As a combatant in the Falklands War, even as a second lieutenant, the lowest form of military life, I was conscious throughout of who was running the show in London – Mrs Thatcher. Most of us were, I think. The intermediate layers of command were more obscure – indeed, the system seemed rather complicated; there were two separate naval commanders – but we knew she was in charge. We could feel it. And it was rather reassuring as we listened to the BBC World Service’s perversely ‘impartial’ commentary on the campaign.  

Twenty years later I found myself working in the Cabinet Office – still a soldier, but on secondment – for the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and I got a glimpse of the central government machinery at work at a time of crisis. I can only imagine what the Cabinet Office was like as the news dribbled in of Argentina’s invasion in 1982. Disbelief, horror, fear – all three, perhaps. All three were certainly in evidence on 11 September 2001 in the same offices. The JIC had not predicted the Argentine invasion until too late, and it hadn’t predicted a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 at all. Of all the memories of that day, the sound of running feet in 70 Whitehall was the most unsettling.

The next morning, along with a number of Cabinet Office colleagues, I was all ready to brief Tony Blair at COBRA. He was just the ticket, providing a masterclass in leadership: charismatic, focused, to the point, and when he had issued the relevant instructions he got up and left, saying he was absolutely confident everyone knew what they had to do. Unusually, he gave the intelligence briefing himself, having just come off the phone to Vice President Dick Cheney. Perhaps it was the first sign that, from now on, the UK was effectively under US control in the war on terror.

The Falklands-related private papers and memos preserved in the Thatcher archive at Churchill College, Cambridge, and released onto the internet in late March, give a good idea of the atmosphere in Downing Street as the Falklands crisis unfolded in early April 1982. They make fascinating reading, providing the ‘noises off’ as the decision to try to retake the Falklands was being made. We know now that ultimately Thatcher launched a task force, and we knew at the time that her senior naval commanders advised that it could be done, but there were a number of important actors to be squared, not least her party and cabinet, before it could put to sea.

It’s not clear from the record exactly when Thatcher took the decision to fight. Certainly, her speech to the House of Commons the day after the invasion makes clear that she intended to return the islands to British administration and that a task force would set sail as soon as possible, but crucially she made clear that she couldn’t be sure what its orders would be. In other words, there was still a chance that a diplomatic solution might be found.

The PM, taking advice from Harold Macmillan, set up a war cabinet of senior politicians, nearly all of whom had military experience. Willie Whitelaw, her senior confidant and fixer, whom she had beaten in the leadership election seven years before, had won a Military Cross with the Scots Guards. Francis Pym, who took over as foreign secretary after Lord Carrington’s resignation, had won an MC with the 9th Lancers. John Nott, secretary of state for Defence, had been a Gurkha officer in Malaya during the Emergency, while the attorney-general Michael Havers had also seen action at sea as a young midshipman in a destroyer. They may have been politicians, but they had a military core. 

As did the senior military commanders. The chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), Admiral Lewin, had fought numerous actions at sea throughout the Second World War, and chief of the General Staff, General Bramall, had won an MC on the Rhine at the end of the Second World War.

No such experience was available to Blair. None of his political colleagues had served in the armed forces and his military commanders were without operational experience. His CDS at the time of Iraq, Admiral Boyce, was an experienced submariner who had commanded a ‘Black Bomber’ – one of the UK’s nuclear-powered Trident submarines – but who had no experience of operations on the surface or on land. Claire Short famously said, “He spent a lot of his life in submarines, and it showed”. The head of the army was General Sir Mike Jackson, a grizzled-looking and gravelly-sounding paratrooper whose experience had been gathered in Northern Ireland.

On the intelligence side, neither prime minister was especially well-served. In 1982 the Argentines caught us with our pants down. Strategic warning came so late that there was no deterrent action the government could undertake. Extraordinarily, the JIC persevered right up to the last minute with the misjudgment that the Argentine navy was putting to sea for fleet manoeuvres. Thatcher must have felt very let down.

And Blair was let down by the same organisation, but in a very different way – and he probably foolishly connived in their downfall. Its senior members allowed themselves to become courtiers, whereas their proper function is to report their findings without fear or favour. In a way, Iraq was a more serious dereliction of duty; errors of analysis based on incomplete intelligence are hard to guard against. The contamination of intelligence by policy is the oldest mistake in the book – like opening the oven when the soufflé is rising. Sir Percy Cradock, adviser to Thatcher on China and historian of the JIC, put it vividly: “The best arrangement is intelligence and policy in separate but adjoining rooms, with communicating doors and thin partition walls, as in cheap hotels”.

One aspect of military operations that Blair did not have to endure was a sudden disaster. British troops may eventually have withdrawn from much of Basra in 2007 in unflattering circumstances, but it took place under his successor, Gordon Brown. It is still possible, in any case, to rationalise the US/UK intervention in Iraq as a success – at a pinch.

But the surrender of the tiny Royal Marine garrison in Port Stanley was deeply humiliating without the possibility of any redemptive spin. They found themselves in an unenviable position, outnumbered at least 10 to one. Rex Hunt, the governor, sensibly viewed the Argentine invasion as a fait accompli and ordered them to surrender, which they reluctantly did. Nevertheless, it sits uneasily in the UK’s military culture and history. Surrender was the sensible thing to do, but it was hardly Rorke’s Drift. The photographs of Marines with their hands above their heads did more than anything else to harden British resolve. The humiliation was only erased by victory.

Some of the most moving exhibits in the Thatcher Falklands Papers are notes passed to her by her staff, alerting her to the latest British casualties. We know that she felt each death keenly, as, no doubt, did Blair in his numerous wars. It must be the most difficult aspect of modern bureaucratic leadership, to send British soldiers to their deaths from the comfort of Downing Street or Chequers. I suspect you need strong nerves to be prime minister, and the ability to switch off. Sleep must come as a relief on some nights, although famously Thatcher slept little. 

One clear similarity between Thatcher and Blair is that they were both exhilarated by events as they unfolded. In 1982, it took Thatcher a few days to get into her stride. Parliament wasn’t televised then, but a recording of her speech to the House of Commons the day after the Argentine invasion is worth listening to. She was shrill and nervous, as she had good reason to be – it was more bluster than leadership. She is jeered on a number of occasions by the opposition – her own party remains sullenly silent during several key passages as she sought to explain the disaster – but once the task force had been despatched, her confidence returned and she became the war leader whose influence and personality we could feel 8,000 miles to the south.

Blair seemed permanently exalted by his military expeditions. Some soldiers in the face of imminent danger and death feel most alive, and maybe some politicians get the same high. Churchill certainly did, so it’s an observation rather than a criticism. 

To be fair, Thatcher had little choice but to try to retake the Falklands from the thuggish junta in Buenos Aires. She was in a way a prisoner of circumstance, and victory was the only solution. Blair’s motivations remain more of a puzzle to us. Wars of choice are different from wars of necessity, but I doubt Blair would concede that he had any choice. British involvement in both Iraq and Afghanistan stems directly from his perceptions of what 9/11 meant. He became unshakeably convinced that unquestioning military support of the US was right for this country in all circumstances. We should have smelt a rat when he gave his own intelligence briefing to COBRA.     

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of our recent military interventions, it is a worry that so many recent prime ministers seem to thrive on war.

Crispin Black’s espionage thriller The Falklands Intercept, based on his experiences in the Falklands and the Cabinet Office, is published by Gibson Square

David Willetts is a very clever man. But he’s in the wrong job.

He is also, incidentally, the only person in the world who can make an effortlessly humorous Voltaire reference while trying to describe the intricacies of working in a coalition government: “You can’t be Panglossian” – his eyes wrinkle in sublime merriment at this – “you can’t live in a fantasy world where everything is always alright.”

However, the common thread, and far too often the shackle, of my conversation with the universities and science minister are his remarks highlighting the opposite. He is an incorrigible, almost audacious optimist.

It seems his cosy semi-cabinet membership (he sits at the table, but heads no department), comfortably ring-fenced science budget, and undeniable enthusiasm for his brief at BIS have softened this talented thinker, who is in the vanguard of Tory modernisation. He should be heading the party’s policy, particularly with a PM wobbling as if he’s had a few too many pennies off a pint.

Willetts’ small and searching eyes, constantly creasing in amusement, peer inquisitively down his nose as if through spectacles (which he no longer wears), giving him the appearance of a particularly benevolent hawk. It’s a professorial look, enhanced by his sweeping, cerebral forehead. A highbrow brow.

He leans back contentedly in his seat to ponder questions, facing the solemn view of Westminster Abbey through his window, poignant by contrast with the steel-and-glass façade of the BIS building. His office is on the top floor, for which there is a “priority lift” that zooms up eight floors without stopping to the lofty ministerial deck. So BIS. You can almost feel Peter Mandelson swooping around up here, gazing down through the glass walls, ruling Gotham City.

When I reach the top, the Conservative MP for Havant, the Hampshire constituency he’s represented since 1992, and his press officer say they are always keen to welcome people interested in discussing higher education policy. So I ask him about the difficult Tory personalities threatening the coalition. He doesn’t like that.

“Without being too pompous about it,” and he’s already smiling again, “I think in general, these are just fundamentally difficult things to do; inheriting a deficit at 11 per cent of GDP and bringing it down, and getting a grip on public spending. I don’t myself think that the personality issue is particularly important.

“It is a tough message to level with people and say, ‘We aren’t as rich as we thought we were’. The way the British government has risen to this challenge in the last three years or so has been very impressive.”

However, there is undoubtedly a section of his own party – however exaggerated by a media waiting eagerly for a fight – which has been tugging at Cameron and his modernisation agenda, forcing him to pay more attention to the Tory right. Blue-on-blue clashes over House of Lords reform, international aid, Europe, gay marriage and even the party leadership are a stark illustration.

No doubt Willetts, who isn’t nicknamed ‘Two Brains’ for nothing, is aware of this. The party’s apparent identity crisis is something that someone like him should be poised to solve. He’s a powerful Tory thinker – Nick Clegg’s former strategist, Richard Reeves, labelled Willetts “a one-man think tank right under his [the PM’s] nose” – with a successful book published in 2010 called The Pinch, analysing the cost for the next generation supporting the baby boomers.

Having worked for the Treasury and later Downing Street’s Policy Unit under Thatcher after receiving the obligatory Oxford PPE degree in 1978, he soon hit Westminster. Elected in 1992, he was appointed paymaster general just four years later.

Throughout, he has been at the forefront of Conservative thought, writing essays and speeches on the party’s agenda, and was briefly head of policy co-ordination under Michael Howard. This was among many shadow secretary roles he held in opposition, from Work and Pensions to Trade and Industry, to Education.

His intellect is an affable barrier against the machinations and vagaries of party politics. However, this image of scholarly, almost zen-like detachment has not necessarily worked entirely in his favour. Why else has a secretary of state position, or indeed one heading policy, eluded him this term, and instead landed him with a Lib Dem boss, Vince Cable?

But one Conservative BIS insider insists this is an inaccurate picture of Willetts: “It’s unfair to pigeonhole him [Willetts] as a policy wonk; he is actually quite politically astute,” they tell me. “Vince Cable campaigns in public, and Willetts gets on very well with George Osborne, which allows him to campaign in the shadows and have a quiet word. He is quietly and determinedly fighting his corner.”

Indeed, a very recent essay by the minister called Beyond bare-earth Conservatism, published in Tory pressure group Bright Blue’s modishly-titled book, Tory Modernisation 2.0, reveals his political nous. In it, he uses colourful, deceptively inoffensive bywords for backward-looking Tory dissent to urge his party to push on with modernising.

One example is that stubborn attitude of “bring-backery”, which is his quaint term for the idea that the typical Conservative’s “utopia” is in the past. It’s a “golden age” Willetts insists “there never was”, preferring instead for his party to look forward rather than dwell on attitudes and policies of a faraway, and often imagined, history.

When I mention this term, his face flickers with mischievous pride. He suggests modern-day economic tangles shouldn’t evoke a reaction of harking back to a more bounteous past: “What’s very important, even when times are tough like this, is for us to be optimistic about the future.

“People nowadays are worried our kids aren’t going to have the same kind of opportunities, or even the same standard of living, we had, so it’s important we spread opportunities for home-ownership, for example, hence the radical ideas in the Budget.”

And the word “radical” here is key. In his essay, Willetts applauds the ability of the Conservative Party to “change far more radically than it was at first willing to accept” after the Labour landslide.

