Friday 31 July 2009

Bob Ainsworth


Ok, Bob Ainsworth may not be everyone’s cup of tea as Defence Secretary. If I were him I probably wouldn’t want to read my morning papers. Phrases like “not up to the job” have followed him everywhere since his surprise promotion from Armed Forces Minister to Cabinet rank as Defence Secretary in June.

One of the few MPs in the Commons to have a background in manual work – he was a sheet metal worker and fitter with Jaguar cars – you wonder what Bob “Bollocks” Ainsworth (a nickname he is said to regard as undeserved, denying that he uttered the words in the Commons) makes of the condescension that seems to flavour a good deal of the coverage he receives. I have a notion that many who actually listen to him think he comes across as sincere and down to earth.

He is under huge pressure at present regarding the court action to limit compensation payments to British servicemen, and, yes, I recognise it’s an incredibly sensitive and serious issue where many of us are offended by what the Government are doing. But when I read that he was, disgracefully, on holiday and should be forced to return – as indeed he did – I began to feel uneasy. Am I the only one to find this perennial campaign every summer to bring a minister back from his or her holiday to “face the music” deeply unsettling? And I say it because, unpopular though the sentiment is at the moment after a year of ugly revelations about MPs and their expenses, many of them work incredibly hard. And I do mean hard, long days that last late into the night, the pressures of many competing demands, and decisions that all of us would find extraordinarily difficult and challenging should we be making them. Yes, politicians are accountable to us and we have every right to demand explanations from them. But it’s one thing to be critical, it’s quite another to treat them all as idle buffoons spending most of their time on holiday sun loungers. It simply isn’t true, and by tyrannising them back home from their family holidays all we do is make it harder for any of them to get a proper rest or to make good decisions when they get back..

Tuesday 7 July 2009

Never waste a good crisis


At a breakfast last week Sky’s Adam Boulton reminded us that Obama had made the phrase “never waste a good crisis” a guiding concept for his administration.

I was initially puzzled, until of course I realised what it means is that a crisis gives you an opportunity to say and do things you never could at any other time. You may be facing huge challenges, but if you’re a strong leader you can also appeal to people in such a situation to accept the inevitability of major change. Think of a family crisis, when all the old rules go out of the window, and you know what I mean.

And it is a tribute I have to say to the failure of most of our politicians that a “good crisis” – in truth one of the worst economic crises we have ever faced – is being squandered. An angry and very senior Tory aide spluttered to me last week “Talking to Gordon Brown is like standing on a weighing machine. You just get robotic comments, no dialogue.” And, taking the analogy a bit further, the wrong weight presumably. Because across Whitehall it is an open secret – blown open I see by the Sunday newspapers – that the mandarins are quietly working out all the true implications of our national budget deficit and drawing up plans to address them as soon as the politicians have stopped pretending that a lot of budgets can easily be protected. Our transformed economic situation and our huge national debt will be a part of all our lives until 2030 at least. Walking up to the problem, and deciding what we should be doing about it, is a NOW problem, not tomorrow. The Tories have launched an open challenge to Gordon Brown on this, and they are right – but they need to add their own reality too and explain what all of them know, which is that after 2011 virtually every government budget will be frozen or cut. The British people are very good at adapting to crises – heaven only knows we have had enough practice over the years - but they need to be told the truth.