The ‘Other’ thing about polls

Some opinion polling earlier this week showed that Labour’s lead over the Conservatives had dropped to 1 or 2%. This generated excitement among those who like the narrative that recent indications of economic improvement in the UK should be followed by an upturn in Tory support. Over-excitement in the case of the normally level-headed and fastidious Iain Martin:

At the time I was working on the previous post about the consequences of the main parties having the same share of the vote, so some statistics to be kept in mind were readily available and are described below.

In the UK we have the two main parties who have had vote shares in general elections since 1945 in the 30 to 50% range, and the Liberal Democrats (Liberals up to 1987) who have been somewhere between 2.5% and 25%. In the 2005 election UKIP, a party founded in 1993, had 2.2% of the votes and 3.1% in 2010. However, in the opinion polls for the last three years, UKIP’s support has been similar to that of the Lib Dems, as the chart below shows (from the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham blog, Ballots and Bullets):

It could be argued that we now have two main parties and two secondary parties – but then what about the rest? The next chart shows the size of the “Other” vote in elections from 1945, defining “Other” as being not Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem, and not UKIP after 2005:

In no election since 1945 has “Other” been more than 10%. The Ballots and Bullets chart above implies that on a smoothed basis “Other” is 11.5% currently. So what about individual recent polls? Some from UK Polling Report for the last couple of weeks are shown in the table below, concentrating on the polling organisations which generated the ‘excitement’ referred to at the start of this post.

Those two polls are highlighted and, interestingly, show anomalous levels of support for “Other” which is usually 7 to 9% - the level in the last four general elections. The 20 January YouGov/Sun poll showing an 8% Labour lead also looks like an oddity.

Some advice for the commentariat, don’t get too excited about a poll if “Other” is less than 7% or more than 9%.


UPDATE 31 JANUARY 

Two more YouGov/Sun polls have appeared. The second shows a 10 point Labour lead, something which Iain Martin seems to have missed.

Scepticism is in order for both by my criterion above, certainly for the second one.

A different perspective on the polls

Ballots & Bullets is the blog produced by members of the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. They recently posted their 28th analysis of UK political opinion polling, Too Early to Tell Outside the Westminster Bubble. In essence, the point they are making is that whatever the “Westminster Village”, as they call the commentariat, may have been saying about the fortunes of the parties, there was no significant change in the poll data in August:

The shortcomings of “Westminster Village” groupthink have been amply on display this summer , The prevailing narrative of the summer was that Labour was divided and weakly led, and that this was harming them with the voters, a judgement which had little basis in the polling evidence. The Syrian crisis has produced a new rush to judgement in the Village, with journalists of differing political persuasions declaring it a death blow for David Cameron, Ed Miliband or both. But in reality it has not changed the political weather outside Westminster much, nor is it likely to. Most voters were against the Syrian intervention, and therefore happy that it is not proceeding. The average voter packing up her barbeque and preparing her kids for the new school year knows little, and cares less, about the obtuse arguments about motions, amendments and Parliamentary authority which have so excited the Villagers. Their judgement about the two leaders’ apparently disastrous performances has been an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. In the latest figures from the Polling Observatory, we have seen virtually no change since the start of August. …

And this is the chart, “pooling together all the available polling evidence” they published to illustrate their point:

I happened to be reading this post on my iPad, so selecting the chart enlarged it nicely to full-screen. Keeping the iPad horizontal and rotating it by 90 degrees anticlockwise, gave a perspective more like this, but better:

It looked to me as though there were two axes of near-symmetry: the brown one between the Lib Dem and Labour levels of support and the grey one between the Conservative and UKIP levels.  If so, it could be interpreted as Labour’s rise in the polls since 2010 being gained largely at the Lib Dem’s expense and similarly UKIP picking up mostly Tory votes. Of course, some people who voted Lib Dem or Labour may have moved to UKIP, and some Conservative voters to the Lib Dems, but I would be amazed if there were that many.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Ed Miliband wanted nothing to do with Syria, given the dislike among Lib Dems (erstwhile Labour voters possibly) of the UK’s previous involvement in Iraq. And the Tories have made no secret of their intention, with the encouragement of Lynton Crosby (reportedly no admirer of the commentariat) to go after UKIP.