However, he warns in the essay that this route is one in danger of being lost in the “sheer busyness of being in government”. The debate, he tells me, should continue, but maintains that the Conservative tradition itself can be a barrier:

“I don’t think it is a job that’s ever over because... you’re always having to respond to changes in the society around you, and that’s always going to be a difficult process for Conservatives. One of the reasons why we’re Conservative is that we love the traditions of our country and understand the value of things that have been tried and tested over time.

“So for a party endlessly assessing what’s changing around it, what’s transient or meretricious, or what’s deep and underlying social change you can’t ignore – that’s going to be an endless Conservative conversation. It’s never over.”

There is not a shadow of frustration in Willetts’ anticipation of this debate with his political peers; he clearly takes some academic joy in tackling how to reconcile various strands of Tory attitudes.

“It’s an interesting, important and worthwhile conversation. It’s exactly the same as people feel in their day-to-day lives: to what extent do you change the way you live your life? Do you move house? Do you absorb new styles of music? Change the goods and services you buy? Or do you stick with what you’re familiar with? It’s a very human dilemma, and one the Conservative Party lives with all the time.”

This domestic analogy could extend to the idea of Cameron’s proverbial ‘house’ not necessarily being in order – his demanding relatives, or former lovers, tripping him up as he tries to do the hoovering. But Willetts does not concede this, and seems to have a bottomless pool of idealism for the Cameron project.

“I’m an optimist, and the coalition is delivering both opportunities for a younger generation and investment in hi-tech ensuring we can be optimistic about the economy they will operate in. That’s the message of Conservatism: hope for the future. I think that David [Cameron] absolutely encapsulates that.

“The government, even when resources are so tight, is going to go down in history, when the history books are written, as one of the great domestic reforming governments.”

Unsurprisingly, Willetts is also a great believer in coalition, exhibiting a donnish delight in a sort of peer-review style of politics.

“There was the loss of confidence in politicians,” he ponders, “partly because of expenses, but more widely than that. Actually, the coalition and the way it’s conducted itself has been quite good for politics; it’s made it rather less tribal. Here, sitting in BIS with Vince’s office alongside me, we have grown-up conversations; we don’t scream political slogans at each other.”

Willetts, indeed, would be the last Tory minister to don the blue war-paint and enter into tribal battle with his coalition colleagues. He talks of future election campaigning as if it were an exotic activity that probably won’t concern him: “Clearly, we’re going to fight in the next election as different political parties with different manifestos, and that’s all understood, but I do think that one of the things holding the coalition together is in cabinet.

“The prime minister and the deputy prime minister have a good working relationship, the chancellor and Danny [Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury] have a good working relationship, Vince and I have a good working relationship... That’s grown-up politics.”

It’s sheer long-term thinking, in both Conservative theory and policy, that elevates Willetts so firmly above party-political wrangling, and he genuinely believes he’s part of a greater process. At one point, he remarks dreamily, “Long after I depart from the scene, I hope we’ll see Britain world-class in sectors like the space sector or life sciences or advanced materials, partly because of decisions we’ve been able to take in this department.”

Maybe it’s the nature of his fairly politically-tranquil portfolio that leads him to celebrate coalition:

“We’ve successfully steered this department by reducing budgets, reforming higher education, developing an industrial strategy, backing hi-tech,” he enthuses. When he launches into such passionate explanations, he leans forward, tapping his fingertips compulsively on the desk. “Britain has historic advantages, in everything from education exports through to the space sector.”

Even if he’s missed out on developing government policy with the Cabinet Office, a job he’d be suited to with his progressive and collaborative outlook, does he not wish to head a department and lead it in his own image?

He humbly calls being responsible for universities and science “an extraordinary piece of good fortune”, as the “research going on in our scientific institutes and universities, the technologies that are being developed, give me great optimism” – there’s the ‘o’-word again.

What about education? Surely his renowned enthusiasm for social mobility – he sits on Clegg’s ministerial group on the subject – means he’d like a bit more say in Michael Gove’s department, where the seeds of higher education policy are scattered?

With characteristic sanguinity, he calls it “a big prize” to have universities in with science, because of the unusually high levels of research and development taking place on British campuses.

Neither does he resent the Home Office for risking damaging the reputation of British universities abroad by changes in student visa rules, decrying the “cruel trick [that] there were people coming from abroad, thinking they were coming to a legitimate British university, with the Oxbridge College of Business Management above a kebab shop somewhere...”

He is adamant that all such policies are “agreed collectively... an overall government approach”. This collaborative attitude even extends to praising the previous government for the Browne Review’s cross-party consultation on higher education funding.

Yet here Willetts’ cheerful expression slips, only once, when recalling the tuition fee-hike furore. Ever convinced it was a “very good offer” for students, his distinctive eloquence falters as he vents frustration at how the controversial 2010 measure was perceived:

“There are all the endless issues in higher education about everything,” he begins, somewhat forlornly. He then pauses, scrambling to gather his words, as if faced with a challenging tutorial question. “What gets me frustrated? What gets me frustrated is casual comment, including media comment that implies students have to pay up-front.

“That winds me up, because if there’s any young person who thinks they can’t afford to go to university because they have to pay [up-front], that would be a personal tragedy for them.”

Later I chat to Willetts about his own university days; he attended Christ Church, Oxford. He lived in the Victorian buildings there in a room with an ivy-covered balcony, overlooking meadows filled with awe-struck tourists, towering rowers and some historically-significant cattle.

He had tutorials in former – and, oddly aptly, Liberal – prime minister William Gladstone’s old rooms. Curious and animated, he quizzes me about my experience at the same college. His press officer hovers in the background looking agitated. It’s little wonder he sees it as a “tragedy” for any potential university applicant put off by fees.

These days we often hear ministers and their shadows discuss vocation, what with a persisting skills gap in the manufacturing sector. However, though boasting a doubling of apprenticeship numbers, Willetts is unusually relaxed about praising the academic route, and peeved at some universities, including Oxford, not taking advantage of their new freedom to increase student numbers. Perhaps this is due to his background being very much removed from university life:

“See, my family, we were all Birmingham craftsmen – they were glaziers and gun-barrel makers and silversmiths. I think it is right we take pride in the modern equivalent of those trades and crafts.

“I personally think the crucial test is rigour. Provided it is done to the highest standards, people can and do respect it. They will respect someone engineering a turbine blade for Rolls-Royce in the same way they will respect someone doing Classics at Balliol... It is the standard that’s crucial.”

And of course, he sees both standards of and applicants to current apprenticeships, at places such as Centrica, Network Rail and BT, as encouragingly high.

I ask if he feels in the minority as an optimist, both in this government and Parliament generally. Inevitably, he beams:

“The truth is all of us have days when the battling is very hard, you have some terrible problem to wrestle with or something goes wrong... there are days when things look pretty grim. But there are other days – and it’s the majority of days – when you think, last thing at night, you actually moved things forward.”

The PM would certainly benefit from him having a little more grimness in his life, working in the gritty business of Tory survival; a political reality he hasn’t properly been faced with in his role, and a challenge he’d surely rise to.

But Willetts himself seems perfectly content, so I leave Dr Pangloss to his work. He is, after all, a very clever man.

“He was just so boring.”

This is the stark conclusion of one member of Ed Miliband’s team regarding their boss’ performance in the media eye at the very beginning of his opposition leadership.

Performance, character and engagement with the audience undeniably remain central to the discussion of, and commentary upon, our political figureheads. Even if they do come across as, well, a bit boring.

But what does this mean for Britain’s satirists and sketchwriters, shouldering the peculiar burden of deriving humour from an emerging, and seemingly increasingly uniform, political class? Is their ink beginning to dry out?

In that ultimate parliamentary battle of winning, losing, and abusing – PMQs – commentators continually reach a verdict each week on which leader, Miliband or Cameron, can be deemed the ‘winner’. Indeed, a Conservative media adviser asserts the importance of performance, admitting to me their concern that the limelight is dimming on the prime minister’s public routines: “He [Cameron] has had a few poor performances at PMQs recently,” they lament.

So how much does performance really matter, in this age where politicians in matching suits and glossy on-message ties toss nothing but soundbites at each other, and the mace remains nestled firmly in its place?

When both leaders of the main parties and many members of their respective loyal bands are ‘career politicians’ – slick, special adviser-to-safe-seat types, who are more managerial in tone than their lustrous-eyebrowed or power handbag-wielding predecessors – is it becoming more difficult to define them as personalities?

During an interview with the Sunday Times in August last year, satirical impressionist and political sender-upper extraordinaire Rory Bremner observed that satire has disappeared: “Obviously, when Cameron came in, we [satirists] were in uncharted territory because of the coalition... But it’s time now, two years on, to have the measure of these politicians.”

Since his lament of last year, not much seems to have developed in terms of biting wit compared to the old days of uncanny impressions or grotesque prosthetics.

Is this because we lack great frontline characters in the image of Margaret Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw, Michael Heseltine, Denis Healey, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, and even Tony Blair, who, arguably, pioneered this era of slick parliamentary blandness? Big personalities like Dennis Skinner and Peter Tapsell merely rumble from the depths of the backbenches.

Michael Deacon, who has been the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter for a year and half, recognises the challenges of adding colour to the politicos who are so painstakingly managed, more so than at any point in the past:

“PMQs is more or less the same every week. Not only is it all scripted, but also it’s the same slogans again and again, the same line of attack again and again, the same line of defence again and again... It’s totally artificial.”

While noting “Thatcher had her scripts and lines written for her as well,” Deacon emphasises that, “politicians at the moment have a greater number of advisers than they used to have... the more people you have writing things for you, the more of a waste of time it becomes, and you think this isn’t a real politician talking to you. This is a team of people doing it for them.

“And sometimes you can tell they’re [Cameron and Miliband] just looking for opportunities to slide in with jokes or slogans or put-downs they’ve prepared.”

He explains why he finds Nick Clegg particularly difficult to wrap his pen around: “Once you’ve described his demeanour – dog pleading for a chocolate drop – it can be hard to know what else to say. No matter how many speeches he gives or how many radio phone-in shows he does, you never get a strong sense of who he is. Is he hiding his true character? Or is there simply nothing much there?”

An interesting result of the homogenous character of our current cohort of politicians is that the sketchwriters embrace it as a new challenge, rather than seeing it as an obstacle to engagement.

The Daily Mail’s parliamentary sketchwriter, Quentin Letts, who began sketchwriting for the Daily Telegraph just before the end of Thatcher’s last summer in office, insists that remarking upon or emphasising any blandness in the Commons is nevertheless important political commentary.

“It doesn’t matter at all if they’re all the same because it reinforces the point. It makes it a little bit less engaging for the reader, perhaps, but it can give you plenty of opportunities for pointing out that these people are all terrible. They’re clones of each other and you can write perfectly well about it.

“What’s difficult for a sketchwriter is persuading the reader to actually believe that things are as we say. We’re a little more factual than satire. OK, we occasionally employ small measures of exaggeration, but not very much, and if you describe the sort of behaviour you see in the Commons, people quite often think you’re making it up. And you’re not.

“For instance, when [John] Prescott was on his feet, we had to under-report it, because if you’d reported all the linguistic bollocks that he spoke, he wouldn’t have made a very appealing sketch.”

Letts also comments that a lack of what he calls “Vaudeville turns” in Parliament, compared with the past, is a positive aspect of modern politics.

“I think we’ve lost some of the more idiotic creatures – OK, they were vivid, they were fun to describe, but they were not an adornment of our democracy. They were colourful, but they were corrupting – some of them... Just look at some of the people who left Parliament over the expenses stuff. There were some pretty grotesque old birds, and I think we’re better off without them.”

However, Deacon is critical of the changing makeup of the Commons, regarding the rise of the career politician. Although he doesn’t let it hinder his writing, he advocates more variety in the backgrounds of those on our political frontlines:

“These days you get an awful lot of politicians who’ve never worked in any job outside politics. George Osborne comes from university and works his way up, all the way through Westminster, and, according to the recent biography, the chancellor thinks it’s proper for politicians to spend their whole life immersed in Westminster.

“I don’t agree with that at all. It would be much better for everyone if you were barred from entering the House until, let’s say, you were 40 and you’d spent your life up to that point working on a job – any job, from the checkout of Tesco to running your own business or being in the military… anything at all, just so you have some idea of what life is like outside Westminster.”

