Nothing gets politicians so worked up as a Boundary Review

THIS week, The Journal reported that there had been more than 900 objections lodged with the Boundary Commission over its plan to alter the face of the region’s one real rock solid Tory enclave – the parliamentary seat of Hexham.

The plans, drawn up last September as part of the government’s proposal to reduce the size of the House of Commons by around 50 seats, would see historic country boundaries crossed in the name of ‘equalising’ the size of constituencies across the country.

If the proposals go ahead, the North-East will see its overall representation in Parliament fall from 29 to 26 with no part of the region unaffected by the changes.

For some of the region’s MPs, it is likely to mean the end of the political road, while those that survive are will find themselves standing for re-election in constituencies almost unrecognisable from their existing ones.

In nowhere than Hexham has the opposition to the government’s plans been more intense.

All three main parties – including the Conservatives and their sitting MP Guy Opperman – have come out against the proposals, with the 950 letters of opposition equalling the number received in all the other 28 North East constituencies put together.

What the opponents of the changes find particularly galling is the fact that the proposed new constituency will breach the historic county boundary between Northumberland and County Durham, with Haltwhistle moving into a newly-created seat of Consett and Barnard Castle.

Other proposed new constituencies in the region – for example Newcastle North and Cramlington – will see the traditional divide between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas breached, although, perhaps surprisingly, these seem to have aroused much less opposition to date.

But the ongoing debate over Hexham could prove to be a microcosm of a much larger battle over the government’s proposals which could yet influence both the timing and the outcome of the next general election.

In my column last week, I speculated that Nick Clegg’s proposals for House of Lords reform could ultimately prove to the rock on which the Coalition founders, with Conservative peers, who want to maintain the second chamber’s built-in Tory majority, threatening to derail his plans.

What does that have to do with Parliamentary boundaries, I hear you ask? Well, potentially quite a lot.

For the Lib Dems are threatening to retaliate against the potential loss of their leader’s cherished Lords reform plans by scuppering the Tories’ attempts to reduce the number of MPs.

Now at first sight, you might think this was yet another ill-judged policy intervention by the Lib Dems that is likely to prove about as big a vote-winner for them as their support for the Euro.

Years of mounting public cynicism about politicians – capped by the MPs’ expenses scandal – have created a climate in which any party advocating a reduction in their numbers is likely to be on pretty firm electoral ground.

But politicians are never so exercised as when their own jobs are under threat – and for that reason alone, a Lib Dem revolt against the boundary review proposals could have a very real prospect of success.

A small number of Tory MPs affected by the changes – some of them only elected for the first time in 2010 and whose parliamentary careers face being cut off in their infancy – might even be persuaded to join such a rebellion.

This is not just about the Lib Dems getting their own back on the Tories, though. There is undoubtedly an element of calculation in the party’s stance.

It is estimated that the boundary changes will be worth an extra 20 seats for the Conservatives at the next election – some of which will undoubtedly come at the expense of their Coalition partners.

The changes will therefore make it much more likely that there will be a majority Conservative administration next time round, and correspondingly much less likely that the Lib Dems will again be in a position to hold the balance of power.

Killing off the boundary review might yet be the Lib Dems’ best hope of hanging onto their ministerial limousines. And it might even win them a few votes in Hexham.

The Coalition will not last five years

In last week's column, I suggested that the key strategic task facing the Liberal Democrats as they gather for their spring conference in Gateshead was to find a way of winning back the support that has deserted them since they joined the Coalition in 2010.

And doubtless there will be plenty of ideas floating back and forth at The Sage this weekend as to exactly how they should go about it.

They could, as some argue, stop the Health and Social Care Bill in its tracks. The Guardian commentator Polly Toynbee is among those warning this week that if they don’t take what may be their last opportunity to do this, it will seal their fate as a party.

Or they could, as Business Secretary Vince Cable has suggested, use their influence to help shape next month’s Budget, taking everyone earning less than £10,000 a year out of tax and introducing a ‘mansion tax’ for the super-rich.

