The other day I came across an article making the familiar argument that politicians these days increasingly have no background in anything other than politics. Unlike their forbears, it is claimed, who had wide experience running other organisations, our leaders these days are woefully ill-experienced. The author of this article - George Walden, who ten years ago I regarded as the intelligent face of the Conservative party, but I’m afraid I now tend to see more as just a miserable old man - particularly compared them with Churchill.

This is now a familiar claim. But - aided by an interesting discussion at that excellent institution Liberal Drinks (which I feel strongly we should encourage to happen as widely as possible around the party, incidentally) - it strikes me that although it conforms to our general sense of the decline and convergence of politics, is not actually supported by the evidence.

I offer two main pieces of evidence against this claim.

Firstly, let’s take a look at perhaps the two greatest Prime Ministers that Britain has had (I’m not trying to start a discussion here about who Britain’s two greatest PMs were, but they seem to me a reasonable pair to pick!).

Churchill was obsessed by politics from childhood, aiming to follow his father into government. He first entered Parliament at the age of 25 and was in the Cabinet by the time he was 34. At various points in his life he made some money through writing, and in his early life had a couple of thoroughly Boys Own escapades in the battle of Omdurman and escaping from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War. They were certainly no routine experiences. But playing soldiers in various parts of the world did not give him much sense of the varied conditions of life in his own country at the time - and it is quite clear that throughout his life his main focus was always politics and government.

Gladstone, similarly, went straight from university into Parliament at the age of 22 (6 years younger than the current youngest member of the House of Commons) after only a Grand Tour that was extremely limited by comparison to today’s gap years, and first became a Minister by the time he was 24. Although he famously had interests in theology and Homer, he never did any job not related to governing the country (or in his case, half the globe too)

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This autumn, conference representatives will elect members of the major committees responsible for running the party. If you have strong views that we should do things differently, then why don’t you stand? We are a democratic organisation, but our decisions will only reflect what members actually want if people do put themselves forward.

Information about the elections has now been published, and the deadline for nominations is 24 September. You only have to get two voting conference representatives to support you, and you don’t even have to be a conference rep yourself to stand.

Of course actually standing for election is not for everyone - I’m very aware that it does require a time commitment which is not everyone is able to give, particularly if you live a long way from London. But in that case please make sure you ask your local party voting representatives how they plan to vote, and of course if you are a voting conference rep yourself, do use this once-in-every-two-years opportunity to question candidates about what they will do. And of course if they’re already members of the committee, challenge them about what they do on it - and give them your own views. As a candidate in recent years I have received perhaps one or two requests for my views in each election - I’d like to see voters using the opportunity much more to question candidates. Several candidates put their contact details at the bottom of their manifesto - do use them!

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A summary of the report from the party reform commission chaired by Chris Bones has now finally become available, for the discussion of it at conference next month. The proposals it makes concerning the future of the party have already been the subject of much heated debate, some of it inaccurate – so now that it is finally available, it seems a good moment to take a look through the main things it says.

The first thing to say is that the commission’s case for the changes it proposes has been seriously hampered by the frankly dreadful handling of communicating its contents to party activists and members. One definition of liberalism is a commitment to dispersing power, and as a result Liberal Democrat party members’ first and most powerful reaction to any proposed changes to their party, before they have heard any actual information about them, is to suspect that they are an attempted power grab by the Leader. Not actually releasing any information about what the report contains, immediately gives it the mystique of being a “secret report”, instantly compounding this suspicion further. People immediately assume that there must be a reason why it has not been released, making this just about the worst possible way of promoting any proposals it might want to make, and this has indeed been widely and rightly criticised.

