The Virtual Stoa

“I felt that God wanted me to follow a path into Politics.” Over here.

In David Cameron’s new classless Conservative Party, etc., is the Amber Rudd who appears on the A-List the same as the Amber Rudd who is credited as “aristocracy coordinator” for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral and who, according to an article in the Evening Standard was a “”posh” adviser… [who] stopped the cast saying things like toilet or serviette”? Or is there another Amber Rudd I need to be knowing about?

It’s been a frustrating year for Tim Collins Watching over here at the Virtual Stoa. He’s kept a very low profile since the voters of the South Lakes area decided that they’d rather not be represented by him in Parliament, thank you very much, and I’ve basically had no idea what, if anything, he’s been doing with himself since then.

Now there’s a chap called Tim Montgomerie, who thinks more highly of Iain Duncan Smith than most people do, and who runs the Conservative Home blog. He’s been performing a service to the nation by publishing the names of people on Mr Cameron’s A-List of priority Tory candidates for parliament, names that, apparently, Tory Central Office would prefer be kept secret.

There was general rejoicing, obviously at the inclusion of Tim Collins on the A-List (an A-List without TC x-MP CBE would naturally discredit itself). But even more excitingly, he’s also posted a long, long comment the same page, explaining why he thinks he lost: tactical voting, “big money”, postal voting anomalies and statistical fluke. And let’s hope this is just the start of his career of blog-commenting.

UPDATE [6.40pm]: On reflection, I think the title of this post should have been, Tim Collins: I Blame Quakers.

When’s the bloody “A-list” going to be published, so we can all have a good laugh?

Now that John Profumo has died, are there any members of the wartime House of Commons still alive? I probably should know the answer to this question, but I don’t.

We don’t hear much about Tim Collins CBE x-MP in the media much these days, which is a shame as I’d be curious to find out how he’s adjusting to Life After Parliament. But there are still occasional references to be found to his brief, shining political career, this one in today’s Independent on Sunday (boo, boo, you’re supposed to pay for it) making a claim I hadn’t heard before. Here’s Alan Watkins, who makes the familiar point associating sex scandals with Tories and Liberals and money scandals with Labour politicians, and who then goes on:

In the 1990s, true, there was a shift in the terms of trade. The Tories started to go in for both. It was not wholly of John Major’s making. I heard his Back to Basics speech at the party conference and read it several times afterwards. It did not contain a single reference to sexual intercourse, whether expressly or by implication. It was all about reading, writing and arithmetic.The sex bit was inserted by Mr Tim Collins, then the prime minister’s spin merchant, who was asked by journalists whether the speech meant that Mr Major expected the highest personal standards from his ministers. Mr Collins replied that that was indeed what it meant. The trouble started from there.

If that’s true, then Tories must think TC, etc, has a lot to answer for, and the rest of us must thank him for services to the gaiety of the nation.

My friend Ewen’s book about Mrs Thatcher has finally come out, so trot along to your local bookshop to buy it; it’s only �12.99. The most striking moment in the opening pages of the book is this one:

“As [John] Campbell points out, the fact that neither of her twins has any strong memories of their grandfather, who died shortly before their seventeenth birthdays, indicates that neither Grantham - nor indeed the Roberts family - loomed very large on Margaret Thatcher’s post-1951 horizon. Perhaps most telling of all in this context is an interview Thatcher gave to Brian Walden at Downing Street in January 1981. She spoke about the influence of her father upon her views and Walden asked her when he had died. Thatcher was flummoxed and asked one of the staff at No 10 to check for her. She was ‘reminded’ by this assistant that her father had died in 1970, at which point Thatcher declared that ‘He died when I was Secretary of State for Education… and a member of the Cabinet’, and she recalled his pride about this development in her career. This indicated a significant lapse of memory, for Alfred Roberts had died at the end of February 1970, which was nearly four months before Thatcher entered the Cabinet.”

– E. H. H. Green, Thatcher, p.17.

A friend came round this morning to drop off a New Year present, for which I am extremely grateful.

Here’s David Cameron, in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday:

“But I don’t believe in the politics of Right and Left; I believe in the politics of right and wrong.”

That’s almost as good as my favourite bit of Al Gore:

“I come before you today to issue a new challenge. Six years ago, we moved politics forward — beyond left and right. Today, let us move politics not only farther forward, but also upward, to a higher place — to a place far beyond the false divisions and dichotomies of the past.”

Mr Cameron says that he wants the Tories to “becom[e] a Party which is more like modern Britain, and which likes modern Britain more…”, and I wonder how he’s doing on this score.

A survey of 500 delegates to the Conservative Party conference in 1983 found that a quarter thought that the “best” British society would be exclusively white, and that 14% favoured compulsory repatriation schemes. In 1991 a poll of 2,466 randomly selected Party members found that 70% “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement that “A future Conservative government should encourage repatriation of immigrants”. That generation of Tory members is dying off: the 1991 poll found that the median age of Party members was 63, the average age of a new member was 54, and that fewer that 5% of the members were under 35 — and the authors of that poll estimated that 40% of the membership then would be dead by 2001.

