So why are there so few disabled people in these elected positions of leadership, authority and power? For several years now, Scope has been monitoring attitudes towards disabled people in general, and, disturbingly, those more often than not out of the public gaze are reporting that attitudes towards them are worsening. The latest results from the poll shows that almost half of disabled people in the UK (46 per cent) say that attitudes towards them have degenerated over the last year.

More than two-fifths of disabled people (45 per cent) say they feel discriminated against at least once a week, and the majority (58 per cent) say they feel a stranger has acted in a “hostile, aggressive or violent way” towards them because they’re disabled.

These are horrifying figures. At the heart of the problem is a lack of visibility and understanding of the reality of the lives of those affected. One of Scope’s survey respondents summed it up: “I really feel that until there are more disabled politicians with a high profile there will never be a good understanding of the problems disabled people have to deal with.”

And that’s why increasing the number of disabled people in elected positions can have a profoundly positive impact on the public attitude. Four in five disabled people felt having more disabled politicians would have a positive effect on how they are treated.

Which shouldn’t come as a surprise; politics at both a local and national level is intricately woven into the fabric of our society. It’s the route through which we, as citizens, can ensure our voices, thoughts and opinions are heard and considered when decisions that fundamentally affect our lives are being made.

Being part of our political life not only creates the space for disabled people to play a key role in these decision-making processes, but can also lead to increased visibility and familiarity in everyday life. 

Having successful disabled role models in visible public roles will go a long way to raising disabled people’s self-esteem and confidence, another barrier in itself. It sends a clear message to those with physical challenges that, despite the barriers we face, we too can achieve great things. But it’s easier said than done.

Last July, the government took a huge step forward on this issue and introduced an Access to Elected Office for Disabled People Fund. The fund gives prospective candidates the opportunity to apply for a grant to help them meet the extra costs they face running an election campaign if they’re disabled.

“I have mobility impairment and suffer from severe arthritis, which makes getting out and about really difficult,” said Karen Bellamy, a councillor in Waltham Forest. “I knew I had the skills to make a difference to my local community but spent 15 years worrying about how I’d be able to cope with the extra costs I’d incur if I ran for office.

“Being able to apply to this fund to help pay for the extra costs I faced as a disabled candidate would have made a significant difference to me, and I hope it will do so for prospective candidates.”

The fund certainly goes some way to addressing the financial barriers disabled people face, but in order to apply for it they need to know it exists. All political parties should be doing all they can to promote the fund through their various channels, as well as building better links to the organisations that represent disabled people to ensure that the message is heard loud and clear.

Upcoming local elections provide the greatest opportunity since the fund was launched for the disabled countrywide to make use of this support. It’s also important, however, to consider that finances are only one set of the barriers faced. Improving the election process to make it more open and accessible is another way to sidestep obstacles, as well as introducing better outreach to identify prospective disabled candidates.

It’s up to political parties and candidate offices across local authorities to sit up and take note, to ask themselves what steps they’ll be taking to attract more disabled candidates and diversify the often ‘closed’ world of local and national politics.

It could genuinely make our society a better place for disabled people.

Alice Maynard is the chair of disability charity Scope and a member of the Access to Elected Office for Disabled People Fund advisory panel

It’s the day of the local elections and South Shields by-election. The holding piece for the early edition is easy – the rise of UKIP is the only story in town – but for the second edition I try to make it about the winning candidate. I’ve got four hours before the results come in, a real luxury.

It’s a safe seat, so I tell the story of Labour’s Emma Lewell-Buck, just leaving gaps for the victory speech and results. Then the count comes in.

The Lib Dems have been obliterated. They’ve come in seventh with half the votes of the BNP. UKIP is doing even better than expected in the locals, and the story I’ve spent four hours crafting gets spiked.

Every minute that passes, another 3,000 copies roll off the printer without the result in it. I bash out my copy in 15 minutes. All good plans…

***

The Queen’s Speech doesn’t seem to have gone down too well with the troops. I collar an old hand as Her Majesty’s carriage is trotting back to Buckingham Palace.

“Not bold enough. It just feels like housekeeping,” he tells me. “There’s so much wrong with this country that needs sorting out, and we’re going to be debating an intellectual property bill and a consumer rights bill, which amalgamates a bunch of laws that are already there. It’s a Queen’s Speech for a government 13 years in, not three years in.”

I try one of the 2010 intake to see if he’s less cynical. “What a disappointing eight minutes,” he says gruffly. “I shouldn’t have bothered coming in.”

***

“How are your plans for Wig Wednesday coming along?” my news editor asks. I think back – weeks ago my ed told me Metro was supporting this year’s Wig Week, organised by children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent; we needed pictures of politicians wearing wigs for it.

I think ‘hair’ – and think Boris, but he won’t do it. I have more luck on the Labour frontbenches. Shadow home affairs minister Gloria De Piero’s up for it, and shadow climate change minister Luciana Berger will do it as long as others do.

Shadow minister-without-portfolio Michael Dugher jumps aboard. It’s starting to look a bit Labour-heavy… “I’ll get a cross-party gang along,” Dugher tells me.

I book a photographer for half an hour before I know there’s a three-line whip vote, so that they’re all there. Job done. I’ll wait till I’ve got the picture in the bag before telling them they have to wear the wig for the whole day…

***

To Ed Miliband’s office in Norman Shaw South for drinks with journalists. That morning his local paper, the Camden New Journal, ran a story on his heroics in helping a young woman knocked from her bike.

I know he’ll be forced to retell the story a dozen times, so I quiz him on Tory backbenchers pushing for an EU vote instead. “You know what,” he tells me, “when I was on my pallet” – he stood on one to speak to the people of Brixton – “I only got one question about Europe. Lots about immigration, but just one about Europe.”

He’s right.

If the Tories look like they’ve spent their time in power obsessing over Europe come 2015, they’ll lose.

***

I’ve been called up to do BBC’s Daily Politics. They’ve paired me up with Helen Lewis from the New Statesman. If TV shows have two guests, they often like them to have opposing political views.

Oh god, I think to myself as the countdown starts in my earpiece, Helen’s clearly got the left sewn up: I’m going to be forced into expressing some far-right view I don’t agree with.

“How did it go?” I ask my wife afterwards. “Very good. That woman you were with was nodding along as you were talking. I don’t know what you were saying, but it looked good.”

***

It’s a bank holiday and I refuse to join the exodus. Instead, family Higginson takes the tube to London Zoo to see its new silverback gorilla.

My wife always tells people she’s “at two” with nature, but I’m hoping young master Higginson, aged 18 months, will be an animal lover like me.

He appears to be following in my steps; a dog can’t pass his buggy without him trying to leap out to stroke it.

On the way I wonder how he’ll react to an animal bigger than a dog... At Gorilla Kingdom there’s just glass and about three feet between us and our magnificent 22-stone cousin.

His watermelon-sized head is resting on his chest, and a fat, sausage finger comes up to pick his nose.

Hector’s pointing and shouting – he’s so excited he’s not even trying to form words, but it doesn’t matter. I’m thinking the same thing: “Wow!”

John Higginson is the political editor of Metro

Just who is Chuka Umunna? Come to think of it, what’s the proper pronunciation of ‘Chuka Umunna’?

“A-moon-ah,” one of his aides explains helpfully. “It’s as it looks. People tend to overcomplicate things a bit.”

Perhaps that’s because Labour’s shadow business secretary is a complicated man. In fact, to describe Umunna merely as Labour’s shadow business secretary itself feels like a ludicrous oversimplification.

The Umunna brand is cool, it’s sexy and it’s trendy. In an era where the cry is “they’re all the same,” it’s difficult to think of many politicians who look and feel more different. One adviser to Tony Blair once said to me, “When the public look at a new leader they ask themselves, ‘Can I imagine spending the next five years looking at this guy?’” It’s not hard to imagine the public wanting to take a second look at the MP for Streatham.

