An innocent at Home
Dominic Grieve, the new shadow home secretary, tells James Forsyth that he won’t ‘resort to soundbites’. But is this a sensible approach for a modern-day politician?
Dominic Grieve’s office answerphone is struggling to keep up with events - the caller has reached ‘the office of the shadow attorney general and the Conservative spokesman on community cohesion,’ it says. No mention of his new role as shadow home secretary.
Some Conservatives wish the answerphone was right. Even normally loyal Cameroons struggle to envisage going into the next election with Grieve as shadow home secretary. They’d rather he was a stopgap measure. Certainly, few would have named Grieve as part of the Tory’s strongest bowling attack a fortnight ago. But this is irrelevant now. Cameron cannot afford to change shadow home secretary again: to lose one looks like misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.
The logic behind Grieve’s appointment was simple. David Cameron desperately needed to stop David Davis’s resignation turning into a ‘Tory split’ saga. So to shut the story down, he appointed a friend of Davis who is a determined and principled opponent of 42 days. But replacing Davis with Grieve carries with it its own risks. Despite the two men being close, their political personas are about as different as you can get. As one well-connected Tory fretted to me this week, the party has replaced Action Man with Professor Yaffle.
Much of the rap on Grieve is that he isn’t Davis. There are worries about what the change does to the balance of the shadow cabinet; replacing a man brought up by a single mother on a council estate with a Westminster- and Oxbridge-educated QC does little to make the Tory top table look like modern Britain or help the party reach out to those crucial C2 voters. Others worry that he is too much of a lawyer to articulate public concern about crime as effectively as Davis did. But perhaps the most commonly voiced concern about him is that he isn’t ready for prime time, that at the next election it might be him who has to go into hiding, as Oliver Letwin did in 2001.
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Speccie was my favourite magazine
June 20th, 2008 2:50pmI see the word has come down from on high that Grieve is to be briefed against. I have met him. He is - as this article reluctantly accepts - bright and articulate. He also seemed deeply principled in that real way Cameron's little Etonian clique find so distasteful. So, tell us James, is this coming from CCO or from d'Ancona? Sadly, you may be right: poltiicans of first-rate ability and intelligence probably are a bit of a liability. You would, however, hope that it might be appreciated by a Spectator jounalist.
Fergus Pickering
June 24th, 2008 7:42amWell of course James, if you are a journalist then you want the chaps to talk in soundbites? But I think (and I hope) that you are wrong again. You are wrong about Davis - what he did was GOOD. And you are wrong about Grieve - he will do very well. course it doesn't matter if a journalist is wrong. In fact it seems halpful if you want a job on the DT for example. But we'd rather our politicians were right at least some of the time. These guys a right.Trust meon this.
John Strafford
June 25th, 2008 11:23amAnother miserable article attacking Dominic Grieve. Are you going through a mid life crisis James, or is being negative your normal behaviour?>