But what’s the state of play like these days, on the cusp of the Cameron Transformation? Has any good data been collected on political attitudes inside the Conservative Party since 1991? To what extent is Cameron pushing at an open door — because these old bigots are now dead or retired from active involvement in Tory affairs — and to what extent has this kind of bigotry managed to reproduce itself within the Tory party down to the present? I wish I knew the answers to questions like these, but I don’t have a clue. Anyone?

David Cameron’s recently unveiled his new Tory team; I’m struck by just how many academic baubles they’ve picked up between them.

I count two Cambridge PhDs (Oliver Letwin MP, moral philosophy; David Lidington, Elizabethan history); at least five Oxford firsts (David Cameron, David Willetts, William Hague, Philip Hammond [all PPE] and George Osbourne [history]; not sure what Alan Duncan’s degree class was, but he held a Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard, which suggests it might not have been bad); and there’s also Caroline Spelman (1st, European studies, Queen Mary College, London), Theresa Villiers (1st in law from Bristol, followed by an Oxford BCL and five years lecturing at KCL). And of the remaining dozen or so, virtually all seem to have degrees (does Lord Strathclyde? I’m not quite sure what google search string to use on him), half from Oxbridge.

The most impressive intellectual achievements are probably those of David Lidington, the new shadow secretary for Northern Ireland, who captained Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, to victory in the 1978 instalment of University Challenge, and then led the same team to victory again in the 2002 University Challenge Reunited champion of champions contest!

UPDATE [4.45pm]: Letwin’s 1982 thesis was on “Emotion and emotions”, and I assume it was the basis of his later book Ethics, emotion and the unity of the self; Lidington’s 1988 thesis was on “The enforcement of the penal statutes at the Court of Exchequer c.1558 - c.1576″.

UPDATE [13.12.2005]: Contributions in the comments suggest that Osbourne didn’t get a first after all, but that Andrew Mitchell (history, Cambridge) might have done, keeping the score at roughly what I thought it was.

Matthew Turner has a graph to prove that Cameron will last c.329 days as Leader of the Conservative Party.

Watching David Cameron’s first appearance as Leader of the Opposition, I’m struck by the very ugly man sitting on his left on the Tory front bench (so on the right of the TV screen). Who’s that? I’m sure I should know, but it isn’t ringing a bell.

Alright, I give up. What has happened to Tim Collins CBE x-MP since losing his seat at the election? Google’s no bloody good, as it just serves up billions of pages about Colonel Tim Collins, but I’m not interested in him.

Curious about the vintage of David Cameron’s recent hawkish rhetoric when it comes to the struggle formerly known as the GWoT, I played with Google for a few minutes.

Writing in tehgrauniad on 18 February 2003 about the forthcoming vote in the House of Commons, Cameron remarked that his party’s then leader, Iain Duncan Smith had been “statesmanlike, rather than opportunistic, and given staunch support to the prime minister”. But he went on to say that while “most Tories back his view”, he described four groups who didn’t, and he aligned himself squarely with the last of these, whom he called “the confused and uncertain”.

The confused and uncertain weren’t peaceniks, Cameron stressed, but they were only “prepared to vote for war in the right circumstances”. Four circumstances were specifically mentioned in what followed. First, “there may be links between President Saddam and terrorist organisations, including al-Qaida”, although apparently the affair of the dodgy dossier was persuading some of the C and the U that there might not be. On the other hand, second, the C and the U had no doubt that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical warheads, and a growing arsenal of missiles with which to deliver them.” And in the third and fourth places, he thought that “many of us will not support preemptive war unless Blair can produce either compelling evidence of the direct threat to the UK, or a UN resolution giving it specific backing” but that “The signs are that he hasn’t got the first and won’t get the second”.

Roughly speaking, then, we’ve got a man who didn’t agree with everything that Iain Duncan Smith was saying (otherwise he would surely have aligned himself with his leader in this article), and who presumably (I’m guessing a bit here) largely voted for the war because he believed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Cameron’s more recent rhetoric on the SFKatGWoT is now utterly different.

So the question is, what changed? This seems to make Cameron one of the very small number of people who has got much more hawkish on SFKatGWoT programme-related activities over the last 48 months, moving from being “confused and uncertain” to, well, sounding a lot like Tony Blair. I can guess at any number of explanations, but if anyone thinks they know what the answer might be, do please write something in the Comments.

My hunch at the moment is that in a run-off before the Great British Tory Public, Cameron beats Davis, Davis beats Fox, and Fox beats Cameron.

Back in 2001, my parallel hunch was that IDS beats Clarke, Clarke beats Portillo, and Portillo beats IDS.

It may very well be that I like to construct these parallel circles more than I’ve got any kind of insight into the contest. Probably. And given the various trumpetings of Cameron in polls and the press in the last few days, I’m not sure how confident I am that Fox could beat Cameron.