Umunna isn’t just another MP. He’s a brand. A concept. A walking, talking political franchise. Or maybe he isn’t. Perhaps that’s just hype, spin. Maybe’s there’s nothing there, save for a sharp suit and an engaging smile.

One thing’s for certain; being Chuka Umunna in the Labour dressing room is hard. “You do know what all the MPs think of him, don’t you?”, one shadow cabinet source asks me. No, what? “They all hate him.” Why do they hate him? “Basically, because they’re jealous of him.”

Soon after Ed Miliband was elected Labour leader, I was speaking to one of his shadow cabinet supporters, and asked who “Ed’s People” were. One of the first names they mentioned was Umunna’s. I put it to them that, given his high profile, the newly elected MP for Streatham was effectively walking round with a big target on his back. “They’re out to get him,” I said. The shadow cabinet member smiled: “Perhaps. But they haven’t got him yet.”

Two years on, they still haven’t. Most new MPs who enter the Commons with a reputation take one of two paths. They pick one or two issues that resonate in their constituency, and keep their heads down − effectively starting again. Or, they adopt a high profile and try to trade off their celebrity. And invariably crash and burn.

Umunna did neither. He entered Parliament, traded on his celebrity and, against the odds, prospered.

One of his first acts was to draft an ‘alternative budget’ and get it published in The Guardian. He got appointed to the high-profile Treasury select committee, despite his lack of seniority. “Just watch. He’s the Streatham Icarus,” one MP told me disparagingly at the time.

But Umunna was about to make his mark. On 18 February 2011, he received a reply to a letter he’d sent to Bob Diamond, the then boss of Barclays, asking him to make good on a promise to publish its tax payments. The letter revealed Barclays had paid just £113m corporation tax on profits of £11.6bn, and sparked a national outcry. Umunna later explained to the Daily Telegraph how he’d spent hours studying videos of Diamond’s speeches and trawling archives, just to prepare his case against Diamond, using techniques he’d learnt when preparing cases as a solicitor at city law firm Herbert Smith. Eight months later he was appointed to the shadow cabinet.

So, Umunna knows how to play the politics of opposition, but does he have any politics himself? One shadow cabinet colleague believes he does, but thinks it’s in danger of being obscured by the contrails of his meteoric rise. “In the beginning he was being oversold – mainly by Chuka himself, actually. Now I think he’s being undersold. He’s definitely got something about him. There’s much more to him than the hype. The question is whether he has the space to develop his thinking. He’s certainly got some interesting ideas – on industrial strategy, for example.” 

If Umunna does have some politics, it’s not easy to identify their ideological underpinning. I first got to know him when we were both doing work for Compass, the leftwing think-tank-cum-anti-Blairite campaign vehicle. At that time we were probably closest to the Brownites in terms of our political worldview.

But in the leadership election, Umunna came out strong and early for Ed Miliband. “It was a gamble,” says a friend. “David Miliband was the safe bet, and it was David who the CLP [Streatham] endorsed.”

No sooner had Ed Miliband been elected than Umunna appeared to shift again, embarking on a flirtation with the Blairites. It emerged that he had meetings with Peter Mandelson, and a private audience with Blair himself.

“That was a mistake,” one shadow cabinet member says. “The Blairites reached out, and he ran towards them too fast. He let them turn his head, especially Mandelson. But to be fair, he’s pulled back now.”

Umunna may have demonstrated some slaloming in terms of his key political relationships, but his speeches and articles show a willingness to push boundaries. In an article for the website Left Foot Forward in May 2011, he became the first senior Labour politician to road-test the ‘One Nation’ slogan that has recently become his party’s mantra.

Setting aside the ‘Blue Labour’ label that was all the rage at the time, he wrote, “The ‘Blue Labour’ label can perhaps be misleading – ‘One Nation Labour’, perhaps, would be more appropriate, signposting Ed Miliband and Labour’s determination to win back support across the country and across all demographics.”

He was also one of the first Labour frontbenchers to acknowledge – and confront – the challenge posed by David Cameron’s global race narrative. Dipping into his personal biography, he told an audience of businessmen last November, “More and more countries are seeking to move up the value chain, in direct competition with us, to meet the new demand coming from the emerging economies. There are, of course, the BRICs, but the ‘Next 11’, too, coming through, like Nigeria, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where we have strong historic ties. My father’s native Nigeria has grown at an average of seven per cent a year over the last decade, despite all its governance issues. If we are not preparing for success in these growing markets, we are simply preparing for failure.” 

None of which necessarily gets us any closer to an understanding of Umunna’s core beliefs. “What does Chuka actually believe? Well, that’s the big question,” says a former Compass colleague. “But look, he’s got the communications and personal skills to come at his politics from any angle. When we were working together, this wasn’t the easiest place to be. You didn’t join Compass because it was the smart career move.”

What was a smart career move was becoming the MP for Streatham. Those who watched Umunna lining himself up for his parliamentary bid again paint a contradictory picture. “He was no carpetbagger,” says one party activist. “He lived in the constituency and was active for years. Kept a relatively low profile. He spent most of his time working up the party newsletter.”

But though he may have kept his head down, Umunna also kept his eyes open. And he had a strategy. “Yes, he’d always lived in the constituency,” says one party member who knew him, “but he kept moving. He moved house three or four times, always to a different ward. That way he was building up relationships across the constituency. It was very clever.”

Good tradecraft, or cynical politics – either way, Umunna’s nomadic existence gave him a base. But it didn’t guarantee him the seat. “People think it was handed him on a platter,” says one party worker, “but what they don’t realise is, Chuka wasn’t even the favourite. The front runner was Steve Reed [the former leader of Lambeth Council, who was recently elected to Parliament in the Croydon North by-election]”.

When people arrived for the selection, Reed was the presumptive nominee. “But he gave a pretty poor speech,” says one party member, “and then Chuka stood up. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about him, but he gave this brilliant speech, without notes. It swung people behind him.”

Umunna is certainly a good communicator. Wooing a bunch of Streatham CLP delegates, however, is not the same as wooing the nation. What evidence is there that the man frequently dubbed the “UK Obama” has what it takes to perform on the biggest stage?

“I’m not entirely convinced by him,” says one Labour official, “but he’s got something going on out there with the voters. Our private polling shows he gets better name recognition than Ed Balls, for example.”

The Conservative Party also senses danger. A couple of days after David Miliband announced his departure for New York, the Sunday Telegraph’s Matthew d’Ancona wrote, “Now that he is off to NYC, the Tories can stop worrying about the return of the older brother, perhaps as shadow chancellor, and concentrate upon Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, as the Labour politician whom they (correctly) see as the biggest threat on the horizon.”

It certainly seems someone has been concentrating on him. Over the past couple of months a slew of low-grade attack stories has suddenly started appearing, including the revelation that Umunna has a penchant for exclusive nightclubs, had been editing his own Wikipedia page and is amassing a collection of expensive watches. He even earned his own personal name-check in the prime minister’s response to the Queen’s Speech.

The Streatham MP’s friends say this is just proof that he has his opponents rattled, but some of his shadow cabinet colleagues think political dangers lie closer to home. “The risk is he lets himself get locked down,” said one. “He was actually better off when he was floating. He shouldn’t really have let Ed appropriate him. And he should never have taken the job [shadow business secretary] when it was offered. It restricted him just at the moment he should have been building his own political definition.”

This analysis is supported by another friend. “He took on too much,” he says. “He admits it himself. He’d just been elected, he was trying to set up a parliamentary office, then he was drafted onto the select committee, then he breaks through and the press all want a piece of him, then he’s suddenly the shadow business secretary... He’s very honest. He lost control of it all a bit.”

Another colleague says Umunna’s biggest challenge has been cultural. “The problem for Chuka is everything around here’s a zero-sum game,” says one shadow minister. “People basically think if someone is doing well then they must be doing badly. There isn’t really any sense of a shared project.”