I continue to think that a sustained economic recovery in the next couple of years is the biggest risk to Labour’s chances in 2015. But it will have to come in a form which encourages disillusioned 2010 Lib Dem voters to return to their fold – difficult, or UKIP enthusiasts to go back to the Tories – less so. Neither may be sufficient to produce the lead which the Tories require to form a majority.

It was Osborne’s inheritance tax proposal which wrecked Labour’s plan to call an election in 2007, as discussed here before (towards the end of this rather long post). I wouldn’t be surprised to see this particular carrot reappear before 2015 in view of its attractiveness to the UKIP age group. The headline to Kellner’s comment that UKIP voters are poorer than Tories derives from a smaller proportion having household income less than £40k per year. But for the age group (71% over 50, as opposed to 46% of all electors) many will be pensioners who have lower incomes but will have acquired capital, primarily in the form of housing.

Crosby and Messina

The amount of effort that the Tories are already putting into campaigning - a stream of media novelties (urging fracking and cycling on one day alone) - you would think that they are planning for an election earlier than 2015.

Last week there was a flurry of interest among the commentariat after the recruitment by the Conservatives of an American, Jim Messina, to join the Australian, Lynton Crosby who is already providing them with strategic campaign advice. In the Financial Times on 6 August, Janan Ganesh was dismissive of what he called “jet-setting political consultants” who reputedly believe “that that a foreign country is just like another swing state”:

The first law of politics is that almost nothing matters. Voters barely notice, much less are they moved by, the events, speeches, tactics, campaigns or even strategies that are ultimately aimed at them. Elections are largely determined by a few fundamentals: the economy, the political cycle, the basic appeal of the party leaders. The role of human agency is not trivial, but it is rarely decisive either.  

… As good as he is, Mr Crosby is not behind the Tories’ recent run of form. He is not yet physically present very much and will not work full-time for the party until much closer to the 2015 election. The economic recovery has changed politics more than any conscious act of strategy.  

… For all his psephological rigour, Mr Messina will not make an enormous difference either. His client, Mr Obama, was re-elected because he was up against a maladroit rival – Mitt Romney, who employed feted and costly strategists of his own – at a time of gently improving economic conditions.  

… the really important events of this parliament were April 25 2013, when the official statisticians revealed Britain had avoided another recession; and September 25 2010, when Labour elected Mr Miliband. Next to these moments, the recruitment of Mr Crosby and Mr Messina are neither here nor there.

Perhaps Ganesh, who seems to have lashed himself to the mast of the sinking ship of print journalism, is wondering whether he should have opted for another calling. Anne McElvoy, public policy editor of The Economist, writing in The Times the following day, was much less sceptical, but she has met Crosby:

Mr Crosby cannot change the fundamentals of the 2015 vote. He cannot make Mr Cameron sound less plummy nor make the economy grow any faster. Yet he is already providing a clearer framing to the contest. This is what able strategists do best and why Labour, stuffed full of chaps who think a sojourn studying political science on the US East Coast is an intro to street-fighting politics, is rightly worried about the Lynton effect.  

I remember my first journalistic date when he was busy master-minding Boris Johnson’s 2008 campaign. The venue was reassuringly expensive (I hope Dave can muster a decent wine budget). “I can’t think why I’m here,” was his encouraging opening gambit. He could see no point in the commentariat, he explained, considering us a distraction from the real business of targeting outer parts of London where the liberal intelligentsia did not dominate conversation.  

The bluff exterior conceals one of the sharpest political brains for hire. Mainly the talent is a simple but effective one. It lies in telling politicians when to shut up and what to emphasise.  

