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James Gray's Blog

Remembrance

This year’s Remembrance Sunday had huge poignancy as the people of North Wiltshire thought particularly about those young men and women – so many of them from this area – willingly risking and in some cases giving their lives in service to Queen and Country in Iraq and Afghanistan. As usual I attended the Memorial Garden outside Westminster Abbey on the Thursday, then the small ceremony in Malmesbury, the parade, service and Cenotaph ceremony in Chippenham, lunch at Hullavington barracks with IX Supply Regiment, and then the War Memorial ceremony, church service and march past at Wootton Bassett.

I was particularly pleased this year to be accompanied at all of those events by my friend Mitra Pariyar. He is the talented son of a Nepalese hill farmer who acted as my guide and interpreter when I was monitoring the Nepali Elections earlier this year. Despite his modest family background – his father’s subsistence farm was many hours walk to the nearest tarmac road – Mitra got a scholarship to the school in Pokhara, thence to Kathmandu University, and now he has become the first Nepali Dalit (“Untouchable” in old parlance – from the lowest caste in what is still a caste-ridden society) to study at Oxford University. He is doing an M.Phil in Anthropology at St Hugh’s College and I am immensely proud of him, and have been glad to try to help with financing his studies. It was good to introduce him to some Ghurkha soldiers during the day, but sad to think that the route along which I was invited to march with Wootton Bassett’s Royal British Legion would the following day witness the return of the body of a soldier from the Second Battalion of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. What a lot our Nation owes to Nepal. And how good it is to try to repay some of that debt to people like Mitra.

I was glad to introduce Mitra to Andrew Mitchell MP, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Development who was the guest at a superb Conservative dinner at Bowood the night before, and I was glad that he reiterated my Party’s determination to raise International aid payments to 0.7% of Gross Domestic Product. We remain one of the richest nations in the world, and it is only right that we should use a good chunk of taxpayer’s funds – even in hard economic times like these- to help those most in need around the World, and to a degree to repay some of the debts we owe our colonial exploitation of India, Africa and much of the rest of the world.

The whole weekend was about Remembrance. “Remember, remember the fifth of November,” (but try to forget that Guy Fawkes did at least some of his plotting in the King’s head Pub in Chippenham). Some people were kind enough to remember my birthday on the 7^th (although I wish we could forget it). “They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old; age shall not weary them nor the years decay…” as we say so memorably on the day of the ultimate act of remembrance - Armistice Day. But I am glad that just as the Wootton Bassett War Memorial’s statue of children’s hands encircling the Globe reminds us that the whole point of warfare is for the future (“ For your tomorrow we gave our today” in the words of the Kohima  Epitaph), I am glad that Mitra’s presence allowed me not only to remember the past, but also to think of the future and the rest of the World and to contemplate what we can all do to try to make it even a slightly  better place.

Role Models

Whether or not you are ‘in’ to motor sport (and I have to admit that I never really was, but have been proud and inspired by the presence in my Constituency of the last privately owned race track in the UK- at Castle Combe,) we must all of us have had a frisson of excitement as Lewis Hamilton overtook on the last corner of the last lap to come fifth in Brazil, and thereby to become the youngest ever, and the first black, World Formula One Champion. How proud we should all be. Let us for once try to emulate the huge national pride the Americans would have shown if it had been one of their citizens. Away with British modesty for once, and lets celebrate a National Champion.

By the time you read this said Americans will be celebrating the election of either Senator McCain or Obama as their President. My own suspicion is that both are fine men, and whichever it is will need every ounce of their obvious ability to address the monstrous problems facing our World. But I particularly salute them, and all of the millions of workers who have been campaigning for them, simply on surviving the marathon effort which the US Presidential race has become, and by doing so re-igniting a fascination with politics and current affairs which is the envy of the rest of the world. Whoever wins: they deserve it and deserve our congratulations and support for the future.

Lewis Hamilton and the two Presidential candidates – like our own Olympic stars so newly back from Beijing - are role models in a modern world which is sadly short of them. Worse than that, some of the younger generation’s role models seem to me to be exactly the wrong kind. I have to admit that I have never found Jonathon Ross anything more than mildly amusing, and have never heard Russell Brand, but like the vast bulk of the decent British population abhor the vicious and unpleasant prank they played on Mr Sachs. Whether or not Mr Ross will miss the million pounds or so he has effectively been fined out of his eighteen million three year contract is another matter. But what I found truly worrying is that as highly professional broadcasters, they presumably believed that what they did would appeal to their particular audience. So it must be that there were some people sitting at home who found their disgraceful phone calls amusing.  And what an awful commentary that realisation is.

The shenanigans of Messrs Rothschild, Deripaska, Mandelson (and with a walk-on part Osborne) are out of the headlines at last. And I am glad of it as the whole episode seemed to me a diversion from the real world. Multi million pound yachts, villas, champagne, private jets and the like. Not much of that around Chippenham, I’d say. But perhaps that’s why it lasted so long in the headlines – it was a story about a way of life of which most of us can only dream, an escape from the dreary realities of everyday life. Maybe that’s why people listened to Ross and Brand.

