Tories

Chris Dillow estimates that there are more heroin users in Glasgow North East than Tory voters*. For that matter, there are probably four heroin users in Springburn for every plucky citizen prepared to vote Liberal Democrat. I suspect Labour won't want to use this factoid for fear it foster the impression that heroin use is much more widespread than it really is. *In, admittedly, a by-election with a 33% turnout.

Yesterday I suggested that Europe may well end up destroying David Cameron's ministry and that, consequently, some of this week's maneouvering has been designed to delay that until a putative second term. So, it's interesting to see James reporting that: The Euro-sceptics are quietly confident. The overwhelming mood among those I have spoken to is that Cameron either has to get the powers back he said he would and show that his measure to prevent any further transfers of sovereignty are effective or there will have to be at some point after 2014 an in or out referendum.  In other words, they're quite happy to bide their time before destroying their own Prime Minister. Then again, for the sceptics everything is a tactic on the road towards their blessed "In or Out?

Timothy Garton Ash's piece recalling his adventures in central and eastern europe for this magazine is just as enjoyable as you would expect. Which is to say that it's very enjoyable. But, mischievously, he ends with a provocative question: Now, 20 years on, the enlargement of the European Union to include most of the post-communist democracies of central and Eastern Europe, a logical (though not inevitable) conclusion of revolutions that were conducted under the motto of ‘the return to Europe’, has made the dreaded federal superstate of Eurosceptic nightmare a sheer impossibility. It is simply not going to happen, in any foreseeable future, and even Germany, once the motor of federalism, no longer wants it.

So, it seems that dreams of a referendum next year have been dashed. 2010, once the Year of the Referendum, will now be plebiscite-free. No referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and no referendum on the Act of Union either. This my be good news for voters but it's tough on hacks who'll need to find something else to write about. But, for a moment, let's consider some of the implications of this. I'll leave the Lisbon question to one side for now and reiterate my suspicion that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are helping, not hindering Alex Salmond, by agreeing to delay nay referendum until after the next Holrood elections. Granted, the SNP may not remain the largest party, nor form even a minority ministry in Edinburgh after the 2011 election.

I don't think that government ministers should necessarily listen to the advice they're given by independent, expert authorities. That is, the government is and should be free to decide that, whatever the merits of any given piece of independent analysis the larger, more general, interest is best served by rejecting that advice. So there's nothing wrong with Alan Johnson sacking Professor David Nutt. That's his prerogative. But we have our own views and interests too. And we may fairly say that Johnson is a fool and that Nutt's recommendation, shared by his colleagues at Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, that Cannabis should be reclassified at a Class C, not Class B, drug is eminently sensible.

I've often written that the modern Republican party's obsession with Ronald Reagan obscures as much as it illuminates. The deification of the Gipper isn't a great substitute for addressing the particular problems the party - and the United States - faces today. Asking "What would Reagan do?" can't provide the answers to every issue. Nevertheless, there's at least one aspect of Reagan's career that all political parties might bear in mind: his generosity of spirit and, correspondingly, the empathy he felt, genuinely I believe, for people whose circumstances were very different from his own.

Many thanks to Iain Dale for digging up this Tory poster from 1929. Prescient and useful though it may be, I cannot share his confidence that the Conservatives will be very much better. That is, we may modestly expect an improvement in degree but not in kind. Alas. Here, at least, is an opportunity for the Tories to surprise us. In a good way. That's the optimistic take, anyway.

So, it seems that if you want to win a primary contest in the modern Tory party it helps to be a GP. Having selected a local GP in Totnes the Conservatives have selected another local MP in Bracknell. As Liberal Vision's Mark Littlewood says, Phil Lee may well become an admirable Member of Parliament but, from an ousider's perspective it does seem a shame that neither of the two high-profile candidates - Iain Dale and Rory Stewart were selected. Since I've complained about excessive control from the centre it may seem churlish to grumble that there are problems with the way that local parties select their candidates too. But there you have it. There are trad-offs everywhere and nothing and no system is perfect.