… I dare say Mr Crosby won’t be an easy prospect to live with if, like Mr Osborne and others in Camp Cameron, you have ideas of your own about how election campaigns should be run, but so far his basic recipe, “Get the barnacles off the boat”, looks sound. Goodbye to gay marriage, wind farms and the happiness index. A few core subjects such as the economy, welfare and education will be used to ram home contrasts with Labour and ask who has the more compelling answers to the big national questions. Team Miliband, meanwhile, should put as much effort into finding a strategist capable of crossing swords with Mr Crosby as it does into affecting outrage about him.

All I know about election strategists is what I glean from the media, people like these two pundits. Crosby seems to have the sort of forceful nature needed to keep large egos in line. But, as McElvoy points out, there are other big personalities around with their own ideas and who won’t like being told what to do. And what happens when Messina, having mastered the UK postcode system, Skypes from Washington with yet another view?

Messina’s speciality is supposed to lie in social media and voter targeting. One can’t help wondering how transferable his skills will prove. US Presidential politics is a two-stage process. Firstly, red and blue fight among themselves to choose their candidates, then red and blue fight it out in the swing states which determine the outcome of the Electoral College. The voters overall seem to split somewhere between 45/55 and 49/51, but it’s where those votes are cast that matters. In the UK, by contrast, it’s the outcomes in about 100 or so marginal constituencies (in over 600) that determine which party governs. But the UK no longer has an essentially red/blue two-party system, the rise of the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalists keeping the maximum share of the vote accessible by the two main parties below 40%. The next election may see UKIP becoming a significant fourth element, complicating things further. Working out which barnacles to scrape off and which to keep becomes a multi-dimensional problem, particularly for the Tories who have to fight on two fronts, to their left or right depending on the particular marginal involved.

It will be fascinating to see how hiring this high-priced help works out for the Tories – in so far as we get told about it by the media. And, of course, as Messina is no doubt aware, the media’s structure in the UK is rather different from that in the US, being national and having the BBC as an influential component.

Bojoburg

Two members of the commentariat fixated on the same idea last week. The London Evening Standard on 14 May ran a piece by Simon Jenkins, London should quit the EU and ditch the UK too, and, the next day in The Times (£), David Aaronovitch explained why it was necessary to Unshackle London from the backward shires.

According to Jenkins:

There is an easy solution to Britain in Europe. Let the rest of Britain stay but let London leave.  

… Its future is global. Its two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. They depend on self-government, on regulatory discipline and on the value of the pound. Financial services are worldwide in application. They are clearly threatened by what Lord Lawson called “jealous European banking officials”, by regulations designed to underpin German bankers and clip London’s wings.  

The new city state would have a physical boundary, roughly that of the M25. Digital mapping would police the circumference, though open borders are no great problem. They exist like those between Gulf states, between Ireland and Ulster, Monaco and France. London already has its own government under its elected “monarch”, Boris Johnson.  

The rest of Britain may have reasons for wanting to “stay in Europe”. It is time for London to “get out”, of both the EU and the UK.

Goodness knows what Jenkins thinks digital mapping is. Aaronovitch saw the problem as being one of culture, typified in PMQs the day before:

… of the six Conservative MPs who stood to ask questions, no less than five were talking about when to have a referendum on Europe. They might as well have been in Caracas.  

… Where they sit for in Essex, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire or Wiltshire, the EU may indeed be more important than it is to me in London. On questions such as immigration, perhaps my metropolitan attitude seems as peculiar to them as their parochialism does to me.  

… Londoners differ from some of their compatriots in attitudes towards the outside world. The pollsters Ipsos/Mori sent me figures for the regional variations on immigration and the EU. Aggregated for January-December 2012, polling showed an average of 21 per cent of Britons naming race relations/ immigration/immigrants as “one of the most important issues facing the country”. The highest figures were the South East with 28 per cent, then the East Midlands, East of England and Yorkshire/Humberside all on 25 per cent. In London it was 13 per cent. This was less dramatically true for Europe/EU. In the South East 10 per cent had it as a vital issue, compared with 5 per cent in London and 6 per cent nationally.  