Their leader, Nick Clegg, certainly wants to see the party getting on the front foot and proclaiming its successes in the Coalition rather than apologising for being part of it.

“Now it is time to move on. To stop justifying being in government and start advertising being in government. To stop lamenting what might have been and start celebrating what is. To stop defending our decisions and start shouting our achievements from the rooftops,” he said yesterday.

But whichever way they turn, will it make the slightest difference to the party’s electoral prospects?

Well, if history is any guide, no. The plain facts of the matter are that involvement in a Coalition is almost always disastrous for the smaller party, whatever political achievements it manages to extract from it.

The most recent example was the Lib-Lab pact in 1977/78. This was perhaps the most enlightened and humane period of government in my lifetime, but it still ended up doing the then Liberal Party terrible damage.

Far from emerging strengthened, their vote went down at the subsequent general election in 1979 and several of their most high-profile MPs, including the deputy leader John Pardoe, lost their seats.

Further back, the 'National Liberals' who joined the Tory-dominated National Government in the 1930s ended up simply becoming absorbed by the larger party.

And David Lloyd George’s 1916-22 Coalition, in which the Tories also held a numerical majority, likewise ended disastrously for the Liberals and their leader despite victory in the First World War.

It is partly for this reason that I have argued from the outset of the Coalition that, while the Lib Dems probably had no choice but to join it, they also needed to find a way of getting out of it alive – preferably well before the next election is due.

The Health and Social Care Bill, on which the Lib Dem rebels are more in tune with public opinion than the government is, would have given them a plausible pretext, although the party activists’ last-ditch bid to halt the Bill now looks unlikely to succeed.

Europe, by contrast, would not be a good reason for the Lib Dems to try to collapse the Coalition, for the simple reason that on this issue, it is the Tories who are much closer to the mainstream public view.

One less widely-canvassed possibility is House of Lords reform – not the sexiest of issues, for sure, but one on which the Tory ‘backwoodsmen’ seem almost certain to thwart Mr Clegg’s well-meaning attempts to drag the British Constitution into the 21st century.

The last time I discussed the possibility of the Coalition ending before its due-date of 2015, a commenter on my blog reminded me that the government has already passed legislation to bring in five-year fixed-term Parliaments.

My view, however, is that this could turn out to be no more than a quaint constitutional notion, given that the legislation also allows for a two-thirds majority of MPs to dissolve Parliament ahead of its term.

Let’s just suppose that David Cameron decides he wants an election. Would Labour MPs, in such circumstances, really vote to keep him in office until 2015?

It stands to reason that the Coalition will not last five years. It will, rather, last just as long as both of its partners want it to.

The real issue which the Lib Dem spring conference needs to address

Back in the bad old days of two-party politics, the Liberal Democrat spring conference was one of those recurring events in the political calendar which even political journalists struggled to get too worked up about.

Sure, the BBC invariably ran a short item about it – but that was only because its rules on impartiality oblige it to give Lib Dem gatherings the same coverage as those of the other two main parties.

How times have changed, however. Not only is this year’s spring conference in Gateshead a big story in the North-East, but it is also set to attract the kind of national media attention which the third party could once only dream of.

At stake could be the future of a flagship piece of government legislation – and in the longer-term, the future of the government itself.

Last year’s spring conference saw Lib Dem activists effectively force their Tory coalition partners to order a ‘pause’ in the controversial Health and Social Care Bill designed to hand large parts of the NHS over to GP consortia and increase competition across the service.

A year on, and this year’s may yet result in the hated Bill’s final demise.

Alongside Europe, the Bill remains perhaps the biggest point of division between the two Coalition partners, despite continuing attempts by both party leaderships to soften it at the edges in the hope of avoiding a showdown.

But even a desperate entreaty by party leader Nick Clegg and much-loved veteran Baroness Williams this week looks unlikely to head-off an attempt at next week’s gathering to kill of the legislation once and for all.