And maybe that’s why we must all be doing more to try to provide decent role models for the young. So give me dear old Terry Wogan any day. Highly amusing, wry, professional, and intelligent. Give me Messrs Hamilton, Mc Cain, and Obama. But spare me Ross, Deripaska and Mandelson.

Osborne Gate

Wiltshire Coroner David Masters pulled no punches in his report on the tragic death of ten servicemen in Hercules XV179 near Baghdad in 2005. He is clear that had suppressant foam been fitted in the wing tanks there is at least a chance that the plane could have landed and saved their lives; he has some tough questions to ask about why the RAF chose to ignore a 2002 recommendation that the foam should be fitted, and why a number of documents about it all seem to have been shredded in the meantime; he highlights an intelligence failing – that two US Black Hawk helicopters had been fired on in exactly that area that morning – and questions why the US Military refused to give evidence to his enquiry. There are all sorts of questions to be asked and lessons to be learned here, and I will make it my business to do so.

Parliament meanwhile was passing the highly controversial Human Embryos Bill, with me being one of the 140 or so MPs to vote against it. I favoured some of its proposals. Using cows eggs rather than human ones for experiments seems to me rather sensible, and as Chairman of the All Party Group for Multiple Sclerosis, I am encouraged by the idea that some such experimentation just may find the causes – and therefore the cure – for that terrible disease. But some other parts of the Bill – such as the ludicrous notion that a child’s birth certificate could feature two women as the natural parents – made it overall unacceptable to me. Parliament also passed the Climate Change Bill – a matter, of course, of vital importance to us all and to the future of our Globe. The debate rages on about the Credit Crunch, banking collapse, Stock Exchange in free fall, employment and inflation on the up, and the outlook economically grizzly in every way. Who is to blame and what can we do about it? Borrowing our way out of it, and spending shed loads of money on public projects in a Keynesian sort of way strikes me as being exactly the sort of thing NOT to do.

The outcome of the US Presidential race is, of course, of huge importance in itself. But I am also worried about the risk of violence from terrorists, or even internationally some time between 4^th November and the installation of the new President in January. There has even been talk of a possible Israeli strike against Iran during that period, which would risk terrible consequences. The World remains an incredibly dangerous place – if you were Osama Bin Laden what would you be doing to worsen the effects of the economic crisis on the hated West? There were two debates in Parliament this week, in which I took part, to question the strategic reason for our continuing presence in Afghanistan, and Secretary of State John Hutton’s commitment that we would have to stay there ‘for decades’, and to argue the case for stronger armed forces to face the continuing threat from International Terror, despite rumours that the Government’s over-borrowing may result in deep and damaging defence cuts.

With all of those hugely important issues swirling around, and with many aspects of all of our futures hanging in the balance, I have to say that I find the media’s fixation with ‘Osborne- Gate’ pretty grating. Russian Oligarchs, Yachts in Corfu, the oleaginous Lord Mandelson and the rest of it is pretty peripheral stuff. It has led to some press speculation that it may herald an earlier General Election than the 2010, which most people had hitherto been predicting. It is perhaps a mark of the calibre of the Mandelson project that trying to character assassinate the Shadow Chancellor in this way should form a key part of his stratagem to try to win any such election. I hope that, by contrast we will all be able to focus not on personalities, gossip, plots, insinuations, but on those great and pressing issues facing us all.

Superman or Icarus

There’s something unnerving about the Prime Minister’s depiction of himself as some kind of International Superman flying round the world attending assorted summits and saving our banking system; and something rather unrealistic about the “Brown Bounce” which, as a result, he now seems to be enjoying in the polls. Hang on just a minute, there, Gordon. Am I getting mixed up, or are you the same Gordon Brown who sold our gold at the bottom of the market and as Chancellor presided over the highest spending and booming administration, who removed the requirement that the Bank of England should supervise the banking system, who is now facing inflation at 5.2% and a predicted unemployment of 3 million in the next 12 months, and about whose economy most people seem to be predicting a `1920’s style depression?

I very much welcome David Cameron’s change of tone signalled last Friday in a speech in the City of London. It is right that we in her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition have been relatively supportive of the Government in the eye of the storm. It would have been wrong had we further destabilised the markets by any excessively party political attacks. And we do indeed agree with very much of what Messrs Brown and Darling have done in recent weeks - the nationalisation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, for example. But all of that need not mean that we should fail to do our democratic duty of pointing out what we believe to be wrong with HMG, nor where we disagree with them, nor indeed who is to blame.

I also find Mr Brown’s constant claims that this is a Global Crisis and therefore nothing to do with him both unconvincing and rather irritating. There can be no doubt that it is Global. But Mr Brown is the PM of the fourth largest economy in the world; most economists seem to be in agreement that things are worse here than elsewhere, and that Mr Brown ‘failed to mend the holes in the roof while the sun was shining’. His constant mantra that New Labour meant an “end to boom and bust”, his over-use of the word “prudence” and his fiscal rules which have turned out to be rules only in the good times, and are immediately abandoned when the economy turns down; all of those things are testament to the shambles which Gordon Brown has made of our economy. And I would much prefer it if instead of sheltering behind some kind of Internationalism, indeed trying to benefit from it by positioning himself as international statesman, he would simply square up to the fact that he got a great deal of the management of our economy fatally wrong over the last 11 years, and that he personally is to a significant degree to blame for it.

