Richard Spring MP
Member of Parliament for West Suffolk

If it was not that he is known as a very partisan and very politically ungenerous individual, I might have had just a fleeting tinge of feeling sorry for Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday.

It was simply horrible, porkies and all. In contrast to Tony Blair, the present incumbent is wooden and flat-footed. Now out there Prime Minister’s Questions may seem unpleasant and irrelevant to some, but it is a tribal experience, and it impacts the morale of MPs very considerably. The wretched expressions of Labour MPs, most especially the Cabinet, was a sight to behold. Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon, the Chief Whip, looked shaken.

Pressure and tension affect people in different ways. Margaret Thatcher looked energised by the demands of her job. David Cameron seems to have exactly the same quality.

Gordon Brown, by contrast, looks as if he has undergone an extraordinarily rendition experience. Yesterday was obviously torture for him, and it showed.   

And the one sided bullfight is set to continue week by week.

Roads, like airports, provoke mixed emotions. A new road may destroy some precious green spaces. Yet congestion causes a negative environmental impact and is costly on time and stress. How also do you measure the cost of death and injury brought about by a dangerous road?

In West Suffolk, leading into Norfolk, is one of the most treacherous and congested roads in the country, the notorious A11. To dual it, and bypass the village of Elveden, would mean cutting through a man-made forest, with one landowner. By anybody’s standards, the planning and ecological impact is very low indeed.

For 30 years a plan has existed to resolve the problem of the A11. BBC2 actually put out a programme to illustrate dramatically its sheer awfulness. The incoming Labour government promised to act, and then just at the point we believed it would be built, it was moved to the East of England Regional Assembly (EERA) to prioritise this project.

There is no point in revisiting what happened next. However, following a meeting with the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, there is a greater sense of understanding between EERA and the Department of Transport.

There are important hoops to get through and over £100 million would need to be found. But at least EERA understands now that it unequivocally has to back the scheme if it is to be realised.

Charles Clarke and I are hosting a meeting today to bring together all the local and regional stakeholders, to get our ducks in a row.

This is not a party political issue. When people lose their lives on the A11, as scores have, nobody asks whether they vote Labour or Conservative.

I have such a sense of personal disappointment as the local MP that the A11 has not been dualled yet. It is a disgrace. I can only hope today that our meeting really does move the matter forward.  

This afternoon we are holding a Conservative Business Relations seminar looking at environmental strategy and UK business. It is going to be hugely well attended. 

Yesterday George Osborne spoke at a City lunch with leading members of the accountancy profession. 

In businesses of all sizes and sorts, there is now a desperation to get rid of this Government. It is the sheer incompetence on top of the burdens of regulations and taxation which is causing this. 

But there is also a much greater realism. Of course they realise that we are increasingly uncompetitive, and that businesses continue to look abroad for a better environment. However they now realise how tied any new government will be, how restrained by the terrible fiscal legacy of this Government. Unravelling this will not be easy, and it cannot be done overnight, but they now appreciate how much more difficult it has become to achieve quickly the lower tax environment they all want. 

Meanwhile we are listening very carefully to what they have to say. Their comments would not exactly please Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling who have jointly created this unhappy situation, and burdensome future legacy. 

Having been abroad last week, it is somehow a bit different looking again at the British political scene. I suspect that Labour MPs in their constituencies last week will have had a bellyful of complaints about the Prime Minister.

There were three articles last week which underline his dilemma. Andrew Rawsley invites him to be bold and be true to himself. I suspect that the Prime Minister will ultimately spend a lot of time dithering about how to be bold, and then give up. Alan Milburn writes out a programme for reviving and revitalising the Labour agenda. However Gordon Brown spent much time preventing any of the reforms advocated, and will hardly change his mind now. Ben Wegg-Prosser accepts that the huge state apparatus which Gordon Brown helped to create is now being rejected by the overtaxed and over governed electorate. However no control freak would countenance the withdrawal of the state in the way suggested. Leopards do not change spots, at least not in their sixth decade.

If regicide is practised, would the Labour Party go for the steadiness of Jack Straw who has actually been so centrally part of the very policies which people are rejecting? Or go for a younger politician who would have to consider whether they would wish to be the captain of a ship heading for the rocks. In any event none of the likely younger candidates match up remotely to David Cameron.