Unlike on Europe, it has been clear for some time that the Lib Dem tail is wagging the Tory dog when it comes to the NHS.

Earlier this week, Lib Dem peers put forward a fresh series of amendments to the Bill in the House of Lords designed to further water down the requirements for increased competition.

Initially, the government said it was ‘not minded’ to accept the amendments, but once they were duly passed, it decided not to try to overturn them.

At the same time, Mr Clegg and Lady Williams issued a letter to party members saying that the Bill as now amended contained all the necessary safeguards and should therefore now be “allowed to proceed.”

Early signs are, however, that activists are determined to press ahead with a conference vote on the motion, which calls for the "deeply flawed" Bill to be "withdrawn or defeated.”

One prominent Lib Dem, Graham Winyard, has already resigned from the party over the issue, warning Mr Clegg that his support for the bill would be "a slow-motion disaster" for the NHS and the party.

Labour has not been slow to seize on the divisions, with shadow health secretary Andy Burnham attacking Mr Clegg’s “stage managed posturing” over the Bill.

He urged Lib Dem rebels to work with Labour and dismantle the Bill to remove the provisions relating to competition.

But of course the Lib Dems’ problems go much wider than health. Their real difficulty lies in the fact that voters have deserted the party in droves since it joined the Coalition.

In this sense, it is ironic that they are meeting in the North-East at a time when the party’s standing in the region has possibly never been lower.

A poll carried out by YouGov the week before last showed the party now has the support of just 4pc of the region’s voters – lower than the UK Independence Party on 7pc.

The days when the Lib Dems entertained serious hopes of winning parliamentary seats such as Blaydon and Durham City now seem a very long way away indeed.

Under Charles Kennedy’s leadership from 1999-2006, the party pursued a successful strategy of appealing to disaffected Labour voters as well as its own traditional supporters, gaining its higher number of MPs since the 1920s.

It is now facing the nightmare scenario of its parliamentary representation being reduced to single figures for the first time since the revival of third-party politics began in the 1970s.

It is hard to dispute the analysis of Gateshead councillor Ron Beadle that, in electoral terms, the Coalition has been a “disaster” for the party.

This, not the future of the health bill, is the real issue which this spring conference needs to address.

What next for David Miliband?

It was Clement Attlee who famously told a Labour colleague that a period of silence from him would now be welcome, thereby inadvertently earning himself an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

And it is certainly true that there are times in politics when it is best to keep your head down and your mouth shut.

By and large, the past 15 months have been such a period for David Miliband, the South Shields MP and former Foreign Secretary who, until October 2010, had been widely expected to become leader of his party.

But it wasn't to be and, rather than risk the sort of comparisons that might have undermined his younger brother's leadership, the elder Miliband stood bank from the political frontline and confined his public statements to the occasional supportive message.

Such was ostensibly the nature of his article in the New Statesman a couple of weeks back in which he outlined a seven-point plan for the future of the party and called for “restless thinking” in its bid to recapture power.

He made a point of praising his brother Ed on no fewer than four occasions, highlighting his success in maintaining party unity, and having spoken out "powerfully" over issues such as welfare cutbacks.

But that, of course, did not stop the political commentariat once more portraying David’s intervention as a covert leadership bid.

The resulting furore saw Mr Miliband forced into another round of interviews in which he appeared to rule out any return to the frontbench on the grounds that it would merely perpetuate the “soap opera.”

One rather venomous interpretation of his actions came from the Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in an article headlined: ‘The sniping and self-pity of a truly feeble man.’

Likening Mr Miliband’s political modus operandi to the game of Knock Down Ginger, he accused him of thrice raising the standard of internal revolt before “scuttling away to hide in the bushes.”

“The pattern was set in the summer of 2008, when David wrote a barely coded article in the Guardian lacerating Gordon Brown. The moment it was greeted as the challenge to the PM’s authority that it certainly was, off he scarpered, denying any such intent,” he wrote.

“Within a year, his close friend and Cabinet ally James Purnell resigned, laying the ground for David to oust Mr Brown by doing the same. Again he bottled it, and stayed."

