I’ve decided not to read Peter Mandelson’s self-serving memoir, or even name it here. He might imagine he’s Harry Lime, but some of us think more of lemons when he pops up.

After enduring 13 years of Labour’s rancid internicine warfare, conducted within the portals of the British Government, it’s a relief not to be a political historian and have to crawl through the muck and the ricocheting bullets all over again.

God knows what they got up to in Downing Street in that time. Only a combination of Mandy’s pandemonium and Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party gives us fleeting glimpses of the Devil’s Kitchen that our centre of government became under those putrid, fake personalities.

Former Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, became a Baron last week. After a lifetime of condemning the House of Lords he recanted in his own interest, even blaming his long-suffering wife Pauline, who “wanted to become a Lady.”

As some sort of exculpation, he cited Lord Hoffmann, once a Law Lord, for a complex speech he gave on a point of law. “We don’t get speeches like that in the Commons,” he wailed.

What does he expect with characters like him entrenched there?

Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons (PMQs), is taking on a familiar pattern. Acting Leader of the Opposition, Harriet Harman, asks a narrow, niche question about a topic she knows has not yet been fully resolved, or is part of a much wider, complex issue that doesn’t allow a simple answer.

When David Cameron talks around it, she accuses him of not answering the question. This continues for most of the session, with the PM appearing to flounder. Eventually he gets angry and accusations start to fly. However, the impression remains that Harman has won the encounter.

Today, it was about whether the Coalition will stick with Labour’s two-week consultant appointment target for cancer patients in the NHS. Cameron’s obvious retort was: On past form it’s unlikely that the target would be met and that quality of treatment would suffer because of dishonest reporting. This area, he could have said, is still under review, as she well knows.

Instead, he waffled and claimed that for some patients, two weeks was too long, implying an even tighter target.

There aren’t many of these PMQs left now until a new Labour leader takes over. He needs to improve his technique before the autumn when replying to questions of this type.

Annoyment of the Week

William Hague’s instructions to the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, in which the British Tories sit, were decisive in securing a crucial positive vote on the European External Action Service (foreign embassies), according to EurActiv.

“The Tories, known for their Eurosceptic views, helped to save Europe’s future diplomatic service, Parliament officials said.”

Why is William Hague now supporting a European diplomatic service in direct opposition to our own?

I suspect some stitch-up has been arranged behind the scenes whereby Britain gets something it’s persuaded it wants in return for letting go of something it already has.

Don’t British politicians ever do the maths? The overall result of these deals is that we lose core competencies, and hence sovereignty, in exchange for trivial hand-outs in matters of the moment.

I believe William Hague is now fighting to keep open some British embassies threatened with closure. How does this square with his support for a very expensive EU diplomatic service?

Anyone who is still wondering how the financial crisis could happen in a reasonably regulated world, should read economic historian Niall Ferguson’s recent article on the subject. Here’s the bit with the eye-opening revelations:

We know from the hubristic emails of the Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice Tourre just how out-of-control things were on the eve of the financial crisis. Tourre positively gloried in selling the quintessential toxic assets – “synthetic abs” (asset-backed securities) and “cdo2s” (collateralised debt obligations “squared”) – to “Belgian widows and orphans”, knowing full well that the subprime mortgages on which these assets were based were already “totally dead”.

With its sly winks and surplus exclamation marks, Tourre’s email perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the age – an age in which clients were merely “counterparties” and conflicts of interest were there to be “embraced”.

Terrifying, isn’t it?

How fast this summer is passing by. Punctuated as it is in England by great sporting occasions: the Test matches, Wimbledon, Royal Ascot, I usually feel a chill in the air when the Open Golf hoves into view, quickly followed by the First Night of the Proms.

With the hottest weather normally yet to come, for some reason mid-July always feels like a slippery slope back to winter.

We’ve been lucky this year. The Cathedral Green in Exeter is a straw-coloured desert. Not a sight many of us have seen before.

Nevertheless, the Open is about to begin. Batten down the hatches, and prepare for autumn’s gales.

Video of the Week

Some shaky video of the dragonboat racing at Exeter’s Quay on Sunday by yours truly.