The other day Pete mentioned David Cameron's desire to bring in outsiders to staff his government ministries, making it a Tory version of Gordon's so-called Government Of All the Talents. One can see why this must be an appealling notion. You might share it if you were charged with assembling a government from the parliamentary Conservative party. Christ, you might think, they sent me this? Bricks without straw also ran. Now Benedict Brogan says that the Tories are thiking of creating as many as 40 new Conservative peers to stack the House of Lords with reliable Cameron votes. Again, one can see why he would want to do so even if, happily, a Conservative ministry will still be unable to command a majority in the Upper House.

Members of the Bicester and Whaddon Chase Hunt. Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images. And so it begins. As a traditionalist when it comes to these matters, I think it best that parties wait until they win an election before they water down or abandon their promises. Apparently, however, that's an old-fashioned view these days. Despite repeated promises that there would be a government-sponsored bill to repeal the Hunting Act, it seems that Dave's Conservatives are preparing to abandon that commitment and leave the matter to a Private Members' Bill. According to Melissa Kite's Telegraph report: The shadow cabinet member in charge of hunting last night confirmed that the party was considering the move.

At first I thought it a little unfortunate that David Cameron's peroration today unconsciously - I assume - echoed the Royal Bank of Scotland's slogan "Make it happen". But actually, the rise and fall of RBS is something of a template for the rise and fall of governments. Years of promise and fat and profit encourage excessive self-confidence and over-expansion that ends with a devastating, humiliating crash. That has been Labour's experience and it will eventually be the Tories' story too, assuming that Cameron and his pals form the next government. This was a bleak, sombre speech. Perhaps even excessively so.

Plenty of Tories are, it seems, cock-a-hoop about the news, still to be confirmed, that General Sir Richard Dannatt is to be elevated to the House of Lords where he will become a Tory defence adviser and, perhaps, a minister in the next Conservative government. And, in fairness, one can see why the Conservatives would be so pleased. There's no-one on the Labour benches who brings as much firepower to the political battlefield as General Dannatt. Yet if the government's criticisms of General Dannatt were, at times, unseemly then so too was his very public dissension from (aspects of)  government policy at a time when he was, after all, in charge of implementing that policy. General Dannatt thought little of stepping outside the chain-of-command.

Fraser says there's plenty to fight for on the Great European Question and, in many ways, I'm sure he's right. But what is Tory policy in the event that Lisbon is ratified before the election? That may be a hypothetical, but it's not an unreasonable one. It deserves a clear answer. I'm struck too by what Cameron said in his interview with Fraser in this week's edition of the magazine: The whole Conservative party has had the benefit of learning the mistake Blair made - having a mandate and not using it. Not actually using your early months to demonstrate how you can transform a country... There are some things you can do very quickly. There are some easy wins. Well, that sounds quite promising. But what happens if the first six months of a Cameron ministry are dominated by europe?

Gordon Brown is an intelligent man but I've always thought him a better tactician than strategist. His speech to the Labour party conference yesterday confirmed that view and, indeed, strengthened it. Consider this passage from Jonathan Freedland's column today: The Brownites always loathed Blair's "respect agenda", regarding anti-social behaviour orders as dismal and sacking Blair's respect tsar. But Brown devoted a full page and a half of today's text to the topic, more than on foreign policy, defence and climate change combined. So there were crowd-pleasing promises to crack down on Britain's "50,000 most chaotic families" and to set up "supervised homes" for teenage mothers.

The other thing to be borne in mind about the Liberal Democrats - apart, that is, from the fact that they betray proper liberalism every day - is that they're hopeless at politics. Vince Cable's proposals on freezing public sector pay, reforming pensions and increasing the personal allowance are actually all very sensible. Good policies in fact! Worth talking about! So what does he do? Only ruin everything by proposing an absurd, back-of-a-napkin plan to tax large houses still further. (That the Lib Dems are, or used to be becauses, really, who can tell these days, in favour of replacing property taxes with a local income tax merely adds to the absurdity of the situation.) So, guess what gets the headlines? Surprisingly it's not the sensible ideas. This is elementary.

Sometimes, you know, I wish I could. Then the Liberal Democrats come along to remind one how difficult it is to support them. But, in theory, could one vote for a truly liberal party? Of course one could. And would, if only one were so available. In Massie's Better Ordered Political Landscape the Liberal Democrats would, roughly speaking, be the equivalent of Germany's Free Democrats*. It's true that there are some liberals** in the Lib Dems - one thinks of the gang at Liberal Vision and other bloggers such as Charlotte Gore - but they're a minority within their own minority.