The inside track since 2003

• St FM, St Helena, radio interview

  P:  We can now talk to Lord Ashcroft?

• MA: It’s wonderful to be returning. In fact I set foot in St Helena in 1948 as a two year old boy with my parents coming from England to Cape Town in 1948 and they tell me that I fell into Napoleon’s fishpond when I came ashore at the time so in fact I have actually set foot in St Helena.

• P: Yes and we said before, before we started the broadcast that you are about 15, 20 minutes away from Saint Helena at the moment?

• MA: I’m about 25,000 feet in the air descending, slowly descending at the moment so I should be over there in about 15 minutes time.

• P: That sounds wonderful.

• MA: And I hope that my little one man protest that I cannot land at St Helena, I believe that you should have an airport, you should be able to open St Helena up to the world and I hope that an incoming Conservative government in due course will strongly support an airport there.

• P: That’s lovely to hear. But as we said before I hope to have, to make your time sir, to give us another call when you have seen a little bit of St Helena when you’re flying over the island, I am sure that everybody in St Helena would very much appreciate. We know that the radios are on everywhere at the moment listening to you Lord Ashcroft.

• MA: Well that’s absolutely wonderful and I’ll give you a call after I depart, about five or ten minutes after I depart and sign off as I’m on my way then to Brazil.

• P: That’s really nice to hear because then we can talk more about St Helena because when you were in St Helena that was a long time ago and of course you can see now and I think you will be flying so low so you can actually see the people out looking for your airplane Lord Ashcroft?

• MA: And I apologise in advance for the noise that we’ll be making.

• P: Yes we have put that over as well but you are welcome to the noise because I think your statement is really good for the island and an important message to the British government and as you say after the election it might be slightly different.

• MA: I am looking forward to it and I hope the governor is there, Andrew Gurr, who I’ve met in London, I think he’s a great governor for the Island and I will give you a call when we start to leave. Take care.

• P: Thank you very much Lord Ashcroft and you will be back on the air in about half an hour’s time.

A new Facebook group on copyright reform set up. More background can be found here and here.

Surprise, surprise.

Conservative Home: The Tories will NOT hold a referendum on Lisbon but seek a ‘manifesto mandate’ to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU.

This morning, The Sun has apologised. (PDF)

I’m not sure if Liam Fox has done his homework with this story, that the Tories may privatise the Met Office. From memory, I think that the Met office makes a surplus. It’s a Trading Fund with the MoD being the lead department in government. Sure, they could privatise it and make some money but it wouldn’t cut costs at the MoD. It might arguably increase spending given that our Defence personnel consume a lot of weather information. To purchase the stuff from a commercially focussed, privatised Met Office may cost them more than they currently pay. I’m sure his colleague General Dannatt would tell him that.

This story “Conservatives plan to give ministers more power over the civil service” is fascinating. For all the bluster about NuLab centralisation of power, it shows the the British Conservative Party has no intention of letting go of the reins. In fact, if the article is true, it suggests that in the unlikely event of the Conservatives winning the next election, ministers will be given more power to run their departments, with greater hiring and firing powers and executive control of delivery.

And my response is to say good on Francis Maude for having the courage to say it.

Out of respect for the former civil servants I used to work with, I will not highlight the examples of where my “maverick ideas” were held-up, delayed and ultimately ignored. But there were enough for me to know that the civil service was a seething mass of small “p” politics that needed stamping on. One day, I might tell the whole story.

Given the accusations of cronyism that were leveled at Ken Livingstone, the letters from Liz Forgan, Chair of the Arts Council to an officicial at the Department of Culture Media and Sport and, Boris Johnson to Ben Bradshaw, are pretty damning for the Mayor of London.

Alexander Heath doesn’t pay tax in Britain. He’s a director of the Taxpayer’s Alliance (of Britain).

As well as being exposed for being a shallow campaign front for the Tories, the taxpayer’s alliance should also be prosecuted under the trades description act.

For the second time in a month, Vodafone have cut off my phone at 10pm on a Friday evening. You ring the call centre and they tell you that they cannot deal with your problem until Monday. Last month a kindly operative understood my difficulty and switched me back on to the network. This weekend they are less flexible.

I’ve been with vodafone for 11 years. We’ve had a our good times, we’ve had our bad times. It’s got to the point where we may have reached the end of the road in our fragile relationship.

Vodafone, you are useless.

Next time I do one of those MPs surveys where they ask what you think about companies, I’m going to give you 1 out of 10.

How would a party worker be able to show a text message from David Cameron to Boris Johnson, unless he was holding Mr Cameron’s phone. Either way, it’s revealing.

