The budget, not Byers, will shape the election campaign

The Paul Richards Column

To enjoy the television programme Hustle you must suspend your disbelief. If you’ve not seen it, it’s about a gang of good-looking, nattily-dressed confidence tricksters using an array of fake offices, hastily knocked-together websites, secret recordings, and suitcases filled with cash to lure dim-witted greedy ‘marks’ into too-good-to-be-true money-making schemes. As The Streets said ‘you can’t con an honest John’. Each of the marks is wide-eyed and avaricious. Suspension of disbelief is required because of the implausibility of the cons, including in one episode a faithful re-creation of the horse-racing betting scam from The Sting. Our tricksters just hoped their marks hadn’t seen the movie, I suppose.

I can forgive Hewitt, Hoon and Byers if they haven’t seen Hustle, but it stretches credulity that they’ve forgotten the last time the Sunday Times ran the fake-lobbyist-wanting-access scam. Then, the marks were merely an adviser and a former adviser, who had never worked inside government. This time it netted three former cabinet ministers, plus a backbencher too ill to run her constituency surgeries, but not too ill to go for job interviews in St James’s. When Dispatches aired, many people in the party were angry. Some saw it as a chance to settle a few scores. There was some lazy talk of ‘Blairites’, an inaccurate description of politicians who cut their teeth under Neil Kinnock.

The shaky footage, filmed by a camera hidden inside a handbag, lampshade, or some such, would make anyone look like a shady character. The language used, especially by Stephen Byers, was toe-curlingly awful. And the rates of pay? Five thousand a day for advice which they could have found on the internet. I could have told them how to sponsor a think tank, or write a letter to a minister, for half that (just a little joke, of course).

I used to work for Patricia Hewitt as a special adviser at the Department for Health. She did some tough but necessary things to reform the NHS, and always struck me as a decent, hard-working person. She was intellectual, but not necessarily street-wise. On the day Ronnie Barker died, she couldn’t understand why people were upset at the death of a Great Train Robber. There are at least three current Labour PPCs who worked as advisers to Hewitt and Hoon. For those that know these former ministers, I think the main reaction to Dispatches was sorrow, not anger.

The whole sorry episode reminded me of words written by Bernard Crick, a great socialist writer, about the ministers who served under Wilson and Callaghan, and the party’s subsequent repudiation of them:

“…inexperience in high office appears as a virtue both to party activists and to many of the general public: the past is tainted, and ‘experience’ (with honourable exceptions) has become a synonym for the virtual withering away of all those values and theories that used to constitute the public philosophy or the political rhetoric of the Labour movement – a movement that once talked to the public not almost exclusively to itself.”

We should take a great deal of comfort from the public’s ability to distinguish between the actions of a few ex-ministers who won’t be MPs in six weeks, and the big arguments and issues that will shape their futures if Labour loses the election. The polls, taken after Dispatches, show a continuing narrowing of the gap between the Tories and Labour. They’re still a disaster for Labour, showing us consistently behind. But some at least suggest Labour will have the largest number, if not the majority, of seats after 6th May.

The Budget was a fine blend of high politics and economic common sense. It is increasingly clear that there will be only one salient issue in the coming election: not expenses, not party funding, but the economy. Jobs, businesses, taxes and public services. This is good news for Labour, because it plays to our strengths. The budget showed the value of government intervention in a recession. It proved that to have done nothing on the banks, mortgages or jobs, as the Tories proposed, would have led to a depression. It is bad news for the Tories, because people still don’t trust them on the economy, not only because of their record, but also because of their wrong calls over the past 18 months. In the words of James Carville: “we’re right, and they’re wrong.”

Cameron’s tragic loyalty to George Osborne means that the latter remains a drag-anchor on the Tories’ recovery. Osborne is not credible with either markets or voters, and eventually Cameron will have to sack him. Labour will hope that Osborne stays in post until polling day, increasingly isolated and hidden from the cameras. I feel some ‘Sherlock Holmes’ stunts coming on.