All of this reminds me of his ten Budget speeches, which were broadly welcomed by the pundits on the day of the debate, but unravelled to a significant degree by the Sunday papers. Before he has a chance to call a snap election to benefit from his ‘bounce’, Mr Brown may well find himself crashing back to earth, more like Icarus than Superman?

Keeping Your Head

Parliament’s first week back has been extraordinary.  As the debt-fuelled excesses of the last ten years bring capitalism crashing around our ears, as the entire world holds its collective breath to see whether we are in for recession, unemployment, bankruptcy and worse, as the world’s leaders flit around from summit to summit and produce ever more dramatic rescue packages costing eye-watering amounts of money which are so vast as to be incomprehensible; as all of that goes on around us, political and Parliamentary and constituency life feels remarkably mundane and normal.

There have been statements from the Chancellor and Prime Minister, but we in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition have quite rightly sought to avoid rocking the markets any further by acquiescing in what is proposed.  I personally cannot help worrying that we are stacking up problems for the future – the Government are risking a vast swathe of taxpayers’ money, borrowing is at astronomic levels, and there will be a price to pay in the ordinary public finances for many years to come, especially if in the end the effort proves fruitless.  But for now, we must keep our heads down and get on with ordinary life.

That’s why I asked a question about copyright on behalf of Purton-based band Pendragon on Monday, attended a debate about the South West Regional Spatial Strategy, had lunch with the Parliamentary Minerals Group to discuss the Cotswold Water Park, went to a Wiltshire Wildlife Trust reception and did a live news interview for ITV West on Tuesday about the Minety gypsies; asked a question about the “Social Exclusion Unit” immediately before PMQs on Wednesday; took part in Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show on Thursday about Calne RBL’s parcels for our troops initiative and then rushed back to the Chamber to take part in a defence debate, especially raising RAF Lyneham topics on Thursday; chaired the opening of the excellent if intellectually challenging Thomas Hobbes Conference in Malmesbury and attended Caroline Appelbe’s outstanding art show in Little Somerford on Friday, had surgeries in Chippenham and Corsham on Saturday followed by an BBC West Interview about redundancies at Dyson; attended the absolutely brilliant parade in Wootton Bassett in Sunday, by which the RAF thanked the people of the town for the respects which they regularly pay to our war dead; and then spent 12 hours in Newmarket at the AGM of The Association of British Riding Schools of which I am President, before returning to Westminster for another no doubt similar week.

Tacitly supporting the Government in their efforts to calm the markets as we have been doing for the last week or so, despite niggling worries that it won’t work and may even make things worse in the long-run, reminds me rather of the feeling that I had in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 when the Opposition (although not I) supported the Government’s invasion of Iraq.  I knew it wasn’t right, and resigned my post as Shadow Defence Minister over it, although in the end I abstained in the main vote to avoid rocking too many boats.  I have always felt that perhaps I should have made more of a fuss then, and slightly wonder if I should be today?

But for now I shall take Rudyard Kipling’s advice about “Keeping your head…when all around are losing theirs,” and just get on with my ordinary - sometimes mundane but highly satisfactory public life.

Equinox

Have you ever noticed what dramatic events occur a week or so either side of the Equinox?  There are of course equinoctial storms every year, very often those truly dramatic ones with widespread fallen trees and the like, sometimes extreme weather oddities like tidal waves and huge tides.  But it has also always seemed to me that dramatic events of other kinds tend to occur at or around the Autumn Equinox.  Stock Exchanges collapse; massive changes in politics and current affairs; even personal disturbances of one kind or another.  “There is a tide in the affairs of men……”

2008 has been an extreme example.  Tropical storms in the Caribbean; dramatic International events such as the removal of the Pakistani President which may well have such far-reaching consequences for Global peace; The Credit Crunch and extreme volatility in all markets (which, after all could have happened more or less any time for the last six months at least); the biggest bail-out in the history of banking, massive collapses in house prices, the possible end of capitalism and banking as we have known it for 200 years; And now we have the return to the  domestic political scene of that Prince of Darkness, Peter Mandelson.

Opinions will wax and wane about whether this was a bold Prime Ministerial burying of ancient hatchets in the greater interests of the UK economy or a  desperate attempt by a failing PM to bolster his support amongst his sworn enemies.  My own instinct having watched Mr Mandelson operating over many years is that Mr Brown should have supped with a much longer spoon, and that plots, conspiracies, gossip, briefing of the press and general mayhem will result from this particular appointment.  After all, the Blairites who Mr Brown was presumably seeking to appease actually hate that arch-Blairite Mr Mandelson almost as much as the Brownies.  And I personally regret the passing of Ruth Kelly and Des Browne, both of whom are good friends and sound and sensible people.

