The Conservative Future fuckers hacked my article.

Thankfully their site does not carry bylines so it doesn't make much difference to me. You can't write for a party run website and then complain when you're copy is turned into propaganda. Not even I am that naive. I publish it in its original form below:

Jowellgate: Labour and Love.

The Jowell fiasco has exposed Blair’s 1997 promise of a government that would be “purer than pure” as the sham it always was. It was an easy thing to say in opposition to a Conservative Party then rife with sleaze, but it was naïve to expect that power could shed its old influence overnight.

Tony Blair came to power as a pragmatist and the New Labour practice of muddling through with a hotchpotch of right wing alliances and left wing rhetoric, reflects this. In such a climate is it really surprising to find a cabinet minister, in a government that is clamping down on tax avoidance, married to a lawyer who specialises in the same?

But as the media speculate about how much she knew, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t always this way. When Jowell met her husband in the 1970s they were both Labour councillors, some websites even describe Mills as having held Marxist views. How then did Tessa Jowell view her husband’s transformation into the kind of capitalist who could make Milton Freidman blush?

My own suspicion is that she did her best, as far as possible, to ignore it. Relationships are curious things and, thankfully for me, generally not founded on political accord. My girlfriend and I are currently observing a cease-fire, it’s better that we don’t talk politics because when we do we argue.

So perhaps because they prized their relationship they did not discuss his business. He nurtured acquisitiveness secretly, like an addict; she tried to ignore him as he schmoozed Baroness Symons over dinner as some wives do their conventionally philandering husbands.

Arguably it was the right thing for their relationship, whether it will prove to have been the right thing for her career only time can tell.

First steps

This evening I went to my first Conservative Party event, if you could call it that, Mark Field, Shadow Arts Minister giving a lecture called "The way ahead". It took place in one of the committee rooms at the House of Commons. I like the House of Commons. It smells so strange and the wallpaper and carpets are psychadaelically patterned. I met the Andrew Young bloke, who runs the Conservative future website, outside in the corridor. He was suprisingly elegant, in a blue pinstripe suit and brown slip-on shoes. Tall too, where I had imagined him small, probably because the tories I've met (of my age) have tended to be nerdy and bullied looking. There was another Conservative Future boy there, who conformed to that type exactly, he had buckteeth and lank hair that for some reason he had bleached blonde.

Mark Field seemed pretty smooth, if a bit orange, so that for much of his lecture I speculated distractedly as to whether his tan was real or sprayed on. His voice was plummy, but occasionally the stutter I had heard when we spoke on the phone crept in. He began his lecture by talking about the July 7th bombs. He didn't call them 7/7 bombs although for some reason he mentioned 2003 he said it twenty-oh-three, which I have never heard before.

I really wanted it to be a good talk. But, although he had cards he rambled and there seemed to be a vital point missing from his argument. When I looked at his site I saw that he was a prolific speaker and he reminded me of Richard Mason, the prolific author, for whom touch-typing was a subcortical activity. His argument went a bit like this I think:

7/7 was bad, really bad. It happened on my watch you know (I'm MP for Westminster).
Those signs the other day after the Mohamed cartoons, they were bad too.
They signaled for me the "Failure of Multiculturalism".
Because those suicide bombers were British born and, importantly, educated.
But they were part of a radical political cult, more so than a religious one.
Before Luther, Britain lived under Catholicism that did not admit of heresy.
A bit like Islam.

The most important thing about freedom is owning property(?)

Immigrants, my family were immigrants too, but more of them later.
In Britain our social contract is not codified as a constitution
We don't like to write that kind of thing down.
We don't like rules necessarily, that's part of being British.

My mother was an immigrant from the part of Germany that is now Poland you know.
They left with nothing.
It's very important to be able to own land.
In fact, it's essential to the idea of freedom.

I went to Syria and there they moan all the time about Arabs losing their land to Israel.
My parents were immigrants, and you don't hear me moaning about the land they lost.

Somehow we need to encourage moderation within Islam.
It will probably take a long time and be something like the Cold War.

Really I lost the rest of it.

I did ask a question, about whether you could neatly divide Islamic Fundamentalism, as a extremist political cult, from Islam, as a religion. I got very nervous though and also tried to use the words apostasy and Lutheran (which I pronounced accidentally, in what I now find is the obsolete form, Lutherian) in the same sentence, so it didn't go that well. Then I interrupted his answer to tell him that an Islamic society was necessarily a theocracy. This distracted him from answering my question, which, in all honesty, I'm not sure he intended to do anyway, and gave him an opportunity to tell me that Iraq had been a secular Islamic state. That wasn't really what I meant, I think what I meant was that according to the Koran, and Islamic state should be theocracy, I'm pretty sure, I think James told me it. I couldn't remember the word Koranic/Quranic though, that was my problem.

