Martin Bright

I am travelling to Conservative Party conference in Birmingham today and thought this would be a good time to return to this blog. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments in my absence. As ever, I will try to respond where I can. I should be up to full speed during the week. Meanwhile, I thought I would lay out the five themes I will be addressing over the coming weeks. So do feel free to  provide me with ideas. I'm sure you will. 1. Ed Miliband may not be the answer, but he is a pretty good question for Labour. The new Labour leader is neither their equivalent of William Hague nor Iain Duncan Smith. The party needs a period of reflection in opposition to work through a thoughtful response to the Coalition government. Will he provide the necessary leadership?

I will be taking a sabbatical from the Spectator over the summer in order to think about the future of the Left and the historical connections between Britain and the Islamic world. I will return for party conferences. Thank you for all your challenging comments.

The choreography of the new coalition is designed to make this look like a partnership of equals. But I'm increasingly convinced that Nick Clegg pulled a masterstroke here. This really is a joint premiership. Someone suggested I take a look at the full coalition document  on the Cabinet Office website to see just how much the Liberal Democrat leader had wrung from his Tory counterpart in the negotiations. The most striking phrase is: "... will be agreed between the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister", which litters the document. The "I agree with Nick" slogan used by the Lib Dems during the election campaign has thus become embedded in the constitutional agreement.

Thanks to Richard Millett who has alerted me to the latest outburst from Labour's failed mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone on Irainian state-funded Press TV. In an interview with Andrew Gilligan, Livingstone comes close to condoning suicide bombing in his defence of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the controversial cleric. “There would not be any Palestine suicide bombers if Israel withdrew from the occupied lands. If Israel wants peace it should withdraw from the occupied territories and dismantle its nuclear weapons,” he says. Millett goes on to say:  "Livingstone also refers to Martin Bright... as 'a bit of an Islamophobe'.

I have yet to get really excited about the Labour Party leadership race. I was deeply depressed by the manner of Andy Burnham's entry into the fray. Too many Labour politicians and activists were over-impressed by talk of immigration on the doorstep. They think that because the subject was raised again and again, then it is the key to Labour's failure and therefore its potential future success. The point is that the issue was raised in 2001 and 2005, but Labour knew it would win on both occasions on so chose to ignore what its core voters were saying about foreigners. They believed they had their votes in the bag. That was probably a mistake, although the core vote seemed to hold up rather well even in 2010 considering what a useless campaign Brown ran.

Congratulations to David Cameron and to Nick Clegg. It is a remarkable achievement to have formed this coalition government. Now we shall see whether it can hold together. Some in the Labour Party are already feeling smug about the Liberal Democrats' discomfort. But this way madness lies.  The Labour Party should begin from the assumption that the new government will not collapse and that most people will give it the benefit of the doubt in the short term.

I left the Labour Party in 1994 and re-joined on May 6th 2010. There, I've said it. I had always intended to vote Liberal Democrat in this election, but changed my mind in the polling station. It seems I wasn't alone.  I couldn't ever quite buy in to the New Labour project, but I would like to be involved in whatever it is that happens next.  Unlike others on the left, I would not be horrified by a Conservative/Liberal Democrat government, although I would be happier with a grand coalition/government of national unity. I voted Labour with a heavy heart. My local MP, Lynne Featherstone is exemplary and the local Labour council's handling of the Baby Peter scandal was woeful.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from the television debates, it is that people have grown tired of politicians slagging each other off. David Cameron promised an end to "yah-boo" politics, but the institution of parliament makes this near-impossible in practice. However, while parliament is out of action, there just might be the possibility of creating something genuinely ground-breaking: a government of national unity. I first suggested this idea in the New Statesman during the 2008 Labour Party conference: "If the financial crisis is as serious as many in the government suggest, then extraordinary times require bold solutions.

