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One of the key issues floating around the news of Liam Fox's problems has been the issue of lobbyists. As the Cabinet Secretary's report in to this debacle has revealed the civil service does not believe that Mr. Werrity was a lobbyist. Whilst he clearly held views he was not promoting them on behalf of any person or company - certainly that s the view of the Cabinet Secretary. But this has raised a debate about the issue of lobbyists, something David Cameron argued, at the time of MPs expenses and the phone hacking scandal, was the 'next big scandal waiting to break'.

There are some, mainly on the left, who see lobbyists as a corrupting evil on the body politic. Whilst it is true that when 'brown envelopes' change hands there is a need for examination into the role of lobbyists but in a democracy lobbying is a respectable trade.

The reality is that we all lobby. Lobbying is part of our human instinct. From the day we asked our Mother to buy that special toy we have lobbied. When our Mother refuses it we set about to try to get our way through persuasion and manoeuvring.

In our democracy, whether local or national, we all want elected politicians to see our viewpoint and do what we want. In a very local sense that includes campaigning against a planning application or trying to get our school system changed.

A company is as equally entitled to hold views that it wants decision makers to be clear about. In the context of national legislation companies affected by a changing tax regime are entitled to use lobbying to get across what they believe those changes will mean for employment, profitability and growth. Some of the most successful organisations at lobbying are in fact Charities although my experience is that they tend to be less successful than they themselves think they are.

Lobbying continues to be all around us, indeed many of the current Government, Ministers and advisors, are former lobbyists. This is especially true in the Deputy Prime Minister's outer office. In a very real sense lobbyists are part of democracy and attempts to prevent them playing their part is itself an affront to democracy. But supporting lobbying does not preclude the need for transparency.

The public and their politicians need to be very clear about who is objecting to a change in legislation in the same way it is only right that planners and developers are aware of who is objecting to a planning application. Maybe this can be achieved by a compulsory registration of lobbyists and for Government to always make sure their civil servants always detail who they meet.

Taking decisions in a democracy is never very tidy and it will always be messy. The many parts that come together to form a politician's decision are influenced by personal experience as much as they are by fact and for as long as politician's exist they will always face external pressure on their decisions from their electors and the people and businesses they affect by their decisions. That is the way it has always been since the time man learnt to argue a case and to say that elements of that decision-making pressure should be removed is as much a nonsense as to say politicians should stop facing elections.

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An odd thing happened to the Conservative Party conference this year - it changed.

I have been to many conferences, although to be honest it is only in the past five or so years that I have endured the entirety of the event. What was odd was the atmosphere of virtual disdain for the process of conference - not just from the party faithful but from those outside the hall.

I arrived on the Sunday afternoon and was walking to the venue from the hotel. I ran in to the remnants of the anti-cuts demonstration that had taken place. I would add at this point that by calling this 'anti-cuts' I do not intend to give succour to the idea that there are cuts, for the reality lies somewhere closer to the 'slower growth' school of thought than it does to cuts. I leave it to the economists of our time to debate the preference of real terms growth against cash growth!

I chose not to wear my conference badge as I had surmised that with 35,000 people on the streets of Manchester there was no telling whether this would tip over in to something more than a gathering of like-minded souls. As I walked past the scattered and somewhat drilgy looking protestors staggering back to their lairs I heard them mutter 'Tory tosser', or some such other insult which they considered would upset me. This led me to wonder later about the position of political discourse and whether the nature of politics is now reverting to that happy place where those who govern best are governing and those who do opposition best are in opposition. Demonstrations and insults are clearly the preserve of the Left whilst reform and change is the preserve of the Right. As for the Lib Dems they like neither.

Putting aside the Lib Dems, something which both main parties could obligingly agree we should, then the simple fact is that the history of the past 150 years of Parliament indicates that the Conservatives are those who sort out the economy, legal and social system whilst the Left are those who come in and destroy it again with their noisy sophistry. Thus, the circle begins again.

The left are not great reformers. Even with the NHS, something which the left whine on about interminably, it was the case that the work for its introduction had been done two years before the Government of Atlee came to power in 1945. In fact there had been debate within the cross-party War cabinet as to whether they should even publish what was seen to be an ambitious proposition laid out in the Beveridge report. Despite Labour rhetoric today their party actually opposed the idea of the NHS and Beveridge showed a great deal of frustration at the stance of Ernest Bevin who called it a 'social ambulance scheme' and wanted it delayed.

I digress, but the point is that the Labour party are not radicals and they are certainly not innovators. It is now difficult to know where they stand in this current crisis. If they believe in slower cuts then surely all they are suggesting is that this crisis would drag on for considerably longer - twice as long by their reasoning. This is also precisely the same thing they said in the early 80's when they ranged against the Lawson budgets that reduced expenditure and they were proved at best wrong and at worst dangerous.

