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Saturday 22 November 2008

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?

Grieve has previous. During the great grammar schools row, he popped up to clarify the new Conservative policy. It did not mean that they would stop more grammar schools being built in areas — like his constituency — that already had them and needed more, he said. Debate still rages over whether this was a calculated intervention, made at a time when his leader was too weak to slap him down or whether this was Grieve blithely tying up loose ends that were best left undone. The nervousness with which his press officer, inherited from David Davis, passed him over to me on Tuesday strongly suggests that the latter is more likely.

Talking to Grieve, one can’t help but be struck by his intellect. It is easy to see why he was appointed a QC and is lauded as one of the best debaters on the Conservative benches. But one can also imagine that Labour’s opposition research team (one bit of its operation that hasn’t yet fallen apart) is hanging on his every word. In a political culture where an ill-chosen word can end a career, talking in paragraphs can be a liability.

Grieve and I begin by discussing 42 days. He raised eyebrows on his first day in the job when he announced that the Tory party would repeal the measure, if it passed, once in government. This is Tory policy but it is normally stated with a caveat about ‘notwithstanding new evidence’. The caveat is both designed to prevent a shadow cabinet split on the issue and to give the Tories cover if they decide the problem looks rather different from behind a ministerial desk.

Grieve starts off by stating the policy with the necessary qualifier. I ask him if that means the position has changed since Thursday. He, rather exasperated, replies that it hasn’t. His tone suggests that he thinks we’re playing a silly game. As he puts it, you ‘don’t just ignore new evidence’. Substantively Grieve is right. But if one half of the shadow cabinet are using one line and the other another, then the press are going to exploit the arbitrage opportunity.

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