Tory conference delegates will have been on the edge of their train seats waiting to find out what the new ‘Maggie Shop’ would be selling. Well you can’t say Craig Oliver’s tribute hasn’t exhausted every possibility of Lady T merchandise. It’s, er, what she would have wanted?
A ten minute tribute to coincide with the launch of a Margaret Thatcher shop tomorrow. The Tories are quick to credit Craig Oliver with the idea…
Online, on TV, in print, on mobile, on tablet and now… Guido is available in Lego form. Supernerd James Pegrum has built 4,000 years of British history out of Lego, including the original Guy Fawkes’ finest hour.
Margaret Thatcher’s first day at Downing Street is also a classic. Fun for all the family…
Conservative party
Richard Balfe– former MEP and Conservative Party Envoy to the Trade Unions and Cooperative movement
Sir Anthony Bamford DL – Chairman and Managing Director of JCB
Nicholas Bourne – former Leader of the Conservative Group in the National Assembly for Wales
Matthew Carrington – former Conservative MP
Daniel Finkelstein OBE – Associate Editor of The Times and former Head of Policy for the Conservative party
Annabel Goldie DL MSP – Conservative Member of the Scottish Parliament; former Leader of the Scottish Conservatives
Lady (Fiona) Hodgson CBE – campaigner on women’s issues; senior member of the Conservative voluntary Party; former Chairman of the Conservative Women’s Organisation
Christopher (Chris) Holmes MBE – former Paralympic swimmer; Director of Paralympic Integration at London 2012; Non-Executive Director of the Equality and Human Rights Commission; and a former Non-Executive Director of the Disability Rights Commission
John Horam – former MP; Conservative representative on the Electoral Commission
Howard Leigh – senior corporate finance professional; Conservative Party Treasurer; former Chairman and current President of Westminster Synagogue; former Trustee of Jewish Care and current Chairman of Jewish Care’s Business Group; Trustee of the Jerusalem Foundation in the UK
Dame Lucy Neville-Rolfe CMG – former senior civil servant, including Number 10 Policy Unit; former leading Executive at Tesco Plc
Sir Stephen Sherbourne – longstanding political career in Westminster and public affairs, including former Political Secretary to the then Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher), and former Chief of Staff to the then Leader of the Opposition (Michael Howard)
Michael (Mike) Whitby – Conservative Councillor in Birmingham; former Leader of Birmingham City Council
Susan Williams – former Councillor and Leader of Trafford Council
Green party
Jenny Jones AM – member of the London Assembly; former Chair of the Green party of England and Wales and former Deputy Mayor of London
Labour party
Sir Charles Allen CBE – Non-Executive Director of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games; Chairman of Global Radio Group
Sir William Haughey OBE – prominent Scottish businessman and CEO of City Refrigeration Holdings
Alicia Kennedy – former Deputy General Secretary of the Labour party
Doreen Lawrence OBE – campaigner for justice, race equality and better policing
Jonathan (Jon) Mendelsohn – business advisor and co-founder of LLM Communications
Liberal Democrat party
Catherine (Cathy) Mary Bakewell MBE – former leader of Somerset County Council
Rosalind (Olly) Grender MBE – former Director of Communications for Shelter; former Director of Communications for the Liberal Democrats
Christine Mary Humphreys – President of the Welsh Liberal Democrats; former Member of the National Assembly for Wales
Zahida Manzoor CBE – former Legal Services Ombudsman; former Deputy Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality
Brian Paddick – former Deputy Assistant Commissioner in the Metropolitan Police Service
James Palumbo – co-founder and chairman of Ministry of Sound Group, the international music and entertainment business
Jeremy Purvis – former Member of the Scottish Parliament for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale
Alison Suttie – former Press Secretary to the President of the European Parliament; former Deputy Chief of Staff to Nick Clegg and Election Manager for the 2010 General Election
Rumi Verjee CBE – entrepreneur and philanthropist
Sir Ian Wrigglesworth – Liberal Democrat Treasurer; former MP for Teeside Thornaby and for Stockton South
Catching up with Andrew Rawnsley’s “award winning” column yesterday, Guido could not help think he had read the same points being made, with all the same examples and the same anecdotes, somewhere before. Rawnsley tackles the great North/South divide debate with a remarkable similarity to Jeremy Cliffe, the Economist’s UK politics correspondent, who wrote extensively on the issue in April. Cliffe’s two pieces are online here and here.
Guido first smelt a rat at the mention of Alastair Campbell, who Rawnsley writes “secured his two, even more whopping landslides in 1997 and 2001 by winning for Labour in places that had been previously thought unreachable. On the night of his first victory, he thought his staff were pulling his leg when they reported that Labour had won St Albans.” Something Economist readers would know from April, minus the insider anecdote.
“Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s spin doctor, recalls the party’s astonishment at the results: “seats were falling that we would never have imagined standing a hope in hell of winning.” The greatest swing was in the south-east and eastern regions, where Labour won 44 constituencies, including such leafy, middle-class suburbs as St Albans (now comfortably Tory once more).”
A coincidence, surely? So Guido started compare the rest of Rawnsley’s column to the Economist pieces, and it does not look good. See if you can spot the differences here:
Economist:
“Of the 158 seats that make up the three northern English regions, only 43 are Conservative […] Of the 197 MPs representing the English south beyond the capital, just ten are now Labour. The Tories hold only two seats in the north-east and one in Scotland.”
