Tuesday May 20 2008
All times are London time
Paddy Power, the bookmakers, are paying out on a Boris victory. Even though the final result is still seven hours away.
The loss of London would be the final nail in a devastating day for Labour. Soon we will find out for sure.
Minutes after the polls closed and a good 20 hours before we can expect the official result, Conservative Home have called the London mayoral race for Boris Johnson. Brave stuff.
The betting markets have moved heavily against Ken Livingstone. According to punters at Betfair, he now has just a 15 per cent chance of winning.
This graph shows the pattern of betting on Livingstone through the entire campaign.
One key part of Gordon Brown’s trip to the US has until now remained a secret: the prime minister caught up with Rupert Murdoch.
The meeting, held in Mr Brown’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, lasted about half-an-hour. We’re not sure what they chatted about. But the timing of the get together should give us a clue.
Mr Brown’s meetings with the media tycoon have begun to synchronise with the electoral calendar — they met at Chequers last year just before the prime minister decided against calling a general election. Mr Brown is probably wishing he could delay today’s local elections too.
One wonders whether Mr Murdoch already knew that his stable of UK papers would back a Tory candidate for London Mayor (you can read the endorsements here, here and here). Whether he told Mr Brown that The Sun and The Times were deserting him, at least for now, was probably irrelevant. I’m sure Mr Brown got the message.
Those who have worked with Mr Brown say he pays incredibly close attention to how the papers cover him — much closer attention than the average reader. The mayoral result on Friday may well reinforce his theories about the power of the press. More seasoned observers of Mr Murdoch’s career may well see it as another example of how seamlessly he moves with the prevailing political winds.
There won’t be much coverage tomorrow of the energy debate on Thursday morning: alas.
But 33 Labour MPs rebelled this afternoon to back an amendment to the Energy Bill which would have encouraged homes and companies to install renewable energy systems such as solar panels or wind turbines.
They joined the Tories and Lib Dems to back an amendment by Alan Simpson, a Labour backbencher, calling for “feed-in tariffs” - which would set a fixed longterm energy price for people who installed green energy systems.
The government is still looking at the viability of the tariffs, a key part of the Tories’ energy policy.
But Mr Simpson, talking in the Commons today, made a vivid and depressing contrast between Germany (where these exist) and the UK.
We are far, far behind on almost every measure of sustainable energy.
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Gordon’s tea with Thatcher last summer seems like an eternity ago.
At the time, their only common ground seemed to be that Gordo - like the Baroness - was “not for turning”.
It is hard to remember a single example of the prime minister admitting to getting anything wrong.
This morning that changed when he conceded, on the Today Programme, that he made “two mistakes” in the way he abolished the 10p income tax rate.
The PM said the policy was right but the measures did not “cover as well as we should have” the issue of low-income workers and 60-something pensioners.
It is not hard to sense the invisible hand of an adviser, if not several, urging Brown to become more touchy-feely.
The pitfalls are obvious.
This is the man who built his political reputation on steely, stern, principled, unyielding solidity. People found his personality peculiar but liked his firm hand. That will change with each successive U-Turn.
Unlike Tony Blair, the Scotsman doesn’t do “human” too well - as Nick Robinson describes over on the Beeb blog.
The Kate Hoey rebuttal has just come out.
Boris Johnson’s campaign had claimed this morning that Hoey (Labour MP for Vauxhall) would be the first member of his new administration if he becomes mayor at the end of this week.
Within minutes rumours started circulating that the whips were about to move in on the sometimes obstreperous MP. And yes there was a meeting with Geoff Hoon, chief whip, later this morning.
Hoey (pictured left) has just issued her reply:
Yes she would advise Boris on sport on a “non-partisan basis”…in a non-executive role.
But
“The key part of the Boris Johnson statement – ie that I will be the first member of his administration – is wrong. I have simply agreed to act in a similar position, for example to Conservative MPs John Bercow and Patrick Mercer – in that I have said that I will advise on a non-partisan basis in respect of my lifetime commitment to bringing sport to the people of London.
This is not an endorsement of Boris Johnson for Mayor. I will be voting for my party and Labour candidates on Thursday.
I am a Labour MP and I am standing for Labour at the next election.. I support the Labour Government. I have and shall continue actively to campaign for Labour in these elections, not least for Val Shawcross, my local GLA member. “
British soldiers must be feeling a little dizzy. Gordon Brown has made some big promises to them about troop numbers in Iraq, which have invariably proved inaccurate. Remember the 1,000 troops home for Christmas? And the halving of British troops serving in Iraq to 2,500 by the Spring? Ministers have either done some creative work on definitions of “home” or blamed changing conditions on the ground. But, from what I have been told, it has as much to do with the prime minister’s penchant for round numbers.
