It didn’t last long – the peace that rippled across the green benches of the House of Commons in November of last year when the government gave the Post Office card account back to the Post Office. This decision was a love bomb, dropped just about where the mace normally lies. So many had assumed it was a done deal, but instead the announcement that it would revoke the competition to look for a private buyer stunned backbenchers and the opposition (who had said they’d join forces against it). The government didn’t shoot the Tories’ fox, they stroked it and gave it a soft cushion to relax on.
Against this backdrop, MPs and peers assumed the government would spend the next 18 months before an election in a similar vein – shooting a whole lead of Conservative foxes, to extend the metaphor – namely Heathrow and Royal Mail privatisation. Well, says the Insider: yeah, right.
The decision on Heathrow disappointed. Miliband the Younger and Benn the (also) Younger were the voices of opposition (an aside from the Insider: when Hilary’s dad helped Ed with his homework – it DID happen – did the one-time technology minister Tony Benn, with his part in the development of Concord, ever broach the subject of aeroplane pollution?). We learn from the Pollyanna press that said cabinet ministers demonstrated manful protests against the runway – you can almost see them hanging on to the jumbo jet as they try to keep planes from taking off. But the serried ranks of Hoon, Blears, Smith and Balls proved too much and a third runway still went ahead.
It has been explained to the Insider that for some of these ministers, the sight
of young Ed – talked about by some as a future leader – ‘stamping his feet in a huff’ was enough to make anti-third runway ministers pro.
Why? Some feel that the imperative for the next 18 months before an election is to stop the next generation rather than encourage them. Really, asks the Insider? Yup. Here’s why: any poll is looking increasingly likely to produce a hung parliament and the older cabinet ministers think such a situation will need a stability candidate – Brown – not a change candidate – a Miliband, a Purnell… or a Balls-Cooper.
But there was more strategy in the Heathrow decision, according to those near the top, and it is likely to mean the government also go for some kind of privatised Royal Mail – the next decision Most Likely To Disappoint (it was a manifesto pledge to keep it in-house), careering down the tracks.
The strategic argument runs this way: Royal Mail and Heathrow may seem to the left of left among you as betrayal – but they are, apparently, part of a greater good. Now we have 68 per cent of, for instance, RBS, on the government’s books it is said the government are growing scared of
the attack that they are the nationalisers of the 70s.
The attack is expected to materialise, the Insider is told, when an election is called at which point the capitalist credentials of Heathrow and the privatising potency of an independent Royal Mail will be mobilised in defence.
Rights return
‘Any other business?’ you can hear the prime minister enquire as cabinet ministers shuffle briefing papers and bang shut red boxes. If it’s all economic crisis, and there’s no attempt to sugar the pill at all, then surely it sends to the electorate a note of panic? Ehem, the Insider hears one member of the cabinet say, clearing his throat. Jack Straw does have other business, something chucked out by his colleagues before Christmas.
Tasked with steering a key Brown project through – bringing, among other things, a Bill of Rights into being – injustice was meted out to the justice team from fellow cabinet ministers when Straw tried to get it into last year’s Queen’s speech. By all accounts, Jacqui Smith in particular was very rude about it, martialling the counter argument that Home Office civil servants said social environmental and economic rights were irrelevant during a downturn and not justiciable.
Well, the Bill of Rights will be back, and its supporters tell the Insider that, far from being peripheral, it is regarded by Brown and Straw as strategically central. There are key voters in marginal seats, their argument goes, for whom fundamental policies like a Bill of Rights will be important in helping them decide how to vote. There are not many, but they are importantly placed. So expect to hear more about the right to a Bill of Rights.