Most people who know Umunna well say despite all the scrutiny – some of it self-generated – he is alive to all this, and remains relatively self-aware. He has a large staff, but is careful not to flaunt it. “He’s got a lot of guys working for him, but to be fair, he doesn’t show them off,” one Labour adviser tells me. “He doesn’t wander round with an entourage.”

A friend from Streatham concurs: “When I first knew him, he was what you’d expect, young and ambitious, but he’s matured quickly. He’s definitely grown.”

He also has one other advantage. Labour’s pool of talent, by common consent, is shallow. “The reason he’s getting so much attention is, who else is there?” asks one MP. “Yvette [Cooper] and Ed Balls are still laying the same tunes. Sadiq Khan. Rachel Reeves. What are they really offering?”

Another MP thinks Umunna’s rise is as much a testament to the paucity of the debate in Labour’s ranks as it is to the paucity of talent: “We don’t do ideas at the moment, so instead we look for personalities.”

Umunna is certainly a big personality, but to return to the original question, is he anything beyond that? Having spoken to a lot of people about him over the past month, the short answer is ‘yes’. Time and again the same phrase kept popping up: “He’s definitely got something”. The problem is, pinning that “something” down is very hard to do.

There is a popular perception that spin and hype are used to mask shallowness and political deficiency. In Umunna’s case, the opposite is true. The branding is hiding something substantive.

But having allowed himself to be locked too early into the straitjacket of his own shadow cabinet portfolio, he’s finding it hard to reveal what that substance actually is.

Yes, Umunna knows how to play the political game, but at various stages in his embryonic career he has already shown a willingness to take risks: his Compass activism, his early endorsement of Ed Miliband, his refusal to play by the normal Westminster rules.

“He mustn’t lose that,” says one MP. “He’s let himself become too taut. He needs to be a bit edgier.”

His friends made efforts to keep his feet on the ground. In response to one of the early features on Labour’s ‘rising star’, Compass colleagues took to standing and bowing when he entered the room. “He took it pretty well,” one recalls.

Another former colleague recognises the extent to which the shadow business secretary remains something of a political enigma. But he is hopeful:

“I’m like that guy in the film Witness. If you ask me, can I look into Chuka Umunna’s soul and honestly tell you here’s a good man or a bad man? No. But he deserves the chance to show us what he can do.”

Who is Chuka Umunna? I’m not sure. But it’s worth hanging around to find out.

When Chris Huhne is released from prison in a few months’ time, he will be handed £46 in cash to help him with his journey home, given a plastic bag filled with his clothes and personal belongings, and be sent on his way into the car park by the guards at the prison gate. If he’s lucky, he might receive a few words of encouragement, rather than the more common ‘See you soon’ reserved for the regular customers.

As Huhne was sentenced to less than a year in custody, he’ll never be bothered by a probation officer, and is unlikely to be in touch with a mentor, mental health worker or drug treatment specialist. He will receive zero support or advice aimed at preventing him from re-offending. In fact, he’s much more likely to have picked up a few tricks of the trade from his cellmates.

Now, this might all be fine if you’re a highly-educated former banker, journalist and politician, but what about the thousands of drug-addicted, alcoholic, chaotic, workless and mentally-ill men and women who make up much of the rest of the partakers of our prison system? Can it be right that the state offers no support whatsoever to short-term prisoners upon release, or that the support it offers to those serving longer sentences is often limited to a weekly cup of tea in a busy office with a stressed-out, overburdened probation officer?

Many prisoners genuinely want to turn their lives around but simply don’t know where to start, and many working in the criminal justice system want to help support offenders, but can’t. The government’s ambitious reforms of probation are designed to cut through all of this and generate, for the first time, a laser focus within the system to prevent people from coming back into it.

The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, has chosen payment-by-results as the mechanism to achieve this, a principle Policy Exchange has long advocated as a solution to tackle stubbornly high re-offending rates. The state will say to providers, ‘Cut re-offending, and we’ll pay you in full. But if you don’t, we won’t’. This is potentially revolutionary.

There will be a new, powerful commercial incentive for providers to innovate, driving badly-needed culture change within the system. More than a decade of micromanagement of probation from Whitehall has meant that professionals have become completely overrun with process, reports, input measures and backside-covering paperwork. It has now reached the point where probation officers literally spend more time on their computers than they do with offenders. The system is crying out for change.

As the public sector cannot be allowed to fail financially, payment-by-results inevitably means opening up the probation system to new providers who have the capacity to take on significant financial risk and invest in the new services required to cut rates of re-offence. Inevitably, critics argue that this is just dangerous privatisation and the ideological introduction of a nefarious profit motive for those providers who will be charged with cutting re-offending.

It seems strange that in this country people object so vociferously to the idea of a company making money by helping people, but yet we have absolutely no problem with companies which make money but don’t help anyone. Many would actually prefer to keep a service that didn’t cut crime or change lives, so long as no one is making any money out of it. Could this be one reason why bright, talented UK entrepreneurs choose to found tech start-ups rather than help tackle our deep social problems?

But leaving aside the quality of the country’s public service reform debate, what people are missing here are the huge opportunities these reforms will have for the professionals working in our system. These reforms could set them free from the bureaucracy, inertia and risk aversion that currently holds them back, and they will give them the freedom to try new things, to be rewarded for success and to enhance their professional training and status.

There are many details that the government must get right. It should adopt Policy Exchange’s idea that the most hardened criminals attract a higher tariff, so that the hardest-to-help get proper support. It must devise a new measure of re-offending that ensures providers don’t just cream off the easy cases, or park the hard ones. It should wrap the prison system into these reforms too, by setting each prison an individual re-offending reduction target. This will ensure that offenders are properly prepared for release and don’t fall through the cracks. The government could also start training a nationwide army of ex-offender peer mentors now, so that they can be ready to go when the new system is up and running in the next 18 months.

So, there are lots of important decisions to be made about exactly how the new system should work, but one thing is certain: if the government isn’t blown off course by the howls of protest from those with vested interests in the criminal justice system, prison guards might find themselves saying, ‘see you soon’ a little less often.

Max Chambers is head of crime and justice at Policy Exchange

TALK

Why did Britain give up its Empire?

Dr Sean Lang lectures on the decline of the British Empire. Examining the reasons behind the Empire’s fall after the Second World War, Lang asks whether the cause of the Empire’s retreating borders was the inevitable march of history, a triumph of terrorism or a graceful change of policy at the top. Lang is senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in the history of the British Empire. His books include Nazi Foreign Policy 1933-1939 and Parliamentary Reform 1785-1928.

22 May, London Jewish Cultural Centre

DISPLAY

Diplomatic Dignitaries  

Hidden away in Room 23 at the National Portrait Gallery is a collection of comic caricatures of important diplomatic figures from overseas. On display are five original sketches by the artist Leslie Ward, including the first Chinese minister to Britain, Kuo Sung-t’ao, and the exiled Grand Vizier of Turkey, Midhat Pasha. The portraits were originally drawn for Vanity Fair, whose editor commissioned Ward to depict “the numerous foreign rulers, who have visited our islands from time to time”. Nicknamed ‘Spy’, Ward used covert study to acquire his likenesses. The exhibition also draws on Ward’s memoirs and Vanity Fair’s explanations of the significance of the foreign statesmen depicted.

Until 14 July, National Portrait Gallery

BOOKS

London Literature Festival

For over two weeks, the Southbank Centre will be hosting this literary festival of authors, speakers and poets. Readings by the ten authors nominated for this year’s Man Booker International Prize kick off the festival. Festival highlights include readings by Lionel Shriver, Audrey Niffenegger and James Salter. China Mieville and Rebecca Solnit also discuss their work. Philosopher AC Grayling lectures on humanism, while 40 leading women poets and performers read the whole of Sylvia Plath’s celebrated work Ariel. Celebrated biographer Claire Tomalin also presents five lectures, the first of which is on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

20 May-4 June, the Southbank Centre, London

David Cameron remains a frustratingly ill-defined character. Come June 2013, he will have been Conservative leader for over seven-and-a-half years. His smooth features are yet to develop deep lines from the stresses of his time so far in office. This youthful façade hides well the steadily mounting pressure from his own party. A cynical wag might point out that this is due to his ivory tower existence among Downing Street’s chumocracy.