Like Letts, the Guardian’s resident sketchwriter, Simon Hoggart, refutes the idea that our politicians are becoming increasingly difficult to depict engagingly, and that their collective slide towards the insipid can actually be part of the fun.

“When New Labour came in in 1997, everyone told me that they’d be as difficult to satirise as the quarterly sales meeting of a white goods distributor,” he recalls, “in fact they were full of wonderful characters, such as Prescott and, of course, Gordon Brown.

“It’s vital for a satrisist, or a sketchwriter – not quite the same thing – to create his own jokes. If the characters aren’t funny, make them funny. Sometimes dullness can be funny. Take Iain Duncan Smith – who could be more boring than him? He was hilarious in his tedium.”

Deacon is eager to point out that colourful characters remain in UK politics and that it’s a “trick of the human memory” to hark back to a more dynamic past. He lists for example Osborne, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, George Galloway, Ed Balls and Harriet Harman as “great, grotesque caricatures”.

Yet he also acknowledges that even a flatness of personality can still make for enjoyable writing: “I’d normally say Philip Hammond is difficult to write about, except he’s so boring that you actually have quite a lot of fun describing how boring he is. I often wonder, is he boring in real life or is it put on?

“When you see him making a statement about something incredibly important, he makes it so boring that people nod off listening to it, and he’s using so much jargon and is deliberately so flat, they think, ‘Is he cutting something or isn’t he? Has he just shut down the navy? I can’t tell because what he’s saying is so vague and dull.’ So you can actually make a funny sketch out of someone being dull.”

Letts also delights in covering some of Parliament’s current members, calling the Commons “very sketchable”. He describes Lib Dem backbenchers, usually a neglected bunch in political coverage, as “terrific sport”, specifically citing Julian Huppert – who often conjures collective groans from the House when he stands to speak – and Ming Campbell.

He also mentions junior ministers such as Liz Truss, who is “very capable; she’s like a sort of James Bond beauty”, and John Hayes, now minister without portfolio, whose “very florid language” makes him “terrific value”.

Although the nature of political performance has undoubtedly transformed, what with the rise of career politicians, New Labour and the coalition changing the face of parliamentary debate, sketchwriters and satirists are deriving humour and colour from different sources.

Does this trend translate from the page to our screens, however? Political satire on television, other than the festival of painful politicking and artistic expletives that is The Thick of It (TTOI), is sparse, but I discover that this could be born of controllers’ interests rather than a reflection of today’s politicians.

TV comedy writer David Quantick, who has written for TTOI as well as writing the 2010 mockumentary satirising Ed and David Miliband’s relationship, Miliband of Brothers, remarks: “TV commissioners don’t think satire is worth doing. Every political sketch show starts off with teeth and ends up being gags about celebrities. I was once told by a Spitting Image producer that they wouldn’t do a sketch about the conflict in Bosnia.

“Satire offends some people, it involves attacking powerful people, and in a climate where broadcasters are under attack, upsetting the rich and powerful is not something programme makers welcome… but there’s a gap in the market.”

This resonates with Bremner’s analysis last year that TV “has shied away from” political satire, which “has to do with controllers, the people in charge,” who have lost their nerve, rather than a lack of audience interest.

However, Quantick recognises that our current political figureheads could also be a hindrance to satirists:

“They [the Milibands] were hard at first because neither has the kind of big personality that suits comedy. You think of George W Bush, or Margaret Thatcher, or [Nicolas] Sarkozy, and they’re all larger than life or have a characteristic that’s easy to exaggerate and mock. They’re not innately mad or comical people.”

He then concludes frankly: “So we really made a lot of it up – sibling rivalry is always funny.”

Although having worked on TTOI, the highly successful and searing indictment of modern-day government, he looks back longingly at the idiosyncrasies of past politicos.

“In the ‘70s, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were big and easy to mock... The hard bit is when a politician is new. Early parodies of Blair were a bit vague because nobody knew what he was like.”

Yet, like the parliamentary sketchwriters, he finds blandness poses a fresh and welcome challenge: “It’s tricky, but you can always find a way in. And if they’re similar, that’s the joke. All these leaders in their shirt sleeves and ties, like they’re holding a team building exercise...

“This government is always ripe for satire. Nick Clegg fascinates me, the man who sold his party so he could be in government. He’s a classic slimy Judas, in my eyes.”

Stand-up political comedian Matt Forde, who previously worked for the Labour Party and various MPs for 10 years, argues that any strong personality is dampened by our present political culture.

“I think there are characters around, just not necessarily in leadership roles. Nationally there are still a few like Galloway, Farage, Johnson, who have big personalities, it’s just that the prevailing culture in politics at the moment is averse to it, and it seems a negative thing.”

Forde, whose new live show The Political Party with Matt Forde, which combines topical stand-up and political debate, and will host guests as varied as Lembit Öpik, Tim Loughton and Jack Straw in coming weeks, strongly senses “a lack of personality at the top end”.

He explains: “I think below that there are a lot of ministers who are quite funny – and Bercow is phenomenal – but if you look at Cameron, Miliband and Clegg you don’t get them as ‘people’ a lot... They move in a similar way, they sound similar, they almost look similar.”

However, he derives his comedy from other areas: “On Twitter and the online world there are still plenty of opportunities for MPs to make fools out of themselves.

“There’s still a genuine public appetite to see more of politicians’ personalities, and the rise of Boris is partly explained by that. It’s just about whether the public really cares enough about the individuals, which is difficult. We’re living in a period where politics is almost seen as irrelevant, and that’s dangerous.

“Even though it [politics] is a little blander, there’s still so much to do with it, in terms of making it entertaining. The real irony is we’re living in a period of intense economic and social upheaval, yet our politics doesn’t reflect that at all. We live with politicians who talk in bureaucratic language; a lot of them are former SpAds who don’t really turn the public on, but this is a time for strong voices and interesting people.”

Although he was a New Labour supporter, Forde blames the movement’s desire for discipline and professionalism, following the “total mess” of the party in the ‘80s, for this uniform culture that “rings so hollow with the public now”.

So, these times of increasingly slippery and subtle dramatic personae on the Parliament channel seem to be making room for a certain more cynical type of comedy, both in print and onscreen, rather than the traditional impersonations and flamboyant parodies of the past. The humour isn’t dead yet.

Quantick supports this conclusion: “Its [TTOI’s] message – that nobody knows anything, that our masters are confused idiots, and that politicians are venal – suits the times. Politics in the 21st century is full of cynical people trying to make some money, and it reflects that.”

Well, at least wherever there is despair, there’s still room for a little laughter.

We’ll call him Michael, but that isn’t his real name. He is in his mid-30s, in good health, has a girlfriend he thinks he may be falling in love with, and is genuinely happy with life.

But Michael has a problem. He’s hooked on spin. “You have to want it”, he says, staring at me intently, “You have to need it. The other day [names Labour shadow cabinet member] was in the midst of this big crisis. And [names shadow cabinet member’s press officer] he was moaning about the whole thing. And I’m thinking, ‘Jesus, mate, this is what it’s all about’. I was jealous of his crisis. You have to want to be at the heart of things like that. When the phone’s buzzing, and the mailbox is filling up. If you don’t, then you’re in the wrong job.”

Michael isn’t the only one addicted to spin. Westminster is obsessed with it. Books have been written, plays staged, films produced, just on how modern politicians – and their dark-suited, burgundy tie-clad tribunes – manage their relations with the press.

Recently, the obsession morphed into near hysteria following the announcement Gordon Brown’s former spinner Damian McBride had sold his memoir Power Trip to Biteback Publishing.

But though much ink has been spilled detailing how these modern Machiavellis ply their sinister trade, much less attention has been paid to why they ply it. What motivates them? What drives them? What is it that makes a 21st-century spinner spin?

“Part of it’s the immediacy,” says Michael. “You get almost instant satisfaction; a tangible result. Say you get a page lead in The Sun, or an online rebuttal, or a supportive leader. Or over the longer term you can actually see an argument gaining traction. Maybe you can even score a resignation. You just don’t get that in a think tank.”

The standard – if ironic – line from the spinners themselves is they get a bad press. Far from being political poisoners, they are bodyguards. The media, the opposition, even their own colleagues, are out to get their employers. Their job is to take the bullet first.

In reality, the relationships involved are more complex: “You do develop a bit of a weird relationship,” says another spin doctor. “In fact, being a spinner means building one of the two most dysfunctional relationships in politics.” The first? “The female political secretary. They always fall in love with their boss. They spend their entire time running around sorting every detail of their lives, remembering kids’ birthdays, ordering the wife flowers. And the guy doesn’t notice. Then one day, every couple of months, he turns round and says, ‘Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you’. And she gets all excited, and off it goes again.”

And the relationship between the politician and their spin doctor? “It’s a bit of a bromance”, says one, “So like, the other day, he and I had a row over something. And then he calls up quite late. And we’re just talking general rubbish about politics, nothing really work-related. But we’re not talking about politics really. We’re making up.”

Part of the uniqueness of the relationship is that spin doctors don’t just regurgitate their employer’s own words. They speak for them, frequently without their knowledge or even their consent. “I freelance,” one spinner happily admits to me. “If he [his shadow cabinet employer] knew some of the things I get up to, he’d kill me. But that’s what you’ve got to do. It’s the job.”

Another draws a distinction between being a press officer and a spin doctor. “A press officer will basically take a press release and try and sell it in. Or sell in a line or set up a broadcast opportunity. A spin doctor has to be more of a jack of all trades. A bit of policy, a bit of political and communications strategy, a bit of personal counsel to your principal, their eyes and ears within the lobby.” 

But there’s a downside: “Being an all-rounder gives you status, which is good for people who are political or ambitious. Or even a bit arrogant. But this can also be negative in the long term. In opposition it’s OK, but in government, policy is all. Being seen as a spinner means you’re a little bit shallow. You play the game but you’re not a serious politician.”

None of which means spinning isn’t a skilled calling. “The key to being a good spinner is you have to be good with words,” says one practitioner, “It’s actually quite old school, like the old politicians and their speeches. We’re trading in words; the punchy line, the snappy phrase.”

A phrase like ‘Aspiration Nation’? “I actually thought of that independently one day. And I said to myself, ‘Dear God no’. If I knew I was responsible for that I’d never be able to look myself in the mirror.”

Not all spinners are classic wordsmiths. Charlie Whelan, latterly Brown’s second most famous spin doctor, never bothered to draft press releases; he did all his work on the phone.

I told this to one of the spinners I was talking to for this piece, and recounted a story Ed Balls shared of the day Whelan walked up to him with a wide grin and said,  “I’ve just told a couple of the guys [lobby journalists] Geoffrey Robinson’s going to buy the Gay Hussar restaurant”. “Why did you do that? It’s not true, is it?” Balls responded. Whelan shrugged, “Nah. But so what?”

The spinner opposite gives me a slow nod of recognition: “Charlie had the hunger”.

One thing upon which all the spinners I spoke to agreed was that theirs is a macho, male-dominated environment. “There’s a big drinking culture, most of the politicians are men, most of the journalists are men, and so most of the spin doctors are men. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is,” says one.

So what’s it like for the handful of women who do manage to penetrate this male sanctuary? “To be honest, I quite enjoy it,” says one female spinner who works in one of the major party press offices. “I like the fact it’s so male-dominated, and I’m in there, disrupting and challenging it.”

And from her perspective, what’s the culture like? “Oh, basically as you described. There are lots of late nights, and drinking. Plenty of boys running around, trying to act tough and aggressive. There’s something a bit homoerotic about it all.”

But how do the boys react to her presence? “Well, they’re quite easy to shock. So I’ll be sitting there in a room with 12 guys and it’ll come to a point in the conversation, and I’ll suddenly peep up with something they’re not expecting me to say. And you can see they’re thinking, ‘OK, but she’s the woman. Does she really know what she’s talking about?’”

Outright hostility is rare, but it does exist. “There’s one lobby journalist who just refuses to speak to me. Point blank,” says one politician’s female spinner. “If I see him in the corridor he’ll be nice and polite. But when he’s trying to talk to my boss, he’ll go through several different routes to try to get to him, rather than come through me. And all those routes just happen to involve talking to men.”

I ask if this can all be quite dispiriting. Lonely, actually. “The key is to have one strong ally,” she says. “So much of what you do as a spinner is making marginal judgment calls, and whatever anyone says, none of us ever know for certain how they’re going to play out.