It is clear that London and the South East are in some ways two different countries and that is why Boris has to be Janus-faced. To become Tory leader he must somehow finesse the fact that he knows a lot of rural/ suburban Tory-Ukippery just doesn’t make sense in the big, competitive, changing world. Like Boris, I do not want to inhabit this parish of 1950s retro enthusiasts.  

… So we may need to secede from the hinterland. And the same is true of our other great cities and university towns which, together, could make an outward-looking, open-minded polity.

So not so much an island state as an archipelago one. Well pundits have to write about something – in 2011 Aaronovitch thought the UK should become part of the USA. And it might have been inhibiting if the position Mrs Thatcher found herself in in 1982 had been remembered:

On the morning of Wednesday 22 September I and my party took off from Tokyo, where I had been visiting, for Peking. Fifteen years remained of the lease to Britain of the New Territories which constitute over 90 per cent of the land of the Colony of Hong Kong. The island of Hong Kong itself is British sovereign territory, but, like the rest of the Colony, dependent on the mainland for water and other supplies. The People's Republic of China refused to recognize the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, by which the island of Hong Kong had been acquired by Britain. Consequently, although my negotiating stance was founded on Britain's sovereign claim to at least part of the territory of Hong Kong, I knew that I could not ultimately rely on this as a means of ensuring the future prosperity and security of the Colony. (The Downing Street Years, page 259)

London, with its “boundary, roughly that of the M25” (see above and the surrounding regions), would be far worse-placed than British Hong Kong. Being on the coast (see below, right), the former colony could trade with the rest of the world without having to enter PRC airspace or territorial waters and at least produced its own electricity and gas.
 

Somehow I don’t see “monarch Boris” converting Tate Modern back into a power station. A secessionist London would have to import electricity and gas from the English grids, would be dependent for its water on the English Thames into which it would also have to discharge its sewage. No doubt the supply of all these things, and a few others (like the westward extension of Heathrow or its replacement) could be arranged amicably – at a price and in return for financial services from London. Until BNP Paribas arrives in Bristol and Crédit Agricole in Birmingham. Of course, London has virtually no armed forces apart from the ceremonial, so all defence capabilities including the nuclear deterrent would be in the hands of the Welsh-English-Scottish rump, as would GCHQ. London would be run out of the Mayor’s office because Jenkins thinks that:

The bulk of British government would have to relocate out of the present capital. Because no one would agree on where, departments would be fragmented around the provinces, to the benefit of all. Parliament could relocate, perhaps to Salford or to an Orwellian “Elizabethville” in south Yorkshire. Essex and Sussex would concentrate development around Stansted and Gatwick, relieving pressure on Heathrow.

All quite barking because London, unlike Singapore (above, left), is land-locked and geography dictates that it cannot become an island city-state. But perhaps there is an even deeper flaw in Jenkins’ concept that London’s

… two great industries, finance and leisure, are peculiar to itself. … Financial services are worldwide in application.

He should have read an article in the Financial Times (£) on 7 May, Cornwall beach buoys London’s financial status. It explained that a beach near Bude in north Cornwall in SW England:

… is one of the main landing points for thousands of miles of submarine cables that carry trading data from New York. Britain’s westerly location means data can reach traders in London several milliseconds quicker than competitors in Frankfurt and Paris – a key advantage in the era of high-frequency trading.  

… “The UK is an underwater cable hub for all the financial institutions in Europe,” says Jack Steven, asset manager at the Crown Estate. “The alternative is to go through somewhere like Portugal, which is closer to the US but which historically hasn’t developed capacity in the same way.”  

According to the Crown Estate, about 95 per cent of the UK’s communication, such as email, internet and telephone calls, is transmitted through submarine cables. They are cheaper and more reliable than satellites, which are expensive to get into orbit and vulnerable to collisions with space debris. The shorter the cables, the quicker data can be transferred. It takes about 65 milliseconds to trade between London and New York. From east London it takes a further five milliseconds to Frankfurt.