Certainly the PM has failed to keep large tracts of his parliamentary party onside. History, though, may mark Cameron more kindly than his political contemporaries for his party management. A quick rewards culture has risen among the 30- and 40-somethings entering Westminster. There is little appetite for serving long years on the backbenches.

Allied to this, the Conservative Party’s culture shock upon entering a coalition government suggests bloody battles await if the 2015 general election finishes in another hung Parliament. It may be that any Conservative leader would have struggled to maintain order in such circumstances. Of course, Cameron ‘failed’ to win in 2010 – a black mark he finds it impossible to rub out. And then he started playing tactics with the EU. We await the consequences of opening that particular Pandora ’s Box.

Our interview, on p50, covers much – Europe, the two years remaining until 2015, his inner circle, and relationship with George Osborne. I was particularly struck by his answer to what should happen if the Lib Dems block further Conservative measures. This PM just might try it alone.

This is my last magazine as editor. I’m heading off to a new challenge. It has been a fantastic experience working on Total Politics alongside immensely talented colleagues, past and present. My first interview for this magazine was with Gordon Brown in No 10 way back in 2008. Now I sign off as editor with a David Cameron cover. An awful lot has happened in those intervening five years in British politics and it has been a privilege to witness it. Thank you, most of all, to the readers.

Ben Duckworth • Editor | editor@totalpolitics.com

"When I first saw Total Politics I felt that the magazine was in need of support and clear direction on how to illustrate basic words with clear design.

“I take inspiration from everywhere and I apply those influences to my work and in this instance for the design of Total Politics. The name itself, Total Politics, is a source of inspiration since it holds all the colours of the British politics.

“I wanted to simplify the magazine with my design – giving a distinctive character to the various parts of the publication and supply the readers with the right signpost of each section, then furnish the pages with linear and brand new fonts and custom-made photography.

“I hope that with the redesign of the mag and the website we have more people following us."

The Conservatives Party’s 2010 general election campaign put David Cameron up front, even if he was a bit too air-brushed. The rationale was clear: he connected better with voters than Gordon Brown did, even if the poll evidence was not always conclusive.

Ditching Brown gave Labour a popularity boost of around four percentage points, but political parties rarely think strategically when choosing replacement leaders. By electing Ed Miliband, Labour had clearly not learnt from the post-Blair experience, or it would have made jolly sure that David had won. They are now saddled with a sub-optimal choice of leader compounded by the widespread view – still – that he nicked the leadership from his brother, whose recent departure they so vocally regret.

Fast-forward to today, and the ‘presidential factor’ – Cameron versus Miliband – is central to the Conservatives’ 2015 election hopes.  But will it work? It’s certainly risky. Cameron polls badly in terms of being seen as ‘just a slick salesman’ and too posh, but you can get away with being a toff as long as you’re a competent toff, and that’s where Cameron’s positioning on the economy helps him.

First, though, why the presidential style of campaign? One reason is the received wisdom that just as Brown dragged his party’s poll ratings down, so Ed Miliband will do the same, whereas, in contrast, Cameron is, so the line goes, the political equivalent of Viagra. There is indeed some sense in this logic, as the table below shows:

In April 2010, Ipsos MORI asked a similar question about whether voters liked Brown and/or the Labour Party. The equivalent figures are startling because Brown’s net rating in 2010 was identical to that of Cameron today (-23 per cent) and the Labour Party’s net rating was also similar to today’s, at -11 per cent. The difference, however, is that the proportion who said they liked Brown in April 2010, at 37 per cent, makes both Cameron, on 26 per cent, and Miliband, on 19 per cent, look pretty unpopular. Now the question wordings are different, but it suggests that while Miliband’s popularity rating really is dismal, Cameron has little reason to be upbeat either.

As far as the two main parties are concerned, there’s not much to divide them on economic competence. However, there is when we look at the leaders, and there’s plenty of polling showing that Cameron is seen as a safer pair of economic hands than Miliband. However, just as their net popularity ratings are all negative, the three party leaders and their economic sidekicks all have negative net ratings on running the economy. See graph opposite below.

Why is this important? Because, despite Miliband’s exemplary claim to economic superiority – he was giving economics lectures to students while Cameron was on the opposition backbenches – his association with the last government makes him seem at least partly responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.

Given that the economy eclipses every other issue in every issue tracker you care to name, the 2015 election message will surely be that a vote for Miliband would be a return to the ‘bad old days of spend, spend, spend’.

But why could the presidential strategy not work? The problem is simply one of risk. In ancient times, the death of a leader in battle would mean slavery or worse for the defeated side; likewise, in a presidential-style election battle if Cameron were caught with his trousers down, or suffered a catastrophic failure in authority, there are 303 Conservative MPs whose careers depend on him.

So the gamble will be that at a time of crisis voters will flock to the security of whom they know. While this may be true while Cameron has a lead over Miliband on the economy, it has not really helped the Conservatives so far. They still trail Labour by around 10 percentage points.

For Labour’s part, it’s harder to see how a presidential election can work, given their leader’s unpopularity. Miliband will make more of a virtue of his ‘One Nation’ approach by portraying that Labour is a party united in tackling the country’s problems, in contrast to the in-fighting Conservatives. He will also be keen to highlight his ‘ordinary Joe’ appeal.

Ultimately, though, whether the 2015 election is truly presidential depends on whether the broadcasters succeed in getting the parties to agree to leader debates again. And here Cameron is in a tricky position because of the likelihood that Nigel Farage will demand inclusion, and Cameron risks appearing a coward if he refuses. Without the Farage factor, however, Cameron has less to fear from them than Miliband does.

Andrew Hawkins is chairman of ComRes

The pace of government appears to have quickened for David Cameron despite being three years into a five-year parliamentary term. In an illustration of the PM’s diary, our interview is pinned tightly between a briefing on Syria and a meeting with Prince Charles. The prime minister has had several difficult weeks when Total Politics meets him in his inner sanctum within No 10, which is a moderately sized room with comfortable sofas – and, incidentally, about a third of the size of the deputy prime minister’s office.

As I sit down, I notice the sofa is well-worn, and as I look across at the prime minister, he looks like he’s had a particularly long day. The ‘chillaxed’ PM, who was said to thrive on date nights and ‘Angry Birds’, is a different man. The burden of the most demanding and loneliest of jobs has, metaphorically speaking, furrowed his famously smooth brow. He is anxious to sell his message, to convince, to be evangelical about his beliefs. While he still exudes an easy charm, this is a much more businesslike, less casual politician.

We meet as Cameron faces accusations that could prove fatal to a Conservative prime minister − that he is losing control over his party on Europe. Many of his MPs are discussing how to deal with the threat from a burgeoning UKIP. Cameron sweeps any talk of a reactionary rightwing lurch aside with a dismissive, “That’s not going to happen under my leadership.” And the threat from Nigel Farage and co?  He is diplomatic: “Well, UKIP obviously performed well in the local elections and, as I said after those elections, we should listen carefully to what people who didn’t vote for us this time have to say. There’s a very clear message – they want us to do more to sort out the issues they care about; cost of living, welfare, dealing with immigration. People are frustrated there hasn’t been more progress in these areas, and of course we need to do more. But the government is taking action on all of these issues – we’re tackling out-of-control welfare spending, we’ve reduced immigration, and I hope that over the next two years we can win back many of these people, both by getting our messages across and also by doing more to help them.”