Rawnsley:
“Of the 158 seats in the three northern English regions, only 43 have a Conservative MP. The Tories hold just two seats in the north-east and have only one MP in the whole of Scotland. […] Under a line drawn from the Wash to the Bristol Channel, there are 197 seats outside London. Just 10 of those seats are represented by a Labour MP.”
Lifting statistics from the Economist is one thing, but what about whole chunks of analysis?
Economist:
“well-off people in the north are more likely to vote Labour than the poor are in the south […] northerners from the highest social class are more likely to vote Labour than are southerners from the lowest social class.”
Rawnsley:
“Well-heeled parts of the north are these days much more likely to vote Labour than their counterparts in the south. […] Affluent northerners (the As and Bs of pollsters’ jargon) are more likely to vote Labour than poorer southerners (the Ds and the Es).”
Economist:
““LET’S all do the conga, Maggie is no longer,” sang fans of Liverpool Football Club during their trip to Reading, in southern England, on April 13th. It was as revealing as any opinion poll. […] Polls following Lady Thatcher’s death revealed a country similarly divided over the merits of her grand funeral. […] Mrs Thatcher did indeed oversee a collapse of northern manufacturing (though that process neither began nor ended with her), as well as a financial-services boom that was mostly felt in the south-east.”
Rawnsley:
“It is still suffering from the shadow of Mrs Thatcher, which none of her successors has dispelled. As we saw in some of the responses to her death, in much of the north she stands for savage deindustrialisation, impoverishment and southern disdain. She triggered a boom in the City and another in the services sector, the fruits of which were mostly enjoyed by the south.”
Economist:
“Under the 1997-2010 Labour government the economy grew more slowly in the north—and, partly as a result, the state accounted, directly and indirectly, for a larger share of jobs created there. […] When Labour increased public spending in the north it strengthened its position there. When the Conservative-led coalition began to cut public-sector jobs they strengthened Labour’s position there, too. (The same may yet prove true of cuts in benefits, which are a larger part of incomes in the region.)”
Rawnsley:
“Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the economy still grew more slowly in the north, but it received proportionately more of the increases in public spending. Now austerity has fallen most harshly on the north, where more jobs are reliant on the public sector and a higher proportion of the population is drawing benefits.”
Oh look, if you change the county, nobody will notice:
Economist:
“And regional success and failure are self-reinforcing. A bright young thing in Kent who wants to go into politics has two good options: join the Conservative Party, or leave Kent.”
Rawnsley:
“The divide has become self-fuelling. […] A Labourite in Surrey has a similar problem: forget about being an MP or head north.”
Rawnsley was clearly concious of being accused of lifting his column or he would not have bothered to make such a minor change.
He didn’t stop there though:
Economist:
“Most obviously, it is much harder for one party to secure a strong political mandate. […] some way to surmount the problem has to be found if either party is to get a respectable absolute majority. […] The country needs national political parties. At the moment, it does not have them.”
Rawnsley:
“For as long as the two parties are entrenched in their strongholds but incapable of reaching very far beyond them, it increases the likelihood of there being more hung parliaments. Even if one or other of them can scrape together some sort of parliamentary majority at the next election, it is unlikely to be an impressive one, meaning whoever is prime minister will struggle to claim to have a national mandate.”
Economist:
“The Conservative Party now has scant direct knowledge of the northern cities. Labour is similarly clueless about people living in southern towns.”
Rawnsley:
“When speaking about the south, some Labour people talk as if they were describing hostile territory rather than part of their own country. When on the subject of the north, some Tories can sound as if they are talking about a part of the map captioned: “Here be dragons”.”
Economist:
“Both main parties will concentrate on the Midlands, where loyalties are less entrenched, and on picking off Liberal Democrat seats; but the Tories need to win some northern seats to get a majority.”
Rawnsley:
“They will concentrate on the Midlands and trying to bag some Lib Dem seats, but the Conservatives need to gain some northern seats to have any hope of constructing a reasonable majority.”
Economist:
“The ideal economic solution would be to build a bigger private sector in Britain’s north (and in Northern Ireland and Wales), demolishing what Tories angrily refer to as Labour’s client state. This is the work of many years.”
Rawnsley:
“Politicians of all parties talk about “rebalancing” the economy, but that is the work of many years”
And as if that was not enough, for good measure Rawnsley even nicks Cliffe’s “two nations” sentence:
Economist:
“The diverging politics of the Labour north and Conservative south make England look ever more like two nations.”
Rawnsley:
“We are not so much a country divided as two nations.”
Struggling with Labour out of power and a complete lack of access, the Observer’s “award-winning chief political commentator” has taken to stealing the work of someone twenty years his junior and attempting to pass it off as his own by tweaking a few words. Quite tragic really.
As Guido revealed in yesterday’s Sun column, the Tories will move CCHQ in January from Millbank to Matthew Parker Street behind the QEII Conference Centre in Westminster. After the students smashed up Millbank in 2011, their insurance bill soared. All three major parties will have moved since 2010 by the next election. Their new building doesn’t have a name yet, but Guido imagines the focus groups will stop them having the balls to christen it Margaret Thatcher House. Global Race for Hard-working People House just isn’t very catchy…
