The UKIP Blip

I hope it will be more than a blip, of course. Not because I am a member, or vote for them (except, of course, in European elections), but because I believe that the only way the Conservatives will ever win a proper mandate (ie a majority in parliament and a manifesto which talks turkey) is to embrace the UKIP vote. And if the UKIP vote stabilises around 10-12%, they will have to get wise and do a deal.

32 million votes were cast in 1992, over 14m of them for the Tories. 26 million were cast in 2010, 10.7m for the Tories. The Tory vote has not so much 'switched' since 1992, but just stopped voting. I think they were/are 'Thatcher's C1s/C2s', in other words the skilled and semi-skilled working class who have done so badly under Labour and mass immigration.

Cameron, Osborne and their modernisation project coterie of friends have obviously blown it. They thought (honestly) that by embracing unconservative irrelevances - ring-fencing the Mercedes-to-Dictators Overseas Aid Budget, 'marriage' for gays, Big Green Taxation, etc - they would win Liberal votes. Maybe one for every four 'core' votes you lose, boys; the mathematics are not on your side, even if you end up getting an invitation to Elton's annual white tie and tiara ball.

Thomas Pascoe in the Torygraph Blogs:

UKIP are the party of grammar schools, controlled immigration, Euroscepticism and the small state. These are the values of the Conservative party members, whose devotion mitigates the inadequacies of CCHQ. They are also the values of many Tory MPs.

In fact, the only people in the Conservative Party for who those values are an anachronism are already ministers.

The Face of Evil

Joyce Thacker, Rotherham Borough Council: ''We had to seriously think about the long-term needs of the children''

This imbecilic woman, and her poisonous left wing views, is symptomatic of much that is wrong with Britain today.

She should be sacked without compensation and imprisoned for abuse of office, the slandering of a couple of utterly decent foster parents, and denied her pension rights.

If they were to bring back the stocks, I would be happy to drive to her benighted town with a boot full of rotting vegetation and hurl it at her smug lefty face.

What an evil woman. Top of Idle's villains of the year.

Lost the Thread

Introducing the new England rugby kit, proudly sporting the national colours of, er........

Cranberry? Merlot? Blackberry Crumble?

The hopeless incompetents at the RFU, keeping up a long history of idiocy and greed stretching back to the beginning of the professional era in the 1990s, have evidently decided that England don't need to wear white shirts. This is what happens when you pay a marketing director a couple of hundred grand a year and waste a million or two on PR consultants and stylists - you have to listen to their right-on, rootless, ahistorical bleatings. And you end up with the plastic rubbish bags being worn above. And before they start defending themselves by calling it an 'away' kit, England were playing at home today. And before they start gibbering about the similarity of the England white shirt to the Wallabies' gold, remind them that this has been ignored for a century, including a world cup final.

It is true the All Blacks occasionally have to wear a white change kit, but I bet the players know they are not wearing all black (imagine the horror if that was the one only cap you won!). It's the reason they are not known as 'New Zealand', for heaven's sake! The Aussies drone on about the 'Green and Gold' as much as their cricketing counterparts mention the 'Baggy Green', but this is the right sort of pride.

So why can't England stick to their roots and show some pride and loyalty to their traditional national colours? They lost the plot, as well as the game.

(As written by Idle, born and bred in Aberdeenshire, long-suffering Scotland supporter)

Take Them to the Cleaners

Poor old Lord McAlpine. I always thought of him as one of the good blokes and reading his Wikipedia entry has reinforced this many times over. He has lived a full and blameless life, now in its ill-health dotage in Southern Italy. Blameless, that is, unless you are motivated by hatred of Tories, as those are who jumped onto the bandwagon to put the boot in when he was mistakenly implicated in the wretched child abuse furore.

Well I hope he sues the cynical and posturing George Monbiot, the imbecilic tarty Sally Bercow and the vain idiot Philip Schofield for millions. Not only because they utterly deserve it, but because he will be doing a great service to society at large by helping (slightly) to stop the thoughtless (or deliberate) spread of malicious rumours on the twittersphere. It is a saying as old as the hills: a rumour can travel round the world before the truth has got its boots on - but it has been compounded a thousandfold by modern technology.

