91Èȱ¬

My fellow blogger, chastised the media this morning for obsessing about ministers' responsibility for the doubling of Sir Fred's pension instead of the banker and the banks themselves.

It's worth pondering why the cheerleader in chief for a fourth labour victory has done this.

Prezza has a shrewd instinct for the public mood. He can feel and smell the scale of the mounting anger. What he is about is channelling that towards bankers in general and Sir Fred Goodwin in particular and channelling it away from Gordon Brown and his ministers.

That might have been possible if it were not for yesterday's revelations that the treasury minister Lord Myners knew of the size of Sir Fred's pension pot, didn't question whether it could have been reduced and didn't try to insist that he be sacked instead of been given early retirement with a pension worth almost £700,000 a year.

Ministers believe that it was not only Lord Myners who did not know that Sir Fred's pension was discretionary. They believed that the old board of RBS was kept in the dark too and this feeds their hopes that legal action will be possible.

However, the who-knew-what-when saga of Sir Fred's pension pot is distracting from the much more important story of how much is being paid for what benefit. In other words the fuss over a few extra million for the former banker is distracting from the question of what exactly the country will get for the squillions that are being paid to underwrite the banks.

That is the big gamble that was taken this week, never mind what happened last October. It is that that will matter in 10 years time not the squabble between two wealthy former bankers.

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Why, at a time like this, are ministers picking a fight with many of their own supporters about ?

That is the - not just on the left but also on the right and in the cabinet itself.

On Tuesday morning what's called the "L committee" of the cabinet (the L is for legislation) could not agree on the Parliamentary timetable for the bill which will part-privatise .

chairs the committee as Leader of the Commons. She told colleagues she needed more time to consider how to proceed.

They claim that only the intervention of the prime minister secured her eventual agreement to publish the bill this week with the intention of it becoming law by the summer.

If Harman has her doubts she is not alone.

The has done his Parliamentary arithmetic and has told the other Mr Brown that, in its current form, this bill can only be won with Tory votes.

, the former general secretary of the postal workers' union, is said to be no more convinced now than he was when he fought Tory plans to privatise the Royal Mail.

Some Labour MPs believe that he has rediscovered his appetite to lead his party in the event of defeat at the next election.

Some also claim that David Miliband is a sceptic.

Even Blairites, who usually call for more not less reform, are unconvinced. One told me "It's all very well to take on the party when you're on the public's side. But when you're not..." The sentence trailed away.

So, how do ministers answer the question I began with?

They say they've simply no choice.

Left to its own devices, Royal Mail would simply go bust - sunk by the .

If taxpayers are to pick up the tab for that they will, it's argued, demand that the company is finally sorted out. .

Only private management with its experience of running postal services abroad have any hope of doing that, ministers go on to insist.

"We'll have the pension bail out but not the privatisation" comes the reply - not just from the traditionally change-resistant postal workers' union but its many allies.

A growing number in the Labour Party cannot understand how their party can one minute nationalise a bank and the next privatise parts of the Royal Mail.

Today, Peter Mandelson has tried to woo those who are not implacably opposed to private sector involvement in the Royal Mail with a pledge that full privatisation (which he once backed) would be ruled out in this bill and also with promises of changes to the competition regime which many complain makes it uncompetitive.

However, those who have never believed in the New Labour holy trinity of markets, profit and privatisation, now think that they have found their cause, their time and a battleground on which they believe they can win.

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Those who have lost a child say that the depth of grief is impossible to imagine. No less so for parents who live with the knowledge that their severely disabled child's life would be short.

Imagine then having to cope with that grief in the public eye. , David and Samantha Cameron's first child, will shape the man who may be our next prime minister.

Ivan was so severely disabled that he could neither walk nor talk, and for a long time the drugs he took made him unresponsive to the love that his parents lavished on him. Friends have told me of the joy David Cameron felt when, after a change of medical regime, the Tory leader could declare: "Ivan has got his smile back."

Mr Cameron has described discovering the scale of his son's disabilities as like "being hit by a freight train". Non-political friends of his have told me that it changed a man who, until then, had had a privileged, happy, and in many ways extraordinarily lucky life.

Ivan's regular medical crises forced many emergency trips to hospital - nights slept on the floor for his parents and bonds formed with people from backgrounds very different to the Camerons.

