Banks, but no banks

I quite like the idea of giving everyone shares in Lloyds and RBS, because there is a nice neatness (almost a sense of closure) to the concept of us getting something back from the banks we saved. But at the same time I think it’s an unworkable stinker – quite apart from the issue of whether it wouldn’t be better for the government to sell the shares normally and use the proceeds to cut public borrowing.

Mr Clegg said that it was “psychologically immensely important” for people to be given a stake in the banks … to turn RBS and Lloyds Banking Group into “people’s banks”. … “The idea is that people could buy or sell shares over time.” … Mr Clegg said the proposal would create an army of private shareholders that could hold some of the big banks to account, replacing institutional investors who had done too little to curb boardroom excess.

I see his point. But I don’t think it’ll work. He’s reckoning that people will think:

Ooh, shares in a couple of banks that almost went catastrophically bust! That’ll definitely be a good investment, I’ll hang onto those for the long term and certainly not sell them immediately.
And I’m sure everyone else won’t be selling them immediately either, because that would (a) depress the price of the shares, limiting the benefit that people would get and hitting public confidence in the whole exercise, and (b) quickly concentrate ownership of the banks back in the hands of large institutions.
What’s more, now that I own 0.0000018% of RBS and 0.0000009% of Lloyds, I can use my spare time to become an active shareholder and contribute to how these banks are run. It’ll be like the Big Society meets the minutiae of financial corporate governance – I can’t wait!

I suppose it’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Fraternité

Last year I thought David Miliband would be a more capable Labour leader than Ed; I still do. But I worry about the idea of (somehow) replacing the one with the other.

The main thing most people know about Ed is that he beat his brother to get the job – and they think that’s a bit odd, and maybe a bit suspicious. That’s a pity. But for Labour to go on to dump Ed and install David would magnify this ‘dysfunctional family’ thing a thousandfold. And it could make the party look very short of talent. Speaking of which...

If there were another credible leader in the wings, the dynamic might be different, but I don’t see who that would be. So, for the time being, we’re stuck with Ed.

The timelessness of news values

My colleague K, who is trawling through old newspapers for her dissertation, has just unearthed this report from the Daily Express in 1965:

Rhyme and reasoning

I know! I can fob them off with some stuff I wrote somewhere else a couple of months ago!

Ahem. A while back, Jams O Donnell asked his blog readers for philosophy poems. Among the responses were a few from me.

First, a pair of limericks advocating and rejecting Descartes’s ‘real distinction’ between mind and body:

A skeptical Frenchman did find
He couldn’t deny his own mind,
But his brain he could doubt
So he therefore ruled out
That the two things were of the same kind.

But Lois thought Clark was a clot
While Superman surely was not;
So they differ, she’d claim,
And yet they’re the same –
So distinctness from thought can’t be got.

First-year undergrad stuff, to be sure, but that’s about all I can remember these days. And they’re bloody limericks, how much sophistication do you expect?

And then I tried a haiku based on David Hume’s view about the standards of evidence needed to establish that a miracle had really happened:

Water into wine
Or wine into witnesses:
Which would you swallow?

Raise rates to cut inflation? It may not be so simple

Higher interest rates do, other things being equal, lead to lower inflation – but this effect takes time to work its way through the economy. What doesn’t take time is the rise in mortgage costs when rates go up. So, in the short term, a rate rise increases rather than lowers the cost of living as most people understand it.

The Bank of England’s target measure of inflation is the CPI. This differs from the previous target measure (up to 2003), the RPI-X, but both have in common that they don’t include mortgage interest payments. The RPI measure does include these (the X that RPI-X leaves out).

This table shows correlations between changes to the Bank’s base rate and changes in the three inflation measures:


(Data from the Bank and the ONS; going from January 1997, before which CPI figures are only estimates, to September 2008, after which we had the extraordinary bout of rate-slashing followed by two years and counting of no change.)

So rate rises are, in the short term, associated with barely lower CPI and RPI-X but substantially higher RPI. A 1 percentage point rise in the base rate over the course of up to a year is on average associated with a 0.7–0.9 point rise in RPI.

Of course, there are plenty of things that affect inflation on any measure – the pressures that might prompt a rate rise are likely to persist – so we have to be careful drawing conclusions about causation. But the difference between RPI and RPI-X is very telling. The two measures should be subject to the same pressures except for those to do with mortgage costs. So this comparison is a pretty good control, suggesting that the Bank’s rate rises cause a much bigger short-term rise in the RPI – and in mortgage-holders’ experienced cost of living – than they cause a reduction in the other components of overall inflation.