The recent changes to the shadow cabinet seem to bring only youth into their front-bench but does little to assuage to commentariat that they understand the need for rationality in a crisis. Labour seem to not have grasped that this is a serious crisis that could easily topple into the need for a Government of national unity if the implosions forecast in the EU were to even partly materialise. This would leave them not only bereft of policy but also naked in the eyes of the public.

Back to the Conservative conference? well it lacked everything that you could imagine it might lack. There was no debate and there was no place for activists at what has become a somewhat media dominated enterprise where the media hacks discuss late in to the night who is in and who is out and those MPs who can be bothered to attend greet each other as long-lost friends. The Parliamentary party is clearly not connected in a way which ordinary members and voters would imagine but then I suppose there are 300 of them and organising that many people in the tunnels and vestibules of Parliament is a job worthy of only the finest shepherd.

I think the Conservative party needs to be radicals with their conference. Let us change the conference so that they do not waste the time and money of the membership and are open to the greater public. The party needs to stop treating members and activists like fools.

• move conference to a bi-annual event
• in the off-year hold regional conferences where MPs can meet the public and there is no closed shop
• open up a youth camp on the Glastonbury scale - there were many more young people at conference then I can remember
• make the secure zone a real secure zone where party members can engage with politicians and ban journalists and lobbyists - to be fair the party did try something like this in Manchester but it needs to be expanded
• stop making announcements to the press before they are announced in the conference hall.
• hold them in places that have cheap accommodation and don't seem to ramp up the costs because the 'Tories are in town'.

Like many things in life the best time to change them are when the economic circumstances force change, maybe this is just another example.

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I was present at a fascinating debate between Nick Boles MP, Stephan Shakespeare (Yougov) and Tim Montgomerie (Conhome). They were debating what it was the Conservatives needed to do if they are to win the next General Election outright - and implement the things that the Lib Dems are preventing us from doing.

Stephan Shakespeare's view is that there only two ways of gaining a full majority because the electoral reality is that the two main parties now only attract some 65% of the vote and given this it is difficult for any party to get an overall majority. His first route to victory is that we annihilate the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems deserve to be annihilated and their poll ratings tend to suggest they have annihilated themselves but even at the levels they are polling now they would still deprive us of seats that should normally be ours for the taking. His second view was that we needed to broaden our appeal to take votes from across the spectrum. There was little division that this was the correct thing to do but it was how we achieved that. Interestingly Stephan was pointing out that this is not a simple 'right' v 'left' divide where we nibble at our left fringe to take votes. He says this because he knows that the majority of voters are not at all political and they tend to pick policies from both left and right. They form a smorgasbord of party support that is balanced by the experiences they have and the people they have as circles of friends and families.

Nick's view was that we need to deepen the modernisation process by applying two tests to every announcement and policy we make. Test one would be 'is this policy relevant to people now', is it going to put right something that matters to people - is it in the top five issues that they tell pollsters are important.

His second test was is it going to relieve financial pressure on very hard pressed families. When challenged about whether this would include green policies (something Nick is very much in favour of) he said that it probably meant 'no', because green policies were costing people more and

Tim's view was that we needed to ensure that we were appealing to a broader number of people and that the 'left' should not be able to pretend they are somehow for the poor and we are not, when the evidence is very much different. He agreed we needed to appeal to the issues that matter although he felt that it was not as simple as using polling information.

The fact is that for the Conservatives to win the next election we need to broaden our appeal and ensure that we attract back those Lib Dem voters who are naturally Conservative. To do this is not about the 'lovebombing' we tried before the last election - that did not work because we could even get rid of Chris Huhne on a wafer thin majority - but it does mean doing more to point out what it is the Lib Dems are for and what they stand for that is so at odds with the voters thinking.

We need to tell people that had they had their way we would have been in the Euro and facing rising unemployment and home repossessions as borrowing rates soared and our public services were slashed.

We need to tell them about the raft of taxation that would have penalised the middle classes, their local income tax and their duplicity over so many areas of policy. But we equally need to ensure that in Lib Dem seats they are reminded of the cost of a Labour Government. BY doing both things together we can start to edge back Lib Dem voters and secure seats.

I do not doubt that the Lib Dems have done the nation a great favour by allowing a minority Conservative Government to sort out the nation's mess, but the nation needs the radical reforms that only a Conservative Government can deliver. The real danger is that a divided Lib Dem party whose leadership is so at odds with its members over so much of what we are doing is a brake on the future success of the country.

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Day one of the Conservative party conference has been characterised by the name that dares not speak - th Lib Dems.

No one wants to mention them and certainly no one wants to try and compete with the childish outbursts we had at their party conference. In many respects the only debate we are hearing so far is does anyone want to continue the coalition after the next election. I have to say on this the party appears split, although I cynically wonder whether those promoting the coalition are doing so only because they feel a need to support the leadership and not destabilise the Government!

