there's a fantastic rush. We sort of know when the next election is."

Which constituency Campbell has in mind has not been reported yet.  He has two potential princes and one princess, and a partner, Fiona Millar, who was rumoured to be interested in taking over Glenda Jackson's seat. 

President Hollande and us

I like Toby Young’s writing (he’s @toadmeister on Twitter), even though I sometimes disagree with him. Of course, his father’s books made an impression on my generation, The Rise of the Meritocracy being required reading for any university-bound sixth-former. Admittedly some of us might have interpreted it as encouragement rather than as satire. Also my having commented as ‘Western Independent’ on a couple of Toby Young’s Daily Telegraph blog posts last year still misleads some of his readers into hitting on here. For which I am grateful, even if it goes to show that he used to get many more readers than I ever will.

I say “used to” because @toadmeister’s Telegraph blog ceased when he started to write a column for the Sun on Sunday. On 14 May, it included the following, under the heading France feeding frenzy:

NEW French president Francois Hollande has a novel theory to explain the problems afflicting the eurozone. Forget about restrictive employment laws, unaffordable welfare systems and soaring levels of public debt. And, of course, it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the folie de grandeur that is the single currency. The real reason, apparently, is because Britain treats the Continent like a “self-service restaurant”. Come again, Inspector Clouseau? What he’s trying to say is that we just help ourselves to all the goodies without wanting to pay for them. Which is quite cheeky. Our annual contribution to the EU budget has just gone up by more than £1billion to £16.6billion. How much do we get in return? Much less than that. We’ve been members of the EU for 40 years and in 39 of them we’ve been net contributors to the EU budget. So no, Monsieur le President. It’s more like an all-you-can-eat buffet in which Britain is the only thing on the menu.

The original was laid out almost entirely as one sentence paragraphs. In fact, Young’s style in the Sun is clearly focussed on what he thinks its readership has a taste for. Fortunately the distinction between pastiche and parody is unlikely to worry many of them. More analytically, the Gunning Fog Index (an Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading) is 8.61 for the piece above. By contrast his Status Anxiety article in the Spectator on 5 May had an index of 12.05 and the first section of Chapter 3 of his How To Set Up a Free School is 14.12.

But what did Francois Hollande actually say? His remarks (commented on elsewhere in the British press) come from answers to questions put by French Slate:

Vous n’avez pas non plus été reçu par David Cameron, le Premier ministre, et la presse britannique et la City n’ont pas forcément été tendres à votre égard. Sur quelles bases comptez-vous renforcer la relation franco-britannique?  

Reconnaissons que les Britanniques ont été particulièrement timides sur les enjeux de la régulation financière, et attentifs aux seuls intérêts de la City. D’où leurs réticences à la mise en place de la taxe sur les transactions financières et à l’harmonisation fiscale en Europe. Et qui s’ajoutent à une relative indifférence à l’égard du sort de la zone euro, car la Grande-Bretagne est davantage protégée de la spéculation puisque la Banque centrale peut intervenir directement pour le financement de la dette. L’Europe n’est pas un tiroir caisse et encore moins un self service.  

Je rencontrerai rapidement David Cameron pour évoquer les avantages d’une coopération plus poussée de nos deux pays au plan industriel et pour poursuivre le rapprochement engagé en matière de défense.

which can possibly be translated as:

You have not been received by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, and the British press and the City inevitably have not shown you much consideration. On what basis do you intend to strengthen the Franco-British relationship?  

[We] recognize that the British have been particularly half-hearted in the financial regulation stakes, and focussed on the particular interests of the City. Hence their reluctance towards the introduction of the tax on financial transactions and towards fiscal harmonization in Europe. And additionally a relative indifference to the fate of the euro zone, because Britain is more protected from speculation since the central bank [ie Bank of England] can intervene directly in debt financing. Europe is not a cash register, and still less a self-service restaurant.  

I will meet David Cameron soon to discuss the benefits of a more thrusting cooperation between our two countries in industrial planning and to pursue the coming together on defence matters already agreed.

(Of course, he's already met Ed Miliband).  But if the above has the sense right, it’s not the relationship between the UK and the EU which is like a self-service restaurant, but that between the UK government and the Bank of England, ie our cash register. Hollande might even be envious of it. Slate went on to ask (in English):

Mister Hollande, do you speak English?  

Yes I speak English, more fluently than the former President. But a French president has to speak French!

which was probably an énarque’s dig at Sarkozy who seemingly failed to graduate from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, one of the grandes écoles) in 1981 because of a «note éliminatoire en anglais»!

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.

Could Ken Livingstone really bring Ed Miliband down?

Toby Young, now at the new Sun on Sunday, wrote a piece on 26 February about Michael Gove’s prospects of leading the Conservative party which began:

THERE'S a good deal of speculation in Westminster about who might succeed Ed Miliband if Labour don't start performing better in the polls. The next big test of his leadership will be the London mayoral elections on May 3. If Boris beats Ken, it will be one more nail in Ed's coffin.

The polling so far this year certainly suggests that the race is neck-and-neck between Boris Johnson (Conservative) and Ken Livingstone (Labour), most recently, according to YouGov, at 51% and 49% respectively, when the other candidates have been eliminated. Before that, Boris gets 46%, Ken 45%, Hugh Paddick (LibDem) 6% and others 3%. But as UK Polling Report points out, the YouGov poll shows that in a national election the same Londoners would vote 35% Conservative, 47% Labour and 9% LibDem, a slightly bigger swing towards Labour since the general election than nationally.

Obviously, it would be better for Labour nationally if Ken were to win, but I really can’t see the  party wanting to blame Ed Miliband (42) for the inability of Ken Livingstone (66, a generation older) to stop some of Labour's natural vote defecting to Boris Johnson or to discourage a greater proportion of the LibDems from making him their second choice. Nor is Ed Miliband likely to be blamed for not attempting to obstruct Ken’s adoption as Labour candidate in the first place.

Last Tango in New York

In my last post I wrote in passing about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s chances as a candidate for the French presidency next year. Since then everything has changed. Even if the case against DSK were to collapse totally at some point, which would require something as unlikely as the victim resiling from her statement, there now seems little chance that he will be a presidential candidate or continue at the IMF. Though his closest supporters, Le club DSK, seem to think otherwise.

Toby Young, who worked in New York as a journalist for five years and wrote about his experiences in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, has made a neat comparison of DSK’s position and the plot of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. (Bûcher translates as pyre, for being burnt at the stake on!)

Tim King, who regrettably writes less frequently for Prospect magazine than in the past, makes some interesting points about “the cosy elite” who run France and their solidarity with DSK in recent days. An example of this is the attitude of Bernard-Henri Lévy, in translation here. BHL could exist only in France - here he is on BBC2’s Newsnight in March explaining his role in catalysing France’s involvement in Libya.

Tim King is probably right in predicting that the left will now have to vote for Sarkozy to keep out Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election next year.