Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

I am glad to learn that becoming Speaker has not gone to John Bercow's head.

A friend spotted him on Wednesday night eating in the Victoria Street, Westminster outlet of Pizza Express.

Perhaps I should declare something of a personal interest in the story of the Totnes ballot, since about 35 years ago, when I was a teenage schoolboy, The Guardian published a letter of mine advocating the use of US-style primary elections by the British political parties in their selections of Parliamentary candidates.

I wasn't, of course, the first person to suggest this - and by no means the last. Indeed in the last few weeks, in the wake of the expenses scandal, it has become a pretty popular idea as a means to help reform British politics.

On Newsnight tonight I report on how the Tories in Totnes have come the nearest to fulfilling this idea in Britain, as they try to choose a successor to Anthony Steen, who has been forced to step down as an MP at the next election over his expenses.

At huge cost the party has sent out postal ballots to every voter in the south Devon constituency asking them to select, from a shortlist of three, the candidate to represent Totnes Conservatives next time round.

Indeed he or she will probably become the next MP for Totnes.

The trouble is that the process down here in Devon has been rushed. Candidates haven't had the time to organise big campaigns, and voters haven't been given a varied choice.

So the turnout may not be that high when the result is announced next Tuesday, with the danger that what could be a bold, exciting development in British politics is quickly discredited.

Labour MP Jon Cruddas has told the Fabian Society that he is not interested in standing for the Labour Party leadership after the next election.

Mr Cruddas had been mooted as a possible leadership contender, and a figure who would have been relatively untainted by the Brown government, as he has repeatedly declined to serve as a minister.

Mr Cruddas told :

"The leadership doesn't interest me. There are certain identikit characteristics which a leader has to have, and I don't have them. I don't have the certainty needed to do it. I couldn't deal with it. I have a different conception of how I want to live my life.

"I literally am not interested. A lot of blokes in and around Cabinet could do it. Harriet Harman has shown real steel. There's the Miliband lads, James Purnell and younger people...

"I'm not ambitious - that's my problem. Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and David Cameron are physiologically interchangeable. They are merging into the same person - constructing a politician that fits the rubric."

Despite his modest comments, I imagine Mr Cruddas may still be interested in the deputy leadership, following his reasonably successful campaign for the job in 2007, perhaps on a joint ticket with Alan Johnson.

Relations between Gordon Brown and the head of Army General Richard Dannatt are terrible right now - perhaps worse than they have ever been between a Prime Minister and one of his top generals.

People in Downing Street are especially angry because Gordon Brown's instinctive reaction last weekend, after all the recent deaths in Afghanistan, was to get on a plane on Sunday, and go to visit British troops in Helmand to show his sympathy and solidarity.

I'm told, however, that Sir Richard and his colleagues advised the Prime Minister that whilst the Army had no problem with Mr Brown visiting Afghanistan at some point this summer, it would be "too dangerous" simply for the PM to make an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment trip.

Mr Brown accepted this advice. His plans were dropped and instead he made a statement about Afghanistan to the Commons on Monday.

I'm told that what especially infuriated Brown and his colleagues in Number Ten however is that on Wednesday morning Dannatt suddenly popped up on the Today programme, speaking from Afghanistan, voicing his scarcely-veiled criticisms of government policy.

Some of Brown's aides immediately concluded that they had been badly outmanoeuvred, and that Sir Richard and his colleagues didn't want a high-profile surprise trip by the Prime Minister to steal the thunder of Dannatt's own long-planned farewell visit.

And the fact that Today presenter Sarah Montague and her Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ producer travelled out by plane with the Army chief last Sunday, make Brown's staff even more suspicious. They think the whole trip and the attendant publicity were long-planned, and that Sir Richard has badly over-stepped the mark in what he's said this week.

On the other hand, Sir Richard and his colleagues were surely right in that it would undoubtedly have been very risky in the current circumstances for Gordon Brown to visit Afghanistan. A lot more risky than for Dannatt himself or for Sarah Montague.

There may also be an element of paranoia among people in Downing Street, which would hardly be surprising. But that in itself is important element in the story.

Now the relationship between Number Ten and Sir Richard is expected to get a lot worse, especially once the general retires next month, and becomes head of the defence think tank RUSI where he's expected to become a regular military pundit on radio and TV.

LATEST 21.30PM:
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has confirmed to me tonight that Gordon Brown did enquire about making a trip to Afghanistan, but that they advised against him going for "operational sensitivities". The MoD insists the Prime Minister was advised by them not to go, and not by General Sir Richard Dannatt.

The government has been forced to agree to a new law banning people who do not pay UK income tax - or are not liable to do so - from giving money to political parties.

Threatened with a huge rebellion - and possible defeat - in the Commons on Monday, the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has made a dramatic U-turn and withdrawn government opposition to an amendment to the Elections Bill recently passed in the Lords by an alliance of Labour rebels, Liberal Democrats and cross-benchers.