Mr Brown’s role in the “1,000 home for Christmas” has been well reported. The catchy announcement was made without consulting the Ministry of Defence. There was then a scramble to work out how the pledge could be met. In the end, about 500 support troops sent to Kuwait were defined as being out of Iraq and therefore “home”.
Mr Brown’s role in the setting the 2,500 target for the draw down in Iraq is less well known. Again, he delivered a catchy message (this time in the Commons in October): the British presence in Iraq would be halved by the Spring. The number was chosen “after detailed discussions with our military commanders, a meeting of the National Security Committee, [and] discussions with the Iraqi Government and our allies”, according to Mr Brown.
But since then, British officers have concluded there must be at least 2,800 men to be able to protect the base adequately. So even when the withdrawal resumes, we are unlikely to hit the magic 2,500 number. The rounding error had more to do with Downing St than inaccurate military plans, according to one defence insider. Another official suggested to me that the low number risked upsetting officials in the US and losing Britain any benefits, in terms of the special relationship, it has derived from taking part in the war. “They can be rather unforgiving”, the official said.
Anthony Seldon, Tony Blair’s biographer, has penned an thoughtful oped arguing that Gordon Brown has a personality better suited to good times. Had he taken over in 1997, rather than 2007, his eccentricities would have proved “less of an obstacle”, Seldon argues. This passage is worth quoting:
Personalities of Brown’s introverted type flourish when things go well, but find it hard to cope in adversity. Many prime ministers, like Churchill, have had their own “psychological flaws” and yet have served with distinction. Blair’s own extrovert and optimistic personality would have been better suited to the adverse conditions that bedevil any long-serving administration. But the combination of his immaturity and Pollyanna mindset was fatal when mixed with the euphoria of those early years in power, when it was inevitable that only flim-flam emerged from No 10.
Brown’s seriousness would have made a much better fist of it. He had the makings of becoming a considerable prime minister, especially if he had then stood down for Blair before 2003, as Blair initially intended to do for Brown. But the dinner discussion at Granita went the other way, so we shall never know how Brown might have fared if he had jinked ahead.
Whatever the merits of this theory, No 10 have clearly recognised that the prime minister has to show some more empathy — cue the furrowed brow, (near) apology over the 10p rate, and hand-wringing over effect of the credit crunch on hard working families. Expect more.
Forget affordability. The toughest problem facing Treasury officials may be finding a way to make timely payments to some of the 5.3m households that are set to lose out from scrapping the 10p rate.
The rub is that if officials choose to keep Gordon Brown happy by using his cherished tax credits system, the lucky losers identified for compensation may be waiting for up to 18 months for their backdated cheque. This would coincide with the much heralded plans to raise the minimum wage, which will not come into force before October 2009.
I’m not convinced voters will be understanding about such a long wait.
Here is why it could take that long. The tax credits system is cumbersome and hard to manage. It works on an annual basis and is fiendishly difficult to adjust mid-year in any significant way. Monthly payments are set at the start of the financial year in April. A process of “reconciliation” then takes place in September, where overpayments and underpayments are calculated. (About 2m families are told at this point to give money back to the government because they have been overpaid. Great politics.)
A best case calendar for extending tax credits to those low-paid workers without children would look like this:
A more realistic scenario was outlined to me by Ian Mulheirn of the Social Market Foundation, who wrote an excellent review of the options available to the chancellor.
“Amending the tax-credit system to assist these people would only take effect from April 2009 and any backdating in respect of 2008 would probably take another six months,” he told me. Basically, the backdated payments for 2008 would be calculated when it comes to “reconciling” the tax credit payments in September 2009.
This would effectively mean that even those lucky few chosen to receive compensation would be out of pocket until October 2009.
Is that a message that will win votes on the doorstep?
A far simpler and much quicker alternative, advocated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is to increase income tax allowances, a measure Gordon Brown has criticised in the past because it is more regressive than tax credits. Changing the income tax schedule was not mentioned by the Treasury in its letter outlining the 10p rate U-turn.
The question is: will the prime minister swallow his pride and admit that tax credits are not the best solution to his compensation puzzle?
In the end it took a face-to-face meeting between Gordon Brown and Frank Field last night to end the 10p revolt.
But if the government thinks it’s out of the woods, it should think again. Backbenchers are ready to use their newfound clout over other issues: the next big one being 42 days terror suspect detention without trial.
Not that the more left-wing Labour backbenchers are wholly convinced by today’s concessions:
Paul Flynn, MP for Newport West, tells me: “We’re saying we want to see issues that are recognisable as traditional Labour issues, we are now seeing the strength of the backbenchers, muscles have been flexed.”
Dai Havard, MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (pictured below), says Frank Field had capitulated too quickly without cast-iron guarantees: “My opinion is if we’d squeezed his balls we’d have had £1bn in writing by Monday,” he tells the FT.
