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Letters | 25 October 2012
The toxic centre-ground Sir: I found it hard to be convinced by Matthew Parris’s claim (‘The centre holds’, 20 October) that David Cameron has ‘brilliantly understood’ that old ‘nasty party’ problem. It is held by the soft wet left of the Conservative party that Mrs Thatcher’s party was that ‘toxic’ nasty party. However, the figures suggest the opposite. She won her first election as leader in 1979 with 13.7 million votes, her second in 1983 with 13.0 million and her third with in 1987 with 13.8 million. In the afterglow of Thatcherism without the poll tax, John Major scored a record 14.2 million. That master politician Tony Blair managed 13.5 million in 1997, but by his third victory that had fallen to 9.
Portrait of the week | 25 October 2012
Home Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative chief whip, resigned, still denying that he referred to police as ‘plebs’ for refusing to allow him to cycle through the main gate to Downing Street three weeks ago. The Chancellor, George Osborne, was caught in a first-class carriage with a standard-class ticket. One of his aides paid £160 for an upgrade, saying that the Chancellor couldn’t possibly travel in standard class. The Prime Minister said that energy companies would be put under a duty to make sure that their customers were on the lowest-possible tariff, but the plan lasted only three hours. The working population rose by 212,000 to just under 30 million, the highest number ever recorded.
Policing the police
Public officials, even retired ones, should not as a general rule attempt to undermine democracy. Imagine if, for example, a permanent secretary in the Home Office took to the airwaves to persuade the public to sit on their hands in a general election, in the hope that a low turnout would remove legitimacy from the process and let civil servants get on with their jobs without bothersome interference from ministers. That is pretty much what Lord Blair, former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is now doing. Earlier this week, he said that he hoped people would not bother to vote in the first police commissioner elections on 15 November — in the hope that mass abstention would fatally undermine the process.
Barometer | 25 October 2012
Electric dreams Manganese Bronze, the manufacturer of the most familiar model of London taxi, went into administration, putting a question mark over the black London cab. — Although they enjoy the status of a timeless icon, London cabs only became universally black after the second world war, while their less welcome signature, diesel fumes, only came in during the 1950s. Remarkably, the first non-horse-drawn London cab was in fact electrically powered. — Introduced by Walter C. Bersey in 1896, the cabs could achieve 12 mph and had a range of 15 miles. — The 12 cabs were withdrawn by 1900, however, on account of unreliability, not so much because of their batteries as their pneumatic tyres.