This means that if the current high inflation (on any measure) is only temporary, as is often suggested, then rate rises are not just an unnecessary response but a positively counterproductive one. If the inflationary pressures (from e.g. the VAT rise and higher energy costs) are going to drop out of the figures before too long, the only real danger is if these permanently raise people’s inflation expectations and fuel a wage-price spiral.

Given that, an extra jump in the RPI via higher mortgage costs would only add to the risk.

(On the other hand, if the inflationary pressures are likely to endure, then the longer-term disinflationary effects of higher rates may outweigh the short-term risk.)

VAT: the inflationary fiscal contraction

Plenty of us are worried about George Osborne’s doctrine of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ – that as he cuts public spending and raises taxes, the economy will not weaken but strengthen.

His theory is that the financial markets will ease as the government borrows less, so that businesses and households will be able to borrow more cheaply and thus spend more, because the now perfectly healthy banks have oodles of spare money to lend and the last few years have absolutely not made any of us debt-averse. This will boost growth and certainly not store up any kind of trouble because rising private debt never leads to economic problems. What’s more, by laying off hundreds of thousands of its own workforce, the government will free up productive capacity and stop ‘crowding out’ our frustrated private sector, which has been desperate to hire more people but just can’t find anyone who’s unemployed.

Well, maybe. But I’m thinking about yesterday’s inflation figures. CPI is up to 4.5%, well above the 2% target, and it’s expected to go higher. As Duncan notes, without the effects of the VAT rise and other indirect taxes, inflation would be a more manageable 3%. Three-fifths of the above-target inflation is the government’s fault.

Pretty much all tax rises slow the economy down. Mostly, they also reduce inflation, as producers and retailers adapt to lower demand by cutting prices. But the government has discovered the ingenious double whammy of a tax hike that raises prices as well as hitting growth: an inflationary fiscal contraction. Both of these things are bad in themselves, but there are two further bad consequences.

First, the combination of them makes life very hard for the Bank of England. Inflation is way above target, but interest-rate rises – the tool for reducing inflation – are risky given the weakness of the economy. The theory was that loose monetary policy could offset ever-tighter fiscal policy, but with fiscal policy creating higher inflation, the Bank will probably have to put rates up sooner rather than later.

Second, state pensions and a number of benefits are linked to inflation. Putting up VAT is supposed to reduce the deficit, but the resultant higher inflation means that a fair amount of the money raised will just end up being paid out again: as a revenue-raiser, it’s inefficient. This will mean the deficit stays higher for longer – unless Osborne, who takes pride in refusing to budge from his Plan A, tightens further still.

Lucky us.

The last gasp of the Labour government

From the IFS:

Crossing out and counting in

As the dullest farce in British history crawls to a close, those of us still in the audience grow gloomily aware that we need to write its ending. This flat, tetchy, flimsy spectacle of a referendum campaign is going to have to have a winner. And what rotten, wooden characters to choose from, reciting lines so outrageous they almost threaten to rouse us from the torpor they send us into.

But I don’t know how to abstain. So I have to try to focus: Alternative Vote or First-Past-The-Post?

Throw off the pious fantasies of the ‘yes’ campaign – as if reshaping the ballot paper would make politicians more decent and diligent, as if we could fashion saints using origami. Cast aside the paranoid fallacies of the ‘no’ campaign – as if some people would get more votes than others, as if a vote counts for more when it’s forced to move downmarket than when it can stay with its first true love. Focus.

As you’d expect from a man of his political acumen, David Cameron cuts to the heart of the matter. He says he will vote against a system that is “a confusing mess of preferences, probabilities and permutations”. And so will I.

Under FPTP, you pick which candidate you like the most. Then you try to estimate whether they have a chance of winning, based on your calculations of how other people are going to vote (all the harder given the big boundary changes for 2015). If you assess that they’re unlikely to win, you have to decide whether it’s more important for you to register your support for them or to pick one plausible winner that you prefer to another such. You mentally compile a list of the candidates that you judge to have a fair probability of winning and decide how much you like or dislike each of them. Then you compare how strongly you feel about your favourite candidate with how strongly you feel about the difference between your most and least preferred of the serious contenders.