For what it’s worth, having raised this with several people concerned with managing this commission and its report, for myself I’m satisfied that there was no desire to keep any of it confidential (other than perhaps one or two small sections which relate to very specific individual staffing matters). They were concerned – understandably – to ensure that the report was presented first to those who actually commissioned it and have a legimitate right to see it first, such as the party’s Federal Executive. They felt that not doing so would mean they were also subject to criticism. I accept that for a report with such a wide-ranging remit, engaging all such stakeholders in the right way is somewhat complex. Nevertheless they could and should have done a much better job of communicating the report – for example they could at least have found some public way to explain that that was what they were doing. This is not rocket science – we have for example done a much better of communicating with the wider party in recent major policy exercises such as Meeting the Challenge/Trust in People and recent work on developing the manifesto. And apart from anything else, doing something similar with the Bones report would have made it much easier, when the time comes, to gain agreement to its proposals.

Nonetheless, we are now finally able to see the main elements of what the Bones commission are proposing and so I think we should leave behind the messy handling so far, and actually have some sensible discussion about what it proposes.

Generally, I strongly welcome the report’s general approach and most of its specific proposals. If we are to make progress as a party then we do need, as the report says, to balance building on our existing successes and doing things in new ways, and I think their proposals do suggest good new ways of doing that.

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It must have seemed like such a good idea to someone to run Boris Johnson as the Conservative candidate for Mayor of London. It seemed he had very little chance of winning, but would raise the party’s profile and, frankly, fill the embarrassingly huge gap that no-one else was coming forward to be the Tory candidate. But then, just as in 2000, the voters of London made the calculation that in the grand scheme of things the Mayoralty of London wasn’t really that important, and so seized the opportunity to vote for the maverick outsider candidate as a cost-free way of showing their displeasure to the occupant of Downing Street.

And so we get to see what a new-style “post-nasty party” Cameron Conservative government would actually do, through what Boris and the Conservative team are doing in City Hall. And make no mistake, Boris may be a one-man maverick, but for exactly that reason, those close to Cameron have foisted on him their top team of managers, to make sure that it is not just a goofy Boris show, but a proper Conservative government of London.

All of which makes it all the more significant that it’s not working out well.

This week Boris’ “First Deputy Mayor” left the team, the third senior figure, and second Deputy Mayor, to leave that team in some disarray (there have also been one or two more routine departures).

Applying the Lady Bracknell test, this is really start to get pretty embarrassing. You cannot continue to lose one senior figure a month, and remain credible for very long.

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The German communications agency Euro-Informationen has come up with a neat way of making the point that together European countries can form a bloc with enough clout on the world stage to rival the USA and China.

If the EU were a country, it would be well out in the lead in the table of gold medals at the Olympics: at the time of writing having 51 golds, compared to 35 for China in 2nd place and 19 for the USA in 3rd place.

Of course the EU isn’t a country and in many ways this is just a piece of fun.  

But their table makes very well the simple point of just influential a power bloc the EU can be on the world stage when it acts together rather than separately.

I’ve been working on tidying up the recording of the recital which Sarah Wilkinson and I did in June of Schubert’s song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, so it does now fit on a CD properly. As well as the usual useful experience of learning from hearing yourself singing, it’s also reminded me of the challenge of which language to sing it in, that I struggled with before the performance.

On the one hand, one of the things that Schubert does best, is to combine the music with the sounds of the words themselves in Wilhelm Müller’s poem cycle, originally written in German. Along with the strong preference of the musical establishment over the last few decades to perform music ‘authentically’, ie exactly as the composer intended and as he himself would have heard it, this makes a strong case for singing the songs in the original German. This would be the generally accepted way of performing the cycle these days (although personally I have significant differences with the whole authenticist movement, but that’s a topic for another post!).

However I do also feel very strongly that the actual meaning of the words is also integral to appreciating the songs, and Schubert’s achievement in setting the poems to music. The words and sense of the poems are so subtle and nuanced, and Schubert does such a good job of building the music around them, that I just think that if people can’t understand what is being sung, then there is almost no point in singing them. The songs are not just notes which the singer happens to be singing to a random collection of vowels and consonants – the words and music together form a whole experience communicating the poet and the composer’s subtle – and in the case of this cycle, extremely powerful – meaning.

And to a London audience, this means singing the cycle in English.

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There’s a rare degree of consensus about at the moment on where Britain’s political situation has got to, so I thought I would treat readers to my take on the current situation.