The two Party Conferences passed much as predicted, the end result probably being a kind of no-score draw.  But now real battle will commence as Parliament returns for its “Wash-Up” session leading up to the State Opening of Parliament and the Queen’s speech at a surprisingly late 4 December.  There are a group of highly controversial bills which we will have to complete - or ditch - in that period, including the Embryology Bill which I shall now vote against and some kind of fudge with regards to the EU Constitution which cannot now be signed off thanks to our friends in the Irish Republic.

The Credit Crunch and the Economy will of course dominate our discussions, and for the good of the Country and the people we represent, all sides of the House will be seeking to cooperate to avoid meltdown in our banking systems, and the economic slump which would assuredly follow.  (Why were we not recalled to discuss it? We should have been.)  Afghanistan and International affairs, especially with regard to Pakistan and Palestine will be bubbling along worryingly, with an ever greater terrorist threat to mainland Britain.  The US Elections on 4 November will be gripping – I am told that the polls are wildly misleading, and that all we can be sure of is that it is a close-run battle; and the period between then and the installation of the new President after Christmas may well be a period of disturbance especially in International Affairs of almost equinoctial proportions.

We are condemned to live in exciting times indeed.

Conferences

You may have thought that Gordon Brown was facing a difficult Party Conference, but as I write on the Friday before the Tory one, it is my view that David Cameron’s challenge is even trickier.

In the old days of course the Party Conferences were rather starchy events.  The ladies wore hats at the Tories’, old men in mufflers at Labour, serious discussions behind closed doors about party policy, the traditional ‘smoke filled rooms.’  Well it’s all different now.  The Liberals must have had a Conference, but I fear that the excellent Mr Clegg barely registered on our Richter Scales.  Labour was as dull and forgettable as the party managers wanted it to be, Gordon Brown’s speech full of his habitual meaningless clichés, and enlightened only by that marvellous moment when Sarah Brown ‘stood by her man’.  Well done her, I’d say!  That ‘novice’ David Miliband having been made to look small, and the worst excesses of rebellion avoided, you could have heard the collective sighs of relief round the bars in Manchester – at least until that bungled (or was it?) resignation/sacking of that rather nice and certainly principled Ruth Kelly.  That aside, Mr Brown has lived to fight another day.

Now on the face of it, Labour’s discomfort, the Tories’ massive lead in the polls, David Cameron’s huge popularity and our raft of fresh and interesting ideas ought to make the forthcoming Tory Conference one of our best ever.  And I hope it will be.  I hope that speaker after speaker will take to the platform, and more importantly to the Fringe platforms to lay out in a quiet, serious and modest way what we will do in Government.  We must not be triumphalist, nor complacent, nor must we glory in Labour’s discomfort.  (Well, not too much anyhow.)  The people need to see us as a level-headed, down-to earth and above all competent Government-in-Waiting.

After all, what we are talking about here is not just “It’s our turn now.”  We are faced with some of the gravest problems at least since the end of the Cold War, probably since 1945.  I have to admit that I don’t quite follow what’s happening on Wall Street and the City, but it’s not hard to tell how big it is.  A $700 billion rescue package – the equivalent of $2000 for every family in America – demonstrates how very seriously they are taking it on that side of the Atlantic.  If only I was confident that the Brown/Darling duo had the same grip over here.  The Great Depression in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, the General Strike, hardship and poverty was one of the contributory factors to the Second World War, and the World did not truly recover for a generation – until the ‘sixties effectively.  Get this banking crisis wrong and we could be facing something similar.

And that comes on top of an international situation, the gravity of which we should not forget – Pakistan, Afghan, Iraq and Iran, Israel/Palestine, International Terrorism.  Add a Western financial meltdown to that toxic brew, and who knows what kind of a world we will leave for our grandchildren.

So now is not the time for Party Politics.  It’s not the time for spin and PR.  Now is the time for true greatness, statesmanship; and I hope that by the time you read this column you will agree that those are qualities which my colleagues in the Conservative Party have demonstrated in Birmingham all week.

The Economy

Which US Presidential candidate was it who, on being asked why he won, responded: “It’s the economy, stupid”?  That certainly used to be the case in British politics too, at least through the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, most obviously perhaps in 1979, when economic collapse in the UK meant an overwhelming electoral success for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party.  But I have since then been in two minds as to whether the age old correlation between the performance of the economy and the electoral fortunes of the governing party had in fact been dislocated.  After all, the economy was floundering in 1992, when the Tories were nonetheless re-elected to Government, and our ignominious removal from office in 1997 coincided with one of the strongest economic pictures for decades.

Perhaps that electoral truism is reasserting itself now.  There can be no question that at least part of the financial crisis we are all now facing – a stock exchange in turmoil, a banking system in systemic failure, the housing market in collapse, inflation looking dangerously out of control, a massive trade deficit, unemployment rising, taxes high enough to hurt- is at least to a good degree Mr Brown’s fault.  Record spending and unsupportable borrowing to pay for it; the 10p tax debacle; the Northern Rock shambles; a missed opportunity with the recent housing market package; all of these and so much more are disasters made in Downing Street (both No 10 today, and No 11 for the last 11 years.)

