91Èȱ¬

A senior government source has told me that the government has abandoned plans for a vote on the controversial second homes allowance (officially called the additional costs allowance) this Thursday.

Gordon Brown proposed last week it should be replaced by a daily attendance allowance but having failed to get agreement from the other many parties, and many of his back bench MPs, the government has decided instead to refer the question of the second homes allowance to the inquiry being conducted by and the .

However, MPs will vote this Thursday on each of the other individual items proposed by the prime minister in his last week, such as greater transparency and withdrawing the second home allowance from MPs with seats in Outer London.

In the circumstances Gordon Brown and his colleagues had no option but to back down, as I said on Newsnight last Thursday, the prime minister was heading for certain defeat.

One of the most striking features of politics these days is the rapid churn of events. Gordon Brown's success in chairing the was only three weeks ago, yet already it seems like ancient history.

In the last fortnight we've seen the sudden neutralising of what some Labour people were hoping would be two of their most powerful weapons at the next election. First, as has been widely said already, the will make it a lot harder for Labour to mount personal attacks on leading Conservatives. Any attempt to do so will prompt reminders from the Tories about the "McBride smears".

And this week's budget has caused another big change. In 2001 and 2005 Labour had great success by accusing the Conservatives of planning big cuts in public spending - even though most of what the Tories contemplated was merely efficiency savings of the kind Alistair Darling outlined this week.

As I explain tonight, is suddenly transforming the terms of debate. Until recently, spending cuts were the great unmentionable in British politics. Now leaders of all parties recognise public concern about the huge levels of public debt, and in the last 48 hours have almost been falling over each other to .

And so Labour has lost another stick with which it hoped to beat the Tories.
First they've lost the "Tory toffs" line of attack, and now "Tory cuts".

Conservative strategists must be cock-a-hoop.

Several papers suggested this morning that Jacqui Smith's job as 91Èȱ¬ Secretary is on the line after a succession of problems - the Damian Green debacle; public outrage over her Parliamentary expenses; and several controversies involving police incompetence, or apparent heavy-handedness, or both. Her political authority has been falling rapidly.

So I went to Redditch in Worcestershire this afternoon, to see what her constituents think. Redditch is the most marginal seat held by a Cabinet minister, ranked 45 among Labour's most risky constituencies, with a notional majority of 2,163 under the new, slightly revised, boundaries.

Many shoppers and traders in the market place were disgusted by her expense claims. Some think she has also done a poor job as home secretary, though few people are familiar with the details of the problems which have beset her.

"She should go and get a job in Tesco,' one constituent remarked. 'But they'd have to train her up!"

What struck me, however, is how many constituents, usually unprompted, said she was an excellent local MP, and several of them cited cases which Jacqui Smith has specifically pursued for them.

And even the Lib Dem leader on Redditch Council, who stood against Smith in 1997, admitted she is a good constituency member. A quote which I can easily see appearing on Jacqui Smith's leaflets at the next election.

So watch my piece tonight, particularly the good-natured spat about Smith between women as they bought their weekend strawberries. One of my best voxpops in ages!

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Alas, we didn't have time to visit the National Needle Museum located in Redditch. Just as well perhaps. They might have accused us of stitching them up.

If Gordon Brown, or anyone else, needed to know about Derek Draper's sense of judgement before inviting him to Chequers, perhaps they should have read an article he wrote for the Sunday Mirror back in 1999.

Draper described in great detail 10 years ago how he had been sacked a few weeks earlier as a contributor for the radio station Talk Sport, after broadcasting live from a hot tub in an Amsterdam brothel, with a prostitute.

One unfortunate thing just led to another, Draper tried to explain to Sunday Mirror readers.

First, he'd had to stay overnight in Holland en route to Morocco.

Then, he asked a taxi driver to suggest a club he might visit, and ended up being driven to a high-class brothel, where he was befriended by a beautiful blonde called Claudia.

Draper took up the story:

"Eventually, after downing a bottle of champagne, she [Claudia] said: "Let's go upstairs."

I will be honest. I was tempted. Any bloke would have been - but I also knew I just couldn't do it. "I'm sorry, Claudia," I whispered. "You really are lovely but it just feels wrong."