Mr Norman saw the New Statesman article, and the semi-retreat that followed it, as more of the same, going on to suggest a permanent silence from a man he charmingly described as “a mincing paean to metrosexual narcissism.”

It was left to the former Labour North official and Blairite blogger Hopi Sen to leap to Mr Miliband’s defence, pointedly describing Mr Norman as a “food writer” alongside various other less polite terms.

But beneath all this knockabout lies a serious point - namely what is to become of a politician who still has much to say about the future direction of his party – but who is unable to say it without his actions being either over- or mis-interpreted?

As one of those ubiquitous ‘friends’ put it: “This is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the Labour Party. The way the cookie has crumbled, the only way he can do that is through argument and debate.”

Perhaps the real purpose of David’s New Statesman article was to find out whether he can actually now start to contribute to that debate without others seeing it as an attempt to further destabilise his brother’s somewhat faltering leadership.

If that was indeed his intention, the answer seems to be a resounding no.

Sadly, the likely upshot of this is that Mr Miliband may well come to feel that the only way to end the soap opera will be for him to remove himself from the political arena entirely, and leave Parliament at the next general election.

And given his stature in both the country and the region, I, for one, would consider that a shame.

Milburn machinations show governnment's desperation

Back in 2003, I went along to a Downing Street press briefing along with the rest of the Westminster media corps expecting to be given details of Tony Blair's latest Cabinet reshuffle.

We emerged 20 minutes later with the very surprising news that the health secretary, Alan Milburn, had resigned from the government, saying he wanted to spend more time up North with his young family.

The sudden departure from government of the then Darlington MP, who until then had been widely tipped as a future candidate for the party leadership, was possibly the most unexpected resignation of the Blair years.

But for shock value, it would have paled into insignificance if this week's rumours about a Cabinet comeback for Mr Milburn - in the very same job he abruptly left nine years ago - had actually come to pass.

The story went that a newly-ennobled Lord Milburn would be brought back by David Cameron to push through the health reforms that Gordon Brown succeeded in blocking nine years ago.

The Prime Minister would then be able to claim - as he already has with Michael Gove's education reforms - that he is merely carrying on the work that Mr Blair and New Labour began, thereby strengthening his claim to the political centre ground.

It seems likely from what has emerged this week that this bizarre proposal was at least discussed at some level in Number Ten, even if those discussions didn’t actually get as far as Mr Milburn himself.

But the fact that such a conversation could even take place at all is an indication of the mess that the Coalition has got itself into over its own attempts to reform the NHS - and in particular the position of the current health secretary, Andrew Lansley.

Government colleagues of Mr Lansley were pulling few punches this week as his flagship Health and Social Care bill suffered another mauling in the House of Lords.

“Andrew Lansley should be taken out and shot. He’s messed up both the communication and the substance of the policy,” a Downing Street source was quoted as saying.

Of course, had Mr Cameron wanted to get rid of him, he had a perfect opportunity to do so last week with the mini-reshuffle sparked by the enforced resignation of the energy secretary Chris Huhne.

But as I have noted before, the Prime Minister hates reshuffles, having apparently been warned against them by former Cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell, and for now, Mr Lansley retains his “full confidence.”

To those of us who have been following the progress of the government’s attempts to introduce greater competition into the NHS - and hand over the running of it to reluctant GPs - none of this should have come as any great surprise.

Mr Cameron has been warned on several occasions that the reforms, which are opposed by just about every leading professional body within the service, risked becoming his Poll Tax.

His apparent obduracy over the issue is all the more surprising in the light of his determined efforts before the last election to “detoxify” the Tory brand when it came to the NHS.

As the Conservative Home website pointed out yesterday; “David Cameron’s greatest political achievement as Leader of the Opposition was to neutralise health as an issue. The greatest mistake of his time as Prime Minister has been to put it back at the centre of political debate.”