“So you have to have one close person who you can speak to and bounce things off and say, ‘What do you think about what I’m doing with this, am I wrong?’ As long as you’ve got that, you don’t feel you’re on your own.”

Spinning, it’s fair to say, is not regarded as the most honorable of professions. From the McBride uproar, when he was found planning to smear senior Tories, to The Thick of It stereotype, spin doctors are invariably perceived as operating without a moral compass.

Ask your average spinner about this, and they will deploy the company line; they’re working for a cause they believe in, politics is a business for grown-ups, etc. But if you dig a little deeper, some will concede they occasionally find the nature of their role troubling.

“I sometimes find it quite challenging to know where the line is,” concedes one Labour spinner whose boss has doubts about the political course being mapped out by Ed Miliband. “Overall, you need, and want to be loyal.” He pauses. “But at times you just know things aren’t moving in the right direction. And then it’s difficult to strike a balance.

“Should you be pointing journalists in the direction of things that could benefit from a bit of scrutiny? I try to help journalists develop arguments that are already out there, rather than set whole new narratives running. But it’s a dilemma. You’re trying to help but at the same time you’re also undermining.”

It’s a dilemma that confronts spinners on both sides of the political divide. Though some clearly find grappling with it easier than others. “Yes, I pursue my own agenda,” says one government spinner, “but to be honest, that’s partly because I can. Downing Street is a mess. There’s no one over there who scares people. If someone says, ‘It’s Craig Oliver on the phone’, I’ll just shrug and say, ‘So what?’ The only person anyone’s really scared of is the PM. And how often is he going to be on the phone asking, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ He’s got a country to run.”

But there is one thing that unites all the spinners I spoke to. What they do isn’t a job, or a calling. It’s an addiction.

“I still remember the first time I saw myself quoted as a senior source,” says one spinner. “I’ve got to be honest, I got an erection.” Another tells of the time when she was taking a few weeks off after an especially intense period of campaigning. “I started getting these headaches I couldn’t shake. I spoke to a friend about them, who said, ‘You know what your problem is, you can’t cope without the campaign. You’re addicted to stress’.”

One spinner recounted the time he went away for a holiday. “So I was out there, and I made the mistake of buying a paper. And I opened it, and there was this quote from the boss. He’d got in the paper without me. I just sat there looking at it. I felt gutted. Actually, I felt betrayed. It was like I’d caught him having an affair.”

Despite what people may think, spin doctors are not machines. They have hopes and dreams and fears just like the rest of us. If you cut them, they really do bleed. “I remember the first time I was misquoted,” says one spinner, his eyes glazing over at the memory. “I felt sick. It was supposed to be off the record, but it was obvious it had come from me. I rang up the journo and said, ‘You’ve misquoted me’. And he said, ‘No, you said it’. And I’m saying, ‘But I didn’t. I didn’t say that’. And finally he says, ‘Well, it’s broadly what you said’. But what can you do? The damage is done.”

I also spoke to an ex-spin doctor, whose politician recently lost their job in a reshuffle. “I found it hard at first,” she admits, “But I’ve moved on... But now I’ve left it all behind. It’s brought closure.”

I want to believe she’s moved on. But I’m not sure I do. I’m not sure any of them do. I think she’s spinning me.

On 15 March, 80 business leaders gathered at a college in Cumbria for Made By Carlisle. They browsed an exhibition of local businesses and had lunch with a minister; the food was produced and prepared by college students.

The man behind the event, John Stevenson, is our MP of the month for his work promoting UK’s manufacturing revival.

He explains the idea behind the event: “There’s a tremendous heritage of manufacturing within Carlisle, so I thought it would be a really good idea to support and promote the fact that the city still makes an awful lot of products, and encourage the students and school children to come and see for themselves which goods are being made and learn generally a little bit about manufacturing.”

Stevenson has chaired the all-party food and drink manufacturing group since 2010 and has been the secretary of the all-party manufacturing group since 2012.

As MP for Carlisle, he’s well placed to promote British production:

“If you look at the Carlisle constituency, over 20 per cent of its local economy is still manufacturing, which is unusual, as you’ll appreciate, when the rest of the country is 10 per cent.

“It’s a major employer; we have significant national and international firms, as well as smaller ones.”

The event included many of these firms, from large internationals such as Pirelli and United Biscuits to local businesses such as Linton Tweeds and Print Graphic.

Twenty-three local businesses had stalls. The exhibition was followed by a roundtable event with housing minister Mark Prisk.

“I think there are clusters of manufacturing, so there’s still a tradition for it,” said Stevenson. “There’s still a tradition of people going and working in global manufacturing businesses. That helps in terms of skills, and there’s an awareness that we have to get fewer graduates and more apprenticeships into these organisations.”

Carlisle is a manufacturing town that has been represented by Labour MPs for half a century, but Stevenson is sure the town holds support for the Conservative Party. “At the end of the day, people want to live in successful communities; they want prosperity and they want jobs.

“Those who work for these businesses understand that they have to make a profit, they have to produce good-quality products, and they have to work hard. We should make sure they recognise that, as if they do that, they get their rewards for it.”

But when he stood for election in the northern town in 2010, he didn’t rely on manufacturing renaissance alone. He also pledged he would cycle from his constituency to Westminster should he be elected. He fulfilled that promise in autumn 2010.

“That was one of the first things I kept being asked by locals,” he remembers, “’When are you going to do it?’ We did it for the local hospice and we raised about £13,500.”

But aside from cycling, Stevenson is focused on his day job of exporting the manufacturing success in Cumbria to the rest of the country:

“The revival of British manufacturing will come partly through modern technology, but it’s also about quality and about making sure that they can deliver the products on time, on budget and to the specifications expected by, principally, retailers.”

Stevenson is reluctant to sound complacent about Britain’s possible manufacturing revival. Is he confident it will happen?

“No,” he replies. “I’m confident that I think there’s a potential now for that revival to begin, and I think you’ve certainly seen it in parts of America. And you’re starting to see bits of it in this country.”

He’s keen to emphasise the strengths of Britain’s industries. He tells the story of a local business that almost went bankrupt but is now thriving because its products are reliable, high quality, and produced close to the point of sale.

Whether or not he’ll succeed, Stevenson is a spirited advocate for British manufacturing, even if it is an uphill struggle.

Three days before David Miliband announced he was stepping down from British politics, a customer made an online bet with a bookie that the MP would not be on the Labour frontbench in 2016. It caught the eye of one of the company’s political traders, who thought it could be an indication a by-election in South Shields would soon be taking place.

Sitting at her desk in front of a bank of seven monitors, with more flatscreens hanging on the walls, the Dublin-based trader began to formulate a possible South Shields market. Once Miliband senior had confirmed he was off to New York, Paddy Power had its market up within an hour. Its rivals were just as quick. First up were the winner’s odds, then the second-place market took a little longer. Next, the bookies dug up previous electoral results, newspaper articles and any related statistics that would inform the traders for creating odds on voting percentages. Further bets will be offered as the by-election day approaches, from turnout to novelty questions – anything that will keep the punters interested and betting.

The world of political betting is one of highly organised chaos. Possible betting markets are only limited to the imagination of bookmakers and customers – as long as the outcome can be put in black and white terms. Political betting is big business in the UK − £25m was bet on the 2010 general election and £40m on the 2012 US presidential election – and the expansion into online means that anyone betting through a UK or Irish bookie can put money on political events taking place all over the world.

Each bet is an individual opinion. Once you’ve got, say, 200 bets, a line begins to emerge. Both sides of the bet, the bookies and the punters, hunt for wisdom in the crowd. Bookmakers’ odds are now taken seriously as gauges of political performance. After all, they put their money where their mouth is.

Sports will always reign supreme, but political betting, in the words of Stewart Kenny, co-founder of Irish company Paddy Power, “doesn’t decide the year, the month or the week, but is a significant chunk of our business now”.

Betting on British politics is nothing new. Graham Sharpe of William Hill, who is an industry historian, notes that Sir Robert Walpole hurled a guinea across the House after losing a bet with a fellow MP on whether he had quoted the philosopher Horace correctly. White’s club ran a ledger in the mid-18th century for its gambling politicians – particularly popular were bets on the number of peers who would die over set periods.

When Sharpe began working for William Hill over 40 years ago, political betting was restricted to general elections or limited one-off events. Bookmakers began expanding their political betting markets because it was an effective marketing ploy to appear on newspaper front pages as well as the back. Sharpe believes the 1992 general election marked lift-off for the industry. It was all down to a fast horse: “The general election was called for five days after the Grand National, which was won by a horse called Party Politics. That gave us a great excuse to hang all the political bets onto the horse.”

Stephanie Anderson, novelties and politics manager for Paddy Power, notes, “The type of punters who are taking an interest now in what we would have previously considered smaller events is unbelievable.” She adds: “People whose mainstay is betting on football and tennis were having a go on the Eastleigh by-election.” She believes this shift is down to the accessibility to news. People are getting hold of information instantly, and then getting involved in topics that would not have interested them before. The move into online betting also means it’s simpler to put bets down on other areas quickly and easily.

The heavy bettors, however, are the political specialists. Sharpe puts it succinctly: “If you’re a racehorse owner, you believe you know more about your horse than the bookmaker. Therefore, you’ve got a chance to exploit a bit of superior knowledge. The same applies for those who live in the village of Westminster and its environs.”

The doyen of British political betting is Mike Smithson, who runs the astonishingly successful PoliticalBetting.com. The former Oxford academic began the website in 2004 to improve the quality of online discussion. His first bet was – illegally – when he was 16 or 17 and bet on Christopher Soames to replace Macmillan as leader of the Conservative Party. Fortunately, Smithson has improved markedly in the following decades to the point where he devotes himself full-time to betting. He bets, he says, because: “It’s getting it right, it’s not just the money. I was chuffed as hell at the Eastleigh by-election that I got the first five in the right order.”

From speaking to Smithson and betting companies, it’s possible to draw up the key qualities required for a successful political bettor − in addition to luck. First up is that you should ignore any political allegiances. As a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate, Smithson says his winnings benefit from him learning to overcome any partisanship when laying bets. He explains: “Political betting is quite profitable because you get a lot of people betting with their heart rather than their head.”

Intelligence is vital for both betting companies and punters. Jumping around following the news channels, though, will not lead to success. Smithson explains: “You get a media narrative that decides what the outcome is going to be.” He points to the 2010 Labour leadership election as an example: “The media narrative was that David Miliband was odds-on favourite. My reading of the situation, based on my own contacts, talking to journalists, and looking at the polling that existed, was that Ed Miliband was going to sweep the trade union section, and was probably going to hold his own among the members and be not too far behind among MPs.” Smithson bought a car with his winnings.

The bookies, too, must make a judgement on whether a news story is a flash-in-the-pan or marks a more significant movement in the fortunes of a politician or a party. Anderson says Paddy Power decided that the recent Eddie Mair interview with Boris Johnson did not change the latter’s prospects of becoming PM despite dominating two days of the news agenda. The odds remained the same.

In his four decades of betting on politics, Kenny has learnt one lesson from ignoring media narratives: “Leaders never resign as quickly as you expect them to.

“The bookies always do well on betting on a leader to resign by such and such a date. People bet on the leader to resign because that will be the mood of the money, and it will collect better that way than if they bet on them to stay.”

Excellent contacts within politics are essential for both bookies and gamblers − the higher up the political ladder, the better. Politicians, journalists and advisers are all essential tipsters for setting odds, or deciding whether to lay a bet. Allied to those contacts is the requisite obsessive knowledge about politics. It means gamblers are then willing to take punts. Two of Smithson’s favourite bets came from such instinctive flutters: In September 2008, he put £50 at odds of 33-1 on Ed Miliband becoming the next Labour leader, having been impressed by Miliband’s performance against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. And, back in 2005, he bet on Barack Obama to be the next US president at 50-1. After reading about him, Smithson found his 2004 Democrative convention speech on YouTube and was “spellbound”.

The knowledge and contacts base might need to be extensive, but political betting is a deceptively simple process. Sports betting is a confusing world of accumulators, fourfolds, trixies, patents and super Yankees, but politics is dominated by single bets. Even general elections with 650 seats up for grabs do not have accumulators on them because they’re treated as single events.