I recall receiving a call from Mr Cameron apologising for cancelling an interview we were due to do at the end of his holiday. Ivan had been taken ill and he was now driving his son miles to the nearest regional hospital for treatment.

Today I have no doubt that politics will be suspended, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because Gordon Brown I suspect will be reliving the moment his first child Jennifer died. It is a tragic bond that connects the prime minister and the man who would be prime minister, who are different in so many other ways.

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It was meant to be ministers' trump card.

The hole in the Royal Mail's pension fund is so big that they've been warned the company is "balance sheet insolvent" and postal workers wouldn't get their full pension if the scheme was wound up.

Ministers released the letter from the pension fund trustees on the eve of today's demonstration by the postal workers union against part privatisation.

The letter's message is clear: "How can a union and Labour MPs protest when we're coming to the rescue of the posties pension fund at the very moment many want us to scrap cushy public sector pensions?"

Rebels may reply "we'll take the pension protection without the privatisation, thanks".

By starting this bill in the Lords, ministers have given themselves a couple of months to try to win the argument with almost 140 rebel Labour MPs that the taxpayer cannot be asked to foot the bill for reforming Royal Mail as well as paying its pensions.

The problem they face is that numbers have almost lost their meaning these days - after all, what's £7bn at a time we're spending £1.3tn on bailing out the banks?

PS Forgive the shameless plug, but you can catch up on the first of my programmes, the Prime Ministers, by listening here.

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A global financial crisis. Repeated allegations of sleaze. A hostile media. It can't be much fun being prime minister.

Pause a moment before shedding a tear in sympathy for Gordon Brown or throwing your mouse at the screen whilst screaming "he brought it all on himself". I am writing not about the current prime minister but about another chancellor who moved into 10 Downing Street - indeed the first to do so, Sir Robert Walpole, our first Prime Minister.

I've been examining the history of those who've lived and worked behind the most famous front door in the world for The Prime Ministers - a new series which begins tomorrow on 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4.

Politicians would have us believe that it was all so much easier before the era of globalisation, 24 hour news and widespread cynicism. There was, they suggest, a golden age in which politics was not dominated by talk of spin, sleaze or splits in parties, when it focussed on policies not personalities and when our leaders had the time and the space to take considered decisions. It's a proposition I've been examining through the modern glasses not of a historian but of a hack.

When chairing the Cabinet Gordon Brown sits in front of a portrait of Walpole - the man who governed Britain from 1721. Though much has changed during almost three centuries separating their time in office, there is more than might you expect that connects them.

Whilst Brown has faced the credit crunch, Walpole had to deal with the economic havoc created after the South Sea bubble burst. It was a vast speculative bubble not in sub-prime mortgages but in the shares of the South Sea company.

When investors realised that those shares were about as worthless as the 400% mortgage of an unemployed man living in Minnesota the impact was felt not just around the world but by the highest figures in the land. The King and many of his courtiers had invested in the South Sea bubble.

The current occupant of Number 10 has faced questions about the expense claims of his MPs, the second homes of his ministers and loans to his party. His 18th Century predecessor was a touch more brazen - employing one son in a post that gave him a peerage and £7,000 a year (rather a lot in those days) and another who was still at school as "Comptroller of the Pipe and Escheat". Walpole also sold seats in Parliament.

Gordon Brown has, it may not surprise you to learn, occasionally been known to complain about the way he's reported. Discretion prevents me from adding more. Consider how he would feel, though, if he'd been presented as our first prime minister was. One cartoon of the day showed a massive naked bottom straddling the entrance to the Treasury. No face was shown. None was needed so widespread was the view that in order to get on you had to kiss that part of Walpole's anatomy.

The prime minister then could do something that his successor must sometimes want to do - banning all reporters from Parliament and introducing government censorship of the theatre but this did not protect him from public scorn.

So far so similar you might say but the current occupant of Number 10 also has to confront the threat of terror. So, too Sir Robert Walpole. The terror threat of his day came not from al-Qaeda but from the Jacobites who were intent on restoring a Catholic to the throne of England.

After one plot was uncovered the prime minister ordered thousands of troops to mass in Hyde Park. Some accused him of exaggerating the threat in order to whip up public anger and to bolster support for the government. Such a thing would be impossible today, wouldn't it?

I've always winced when hearing modern politicians condemned for their lack of a sense of history as I feared that I was all too guilty of the same offence. I've thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in the story of eight former prime ministers from Walpole to Attlee (chosen, before you ask, on a whim) and I owe a huge debt to the historians whose work I've shamelessly plundered.