Despite all the confused, angry noises on Europe from his own party, the prime minister believes he has the right policy on the EU. A procession of Tory grandees has questioned Cameron’s policy of renegotiating with EU partners and putting the result to the British people. But he’s not for turning. “I do not agree that we cannot get anything from a negotiation with Europe,” he says. “People said we wouldn’t get the European Union to agree to a cut in the seven-year budget, and they agreed to it. They said we couldn’t get Britain out of the EU bailout fund, and we did. There are many things people said we couldn’t get from the EU that subsequently we did. As for the referendum, what I want to see is a reformed EU; that’s why I’ve pledged to negotiate a new settlement and then put that to people in an in-out referendum. That will be the time to have a full and frank debate about our membership.”

Would life outside the EU be disastrous for Britain? “Of course Britain could make her own way if we chose to do so, but, as I say, we’ll have to ask ourselves, is that what we really want? I’m confident that we can negotiate a new settlement and make the case for Britain remaining in the EU with that new deal. I’ll consider any options to strengthen our commitment to holding that referendum in the next Parliament, but there are clearly difficulties for the government in introducing legislation while we’re in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.”

Over the past five or so years, Cameron has had to lead his party out of opposition, negotiate and maintain the first coalition government in living memory and tackle arguably the biggest economic crisis the country has ever faced. His personal life also has not been without difficulty, most notably the losses of his father and his first-born son. I ask him who he turns to in his darkest and loneliest hour. His response is instant: “Sam. She’s amazing in every single way. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have her.”

Samantha and David have been together for a long time. A semi-embarrassed PM puts his hands over his face as he describes how they met: “She was a very good friend of my sister Claire. We have an argument about when we met, but I think it was when she was 18.” It wasn’t quite ‘love at first sight’, though, because as Cameron says, “She was this very laid-back, very chilled, rather cool friend of my very cool younger sister, and I was the sort of square brother. I got to know her on a family holiday, and that was pretty much love at first sight.”

I ask what in the Cameron book of romantic tricks finally wooed her: “She claims I was the first boyfriend who had a car and asked her out to dinner… but it took a couple of years to persuade her to marry me.” Oh, and apparently Ed Vaizey was wrong – Samantha never voted for Tony Blair.

Over the past eight years, it has become apparent how very important family is to the MP for Witney. And he still loves to talk about them when I ask him what they get up to at his constituency home. “Elwen loves playing football for the village team. Nancy is starting to show enthusiasm for planting things, so weekends are pretty active. We all like cooking, and there’s usually a fight over tossing the pancakes.”

But it’s difficult to manage a family life with such a demanding job. Cameron works every day of the year, one way or another. There’s no escape from modern communications, but wasn’t this what he spent his life preparing to do, I ask? “No,” he says firmly. “Look, I wanted to become a member of Parliament, as I believe in public service. I was passionate about doing that, but I didn’t know where becoming an MP would end. I certainly spent the near-five years as leader of the opposition… thinking what I would do as prime minister.”

Of course, a lot of the thinking in opposition went straight out of the window, as the country found itself in a dire economic crisis. Cameron believes this has framed the terms of his premiership: “I became prime minister at a time when what was required was an economic rescue job, and I still see that as the most important priority for the government – turning the economy around, paying down the deficit, getting people back to work, getting the economy moving. That’s the absolutely first and central task of this government. I’ve always believed that you can do other things at the same time, and many of them are linked to our economic performance – reforming our education system, reforming our welfare, encouraging the Big Society, and people volunteering and putting more back into our country. They’re all linked, but at the heart of this has got to be an economic rescue.”

The PM, however, is very frustrated and impatient; it shows in the way he regularly jerks forward to emphasise a point. Perhaps it explains the change I detect in him from a couple of years ago when I last did a lengthy interview with him. For him, government is too slow and unresponsive. “We spent a lot of time in opposition thinking of the right policies and thinking of the right programme,” he says, “but I think we should have spent even more time thinking about how to make government work better and faster. I wish we’d spent more time thinking about just how furred up the arteries of government had got through the extent of judicial review, the extent of consultation, the difficulty of getting things done, the enormous amount of additional bureaucracy, the number of non-departmental governmental bodies... but I think we’re now cutting those quangos, scaling back judicial review, cutting the amount of consultation periods.”

The job has also been, in this and other respects, different from what he anticipated. Cameron watched other prime ministers from close quarters but still was not quite sure what to expect as PM. He says national security counter-terrorism “looms much larger in reality”. Foreign affairs and diplomacy also takes up a huge amount of a prime minister’s time. “I knew that would be the case,” he says, “but I suppose it appears larger in reality. It means you have to make sure you use the rest of your time for the most important parts, such as the economic programme.”

Looking at the job of our country’s leader from the outside, it’s quite difficult to understand what keeps him going. “Well, I wake up every morning and feel an immense sense of responsibility for what I have to do. But also, it’s extremely challenging and very satisfying because all the time you feel you’re getting things done that matter,” is how he puts it.

The day we meet he has opened a big global investment conference with all of the world’s biggest financial institutions and businesses present in London. “I had to open with a speech to tell them why I think they should invest in Britain,” he continues. “I passionately think that Britain’s a brilliant place to do business, and it was an enormous privilege to have them all there in the room and have half an hour to sell my country as hard as I possibly could to them. So, every day there’s something that’s challenging, interesting, potentially good for the country and really worth doing... there are frustrations every day as well, but I still find it both challenging and stimulating.”

One of the big frustrations is coalition government, and in particular the Liberal Democrats reneging on a deal on boundary changes. “Yes, that was immensely frustrating,” Cameron says. “The coalition has its frustrations, there’s no doubt about it, and we have disagreements. Sometimes those disagreements mean you can’t take actions in the areas you want to, but when I stand back and look at the coalition, I still think what’s remarkable is how radical we have been in making really important changes in our country.” He points to changes in education, welfare and those outlined in the Queen’s Speech to show how radical the government continues to be.

Despite his clear frustrations, he still believes the coalition “should go the distance. I’m here to deliver good government for the country, and we’ve still got important work to do – paying down the deficit, turning round the economy, and all the rest of it. What matters to me, though, is can we get things done? Can we improve the state of the country? Can we fulfil our manifesto? The best way to do that is to continue with the coalition, but if that wasn’t the case then we’d have to face the new circumstances in whatever way we should.” 

Does that last sentence suggest that there’s a line across which the Lib Dems should not stray? Should we be thinking about general elections? Is there a chance Cameron will go once again for one of those big, bold game-changing political initiatives that has marked his leadership of the Conservative Party, particularly when his back is against the wall? Perhaps, although he also speaks with gusto about the next two years: “A lot of people thought that after two Queen’s Speeches we would have run out of steam. This one has actually got some very important measures in it that will make a difference to our country and will help our working families.” He points to changes of importance that the next two years will deliver – a single-tier pension, reform of the care system, prisons and probation, for example.

A lot to do and achieve, but it would be foolish not to recognise that the PM has some tough fights ahead, and questions are being asked if the cabinet and the No 10 machine is up to the job. His view is clear: “Machines always come under crisis, and I would defend the people who work for me. Often, people have a go at them when they really want to have a go at me. We have a very strong team. Could we improve the communication of the message? Yes, of course, I think you can always do that.”

He also speaks up strongly for his cabinet: “One of the questions in politics is, ‘which are the dogs that aren’t barking?’ and ‘what’s different about this government from previous governments?’. I’ve had the same home secretary for three years. She’s doing a brilliant job – cutting immigration, cutting crime... I’ve had the same chancellor for three years, and he’s reduced the deficit by a third. I’ve had the same welfare secretary for three years – he’s undertaking the most enormous reform of the welfare system. I’ve had the same education secretary for three years, and he’s turning around Britain’s schools. How often has a prime minister been able to say that about all the key figures in the cabinet?”