So I shall watch the drama being played from the ringside seat of the Commons.

What is for sure is that Gordon Brown’s personal chemistry is dreadful. But the notion that changing the leader will resolve Labour’s crisis is misplaced.

The Party is intellectually and politically bankrupt, and Labour MPs as much as the electorate, know  it. And by the way, whether that bankruptcy is expressed in a Scottish voice or not is really totally irrelevant.

On Monday, whilst canvassing in Crewe I felt the extent of the dramatic swing to us. By Wednesday I began to doubt my own judgment, in part because Crewe voters were fed up with seeing people like me on their doorstep. 

Yet there really is something profound in the air. Last night Iain Duncan Smith came to speak at my annual dinner. He made a long and very passionate speech about the state of our fractured society. A hundred people listened in enrapt attention. Two years ago that would simply not have happened. Last night they wanted serious politics. They know that the Government is unravelling. 

The fact is that up and down the country people sense the terminal failure of this Government. It goes well beyond rising prices or ridiculous by-election campaigns. 

If taxes and death are life’s inevitabilities, then the electorate is getting both with Gordon Brown. That is what the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was ultimately all about.  P.S. We are now in recess for a week after which blogging will return

A couple of years ago I was standing in an airport check-in queue in the United States. A lady from Mexico, also en route to London, asked if I had been very polite to the rather bemused check-in attendant. “I believe English people are so polite and have wonderful manners” she enthused.

Well I hope she was not too unpleasantly surprised on her visit here. Whilst it is surely true that most people here are indeed polite, we have a terrible loutish, yobbish minority whose behaviour here or abroad is at times grotesque. Drunkenness and violence are now internationally recognised characteristics of contemporary British society.

The extreme manifestations of this is the knife and gun crime culture which takes such a tragic toll. This Government has sought to redistribute wealth to try to help people at the lower income scale. However alienation and feral behaviour has worsened. It is clear that money will not solve the problem, and endless new criminal justice legislation.

Iain Duncan Smith has tried to examine the causes of this through his Social Justice Commission. He has explored the darkest nooks and crannies of British life. It is not a pretty picture.

He has examined the causes and come up with some solutions which go well beyond simply deploying redistributive tax and welfare arrangements.

Family breakdown is at the heart of our social malaise, people trapped in welfare dependency, educational failure, increasing addiction and soaring personal debt – these are the root causes of anti-social and at times brutal behaviour.

For this we should be hugely grateful to him. It will be up to the next Conservative government to begin to reverse the destructive atomisation of our national life.

Iain is guest speaker at my constituency annual dinner tonight. It is a sell out. Everybody present will know that this has been a huge failure of this Government, and will be listening to him with great interest, admiration and concern. 

If you were to go into a tourist shop in one of South Africa’s cities, often you may if you wish practise your French. Many of those working there are from Gabon, Senegal or the Congo, and are French speakers. The rainbow nation has attracted immigrants from all over Africa and like migrants frequently are, they are often very industrious.

However their numbers are insignificant compared with the human avalanche from the economic horrors of Zimbabwe. So an employment powder keg has begun to explode, with tragic consequences for some of the incomers.

Years ago we suggested that the South African government should take the strongest possible action against the destructive policies being pursued north of its border. We were told that this would greatly damage Zimbabwe’s citizens. Well we now know what a catastrophic misjudgement this was.

Being Opposition leader in South Africa, so overwhelmingly dominated by the ANC, is a thankless task. My friend Tony Leon did so energetically for many years, and constantly criticised the quiet diplomacy over Zimbabwe which yielded so little. He is in London at the moment, as the Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, and talks about Zimbabwe with real passion.

The unwillingness of some Southern African leaders to take on Robert Mugabe has now unleashed the sort of anger and xenophobia which we are now seeing. It must be absolutely terrifying for those poor Zimbabweans who have taken huge personal risks to cross the border. Of course they do not wish to be there, and they know that there is real antagonism towards them, given the high levels of unemployment. Locals also blame outsiders for criminal activity.

There is no country in the world whose success is more cherished then South Africa. Individuals like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu are iconic figures of the Twentieth Century.