And then you distil all this down to one cross in one box. One cross, whether you’re wildly keen or glumly tolerant, whether this is your first choice or just the lesser of two evils.

Yes, AV is more complex than FPTP. That’s something it has in common with us: we are more complex than FPTP, and AV lets us show it without having to second-guess whether our favourite is in with a chance. Because AV is more sophisticated, it allows us to be sophisticated too; it doesn’t force us to feign a single, all-or-nothing partisan identity.

And I’m not just talking about political anoraks like me. Most voters don’t have an overwhelming party allegiance. A poll for the Institute for Public Policy Research finds that just 18% of people are strongly attached to one party; 60% of us have some sympathy for a number of parties.

But is AV too complex to understand? Well, the Aussies seem to manage. Londoners seem to manage with the preferential voting system for the mayor. The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish seem to manage with the assorted proportional systems for their devolved bodies. And the 2010 British Election Study (cited by the IPPR) gave 13,000 people a mock AV ballot: of those who voted in it, more than 90% picked a second preference, over 80% picked a third and over 70% picked a fourth. It seems that most of us have the nous, as well as the range of opinions, to do this.

It’s true, AV will need more explaining than FPTP. But it’s not nearly as hard as people are being led to believe. Alas, the Electoral Commission’s official explanation is dry and abstract; my own effort was also a bit abstract, as well as being handicapped by its own words-of-one-syllable gimmick.

But I have seen one very good showcase for AV – a three-minute video of people picking where to go for a drink. It ingeniously uses ‘voting to make a choice’ as a metaphor for ‘voting to make a choice’. It applies AV and FPTP in an easy-to-understand context, and shows how AV can stop a minority from beating a majority who are divided by less than what unites them.

So I like the process. What about the results?

The concrete effects AV would have are hard to guess. The safest prediction seems to be: (some) more seats for the Lib Dems, making hung parliaments and thus coalition governments (some degree) more common.

I don’t think coalitions are good or bad per se. I’m no fan of the current one, but I don’t imagine I’d like a Tory majority any more. There’s a view, though, that the process of coalition-making is undemocratic. As Janet Daley puts it, “no political leader can be held to account for his pre-election commitments because they must all be up for grabs in the post-election horse-trading”.

The Lib Dem poll ratings disprove this. There’s a world of difference between political leaders feeling able to say ‘don’t blame me, it’s a necessary coalition compromise’ and voters accepting that.

What’s more, with parties competing for lower preferences as well as first ones, campaigns – and our whole political culture – are likely to become less absolutist. Without the dogma of the immaculate election, as the sanctity of the unsullied party ebbs, so the idea of coalition will become less alien. I don’t say this is good or bad, just that if AV does produce coalitions, it’ll do so by a process that gets us thinking in that direction anyway.

So I’m voting ‘yes’. While AV does cost us some clarity, a lot of that clarity is phoney or forced. AV lets us say more. It allows us to think a little more broadly, to do a little more than dump all our reproachful hopes at one person’s door. People who truly do love one party and hate the rest can carry on putting a ‘1’ and nothing else; people who see shades of grey can be as discerning as they please.

There’s a lot more that could be said about either system; I’ve just focused here on the points that keep leaping out to me. And there are plenty of failings in British democracy, both constitutionally and culturally, that a change of voting system won’t solve. But AV or FPTP is the choice we’ve got to make this week. So, however this ends, after the curtain falls and we shuffle back into the daylight, let’s not conclude that ‘reform is done’ or ‘reform is dead’. Let’s try to do politics better.

Jack Bauer, copyeditor

If you share my sense of humour and fondness for grammar, you might like this what I wrote. (If you don’t, you probably won’t.)

Update 2/5: And here’s a topical second episode, revealing Jack’s role in bringing bin Laden to editorial justice.

AV and minor parties

What would happen to minor parties under the Alternative Vote?

It’s well known that, under First-Past-The-Post, there are people who vote tactically: for a tolerable party that stands a decent chance of winning rather than for a favourite party that doesn’t. This means we can reasonably expect that parties placed low down the poll would get more first preferences under AV than they do votes under FPTP.

How many more votes would the small parties get under AV? This is impossible to quantify in advance, but one thing worth noting is that this question is the mirror of another: How many votes do minor parties currently lose to tactical voting?