Plans are now being laid for a debate at the Liberal Democrat spring conference which is expected to result in fresh calls for the bill to be scrapped, if it hasn’t been already by then.

And Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham has shrewdly called for cross-party talks on a compromise deal which could see the non-contentious parts of the bill covering public health, social care and GP commissioning kept, while scrapping the bits relating to extending the private sector.

It is understood that this option is now being seriously canvassed within the government, but if adopted it would of course represent a complete humiliation for the health secretary.

When Mr Milburn walked out of the health department, Westminster was genuinely stunned. The greater surprise this time round would be if Mr Lansley stays put.

Advantage Tory right as Huhne exits stage left

So farewell then, Chris Huhne – well for the time being at any rate, as the erstwhile Energy Secretary quits in order to fight charges of perverting the course of justice in relation to a driving offence committed in 2003.

The leading Liberal Democrat politician was left with no choice but to resign from the Cabinet yesterday after effectively being charged with lying to the police over whether he or his ex-wife was driving at the time of the incident.

Mr Huhne, who continues to deny the charges, will now have to clear his name if he is to stand any chance of resuming what has been an eventful career over the course of less than seven years as an MP.

For now, though, his Lib Dem colleagues will have to manage without his combative presence around the Cabinet table as the curse that has seemed to bedevil the party’s senior figures since the last election strikes again.

They lost their cleverest minister, David Laws, within 16 days of the Coalition taking office, and nearly lost their most well-known, Vince Cable, over his ill-judged pledge to destroy the Murdoch empire – uttered before it succeeded in destroying itself.

Now they have lost their most abrasive in Mr Huhne, the stoutest defender of the party’s interests within the government and, by some distance, the Tory backbenches’ least-favourite Liberal Democrat.

Few Tory tears will be shed at his departure. Right-wing internet bloggers who have had Mr Huhne in their sights for some time were literally cracking open the champagne yesterday morning – and one even posted a video of himself doing so.

The evident Tory glee demonstrates the fact that Mr Huhne’s enforced resignation is likely significantly to alter the balance of power within the Cabinet in their favour.

His successor Ed Davey is a capable minister who deserves his Cabinet promotion - but he is no Chris Huhne, described by one commentator yesterday as a “political bulldozer who would try relentlessly to get his way, and who was not averse to media shenanigans to advance his cause.”

It was Mr Huhne, rather than Nick Clegg, who led the attack on the Tories over their handling of the referendum on the voting system last May, when Mr Cameron gave the green light for a series of bitter personal attacks against the Lib Dem leader.

And it was he who articulated the Lib Dem rage over Mr Cameron’s decision to veto a new EU treaty at the Brussels summit in December.

What gave Mr Huhne a particular degree of authority within the Cabinet was his strong power base within the party as a two-time leadership contender and de facto leader of the party’s social democratic tendency.

He could very well have become his party’s leader instead of Mr Clegg, had not a pre-Christmas postal strike in 2007 led to thousands of votes in his party’s leadership election arriving after the ballot boxes had closed.

Until yesterday, he would have been the likeliest replacement for Mr Clegg were the latter to have been forced out by party activists still grumbling over his decision to join the Coalition.

Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron, the party’s distinctly Coalition-sceptic president, now looks odds-on for that role, possibly as soon as 2015 in the event of Mr Clegg’s three-way marginal Sheffield Hallam seat turning either red or blue next time round.

The short-term impact, then, of Mr Huhne’s departure is that it will embolden the Tory right and make this look even more obviously a Conservative-led government than it already is.

This in turn will be good news for Labour and Ed Miliband, whose essential line of attack on the Coalition is that it is a Tory government in all but name, and who this week restored some of his party’s sagging morale by putting Mr Cameron on the back foot over bankers’ bonuses.

The real nightmare scenario for the government, though, would come if Mr Huhne were to go to jail – forcing a by-election in his highly marginal seat of Eastleigh which would pitch the Lib Dems and the Tories against eachother.

And the potential consequences of that for the Coalition hardly need spelling out.