John Evans

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It’s that quadrennial time again when our football supporters and top players, with their WAGS in tow, leave our shores for foreign climes.

Far from leaving us in peace, they get at us by dominating TV and radio airwaves with their inane chanting and drunken rowdiness.

Definition of the World Cup: People getting excited by people getting excited.

William Hague and David Cameron have a chance to exploit the bitter split between Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sarko wants to set up an economic government for the European Union — a council of the eurozone — to regulate the EU’s “economy”. Merkel is set against such a move, which would be heavily resisted in Germany.

Note the intrusion of eurozone affairs into the EU. Britain, Sweden and Denmark, along with newer members of the EU, are not in the eurozone at all, although some have applied. It has to be said, it’s very unlikely that any of these applicants will be granted access to the top table. Hungary’s woes, made public last week, have certainly put the kibosh on its future membership.

Britain should not be hesitant in all this. It’s in the UK’s interests to break up the big, cumbersome bloc of Western European nations and its “European Model” that is likely to retard growth worldwide for decades to come.

As suggested here before, Britain should aim to drive a wedge between the eurozone proper and the wider European Union.

A new loose bloc, without a common currency, involving some northern European states: UK, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic and Ireland, would challenge the spendthrift power of the rest of the eurozone.

Is the Coalition up to such bold politics? Will Nick Clegg abandon his europhilia in the face of its slow-motion collapse?

These are questions that will tell us much about the sustainability of our new Government.

Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, was reported by Francis Fukuyama to have told President George W. Bush that “deficits don’t matter”. At the time, even large deficits were easily handled by selling American bonds to China and by incoming investments in dollar assets.

It’s not so easy today, even though China has partly reversed its retreat from the dollar. It has nowhere else to go now that the eurozone is in its death throes.

Even so, the idea that deficits don’t matter means that governments’ stock of public debt grows year by year and has to be paid for through increasing interest payments. The danger point is breached when a debt compound spiral adds costs that can’t be met out of income or yet more borrowing.

Venice has been selling off its Palaces (palazzos) to all-comers just to service its spiralling debts. Britain may approach that point within this Parliament as national debt hits 100% of GDP.

But back to Dick Cheney. He was also the prime encourager of US involvement in Middle Eastern wars. Trillions of American treasure has been spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, making the United States one of the world’s deficit basket cases.

Now we hear that the company Cheney ran, Halliburton, was the supplier of the faulty cement for the BP oil well and is deeply implicated in the current Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.

Is Dick Cheney the worst disaster to happen to the United States in recent history?

Annoyment of the Week

Two or three months ago, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek diary piece about a building near where I live named Casting House. I imagined Cheryl Cole popping in and out of a back door and a queue of would-be starlets.

Last week, behind that rear entrance, a store of road-making materials blew up. A enormous plume of black smoke caused by burning bitumen soon hung over the adjoining residential area, including Syntagma Towers. The cloud could be seen from as far away as Dawlish.

Fifteen fire engines and 84 firefighters burst upon our tranquil scene. Many of us were evacuated by the police because of toxic fumes and the danger of a “massive explosion” of gas cylinders stored on-site.

Was Casting House getting its own back on me for casting aspersions against its industrial honour?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Met Office woes are reprised. Despite the rash of criticism over its performance, after forecasting the direct opposite of what our weather actually turns out to be, the Met Office Wet Office has just got worse.

Hoteliers on the English Riviera are complaining again that the bad weather forecasts for two recent sunny Bank holiday weekends, have cost them a fortune in lost revenues.

During the recent ash cloud disaster for the airline industry, guess which institution was gathering and number-crunching the data for Europe and beyond. Yes, our old chums at the Met Office.

As far as anyone can remember, when they operated off the Air Ministry roof with a few thermometers and a rain gauge, they were a national treasure. They even got the weather spot on for the D-Day landings.

Those of us who live in the West Country suspect it was their move to Exeter that broke the back of this once fine body of cloud watchers. Some believe that many of the boffins are lounging around on the beaches rather than compiling their charts.

Actually, it seems to be their involvement with international affairs and global problems that has destroyed Met Office credibility.