You can listen tomorrow at 0930 GMT on 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4 (or again on Sunday night at 2245 GMT) or by clicking here.

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I've been looking at how the language of our economically troubled times have evolved from "difficult times" to "the worst global recession in a hundred years" and why Gordon Brown is determined to stay linguistically cheerful. You can listen to my .

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He wasn't told, he didn't know and, besides, those that did know advised him to appoint Sir James.

That, in summary, was of his decision to appoint Sir James Crosby to help regulate Britain's banks at the Financial Services Authority. This after last night's revelation that Sir James had received warnings from that same regulator that his growth strategy for HBOS posed risks to the bank.

The Halifax Bank of Scotland, you may recall, went on to need a "little extra help" from you and me - in the form of £11.5bn of taxpayers money.

The prime minister's essential message was that it is only with the benefit of hindsight that the warnings to HBOS look significant. The FSA warning to the bank that grew too fast was, he said, "standard and routine"; it was one of 29 similar reports issued at the time (2006) and did not conclude that HBOS posed a risk to the entire banking system. That is why the Treasury were not told.

The search for who knew what when, and who could and should have acted differently, will go on. In part, because lessons do need to be learnt. In part, because Mr Brown's enemies want to prove that the rail of failure leads from the bankers to the prime minister.

The lesson I've already learnt is that the City merry-go-round which Sir James Crosby rode - first a banker, then a government adviser with a knighthood, then a regulator - made us all sick.

UPDATE 1140: I've just noticed that Gordon Brown's defence of his appointment of Sir James Crosby to the FSA related only to the period 2003/4, ie when Sir James was made a non-executive director of the FSA.

The most serious FSA warning to Crosby's bank HBOS came in 2006. The following year he was made Deputy Chairman of the FSA. By then, of course, Mr Brown had been replaced as chancellor by Alistair Darling.

Could this be a case of saying "not me, guv"?

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Downing Street is being rather coy about whether the prime minister or any of his officials was in contact - directly or indirectly - with Sir James Crosby in the 24 hours before his .

The Treasury has told us that their ministers and officials had no contact with him.

Gordon Brown told the Commons within minutes of Sir James's resignation being announced that it was "the right thing to do".

Political historians will note that resignations do have a habit of happening on the day of Prime Minister's Questions. The reason is obvious. The PM's officials are paid to know when their guy risks standing naked in front of an open goal (forgive the horribly mixed metaphor). They're also paid to sort the problem out before their man gets to his feet at noon on Wednesday.

This, incidentally, has been true down the ages

Why, you may ask, does this matter? The reason this story is politically explosive is that it has given the prime minister's enemies their first chance to link Gordon Brown personally with someone who, it is alleged, ignored warnings that brought down the Halifax and cost taxpayers billions of pounds.

It's ironic that the first casualty of yesterday's select committee of British banking wasn't even there.

PS: Knowing the wisdom of that old and controversial adage about "a good day to bury bad news", I simply note that Yates of the Yard has chosen today to that the Met will not investigate allegations that some peers attempted to change the law to the benefit of companies paying them.

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Perhaps the song now needs to be rewritten. Sorry does not, after all, seem to be the hardest word.

Not, that is, if you're one of those billed as the "guilty men" of British banking facing .

They had their apologies scripted and ready.

However, the question was left hanging: "what are they sorry for?" For the consequences of banks' failures for shareholders, staff and customers certainly. What was much less clear, however, is that they accepted personal responsibility for causing those consequences.

This felt more like the captain of the Titanic saying "I'm sorry the iceberg was there" and less like "Sorry I steered the ship into the iceberg and promised you that it couldn't sink".

The point of these hearings is not, of course, merely to extract apologies but to learn lessons for the future. The MPs on the committee did not feel they'd learned enough.

Those who blame them should ponder how easy, say, John Humphrys, Radio 4's inquisitor in chief, would find it to interview four people at once while sharing the job with 13 of his colleagues.

Tomorrow, the committee will try to get to grips with those who are now running the banks.

It may well turn out that "the hardest word" for a banker is not sorry but "no" - as in "no, we won't be paying any bonuses".

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He didn't mean to say it, but he did mean it.

