The current scene

I've just sent most of this to balancedparliament at libdemvoice.org

To my surprise I find I'm less bothered about facilitating a Tory government than I thought I would be. I worked through the 80s and 90s when almost every day brought more examples of Tory viciousness and Tory sleaze, and we still see evidence day to day that many of the party grassroots haven't changed a bit. I still think that if they get into power the right wing will come out of hiding and try to blast Cameron into submission to their way of thinking. For what it's worth,. I don't think Cameron himself has a political anchor. He doesn't really believe much of what he's been selling to the British public over the last couple of years. But also I don't think he's actually as right wing as the 2005 manifesto that he wrote. He is a supreme salesman. If he believes in anything, he believes in privilege. But his political position has no weight, and he is therefore vulnerable to being knocked rightwards by the blasts that will come at him from the Tory roots.

But we strive to be democratic, and as somebody said grown up politics involves sometimes having to work with your enemies. I think we have already put ourselves into a good position by being consistent – the party with the mandate to govern should govern. The Tories have that is both votes and seats, so they get their chance.

Yes, we could prop up Brown, and his offer on electoral reform is probably more soundly based than anything we'd get from the Tories, because he knows it's his last chance. And, OK, many of us are instinctively closer to Labour than to the Tories. But I don't think the voters will forgive us in the end for keeping Gordon alive. And after all he has form – 13 years in power, not one step on electoral reform till he's on his political deathbed. Grown up politics sometimes means not working with your friends, when your friends have turned out not to be real friends.

At the same time we have to be clear about how much power we have, or rather don't have. We can do what we can, but it's limited in the face of a Tory party that hold most of the cards.

I don't think we should ally with them. It's a political calculation of costs and benefits. I do not believe we will get any great benefit – electoral reform in particular will be manoeuvred out of the way. Even if Cameron was half inclined to deliver it, any move in that direction would cause his troops to march him behind the bike sheds for a mock execution. Followed by a real one if he went any further.

So to my mind the resource and supply idea is probably our best bet. The key thing is for us to both act and present ourselves as acting for the good of the country and for the good of democracy. We must strive not to be saddled with responsibility for Tory actions that we really disagree with, and we must strive to present our arguments in favour of those actions that we do agree with. It will call on our Parliamentarians to be extremely well organised and extremely nimble to keep on top of all the political and procedural manoeuvrings that will take place. My MP is Norman Baker, and I know of nobody who works harder than he does, but he and all our other MPs will have to work even harder. All our new MPs will need to learn very quickly when to act and when not to act, and they will need immense support from our seasoned campaigners.

Along with that, we will need to take a good long look at all the party's resources, and rearrange them if need be to provide the best support we can to our MPs and our spokespeople over the next few months. Making sure that they get the support they need to make the right decisions, and making sure that the message gets out about how and why we are doing what we are doing is more important now than ever, so at some point soon, the powers that be in Cowley St and the regions need to have a good hard look at how our administrators and support staff can be best utilised. That is also part of the stuff of politics.

I have a couple of other minor observations about the current political situation. Firstly, there has been some talk of us being able to manoeuvre George Osborne out of the way and get Cameron to replace him with Ken Clarke. Much better idea for the country. But we have to get real about the amount of power we have. See the execution scenario above. The idea of a pro European in charge at the treasury is even less to the liking of the Tory grassroots than PR. So we're stuck with Sixth Form.

And secondly one of my biggest fears about a Tory majority was the social repression that might follow in its wake – votes on the hunting ban, and an all out assault on our abortion legislation, in particular. Those now seem much less likely with the Tories in a minority. I haven't looked at the balance of the new Parliament on those issues in detail and I have no idea how the numbers stack up. There will definitely be some people calling loud and long for them, but they will not get their way nearly so easily.

Stroud vs Stroud

Philippa Stroud has hit some headlines, though notably not those of the Murdochracy, or of the BBC, which is apparently too frightened of the Murdochracy to run it. The nub of the issue is her practice of praying for homosexual people to be released from the demons which so obviously infect them.

The response so far has been fourfold:

a) a denial from Ms Stroud that she believes homosexuality is an illness. Which is an accusation nobody has put to her.

b) silence from her on the issue of whether homosexual people are possessed by demons.

c) a rapid disappearance of Philippa from Twitter and Facebook, presumably in case people press her on these issues. Wonder what she's got to hide then.

d) a concerted defence from various Tories, including, bless him, Iain Dale, that this is old news, something she did ten years ago. With the carefully not spelt out implication that things might be different now.

There has been little coverage of whether she is still a member of the church she founded, which holds among other relics of tub thumping patriarchy, that the man is the head of the woman and she must submit to his authority.

Now we find that Mr Stroud, said authoritative husband of the above mentioned, has signed a declaration intended to put the views of socially conservative Christians, the Westminster Declaration, so he's still around and still very right wing. (Update: it's been fisked by Ekklesia, thank goodness.) So this is a live story, not a ten year old one. Given that she's standing for Parliament, and given that this is still a democracy, her potential constituents have a right to know:

a) does she still hold to the tenets of the church that she founded?

b) in which case does she still believe that homosexuals are possessed by demons?

c) does she hold that she is subject to the authority of her husband?

d) in which case whose conscience will decide her votes if she gets into Parliament and exercises that vote on behalf of her constituents - hers or her husband's?