The United Nations and NASA relied heavily on Met Office-sponsored research at the University of East Anglia for the climate change outrage, just as the European Union trusted them with Icelandic volcanic eruptions.

Megalomania probably comes near to the truth.

Quote of the Week

“Quiet effectiveness is what I aspire to. There has not been some frenetic round of the media. This is one of the first interviews I have done.”
David Cameron, speaking to The Sunday Times

Have a good week.

John Evans

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When the eurozone goes, it will go suddenly. One moment it will be there, and then it will have vanished into the historical annals of catastrophic human vanity projects that disappeared.

Gordon Brown, who claimed to have “saved the world”, was partly instrumental in all this. He it was who transferred the massive private debts of the ailing banks onto the public balance sheet, thereby creating the current crisis: Sovereign Debt.

The world followed the sorcerer’s apprentice into universal contagion. Brown made his claim for glory, now he must bear the approbrium of putting the world’s financial systems at deadly risk.

Europe is the epicentre of the new Armageddon, and the euro currency is its central cause. Britain did well to stay out of it, but, as an EU member, we are still trailing in the wake of this approaching cataclysm, subject to bigoted laws and restrictions from Brussels.

To make matters worse, regulators are depressing the money supply right around the world by their insistence on higher capital ratios in the banking sector.

Moreover, Britain is being contaminated from the Continent in ways that are not being explained to the general population unless they read the FT or the business section of other newspapers, notably, the Telegraph. We are in the eye of a storm, and it’s relatively calm … for the moment.

If Greece, Spain, or Portugal collapse, banks across the European Union will be left holding almost worthless sovereign bonds. It will be the end of the road if trillions of sovereign debt is written off, or “restructured” in the jargon. Major banks and corporations will fail.

Such contagion would leave governments helpless to respond. Theoretically, the IMF would be bust. The US Senate has already made its position clear by 94 votes to 0 — no more American dollars.

Almost the minimum that can happen now is an awesome deflation across Europe and America — already the US money supply is shrinking at an alarming 10% on an annualized basis. A double-dip recession is at the benign end of the spectrum.

The worst case scenario is that a worldwide contagion begins on the European continent. August 1914 will have its 21st-century anniversary in four years. And the grandiose political vanity of Continental politicians will be at the heart of it.

This sunny spring could represent a kind of Edwardian glow before the chancellory lights go out once more across Europe.

David Cameron should use his new leverage to negotiate the UK out of the danger zone and back to full independence.

John Evans

I have not written about politics for a week or so because the smoke of battle had not yet cleared, and the toe-curling necessities of compromise were still underway.

We’re getting a better picture now — some commentators might later regret their bawling out of that bloke called Dave. Far from being a LibLab pact in all but name, the new arrangements have “Conservative” embedded in their core, rather like a stick of Torquay rock.

Daily we’re seeing Tory policy changes implemented, largely below the surface, or at local level, that tell a different story from the prevailing mood of gloom on the Right.

Civil servants are reporting a new atmosphere of courtesy in Government circles, in place of the aggressive “f-ing and blinding”, equipment-hurling chaos of the Labour administration.

On the macro view, the Prime Minister’s strong performance in Berlin yesterday reset the scale on Europe.

David Cameron put aside weasel words and articulated unambiguously what many of us have thought about the EU for decades. No more treaties, no eurozone business conducted under the umbrella of the wider European Union — Britain will veto them at birth.

A notice of intent has been driven into the gap between eurozone and the concept of the EU. This wedge is apposite because, although around half of our exports go to the eurozone, they are sold to people and companies, not to politicians.

The implications of this are profound. If the eurozone wants to turn itself into a country with a new political government to oversee its economic infrastructure, it will have to make treaties of its own. The UK will have none of it, knowing it would be drawn into the net at some point.

This is very shrewd. What Cameron seems to be implying is that Europe must make up its mind about the solidity of the common-currency zone, or break it up so that what’s left is viable.

Britain is now striking out on its own, daring a central core of states to remake its own EU. If that happens, whole chunks could be ripped out of the existing treaties where Britain, Sweden and other possible volunteers are concerned.

