Dave says goodbye to Ken and the centre ground

When in doubt, go for a curry. That’s what Ken Clarke did in 1996 when the Daily Mirror got hold of a copy of his budget speech and no-one at the Treasury quite knew what to do about it. As he explained to Andrew Rawnsley in yesterday’s Observer: “I was surrounded by people running around in ever-diminishing circles. So I said I was going for a curry and I hoped we’d have a lawyer when I got back to give advice on whether we could stop the leak. And we did. We got one of those midnight injunctions.”

But it is not fair to say that laid-back Ken is more interested in curry than politics. He likes cricket too, and spent three days at the test match in his Nottingham constituency last week while other ministers (and wannabe ministers) checked their phones for signal strength and/or messages.

The cabinet will be weaker without Ken Clarke in it. His political maturity is not just down to age (he is 74). He has long been a down-to-earth – if not infallible – provider of common sense. He has resisted most of the fashions adopted by contemporary politicians – PR stunts, Twitter spats, policy-making by focus group. Most of all he has remained pretty moderate, unexcitable, serious and long-term in his perspective on important matters.

This is one of the reasons why, in his Observer interview, he expressed doubts about the health and sustainability of the economic recovery.“We don’t want to be a low-wage, low-productivity, long-hours economy,” he said. Spoken like… well, spoken like Ed Miliband, really.

And that is perhaps the key point about Clarke’s departure. That Tory One Nation (and pro-European) tradition now has no significant representative or spokesperson in a senior position in this government. The ending of Clarke’s frontline career marks a Tory abandonment of what is sometimes called the “centre ground”.

Left, right and centre can at times be rather artificial labels holding little meaning for most people – who, in the British way, find talk of sex, religion and politics equally awkward and unappealing. Is it left wing or right wing to want law and order, a stable economy, good jobs and an affordable transport system that works? Are all right wingers indifferent to poverty and suffering? Do lefties want businesses to fail? The caricatures are not very revealing.

That is the power of a politician like Ken Clarke, who does not come across to many as being terribly political at all. It is a quality that Tony Blair, at his best, had too. Politicians such as these speak plainly and simply, in terms people can understand. It is not obvious of which frontline Tories this can still be said.

While it will suit Labour’s opponents to suggest that “Red Ed” has dragged the party wildly leftwards, the programme and ethos that have emerged from the national policy forum suggest otherwise. What is being proposed is radical: an answer to the question “how do you do social democracy when there is no money?”, as one senior party source puts it. There are some bold ambitions here. But they have to do with people’s everyday concerns.

Many have been sceptical about the effectiveness of Labour raising a One Nation banner, and the evidence is that voters, when they have noticed at all, remain unconvinced. But the departure of Ken Clarke from the front line confirms that a large stretch of political territory has been ceded. You can call it the centre ground, or even the land of common sense if you like. Either way you won’t find many Tories there any more. Labour should make it clear that it is preparing to march confidently onto this territory, fortified, I hope, by a decent curry.