It’s notable that Cameron is still singing the praises of his chancellor, and the two are known to have an extremely close relationship. As if to prove the point, our interview is interrupted by George Osborne needing “an urgent word with the PM”. I sit outside, as Osborne and Cameron speak in an animated fashion – they clearly are at complete ease with each other. This is the axis on which this government spins. Although Cameron has said in the past he would move or sack his chancellor if necessary, it looks extremely unlikely: “On the key judgements and questions I think he’s right,” Cameron affirms. “We’ve worked very closely together in opposition and in government – a government is a bit like a business; if the chief executive and the chief financial officer don’t work together, that’s very bad for the business, very bad for a government. I find it incomprehensible how Tony Blair managed to be prime minister for so long while having such a bad relationship with his chancellor.”

One of the biggest headaches for the PM has been party management, and I ask him about class becoming an issue within the Conservative Party. Although his answer is perfectly clear and fair about judging people on their merits and what they have to offer, he appears uncomfortable discussing it. “To get all these things down to issues of class, and where you went to school and everything else, is wrong,” he says. The class issue links into his relationship with his backbenchers, which continues to cause him problems, particularly over Europe. Mistakes have been made and the PM acknowledges them: “A lot of politics is about relationships, and working on relationships. You can always do better – the relationships you have with cabinet colleagues, with ministerial colleagues, with backbench colleagues, the time that you put in, the listening that you do… Now we’ve got a better programme of engagement and a better way of listening to people’s views and making them feel part of a shared project. I think it’s [more] difficult in coalition.” He believes that a gap can develop between those inside and outside the government that is more sharply drawn in coalition, so you need to work harder at it.

The grassroots Conservative Party is also an issue, as membership has dropped sharply in recent years and is geographically limited. Cameron doesn’t see the drop in party membership as a particularly ‘Conservative’ problem, though. As he points out, “All political parties are challenged by maintaining and growing a mass membership.” But he also suggests that the party has a stronger local council base than when last in government, and reacts strongly to the suggestion that the Conservative Party is geographically narrow. He points to the winning of seats in 2010 across large swathes of the country, and in Wales (but still not in Scotland).

I put to him that even with the positive circumstances of 2010, the Conservative Party still peaked at only 36 per cent of the vote. The Conservatives didn’t win enough of those blue-collar Tories. Can he win a majority? “I firmly believe we can win a majority, even on the old boundaries,” he says with complete conviction. “The main reason I say that is because people understand that these are difficult times, that this is a government having to take tough decisions, but that we’re making progress – the deficit is down by a third, immigration is down by a third, welfare is being capped. And where is the Labour Party on all of these big issues? Absolutely nowhere. They want more borrowing, more spending and more debt, they opposed our measures to cut immigration, and they oppose capping welfare. So, I think we’re winning the big arguments in politics that people will consider when they are making up their minds in 2015. Now, on top of that, we have the 40/40 strategy, which is how we campaign in the key target areas. Winning the big arguments and having the right campaigning apparatus in place means we can definitely win the election outright.” 

Cameron claims that Labour’s performance in the local elections under Ed Miliband compares unfavourably to Michael Foot in 1981 – “And of course we all know what happened to Michael Foot at the subsequent general election.”

This comparison might be a little questionable, considering how open the 2015 general election looks, but, two years away, we know the key themes that Cameron will campaign under. The prime minister lays out the Conservative pitch as “continuing on the road we are on to turn the country round” versus Labour “who will take us back to square one”. In terms that will be very familiar by 2015 he says: “So that is the choice – continue making progress to sort the economy, welfare and immigration, or go back to where we came from with a Labour Party that has learnt none of the right lessons from its mistakes.”

Cameron also has the blue-collar Tories in his sights, as he believes they and others didn’t vote Conservative because they still had doubts about the party. His strategy is to demonstrate to those who work hard, support their families and do the right thing that the government is on their side. He also believes they’ll respond to the fact that the government is stopping the wrong people getting rewarded. “It wasn’t a fair country”, he says, adding, “but we also need to think about making sure the Conservative Party remains broad, open, tolerant and inclusive; we shouldn’t try to find all our votes in one place.” 

The ‘Heineken’ Conservative who reaches places other Tories can’t is, of course, Boris Johnson. I ask if Cameron finds Boris’ jockeying for position irritating and whether he thinks the London mayor can become prime minister?

“Boris can do anything and I would never put a limit on what he can achieve”, replies Cameron. “He is one of the biggest assets we have in the Conservative Party. We are very lucky to have lots of good people who could make excellent leaders. But the next leader of the Conservative Party will not be a decision for me – that is one decision that I will not have to take.”

It appears the frustrations of coalition and slow government will continue to dog a PM desperately keen to deliver for the country. His desire to turn the country around is not in any doubt, but his ability to achieve what he wants still is. He now has two years to focus on delivering what the British people want.

To be successful, he will need to be both courageous and businesslike.

Rob Wilson is MP for Reading East

The magnificently-named Sir Cloudesley Shovell was a post-Restoration admiral whose naval exploits were, in their day, as famous as those of Nelson a century later. In two stints, he was also a member of Parliament.

Shovell had over 30 years’ service at sea when he first entered Parliament for Rochester in 1695. Rochester was heavily influenced by the navy, due to the nearby Chatham Dockyard, and the Admiralty could often effectively nominate one of its two members. Even before the expected dissolution of Parliament by William III, it was announced that the town of Rochester had agreed to elect Shovell to the next Parliament. 

In October 1695 he was returned unopposed. His success may have also been assisted by a generous financial contribution to building of splendid plaster ceilings in the town’s Guildhall. At the 1698 and the first 1701 general elections he retained his seat without a contest. He continued to contribute to other building works in the town, including the Butcher’s Market (now the Corn Exchange) in 1706.

As an active naval officer, Shovell was not a regular Commons attender, being given leave of absence as required. However, his name does appear from time to time, largely on naval matters. Though this era was one of loose political factions, often defined by their connections with the court, rather than of clear parties, Shovell was generally regarded as a Whig rather than a Tory.

As an MP, he was also subject to requests from his constituents for patronage. For example, in April 1697, he had to be suitably obsequious when having to reply in the negative when Rochester’s mayor had asked him to employ a particular person as his naval surgeon.

Shovell’s dealings with Parliament were not just as a member in the Commons. Twice his service at sea was the subject of close and critical scrutiny, with his naval career in peril. The first instance, in 1693 before he became an MP, involved two fellow admirals, jointly commanding the Fleet that year. They were ordered to protect a large convoy of merchant ships sailing from England to the Mediterranean from the enemy French forces, but unfortunately were unable to prevent a strong French fleet destroying much of the flotilla.

The three admirals were heavily criticised, even by King William at the State Opening in November, for their apparent failures, and both Houses began inquiries. Eventually all three were stripped of command, though Shovell, as the sole Whig, was treated far more leniently and able to resume his career.

Three years later, the Commons instituted further inquiries, this time into alleged naval failings in the summer of 1696. Shovell, by then an MP, was critically examined several times by the House that autumn. This time he escaped censure, though these parliamentary criticisms clearly affected him.  One contemporary noted that, “Sir Clowdesley (sic) says there is no storm so bad as one from the House of Commons.”

Shovell did not stand at the second 1701 general election and was out of Parliament for four years. He sought a return at the 1705 election, but matters were complicated by the local custom that Rochester’s two seats were split between a naval officer and a local landowner. Another senior naval officer, Sir Stafford Fairborne, was keen on securing the ‘Admiralty’ seat, and so claimed that Shovell should be regarded not as the sailor but as the country gentleman. Although Shovell refused to go along with this, both were safely returned unopposed on 8 May.

Shovell died in strange circumstances, when his vessel, the flagship HMS Association, was shipwrecked off the Isles of Scilly in October 1707. It was never conclusively determined whether he drowned, like all his crew, and was washed ashore, or survived only to be killed on the beach for his jewellery. 

