17/07/2014
For the last few days, I've been intensifying the effort on "Flexcit" trying to knock it into better shape as I creep past 100,000 words and the book begins to look something near to what might be its finished form.
As if it has not been hard enough already, it gets harder from hereon as we refine the text and impose more rigour on the content, all to ensure that the message is delivered with utmost clarity and consistency.
Meanwhile, the shockwaves from the event which brought about my own burst of energy
continue to reverberate around the fringes of the "bubble", even motivating
Peter Oborne to come out to play, with a cry of outrage as he suggests that Mr Cameron's reshuffle "almost looks like an act of sabotage".
And for once, Oborne's political analysis is probably close to the mark. He sees in the reshuffle "the logic of the Downing Street modernising clique", led by George Osborne. "Mr Paterson, public-school-educated and in his late fifties, is an obvious barrier to change. His undoubted integrity is a nuisance rather than an asset. Replacing him with a young, state-educated woman sends out the right signals".
Those looking for a deeper, more profound reason for Mr Paterson's sacking, and the ethos behind the reshuffle in general, are going to be disappointed. Sometimes, as Freud once said, "a pipe is just a pipe". Sometimes, when a reshuffle looks like a shallow exercise in window dressing, it is because that is just what it is.
Oborne later goes on to remark that reshuffles "excite Westminster insiders to an unhealthy extent", but leave the majority of voters untouched. But before he gets there, he tries to look at Paterson's sacking from the point of view of the voters.
He tells us that Mr Paterson, who was raised in Shropshire and ran the family leather business for 20 years, is one of a tiny number of genuine countrymen in modern politics. When he was political columnist of the Spectator 13 years ago, and Mr Paterson had just been elected to Parliament, he reported that he could occasionally be spotted in the Members' Lobby removing a straw from his hair.
Mr Paterson, Oborne continues, has a profound love and understanding of the country and talks the same language that farmers do. As a result, he has been the most interesting and original environment secretary in three decades, rescuing his department from a morass of town-based pressure groups. He thus tells us:
Showing considerable moral courage, he [Paterson] has challenged the intellectual consensus that there is a contradiction between economic growth and conservation. Stone walls don't get built, Mr Paterson likes to point out, unless someone has the money to pay for them. His departure has been welcomed by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Badger Trust, the Wildlife Trust, the RSPB: that large class of do-gooders who articulate an essentially suburban and sentimental understanding of the countryside. It is unlikely to go down so well in farmers' markets this weekend.
Gainsaying his own point about lack of voter interest, Oborne thus recognises that agriculture ministers are different. The rural communities tend to know who their ministers are. They see them, and many meet them â and certainly come to listen to them in the flesh â at agricultural shows and game fairs.
Owen Paterson was a reassuring Conservative presence at such events, but Oborne guesses "the Downing Street modernisers calculate that Britain's farmers don't matter because they are Conservative voters anyway". Perhaps, he says, "they reckon it was worth selling out the farming community in order to obtain slightly better coverage on the leader pages of the
Guardian".
It was said to me earlier that this is in fact typical Cameron, dumping the voters he has, in order to chase after voters he will never get â exactly the mistake he made with the 2010 election strategy and one he is set to make yet again.
And this comes at a time when even Oborne has noted that UKIP is starting to reverse the "spectacular gains" it made earlier this year. It is now down to less than 10 per cent, with the Conservatives recovering as a consequence.
This is a trend, Oborne says, that could see Cameron back in Downing Street after the election, although he then acknowledges that "this week's fiasco of a reshuffle" will fuel the damaging UKIP criticism that the Tory party "has been captured by a tiny, metropolitan, centralising elite".
A reshuffle, therefore, that was supposed to set Mr Cameron up for the election, therefore, is more likely to have damaged him. " It has also sowed the seeds for future divisions", concludes Oborne.
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