The only defence that Moonbat, Moocow and prettyboy have is that they were passing on the information 'in good faith'. Let us hope that judge and jury recognise this for the bogus justification it is; they have responsibility for their own actions, and should therefore be wary of spreading muck. If you're planning to shoot an outlaw, you'd better make sure he's an outlaw, otherwise it's murder.

I doubt any of these three has ever met McAlpine or has any personal animosity to him. They did what they did because they hate the Conservative Party, particularly the 'Thatcher Era" (did you notice how often this phrase was used when the rumours started?), and they believe they have the public on their side, which increased their confidence that they could get stuck in without consideration for their libel, let alone giving the individual concerned a fair hearing.

I hope it costs them their jobs and their life savings.

Family Masterchef

This time last year Idle entertained 120 of his closest friends to dinner and dancing to celebrate his 50th. It was exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure, and ruinously expensive.

Tonight, the other side of the coin: Family Birthday Masterchef. The Contestants:

Idle, 51, a poor banker from Aberdeenshire now living in Sussex. Idle will be making the starter: scallops wrapped in pancetta with pureed celeriac and lightly sauteed chestnut mushrooms.

Lady Idle, a multi-tasking expert from (expat) Hong Kong, now living in Sussex. Lady Idle will be making the main course: fillet steaks with boulangere potatoes, green beans and mushrooms and roasted sweet spear carrots.

Younger Miss Idle, 18, from Sussex. Miss Idle will be making pudding: chocolate pots.

The sommelier, Monsieur Idle, chose the following wines:
Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Rose, NV (contributed by Miss Idle)
Ch d'Armailhac, Pauillac, 1995
Chartreuse de Coutet, Sauternes, 2007

Elder Miss Idle, 20, from Sussex, reading Writing, Directing and Performance at York University, was unable to attend due to the three-day sellout of her university directorial debut, and will be sorely missed.

Epilogue

I suppose we should congratulate the Republican Party for choosing a candidate who won the retired white male vote quite as convincingly as he did. 66% and counting! Way to go!

Mark Steyn, reporting from his mountain lair in New Hampshire, tells us that even this narrow electoral pitch failed in his state, with the electoral college, senate, house seats and governorship all falling to the Dems. And this, in truth, is the story of the modern Republican Party - it can go so far, but only so far. When every Pentecostalist, retired US Ranger, banker and captain of industry has been safely delivered into the Republican lobby to vote in Notchville Duck, NH, the tally still stands at a frustrating 49% because that Vietnamese family of four adult voters, who moved in last year to start a restaurant-cum-bicycle repair shop, all vote Dem to tip the hamlet into the Blue column. What is a poor white financier down to his last $170m to do?

The answer, of course, is to find another Reagan. But is this a possibility? Idle was being abused by Sandhurst NCOs when Reagan won his party's nomination in 1980, but I'll bet Dutch wasn't up against the array of loons that Romney found himself surrounded by a year ago. The electoral process is set in stone in America, so prepare for more of the same in three years' time: a ship of fools descends upon Iowa or New Hampshire, pitching themselves against an electorate of Republican-registered voters. The hopefuls are desperate for early momentum, so what do they do? They explore their inner Palin and set up camp so far to the right, they might as well be on the Pacific coast of Japan.

After that, it's a long way back to the moderate Right, let alone the centre. And as they make that journey, between February and August, they lose a few rabid former supporters, falling off the back of the wagon and shaking their fist at the departing 'liberal', accusing him of selling out and all manner of other dastardly political activities. The moderate Democrat or floating voter, however, remembers the bible-bashing and quail-hunting nomination-seeker of late winter, and no amount of compassion, tofu-eating and reasonableness is going to gull them into the polling booth with a Republican vote in mind.