It’s almost a new Doctrine that the Prime Minister would do well to define more clearly in the near future. Brussels has dug itself into a hole that could have been avoided. Its blinkered personnel need to be forced into an acceptance of the magnitude of their failure.

The alternative is that the once smug, comfortable-in-its-own-skin euro area could indeed be responsible for a worldwide Great Depression II, as some economists are now warning.

On a local level, the beast of Whitehall is stirring too. Here in Devon, the proposed Unitary authority of Exeter, pushed through at the last moment by outgoing Ministers — with more than a hint of gerrymander about it — has been scrapped, subject to repeal legislation. The impoverishment of the County of Devon has been averted.

Similarly, the absurd emergency fire callcentre in Taunton has been abandoned in favour of retaining the service in Exeter. Localism lives. Well done the Tories.

I’m also satisfied that the abysmal Human Rights Act (read: Human Wrongs Act) will be tamed by subterranean forces if only we have the patience to wait awhile.

As for the muddle of tax cuts/rises disputed by the two parties of Government, they will be massaged into shape in their own good time, I have no doubt.

It could be a lot worse. Gordon Brown and Ed Balls could still be there.

Hope trumps despair. I’m increasingly sanguine that something approximating a minor Panglossian scenario is at least visible on the very far horizon with the correct magnification binoculars.

And the Conservatism is just below the surface.

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There they stood, in the Rose Garden at Number 10 Downing Street. Two smoothy 40-somethings in blue suits, arraigned behind identical lecterns, joshing away like a pair of ITV comedians — the Chuckle Brothers, perhaps.

The era of Dick Clameron has begun.

One can perhaps forgive them their moment of exuberance. It’s not often a chap becomes Prime Minister, even if he was expecting it. Nor a no-hoper, doomed to a life as a political Bedouin, unexpectedly to emerge as Deputy Prime Minister. It was more than a jaw-dropping occasion, it had all the ingredients of a new dawn, did it not?

For those who welcome a kindlier, softer form of Government, stationed firmly on the soggy marshland of the centre ground, it must have been a red letter day. From now on blue means red, or at least orange.

And, yes, there are lots of kindlier, softer things to look forward to, including higher taxes, chummier governance, smiles all round.

Crisis, what crisis? Do you mean our little, local difficulties? Don’t worry your pretty heads about it. The Clameroons are here.

Even Alex Salmond fell for the spell as the circus wafted into Edinburgh yesterday. Don’t be fooled, the phoney honeymoon is about to end.

Next week is a crunch period for the country. The question put will not concern who occupies Downing Street, but who governs Britain?

In Brussels, our secret masters are planning an audacious land-grab of power under the cover of the collapsing eurozone. Having presided over that chaos, they now want to drag us into the mess of their own manufacture.

On Tuesday, the Alternative Investment Directive comes up for final endorsement by senior politicians. It’s already got through committee stage, as participant Daniel Hannan has described in his blog.

It will do untold damage to the City of London, which has over 80% of Europe’s alternative investment businesses. Even the Americans, who are competitors in this trade, are protesting at this bulldozing measure.

Where is the opposing army to defend our shores? While I have every faith in George Osborne and William Hague to put up a fight, somehow Dick Clameron doesn’t instil much confidence.

There follows the EU Commission’s demand that all UK Budgets be submitted to them for approval before they are put to our “sovereign” Parliament. Where are the shouts of opposition? Apart from a few doughty journalists, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in particular, most people are still basking in the rosy glow of sweet togetherness.

Three governing bodies are being set up in Brussels to cement the final bars into our new economic prisonhouse. Welcome to the fascist Europe some of us have been warning of for years.

Make no mistake, these decisions will make Britain a minor protectorate of the illegitimate Brussels regime.

David Cameron must now tear himself away from the embrace of LibDem Euro infatuation and fight as if his life depends on it. Now is the time to take an arms-length position to the colossal burgeoning mess on the Continent and refuse to participate in anything they cook up.

If the Conservative Party can’t handle that, it doesn’t deserve to exist, let alone take office.

John Evans

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