On his death, Queen Anne described him as the ablest seaman in her service. Shovell was buried with full ceremony in Westminster Abbey on 22 December and there is in the south choir aisle a large monument to his memory, designed by the celebrated sculptor Grinling Gibbons. Curiously for a naval hero, Shovell is depicted sprawled on a couch, wearing Roman armour and a huge wig.

Yes, says Don Foster

The homes and the communities we live in are vital to our quality of life. Having a home that’s appropriate to their needs, affordable and in a safe neighbourhood are some of the biggest concerns for people and families across the country, yet housing, including the need to build more, has not been given the priority it deserves. This government has changed this, as we saw again last month when the chancellor put housing centre stage in the Budget. I won’t be complacent, however, and claim that we’ve fully solved the housing problem, but the situation is improving, despite one of the deepest recessions in memory.

Many people face overcrowded homes, long waits on social housing lists and the inability to get onto the housing ladder. The causes of these problems and their solutions are, however, complex and go wider than just building more homes, so we’re taking action on several fronts.

Firstly, we do need to build more homes. When we came to power, house prices so far outstripped salaries that an increasingly wide section of society, in particular younger people and families, were blocked from the housing ladder, a straightforward issue of demand outstripping supply. The previous government thought it could build more homes just by creating targets for councils, but in 2010, building had fallen to its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s.

We’ve scrapped the failed house-building diktats and replaced them with incentives. The £1.3bn new homes bonus scheme provides funding for councils that approve the new homes local people need by match-funding these homes’ council tax receipts, pound for pound. We’re also investing £4.5bn and levering in a further £15bn private investment to build more affordable homes. These schemes are kicking in: 118,000 new homes were built in 2011-12, up a tenth on the previous year, and we’re well on course to hit our target of 170,000 by 2015.

We’re also making it easier to build more homes, and to ensure government and private investment produces results. The previous planning system was bureaucratic, slow and bloated, and we’ve reduced over 1,000 pages of planning rules to just 50, facilitating the building of homes where they are appropriate, while keeping the strong protections our beautiful countryside deserves. There are already signs this is working, with over 33,000 new homes given permission between summer and autumn last year, well up on the previous quarter.

Secondly, we need to make it easier to get onto the property ladder – there’s no point building more homes if people can’t get hold of them. It’s financially viable for many would-be first-time buyers to take on a mortgage, but they’re blocked by the sheer size of the deposit needed. Last month’s Budget introduced two ‘help-to-buy’ schemes to make mortgages more affordable: A government equity loan scheme to provide first-time buyers a share of their home’s value, which started on 1 April, and a £130bn mortgage guarantee scheme, which we’ll be consulting on shortly. Both will make it easier for first-timers to get mortgages, and will create vital growth in the housing and construction market. We’re also making it easier for social tenants to get onto the property ladder by increasing the discount under right-to-buy to £75,000 nationally and £100,000 in London.

Thirdly, we need to stop the haemorrhage of affordable housing and the waste of existing empty homes. We’re bringing more empty homes back into use, and tackling the problems of urban blight and squatting, while allowing councils to penalise owners of long-term empty properties with a 150 per cent council tax charge. The last government let thousands of affordable homes be sold off, resulting in a net loss, so we’re building more affordable homes and making councils replace homes sold through right-to-buy with a new home.

In total, we’re investing £11bn of government funding in housing in this spending review period, and all our schemes are starting to bite, in spite of the recession. They’re helping to tackle it by creating growth and jobs in the housing and construction industry.

Housing is a big, complex machine, but we are now heading in the right direction.

Don Foster is the communities minister and Lib Dem MP for Bath

No, says Clive Betts

The country has not come close to delivering the number of homes it needs for many years, a situation exacerbated by the recent financial crisis. We need to build around 250,000 new homes a year.

In 2010, then housing minister Grant Shapps MP stated that, “Building more homes than the 170,000 pa built immediately before the recession was the gold standard by which the government would be judged”. Over the last three years, housing completions and starts and new residential planning permissions have fallen – clearly, by its own standard, the government has failed abysmally.

It’s arguable that housing remains overvalued. While the economic outlook stays bleak, confidence is low, earnings are squeezed and minimum deposit requirements have increased, it’s been difficult to believe that, in the short-term, funded demand for owner-occupation would return to pre-recession levels, and government initiatives to date seem to have supported more the finances of house builders than addressed housing need.

Considerable uncertainty remains about the real impact of the government’s changes in the planning framework on the supply of housing land at local level.

Developers certainly believe there will be a fall in the impetus to prioritise brownfield sites, claiming that the economic situation makes many of them unviable.

Last year’s investigation by the all-party select committee concluded that a basket of measures, covering all tenures of housing, is needed if enough finance is to be made available to tackle the country’s housing crisis. A longer-term approach is essential if we’re to see a sustainable change in supply, matched by affordable demand.

The committee set out four key areas for action, which, taken together, might go some way to raising the finance needed to meet the housing shortfall:

• Large-scale investment from institutions and pension funds, including the creation of a housing investment bank;

• Changes to the financing of housing associations, including a new role for the historic grant on balance sheets;

• Greater financial freedoms for local authorities;

• New and innovative financial models of supporting owner-occupation, including a significant expansion of self-build homes.

Increased investment from large financial institutions and pension funds may not be a panacea, but it could make a significant contribution. We know there is interest among councils and housing associations to encourage institutional investment, while vehicles such as Real Estate Investment Trusts should be revamped to encourage investment.

There are real concerns about whether the affordable rent model is sustainable over the longer term. Concurrently, the historic grant that sits on housing association balance sheets is potentially an untapped resource.

Local councils have a vital contribution to make to the new housing supply and in making land and finance available for development. Further, there’s a strong case for allowing local authorities, within prudential limits, safely to increase their capital borrowing to finance new supply. This alone could release a further £4bn, sufficient to build 60,000 homes.

We were adamant that there must be support for financing new homes for owner-occupation and that this should be combined with encouraging investment in shared ownership and shared equity mortgage products.

Although I haven’t seen the details, it appears that the government has listened to our proposals with its help-to-buy, equity loan and mortgage guarantee initiatives announced in the Budget.

However, we should note that, after many months, not a brick has been laid as a result of the government’s previous, much-trumpeted housing guarantee scheme. Further, the Council of Mortgage Lenders has already said these new initiatives “will take some months to design and put the scheme in place”.

Self-build and self-contracting schemes have great potential to deliver a major contribution to housing supply from a fresh source.

Big institutional change in lenders and councils will be necessary to achieve this, but the government must lead and drive this, using models already working in The Netherlands.

Finally, all this needs to be delivered in parallel with a complementary apprenticeship training scheme. The numbers of skilled plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters plummeted last year as a result of the economic downturn and the depressed housing market. It will be no good finding the financial will to meet housing need if the practical means aren’t there to achieve it.

Clive Betts is the Labour MP for Sheffield South East and chair of the communities and local government select committee

But it is a debate that has unfortunately been hijacked by those who label vast swathes of the UK population as staunchly eurosceptic without sufficient cause. In fact, the evidence at hand can’t do justice to how europhobic politicians seem to think the public is, nor to the privileged position they give the issue of Europe in explaining electoral trends.

February’s Ipsos MORI Issues Index unequivocally shows that most of us have bigger fish to fry than Europe. Concerns about the economy trumped all others by a significant margin; 52 per cent of the public thought it was one of the most important issues in today’s Britain and 34 per cent put it in pole position among all their worries. Europe qua Europe did not even feature in the top ten concerns drawn from the study. In fact, for nearly ten years now, the proportion of voters expressing concerns over Europe in the index has failed to exceed 10 per cent.

Yes, the index did show a significant concern over race relations and immigration, but neither of those things are the same as concern over Europe. For genuine eurosceptics, their disenchantment with the EU extends way beyond its impact on immigration alone.