Romney arrived at his party's convention not so much to be crowned as to be admitted into A&E and have his wounds attended to. All those whoopin and hollerin delegates had been chowin and gluggin at the complimentary bar and buffet for two days before Mitt limped onto the stage, chock-full of morphine. They cheer because, hell, the fella is still standing up, isn't he? Their sights are now set on the imposter in the White House. They don't see that they have reduced their nominee's chances to near zero, because they are the folks who emasculated his broad appeal back in the snows of February.

My advice to the Republicans is to hold an open primary in a knife-edge swing state (Ohio, anyone?) BEFORE the usual Iowa caucus. Don't allow the turnout to be anything other than highly representative of the last presidential election's. This will empower the moderates at the expense of the firebrands. It will encourage more presidential types to stand, as they will feel that they can at least start off in the sort of circumstances they hope to end up in come November - fighting for the votes that WIN close presidential elections, rather than for the votes that will come guaranteed to any realistic moderate conservative with a bit of character, purpose and humour about him.

At the risk of boring you (again) with the old phrase, if your political strategy is to rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the vote of Paul. The Democrats know this. America has more Pauls (not Ron) than ever before, and unlike past generations of Pauls, they are less socially mobile than they were. This is because (as any European knows) if you start paying people a good income for fecklessness and idleness, you'll end up with many feckless idle punters. They become less ambitious, less employable, and hungry for more entitlements. Peter, who has enhanced his wealth despite sub-optimal economic or fiscal conditions, finds himself supporting more Pauls than before. And so it goes on.

What happens when Peter finds himself in a tax regime akin to late 1970s Britain? It's not so far fetched, when one tots up the US debt and remembers that if the Chinese don't buy it, no one else will. Following the logic that the healthy birth rate of "brown" America produces more Pauls than Peters every year, the fiscal landscape of America seems bound to change. The Latino vote was 8% of the total in 2008, 9% four years later. They vote Democrat, by the way, in the same sort of percentage as retired white males vote Republican. The math, as they would say, don't lie.

Previous generations of American Peters have almost never been forced to leave their own country in order to find economic opportunities. Maybe in the 1930s, but few. I don't see them leaving en masse even under the cosh of confiscatory tax and an overweening government (Uncle Sam taxes them overseas until they give up their passports, anyway). Maybe they will hole up in Wyoming and try to secede from the union.

One thing is for sure: as a great British prime minister said, the problem with socialists is that sooner or later, they run out of other people's money. When this happens in America, with the attendant unemployment and plunging living standards, the American century of world hegemony will be over in a way that is unlikely to be the slow suffocation endured by Britain after the Second World War and the subsequent retreat from empire.

Stranger Things Have Happened

We enemies of Socialism are looking for something to cling to, if we are to keep the flame of hope alive, but one of the legacies of Hurricane Sandy is that there is flotsam everywhere we look. The last two nationwide polls today are a tie and a Romney +1, and some swing state polls positive for Romney, including Michigan, where he grew up and where not everybody believes that Mitt wants to close down Detroit and gas the laid-off workers.

This is not completely over. The margin of error is comfortably wide enough in the six or seven swing states. I would be less surprised by a Romney short-head victory than I was when Britain looked itself in the shaving/make-up mirror in 1992 and decided that, whatever their shortcomings, John Major's Tories were a better idea than that bottomless pit of vacuous Valley-Welsh socialist rhetoric, Neil Kinnock. What a terrific morning the next day! BBC and Guardianista types weeping openly, blaming the polls and the Sun and the Mail and the weather and the TV schedules and trying to come up with a conspiracy theory. Pity that Major then governed quite so hopelessly, but I suppose he did the country a favour by forcing Old Labour into permanent retirement.

In short, Kinnock was found out during his campaign in such a way that the electorate decided not to trust him with the job. Obama was up against a hopeless old candidate four years ago, was trusted with the job, but has been found out over four long years.