Another fair assumption is that the current tactical switching (from a no-hoper to a serious contender) is likelier when one of the big parties is politically closer to the smaller party in question. Thus Green supporters may vote tactically for the Lib Dems (or, these days, perhaps more likely Labour) and UKIP supporters vote Conservative. The more extreme a smaller party is – in terms of distance from the larger parties – the less likely its supporters will be to find one of those larger parties a tolerable compromise.

And so, conversely, introducing AV would be likelier to boost those smaller parties that are closer to large ones, as the tactical voters instead follow their hearts with their first preferences.

This suggests that BNP supporters are currently less likely to vote tactically, and thus there would be fewer of them to switch to voting BNP under AV. One important caveat, though: this assumes that BNP supporters share the mainstream view of the party as being in a league of its own rather than part of the normal political spectrum. This may not be the case.

But so far this is all about votes. What about how smaller parties would do in terms of seats won?

This is even harder to tell. If there are massed ranks of people who’d like to back these parties but don’t, because they think their ranks aren’t all that massed, then AV could mean quite a big rise in these parties’ votes – in some cases, perhaps enough to put them into contention for winning a seat. In that case, if they can attract the lion’s share of second, third etc. preferences from other eliminated candidates, they can win the seat.

I suspect that in most seats, these two ifs would be too big. And again, parties perceived as more extreme would be less likely to pick up second etc. preferences.

So my reasoning is that minor parties would get more first preferences under AV than they get votes under FPTP (with those that are seen as very different from the bigger parties gaining the least). And my hunch is that this will translate into very few extra seats in parliament for them.

If so, this could actually promote disillusionment with the system. The gap between minor-party representation and actual minor-party support would shrink a bit, but the gap between minor-party representation and visible minor-party support would grow significantly. What’s more, the rise in visible support for minor parties may give their spokespeople greater moral authority given the larger share of the electorate they could claim to speak for.

Ouch

This is one of the most damning opinion poll findings I’ve seen in a long while:

Love makes fools of us all

Having shared the good news with my friends on Facebook this morning, I thought I’d announce it to the rest of the world:


It’s been a whirlwind romance. We met while stuck in a kettle at the protest last weekend. We were already quite emotional having heard Ed Miliband's uplifting speech, and one thing led to another...

Apparently she had been seeing some other guy, but “he’s just not classy like you are, Tom”. Ah, that’s my Kate. There’s something special about her. It’s as if she somehow embodies the entire nation’s dreariest hopes and dreams.

Labour ponders shooting itself in the other foot

I’ve said it before, but reality unaccountably failed to bend to my will, so as it’s in the news again I’ll say it again.

Labour’s electoral college for choosing its leader means there can be a split result (party members voting one way but union members and/or MPs voting more strongly the other way), and a new leader can come to office facing jeers of ‘you’re the choice of the unions, your own party members didn’t want you’. This is what happened to Ed Miliband and it’s embarrassing.

Now there are moves afoot to give the wider public a say in leadership elections, by allowing them to register as supporters for free:

How registered supporters could be involved in leadership elections will not be detailed tomorrow, but [Peter] Hain said they could be given their own section in the electoral college of MPs, individual members and affiliates.

Please, no. The party should scrap the electoral college and have everyone’s vote going into the same pot. Otherwise the risk of embarrassment will grow.

Making a big show of reaching out to members of the public who are not normally into party politics is fine. But if they’re going to be given a say in party elections, it will risk looking terrible if they can then be outvoted.

Don’t put the party in a position where a future leader can come to office facing the even more embarrassing jeers of ‘you’re the choice of the party machine, the public didn’t want you’.

The Libyan aftermath: not in his name

What follows is rather jumping the gun – and a lot more firepower besides – but it struck me as potentially significant, so here you go:

I do believe that David Cameron wants Libya to become safe, peaceful, stable, free and democratic, and he’s made a difficult decision sincerely in support of that. But I’m less sure about his deeper political position.

Before all this, his occasional speeches on foreign affairs had been notable for their implicit sneers at (a caricature of) Blair and Bush: “I am not a naive neocon who thinks you can drop democracy out of an aeroplane at 40,000 feet”.

His push for military action therefore struck many as a change of heart. But the same scepticism of foreign entanglements is still there. I was struck by one thing he said in the debate yesterday:

This is different from Iraq. This is not going into a country and knocking over its Government, and then owning and being responsible for everything that happens subsequently.

I find this unsavoury: it sounds as though the key point is not whether Libya goes to hell after the bombing is done but whether we (or, in practice, he) can avoid blame if it does.