The situation to-and-fros when you look at how the British people would vote if a referendum on membership were held today, but never with a significant majority voting to leave. This strongly suggests we need to start looking for other reasons why we perceive such disproportionately high levels of euroscepticism in the British population.

It’s partly down to the self-fulfilling prophecy that is Nigel Farage’s popularity. The more hours he spends occupying our TV screens, radios and newspapers, the more we assume he has a point about how much we all despise Europe. His popularity has grown directly in line with his exposure, exposure which has been meticulously managed for the most part. His party delivers a well-targeted barrage of communications which make people feel like they’re somehow missing out on the anti-EU feeling sweeping the nation. But as the Ipsos MORI index shows, there’s simply no such thing.

The problem is, the partly fictional europhobia that Farage is stoking has become the tail that wags the Conservative Party dog. Suddenly, Cameron’s promises of a referendum by 2017 were no longer good enough. The public was demanding more, we were told, assuming away the significant number of people who voted for UKIP simply to get one over on the establishment parties or who may have voted on an aspect of UKIPs policy that doesn’t involve the EU.

A combination of poor economic results and UKIP’s opposition to new gay marriage legislation has turned many rightwingers who would otherwise align with the Tories over to Farage. As ComRes chairman Andrew Hawkins told Reuters when the gay marriage debate was in full swing: "There is good evidence that many UKIP voters are erstwhile Conservatives on the rebound: large proportions are negative about David Cameron and George Osborne on the economy, and about Mr Cameron's handling of gay marriage."

Not one mention of Europe was needed to make that assessement. Nevertheless, more than 100 Tory MPs last week “expressed regret” that the promised bill to lay out plans for a referendum was not brought forward in the Queen’s Speech. This didn’t happen because we as a public are terrified of a new Eastern European immigration wave. It happened because politicians are so keen to appear like they’re doing something to compete with Farage on the issue of Europe that any action was favourable to the status quo.

The 116 rebels in the Tory ranks account for only half of all Tory backbenchers anyway – not exactly a definitive statement that our politicos feel compelled to legislate for a referendum giving the people the right to formalise their anti-EU sentiment because it has reached critical mass.

The fact that the vote was called forward in the first place could simply be a reflection of deep-seated mistrust towards Cameron, ie, his backbenchers wanted to keep Cameron honest more than they actually wanted the referendum pledge put in the government’s legislative programme. MPs fed up with U-turns are wont to devise ways to tie their party down to some agenda or other. It just happens that Europe is in fashion at the moment.

All this blustering saps attention from the issues that genuinely preoccupy us as a nation. Or, to put it in Clegg speak: "endless navel-gazing" over Europe is an unwelcome distraction.

Ironically, if the argument was genuinely being driven by public affections and not political point-scoring, we’d soon see that it’s in our national interest to maintain our allegiance to the world’s largest trading bloc. Why risk losing jobs and potentially erecting new trade barriers by exiting when this could compound our economic woes? After all, jobs and the economy are what we really care about, and no amount of anti-EU hype should divert us from addressing those issues.

Siegfried Sassoon’s The Flower-Show Match and Other Pieces is a lovely little collection of his essays, reflecting his journey from romantically patriotic support for the war in 1914 to his horror at the foolish realities of the trenches. His unsentimental nostalgia for the Old England of his youth shines throughout it.

Essays entitled The Tent on the Lawn and Sherston’s First Day Hunting jostle with The Raid and In Reserve. Yet Sassoon ends the collection with Edingthorpe Revisited and Sunday Morning Visitors, as if in justification.

Sassoon chose the name Sherston, a village in the heart of my constituency, for the autobiographical central character of his trilogy, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston’s Progress. His love of the countryside, especially Wiltshire, endears him to me, as does his juxtaposition of the horrors of trench warfare with the peace of tea in the vicarage garden. We fight today to preserve all that’s good about England, yet does that justify the bodies carried through Royal Wootton Bassett only a few miles from Sassoon’s home? Statesmen today wrestle with that as much as they did then.

James Gray is the Conservative MP for North Wiltshire

Gove was an appropriate choice for the annual lecture in memory of CPS co-founder Joseph. He shares the same cabinet position Joseph held for the lion’s share of his time in office, and holds Margaret Thatcher, Joseph’s CPS co-founder, in the same high regard. Gove is moulded by the same influences upon which Joseph built the CPS; free markets, small states, low tax and self-determination.

Just like Joseph, Gove is trying to move the middle ground with his uncompromising efforts at Conservative policymaking. But in terms of public speaking, he fell straight into it last night. The purpose of the memorial lecture, first given by Maggie herself in 1996, is to recall Joseph’s integrity and dedication, both to conservatism and to public service. Gove began by conforming to this expectation, but it didn’t last long. His eulogy was quickly superseded by an equally flattering representation of his own present day cabinet colleagues.

In a painfully methodical fashion, Gove rattled off odes to Jeremy Hunt and the Department of Health, Ian Duncan Smith and the Department of Work and Pensions  - “the welfare system is being reformed not to save money, but to save lives” – Theresa May and the Home Office, before finally singing the praises of Chris Grayling and the Department of Justice.

All of them, he held, embody the same Conservative principles as Joseph and the CPS. “People can achieve amazing things through their work. They rarely achieve anything through dependence on the state,” he said. What was far more revealing than the fairly perfunctory defences of Tory programs however was the cabinet colleagues he elected to leave out of his celebratory report card; Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Ed Davey.

Gove relied on his script far less when he finally got on to his own specialist subject, the Department for Education, providing far more valuable input than what almost felt like a Commons speech up to that point, trotting out stock lines to attacks that were on this occasion invisible.

As he outlined his party’s work on issues such as the pupil premium, Teach First and cutting red tape for social workers, he returned after a significant hiatus to reference Joseph once again. “I know these changes might have commended themselves to Sir Keith had we been blessed enough to still have him around to see them”. The education secretary’s closing remarks on the virtues of increased home building seemed a little tangential, but were at least delivered with some zeal.

When asked about the chances of a Conservative/UKIP coalition come 2015, Gove’s response was initially evasive. “I was told it was always a bad idea to answer hypothetical questions…” A chuckle from the audience opened the door for a more direct continuation in which Gove assured the crowd of his faith that the Conservative Party would win an outright majority at the next election, hence he was “absolutely confident that the situation need not arise.”

The idea of the Conservatives being in coalition with anyone seemed not to sit well with the education secretary, who commented: "I don't think the Conservative Party should form coalitions with anyone", and he also warned of the dangers of reading too much into UKIP’s ascendancy and the Tory slump at the recent local elections. “It’s important that we do not succumb to a council of despair” he insisted.

When quizzed on the direction education reform seems to be taking, away from ‘soft’, more artistic subjects to more rigorous ones, Gove brushed off criticisms that had been levied at him by some in the profession. “There are academics that will attack our reforms because they embody a culture of high standards”, he said, seemingly suggesting that some teachers were on a nefarious mission to promote lax education.

For someone who is normally such a confident, assured speaker, his performance overall seemed a touch wooden and uninspiring. As introductions were made, he sat somewhat awkwardly on the stage, fumbling slightly with his notes. The event apparently didn’t leave one Nigel Lawson, also in attendance, in raptures; a fellow audience member told me he spotted the former chancellor playing a game of chess on his iPad at one point, more concerned with his opponent than his surroundings.

In a sense, it was a missed opportunity for Gove. The lecture would have given him a fine chance to relate the free market, minimal state, individual empowerment agenda Joseph was so fond of to modern education policy, illustrating how the ideas that underpin the CPS have permeated through to Gove’s own thinking in the area. He had the undivided attention of an audience no doubt sympathetic should he have outlined how he planned to continue Joseph’s legacy in the education department even further into the future.

Instead, he ended up spending the vast majority of his time simply defending his fellow frontbenchers, preaching to a Conservative choir that had no doubt heard it all before.