If 4 things happen, Romney wins:

Obama's 2008 high-water-mark vote shrinks by a modest amount (3 in 100, say) as his HopeyChange mantra now looks as dated as a Mark 1 iPod;

Those tepid Republicans shamed by the Dubya second-term and uninspired by McCain in 2008 return to the Romney candidacy (again, let's say a modest 20% of 'lapsed' Republicans in 2008);

The polls overstate Obama by 1 in 200, or 0.5%, for the usual reasons: Republican-vote admission shame, incumbent bias.

Floating voters break for Romney on the day, 55-45. Psephologists agree that this usually happens when the incumbent has been, by common consent, a first-term underperformer, and the challenger has 'won' the campaign by improving in the polls, even only modestly.

Of course, these 4 things have to happen in the swing states, rather than Nebraska or Mississippi, but I think they are all more than likely. The 1992 UK exit-poll debacle was blamed on a late swing to the Tories, which I don't believe - Kinnock hadn't sealed the deal in 1992 any more than the hugely disappointing Obama has done with this election.

UPDATE: Wednesday 1030

No real winners emerged last night. Obama, without an agenda and therefore without much of a mandate, also has a Republican House to obstruct his more fanciful welfare-state ambitions. Maybe they will prevent Obama2 from increasing the debt as much as Obama1 - if they don't the Dollar is sunk.

Romney was neither fish nor fowl by the end. A chap writing in the Independent this morning suggested that the message of the election was that America still has a reasonable appetite for moderate conservatism, but the Republican Party didn't want to provide the candidate. I think Romney did quite well, but frankly he should have been pushing on an open door, given a poor incumbent president and a bad economy.

I forecast that Obama will play a LOT more golf in the next four years.

Suspension of Logic

Political Betting, not as dull a blog as it sounds, carries an extraordinary statistic, which suggests to me that there must be something deeply unattractive about Mitt Romney which I have not noticed, or that socialists in Other Countries somehow don't bother conservatives in Britain in the way that imbeciles like Kinnock or creeps like Brown do. Either that, or they have not been concentrating during the past 4 years during which Obama has tried his hardest to turn America into a Big Government entitlements culture along the lines of France. He would have got further than he has, had he not suffered a disastrous setback in the midterm elections of 2010, when he lost the House to the Republicans and presided over the biggest midterm loss since 1938.

Here's the statistic from Political Betting:

In Britain 86% of Con supporters would choose Obama over Romney / 95% Lab / 96% Lib Dem @YouGov #stat2watchpic.twitter.com/rZyEs0jF

Eh? Seriously? Why?

I just don't get it. Logic tells you that the majority of Conservative supporters in Britain would instinctively recognise, in America, that Republicans are the conservatives over there. True, Dubya Bush and von Rumsfeld might have been a bit too bloody in tooth and claw for them, but Romney is a moderate Republican. The guy won the governorship of Massachusetts, for heaven's sake! He is no redneck. He may be very rich, but he's no Michael Bloomberg. He may have dissed London's preparations for the Olympics, and been proved wrong, but there are worse things: Obama returned the bust of Churchill to the British Embassy in Washington and then described France as America's closest ally, or something equally lunatic. He thumbed his nose at Britain, and most sentient Conservatives would have noticed, and remembered.

And just how much does the average Conservative know about Obama? Or Chicago politics? These are deep and murky waters. He seems a cool enough dude to me but he's a socialist and has managed to get the US debt up to $16 trillion, which means spending tax not yet taken from generations not yet born on a scale not hitherto attempted. This is neither caring, compassionate, nor progressive, as Mark Steyn points out in After America in a way that will make your hair bristle.

Romney might not win on Tuesday but this is obviously a very close election and it is always hard to depose the incumbent, particularly one so loved by the (overwhelmingly) liberal media in America. He seems decent and sensible and he looks a better CEO for a country that simply has to get more realistic about how to pay its way and compete with the emerging countries, which America has done so much to free from despots and pursue popular liberal democracy.

86% of Conservative voters really want Obama? I'm staggered.