The shadow Home Secretary David Davis has astonishingly announced he will resign his seat in East Yorkshire and force a by-election on the single issue of liberty: he sees it as a personal campaign to stop the government’s erosion of civil liberties, not just in the Counter-Terrorism Bill, but more broadly. It seems from what Nick Robinson’s been saying on telly that this move is not approved by David Cameron.
This is really extraordinary. I expect Davis to win: his main opponents in Haltemprice and Howden are the LibDems, who may agree to stand aside for him. In any case they can hardly oppose him on the issue he’s chosen, or if they do oppose, they have no chance of upstaging him. Labour would need a miracle, a local uprising in its favour, to defeat him. But I doubt the strategic wisdom of this move. It won’t prove much unless he gets something like 80% of the vote, and I don;t think it’ll destabilise the government. If it’s true that he’s done this in spite of David Cameron’s disagreement, then you have to wonder what Davis thinks he’s up to. Don’t the Tories need discipline and focus just now, rather than Quixotry?
The only way this kind of stunt would have really helped them would have been if, say, a dozen Tory MPs in marginal seats all over the country had resigned on the Lisbon referendum issue. That might seriously have shaken the government.
Aha! Well, the intervention of my old mate, Kelvin McKenzie is going to make this interesting. I would not be at all surprised if McKenzie wins. The fact is that many ordinary people are puzzled that their politicians seem obsessed with wasting time ‘protecting terrorists’ and arguing endlessly about 14 days or their own expenses-claims when they think the politicians should be reducing the price of oil and food and stopping the slide in house prices. Whilst none of this pleases those of a liberal tendency such as myself, it is as much a reality as your own view as to why the EU ‘treaty’ deserved to be defeated by the Irish: politicians ignoring the people. The Sun will probably back McKenzie, and whether you like him or not if it comes to a battle of charisma, David Davies would struggle to beat the average Big Brother contestant, let alone the colourful ex-Sun man.
The good news in all this is that a McKenzie win would show that the current Conservative party is also well out of touch with the typical voter, and be the first tangible evidence that the ‘Tory come-back’ is more to do with disillusionment with Labour and the usual desire by the electorate to look for something different every now and again on the ‘Buggins’s turn principal’.
I’m not convinced, Kelvyn. McKenzie is a good performer on telly, and I agree David Davis isn’t the most exciting, but I think he’ll discover that politicians are pretty damned good at this sort of thing, actually. I think Davis knows well that he’s personally popular enough to win by a mile however the campaign goes, plus he made sure to remove the one big obstacle to him – the LibDems – before he moved. I also think Kelvin McKenzie is very personally exposed: he’s dished out all kinds of stuff to politicians over the years and will find a lot of the same coming his way if he does stand – as his Hull blunder showed the other night. Standing at the plate in politics is I think much harder than pitching from tabloid pages, and I think again he’d find he was fighting Davis on the territory Davis knows.
Finally, I think the majority that backs Gordon Brown on this is very passive and very soft. People feel very strongly about terrorism, yes, but not about 42 days per se, so I really can’t see many people feeling a strong urge to get McKenzie in.
Sadly, it seems that big Kelv has pulled out. Pity, it would have brightened up an otherwise pointless election. The day the Tories can claim to stand up for civil liberties (others have pointed out Davis’s record on gay rights, for instance) is the day we should start voting for Respect.