Anyone interested can learn more about the global undersea cable network (above) on the Guardian Data Blog.

Boris Johnson, to be fair, has not expressed any opinions, as far as I know, in favour of London’s independence, even though Aaronovitch seems to think he is a closet isolationist. A shame when London could so easily be renamed Bojoburg in his honour as its first head of state. I don’t think either Aaronovitch or Jenkins think for one minute that their proposals will ever happen but, as part of London’s media elite, they are expressing their exasperation with the rest of us.  But most people don't live on six-figure salaries, probably getting away with a day’s work a week writing a thousand words or so about whatever they chose, and having expenses-paid lunches in top restaurants with interesting people talking off the record.

The Boris and Pippa Show

Pippa Middleton has emerged as a celebrity on the strength of being the younger sister of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and likely Queen consort circa 2045. Last year, Time magazine considered Pippa to be one of the 100 most influential people in the world and, who knows, she might appear on their list again in 2013. Wikipedia currently describes Pippa as a ‘socialite’ and a perusal of the rest of the entry suggests that her principal achievement so far has been the authorship of a guide to party planning, Celebrate. Despite her book’s mixed reviews, for example in the Daily Telegraph, Waitrose Kitchen magazine has recently recruited Pippa as a columnist.

I have already posted about Boris Johnson’s appearances on the BBC last week. A couple of days later a feature article appeared in the Spectator written by Pippa and mostly about her skiing holiday, but:

Back home in London after my Alpine challenges, I can now pursue less demanding hobbies in my spare time, such as ping-pong. I’m informed that Boris Johnson, former editor of this magazine, wants to be ‘whiff-whaff’ world king even more than he wants to be Prime Minister. I’m also told the Johnsons are almost as competitive as the Middletons. So I’d like to lay down a challenge to the Mayor. My only stipulation is that I can use my favourite Dunlop Blackstorm Nemesis bat, which I used when I played in the Milton Keynes U13 National Championships, don’t you know. Bring it on, Boris.

There was a rapid follow-up from the Spectator’s gossip columnist Steerpike:

Game on: Boris has accepted Pippa Middleton’s ‘Whiff-Whaff’ challenge. The Mayor of London has declared:  

‘I’m game if she is. Happy for Pippa to join me on a visit and see the benefits of our £22m Sports Legacy Fund in action.’  

While Pippa would no doubt enjoy that, the Spectator is happy to set up a ping pong table in our garden. Pol Roger will be served.  

UPDATE: Mr Steerpike has confirmation Pippa is still up for the contest. I hear she ‘sensed some nerves’ in Boris’s reply.

I was half-expecting to see some critical reaction among the commentariat along the lines of the importance in a constitutional monarchy of members of the royal family keeping out of politics. Of course, Pippa Middleton is not a member of the royal family, but who would have heard of her if her sister wasn’t? And with Boris Johnson Pippa is linking herself to one of the biggest political personalities in Britain, seriously discussed as a future Conservative Prime Minister. But the issue, if it existed, seems to have been overtaken by events, particularly the death of Lady Thatcher. The funeral next week will be attended by the Queen, her second for a former Prime Minister, the first being Winston Churchill's in 1965.

I wonder if any more will be heard of Pippa playing ping pong with Boris.


UPDATE 3 July 2013

As if in belated answer to my last point, Pippa provided another Diary for the Spectator dated 29 June (which becomes available on-line late on 27 June) and concluded:

The last time I wrote in these pages, I issued a challenge to Boris Johnson to take me on at ping pong. The Mayor said he’d be up for it, and his office duly contacted The Spectator to arrange the details. Team Johnson insisted that the match should be held at a venue of their choosing. I said by all means. And then — nothing. The Spectator has tried to follow up, but now it’s radio silence from the Mayor’s office. Is Boris scared or what? He should be.