Nick Robinson: If viewers heard a bit of a cheer there in the hall, that’s interesting for the future of the Tory Party, it was a picture not of David Cameron on his own which they are largely seeing, it was a picture of him and Boris Johnson who has been both the star of this conference and its biggest problem, because he simply refused to follow the script on Europe. Wouldn’t do it, nearly was generating massive headline by doing so, ignored the advice that he was sent. One party worker close to David Cameron showed me a text message that had been sent to Boris as he got on the train home. Not a word of it I think is safely repeatable at any time on television.

Andrew Neil: Really?
NR: Absolutely so furious.

AN: We are often accused of exaggerating this but there is a certain tension between the two. The mayor of London and the leader of the Conservative Party.
NR: They were, they now talk of him in the way that Tony Blair used to occasionally talk about John Prescott. Boris will be Boris, Tony Blair used to say John will be John. It’s a way of saying, what are we supposed to do, what can do about it?

AN: I’m told it all goes back to the fact that they come from different parts of Eton. That Eton’s actually divided into Sunni and Shiite or some equivalent.

Shaun Ley: The disquiet over General Dannatt’s move to the Conservatives is not just confined to Labour politicians. Lord Ramsbotham is a former Lieutenant General in the Army.

David Ramsbotham: The tradition has always been that the military do not align themselves with any political party. I was commander in Belfast in 1979 and on one Thursday I woke up in the morning with a Secretary of State from the Labour Party and that evening we had a Conservative one. But it didn’t matter, you were going on whichever government was there and that tradition is terribly important if there are to be proper relationships between the military and government that they should be entirely non-party and therefore personally I regret is when someone so soon after leaving and particular somebody who’s been so controversial as it were should appear to be lined up for a job with one or other of the political parties.
SL: There is an argument I suppose that we have no evidence that he effectively was expressing the views that he expressed in order to curry favour with the Conservatives so in that sense if this has happened after he ceased, being chief of the general staff isn’t that fair enough? If he’s now a private individual?

DR: Yes he’s perfectly entitled to express his opinions. What I’m concerned about is the suggestion that Mr Cameron who may be the next Prime Minister is seeking to use him as a source of advice and no reason why he shouldn’t of course but he was one member of the chiefs of staff committee and it was the chiefs of staff who provide military advice and of course if Mr Cameron becomes Prime Minister to whom he goes, not a former colleague.
SL: Do you think Sir Richard has made a mistake?

DR: Well I couldn’t comment on who gave him advice but I personally wish he had not allied himself so publicly with one political party at this particular time when so much febrile activity about who said what to whom about troop reinforcements and so on, is very much in the media.

David Cameron, glugging champagne on the day four million people heard their pay would be frozen; the day after they announced they’d slash pensions:

“When we caught him sipping fizz at an exclusive party, heavy-handed minders immediately moved in and tried to stop us leaving with the embarrassing snap.”

Basically, they’re taking us all for chumps. It’d be laughable if they weren’t 14 points ahead in the polls.

I think it speaks for itself. If you have views on this issue, please share them in the comments section below. I’m pretty certain they’ll get read by the Royal Mail.

Adam Crozier letter

Dear Mr Crozier,

ErnestMarples.com was set up in July to provide a free service to
convert postcodes to physical coordinates. Its founders believe that such a service is fundamental if we are to create an ecosystem for innovation on the web.

On Friday 2nd October, ErnestMarples.com was forced to close down
because of legal action by Royal Mail. As its services also powered
other sites, this has had a knock-on effect meaning the likes of Jobcentreproplus.com, planningalerts.com and thestraightchoice.com are
now no longer functional either.

The heavy handed approach by the Royal Mail to a growing sector of not-for-profit citizen focused websites is not new but still deeply regrettable. As a minister, I initiated a conversation that I hoped would lead to Royal Mail taking a more flexible approach with the web community who seek to use geo-spatial co-ordinates to develop new and innovative services that help the public in their daily lives.

I take the position that the postcode file and the data set of physical co-ordinates that go with it are a national asset that should be freely available to any UK citizen. I understand, though, that in the short term the entrepreneurs in your organisation have monetised their monopoly supply of the file to generate income of about £11 million a year.

We live in tough economic times. I’m a realist. But I do hope that you can apply your considerable talents to find an amicable solution that allows the profit making direct-mail industry to pay a fair fee for a postcode database license, whilst allowing the non-profit sector to flourish and innovate. Do this, and you might even stimulate a market niche of profit making internet related companies that can sustain Royal Mail in the digital age.

I intend to raise this matter with ministers in Parliament next week and look forward to hearing from you.