And I must admit that despite my background in the City of London (albeit 18 years ago now), I have only the vaguest idea of what it’s all about, and I challenge all but my sharpest of readers to better me on it.  What is President Bush’s $800 billion for? And why on the day after its record collapse did it make the Stock Exchange do such a dramatic reversal?  (Or was it just what the dealers call a dead cow bounce?) Why did it take them a year to come to some kind of nationalisation of Northern Rock, arguing that competition rules prevented the bank’s takeover by another, when apparently HBOS could be taken over by Lloyds in the twinkling of an eye?  Most of all of this is beyond any of us bar a few very clever financiers, many of whom live right here in Wiltshire.  But whatever it all means, it seems clear to me that Gordon Brown got it all wrong, and that he is paying a due price in the polls for it.

Now of course, I would most certainly not predict that all of this means an easy return to power for we Tories – we have to earn that honour, not just assume that it will fall into our laps.  And whether or not a Tory Government, even led by clever people like David Cameron and George Osborne can somehow turn around the current disaster is hard to predict.  But of this I am sure: the financial agony which increasing numbers of ordinary citizens and families are facing in this country today has to be the direct responsibility of this current government.  They have been profligate and incompetent in equal measure, and no amount of wriggling at this last week’s Labour Party Conference can absolve them of those charges.  It is the economy, stupid, and Gordon Brown will have to pay a heavy price for his mishandling of it.

Armed Services

I never fail to be impressed with how very lucky we are with our armed services nationally; what a magnificent job they do for all of us overseas and at home; how uncomplaining they are no matter what they are asked to do; how poorly we treat them in terms of equipment, pay, housing health and family welfare; but just how coolly professional they are in everything they do.  We here in the County of Wiltshire make a significant contribution to the defence of the Realm, and we should be truly proud of them.

In the last few weeks, I have had discussions with Mike Neville, the Station Commander at RAF Lyneham, whose Hercules fleet are “First in and First Out” of every conflict, and without whom our armed services simply could not operate.  The RAF, of course are due to leave Lyneham in 2012, although I am still hoping for a delay in that, and no-one yet knows what will replace them.  There is a great deal of talk around about centralising all of the army helicopters here, which of course would be very convenient for Salisbury Plain’s Training Areas.  I would welcome the continuing use of Lyneham for military purposes, although I am acutely aware that there might well be greater environmental concerns about helicopters than there are about Hercs!

Lyneham has also been the base to which all of our wars dead are returned, and I pay tribute to the solemn dignity with which the authorities carry out that most difficult of tasks.  The Mayor and Royal British Legion of Wootton Bassett pay tribute to each and every one of the coffins which then pass down their High Street, stopping for a moment’s honour outside the Town Hall.  That little ceremony has caught the imagination of the Nation, and acts as an example to so many others.

Another day I visited the multi-million pound redevelopment at Basil Hill Barracks at Corsham which will secure 2000 defence jobs in the area, and allow improvements in the by then vacated Rudloe and Copenacre sites.  The building work may mean some discomfort for locals – for example because of a number of traffic changes on the A4, but again we should be ready to make small sacrifices in the knowledge that the end result will be of benefit to the whole area, and that at all events we are making our own little contribution to the defence of our land.  Corsham also houses 10 Signals Regiment, whose new CO attended the Chippenham Civic Service with me, and four of whose soldiers I was pleased to welcome to Parliament in July.

IX (Supply) Regiment at Hullavington and the Air Defence Regiment at Colerne complete our service bases in the immediate area, although of course we are very close to Bulford and Tidworth, Larkhill and Warminster.  Half of the British Army is based here in Wiltshire –a contribution of which we should all be proud.

None of us wants war; all of us hate the killing and wounding inherent in it.  But my own Regiment, the Honourable Artillery Company has an important motto: “Arma Pacis Fulcra” – “Arms are the Balance of Peace.”  Our armed services and those of our NATO allies are the guarantors of peace, freedom and democracy.  Without them we would have anarchy and dictatorship, and we should both be proud of them, and ready to give them every possible support and assistance, as well as our heartfelt thanks.

The Silly Season

The Silly Season – that news-less period of Mid-August dreamy summer sunshine (what happened this year? Ed.) – is well and truly over.

The biggest single – and surely one of the most gloriously successful – military operations since the Second World War was completed without a hitch.  It took 5000 British soldiers, countless vehicles, and months of meticulous planning to get the giant generator which will eventually supply electricity to so many people in Helmand Province up to the Kijacki Damn.  The Taliban were misled by a clever, classically British, ruse; 200 enemy were killed without a single British casualty, leaving aside one soldier injured beneath a vehicle he was repairing; and probably the single greatest step towards a final peace in Afghanistan was seemingly effortlessly achieved.

