The team that rocks - the yellow bit of Downing Street is about to get a whole load better

After a very upbeat week at Liberal Democrat conference, I am delighted to hear news that two very sensible appointments have been made to augment the Liberal Democrat team within Downing Street.

The first was actually announced about 10 days ago by the Herald - former Herald journalist Christine Jardine is going to be the link between No 10 and the Scotland Office. One can only hope that if David Cameron and George Osborne ever express the wish to say anything about Scotland, she'll be able to lock them in a cupboard until the urge passes.

The second, announced today on her blog, is the appointment of Olly Grender on a temporary basis as Deputy Director of Communications to cover for maternity leave.

Both Olly and Christine are people whose judgement I utterly respect and trust. They are very practical, with their feet firmly in the real world. I don't just expect that they'll make a real improvement to the way the Government operates, I know they will. The analytical and strategic knowledge they bring to their new roles is pretty darned brilliant.

Good luck to both of them.

Daily Mail Fail of the Day - on Nick Clegg and "Lazygate"

Over the past couple of days, we've seen the Torygraph and then the Fail try to establish in our minds that our Deputy Prime Minister is in some way workshy because of a leaked note which revealed that his ministerial red boxes are closed to new routine business at 3 pm.


Olly Grender turned sketchwriter in a brilliant satire on the journalists' motives which will make you laugh.


What needs to be spelled out loud and clear, though, is that items for the box received after 3pm don't just evaporate into thin air. They get put in the next day. And because they're not urgent, that's absolutely fine. It seems to me to be sensible way of his office organising its workload. It doesn't actually mean that he, or they, do less work.


Max Hastings has scraped the bottom of the barrel in today's Fail, suggesting that ministers shouldn't be bothered with this parenting stuff and should get on with the job.  In an article entitled "Running the Country is a full time job - you can't do it between nappy changes", he suggests that ministers should not allow themselves to be distracted from their duty by family life. He also laughably suggests that it might have been a Liberal Democrat spin doctor who leaked the note about the red boxes. I mean, seriously....

It would not be surprising if Clegg’s ‘early closing’ note proved to be some spin-doctor’s idea. The Lib Dem leader is, after all, the man whose ­current ­contribution to making ­Britain more competitive is to demand a statutory extension of paternity leave from the current ‘paltry two weeks’. 

Let's just have a look at that.  What Nick has suggested doesn't mean a reduction in the amount of work being done - it's giving parents freedom to choose between themselves who, if anyone, should stay at home to look after their children. That's a proper, liberal, treating people as grown ups measure that will help many families as well as reducing discrimination against women n the workplace. To me, that's Nick understanding what life is like for real people in the real world and coming up with an innovative, practical solution.


Hastings goes on to look back at writings of spouses of past ministers, from Therese Lawson, to Eden, to Churchill, all of whom complained about the stresses and strains on family life of having their spouse in high office. The subtext is clear - ministers need a little wife at home taking care of the children, leaving them free to do the manly job of running the country.  It's a recurring theme for the Fail, a publication prone to putting about the idea that all the ills of society are caused by working mothers, career women who should stay at home and look after their kids. Of course, this doesn't apply if they're a single mother claiming state benefits, in which case they are simply workshy.


These stories are nothing more than a malicious attempt to pull a "Harriet Jones" stunt on Nick Clegg. For those of you who don't watch Doctor Who, Harriet Jones was the British PM in David Tennant's first episode, the Christmas episode called The Sycorax Invasion. She made a mistake, a big mistake, by firing on retreating aliens who'd had their marching orders from the Doctor. Our friendly Time Lord was livid, and suggested to a passing journalist that Harriet looked a bit tired. In a clever satire on the 24 hour news cycle, Harriet had to step down after this became a full blown health crisis.


In the end, though, she proved her worth by sacrificing herself to help save the earth from the Daleks, and the Doctor would soon have cause to regret his actions, which paved the way for the evil Master's rise to power as PM.


As far as Nick Clegg is concerned, he's in fine form at the moment, as we saw on Andrew Marr last weekend and as Jenny Stanning saw in Aviemore a couple of weeks ago. He works incredibly hard, as most politicians do. These mischievous stories are nothing but a clumsy attempt to undermine him by journalists who don't like the fact that he and the Liberal Democrats are reining in their beloved Tories in Government. 