Probably the greatest failing of the Iraq war was the negligent planning for post-Saddam. The result was bloody. One lesson you could take from that is that we should stay out of the Middle East; another lesson is that if we do go to war, we need to be very aware of the social, religious, ethnic and institutional background and think much more thoroughly about what follows any military action.

A third possible lesson, which might appeal to a consummate politician, is that when it’s hard to predict what will happen beyond the short term, you should take care to establish that people won’t say it’s your fault.

I hope we don’t get to find out who would be blamed for disaster.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Resolution 1973 allows the use of “all necessary measures… excluding a foreign occupation force” to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” and to “enforce compliance with the ban on flights”.

So, as David Cameron says, “the action has the full and unambiguous legal authority of the United Nations”.

The thing is (and never mind exactly how one defines “occupation” and “civilians”): who decides which measures do and don’t count as “necessary”? In practice, the governments taking those measures get to make those calls. One couldn’t rule on every possible path through the fog of war in advance, and there’ll be no UN tribunal at the end of it to assess every bomb dropped. So, in reality, “unambiguous legal authority” blurs into what the governments think they can make plausible. Bombing tanks outside Benghazi? Taking out air force bases? Destroying a government compound in Tripoli? Killing Gaddafi?

What is Cameron’s rationale in establishing what’s necessary? This:

Targets must be fully consistent with the UN Security Council resolution. We therefore choose our targets to stop attacks on civilians and to implement the no-fly zone, but we should not give a running commentary on targeting and I do not propose to say any more on the subject than that.

(And just look at this poor wretch of a Foreign Office minister getting Paxmanned [from about 27’00].)

There’s something of a Humpty Dumpty-ish “it means just what I choose it to mean” quality to this. While bombings and raids are ongoing, Cameron will often refuse to elaborate, implicitly demanding our trust. More broadly, he’ll come up with whatever justifications are needed to maintain a sense of legitimacy about this campaign. Every war leader does this.

International law is a morass of grey areas. In the end, the only authority that will matter to him is moral authority, as defined partly by him and partly by public opinion.

But I hope it works. I hope the cost in lives is minimal. I hope Gaddafi is deposed quickly; given the coverage of the amateurish-looking rebels, it appears that the likeliest way for that to happen is for the army leadership to turn against him. And I hope the successor regime is benevolent.

If I have to be on one side of the fence, then I’ll come down in favour: with no military intervention, Gaddafi would have finished crushing the rebellion and then redoubled his repression. As it is, some other series of events will happen. In the short term, things will be better (or less bad); in the long term, nobody knows. But I hope people smarter than me are thinking hard about it.

The weight of a vote and the strength of a preference

“And for dessert, sir?” the waiter asked. I ummed and ah-ed and then said: “The chocolate cake, please.” “An excellent choice.”

Two minutes later he returned to tell me they’d run out. I looked at the menu a little longer, and picked the sticky toffee pudding. “Certainly, sir, another fine dish.” And he was right: in fact, their selection was generally pretty good all round.

Shortly, he came back, a little sheepish, to tell me the toffee had come unstuck. I pondered again. “Then I’ll take the crème brulée.”

Alas, it turned out that the blowtorch had blown a fuse. After he’d finished grovelling, I looked at what they did have left – hot fudge sundae or nettle tart – and found my decision very easy. So hot fudge sundae I had, and while it was no better than passable, I was deeply glad to have avoided the nettle.

Now, where was I? Oh yes: Danny Finkelstein [£] makes a number of sound points about the AV referendum campaign, including a sensible response to one common canard about AV (which he opposes):

I don't agree with the "no" campaigners that I am voting more than once. Everyone gets the same right to express their other preferences.

Quite right. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying:

But there is a serious - in my view, fatal - objection… The system gives my fourth preference the same weight as someone else's first preference. And it shouldn't.

Two things:

First of all, it’s a mistake to think that what matters most to a voter is the pick of their favourite. What about someone who thinks Labour is marginally better than the Greens, the Greens marginally better than the Lib Dems, the Lib Dems marginally better than the Tories and the Tories vastly better than the BNP? Here, the real passion, the strongest choice, only appears at the fourth preference. Just as I found in my badly stocked restaurant.

Under AV, picking a first preference is answering the question ‘Who do you like the most?’ Picking a second preference is answering the question ‘With your first choice unavailable, who do you like the most?’ And so on. I don’t see why the later questions should be less important and people’s answers accordingly less significant.