The more sophisticated gamblers will then build strategies on top, such as putting bets on where the betting will go, rather than the outcome. For example, in the 2012 White House elections, Smithson bet on Republican candidate Newt Gingrich with one company, then took the opposite bet with a rival. Moving in and out of positions in this way is only possible in a large market such as a US presidential election, when there are lots of other punters betting.

Within the betting companies, the political traders are relatively few. Typically, there might be three people working on odds compilation, and they’ll also work on trading alongside a risk management team. This wider team includes press officers who have contacts with journalists and know what’s going on politically each day. The traders are highly numerate, and accountancy degrees are a particularly popular qualification, because, as Anderson explains: “Just because somebody’s got absolutely amazing fanatical knowledge about a particular area, be it politics or football, it doesn’t mean they can necessarily quantify that opinion or express it as a price.”

How is it all calculated? On their bank of monitors, the traders might have the BBC, Bloomberg and the US news channels running. One or two screens will be the personal monitor with the bets they are currently working on. The feed will be separated into online and retail, and the traders will be keeping their eyes on the field book. For a by-election such as South Shields, this shows the runners, the number of bets on each one, and the amount of money staked on each. The system then calculates the current payout so the trader can see how the bets move up and down, and how much it’s costing the company. Anderson says, “Nobody has any excuse to miss anything. It’s absolute information overload.”

An illustration of the importance of the odds to political reputations is that the betting companies occasionally get contacted by politicians, or members of their teams, who try to exert pressure on them to improve the odds in their favour during leadership elections. Kenny says he has always given them short shrift: “One of their contacts will say, ‘You should bring in so-and-so in price’. My answer will be, ‘If you have enough money on, the price will come in. You want to put your money down’. Of course, they are so sensitive to what people say about them, you’d expect them to be more hard-nosed than they are, but tough luck.”

With so much money now riding on political events, it does raise the question of whether betting on our democracy is not just a little grubby. A football match is one thing, a possible prime minister is quite another, isn’t it? As Sharpe claims, “If it’s legitimate to have opinion polls, it’s certainly legitimate to have betting on general elections. They’re effectively the same thing, except that in one case you don’t have to pay someone to give them your opinion, and are therefore likely to give them a misleading opinion. In our case, you’re paying to give us your opinion on who will win the thing, and therefore it’s probably a more accurate opinion.”

Could this increased activity in political betting attract gambling addicts to elections and leadership contests? Several gambling addiction charities Total Politics spoke to have not heard of political betting addicts. Dr Henrietta Bowden Jones, the director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, said: “Problem gamblers need the immediate rewards from betting. Even tennis matches can last too long. It’s unlikely waiting for an election result or leadership election would suit the neurological loop of pathological gamblers.”

Two current Conservative MPs have large amounts of money riding on them. When Chris Kelly and Justin Tomlinson were students in the late 1990s, they backed themselves at 10,000-1 with William Hill to become PM. Both were elected to the House of Commons in 2010. Still definite outside bets on reaching No 10, they have a £500,000 incentive as motivation.

Politician and punter Sir Clement Freud, who made a six-figure sum betting on the 1979 general election, once said, “If you mind losing more than you enjoy winning, do not bet”. It has to be remembered that even the best have losses as well as wins; your intuition can be faulty.

Smithson is an honest man: “I’m a loser as well as a winner. I don’t always get it right.” He remembers the day he claimed Treasury minister Kitty Ussher was the next Sarah Palin. She was demoted in a reshuffle ten weeks later and left Parliament at the last election. Smithson’s worst day was in 2001 when he thought the Tories would do much better than predicted, due to a low turnout. They gained one seat.  

As Sharpe concludes: “To get it wrong can be very expensive, and that’s as true for politics as it is for the Grand National.”

When the MP for Sevenoaks added Energy to his ministerial profile at the end of March, environmental groups were quick to point out his commitment to renewable energy.

It may seem odd that the co-founder of the Thatcherite group called ‘No Turning Back’ would be welcomed by the environmental movement, but Fallon has consistently shown support for the renewables industry.

In 2008, he authored the Planning and Energy Act, and on a visit to a training academy in Sevenoaks in 2011, described the renewable sector as “the work force of tomorrow”.

But Fallon’s interest in business is wider than the renewables sector. After being the MP for Darlington from 1983 to 1992, Fallon joined the private sector. He worked as the director of three companies partly funded by Duncan Bannatyne from Dragons’ Den as well as the inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon, which is reportedly under investigation in relation to the Libor fixing scandal.

He returned to Parliament in 1997 to represent Sevenoaks, a Conservative safe seat, and continued to juggle his business interests and political career, but has since focused on politics.

He was made Trade and Industry spokesman for the Conservative Party in 1998 but was moved six months later. Labour MPs had accused him of having a conflict of interest regarding the Minimum Wage Act because workers in one of his companies, Quality Care Homes, were allegedly paid less than the proposed minimum wage.

He hoped to become the chair of the Treasury select committee in 2010 but lost out to Andrew Tyrie, whose views on regulation greatly differ from Fallon’s. Cameron made Fallon deputy party leader to replace Lord Ashcroft, and in the 2012 reshuffle, partly due to his experience in business, decided to make him minister for Business and Enterprise. He would be “the voice of business” in government, as the business community reportedly considered him “one of us”.

There was speculation that his appointment was partly to monitor Vince Cable, who is sometimes perceived as the anti-business secretary. Fallon has played down the differences between them, and said in an interview, “We have very different politics but we are both batting for British business”.

His new Energy brief will leave him working under two Lib Dem secretaries of state; Vince Cable at BIS and Ed Davey at DECC.

Fallon’s appointment to BIS was seen as a reward for his “firefighting” work publicly defending government policies over the previous two years. His competency in promoting its record earned him his title of “Minister for the Today programme”. His eye for the media was revealed when he first became chair of the Treasury select sub-committee in 2001 and dubbed the then-chancellor “Complexity Brown” for his complicated tax code.

The Sevenoaks MP is generally seen as having Thatcherite political values. In 1985 he co-founded the No Turning Back group, which produced publications promoting Thatcherism and free-market economics. Fallon was in favour of privatising Royal Mail and opposed the bank bailouts, arguing that the latter would prevent banks from lending to small businesses, as they would have to focus on repaying the government.

He also managed to set up a grammar school in his constituency despite a prohibition by Kent County Council, and even wore a black tie in the House of Commons on the 10th anniversary of Thatcher’s resignation. He also opposed gay marriage.

The minister has been called the “thinking man’s Rottweiler” for his policy credentials and communication skills. He graduated in Classics and ancient history at the University of St Andrews and was also the chairman of the all-party Classics group until 2012.

He studied at Epsom College, the public school for doctors, and has been noted for his formal manner. Former Labour and Lib Dem MP Brian Sedgemore recalled that he once kept his jacket and tie on while trapped in a sweltering New York lift for over an hour.

Dealing with the heat will be a good skill for tackling the energy markets under his portfolio.

The view inside Westminster

Fallon is described as a “realistic Thatcherite” by one government colleague. His ability to work alongside his Lib Dem secretary of state at BIS meant he was earmarked to slot beneath Ed Davey at DECC. His time in the Conservative Whips’ Office towards the end of Thatcher’s reign means older colleagues know how to spot his warning sign: “If he says ‘Everything is going swimmingly,’ he means, ‘it’s a fucking disaster’,” explains one Tory MP.

Tom Watson is something of an enigma. F Scott Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American lives, but he never said anything, as far as I’m aware, about West Bromwich lives. Watson’s media profile has shifted from Brownite apparatchik to Rupert Murdoch’s chief inquisitor – and a few places in between. He’s an increasingly public figure who claims to no longer have personal ambition. The question still remains, however, even for some of those who know him well: Which is the real Tom Watson?

I met him in his comfortable – not especially large – Westminster office on an overcast day during recess. On the floor, his two kids were amusing themselves watching cartoons, and Watson took a fatherly pride in showing me their latest work. Their drawings line his walls, alongside a few mementos charting the ups and downs of his political career. Before the interview starts, we head down to the atrium of Portcullis House to grab a coffee. The MP for West Bromwich East, it seems, knows everyone, and not just the politicians. He also takes the time to have an involved discussion with one of the guys on the till about video games. Watson loves video games. That’s something of an understatement. Every politician needs a way to relax.

And with the amount on his plate, relaxation is probably something of a tall order. His position within the Labour Party was strengthened 18 months ago when he was brought into the shadow cabinet and put in charge of the party’s campaigning strategy. It was a popular choice; members loved that one of the heroes of the phone-hacking scandal had been rewarded, and party staff knew that when it came to campaigning Watson knew what he was talking about. After all, in a past life he’d been one of them.

So, how’s he enjoying it? “I love it, actually,” he affirms. “When I first came back to the shadow cabinet, I was in two minds. I was enjoying the [Culture Media and Sport] committee, having a different kind of parliamentary life, but I felt that, given that even at the age of 46 I’m a party veteran when it comes to campaigns and elections, there was something I could help Ed with.”

He says his new role reminds him of his early days in the party when he joined, inspired not just by politics, but by music, too.

“It takes me back to the days when I first joined up to the party, you know, in the 1980s, when there was a real excitement about music, and people talked about culture. There was a cultural revolution going on as well as a political one, and it’s really great to tap back into that energy. People are up for it.”

It’s funny that Watson mentions music, as alongside video games and the two young children doodling and playing under his desk, it makes up a chunk of what we might call his ‘hinterland’. In fact, I’m pretty sure the first contact I ever had with him was a tweet about the band Elbow. He still finds time to go to gigs around the country – recently he went to see a band called Cry Baby. His passion for them is such that he sent me a YouTube clip afterwards – but at the moment, as has so often been the case in his life, he’s listening to plenty of Billy Bragg. I ask if he still expects Bragg, who has voted Lib Dem in the past, to back Labour in 2015?

“I’m pretty sure he’ll vote Labour at the next election, although if he’s still in Devon he might want to tactically vote against. I would obviously strongly condemn him, and have done for many years… He’s had Lib Dem dalliances, but…”

Some might not forgive Bragg these dalliances, but Watson’s relationship with the ‘Bard of Barking’ goes back further than most. His first Bragg gig was organised by the Labour Party staff social club in 1985. The party doesn’t have such a thing now, which is a shame, especially when you hear Watson talk about how Bragg’s music has influenced his own politics.

“I honestly feel like he’s been with me on my political journey. We did a Hope Not Hate thing in Sandwell a few years back. The BNP got elected in the neighbouring constituency, so we did a huge day where we had hundreds of activists. Everyone delivered. He strummed a few songs, but he let me hear a track that he’d just recorded called I Keep Faith. It really choked me, because that was when I was at my lowest ebb in politics, so he got me through. And many of Billy’s simple lyrics have helped me out over the years.”

But Bragg isn’t the only Labour-friendly celebrity with whom Watson came face to face in the ‘80s while working for the party. He worked for Red Wedge, a collective of musicians who attempted to engage young people with politics in general, and the policies of the Labour Party in particular, many contributors to which went on to become household names.

“In the Red Wedge office there was a guy who, in those days, was called Porky the Poet. He is now Phill Jupitus, and he gave me a Housemartins badge – a London 0 Hull 4 one [the name of their first album] – outside the photocopier in the library. I immediately became obsessed with the Housemartins.”

That Labour Party, the kind with a social club and with comedians stalking the corridors, is not the party of 2013, but the changes that Watson and others are attempting to deliver today are perhaps no less remarkable than the gradual shift from Red Wedge to the message discipline of the Blair years. Watson calls it a “quiet revolution”, describing it as “the Labour Party re-laying roots in communities which perhaps we’d lost touch with, and new techniques for mobilising communities around the issues that they want politicians to address, rather than the ones that politicians think they want addressing.”

This new (rather than New) Labour Party won’t just need a different kind of organisation: Watson believes it requires a re-establishment of trust with the electorate, and a different kind of politics.

“The lessons from the Murdoch and banking scandals are that trust in big institutions has gone. People don’t trust politicians, they don’t trust what they read in newspapers, they don’t trust the banks, they don’t believe privatised utilities work in their interest. People have seen the limits of markets and the unaccountable power of vested interests. If we outline the remedy to the trust deficit, then we really can capture the spirit of change that’s afoot in the country. Labour will embody this change.”

Of course, delivering that kind of politics – and that kind of election campaign – is going to take a rather different kind of party from the one that’s gone before. It’s a change that’s already underway.