PS as a Christian I resent the presentation of the Westminster Declaration "Declaration of Christian conscience" as if it speaks for all Christians. They speak only for those who very selectively quote bits of both Old and New testaments to assert that dinosaurs never existed, except for those who still believe that they have a right to control everything their womenfolk say and do. They most certainly do not speak for me, but they try to claim that theirs is the only truth. They should meet the Pope when he comes over; they'll find they have a lot in common.

Signs of a coalition?

Could these signs mean something???

Actually the most significant thing about this picture is that by no means all of the fields round here are voting Conservative. That may reflect the mood of only a few people, but in terms of the change in thinking necessary for it to happen, it's seismic.

Nick Clegg and privilege

I think Nick Clegg (and the rest of us Liberal Democrats) are letting the media, and the other parties, get away with stabs at his privileged background. You're just the same as Cameron, they say, privileged background, posh school. And they get a defensive and faintly embarrassed response.

But that's not the point. You don't get to choose your parents. You don't get to choose where you're born or (rarely at least) where you go to school. What matters is how you react to that when you get to the age and stage where you do make choices. And there the difference is clear. Cameron has chosen privilege. He believes in it; it oozes from every pore. He thinks he is part of the elite who he thinks deserve to run the country. Clegg has chosen the British liberal way, to regard every citizen as being of equal merit. Cameron has chosen the elite, Clegg has chosen everybody. He should say so.

Peter Oborne never spoke a truer word

From the Mail today: "Voters scored him [Cameron] very low indeed for cherished assets such as honesty and charisma - and alarmingly high for slickness and poshness." The rest of the article is the usual tosh.

The honest truth

This is a series of musings brought on by quick flicks through the ash cloud of coverage we've had of the leaders' debate and the subsequent polls. Somewhere in it, I think there is a coherent narrative, which is about how much easier it is to tell the truth - hence the title.

Let's start with David Cameron's stories. They've been thoroughly covered (taken apart) in many places, such as in the Guardian. Now, using stories, including fictional ones, as a communication technique has a long and honourable history. Reagan and Ted Kennedy in particular were masters of it. One of Reagan's favourites - you can tell it was a favourite because he repeated it so often, was "One for the gipper" where a crewman in a stricken warplane told his mates "One for the gipper" as the plane crashed and they all died. Self evidently a fiction because of its ending, and strangely amorphous in its purpose (something to do with heroism for the cause) yet very effective at rousing the campaigners and voters. Cameron's mistake was to get details wrong, which resulted in a thorough media wide fisking. Even though the incidents are true, in that they happened, he manages to get the details dreadfully wrong because he is trying to use them inauthentically.

Jane Merrick and Brian Brady in the Independent point out that Clegg used stories too. But presumably he got the details right. I haven't checked any of them, but I have no doubt that some of the fresh faced youth in the Tories' rebuttal team have been working feverishly on them, and are currently biting their knuckles because of their inability to find anything to critique. (If they had found something it would undoubtedly already be in the Mail and the Telegraph.)

That, in my view, is the main difference between Clegg and the Terrible Twins. His performance looked effortless and natural, because he basks in the luxury that we have for years fought, worked and campaigned ceaselessly for. He is telling the truth. When he says we're different from them, it's true. When he says that our tax and spend plans are fully audited, it's true. I loved the bit in Matthew Ancona's piece in the Telegraph where he reports George Osborne saying that our policies will come under the scrutiny that we've been avoiding for so long. Pray, George, when exactly have we been avoiding scrutiny? Nick went straight on to the Paxman show for a Paxo grilling on his policies, unlike Cameron, who, like Brown, has had to be dragged there because they now know they can't avoid it. For years we've been begging the media for more time, more time, more time. It's not us who've been avoiding it, George, it's your friends in the newspapers and the TV stations who haven't had the gumption to look at us properly.

There's another thing I like about Matthew Ancona's piece. It's the complete disjunction between the narrative Ancona attempts to put across with the facts that he actually uses. Ancona's piece is entitled "David Cameron must sweep aside the impostor who stole his act". He wants to position Clegg as the impostor. The trouble is that nothing in the piece he then writes lends any credence whatsoever to that narrative - it's all about Clegg winning because he's telling the truth, and Cameron having to find ways to adjust because his dodgy "honest, guv" strategy is failing badly. Cameron himself has always been an impostor, and he's being found out.

Ancona's blindness to the realities of life is evident in his belief that Clegg stole Cameron's act as the "insurgent". That he can genuinely believe that Cameron, who oozes privilege and his belief in it from every pore, can be an insurgent, suggests that he is on a prolonged course of happy pills, and shows no sign of coming off them in the immediate future.

One final thing I like. Andrew Neil on his BBC blog says "A growing group of influential Tories want "Cameron to be Cameron" in the next debate." Please, please, let it be so, that's all I ask.