Questions were more interesting. It emerged that he, and another MP present both voted for Iraq. Field did not regret, the other MP did. Several people said that this was just a "changing of the guard", in that where we had had an enemy in the form of Communism, we now need in an enemy in the form of Islamic Fundamentalism. That the issue was emotive, not real and that we should concentrate on our own economy and developing alternative energy resources that aren't nuclear. There's a lot of this around at the moment. In the Independent this morning and in conversation with Tom on Friday I heard the connection made between the New World Order Blair and Bush want to establish and the end of communism. This was not a link I had made before, stupidly it now seems.

I think there's something awful about those who supported the war in Iraq who are now saying it was a mistake. Also that you can back out of a mistake by saying that you're being humble. I'm sure in times gone they would not have called that humility.

After the meeting I walked with Andrew Young who talked about producing web items to feed to bloggers. I pointed out that they'd have to be really funny for media-jaded bloggers to contemplate running them and that such a strategy was likely to be totally transparent. He said that wouldn't be a problem. This is a man who, on his blog, refers to the Liberal Democrat as the Literal Dumbocrats.

(Also, in the same Independent article this morning, I read that the problem with neo-conservatives setting up a democratic state was that they while they professed to prefer small government they were cranking up a huge one in another country. I like this about conservativism so I think a real Conservative government could not have gone to war in Iraq.)

Sickening Islington Cartel.

The problem with a left leaning government is that it is so tremendously difficult for anyone in power to be true to the socialist ideology. The Jowell business would be bad if she were a tory cabinet minister, but it would atleast be consistent with a tory worldview. Being married to a lawyer whose job it is to help rich corporations and individuals avoid tax, while working for a government that seeks to stamp out tax avoidance, was always going to be a conflicted existence. That might well explain why she wanted to so little to do with what her husband was up to. In a way I hope the same would be true with K and I if I "came out" as a tory. She would never go canvassing with me , but I don't believe she would leave me and the less we talked about it the more harmonious our relationship could be expected to remain.

That's all very well until you start reading about the dinner parties with Oxford professors where hush-hush deals to sell the Iranians planes are pitched over the After Eights. Then it's harder to believe that they kept their lives separate. They didn't, they obviously networked together and hard.

Am reading Seldon's biography of Blair at the moment. I'm amazed by how unexceptional he was at Oxford. Actually his academic career ends up looking a bit like mine. Reports of him at Oxford speak of someone who was surprisingly "straight" though. So even if he didn't anticipate a career in politics he was for some reason careful not to get bogged down with drinking and taking drugs. Wise chap.

This morning I have an Amex brief today, it's really too dull for words. Every time I try to look at it I start to nod off. Also, I haven't written any successful copy for ages. Max just came in to show me the last piece I wrote for Yahoo! which was obliterated with client comments, it just look like I'd missed the point on a lot of it. When am I going to get back on top of this? More to follow on Blair and God...

Bad night, my fault too.

Had a very bad night last night. After the meeting I went home and spoke to K. on the phone. She is obviously quite fraught at the moment - however much I may want to mock actors she does invest a great deal in the parts that she has to play.

So last night we were having a conversation and it somehow led on to Cameron's tories. In fact she led with "David Cameron is really starting to piss me off" and proceeded to do a very good impression of DC spouting vacuities. I didn't try to deny that the "Built to Last" document is, in some ways, quite vacuous. It still doesn't say anything about policy, but it points towards individual freedom, trusting people and not just sticking up for the rich. This is surely what people need to hear from the tories. I explained how I'd watched the webcast of Cameron speaking at Vinopolis and how impressive he'd been, speaking in the round, without notes, for 20 minutes. Quite quickly we were having a heated argument and she was telling me that my wholesale adoption of tory ideas was a mark of low self-respect. I think perhaps that she's right. But I also think that she hasn't really tried listening to how a tory government could work. Because to her, the idea of wanting to pay less tax, only seems a product of greed, rather an incentive to drive the economy. Also she thinks that one must always do one's best to help the weak (I believe this too) and so not being willing to give up any amount of money the government asks of you to this end again, to her, only seems selfish and greedy. When I try saying that sometimes looking after people isn't the best thing for them, or that sometimes systems can run themselves without government intervention, or that systems run more efficiently when they have an inbuilt economic incentive, I get this slightly uneasy feeling. It's like arguing for these things that seem un-idealistic feels decadent, a slight perversion of the intellect, the sense that with the tories I've found club that will allow me to express my worst views and dress them up as legimate, pointing to the gang behind me for support. I think about David Cameron who is so eminently well-fed, so jolly somehow, even when he's trying to be earnest, there is something untroubled about his face, his views were not borne out of a moral struggle, to him they merely feel like the right and proper way of doing things.

Also the vignette that he painted of a state with ID cards:

"...I don't want to live in a country where you go out in the evening to walk your dog and a policeman can come up to you and say "Sir, where are your papers?""

There's the dog, the fact that the policeman would call him sir, it all points to something quite sheltered. Untroubled.

Anyway, we had a row, I went to bed, couldn't sleep and got up to smoke cigarettes and write. Spent an hour on the party scene, which ended up as a digression about me, not the party at all.

Also, I'm worried my friends are avoiding me because I've stopped drinking. This may well be paranoia, but I have the distinct recollection of avoiding Toby when he wasn't drinking. I just didn't know what to do.