Max Mosley’s trial has the media agog. The Times was not alone, yesterday, in printing those  quotes from the ongoing case which it found most, umm, in the public interest (what Mosley said “on the pain of being spanked until he bleeds“, for example). I saw a disinterested media lawyer giving an interview on the TV news. His eyes were bulging with the horror of the consequences of the jury finding in Mosley’s favour: “It would limit newspaper revelations to cases of actual criminality”.

Archer-Pannell Towers emitted a guffaw at that. What strange world does that man inhabit, we wondered, that he couldn’t see the fundamental obscenity of what he was saying, that newspapers should have the right to expose private behaviour, if they decide it’s in the public interest. We get so worked up about the state’s intrusion into our privacy that we tend to forget that private corporations, like the evil Murdoch empire, have an anti-privacy agenda all of their own.

Reflecting further on the lawyer’s fear, I allowed myself a delicious day-dream of a post-Mosley future, where newspapers are forbidden from spewing filth about ‘celebrities’ onto their pages. No more Z-listers telling of their coke-and-shag shame.

But then the dream ended. Of course such filth will continue to pollute the public space, because the sad fact is that there’s an endless stream of wannabe Z-listers who are unable to resist offering up all the sordid details of their lives for some fleeting recognition and a contribution to their bank account.

So isn’t it time to have a test case, a sort of reverse-libel case? I should have the right to take the tube to work without being confronted with images of, for example, the joyless mound that is Kerry Katona. I shouldn’t have to see headlines on adverts inviting me to learn even more about the breasts of – her name escapes me, thank God. I should be able to switch on the television without worrying that the hideous image of Max Clifford will swim into view.
 
Ms Katona, the Breast Woman and Max Clifford should be summoned to a courtroom and forced to pay millions and millions of pounds in damages to the blameless citizens of the UK, and forbidden from sharing details of their sex lives with the newspapers ever again. The public has a right not to know!
 
 
 

I wasn’t hugely interested in the fuss over the re-selection of sitting Tory MEPs when it reared its head a few months ago, if I’m honest. I was a tacit supporter of Tim Montgomerie’s campaign for more openness over disclosure of the full set of selection results - all the data, including the number of spoiled ballot papers, should be released. Nor could I understand the closed nature of the process: no hustings, and automatic top-billing for sitting MEPs (not to mention the bizarre sexism of the selection process for party members, when they were finally allowed to cast a vote). But I’m very guilty of a particularly unTory sin – I don’t care about Europe that much. Sorry.

Given that, how to respond to the continuing drizzle of sickening news about the behaviour of so many Tory MEP incumbents? It’s only a few months since David Cameron gave his speech about transparency, pointing out that to stay within the letter of the law wasn’t good enough, that expense claims and family arrangements had to pass a sort of ‘good smell’ test. Unbelievably, he had to exert pressure on many Tory MEPs to release details of their expense claims and, still more unbelievably, yesterday I read that nine Tory MEPs have failed to sign up to a commitment to transparency in their financial dealings. 

It’s not good enough – politically or ethically – for us to attempt to distract attention, by pointing out the ludicrous nature of the disgusting expenses claimed by Labour MPs (Mrs Beckett’s ridiculous claims for garden plants, the Balls’ and their amazing north Hackney home, which they own without paying a penny of their income to service the mortgage interest, etc ad nauseam). The party of the centre-right, which aims to make the electorate vibrate with a recognition that any Tory government will be a better steward of taxpayers’ money than any Labour one, simply cannot tolerate a situation where our elected representatives make tens of thousands of pounds by manipulating rules designed by their greedy peers. Elected representatives have to be made to understand that legality and rule-honouring are only one, minor, component of the standards expected of anyone in public or private business. Far, far more important is to maintain integrity. If you’re doing something with money which would cause embarrassment to anyone normal, you’ve crossed the line.

So here’s my proposal, aimed at fixing two issues in one stroke. DC could demonstrate to the party membership and the wider public that he both believes in localism and democracy, and that he means what he says about leading a party of integrity, by:

Announcing that the European Parliament Conservative candidate selection process is void, and is to be re-run in its entirety;

Replacing the rigged grandee system (which delivered the mess we’re in) with a sequence of open, regional primaries. Any registered voter in a euro-seat should be able to vote for any (validated by Party Board) putative Conservative candidate.

Of course there are some first-class serving Tory MEPs: but I don’t think the Dan Hannans or the Syed Kamalls of this world would have much to fear from such a proposal. And of course the proposal could be amended: automatic re-selection for any sitting MEP who is completely open about their financial arrangements, for example.