“What we needed was someone to do a root-and-branch reform of the party structures, with a completely new ethos at the top of the party. We stand for communities. Ed Miliband is determined to put the Labour Party in our regional and local structures, back at the heart of communities, before we even knock on a door and ask for voter ID… The great thing about it is that Ed has inspired us all to go out and do it. The gains are remarkable, just remarkable. Even if you are the most cynical organiser, it is a truth.”

I admit to Watson that, in a past life, I was that cynical organiser. He smiles in acknowledgment, and leans back on his office chair: “Well, you know, that’s like me when I was a bit younger. The gap between what can be delivered by full-time professional staff and what it takes to win an election is too great. We empower volunteer members who are the people who are going to win the election in 2015.”

A large part of that empowering of volunteers is coming from American organiser Arnie Graf – sometimes referred to as Miliband’s community organising ‘guru’. It must be said that Graf may be one of the few deserving of such an epithet. Watson evidently agrees.

“He’s a hugely inspiring man,” he says. “He commands quiet but powerful authority in whatever room he walks into. I wouldn’t say he ‘s changed my thinking, but I will say he has definitely re-acquainted me with the enthusiasm I had when I first joined Labour.”

That’s an interesting thing for him to say, as one of the questions that Graf likes to ask when bringing groups of party activists together is, “Why did you join the party?” When Graf asked Watson, what did he say?

“Well, I said I wanted to change the world. I joined the Labour Party in the early 1980s at the age of 15. I came from a political family – not professionally political – and politics was always talked about around the family table. In 1983 I lived in a small town in the Midlands. We had come out of the 1981 Budget, and by the end of the 1980s, there were kids who had left school in 1983–84 who still hadn’t found work. The politics of the day were what really got me in to politics. I was politicised through music and the Labour Party. They were a hugely formative part of that period of political history.”

And now Watson has become a part of this period of political history. His involvement in uncovering the misdeeds of the Murdoch empire is already well known. He’s now a public figure, which must be a change from the years spent working behind the scenes. For some in the party and the Westminster village, however, Watson will always be a “Brownite boot boy”, a “fixer”, someone who gets things done. Which of these is really Tom Watson? Has he always had many sides to him, or is he changing?

“Politicians always say they don’t like political labels, but in my short time in the party I’ve been described as Brownite, Blairite, Old Labour, New Labour, left wing, right wing – I suppose I’ve been on a journey. There’s no doubt when I first entered Parliament in 2001, I had worked for the party: I’d run elections, and I was pretty narrow in my politics. I wanted to see the political gain for Labour in every piece of activity I did. I still want Labour to win, but I guess I’ve got broader horizons now. That doesn’t mean to say I’m not ruthless about wanting to win this general election, I just think there’s a different way of doing it.”

Ruthless: That’s an unusual word for someone to use to describe themselves. Certainly no one doubts Watson’s tenacity, especially not the Murdochs, but surely during the many months of taking Murdoch on – to no avail – was there ever a point where the Labour MP thought he was wasting his time?

“I went into it on the assumption that I’d lose. When I first started doing it, I thought it was over; I was crushed by it, really. I was going to leave politics and move on.”

How different things might look now if he’d stood down – but, of course, he didn’t. He explains there was a nagging voice in the back of his mind, saying, “Don’t let this go”. And he didn’t. Anything but. The impact of phone hacking, and the Leveson process that followed, will be felt for years to come. So, does the press treat him differently now?

“Let’s remember, the phone hacking has affected only very narrow sections of the press. When I talk to lobby journalists, I think they feel unfairly treated and sometimes, occasionally, tarred by the same brush. They think the whole of journalism is damaged. It’s funny, because I feel more optimistic on behalf of their profession. I always say in speeches that it took courageous journalism to crack open corrupted journalism.”

He clearly feels, though, that some in the newspaper world, especially in the Murdoch empire, will ensure he gets his comeuppance:

“As people from News International told me some years ago, it’s an organisation with a very long memory. I’ve absolutely no doubt what their intentions are – but that’s not the case for all the newspapers.”

That kind of lingering threat doesn’t seem to faze him as he goes about his daily work. Having been put through the wringer by the media before, he’s rather sanguine about facing that kind of treatment again, but now the phone-hacking scandal is, largely, behind him, it’s time to move onto the next phase of his political life. What does that look like?

“I want to win the election for Ed and I want to be part of the team that does that. That means working with Iain McNicol, our general secretary, and the party.”

McNicol is a close friend of Watson’s – they shared an office together in Labour HQ many years ago – and the relationship between the two may well define how successful, organisationally, the 2015 election campaign proves to be. Certainly, he has in mind changes he wants to see brought into the party machine.

“We still have a lot to do to get the party machinery right. We have to focus on fund-raising… then there are also things I’d say I actually want to revolutionise [the party]. We need to up our game with our digital presence: We know what we have to do, but just haven’t got the resources to do it, but I want to ensure we can sort that out this year.”

That’s the next couple of years covered, but I don’t believe for one moment that Watson will be heading home to play on his Xbox post-2015, however much he might enjoy that. If Labour won the next election, I ask, would he want a portfolio? Would he relish the chance to run a government department?  

“I don’t know, really. That’s for Ed. Ironically, when I stood in 2010, I ran on my own digital manifesto, and had quite a bruising encounter with the government whips of the day pulling me out for opposing the Digital Economy Act. I’d like to be able to return to work in that area. We need to stand up for greater transparency in powerful institutions and within government – the government very quietly disassembled some of that legacy.  For example, the Department for Education advises people who seek to set up free schools on how to set them up so they don’t fall foul of the remit of the Freedom of Information Act. I want to make sure we can revisit that transparency renaissance, but obviously that isn’t up to me; that’s up to Ed. I’d be happy either way. I don’t have personal ambition any more, but if it works for him, I’d do that.”

Speaking of personal ambition, only a few days before Watson and I met, David Miliband stood down from Parliament. Many have remarked that if a handful of MPs had voted for David as second preference rather than Ed – as few as four people, depending on whose calculations you use – David could have been leader instead of Ed. Watson backed Balls, but came out towards the end of the contest for Ed Miliband as his second preference. So was it, as some have claimed, “Watson what won it”?

“I was pledged to Ed Balls from day one, but fairly early on into the contest it became likely that second preferences would play a key role in the election. I genuinely had an open mind at the start. I didn’t know whom to go for, but Miliband convinced me. On three or four occasions he talked to me about what he wanted to do for the party, the approach he wanted to take, and I just thought, ‘This is a man who can heal the wounds of our recent past and sketch out a vision for a great future’. He won me over. I was pleased and relieved that he won.”

Relieved? Not exactly a ringing endorsement of David Miliband’s leadership bid there. But not as relieved as Ed Miliband and the Labour Party will be if he’s able to help guide Labour to victory in 2015, in the bulk of the 106 target seats the party has identified as crucial to winning.

What’s particularly noticeable is that Watson seems as calm and relaxed as I’ve ever seen him. As he says himself, he’s been on a journey, and at the moment his destination is a gruelling general election campaign. I can’t believe, however, that that will be the end of his journey. Not by a long chalk. Regardless of labels and definitions, regardless of what kind of politician he’s deemed to be, only a fool would underestimate Tom Watson. He’s playing for keeps – ruthlessly or otherwise.

Mark Ferguson is editor of LabourList

This article is from the May 2013 issue of Total Politics

‘Businesses open as usual,’ bellows a big yellow road sign. It squats among prowling JCBs and incipient construction sites preparing to build a new tramline, as you trundle up the high road to Anna Soubry’s constituency office in Beeston, Nottinghamshire.

“Fucking useless, those signs,” snipes a rambunctious Soubry, shooting an icy glance out of the window at the street below, lamenting how the building work closing the road for a year will threaten local businesses.

Her distinctive sharp, blue eyes are narrowed as she rat-a-tats out emails, presumably angry ones, on her iPad when I enter. It’s clear the almost military ‘challenge accepted’ attitude she takes to her new public health brief, which yanked her by the duck-egg pashmina into government in September 2012, also prevails in her constituency of Broxtowe, whose mission she took up in 2010.

Yet despite her barked expletives, no other high-vis banner could be more appropriate perched outside the public health minister’s Nottinghamshire HQ. It’s always business time here.

“I barely see my children, my partner gets pickled off because he doesn’t see me. I work seven days a week, 12 hours a day and I am not exaggerating. I do not have a day off,” she remarks matter-of-factly. I believe her. The convoluted email exchanges between the minister’s office and various other health department apparatchiks, agonising over her tangled diary, meant I’ve had to hop it to the constituency – or “the real world,” as Soubry wryly labels it.

Wearing a casual blazer, her feathery hair remarkably unfrazzled, she settles into a tranquil room set apart from the main office’s flurry of computers, campaign literature and a few health flyers that wouldn’t look out of place in a doctors’ surgery waiting room.

Still, there is a bottle of disinfectant hand gel on the table in this room. A little symbol of her government work truly pervading all areas of life, and not simply because of a brief that, by definition, requires close public engagement. Her remit is all the more intense as she upholds her belief in David Cameron and the party’s modernising wing. Detoxifying the party’s brand, and then reminding it to wash its hands.

One of her fellow Tory ministers tells me the prime minister is always keen to promote modernisers like Soubry, who have “an optimistic view of the world, unafraid of the future, and forward-looking rather than harking back to previous policies”, but points out that “the real opportunity for the 2010 intake to shine will be if we are a Conservative majority government in 2015. That’s going to open up a number of the early stars of that administration, and she’s among that group.”

However, the perception that Soubry is an unblinking Cameron loyalist is something she refutes: “My politics haven’t changed in 30 years, so it’s a bit odd to be seen as some sort of new, young – well, I like the idea of young! – moderniser. No. I don’t agree with everything that the prime minister might believe in.

“But he has transformed the party. He’s made it electable, in a way that it hadn’t been for over a decade. People sometimes forget that.”

From 2010-2012, she was health minister Simon Burns’ PPS, where she earned that ever dubious political accolade, a ‘one-to-watch’.

Burns talks fondly of his former PPS’s talent: “She fights her corner well for what she believes in. I assumed after a reasonably short time of working with her that she’d certainly be one of those people who was in the frame to benefit at a reshuffle, because she was very good and a good communicator.”

He also refers to her belief in the PM: “She totally signed up to the Cameron project.”

Although Soubry points out she’s only ever spoken to Cameron “a few times” and insists, “I’m not an inner-circle Cameroon by any means; I have no direct access to him, or anything,” she clearly believes she owes him her victory in Broxtowe, a tantalisingly slight win of 389 votes: “Of course I’m bloody conscious of how small my majority is; it makes me laugh.”

She also lashes out at the “doom and gloominess” in her own party about Cameron’s leadership: “When people talk about such-and-such a person as an alternative to Cameron, there is no vacancy… What we now need to do is stop people in the party engaging in quite a lot of twattery, and to accept that we’ve achieved a huge amount, and it’s all to play for.

“I came into politics to fight lefties… that’s where political fighting goes. The Tory Party must learn from its own history that when we fight each other, you can guarantee to lose.”

But despite this support, when offered her governmental position by Cameron in last year’s reshuffle, she recalls feeling sceptical. Including herself, the six previous public health ministers have all been female, and even in the cabinet room facing the PM, this did not escape her attention.

“I want my successor to be a man,” she commands. “I’ve noticed that every public health minister has been a woman, and it’s been seen as the soft, girly option. It’s bloody well not, it’s one of the most important jobs… To be quite frank, when the PM said to me, ‘I want you to do public health’, I thought, ‘Oh boss, I respect you so much, but I’m the only woman here and I get public health – I hope there’s no connection there.’

“Maybe I can make people realise that this is not a soft bloody girly option, it is a big serious job. I’m a huge fan of our prime minister… but I did sit there in the cabinet room and think, ‘Boss, you do know what you’ve just done? You’ve given public health to the girl again, except I’m not a girl, I’m a tough old bird’.”

Certainly, her allegiance to the PM does not stop her speaking out. She has barged into the headlines more than once, when branding the UK’s assisted suicide laws “ridiculous”, eating lunch at one’s desk “disgusting”, and linking class to obesity. Both her party and department have had to play down some of her statements, so does she ever feel her frankness constrained by her ministerial position?

“No. No. No. No,” she cries. If only for Cameron’s sake she would sometimes remain this lost for words… “What you see is what you get with me. I say what I believe in and nothing will change it.”