Secondly, under first-past-the-post, we already have people picking their second, third and lower preferences – it’s called tactical voting. Plenty of people have done it at one point or another. Under this system, you look at all the candidates, mentally rank them in order of preference, then pick the highest-ranked one who you think has a real chance of winning and write an ‘X’ next to their name.

And your second- or third- or fourth-preference vote will carry as much weight as my first-preference vote. So the putative unfairness Danny attributes to AV also exists under FPTP, albeit in a less obvious form. But I don’t think it’s unfair.

Unless we require voters to award each candidate marks out of 100 (and do it honestly, which of course is unenforceable), there is no way for a ballot paper to distinguish enthusiastic, overwhelming endorsement from grudging, borderline, best-of-a-bad-bunch acceptance.

I’ve got a little list

Nick Clegg, September 2010:

Clegg feels he is "constantly being urged by commentators, by party activists" to "express identity by tearing strips off the Tories" and by brandishing "trophies of achievement to show the Liberal Democrats have secured this or that concession".
One of the big points he wants to make to his party is that "this temptation" ought to be resisted. "The moment we get drawn into that sort of dynamic, two things will happen. Firstly, it will actually make us seem more irrelevant than we are because it will perpetuate the idea that the point of being in the coalition for the Liberal Democrats is to have a little shopping list of achievements, the assumption being the rest of it is Conservative policy. The truth is much more radical than that. All the big judgments are genuinely jointly taken by David Cameron and myself. That's why I didn't want to have a department, that's why I'm a hop and a skip from his office."

Nick Clegg, March 2011:

Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have ended child detention? Got an extra ten billion out of the banks? Would it have held a referendum on the voting system? Or put up capital gains tax? Ordered an inquiry into torture? Brought in a pupil premium? Or replaced Control Orders? Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have cut taxes for the poorest?
I don’t think so.

I can’t see the Tories being happy with this.

Stroppy editing

I reckon that what my psyche really needs is a bit more fragmentation. So I’ve started another blog, focusing on things I’ve come across in my work as a copyeditor/proofreader/general editorial dogsbody. All anonymised, to spare the blushes (and the sacking).

I like my work in theory, but in practice it often annoys me. Hence the title: The Stroppy Editor. It’s of niche interest, but it’s my niche, so there.

Political meanderings and intermittent silliness will continue here as usual. But posts like this and this and this will in future appear in the other place.

War and democracy

A propos of Libya, Tony Benn, John Pilger and others write to the Guardian warning against any military action. One thing they say is:

The disaster in Iraq should have taught us that military intervention cannot hasten democracy.

For one thing, this seems an overgeneralisation from one example. West Germany post-1945 springs rather quickly to mind.

But more than that, one may agree that the Iraq war caused a disastrous loss of life and was utterly wrong while still doubting that the country would have made faster progress towards democracy if there had been no war.

War does not in itself bring democracy, but can – in some circumstances – remove obstacles to it.

Vegetables, rodents and the man responsible for a Mickey Mouse government

Matthew d’Ancona says:

One of the great Spitting Image sketches portrayed Margaret Thatcher dining out with the Cabinet. “Steak, please,” she says. “How would you like it?” inquires the waiter. “Raw,” replies the Iron Lady. “And what about the vegetables?” he asks. “Oh,” she says, “they’ll have the same as me.”
One of Mrs Thatcher’s most cunning tactics was to distance herself from the government she led when it was under-performing. Routinely, she would refer to her own administration as “they” – signalling that her deeper loyalty lay with the electorate. Now, in a smoother, less combative fashion, David Cameron is borrowing this very technique.

And, a day later, Cameron pops up on the One Show. When asked about the “bit of a rodent problem at Number 10”, he joked:

Don’t talk about the Cabinet like that!

A couple of months back there was much chatter in and around Labour circles about whether using the phrase “Tory-led government” would make criticisms stick better than “coalition”. I joined in myself. On reflection, this was inane.

The government’s (and the Conservative party’s) strongest political asset, and the name that Labour needs to tar with all government failures, is David Cameron. Never mind Clegg: there are more votes and more seats that need to be won from the Tories and that will require knocking down their figurehead. He can’t be allowed to float above the day-to-day grind of governing, a hands-off national leader rather than a politician. Because whether he delegates or micromanages, he’s still in charge and he’s still responsible.