The leader of the Lords rebellion Lord Campbell-Savours has confirmed to me that ministers have now accepted his plan, and this has also been confirmed to me by a senior government source.

The measure is clearly aimed at the Conservative Deputy Chairman and election strategist Lord Ashcroft who has given the Conservative Party millions of pounds in recent years, but who has aroused considerable controversy over whether he pays British tax.

But it is likely to have a significant effect on donations to both the major parties.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are thought to have taken large sums of money from wealthy supporters who are non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes.

Mr Straw has held a series of meeting with Lords and Commons rebels this week but has finally conceded on the issue in the last 36 hours.

Ministers claimed they were sympathetic to the measure but told rebels there were various legal and technical reasons, and issues of principle as to why it was unworkable.

Some rebels suspected however, that Labour may have been hoping for big donations in the immediate future from supporters who do not pay UK tax.

Ministry of Justice officials will be working frantically over this weekend to overcome these obstacles.

An interesting account of the atmosphere at the News of the World during Andy Coulson's editorship can be found in Peter Burden's book "News of the world? Fake Sheiks and Royal Trappings".

Mr Burden says that on the day the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman was jailed for four months for hacking into the voicemails of palace aides, Mr Coulson called a staff meeting to announce his immediate resignation, and told colleagues that he thought Goodman had been treated far too harshly by the judge.

According to Mr Burden, Mr Coulson "took the opportunity to vent his anger at the sentence, railing that just that week the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Secretary, John Reid, had advised judges, in view of current prison overcrowding, that only the most dangerous criminals should be sent to prison".

It would be interesting to know if Mr Coulson still takes that view.

And still supports John Reid's efforts to reduce prison overcrowding!

Senior Labour sources in Scotland tell me the voters of Glasgow North East may have to wait until November before they get a new MP in succession to Michael Martin, who left the Commons when he stepped down as Speaker last month.

If the Labour whips were to call the by-election right now it would occur slap-bang in the middle of the school holidays. Labour thinks doing that last summer helped ruin their chances in the by-election in neighbouring Glasgow East, a supposedly safe Labour seat famously won by the SNP.

Under the rules Labour can't issue the writ for the by-election whilst the Commons is in recess. MPs won't come back to Westminster until 12 October 2009, which could mean an election on Thursday 12 November 2009. Technically they could hold it on 5 November 2009 but that's unlikely given the religious sensitivity of bonfire night in the West of Scotland.

"We want to hold the election quicker than that," my senior source says, "but there's nothing we can do about it. We can't hold it in the holidays again. We got a lot of criticism for that."

At the moment Labour is pretty confident of success. They claim that on the basis of the local figures in the constituency in the recent European elections - which were disastrous for Labour across most of Britain - they actually won in Glasgow North East.

But can Labour keep that up? The general rule in by-elections is the longer the sitting party waits, the more time it gives the challenger to gain the momentum to win.

A small footnote about my former Newsnight colleague David Kerr. He took voluntary redundancy from Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Scotland last week to try to become the SNP candidate for Glasgow North East. But then last night, sadly for him, the SNP picked someone else, perhaps because Kerr was seen as Alex Salmond's preferred man.

I first came across Kerr when he was the SNP candidate in the Falkirk by-election of 2004, when I said in my commentary, rather cheekily: "David Kerr used to be editor of Newsnight Scotland, so he should be used to small audiences."

My producer was having kittens during the editing of my film, and begged me to change the line, fearing the wrath of humourless Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ bureaucrats in Glasgow. In the event, nobody complained, partly because my film didn't go out in Scotland... but also, of course, because there are no humourless Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ bureaucrats in Glasgow.

Until only a few weeks ago, Chris Ostrowski, Labour's young candidate in the Norwich North by-election, was planning to leave the country this autumn, together with his wife Katy, to go and do an MA in International Relations at a university in Madrid.

Indeed, I'm told his forthcoming departure for Spain lay behind his decision, last February, to step down as Treasurer of the Christian Socialist Movement, after two years in the job.

Ostrowski's Spanish plans were so far advanced that many people in Labour circles were rather surprised when it was suddenly announced that he was now Labour's man in Norwich North.

Presumably Ostrowski's academic plans will be abandoned if he is elected to Parliament on 23 July.

But if, as seems more likely, he loses the by-election then Madrid is still very much an option. I understand that in April Ostrowski told the university in Madrid that he wouldn't now be coming this autumn, but that he was still interested in coming in September 2010.
The university are keeping the MA place open for him for another year, and Ostrowski has until next July to decide whether to take up.

For now, a Labour spokesman says, "Chris is focussing all of his attention on the by-election."

There was a moment of panic, I'm told, in the Treasury during Prime Minister's Questions yesterday when David Cameron suddenly brandished an internal Treasury document on government debt.

"Luckily," says my source, "it was only one of the tame ones, that doesn't have much more than is in the public domain. Not one of the serious ones which say what a mess we're really in."