Such a proposal would deliver a cleansing of the stables: none of the current crop of expense-abusing reprobates would stand a chance of re-selection, and, simultaneously, our commitment to localism and openness would be enhanced. A win with the public (on sleaze and transparency and trust) and a win with the members. In the much-maligned world of mega-corporation, where I work – you know, the place where we have to account for every penny we spend – this is called a ‘win-win’.

I’m sure that such a move would cause outrage within some of our sitting cohort – those who have dragged our resurgent party into disrepute. Like, who cares? Most of us would barely notice if they moved en masse to the Communist bloc. A supreme sense of self-importance, manifested through a cavalier attitude to public money, appears to be one of the hallmarks of a particular caste of Tory MEP. Let it also be his nemesis: get rid of the lot of them, and start again.

Labour’s campaign at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election has rightly been attacked for its blatantly racist nature, as well as it’s hideous (and hideously ineffective) attempts to write-off the Conservative candidate, Edward Timpson, as a “toff”.

The Labour tactics have been almost uniquely depressing, so I thought I’d cheer myself up by pointing out that not all decency has vanished from the Left: John Harris at the Guardian wrote adevastating article decrying the Crewe tactics.

Even more satisfying, in the “injection of optimism regarding human life” category of satisfaction, was the article by Sunder Katwala. Katwala’s article is a shameful, ridiculous defence of the Labour tactic at Crewe. But the response from his readership is worth reading, particularly from June15, who wrote

 

John Prescott criticised the treatment he got from idiots on the Tory benches who asked him to fetch drinks for them. He had been a steward in the merchant marine you see. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

Black footballers that have bananas thrown on the pitch and monkey noises made when they touch the ball. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

And New Labour has previous on this. Remember Michael Howard not a toff a gramar school boy from South Wales but jewish. He was depicted as Fagin in the 2005 election. Or Letwin and Howard as flying pigs? Remeber that. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

Timpson’s dad may have made a load of money but he fostered over 80 kids with that money and as well as his own 3 kids he adopted another two. Just because he made money does not make him a greedy self interested toff.

Timpson himself, what does he do with his excellent education? Sit back an run daddy’s business having an easy life. No he’s a lawyer. Does he work in the City on M&A or corporate law making even more money? No he works in family law not the place to make your fortune. Why does he do that. The kids from the broken homes and family breakdowns and bereavements he grew up with in his home made an impact.

For Christ’s sake Sunder. Disagree with the Tories. I do. But Timpson sounds like a decent person and so does his mum and dad.

This kind of thing makes me really want him to win you know. I couldn’t give a toss now about this or that policy in this by-election. This made me sick. If Labour have to make personal attacks on decent people they disagree with to win then the game’s up anyway.

Says it all, doesn’t it?

Perhaps it’s just the heady after-effects of having played an infinitesimally small part in the Victory Of The Boris last week: but what a difference winning makes to the mindset of the party foot soldier (this one, anyway)!

So while standing in line outside City Hall, in the Saturday sun last weekend, with friends and colleagues from HackneyConservatives, I reflected a little on the differences that had been evident in this campaign, and on the lessons to be drawn from it.

First, this was without doubt the most ruthlessly targetted Tory campaign I’ve seen. There was a lot of dog-whistly stuff in the press about a “doughnut” strategy, which I think is a little too broad-brush. Hackney wouldn’t appear in any graphs showing Tory outer borough doughnuts, but we did not resile from campaigning, and nor did we spend the pre-election period providing mutual aid to London’s outer suburbs. What we did do was focus, relentlessly, on those wards which we already knew to contain a sizeable Conservative vote.

Councillor Matthew Coggins (pictured left) was appointed by Team Boris as our borough leader, and he maintained that focus, and the daily leafletting and canvassing (regardless of the weather! Of course the sun is splitting the skies now but in the last weeks of Livingstone, London’s skies decided to treat us to several downpours) in the North Hackney wards we hold. Only once they had been leafletted three times did Matthew permit us to move our campaign to a target ward in the south of the borough – and once that was completed we moved back again to the north.

Undoubtedly this is nothing more than common sense, especially for those of you reading from a safe Conservative or marginal Labour seat with a large and active Conservative association. What was existentially different this time was that the rigidity of the focus had a tangible effect on activists even in a borough like Hackney, which contains two of Labour’s safest parliamentary seats. There were no outbreaks of the sort of personality-driven dithering (”I think we should target ward X” – “no, I prefer ward Y”) that can occur during campaigns run in safe Labour seats. In it to win it, indeed.