Should he? Anyway Pippa’s since been getting lots of attention from another quarter, the Mail newspapers: on 29 June, Does Pippa dress in the dark? … Kate's sister can never get her outfit right; on 30 June, Stay out of the limelight, Kate tells Pippa amid concerns she is courting controversy with her high public profile; on 1 July, Peter McKay asked Isn't it time Pippa put her fame to better use?

À la recherche de la poésie française lesbienne

In a post after the death of Christopher Hitchens almost a year ago, I mentioned in passing the British educational system’s encouragement of “Two Cultures”, essentially science and the arts. This unfortunate separation was originally identified by CP Snow as long ago as 1959 and there are occasional reminders of its existence. I have mentioned Sir James Dyson’s speaking up for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) before, so I was interested to read an article based on an interview he recently gave to The Times (£), whose science and technology supplement, Eureka, ended recently. (The article was headed, rather oddly, ‘Dyson inventor says schools should focus on science, not arts’ – he may be ‘inventor Dyson’ but surely not ‘Dyson inventor’, just ‘Dyson’?). He was reported thus:

Britain has turned its back on what made it great, with too many students choosing to read humanities at university, Sir James Dyson has said in an interview with The Times.

But the engineer and entrepreneur infuriated some who said he was trying to revive an outdated “two cultures” view of science versus humanities. Sir James, who became Britain’s 22nd richest man by developing bagless vacuum cleaners, said: “The more sophisticated you get as a nation the more you turn your back on the thing that made you wealthy. You don’t choose the difficult, hard work, of science and technology and engineering.”  

He said we should talk more about technology so that “little Angelina wanting to go off to study French lesbian poetry will suddenly realise that things like keeping an aircraft industry, developing nuclear energy, high-speed trains, all these things are important”.

Notice that the reader is told of the existence of counter-arguments even before any report of what Dyson actually said! And of course the red-rag-bull reference to “French lesbian poetry” set off the arts-based intelligentsia in the media and elsewhere, most significantly the Education Department, whose Secretary of State, Michael Gove, in a speech soon after The Times article said:

This anti-intellectual strain in British life, and thinking, may have protected us from following the sort of ideological fashions that captured continental minds over the last century. As has been pointed out before, both fascism and Marxism were ideas so foolish only an intellectual could have believed in them. But I fear the anti-intellectual bias in our way of life has, at times, become a bias against knowledge and a suspicion of education as a good in itself.  

… This bias against knowledge manifested itself most recently when the otherwise saintly inventor Sir James Dyson had a crack at people who want to go to university to learn French lesbian poetry rather than applying themselves to matters technical. Having devoted as much of my department's discretionary budget as possible to attracting more teachers into maths and science subjects, including computer science I am certainly no enemy of equipping people with the skills required to master technology. But I am certainly an enemy of those who would deprecate the study of French lesbian poetry. Because the casual dismissal of poetry as though it were a useless luxury and its study a self-indulgence is a display of prejudice. It is another example of the bias against knowledge.

A quick Google search for “French lesbian poetry” now turns up dozens of articles agreeing with Gove and none seeming to support Dyson. An example from the left is Glosswitch in the New Statesman, in a piece headed ‘Vacuum cleaners vs French lesbian poetry: The eternal battle James Dyson is dead wrong - studying things like "French lesbian poetry” can make people's lives better, even if they don't suck dirt up off carpets.’:

Take me, for instance. I’m British. I have a BA in languages, an MPhil in European Literature and a PhD in German and I’ve never invented a single piece of useful household equipment in my life.

and in a loftier manner on the right from Allan Massie in a Daily Telegraph blog:

I would guess that James Dyson is engaging in a bit of guesswork himself. Not having access to the statistics – has he? – I don’t know how many people are taking French Lesbian Poetry as their special subject in A-Level exams. I would however be surprised to find that the number was big enough to doom British manufacturing, as he seems to suggest. This hunch is fortified – if you can fortify a hunch – by reading the entry on Gay & Lesbian Writing in The Oxford Companion to French Literature. Though it runs to three columns, the only Lesbian poets mentioned are Nathalie Barney (1876-1972) and Renée Vivien (1877-1909).

accompanied by a photograph of Renée (above), English-born apparently, and seemingly a bit of a poseuse.