Meanwhile the US Government carried out an almost equally daring operation in nationalising the two huge US mortgage companies, probably at a stroke avoiding meltdown in the Global financial markets, and exposing Gordon Brown’s ill-conceived and hopelessly delivered ‘housing market package’ as a frankly pathetic attempt to save his premiership.  Bear Stearns and now Fanny Mae is how it ought to be done, Mr Brown, compared to the miserable Northern Rock and Stamp Duty Holiday which is all you could come up with.  And anyhow, with the astonishing spectacle of the Chancellor talking down the economy, causing a run on the stock exchange and a plunge in the value of the pound, and a former Home Secretary openly calling for his head, I fear that Mr Brown may need something a little better than that if he is to save his failing Government.

Perhaps he could take some lessons from the USA where the dramatic nomination of that feisty red blooded Senator Palin seems to have gripped the popular imagination, in rather the same way as Boris Johnson did in the London mayoral race.  Perhaps there’s a similar political saviour lurking somewhere on Labour’s backbenches, although none immediately springs to mind!

For me, the silly season is well and truly over too, although I greatly enjoy the comparatively relaxed atmosphere of Constituency work compared to Parliament.  In the last week or two I have visited parish councils in Crudwell, Grittleton, Kington St Michael, Calne Without, Heddington, Hilmarton, Minety, Lyneham, Brokenborough, Sutton Benger and Sherston, and hope to see as many more as I can possibly fit in; I’ve had meetings with Corsham Police and Basil Hill Barracks; held surgeries in all four main towns, had three days in London including attending a rare mid-Recess meeting of the Defra select Committee to discuss food security; attended a hog roast in Devizes Constituency, which included a most enjoyable series of folk songs sung and accompanied on his guitar by my friend and neighbour, Michael Ancram, (whose Column is so much more weighty and learned than mine!); I had drinks with our Euro-candidates, attended the Chippenham Civic Service, spoke to the Rotary Club of the Wiltshire Vale, of which I am pleased to be an Honorary Member, lunched with Wiltshire County Council Cabinet and kept on top of the never ending flow of Constituency emails and letters.

Perhaps not matters of quite such earth-shaking significance as Kijacki, Fanny Mae and Palin; but matters of great importance to me, and I hope to my constituents!

Competence

A good friend of mine who is a Labour MP (and, yes, there are good comradeships across the floor in the Commons) made a telling remark to me the other day in the middle of his general lamentations about the state of his party. He said “The trouble with the Tories is that you’re rather good at running the country, but your PR and presentation is c……; Our problem is that we used to get top marks for spin and PR but we couldn’t run a p…-up in a brewery. But now we’ve lost even that skill.”

Alistair Darling has proved his colleague’s point this weekend by saying that the economic outlook is the worst for 60 years, at least tacitly accepting some of the blame for it, criticising the PM in a Guardian interview and admitting that “the people are p…..off with Labour” There is apparently a terminal spat between Mr Darling and the PM over a housing market package, which reportedly may cost up to £40 billion, and was being described by the Treasury as “all smoke and mirrors, impossible to understand, and highly damaging to the economy.” Not only is it an incompetent shambles; but they have even lost the ability to cover it up and to spin their way out of trouble which Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell were so expert at.

Incompetence in Government was much in my mind at my Wootton Basset and Malmesbury surgeries on Saturday. The woes of almost everyone who came to see me were caused by governmental incompetence – the young South African who cannot return to see his parents until the Immigration Department returns his passport, the young mother in penury because the Child Support Agency are failing to pursue the absent father, the couple brought to their knees with stress because the Child tax Credits people sending them a computer-generated and almost certainly incorrect letter reclaiming an alleged £5000 overpayment.

Nationally we hear of yet more data losses resulting in all of our details being pretty easily accessible by the criminal fraternity, of soldiers in Afghanistan with the wrong equipment, of one senior Metropolitan policemen accusing the Commissioner of racism, of Northern Rock, of overseas criminals released into the community, of farmers’ subsidies unpaid and foot and mouth spores released through broken drains in a Government laboratory, of rank incompetence in every Department of State.

Now Ministers would doubtless argue that those things are really nothing to do with them. How can they be blamed for inefficiencies within their departments, quite possibly at a relatively lowly level? But what has happened to the age-old principle of ‘the buck stops here’ and ministers – most memorably Lord Carrington over the Falklands – accepting full responsibility even if they personally were not involved? And anyhow, surely the success of any human organisation depends to a very real degree on the energy, intelligence, ability of its boss? 

What we need in this country more than anything else is simply good, hard working, sensible, efficient, competent government, and only clear thinking; determined, business-like ministers will produce it. Spin, presentation, ideology and clever policy are no substitute for sheer ability.

2012

It’s so good to be truly proud of something British, for once - our magnificent athletes returning with a record number of medals from Beijing. What an inspiration they will be to our younger generation, and I hope that we’ll see a huge increase in fitness and sport of all kinds as a result of their role modelling, and a concomitant decline in video games and TV watching as a result. Maybe we’ll even see a small improvement in track and field events before 2012! But I do have to say that the medals around the necks of Team GB (as it was incorrectly called since that excludes Northern Ireland), should be reward enough without the “honours” which the Prime Minister rather in-advisedly promised them, presumably in the hope that some of their prowess may vicariously rub off on him!