On polling day itself, teams from Islington and Hackney moved out to Chingford to GOTV in the most Tory-dense part of our GLA constituency: but by this time we had recruited sufficient newactivists that we could maintain a proper GOTV in the Tory vote-dense parts of Hackney too. We have  never been sufficiently numerous to mount that type of campaign before, and it worked: our vote went up by more than 6% across the GLA seat and we went from a poor third to a stonking second, shoving the LibDems down to the point that they were nearly beaten by the Greens. Congratulations to Alexander Ellis (pictured right, with Boris), a fantastic GLA candidate, and to Cllr Coggins, a focused and effective borough leader. 

So what have I learned? Three points I think:

1. With the right candidate, activists will be inspired to work harder than they have ever done before; new activists will flock to the campaign, with the consequent increased outputs in productivity. I think it all starts with the candidate. Boris got a lot of stick before Christmas, but his capacity for optimism and his generous-minded nature soared above the grubby character-attacks to which he was subject for the last nine months. He’s an inspiration.
2. With sufficient volunteers, there are no No-Go areas for London Tories. We have enough volunteers now to marshall machine-like GOTV campaigns in our safest areas and simultaneously target known supporters in less strong areas on polling day.
3. The Tory Machine is back! And it’s got the taste of victory. That’s why several of the east London Tory Collective will be making our way up to Crewe and Nantwich before May 22. See you at the hustings, comrade!

Oh! There’s one final point which occured to me. The Liberal Democrats are so, like, over, as a political force in London. You could not design a voting system more likely to maximise the votes for a third party, than that which we used in London last week. The Lib Dem vote collapsed to under ten per cent. The message for liberal Londoners is clear – you can get it (liberal government) if you really want – from David Cameron’s Conservatives.

In the last couple of weeks there were some disappointing signals about the party’s narrational direction. The first sign was an anti-sign: the near silence over the ongoing “issues” surrounding the Speaker, whose laughable suggestion it is that the best way to investigate the problem with parliamentary expenses was to set up a committee of investigation, led by Harriet Harman, which would report back to MPs sometime before the end of the decade. Given that the Speaker is himself the target of some serious allegations about the misuse of public money, and that Ms Harman isn’t exactly what one might call, in this week of triumph for the Italian Centre-Right, le mani pulite, to put it mildly (she can always ask Mr and Mrs Jowell to translate – I’m sure they’re quite au fait with Italian political terminology, though I doubt whether they approve of this one), then this proposal from the Speaker wasn’t satisfactory. But the response from Tory Leadership Towers wasn’t deafening. Why was that? Why only Douglas Carswell brave enough to stand up and demand a new Speaker?

Next came a disappointing answer from Mr Cameron to Sky News’ Adam Boulton, who interviewed DC on the morning that saw thousands of Londoners demonstrating their opprobrium for the Chinese regime and its thuggish PR tactics. When asked a simple question about whether or not he would attend the Olympics opening ceremony, Mr Cameron gave a noncommittal answer – something about not yet having been invited, so therefore the question didn’t arise. I expected that a liberal-Tory leader would just say “I won’t go to a celebration in China, designed to add lustre to an unpleasant political regime. I send my best wishes to our sports men and women, but there should be no British politicians at the non-sporting opening ceremony”. (News just in from Amnesty: China continues to execute more people than any other country in the world: about six a week. Hope the gunshots and screams of terror, including those of political dissidents, don’t drown out the cheering when the torch makes its way from Tibet back to Beijing).

Finally, there’s the corruption investigation into BAe and Saudi Arabia. More specifically, the lukewarm Conservative support for the then-Attorney General’s “decision” (which we now know had more to do with Tony Blair’s orders, rather than any judicial or legal interpretation of the law) to suspend the original enquiry. I heard William Hague giving some good responses on Any Questions last Saturday, but the problem was that it sounded a bit too Jesuitical. When the government first of all simply ignores the law which protects our liberty, and then proposes to amend the law so that the Attorney-General can decide to halt any such investigation, particularly when the investigation in question is about corruption (something which we used to pride ourselves afflicted Britain at a lower rate than was the case in many unluckier countries), then, in general, surely any liberal knows that they are in opposition to the government’s intentions?

I’m not trying to be a Cassandra. There have been some fantastic advances in the space occupied by Tories under David Cameron, space which we had all but allowed Labour to colonise as its own. I’m thinking primarily of the work on mending our broken society and the focus on social justice. But that only makes these three issues seem to jar more than they otherwise would. To put it another way: I would have expected the Conservative Party in the 1980s to take all three positions – defending the Speaker (if only by silence), attending the opening ceremony for the Chinese Olympics, and supporting the suppression of the inquiry into alleged corruption over an arms deal. I guess I just don’t expect it from the modern, liberal Conservative Party.