Walking The Plank
June 15th, 2008Michael Heseltine was right; David Davis’s resignation was a “new thing” in politics. Usually, we have seen it all before in some form or other, but Thursday’s announcement by the Shadow Home Secretary was a genuine surprise to all of us who had not been privy to his thinking in the hours since the Government scraped home on the latest stage of the Bill to extend Detention before Charge to a potential 42 days. A decision to walk the plank in this way has struck very many in the world of politics as eccentric, egotistical and plain bizarre.
It has caused some logistical problems. David Davies, the MP for Monmouth and old colleague of RB, has been plagued by telephone calls asking him why he resigned. Dominic Grieve, the new Shadow Home Secretary, had to cancel some engagements in Swindon he had arranged with me. (I am looking forward to welcoming Dominic back in the near future, by the way).
To look at this decision in terms of Mr. Davies’s personality is to make a mistake, I think. I suggest that we focus upon the issues he has chosen. His stand seems principled and is in tune with the thinking of most Conservatives in this area. If I hear another Labour lightweight tell us that we need protecting, I shall scream. The fact that we are facing a significant and in many ways unprecedented threat is not in issue. The argument centres upon the way in which we deal with the threat. Internment (for that is what it is) is not the answer.
Constant improvements to our security network and investment in the “front line” against terror are what is needed from Government. We have to deal with these problems without needlessly sacrificing our own freedoms. With proposals such as this one, the Labour Government takes us closer to the sort of system that we are supposed to be fighting against.
The closest parallel I could summon to mind is the Westminster St. George’s By-election, when Duff Cooper faced an Empire Free Trade Candidate sponsored by Beaverbrook and won. One of the themes of that campaign was Baldwin’s famous attack on the press as having “power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”. Replace the Beaver with Murdoch and we are in 2008. Will this by-election really be such “a new thing”, therefore?
I wish David well in his endeavour, and very much hope that if the original “Mr. Angry”, Kelvin MacKenzie, stands, that he will be, in the words of my young son, “Made to walk the plank”.