Soubry is 56, an unusual age for a new face who seems set to climb the party ranks, and many see this as a reason for her no-nonsense and opinionated approach.

“She’s not afraid to speak up, and I think perhaps because she’s slightly older, she knows that if she wants to make her mark she’s got to hurry up and make it,” says one Tory minister.

Her age, which she often refers to in asides (“I love good beer, I can’t drink very much of it because it makes me overweight and I’m a woman of a certain age…”), also means experience, and not just in the benefits of restrained ale-sipping. She already has two extra-political careers under her belt, one as a television presenter, and then later as a criminal barrister, having been called to the Bar in 1995.

And she certainly has the self-assured wallop of someone who has built their career in public speaking, whether to the audience of This Morning or a tense courtroom, pausing for effect, putting on voices and accents to illustrate an anecdote, and always devoid of jargon.

Chair of the health select committee Stephen Dorrell remarks that this background means she’s “qualified by experience”, making her “comfortable in her own skin”.

He also praises her outspoken nature: “She’s clearly a very vigorous minister, and is not frightened of controversy. She’s observing the Jo Grimond rule, which is that if you want to make a difference, you march resolutely towards the sound of gunfire. Well, she’s doing that.”

Usually an acerbic critic of politicians, the Daily Mail’s parliamentary sketchwriter, Quentin Letts, also lauds her former career: “Being a criminal law barrister, she’s seen a lot more of human nature than the rest of us. She’s looked into the eyes of pretty unpleasant people and called them liars. She’s brave.”

Indeed, Soubry talks casually of defending clients 70-80 per cent of whom were “heroin and crack addicts and/ or alcoholics… I was very much in the real world.”

Perhaps “defending the indefensible”, which is how she describes her life at the Bar, is a skill appropriately suited to party politics. Yet Soubry insists that outside experience is a common trait in the 2010 intake, rather than making her unusual.

“We’re not the stereotypical politicians of the past. Poor old Cameron went out and said, ‘I want people from all sorts of backgrounds’, and of course, that was brilliant – and now he’s paying the price because he can’t hurt them and whip them.

“It probably causes the whips so many headaches; they can’t hit the button that says, ‘You’ll never be a PPS’ because you say, ‘Yeah, like I’m crying’. I’m coming in from a third fucking career, so I want to do a particular job because I believe in this.

“There’s this stereotyping that if you’re a politician, you are ruthlessly ambitious. Bollocks, it’s not true. I came into this because I believe that the Conservative Party has the solutions to the problems that we face.”

Without acknowledging it, Soubry is actually atypical of the current governmental cohort because of her background. When growing up, the Hartland Grammar School in Nottinghamshire she attended became a “forced comprehensive”, with the catchment area including villages on the outskirts of the old mining town of Worksop, as well as “an area of town where a lot of the poorer mining community lived”.

She recalls the resulting school as “really rough… We were having lessons in the corridors for about three, four years before they built the actual facilities.

“So it was all fun and games,” she quips in one of her many pleasingly incongruous Malory Towers-esque turns of phrase that pepper her speech (“I used to knock about with a bunch of lads who played rugby” is another favourite, when discussing binge-drinking culture).

She continues: “I went to school with a significant number of children who came from some of the most deprived backgrounds in England. I knew and understood deprivation…”

And other typical Tories don’t?

Soubry is too shrewd to differentiate herself like that, quickly trotting out the Cameron-friendly mantra, “It doesn’t matter what your background is, it’s where you go.”

But she’s firmly aware of how her past has brought her to Parliament, revealing that “I got into politics in the first place because I wanted to make things better for everybody, especially people from those [deprived] backgrounds.” She does, however, display affection for her past career, at one point forlornly protesting, “My life before I was elected was extremely pleasant. In sharp contrast to what it is now.”

Presumably because “now” is all about improving the nation’s health, without appearing to dictate its lifestyle for fear of playing the dreaded “nanny” role.

The MP for Broxtowe is well aware of walking the high wire between responsibility and intrusion. She insists she’s now “convinced” of the government’s proposal for Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP) on alcohol, which has recently been mysteriously muted – “it’s still official policy,” her piercing eyes widen in innocence – having hitherto been concerned about “ordinary lower-income responsible drinkers”.

Yet she still sees why such a measure could be ill-perceived: “Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely understand why it would be that someone at a senior level in government was saying, ‘Well, the political cost would be… [that] it looks like a step too far, it looks too much of a nanny state’.

“You have to get the balance right, especially with public health, so that you take the measures that benefit the public’s health, but without causing people to resent you so that you actually don’t cure the ill that you seek to cure.”

Surely there are some cantankerous Conservatives, particularly in the backbenches, whose kneejerk reaction is to see the entire public health brief as nannying, particularly if Soubry slams our eating habits publicly and calls for a ban on smoking in cars when children are passengers.

“No, it’s not as simple as that. I have colleagues in the parliamentary party who would strongly deny they’re on the right of the party, but who are also not in favour of MUP. It’s about proportionality and it’s about balance.”

But how to strike this balance? I infer from her ensuing tirade that she’d like to use her own strong, personal leadership to steer the public health remit away from ‘state interventionism’ jibes.

“It’s [public health policy] been seen as girly, nanny stuff,” she immediately launches into a high-pitched, saccharine agony aunt voice: “Oh, do eat your five a day! What’s your weight? Don’t drink too much. Do you care about this, that or the other?

“I will never give any quote advising people on what they should or shouldn’t eat, drink, smoke, anything… the idea that anyone is going to listen to me giving advice on salt is ludicrous. That’s the job of health professionals… [they’ve] got the credibility, I’m a politician, I have no credibility.”

Still, she is forthright about tackling how “it’s become acceptable to go out and drink yourself to oblivion”, a cultural shift she discusses at length, while suspiciously eyeing the students at the college opposite outside the window.

She also insists a “great British calorie challenge” is needed to counter “devastating” obesity, particularly in children, a third of whom are either overweight or obese at 11. This is why she urges local food businesses to sign up to a Responsibility Deal, from “the Italian restaurant, the pizza takeaway place and the chip shop”, to reduce their calorie-count, salt, and trans-fats. And it’s not just chippie customers who should beware – even in Parliament the salt sachets have been known to disappear on occasion.

And she’s not afraid to bring class into the debate, although admits the language used around this subject must be delicate. “If you come from the most deprived backgrounds – you can’t say ‘poor’ any more, for some reason,” she huffs – “the statistics show that you’re more likely to be overweight or obese than if you come from a less-deprived background.

“It’s deeply complicated. If you’re a mother, and you’ve got your own problems – say, your partner probably has either beaten you or has cleared off – you’re living a chaotic life in any event, you might have depression, or drink too much… Obviously it’s far less easy to prepare the sort of food that you would if you lived a more structured life.”

This ability to discuss emotive issues involving class and cultural values without flinching, unafraid to cause offence, is rather rare. It stands Soubry in good stead to make her mark on this government, even if, in 2015, her party can’t secure a majority – or “full-fat as opposed to semi-skimmed”, as she describes it, slipping amusingly from the food health message.

Suddenly, she leaps out of her seat. “I’ve got to go and see someone about building a bigger fence.” She roars: “That’s the life of a politician,” and off she darts, with barely time for a disinfected handshake. Business as usual.

We know who Tom Watson doesn’t like. We know some of the music he does like. We know the campaigns he has led and supported. We don’t know too much about what he wants to achieve in politics. So Total Politics sat down and talked to him about it. Watson talked about it at some length.

Labour’s campaign co-ordinator is feared by many in Westminster – for his achievements and due to the myths which swirl around him. Watson’s formal position provides him with great power within the Labour Party. His past as a Brownite bruiser lingers like a black eye – a fact Watson himself acknowledges when speaking to Mark Ferguson. Watson sees himself as a man who has been on a journey. At 46, he is in his political prime and with his description of a “quiet revolution” taking place as Labour commits to “re-laying roots in communities,” places himself at some distance from Parliament.

But don’t think Watson doesn’t seek the ear of Labour’s leadership – he explains how he wants to work closely with Ed Miliband. The word ‘revolution’ crops up again when discussing party machinery and fundraising. Watson’s role is not to be the public face of Labour but he is hugely ambitious about transforming it behind the scenes. Turn to p54 to find out why knowing Tom Watson will be essential to understanding Labour as the general election themes develop this year.

Anna Soubry is the most shoot-from-the-hip, gung-ho politician among the Tory 2010 intake. The Conservative minister’s brutally honest bon mots pepper her interview with Anoosh Chakelian like bullet holes from a Tommy Gun. You can’t accuse Soubry of holding back. Head to p28 to see the results.

The one truth that spin doctors would never publically admit is that they love a crisis – the messier the better. The language used by them in Dan Hodges’ fantastic piece on p40 reminded me of the old adage that soldiers never feel more alive than when in battle. Government and politics is forever accused of short-term fire fighting, but one section enjoys just that over any pre-planned rigidity.

Here's the cover:

Thatcher's chemistry: What was elementary in her life? Our handy periodic table explains it all...

To view the periodic table of Margaret Thatcher, click HERE

This is a special preview from the Total Politics May 2013 issue, pictured below:

Dunne argued the stockpile meant operational commanders in Afghanistan were “no longer constrained in conducting their missions”.

Dunne is also a former merchant banker, farmer, charity director and business entrepreneur. In 1987 he co-founded the Ottokars bookstore, which was eventually bought by Waterstone’s. Speaking in only seven debates last year, the former assistant whip doesn’t court controversy.

After working as a merchant banker for 20 years, Dunne contested and won his family constituency of Ludlow, Shropshire, in 2005. The historically safe Conservative seat was lost in 2001 in a surprise victory for Liberal Democrat Matthew Green. By the 2010 election, however, Dunne regained constituency support with a quadrupled majority.

He holds strong views on defence issues, voting for a replacement of Trident, and voted vigorously for an investigation into the Iraq War, but is firmly anti-ID cards. He is also a eurosceptic, using his maiden speech to attack the European constitution. In 2004, he spoke at the party conference, calling for a repatriation of powers from Brussels. He did not support the gay marriage vote, saying: “I believe that religious marriage is the union between a man and a woman for the upbringing of children, and that is how it should stay.”

During the international debate over military use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or ‘drones’ last year, the minister spoke in favour of the technology, suggesting that he was aware of only “one incident of civilians having been killed by weapons deployed from a UK UAV”. There is no legal or ethical difference between drones and their manned equivalents, he believes: “There is always a human in the loop.”

Describing himself as a “lifelong Conservative”, Dunne has campaigned for the party since 1974. In 2001 he worked in the party’s Central Office on the campaign for securing London seats and became Treasurer of the Ludlow Conservatives, before securing the nomination to be party candidate in 2002.

And he comes from a political dynasty. His grandather, Captain Philip Russell Rendal Dunne, was elected Conservative MP for Stalybridge and Hyde in 1935 and Captain Dunne’s father was Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Marten Dunne, elected Liberal MP for Walsall in 1906.

Like his father, Dunne was educated at Eton, but then went on to Keble College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics.

Despite his background, the minister believes in connecting to the electorate through non-political work: “Politicians can contribute most to their communities if they have experience of the world beyond politics.”

Dunne had a lengthy business career prior to politics. After graduating, he joined British merchant bank SG Warburg for eight years, then worked for James Gulliver Associates before joining Pheonix Securities, an adviser to the financial services sector, where he was a partner for 10 years. 

Dunne’s opinion polling website tellphilip.com brings a quirky element to his style of representation. Polling all Ludlow constituents on matters ranging from immigration to the environment, one notable 2006 survey asked over 6,000 local residents who would make the best prime minister. After 80 per cent of replies favoured David Cameron, Dunne led the PM’s Shropshire campaign.

In early 2010, Dunne slammed Labour’s proposed fiscal responsibility bill to tackle the deficit – “one of the thinnest pieces of legislation that I have seen since I arrived in the House” – and criticised the government for “moving the goalposts” on borrowing limits. In this, he anticipated the “this mess we inherited” policy line, part of a successful coalition strategy to identify Labour with economic incompetence.

Dunne has been responsible for his family farm near Ludlow, where he was brought up, since 1987. Married with two daughters and two sons, he cites the town as his home.

Dunne is the trustee of several local charities. Having a daughter with diabetes sparked his interest in diabetes research and he was also the director of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation until 2005.