Firstly, I don’t buy this overall story that it’s now inevitable that Gordon Brown is finished. The parallel most in my mind has been John Major’s position in the spring of 1994. Then, as now, it was the accepted wisdom among political commentators that the Prime Minister would be ousted in a matter of weeks, and that inevitably, Ken Clarke (in 1994) would replace him in Downing Street. That was no less accepted fact then than Brown’s demise is now - indeed more so, I would say. But in fact what happened was that there was no moment of resolution in 1994, the immediate crisis passed and when, a year later, John Major did cause a leadership election, it was on his own terms and no serious rival came forward to challenge him. And indeed we should not forget the parallel of that leadership election either - this current Prime Minister has an established record of ensuring he is the only candidate in a party leadership election - something which, incidentally, you would think to listen to some people now was an accident. It was of course no such thing, but the direct result of Gordon Brown spending many years carefully wooing MPs and other key figures to ensure exactly that happened when Blair finally went.

And while it’s obviously not something that you can count on, we shouldn’t forget either the potential impact of sudden and shocking events. In the days after September 11 2001 all sorts of things that had hitherto seemed immovably set in stone changed in a matter of days. If some dramatic attack on Britain or elsewhere - and it need not necessarily be on the scale of 9/11, or the July 7th 2005 London bombings - were to happen, it’s not at all difficult to imagine events working out in such a way that people would turn back to Gordon Brown as a solid and figure, highly experienced in government and, as his defenders say, the best person to steer Britain through coming choppy waters.

In such circumstances, would people trust Gordon Brown or David Cameron more? Maybe the public perception of Cameron has moved on so much now that they would prefer him. But for my money I’d still say that people would hold on to nurse, for fear of something worse. Cameron’s ratings are still far more driven by comparative perceptions of Brown, than they are by perceptions of Cameron, and an emergency - depending hugely, of course, on what it was as well as how it was handled - would change that dynamic quite powerfully.

And indeed the little evidence we have of Brown’s handling of such circumstances, from the terrorist disturbances that took place in the few days after he took power, is that he handled them well (even though the whole episode always reminded, me for some reason, of the scene where the Minister of Magic first appears to the Prime Minister in Harry Potter, to explain various odd goings-on around the country).

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I spent three days in Kashgar, the scene of yesterday’s attack on some Chinese police, and where I took this photo in its famous and busy market, a couple of months ago.

It’s a city with a long and glorious history - first as one of the key trading points on the ’silk road’ with a famous international trading market - and then in the nineteenth century as a key location in the ‘Great Game’, the epic power struggle between the British in India and Russia, for control of Central Asia. The opening of a Russian consulate there nearly provoked full-scale war between Britain and Russia (in the end it didn’t survive long as a consulate, but you can still stay in the building, as one person I travelled with this year did).

Kashgar now finds itself in the ‘Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’ - a huge and sparsely populated province which forms the whole north west of the modern state of China. But although it lies east of the massive Tian Shan range of mountains which forms China’s western boundary, bringing it naturally geographically into China, its people are not Chinese and have much more in common with the central Asian peoples west of the Tian Shan. The Uighurs of this region are ethnically central Asian, have been Muslim for many centuries, and speak a language, Uighur, closer to Uzbek, and which is written in the Arabic script. At various points in history they have attempted to assert their central Asian identity, most recently around the time of the second world war, when the ‘Republic of East Turkestan’ was declared (Turkestan being the whole huge central Asian territory of the peoples of Turkic descent going back to Genghis Khan and beyond).

Ethnically, they are clearly right that they belong to Turkestan rather than China.

But equally clearly the Chinese state, like any great power, is not at all keen to have unstable breakaway regions outside its control sitting on its borders. This is hardly something new from the post-1949 communist period in China - emperors two thousand kilometres away in China proper have long sought to have this region and these people under their control.

And so in many ways the Uighurs in Xinjiang (the Chinese name for the province, which I understand means something like ‘border province’) pose a similar challenge to their Tibetan neighbours.

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