And so forth. At which point it is worth noting that Gove, although playing nicely to his gallery of admiring journalists (he was one himself once), has no ministerial responsibility for higher education, which Dyson was referring to not A level. University education is the responsibility of the Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) Department under Vince Cable and specifically David Willetts, and The Times quoted the latter as having “… thought Sir James’s comments unhelpful”:

“The true source of UK greatness is the breadth of our research activities — from nuclear physics to history and ethics. We’ve got great life sciences, which come up with great drugs; the aid programme in Africa that sponsors a great vaccine. But then local leaders fear the vaccine is a plot to make them ill. To get humans to take the vaccine you need anthropologists and linguists who can understand the culture. The future is multidisciplinary."

But no doubt BIS are appreciative of the James Dyson Foundation’s initiatives like the Royal College of Arts Dyson Building. Willetts as a BIS minister must be well aware of the economic prospects for the UK, which would be grim enough if we had a dozen Dysons and we don’t. But as Universities minister in particular he must also be well aware that the UK’s higher education system is turning into a house of cards held together by the readiness of students to take on large loans - long-term debt to be repaid from future income. Little consideration seems to be given to the realities of the graduate employment market by those in well-paid media jobs where they can join in the sniping at ‘the otherwise saintly Dyson’. Scratch the biographical surface of the commentariat and you often find that not only did its members mostly go to Oxbridge, but also that they are so well-connected by family or background that it is little surprise that they are where they are. But what are the prospects for an ordinary young graduate who has been studying for example French literature or history at a university ranked below the top 20 in the league tables? Many arts graduates find themselves in a call centre, supermarket or other workplace where knowledge of poetry, if not a useless luxury, is likely to be of marginal relevance, and they might well conclude that another course of study could have been more sensible.

Perhaps Dyson should have known better by now than to come out with the comment that he did, but possibly his exasperation got the better of him. After all, his company is engaged in a continuing battle with  international competitors to hold on to intellectual property let alone expand it. The Dyson Company’s headquarters are in Malmesbury, the birthplace of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (left), so the boss taking a Hobbesian view of the nature of failure in a competitive struggle is understandable:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

It’s a great pity if Dyson’s underlying point about individual choices in higher education is not being debated because The Times alighted on one particular phrase.

(By the way Malmesbury is in Wiltshire in SW England, so I should point out that, although an admirer of Dyson, I gain no personal benefit from supporting him. In fact I’ve never been able to afford any of his products, but I always think the Airblade hand drier is a brilliant device when I use one!)








ADDENDUM 21 November

The Times (£) published a letter from Sir James Dyson today:

Sir, The comments attributed to me in this paper caused confusion. I was taken aback by the headline (“How to make Britain Great? More science, less French lesbian poetry, says Dyson”, Nov 10); those were your thoughts and words, not mine.  

Unfortunately Michael Gove, Mary Beard and others have used that headline to leverage their own causes and to reassert the arts. Don’t be misled; I’m a supporter of the arts and humanities — my concern is the shortage of engineers in Britain.  

Engineering, science, technology and making things are all being marginalised. We need the hard skills of engineering and science to complement our excellent arts base, otherwise where will our future exportable technologies come from?  

This year’s cavernous deficit of engineering graduates is 60,000. By 2017 we will have a deficit of 217,000 engineers — a staggering shortfall. We ignore it at our peril. The UK depends on the engineering sector for one fifth of GDP, employing 5.6 million people across 550,000 enterprises. 

We must make sure students are given a broad knowledge and the skills to grow this part of the economy. We need poets. But the development of patentable, exportable technology depends on a ready supply of engineers.  

Sir James Dyson  

Chair, James Dyson Foundation

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.