But you can sort of see how the logic of all of this is supposed to work, as the various candidates neutralise one of the other’s supposed strengths: Cameron can play the telegenic youth card against Davis but not Fox; Davis can harvest the non-headbanger vote against Fox but not against Cameron; Fox can get the right-wing vote united against Cameron but not against Davis.

Which means that if I’m right, and if Cameron’s guaranteed a place in the run-off, then the only way to stop him is for Davis supporters to turn en bloc to the doc, as it were, later this afternoon. (But I’m probably not right.)

It’s marvellous entertainment.

I was surprised to read about DD saying he was still “odds-on” to win the leadership, in response to journalists telling hiim he was crap (or whatever). I wasn’t surprised that he was telling a lie, or at least a falsehood, because I thought that he was still odds-on to win, when in fact he wasn’t, at any major bookmaker; and even if I had known that, life’s too short to get surprised when politicians tell lies, or falsehoods. It just seemed a terribly defensive thing to say, as if there wasn’t anything he could say in support of his leadership bid, or no reason he could give as to why he might bounce back, or as to why his crap speech didn’t matter; all he could say was that the bookies’ didn’t agree with the journalistic conventional wisdom of the moment.

Well, as it turns out, they did. Anyway, this is just a preamble to a link to my old colleague Mike Smithson’s site, which I’m sure you all read anyway, as if anyone’s qualified to comment on things like political betting markets, it’s him.

Michael Howard has just started wittering on about how “political correctness, turbo-charged by the Human Rights Act, is destroying the British value of fair play”, which I’m taking to be a signal to turn off the telly and go back to work.

I saw clips of David Cameron’s speech on Newsnight last night, and thought it was piss-poor. Or, at least, certainly not a speech that made me think, Yes, he’d be a good leader of the opposition. I know I’m not the target audience (thank goodness), but am I missing something, either about the speech or about Mr. Cameron?

UPDATE [4pm, Weds]: So apparently David Davis was no good either (though that third piece was written before he made his speech). This is fun.

Why have I not heard of the Cornerstone group before? They sound like splendid nutjobs. Is there a membership list anywhere?

UPDATE [3pm]: In answer to the last question, yes, there is! (Thanks, Mike, in the comments.) A pdf available through Edward Leigh’s website names the “supporters” of Cornerstone as Tory MPs Brian Binley, Peter Bone, Julian Brazier, Douglas Carswell, William Cash, Christopher Chope, Robert Goodwill, John Hayes, Edward Leigh, Ian Liddell-Grainger, Owen Patterson, Andrew Rosindell, Lee Scott, Andrew Selous, Desmond Swayne and Angela Watkinson. I don’t know much about aby of these, except I vaguely remember that Cash and Leigh are odious, and that Rosindell’s got a nasty dog and very right-wing opinions indeed, but if anyone’s got anything to say about any of the others, do fire away in the comments.

UPDATE [6.45pm]: It’s too exciting: there’s a Cornerstone blog, which has an even longer list of supporters down the right-hand side. IDS! Gerald Howarth! Definitely one to watch, and to giggle over. And people seem to be muttering about the possibility of Edward Leigh challenging for the leadership, which is even more comic than the prospect of Liam Fox leading HM’s LO.

With hindsight, why didn’t Michael Howard propose a new electoral system that gave the party in the country a bit-part in the election? If he needed 2/3 of his constitutional college (or whatever it’s called), and if that was full - or even just one-third full - of the kind of people who think that the party in the country is the right kind of body to make decisions of this kind (IDS!), then why didn’t he invent a new system which didn’t freeze them out altogether. Even a simple reversal of the current system (party members vote by Alternative Vote for a list of candidates; MPs ballot between the to two) would have been preferable to the current system, surely?

If this handy page is to be believed, exactly half — 99 out of 198 (hmm, maybe there are 199; not sure) — of Tory MPs have declared a preference for the leadership race. Presumably the David Davis strategy is to find the dozen extra pledges he needs to guarantee an appearance in the membership vote, and then - for every extra vote he finds - tells one of his other supporters to vote for, say, Liam Fox, to try to ensure that his opponent in the run-off is even less credible as leader than he is.

Now that the Tories have voted to retain their ridiculous system for electing a new leader, is it time for Iain Duncan Smith to enter the race and reclaim his crown?

Over here, with a very fine photograph.

UPDATE [11.30pm]: This is almost too exciting: from the Daily Pilot:

NEWPORT BEACH — The harbor commission voted Wednesday to suspend the mooring permit for a barge used to raise white sea bass in Newport Harbor.During the same meeting, the board voted to move forward with new rules designed to discourage sea lions from living in the harbor. The commission considered ordinances that would make it illegal to feed wild animals, such as sea lions and to discard items, especially fish remains, into the harbor.

Harbor resources supervisor Chris Miller said the commission favored additional provisions to the rules pertaining to fishing vessels. Harbor commissioners Tim Collins, Seymour Beek and Ralph Rodheim are set to meet next week to fine tune the ordinances before they are considered by the City Council…

I was wondering whether he’d get a proper job.