When Ed Balls delivered a speech on Saturday to a regional Labour Party Conference, he hadn't planned to say that "the reality is that this is becoming the most serious global recession for, I'm sure, over 100 years" - but he did mean what he said.

He was not arguing that the recession here - or, indeed in the US - will be worse than the the era of the soup kitchens in the 1930s.

However, he was reflecting on the recent collapse in . Japan recently reported that its industrial output had fallen by almost 10% in December alone - that's the biggest contraction since records began. This means that Japan's industrial economy is back to roughly the size it was in the mid-to-late 1980s.

Think about that for a second. It as if Japan - once one of the powerhouses of the world economy - had been economically frozen for the past two decades.

What this speech reveals is a tension at the heart of government about how far to spell out the scale of the economic problem.

Gordon Brown has consistently been the slowest to spell it out, the most aware of the dangers of undermining confidence and the quickest to criticise the Tories for "talking Britain down".

Others believe that it is only by spelling out how bad things are that the public will engage with Labour's argument that the Tories are proposing to "fiddle whilst the global economy burns".

PS: This is the text of what Balls planned to say:

"We meet in unprecedented times. With the world financial system in a crisis more severe than anything we have seen since the 1930s ...Triggering the biggest global recession in our lifetimes."

Update 1352: Ed Balls has just to my colleague Reeta Chakrabarti.

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This morning, I'm going to be contributing to following the Treasury Select Committee's questions to bank bosses (see yesterday's post, Bash-A-Banker). The page will also include video of the session, the news as it happens, and your contributions.

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The Cabinet minister who was Gordon Brown's closest economic adviser for more than a decade has said that he believes this to be "the most serious global recession for...over 100 years".

The comments made by Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, at a weekend conference were recorded by a reporter for the Yorkshire Post.

Mr Balls said "I think that this is a financial crisis more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s and we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy...the reality is that this is becoming the most serious global recession for, I'm sure, over 100 years, as it will turn out."

Mr Balls and Downing Street have tried to play down the significance of his remarks insisting that he was pointing out the unique nature of the global financial crisis and was not predicting that the impact on ordinary people would be worse than that in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In other words, they accept that he said what's being quoted but had not meant to say it.

Only last week Downing Street declared that Gordon Brown had made a slip of the tongue during Prime Minister's Questions when he spoke of the world being in "depression" .

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It's Bash-A-Banker Week. Our MPs can hardly contain themselves.

Vince Cable wants to see them . Oh sorry, I forgot: he later said that that was a joke.

John Prescott is recruiting what he calls to frighten them into submission and Hazel Blears wants to clear out the excess testosterone. And all this before the "trial" of the "guilty men" - as many in Westminster hope they'll see when the Treasury Select Committee cross-examines , the man who made the RBS what it is today.

All this, of course, raises the question of what - if anything - can be done about those offending bonuses. The parties are much less clear than their rhetoric suggests. I'm going to try to find out what - if anything - they might actually do.

UPDATE 1300: As I suspected, there is a lot of political huff and puff about bonuses but few specific proposals for what should be done about them.

The prime minister, we're told, is "very angry". So angry that he wants bankers to consider waiving their bonuses voluntarily.

The Tory leader has attacked the government's slowness to act, declaring that "he who does the paying, does the saying", but he has not spelt out what more ministers could do. He too called on bankers to solve the problem, stating that they should "wake up and smell the coffee".

The Lib Dem leader has called the government's response "pathetic" and said he'd fully nationalise the failing banks. In the meantime, though, he says that bonus payments should be frozen in the semi-nationalised banks (ie RBS and Lloyds) whilst a new bonus structure is drawn up, based on shares and stock - not cash - which could only be cashed in after several years.

So why are the politicians finding rhetoric easier than concrete action?

All agree that the boards of semi-nationalised banks - RBS and Lloyds - shouldn't and will not get bonuses this year. All appear to agree that any ban on bonuses should not apply to the man or woman at the counter in a local bank branch.

All know that the real problem is those in-between - some of whom have contracts that guarantee them bonuses if they or their desk has performed well (even if their bank was saved from bankruptcy). RBS bought many businesses and now has them in 50 countries around the world. The body created by the government to look after the taxpayers' interests - the UKFI - is negotiating with RBS and Lloyds now.

All know that it will be easier to limit bonuses next year, as this can be made a condition for any bank taking advantage of the new plan to underwrite bank loans, so-called asset insurance.