Olly Grender is now writing for the New Statesman

I have been thrilled to bits in recent months to see Olly Grender, who was the Party's Communications Director when we made our big leap forward in 1997, doing the rounds of various media talking an awful lot of sense.

I particularly liked her appearance on This Week just before the tuition fees vote. Andrew Neil went in with all guns blazing, challenging her that it would be ridiculous for Vince Cable to abstain on tuition fees, expecting her to defend that line, and she completely disarmed him by agreeing with him (and me, to be honest, as I'd thought exactly the same and written about it extensively).

She's a much more effective commentator than the people who jabber and point and shout. She makes her point well and takes you along with her.

Anyway, it's good to see that the New Statesman have given her a regular blog on their site. In case you didn't know already, bookmark it immediately because she's already written some good stuff, like this one on Chris Huhne. During his leadership campaigns, he was portrayed as a bit of a leftie, but it was always clear to me that he wasn't. He is, however, incisive, hugely intelligent and a key player in the Coalition.   I also loved this piece on Alan Johnson's resignation - "politics needs people with messy lives". I love the Nancy Seear story in that too.

I've obviously added her to my blogroll so you will be able to catch up on all her posts.

I hope she doesn't mind, but I did a little bit of internet stalking research before I wrote this post and I found this profile of her. It's 11 years old, but it says a lot about the excellent reputation she has amongst her peers. The Tories were in a pretty dark place at that time, and to have one of them describe her as "likeable...scrupulous, a tough manager and has integrity" is quite remarkable.

Advice from Beyond the Bubble: MPs, please forget this abstention nonsense

Deep in the Westminster Bubble, I can imagine that there is a place where trying to get all the Liberal Democrat MPs voting the same way on the landmark tuition fees votes next week sounds quite sensible. Can I suggest that if they want to be cured of that misapprehension, they should watch Danny Alexander trying to rationalise it on Question Time last night?

Now, Danny overall did splendidly on the programme. He had by far the most difficult job and having Nadine Dorries as his coalition wing man was a bit like being chucked into the Thames with a rucksack filled with lead on his back. You probably couldn't have imagined two worse people to be up against in terms of their general humour, personability and charm than John Sergeant and Ken Livingstone. Danny stayed calm, focused and made some good points even when all the heat was turned on him.

What was very clear, though, was that people just don't get internal Liberal Democrat angst. They can't understand why someone who believes in a policy would abstain rather than vote for it to make life easier for their party colleagues. Frankly, people don't want to hear about it. The audience reaction to Danny was pretty hostile on that point and I hope he got the message loud and clear that this group abstention nonsense is just not going to sit well with people.

It doesn't even sit well with the party. If nothing else, the idea that Danny and Vince would abstain rather than vote for has united Liberal Democrats from both sides of the argument - those who think that there should be no fees payable by students and those who never supported it in the first place.

If the Question Time audience isn't enough, then the Parliamentary Party should watch former Lib Dem Communications guru Olly Grender completely disarm Andrew Neil on This Week last night, saying that she thought that the abstention policy wasn't the way to go and suggesting that we could have handled it better.

The only thing I could really have asked from Danny last night is that he could have been a bit tougher on Labour, could have reminded us with more vigour that it was Labour who'd gone back on pledges not to introduce tuition fees in the first place and had somehow managed to introduce them without incurring the rancour of NUS. That a graduate on a lower income of £21000 would actually, under the new scheme, pay £74 LESS a month than they would under the scheme Labour introduced. That's a lot of money.  And that the scheme proposed by the Coalition is virtually the same as that proposed by NUS, except the Coalition's is fairer and not retrospective. If you want to see more of the detail, the Elephant has it all here.

And, just as an aside, Nadine Dorries, who, on a previous Question Time appearance, said that Trident wasn't a weapon of mass destruction, stated that MP's should never abstain on votes because that wasn't the job that they were supposed to do.  My immediate reaction to that was to ask on Twitter for someone to check out her voting record to make sure she'd voted in every single division. Funnily enough, as Iain Whiteley quickly discovered:

@NadineMP Since you've been an MP you've voted 887 times out of a possible 1429 votes thats 542 abstentions #bbcqt#dorries

There's a surprise.

I don't often watch either Question Time or This Week live because I need my sleep. Last night's was possible because Anna's school is still closed so I didn't have to get up early. If you didn't see either programme, check out Danny Alexander and Olly Grender on the iPlayer. They are worth watching.

Pity Question Time only managed to get one woman on the panel, too. I see its gender balance is not improving.