But do you remember that nostalgic scene at the end of “The Great Gatsby”, where the long hot summer of partying is over; the shutters are being put up, a few leaves blowing around the swimming pool, the glitterati gone? Well I guess it must be feeling a bit like that in Beijing today after what must rank as one of the most lavish parties, the most superb PR opportunities in history. The wonderfully orchestrated opening and closing ceremonies, the tens of thousands of well-drilled performers, security guards, customer hosts, the world’s leaders gracing the ice-water chilled seats, brilliantly run games themselves, the city’s environment and air quality improved, press comment carefully controlled, hardly a mention of the T word (Tibet…shh…don’t mention it.) But today: they’ve all gone just like the party goers at the end of the Gatsby Summer.

So now its London’s chance, but didn’t you just hate that effort at self-promotion – a red bus, David Beckham, an ageing strummer from Led Zeppelin, dear old Boris looking a shambles. Is that really all that London can offer the world? And anyhow, should that noblest of competitions the Olympic Games really have become such a showcase for the host country? Is it really right that China spent £18billion, that we will spend £9Billion, not on improving sports facilities, not on training for our athletes, but on fireworks displays? Are the twirling umbrellas, the giant footprints in the sky, the graphic description of the way that China invented printing really anything at all to do with sport at all? I think not.

So I’d like to celebrate our great sporting achievement, to laud the games themselves which are the pinnacle of the sporting world; to use them as inspiring role models for our youngsters, to invest heavily in sports facilities (remember what a battle we had locally to save the Lime Kiln Leisure Centre in Wootton Bassett and those in Calne and Cricklade too?); in other words to use the ancient Greek notion of the Olympics to promote sport; but to do our best to escape from the lavish self-promotion which seems to have become such an integral part of the Olympic movement.

So here are some messages for my Conservative colleagues, Seb Coe, Colin Moynihan and Boris Johnson, who are to run our games in 2012:- let’s get it back to what the ancient Greeks intended. Let’s celebrate sporting prowess in the simplest and purest sort of way; let’s show the world that we don’t need billions of pounds worth of fireworks to promote London, but that we are ready to spend money on the real thing, the main thing: athleticism. A Guards Band and HM the Queen declaiming “Let the Games Commence” should be the British – the understated - way.

Malmesbury

Malmesbury – the opening of whose splendid new Athelstan Museum I attended on Friday – really is a very special place.

“This turf and twig I give to thee as free as King Athelstan gave to me and I trust a Loving Brother thou wilt be” as the Steward of the King’s Heath intones as he strikes a new Commoner of the Oldest Borough in England three times on the back with a birch twig. The freemen of Malmesbury claim direct male descent from the Malmesburians to whom King Athelstan gave the freedom of the Borough. The Abbey of course is redolent with history and traditions – Eilmer the flying monk who so nearly invented flying in the year 800; the famous chronicler, William of Malmesbury; Hannah Twynnoy, the servant girl who was eaten by a tiger from a visiting fair in 1703; the town’s canny handling of the English Civil War.

Malmesbury has a fascinating political history too. The town returned two MPs until the Great Reform Act of 1832, they being chosen by the Old Corporation, reputedly on the strength of the value of the gold coinage hidden under the pewter dinner plates at a pre-election banquet paid for by said prospective parliamentary candidate! The Old Corporation tried to persuade me that that was a tradition worthy of revival – a kind invitation which I sadly had to decline! But that old tradition is commemorated by the town’s coat of arms high in a stained glass window in St Stephen’s Chapel in Parliament, through which I pass every day on my way into the Chamber. Charles James Fox was one of the MPs so chosen – to this day Wiltshire folk call a fox “a Charlie” in commemoration of his wily ways. Then there was Walter Powell the MP and pioneer balloonist commemorated in the name of the Little Somerford Primary School, who was last seen sailing off into the Atlantic in his hot air balloon waving his handkerchief in farewell. One keen local balloonist suggested a re-enactment recently – another invitation I was unable to accept for fear of a by-election! Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, and best remembered by his discussion of whether or not life needs be “nasty brutish and short” was born and brought up in Malmesbury, and is commemorated every year by rather a special dinner.

Local history and especially local political history is one of my keenest personal interests, and Malmesbury, and its splendid new museum are fertile grounds for rooting around and remembering those who have gone before. “Remember, Remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and plot.” (A plot said to have been hatched in the King’s Head Pub in Chippenham, which served for a time as the Conservative Party HQ locally!)  Remember history or be condemned to repeat it. Or as one famous historian, EA Freeman said: “History is past politics and politics is present history.” Maybe those wisdoms, and some of the simpler lessons from the Athelstan Museum would be well remembered by the statesmen of today – in Georgia and Russia (the Soviet Empire); in Afghanistan (Nineteenth Century wars in the North West Frontier and beyond); in Iraq (The Mesopotamia Question); in the Balkans (The Assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914) and in so many other ways. Maybe even Mr Brown would do well to remember 1979!

Olympics

How can President Bush and Prime Minister Putin have carried on enjoying the Olympic festivities in Beijing as Russian planes bombed civilian targets in Georgia in an action rather reminiscent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or even perhaps of Hungary. The politics of South Ossetia are beyond most of us. But surely it could be sorted out without the appalling bloodshed and refugees we have been seeing on our screens. It even seems to amount to a kind of ethnic cleansing.