All know that taxpayers picked up the bill to re-capitalise the banks last October after a weekend of emergency talks provoked by fears that some would collapse. Ministers promised that there would be "strings attached" for the billions of public money spent but, I'm told, "didn't have time" to work out which strings would be attached or how.

So, now our leaders are left sounding very, very cross but also rather impotent -rather as they have through much of this banking crisis.

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David Davis, the former Shadow 91Èȱ¬ Secretary, is demanding that ministers make a statement about whether Britain was complicit in the torture of a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay and whether the American government has threatened to withdraw intelligence co-operation with Britain if details of the case are revealed.

Mr Davis has just raised a point of order on the floor of the House of Commons this afternoon in response to a ruling in the High Court by Lord Justice Thomas in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who has alleged British involvement in torture inflicted on him in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan.

The ruling sounds as if it could be political dynamite, since it involves alleged torture and alleged bullying of a British court by the American administration even though it is now led by President Obama. I should stress that I have yet to see the judgement for myself.

Watch this space.

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"It's very hard to know what's going on here. The Unions say that Total's subcontractors are discriminating against British workers. Total says they aren't. Whom to believe?"

That's the question posed by DisgustedOfMitcham2 in this morning's post.

The government's reply to this is that ACAS will find out the facts, although it's striking that Peter Mandelson appears to have already decided that the company is telling the truth when it says there's no discrimination against British workers.

What's also becoming clear is that there's no agreement on what "discrimination" really means.

The unions believe that EU law should not simply guarantee that foreign workers get the same legal minimum terms and conditions as British workers. They argue that it should prevent "undercutting" of British workers by giving foreign workers the terms and conditions produced by collective agreements negotiated between unions and employers.

The unions claim that the EU's "posted workers directive" would mean this, if it was implemented properly by the British government. They also argue that recent judgements of the European Court of Justice have limited their right to fight for the directive to be implemented.

The Business Secretary begs to differ. In the Lords just now, he argued that "I don't think it's reasonable to seek to change the law in a way, in respect of this European directive which would extend collectively bargained entitlements to all companies and employees in adjacent employment, because that's not in UK law, let alone EU law."

It's not just his cabinet colleague Alan Johnson who appears to take the unions' side. The comments in the Commons of the former cabinet minister Peter Hain and of Labour's former chair Ian McCartney suggest that they do too.

Peter Mandelson is trying to make this dispute purely about the behaviour of Total and his message is, essentially: the company isn't breaking the law, so get back to work. The strikers and many others insist that this dispute is about protecting workers up and down the country.

PS: Brownloather (a name which may tell you something) draws my attention to Peter Oborne's in today's Daily Mail for being "gullible" in my coverage of Gordon Brown's promise to deliver "British jobs for British workers". I simply ask you to re-read what I said at the time the phrase was first used, in September 2007:

"Ponder for a second how exactly the same policies or phrases would have been written up had David Cameron delivered them. A 'lurch to the right' anyone? Or, even, 'language normally associated with the far right BNP'?"

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What is the government's view of the wildcat strikes? Clearly, ministers want them to stop but do they think the strikers have a point or not? Listen to different ministers and you get different answers.

Cabinet minister and former union leader Alan Johnson that "I can understand the anger" of the strikers. He went on to suggest that new EU directives were needed "to make it absolutely clear that people can't be undercut in this way" so that "we don't allow this kind of dumbing down".

Hours later, Peter Mandelson said that the firm involved - Total - has made clear that there is no discrimination against British workers, either in the form of their wages being undercut or them being excluded from applying for jobs. , he said that the issue of European law is quite separate from this dispute.

that recent court rulings make it impossible to defend their members from the threat of cheap labour coming from abroad. They point to the case of a Latvian company, Laval, which had a contract to build schools in Sweden. Laval claimed that its freedom to use a Latvian workforce was being inhibited by attempts to block the move by Swedish unions. Its complaint was upheld in the European Court of Justice.

Business ministers are not challenging this judgement or pushing for new directives, but are merely awaiting a report from the European Commission on the effects of the ruling.
It would only be relevant to the current British dispute if there were evidence of discrimination against British workers - which Lord Mandelson insists there isn't.

This morning, Lord Mandelson suggested that the confusion was simply a matter of timing - in other words, that his cabinet colleague was simply talking before the facts were made clear by the employer.

Somehow I doubt that will quite solve the problem.

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