Norman Tebbit

At least I did not nod off so much during the second Great TV Debate last night, and there can be no doubt that David Cameron put on a much better performance than last week. That is to his credit, for he must surely have felt the pressure of being out-Cameroned a week ago by Mr Clegg. Gordon Brown seemed much more at ease with himself and while Mr Clegg made no big mistakes he simply failed to outpace the other two as he did last time.

But that is really all about style. The content was a different matter. Certainly there was a passing reference or two to those great big elephants, the EU, immigration and debt – but no one seemed anxious to make any proposals about their future.

There was even a passing reference to Blair’s Wars, but again by common consent not much was said beyond the usual… Read More

Nick Clegg speaks at Cardiff student union night club (Photo: PA)

The polls have given the Conservative leadership a very nasty shock. Suddenly they find themselves threatened by the Lib Dems who ought to have the sole function of splitting the Left-wing vote. The problem has its root in the Ashcroft plan to win the marginals by attracting votes from Lib Dem supporters and disillusioned NuLab voters. That, it was decided, would be done by repositioning the Conservative Party onto that muddy, mucky middle ground – even at the cost of failing to win back the electors who had voted Tory before 1997, but had been abstainers since then.

There is not much time to lose. The present Lib Dem surge is based entirely on the performance of Mr Clegg, or… Read More

Climate change is nothing new Photo: PA

I have been asked a good many times where I stand on the great climate change controversy. In short, I am unconvinced by man-made global warming but not dogmatically sure that it is all nonsense, a racket or a conspiracy.

The absolutely sure facts in all this are not very many. The first is that climate change is not new. It has been going on since the world was new. In relatively recent times, say since life emerged, there have been cycles of long-term warming and cooling overlaid with shorter-term fluctuations. It is not easy to identify with certainty a short-term fluctuation from a change in the long-term trend until 1,000 years or so from when the time it began.

We know that within comparatively recent times wheat was grown in Greenland. We know… Read More

Some of the Lefties’ triumphalism at the public reaction to The Great TV Debate was wildly overdone. You might have thought that Cameron broke down and cried, or shouted “We’re all doomed”. He didn’t. He held his own and scored points on the NHS and even, unlikely as it was, on immigration.

None the less, once again the lesson to be learned is that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. David Cameron claimed the leadership of the Conservative Party as the new broom that would sweep away the old Thatcherite guard who used to go around winning elections and talking about hard choices. His new Conservative Party would be no longer “nasty” but modern, new, compassionate and untainted by the past.

Nick Clegg played the same game and played it very well. Mr Clegg bundled up Mr Cameron with Mr Brown as joint leaders of the nasty old two-party racket that had mismanaged Britain… Read More

What a pity that this election campaign cannot be shortened by a week or two. It’s not just that the tedium would be cut short, but that it might just concentrate the minds of the political classes on the need to say something substantial about how they would save us from simply drowning in debt.

The publication of the NuLab and Conservative manifestos hardly got the political blood rushing through our veins with the excitement of it all. Labour’s seemed unable to explain why radical policies are needed to put right so many things that have been the subject of endless reforms, upheavals, changes and re-organisations for the past 13 years, the section on immigration being a particular insult to the common sense and experience of (not least traditionally loyal Labour) voters.

The Tory document had some good ideas and proposals scattered about… Read More

Readers of these blogs will know that I have a great regard for the Polish people. Sadly, history has not been kind to Poland and the tragic aircrash has robbed Poland of a fine President in Lech Kaczynski and so many other leading Poles. I can only hope that there are others as good to step into their places.

Sadly, we have not been so richly endowed with leaders in recent years, which is why not just the opinion polls but the people I meet still suggest a nation uncertain and disappointed with the debate during this election campaign.

In recent days there has been much talk of tactical voting, which is really no more than opting for one’s second choice if there is little chance of getting your first. Naturally this appeals most of all to that second-class, second choice party, the Lib Dems.

The other day, the normally quite rational and rather unpartisan Transport… Read More

It was not a very good start to the day listening to listening to Gordon Brown being interviewed on the Today Programme. This is the man who was first of all navigator, then captain of the UK economy, as it was steered with remarkable dogmatic assurance, smack onto the vast and well charted reef called borrowing and debt. With total self-conviction he blames this unhappy mishap on the adverse currents of the worldwide banking crisis. Then he tells us again that he had abolished the rocks of boom and bust, which had trapped all lesser captains in the past, and was the man to be trusted to get us off the reef which had so inconveniently manifested itself under the ship. After all, as he explained, the alternative crew had little experience of shipwrecks so should not be trusted to avoid another.

It was a bravura performance. Mr Brown’… Read More

At last the Tories are beginning to understand that if they bring forward Conservative and not “son of Blairite” policies, the electors will move in their favour. Even a somewhat timid conversion to Conservatism is already moving the polls. Go for it, David!

The conference of the teaching union NASUWT was a very interesting affair. First of all because even its members began to see how the Blair NuLab agenda for the destruction of education was affecting their special interest, and secondly because of an excellent exposition of Conservative education policy by Michael Gove and the Pavlovian reaction of the Conference against it.

Sadly, the teachers there assembled, whimpering about being bullied by their pupils, could not see that both that and the idiocy of allowing children to interview applicants for jobs as teachers in their schools, as night follows day, the concept of “child-centred education”.

It is not parents ­– who, since they pay for education are the consumer… Read More

What a turn up for the books. Gordon Brown has not only noticed one of those elephants in the room, not only talked about it, he has just about tickled its ears. Yes, it seems we are all allowed to talk about immigration. Goodness me, we will all be “banging on about Europe” if we are not careful.

I think he must have been looking at some private polling, or even listening to either of those two brave Labour MPs of very differing styles and views, Frank Field and Jon Cruddas. Indeed he might have read my own remarks after last year’s European elections which ‘Johnny Rottenborough’ posted on my last blog at 9.35pm on 31st March. We can all acquit the Prime Minister of any charge of having any change of mind about Labour’s policy to change our society for the better by unlimited, uncontrolled, uncounted immigation at least until he… Read More

The polls should be a continuing worry to David Cameron. Although the election is far from decided, there is no sign of the 10 per cent plus that he needs to gain a working majority. The commentators are now talking about a repeat of 1992, when John Major’s government snatched an unlikely victory from Neil Kinnock.

David Cameron: still looking for that elusive poll lead (Photo: PA)

That comparison is entirely false. The Major government had a credible record in its first two years and the benefit of the Thatcherite legacy of the previous eleven. There was no sense of finacial crisis. On the other hand Neil Kinnock was seen as a vacuous, loud-mouthed nobody, even by many Labour supporters. Not even Cameron’s detractors would put him in the same category as the geat windbag. A… Read More