Thursday, 22nd May 2008
11:56pm
If there is one aspect where the Tories still feel that they lag behind Labour it is expectations management. Tory staffers feel frustrated that Labour succeeds so easily in getting its worst case scenarios into the journalistic blood stream. But once again things are going to be a lot worse for Labour than even they though.
Earlier in the week, Labour were spinning that a defeat by 3,000 or less would be a decent result for them. Whether the Tory majority is going to be big enough to ‘force the bastard out’ remains to be seen.
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11:46pm
It appears pretty much certain that the Tories have won tonight's by-election and reports are that they might have done so by a truly staggering margin. If the margins that are being discussed are accurate, and it is likely that they are, then this really could endanger Brown's position. It seems that tonight is going to be another triumph for Eric Pickles and the Tory campaign team. Stay tuned.
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6:59pm
The result from Crewe and Nantwich is expected between 2 and 3am. As long as there’s coffee in the Coffee House, we’ll be covering it. So check back in later this evening for our by-election special.
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6:52pm
Basra, Iraq
Two years ago when Des Browne came here they wouldn’t let him out of the car. Now, he can do a walkabout in downtown Basra.
The liberation on March 25th, when the Iraqi army’s Charge of the Knights liberated the city from the Shi’ite militias, has transformed the situation here. When Prime Minister Maliki announced the Charge of the Knights, Muqtada al-Sadr mocked it as the charge of the mice. But is has turned into the biggest surprise successes of the war. Maliki is making his army’s presence felt in Basra--there are check-points with the Iraqi flag on them all over the city—and he has gone from zero to hero here.
British troops are back on the streets again. But now they are advisors to the 10,000 extra Iraqi troops that are stationed here. Belatedly, the British have adopted the America’s MiTT—Military Transition Team—approach with British troops embedding with Iraqi units to offer their expertise.
The change in the security situation is dramatic. One mother I spoke to would not even send her children to school when the militias were in charge. But now happily does so.
Basra feels how it did after the first, British-led liberation of the war. The Baswaris hope that the Iraqi army stay in large numbers; giving this sewage-strewn, bombed out city the chance to finally get on its feet.
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4:34pm
Over on Red Box, Sam Coates has a report of some apparent dirty tricks in Crewe.
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2:51pm
There was an important story in yesterday’s New York Times about the apparent success of the Iraqi army’s operation in Sadr City. Here’s how it opens:
“Iraqi forces rolled unopposed through the huge Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Tuesday, a dramatic turnaround from the bitter fighting that has plagued the Baghdad neighborhood for two months, and a qualified success for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
As it did in the southern city of Basra last month, the Iraqi government advanced its goal of establishing sovereignty and curtailing the powers of the militias.”
It is hard to overstate the importance of these developments. For ages many in Washington and London despaired of the Maliki government ever acting to curb the power of the Shi’ite militias. But now the Iraqi government has taken action against their two most significant strongholds. Hopefully, this is a sign that Maliki is moving from being a sectarian leader to a national one.
Combine this development with the Sunni rejection of al Qaeda in Iraq and a level of optimism about the future of Iraq seems justified. However, these gains are all fragile. Premature withdrawal, as supported by Barack Obama and strongly opposed by John McCain, could throw Iraq back into chaos.
Later on Coffee House, Fraser Nelson will report from on the ground in Basra. I’ve just been talking to him and what he described was fascinating so do check back later.
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1:02pm
Westminster might be waiting for the voters of Crewe and Nantwich to cast their ballots, but we have already learned one thing from the campaign: Labour’s policy cupboard is bare. That Labour’s hopes of hanging onto this normally safe seat rest solely on hoping for a sympathy vote for the daughter of the popular, recently deceased MP and on caricaturing the Tory candidate as a toff shows that no one in the Labour campaign team can think of a compelling, positive reason to vote for the party.
Martin Bright nails this point in his New Statesman column when he asks what would someone on the left see if they looked beyond Brown’s current political difficulties:
"The truth is that they would see a landscape largely barren of ideas. This is the true state of progressive opinion today. It is difficult to think of a single academic, writer or intellectual who is fully signed up to the Labour project as it exists in 2008. In fact, it is difficult to describe it as a project at all."
It is one of the odd paradoxes of politics that when Labour had Tony Blair at the helm, a man regularly derided as an intellectual lightweight, it was the party of ideas. But now, with a man who wears his learning on his sleeve in charge, the party is—in intellectual terms—treading water.
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11:03am
We've just uploaded the content from the latest magazine on to the website, and I'd suggest you read Fraser's politics column ahead of the results from Crewe and Nantwich tonight. In it, Fraser writes of how the Tories are unofficially shifting to a "landslide strategy". They now regard a whole host of marginal seats as "in the bag", so party resources, cash and effort are being diverted to those seats which were considered "unwinnable" before Cameron took charge. Crewe's something of a pilot for this approach, so the result is of extreme importance to Cameron & Co. What do CoffeeHousers make of the strategy? Is it a masterstroke? Or a risk too far? As always, have your say in the comments section.
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9:26am
Politics Home’s Insider panel’s benchmarks for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election give us a pretty good idea of how the pundit class would treat various results tonight. If the Tory majority is over 4,000, the panel thinks, that Labour would go into a tailspin and it would be confirmed that the Tories were on their way back to Downing Street. So, if the Tories do win tonight—watch the majority. Brown can probably weather a fairly narrow loss, but a thumping defeat would take us into a whole new political stage.
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8:59am
You can add another entry to the list of those who don't like Gordon Brown: the unions. Over the past few days we've been tracking growning union disgruntlement -and the possibility of a Summer of Strikes - over on Trading Floor. And now that mood's been encapsulated in a speech delivered by Brendan Barber, the TUC's general secretary, last night. He certainly didn't pull his punches - the Government needs to "reconfigure its DNA", as it "has not been clear about what it wants to be – and where it now wants to go".
It's becoming increasingly difficult to see who Brown's allies are. The unions don't like him; business doesn't like him; huge swathes of his party don't like him; and it seems voters aren't too keen either. In such a poisonous atmosphere, Brown hanging to his position would be some feat of endurance. Or stubborness.
Anyway, there'll be many hoping that the people of Crewe and Nantwich also register their antipathy. They go to the polls today, and we'll have a result at around 0230 tomorrow morning. Stay wired to Coffee House for updates and analysis.
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