"Then let's just talk and have a Jacuzzi," she replied. I hesitated, then emptied my glass and followed her upstairs. We drank, talked and laughed and then I remembered Talk Radio. I told her about the James Whale show and she urged me to call.

"I couldn't," I said. "I haven't even brought my mobile."

"I have one," she cried, and produced a Nokia from her handbag. We called the station, and the rest is CV history.

And, with phrases that ring awfully true today, Draper concluded his Mirror account:

"I thought in my naivety that this would all make excellent radio and great PR for the station. Little did I know that the next day I'd be fired."

Surely Gordon Brown and his friends should have questioned the judgement of a man who does all this? And indeed, the judgement of a man who goes on to write about it in a national newspaper.

Take a look at the following chart:

It shows the number of MPs elected at each election who were not Labour or Conservative, or allied with the two major parties (in the way most Northern Irish MPs used to be).

So in 1959 there were just six Liberal MPs and one Independent.

Over the years this "others" figure has crept up pretty steadily, to reach 87 MPs at the last election, and 93 MPs now after by-elections, expulsions and defections. (I exclude the Sinn Fein MPs from all these figures, as they never attend the Commons, as well as the Speaker and his three deputies.)

The growth reflects several trends:

First, the revival of the Liberal Party and their successors, the Liberal Democrats, from a mere six MPs in 1959 to 62 in 2005 (and 63 now).

Then there was the dramatic arrival of Scottish and Welsh Nationalist MPs in the 1970s, with a total today of 10 SNP or Plaid Cymru members in the House (though the figure has been even higher in the past).

Third, the number of Irish MPs has grown from just 12 in the decades after the war, to 18 today. What's more, until the early 1970s, most of them, the Official Unionists, were allied with the Conservatives, whereas nowadays the Democratic Unionists are independent.

And finally there's been a small growth in the number of independent MPs (such as Richard Taylor and Dai Davies) and MPs from minor parties, such as George Galloway of Respect, and Bob Spink of UKIP.

This growth of what one might call a balance-of-power block means that it's now a lot harder for one of the two major parties to win a general election outright. In the 1959 and 1964 elections Labour or the Tories only needed ten more seats than their rivals to be sure of a majority in the Commons.

Forty years on, the figure is almost 100. It's a remarkable feature that in 17 elections since the war, only once, in February 1974, have we ended up with a hung Parliament.

Statistically one would expect it to happen a lot more often, especially with the growth of minor parties outlined above. Indeed, some people suspect that the British electorate senses the problems of a hung Parliament and gives a last-minute nudge to the likely winner. (A similar phenomenon seems to occur in English football where it's surprisingly rare for the league to be won on goal difference.)

Certainly many leading Conservatives expect that outcome in 2010. They think its simply too big a task, in one election, to gain the 116 seats they need for a majority, on what would require the second biggest swing in 60 years. Instead, they think their best bet is to be the biggest party in a hung Parliament with the chance of winning an outright majority in a second election in a year or two. It's the two election strategy.

Equally, many Labour people are consoling themselves with the thought they might hold onto power through a hung Parliament.

And even if it doesn't happen in 2010, it bound to happen before long.

News that the former Liberal MP Clement Freud has died, at the age of 84, reminds me of the occasion I first met him.

It was back in 1979 at a debate I held at the Oxford Union when he came as one of my guests.

The Union catering staff were terrified beforehand, because on Freud's previous visit he had dismissed every morsel of food on his plate as too inferior for his palate.

Happily at my debate he seemed quite happy with the meal we offered, and even complimented the cook to her face.

But then, after the debate Freud came very close to fisticuffs in my office, over an exchange he had had during the debate with Malcolm Turnbull, who was then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and is now leader of the Opposition in Australia (see past blog about him).

Sadly I forget the details of what it was that got Freud so angry. I think Turnbull had asked what Freud's reaction would be if someone hypothetically suggested his mother was a prostitute.

On Just a Minute a few years ago Freud also told one of my all-time favourite jokes, as follows:

"'Why are you so fat?' a man asked me the other day.

'Because every time I sleep with your wife she gives me a biscuit.'"