The violence being meted out inside Zimbabwe against those who oppose Robert Mugabe is well documented. For different reasons that poison has spilled southwards.

It is enough to make you weep.      

If you have not won a by-election against Labour for 30 years, and it is not remotely historic Tory territory, you would – as a Conservative – be somewhat cautious.

Arriving early yesterday at one of the Conservative campaign offices in Crewe, Mark Fox and I bump into Lembit Opik MP who looks really pleased to see us. That cannot be said of the Liberal Democrat candidate he is with. We set off canvassing in an area with a high proportion of retirees, in neat bungalows. It soon becomes evident the extent of the disaffection with Labour – it jumps out at you, time and time again. We see Messrs Byers and Alan Milburn out on the doorstep and wonder if they also – for very different reasons – are pleased too.

Feeling very cheerful we lunch at Les’s for fish and chips, and it is delicious fodder. When we return to the office we are invaded by the UKIP leader Nigel Farage and their candidate. I ask him how much a deposit costs. He laughs. Our Tory national treasure Eric Pickles appears, love bombing Labour to great effect. A number of us scuttle back to London to vote in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

I do not know what will exactly happen on Thursday, but something akin to a political cyclone is in the Cheshire air, at least on the basis of our canvassing. The Labour campaign to brand the Tory candidate as some sort of extra terrestrial toff is so amateurish and irrelevant, it is simply laughable. If this is the best they can do, they really have lost it. They clearly have nothing else to say.

In many years of canvassing, I have never had a more cheerful doorstep experience. Roll on Thursday.

On Sunday the Italian ambassador and his wife came to Newmarket to visit the British Racing School and enjoy an afternoon’s racing.

It was a good day for Frankie Dettori who joined us between races for tea. He is such a tremendous engaging character who has personally helped to popularise racing, which is drawing record attendances again.

Now racing in the Newmarket area faces a new threat. Proposals to change the flight paths and stacking arrangements for Stansted airport put at risk the tranquillity of the area. It is bad enough for local people, but breeders of thoroughbred racehorses are up in arms. They fear that the horses will react negatively to the increased noise.

Representations are being made very forcefully. The breeding industry is on something of a knife-edge – the temptations to move to France or Ireland may prove irresistible.

Racing is inextricably interlinked. The breeders, trainers, auctioneers and all the ancillary activities work together in Newmarket, the world headquarters of racing. The departure of one element will impact everything else.

Frankie makes us all cheerful, but underneath we are all pretty worried. The future of this important employer and exporter, a great British success story, is at stake.  

President Bush is in Israel and yesterday addressed the Knesset, where the debates are really lively and where personal insults really do fly. If nothing else, Israel is a remarkable democracy in a region where democracy does not shine through.

Earlier this week I went to a 60^th anniversary celebration in London, at which David Miliband spoke. There were not many MPs present, which surprised me, and they in turn were almost all Conservatives. Guests were treated to some delicious Jewish food.

In the tiny state, the contrasts are extraordinary. Tel Aviv is a sensual secular city, which has the earthy buzz of Rio de Janeiro. Jerusalem has many inhabitants who follow a much more Orthodox religious tradition.

The performance of Israel’s economy has been brilliant, with cutting edge research and business producing world beating products. Yet there is a prevailing sense of tension because of the failure to find the security that would arise from a political settlement.

The Jewish tradition has produced some of the finest minds throughout history, and involvement in political life has often been prescient and with noble intent. It was all too often the Jewish community in South Africa which bravely highlighted the iniquities of apartheid.
Yet the frontier mentality in Israel has inhibited a serious look at its long term strategic interests. If indeed Iran is financing and arming Israel’s enemies, then detaching Iran from Israel’s immediate neighbours has to be a fundamental objective.

There are those in Israel who want to think out of the box of the conventional political wisdom there. But the unqualified and uncritical support and advice of the United States has been something of a mixed blessing in this regard.

There is pessimism amongst Palestinians that a two state solution will ever be found. Many in Israel have abandoned any belief in a political resolution at all.

As we acknowledge the success of a remarkable little country, we can only hope that Israeli politicians look ahead a decade or two and conclude that some fresh geopolitical thinking is required. If not it will not only be Israel which will pay the price of failure, but many people in the region and well beyond.