In most forum, and in the quiet of the late night bars, the Conservatives still wish to destroy the Lib Dems. Their duplicity in Government is the same duplicity that Conservative activist's have fought election by election. The debate though is what will happen.

One of the more unusual aspects of the conference has been the apology by David Cameron for his apparently sexist comments in Parliament. I am somewhat surprised by this as I am not really sure this was much of an issue but the party seemed to have deemed they want to discuss it. Whether that is because they feel a need to show the party needing to change further and modernise or some other belief that the public want this addresses, I really do not know. Whatever else it appears odd, even though it has certainly attracted the headlines.

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I am not normally a fan of Peter Oborne - he looks a bit like a right-wing Gordon Brown. Having said that one cannot argue with the thesis he lays out in this very entertaining booklet on the disgraceful way Clegg, Huhne, Heseltine, Blair, the BBC and CBI tried to sell our currency down the river and enter the Euro.

What price now for someone allowing that to happen.

Click here to read it.

Related articles

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• Will the Real Culprits of Euro Doom Stand Up? (thepressnet.com)
• Some More "Guilty Men" (order-order.com)

Remember that phrase from our Brownian leader. Well, I guess his tune is changing yet again and Lord Mandy is advising him that it was an ill advised and ridiculous statement.

We are seeing demonstrations at Grangemeouth and the French going on strike and at the heart of the demonstrations is the concern that jobs at home are going to those from abroad.

The trouble is that this type of nationalism is the sort of thing that led to the second world war (as Europe came out of recession) and would lead to a longer and deeper recession now.

Who would have thought that Brown would have been doing the job for the BNP - disgraceful?
Grangemouth

France

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Yesterday was a telling day for proportional representation. It involved bribery and the smallest party holding the largest party over a barrel. To cap it all the form of PR that has been used in Scotland has meant the smallest party has MSP’s for whom no one has ever voted!

That's where PR gets you - it is not a better form of democracy;s it is a complete and utter mess. Yesterday at Holyrood proved that.

Mayhem at Scottish Parliament as SNP's budget kicked into touch by Greens - Telegraph

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I am a naturally optimistic person but today's news of further High Street chains going bust (albeit a shoe chain who I do not believe I have ever bought shoes from) and now Lord Mandy's pledge of a multi-million pound bail out of the motor industry, you cannot help thinking the world is coming to a crashing end.

Still, never mind, the people who got us into this mess are doing alright. Today sees hedge fund managers go before the Treasury Select Committee and argue that the run on the bank's share price is nothing to do with them but is the banks fault for having some rubbish managers who allowed the banks to get into their parlous state. That's a fair comment, but your argument is somewhat shot to pieces when it has been announced today that one Hedge Fund, Paulson & Co, made £100m profit from selling RBS short last week - hypocrisy or just plain stupidity?

UPDATE: I gather Ken Clarke has now revealed that Lord Mandy's bail out of the car industry is nothing of the sort. It seems Mandy was spinning again and reheated some announcements that were made back last year.

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Dear Sir,

It is time the Lib Dems who run Somerset started doing their jobs.

I yesterday spent some time in Misterton and was horrified to find that despite the very wet weather we have had this Winter – and indeed we continue to have – key road drains are still blocked up with rubbish and silt. More horrifying is that some of this blockage has come from the original flooding the area experienced back in the Autumn.

When I asked local people about this problem I was told that the Parish Council had been pushing hard for something to be done and that the local County Councillor said he would do something about this immediately. This was some months ago and I gather the said
Councillor is on an extended holiday abroad. Because of his failings in getting his Council to do something about this, houses in the Misterton area face the threat of further flooding.
Being a Councillor is a responsible role and one which should be taken seriously. If, as has been reported to me, Councillors are ignoring the basic needs of local people then I hope they will consider whether it is in the best interests of local people for them to stand at the coming election in June 2009.

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Sometimes, in an attempt to get any press activity, the Lib Dems come up without the most absurd ideas. The latest is that Nick Clegg believes that because the economy is buggered under Labour that we are all going to start clamouring to dump the pound and take up the Euro.

In an interview with the Financial Times, he said public opinion could “turn on its head” and swing against the pound as the “sheer brutality” of the crisis prompted the public to yearn for the stability offered by the eurozone.

Well, there are two problems with this. The first is that there is not the slightest possibility that the British are turning against the Pound. If Mr. Clegg were in touch with the doorstep he might realise they are turning against Gordon Brown - Duh! The fact is the Lib Dems become blind to reason when their thinking is dominated by their obsession with throwing away the powers of the UK Government to Brussels.

Secondly, it seems that many of the Euro Zone countries are now looking back with affection to the time when they controlled their own economy. King amongst those is Germany ( who is, I believe, the only country that has the option of withdrawing from the Euro). A very good analysis of this position was done by Monday by William Rees-Mogg in the Daily Mail which you can see HERE

FT.com / UK - Euro could ‘anchor’ economy, says Clegg:

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