There’s something that the northwest has been crying out for for many, many years, delivered now by this coalition government.” Thus did the chancellor George Osborne tell journalists on 3 October 2011 that the government had approved detailed funding for the Mersey Gateway, a new toll bridge across the river Mersey to be built just east of Liverpool.

It wasn’t entirely new. Osborne had already agreed to fund the bridge in the previous year’s spending review. But the funding package actually pre-dated the coalition; it had been agreed under Labour five years earlier. The project had only been waiting for the green light from government when the 2010 general election was called. This was a political announcement, timed for maximum effect on day one of the Conservative Party Conference.

From the Mersey Gateway to Crossrail to High Speed 2 (HS2), big infrastructure projects have found no more loving adoptive parents than the coalition parties, who seem to like nothing more than donning hard hats and visiting construction sites to emphasise their commitment to investing in infrastructure. Rumours that Crossrail, the £15bn east-west rail line across London, would be scaled back evaporated soon after the 2010 election. Philip Hammond, who, as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, promised to slash departmental budgets, was appointed transport secretary and moved quickly to defend his £33bn budget for the HS2 rail link. Behind the big-ticket projects, the government has started publishing regular national infrastructure plans in a bid to show the industry it means business.

In fact, parties of all stripes have seized on infrastructure investment as the way out of Britain’s economic doldrums. When in January Nick Clegg gave an interview attacking his own government’s policy, he chose to hit out at the cutting of capital spending on items like infrastructure. Ed Miliband, too, called for it in his recent One Nation speech.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the financial crisis of 2008 struck, no recent British government had tried to form a coherent infrastructure policy. As Andrew Rawnsley observes in his book The End of the Party, transport was “a Cinderella department” under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. While France, Spain, Germany and Italy spent the 1990s and 2000s building gleaming high-speed rail networks, Britain’s railways languished. Energy fared no better. “It costs £7bn. Do you have £7bn?” was Brown’s reported response to the idea of a tidal energy barrage on the River Severn. Social infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, got the attention – and the money.

Stephen Ladyman, a former Labour transport minister, argues: “Yes, there probably has been a shift in emphasis… However, the economy was stronger then and growing steadily so they [Blair and Brown] could afford to invest in social infrastructure.”

As well as political will, countries like France and Italy have a long tradition of getting the private sector to invest in roads. Jean-Francis Dusch of banking firm Compagnie Benjamin de Rothschild, who has advised the French state on infrastructure deals, notes: “Obviously, in France the road toll is acceptable; in the UK it is less so. In France, you find the quality of the [tolled] network is not something you find in the UK; it’s better.”

‘Creaking’ is a recurring word to describe our current infrastructure. A McKinsey report from 2011 found that the UK’s roads carry more freight per kilometre than any major economy except Japan, and that rail passenger traffic is at a 60-year high, on a network 40 per cent smaller than in the 1950s. With demand for road, rail and broadband going up, and many power plants nearing retirement age, the risk is that the economy will be held back if we don’t add more capacity for energy, transport and telecoms. Announcing investment can encourage businesses to settle here.

Moreover, as politicians call for a rebalancing of the economy away from financial services, there’s a very wholesome flavour to an industry that puts spades in the ground. They can be used to launch apprenticeships and training programmes (as with Crossrail), and with a sufficient pipeline of projects to bid for, contractors can be persuaded to set up shop here, delighting ministers and MPs in the process.

With the public finances under strain, politicians couldn’t be more enthusiastic about channelling private cash into this new infrastructure. But this is fiendishly complicated; and it’s here where political promises face the risk of unravelling. The coalition is targeting £20bn of investment from pension funds, insurance companies and specialised infrastructure funds over a decade. If this is to happen, politicians need to grapple with some uncomfortable home truths.

Principal among them is that many pension funds can’t stand construction risk – the risk that a project won’t get built due to unforeseen problems. While they have happily invested in existing UK airports, a new airport of the sort Boris Johnson is quite keen on might not only overrun its budget, but also fail to generate expected revenues.

Speaking to investors last year, London Pensions Fund Authority chief executive Mike Taylor was blunt: “not very much” of the infrastructure plan would come from pension funds, he said, adding that he had little interest in funding new build because of construction risk. “Would you invest in HS2, which is a line on a map and probably will never be built? Probably not. Would you invest in Boris Island [the proposed new airport near London]? Probably not.” This is the kind of visceral, deep-seated scepticism that needs to be overcome, if grand promises about attracting new investment are to mean anything.

Once a privately financed project is up and running, it needs to generate a return to investors. But post-financial crisis, they are more risk-averse than ever. Big capital doesn’t just want a revenue stream, it wants it guaranteed, hence the current system of awarding licences for transmitting electricity from offshore wind farms, on which billions need to be spent if the UK is to meet its 2020 renewables target.

The regime gives licensees a 20-year contract to operate the transmission equipment between an offshore wind farm and the grid. After bidding for a licence, the investor either builds or buys the equipment and receives inflation-indexed payments. They are paid regardless of whether the power is needed, and the maximum fine if the lines are unavailable is 10 per cent of a year’s revenue. The costs of the licences are eventually passed on to consumers in their bills, with little incentive for keeping those costs down.

This arrangement has been criticised by the National Audit Office and public accounts committee, which called it “heavily skewed towards attracting investors” in a report last year. Committee chair Margaret Hodge told one investor: “I can’t see what value you are adding… no value, no benefit – except you are making a lot of money.”

Such views may play well in the media and the Commons chamber. For Jeremy Barker, a director in KPMG’s infrastructure advisory practice, they miss the point. “If you present to a sensible investor ‘would you like to own this transmission cable under the sea and you only get paid if the wind farm operates as expected?’ they say, ‘Do I control the wind farm?’ – No. ‘Do I control the wind?’ – No. ‘Do I have a shipping line that can fix the wind farm if it’s broken?’ – No.

“The government said ‘we will pay you for capacity’… and you got a proper competition with a number of interested parties and raised money,” he points out.

“So when Margaret Hodge comes out and says, ‘This is an outrage, the government is guaranteeing the price’… [the government] must realise that it wouldn’t have got the money if it hadn’t done that.”

Private finance is no respecter of political priorities: it looks for good deals and if it doesn’t see them, walks away. “Big companies will invest here because it’s easy to understand English and if deals are structured correctly because of the relatively ‘safe’ environment here, but they’re not wedded to UK plc. I don’t think the government seems to appreciate that often enough,” Barker comments.

Similarly, the coalition is now preparing to use revenue subsidies to guarantee a minimum unit price of electricity to builders of new nuclear power stations. It entered office promising not to do this, but failed to persuade the industry to invest.

Government is between a rock and a hard place. Plans for attracting private finance to the 4,300-mile strategic roads network were due to be announced by ministers last autumn, but nothing came of it, and it’s not hard to guess why. One way of guaranteeing a return without government cash would be to toll the entire network. But Cameron has already promised he won’t do that.

The alternative, as some industry sources hint is on the table, is to carve up the network into regional private companies, similar to water or electricity providers, and introduce some kind of road pricing. Just as the laws governing the water system guarantee that suppliers can recover their investment through charges, so a parallel regulatory system could be introduced for roads. Properly run, it would offer a safe return to investors. It would also be politically toxic.

Ladyman was at the Department for Transport when plans for nationwide road pricing were announced in 2005. Although intended to reduce congestion, he acknowledges that the plan had the secondary aim of creating a revenue stream to pay for selective road-widening or traffic management measures. But the public was having none of it. Nearly 1.8 million people signed a petition on the Downing Street website opposing road-charging and calling it “sinister and wrong”.

“People took the view they were already paying for the use of the roads [through taxation],” he recalls. “They perceived user charging would be a charge on top of that… Try as we might, we couldn’t get the Treasury to say they wouldn’t be charged more.” In the end, Labour backed down, and the Conservatives derided the policy. No wonder they are now hesitant. Cutting fuel duty could sugar the pill, but would the Treasury play ball this time? As well as the problem of pricing, a water-style regime itself may prove unpopular: witness the controversy over Thames Water applying an £80 surcharge to bills to pay for a new giant sewer, despite paying hundreds of millions in dividends in recent years.

Politicians love opening shiny new infrastructure; Margaret Thatcher was enthusiastic about the Channel Tunnel. She was lucky, however, not to be around when its owner Eurotunnel went bankrupt. Today, no such deal could be financed; the private sector would demand government-backed guarantees. The big issue is one of funding – of who pays in the end. If we want new infrastructure, you and I will have to pay more, through higher taxes or higher consumer charges. The question is, can politicians deliver this message without getting shot?

“I don’t think that young people are any less qualified to vote than someone in their 40s, 50s or 60s,” says Stephen Williams, the Liberal Democrat whose campaign to extend the franchise makes him our MP of the Month. He’s speaking from experience. Having spent 20 years visiting schools, sixth forms and further education colleges, first as a local councillor then as an MP, he’s had plenty of opportunity to hear from younger people about politics.

Williams’ persuasive work recently led the House of Commons to vote in favour of lowering the voting age in all UK elections and referendums. While largely symbolic at this stage, it is the first time that the Commons has expressed support for the rights of 16 and 17-year-olds to have a say in government. The vote passed by a majority of 73, supported mostly by Lib Dem, Labour and nationalist party MPs, but with a scattering of Conservatives too.

Winning the support of the House has been a long battle for the Bristol West MP. “I introduced a bill in November 2005, which failed by just eight votes,” he says. “That was the last time Parliament voted on it.” Then titled ‘Representation of the People (Reduction of Voting Age)’, the 10-minute rule bill met with Conservative opposition on the grounds both that overall voter turnout would fall and that the public, allegedly, didn’t want it. 

Yet it looks as if opinion may now have shifted. Last October David Cameron and Alex Salmond signed a deal allowing 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in the Scottish independence referendum, which Williams describes as “arguably one of the most important votes any UK citizen is going to cast over the next decade”. As the referendum is scheduled for autumn this year, the MP thinks young peoples’ inclusion in the specific vote could pave the way to their complete enfranchisement before the next general election. “I very much hope we can get it in place before 2015,” he says.

What happens then? “If I succeed in doing that, there will I’m sure be a huge public engagement exercise by Members of Parliament and councillors up and down the country to engage with young people,” he says. Williams envisages the difference that election debates in schools will make when the students participating are actually able to vote. “I think it will really reinvigorate the interest of young people in politics in realising they have the power to make a difference,” the MP says hopefully. It may not be too far-flung an idea; the student protests of 2010 showed the ways in which government policies can motivate young people.

The only Lib Dem MP to sit on the political and constitutional reform committee, Williams combines optimism about the campaign with a dose of realism. “We have to find a mechanism for actually changing the law,” he recognises, adding that he thinks the most likely method will be “to tag a new clause onto a government bill about constitutional reform”. In a hint at policies to come, he suggests the Queen’s Speech in May will announce new constitutional reform measures. He says: “We’ll be trying to persuade the government to at least give it time so the Commons can debate it and vote on it. Then we might be able to get it passed.”

Currently the chairman of the Lib Dem backbench committee for Treasury matters, Williams was formerly the party’s spokesperson for innovation, universities and skills.

The MP’s care for young people’s representation is self-evident, as he has also served on the children, schools and families committee and education and skills committee. In 2006, he organised the latter committee’s first inquiry into bullying in schools, following up with a campaign against homophobic bullying in schools. Despite this, Williams’ voting record reflects the Lib Dems’ turmoil after joining Cameron’s coalition. Notable for a politician so dedicated to the rights of the young, he abstained from the vote on higher tuition fees.

Yet the long-standing campaigner has achieved a sizeable symbolic victory in securing the Commons’ support for votes at 16. If all goes according to Williams’ plan, younger people can prepare to play their part in choosing the next government.

From the editor

Stephen Williams represents a certain committed breed among politicians: an MP who genuinely cares about extending rights to people who don’t presently hold them. The votes at 16 campaign is a controversial cause but Williams has repeatedly shown his commitment to it, both in 2005’s narrow defeat on the issue and this year, when he finally succeeded in winning the support of the House. How 16 and 17-year-olds will react to being able to vote is another question, but the principle is clear. If politicians like Williams are willing to listen to the voices of the young on the issues that affect them – employment, Educational Maintenance Allowance, housing benefit and student fees – it will be a positive step forward. Politics can only benefit from young people’s input.

Ben Duckworth