Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

A year after the general election and the only ones (still) smiling are David Cameron and George Osborne – and even they have told their party colleagues to keep straight faces for fear of upsetting the Liberal Democrats. Even as Nick Clegg tries to assert that his party is keeping the Tories honest in government, the latest opinion polls – coming so soon after the AV referendum and local election drubbings – do not make cheering reading. According to Populus, The Times in-house pollster, there is a silver lining of a sort for the Orange Book proslatyser: voters think he is not so much dishonest as he is a fool. Ouch. More than half of voters surveyed by Populus felt he was “out of his depth”, more than a third that he is “weak” and a quarter said he was just “out of touch”. A fifth found him “likeable” and only 17 per cent thought he was actually “dishonest”. Yet almost two-thirds (64 per cent) say that a year on the party has not demonstrated they’ve made any difference to the direction of the government. But note, the same poll puts the Tories only 2 per cent behind Labour’s 39 per cent approval rating.

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One of those who most willingly embraced the Tory “slash and burn” rhetoric was David Laws whose career as Chief Secretary to the Treasury was very short-lived indeed. Mr Clegg’s fellow Orange Book-er was this week due to hear the ruling of Parliamentary Commissioner John Lyon. The awkward business of Mr Laws’ wrongful claiming of £40,000 of House of Commons accommodation allowances to pay to his boyfriend/landlord and the covering-up has been the subject of the Commissioner’s deliberations for nigh on a year and is an inconvenient, persistent and immovable obstacle to a return to Cabinet for him. However, all is not lost. Despite suggestions that the Commissioner is expected to find against Mr Laws on six counts, he is apparently holding to the mitigation that all he wanted to do was safeguard his privacy. A year on, it will be interesting to see if people struggling to make ends meet are warmer or cooler to such a defence. l Step forward the Lib Dem who rushed to replace David Laws and has been a credit to his Cabinet colleagues in staunchly defending any number of cuts he opposed in opposition – Danny “Beaker” Alexander who may soon be the unwilling bearer of any number of flatulence-related nicknames. Sky News has reportedly warned all employees that under no circumstances is “off-air” footage of the Treasury Chief Secretary awaiting an interview at the Millbank studios – in which he reportedly breaks wind very, very loudly – to make it into the public domain despite its potential entertainment value to political mischief makers. A spokesman for Mr Alexander was quoted in the Daily Mirror as saying the story was just so much “hot air”. Meanwhile, candidates for Mr Alexander’s new nickname range from “Rolling Thunder” to the more musical “Le Petomane”.

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It often falls to those blessed with the gift of prophesy that they shall be reviled in their homeland. Or so George Galloway might be saying to himself after the voters of Glasgow stubbornly – and spectacularly – spurned him. Gorgeous George, who returned to the Scottish political stage in his characteristically confident, self-assured and even boastful style, predicted early on that the SNP would win by a landslide – the same landslide that surprised and confounded so many pundits on polling night. Alas, the self-styled hero of the left – and opponent of the cuts – accomplished an inglorious hat trick for himself in adding rejection by Glasgow voters to his failures in the European and general elections. Glaswegians opted for SNP, Labour, Green and even a Tory as their MSPs before George.

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It has been official Walk to Work Week, all this week. Which in London carries with it the ever-present risk of a tube strike. One could not but be bemused by the apparent synchronicity of events at City Hall, Transport for London and Downing Street that led to a postponement by Bob Crow’s RMT of what promised to be a lengthy disruption to service next week. No sooner had London Mayor Boris Johnson been publicly upbraided by a Cabinet minister (presumably officially sanctioned by Number 10) for trying to pass off his own responsibility for London Transport industrial relations to the government (he is calling for tougher, anti-strike laws) when he should actually be talking to the unions than suddenly, overnight and after secret talks with TfL bosses, a truce is agreed. The cause of the strike action was the sacking of two RMT members. A tribunal looking into the accusations against one of them, a driver, found that no reasonable employer would have sacked him. Boris, meanwhile, tries to maintain the fiction it has nothing to do with him – a fiction for which Whitehall and Downing Street appears to have fast diminishing tolerance.

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Trade Secretary Vince Cable is delighted to be vindicated by the Press Complaints Commission which censured the Daily Telegraph for the sting operation in which he boasted of preventing Rupert Murdoch’s plans for supreme domination of British media. In so doing he disqualified himself and his party from any formal oversight of the Sky take over bid, and opened himself and his party up to ridicule. But it wasn’t what he said it was how it was obtained.