The old political hands in the Labour Party at least knew that they had to talk down their prospects (beyond the usual nonsense about fighting to win). Lord Mandelson was right to fight this election as the underdog because this now looks in some ways like a victory.  In fact this is a massive achievement for the Conservative Party. When David Cameron took over in 2005 many Tories would have settled for this result. They should always have been fighting a two-election strategy. But the Conservative Party allowed itself to get overexcited about the possibility of outright victory. The Liberal Democrats allowed themselves to dream and find themselves bitterly disappointed this morning.

I have been deeply disappointed by Tory negative campaigning in the past few days. The Cameroon coup was inspired, in part, by Tony Blair, so to decry 13 years of New Labour is deeply hypocritical. The message, pioneered by Oliver Letwin, was that praise would be given where it was due. Britain has become a better place since 1997 and that is true for readers of the The Spectator as much as (and perhaps more than) anyone else. At the same time, Brown's leadership of the country and his party has been woeful. The Labour Party has only itself to blame for this. It should have put up a candidate against Gordon Brown in 2007 and it should have removed him a year later.  This blog is here to give you an insight into thinking on the left.

I have just watched the last images of the election campaign on the Ten O'Clock News on the BBC. David Cameron was surrounded by some seriously off-putting party apparatchiks (why not choose some of the perfectly presentable and normal-looking young people for CCHQ rather than these awful gargoyles?), meanwhile Gordon Brown was struggling to fill a room and Nick Clegg was being mobbed.  I remember a Labour spin doctor (OK it was Damian McBride) telling me that he knew Gordon could never win a beauty contest against David Cameron. He didn't seem to have twigged that modern elections are beauty contests - that is one of the reasons Tony Blair did so well against the considerably less beautiful John Major, William Hague and Michael Howard.

I have had a number of shocked emails from old friends on the left following my previous post here, which many saw as an endorsement of the Liberal Democrats. In fact, I remain one of the great undecided. This weekend I witnessed some good comrades embracing the party of the workers. Nick Cohen devoted his column in the Observer to the thesis (adapting Chesterton) that "when people stop believing in Labour they don't believe in nothing – they believe in anything". Meanwhile, Norman Geras of normblog has published the five reasons he will be voting Labour. There is much soul-searching out there in liberal Britain. The Observer's brilliant but tortured endorsement of the Lib Dems came very close to being an argument for voting Labour.

The letter in support of the Lib Dems in today's Guardian was a brave intervention from Richard Reeves, John Kampfner and a group of prominent figures from left-liberal Britain. It is all too easy to dismiss such interventions as the actions of the usual suspects addicted to writing to the papers to remind themselves of their own sense of importance. But this marks a real shift of the intellectual centre of gravity on the left. The letter ends: "The question is where the energy for the future of progressive politics is to be found. It is a contemporary political fact that the stronger the performance of the Liberal Democrats on 6 May the better the chances of progressive reform. The Liberal Democrats are today's change-makers.

Gordon Brown clearly didn't read my blog post before last. There was something biblical about his humiliation in Rochdale. His loss of dignity was total. It wasn't as if the status of Gillian Duffy as an archetypal Labour voter had not been telegraphed - father singing the red flag at Manchester Free Trade Hall, working for the local council for 30 years. With disabled children for goodness sake. Everything was shouting: "Be nice to this woman. She is one of ours." In public the Prime Minister could keep up the act. But his comments in the car revealed too, too much about the decadent state of Gordon Brown's Labour machine. What happened today is a significant betrayal of every candidate and every party worker currently pounding the streets to get Labour re-elected.

In September 2005 I wrote about the "stampede for the centre ground" in an article for the New Statesman. I had just been underwhelmed by the Liberal democrat conference in Blackpool and noted how easy it was to sneer about the centre party from the Westminster village. The Lib Dems were not making it easy for themselves as they struggled to come to terms with the rise of so-called "Orange Book" Lib Dems such as David Laws and Nick Clegg on the right of the party. However, I said at the time: "It is tempting... to dismiss the Liberal Democrats. It would be unwise to do so yet. Those in the other two main parties thinking seriously about politics recognise this.