Meanwhile in the Olympic stadium itself, anyone found to be in favour of democracy, or anyone who is foolish enough to unfurl a flag of St George to support an English athlete risks being carted off to the Gulag (in the week that Soljenitsyn died.) Anyone mentioning their view that Tibet might have some kind of a right to self-determination will be suppressed just as brutally as the South Ossetians, who also suffer from that mild form of self-delusion – that they should be allowed democratically to decide their own future.

In a four hour orgy of self-praise costing billions of pounds, which of course could not be watched by a vast swathe of Chinese subsistence farmers far too poor to afford a TV, the world’s leaders were regaled with propaganda about how magnificent is the last great Communist dictatorship in the world – the nation which prevents voting of any kind; the nation with the highest capital punishment rate in the world, many of the executions being in public; the nation responsible for Tiananmen Square.

Now I happen to be a great lover of China, their culture and their people. But I have no hesitation in condemning so much that goes on there. I am also much in favour of individualism. If people want to protest about Tibet, why not let them? I’ve always been in favour of protests such as the hideously ugly mess in Parliament Square in London created over many years by peace protestor Brian Haw. I’d much rather that these rather daft eccentrics were amusing themselves daubing nonsensical posters in Westminster than sitting at home making bombs. Suppressing protest as the Chinese have done makes their brave efforts to try to make themselves look positively Western in their civilisation really rather nauseating.

I would love to welcome China to the real world. But if she wants to join us, she must also be ready to accept our high standards of human rights and civil liberties.

Incidentally, call me a miserly old curmudgeon if you will, but I really do hope that the London Olympics in four years time will dump at least some of the razzmatazz. Four hours of performances bearing little if any relationship to athletics felt like a thoroughly unhealthy orgy of politically motivated self-praise. Let’s get the Olympics back to what the ancient Greeks intended them to be – true trials of strength and athletic prowess. So I hope that Seb Coe and Boris Johnson and the others involved in planning for 2012 will opt for a simple opening ceremony. A Guards band and HM the Queen declaiming “Let the Games Commence” will suffice. Something like that would seem to me to be much more in tune with the Olympian spirit, and frankly altogether more British. (Always assuming that unlike the Ossetians and the Tibetans we are still allowed that national pride and independence of thought).

Parish Councils

I understood- and rather enjoyed – the letter in the gazette a couple of weeks ago which enquired “Where do all the MPs go when they leave the Chamber after PM’s Questions on a Wednesday,” and why is the Chamber always so empty when you look in at any other time? Let me answer the question briefly:- to any one of the forty or so Committee Rooms where the real business of Parliament is carried out, and which are full from 9 to 5 every single day of the week; to any one of the 2000 or so other rooms round the Palace for a variety of meetings; to one’s own room to try to keep up to date with the 1000 or more communications we receive a week; to the constituency for some vital event or meeting; or to any one of the dozens of other places and people and events which constantly demand an MP’s attention. Quite frankly if we sat in the Chamber for eight hours a day simply listening in to what may well be a fairly humdrum debate we really would not be getting our work done.

Rather the same when the long Summer Recess starts – oh that’s the MPs all off for their three month holiday. Rather like clergymen who are often accused of working only one day in the week, nothing could be further from the truth. A few days here and there on holiday, but the rest of it firmly taken up with Constituency engagements of all sorts, and always with keeping on top of the ceaseless letters and emails. This summer, for example, I have set myself a target of visiting as many as I can of the fifty or so Parish and Town Councils in the area, and I am greatly enjoying doing so.

In many respects, the work of the parish councillor is one of the most important, and perhaps sometimes least appreciated, of all of our layers of elected governance. They deal with so very many aspects of our day to day lives, pavements and tracks, grass cutting and cemeteries, village halls and recreation grounds, public lavatories and so much else. They also play an important advisory and lobbying role in areas like parking and planning. Their role seems to me likely to become even more important in the years to come for two particular reasons.

First, despite their best efforts to the contrary, the abolition of the district councils from next June to be replaced a by a single-tier “Wiltshire Council” will inevitably mean some degree of centralisation in Trowbridge, which by definition will also mean a greater degree of remoteness from our local areas. Parish Councils should in my view be aiming to help bridge the gulf by making sure that local interests are well and truly represented and heard in the corridors of power in County Hall.

And second, there seems to me to be a progressive sucking of local services into the neighbouring urban areas at the expense of our villages. Post offices closing, doctors surgeries amalgamating into polyclinics, cottage hospitals closing, village shops disappearing, schools merging, businesses moving to the outskirts of our towns, village transport non-existent; these and doubtless many similar trends, risk turning our once vibrant villages and market towns into dormitory areas devoid of real local services. Parish and Town Councils can have a very real role in fighting against that trend by constantly revitalising our rural communities.

So I salute the work of parish and town councillors who I have been meeting on my rural peregrinations. They do essential work, and their role in the future will be, if anything, even more important than in the past.

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