Much ado about what in particular? Or the Guardian and lazy journalism

When I tell certain people that I enjoy reading the Guardian, they give me a quizzical look - as though they are a parent whose son has returned from his first term at university with his polo shirt done up to the top button.  He looks like the son you knew and there shouldn't, in theory, be anything wrong with doing up the top button of a polo shirt but...you just know he probably won't be the same again.

But there you go.  My name is Nik and I read the Guardian.  I've said it.

Why do I read it?  You get something different from its news coverage, for a start - the Guardian tends to cover quite different sorts of topics, or at least the same topics from a quite different angle.  So it is informative and challenges me to think differently or to reinforce my views.  Plus it has a stellar cast of columnists, from Michael White to Michael Kettle; Sir Simon Jenkins to Simon Hoggart; Julian Glover to Polly Toynbee.  Even Polly.  You might not always (you might never) agree with her but she is a media heavyweight.

Yet sometimes you do wonder why you read the Guardian; moments like when you come across Patrick Butler's blog today, 'Domestic violence: women's charities face 100% cuts'.  From the starting blocks, you know precisely where this is all heading:

"In an era of senseless cuts to vital public services, here's one that in its brutal scale and short-sightnedness almost beggars belief: Devon county council's proposals to reduce funding for domestic violence support services by 100%."

Brief summary: as part of its budget settlement, Devon County Council is, like all councils, having to make cuts to its expenditure.  As part of that, it has proposed to remove £1 million of funding from three domestic violence charities.  That represents less than one-fiftieth of the overall cuts being made.  It represents 0.0006% of local government spending; or 0.0001% of total UK spending.   Of course cuts to charities - whom I'm sure do a good job - are regrettable but Butler's way of expressing it is utterly pathetic.

First, of course these things look bad, but that's localism for you and the chief paradox at the middle of the Government's worthy decentralisation programme. The centre wants to devolve responsibility and accountability but flak still returns to the centre, even though it's not their decision.

Secondly, this is simply media trailing.  The council is putting out an interim suggestion on where cuts might fall but the actual decision isn't being taken until later.  It's part and parcel of announcements to gauge public reaction and act accordingly and governments have been doing it as long as there's been a popular press.  The decision has not been made.

Thirdly, in typical Guardian style, the author mews sanctimoniously about a single issue and won't mention any context.  At least Polly Toynbee tends to put things in context.  What other actions are Devon County Council taking as part of their budget settlement?  Who knows, not the general reader because they haven't read the settlement, perhaps the journalist hasn't bothered either.  If you go to Devon County Council's website you will see that, yes, they have to propose £54.6 million of budget cuts.  In spite of that, there will be increases for social care for older people and people with disabilities, children in care and children with special needs.  Direct grants to schools will increase and no libraries will close.  They are undergoing public consultation before announcing the full settlement next month.

Moreover, what do we know about or are told about the state of Devon?  Have quick look at the National Statistics website and you'll see that the south-west of England has the highest life expectancies and the lowest proportion of the population in social rented housing.  It has one of the highest household incomes in the country outside London; the lowest proportion of workless households; and the lowest crime rates in England.

Now have another very quick glance (its quite simple all this research) at recent British Crime Survey statistics on domestic violence:

"The risk of intimate violence varied by demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics. Characteristics that were independently associated with an increased risk of intimate violence across all the forms included marital status (in particular being unmarried), housing tenure, age (under the age of 45), and having a limiting disability or illness."

I'm not saying for a moment that there are not some serious cases of domestic violence against women that occur in Devon.  But, in short, Devon is evidently not the epicentre of the problem.

It isn't only the Guardian (the Daily Telegraph is turning into a tabloid with a bow-tie), but it does really grates me the way things like this are reported.  A narrative has been cast about these cuts and elements of the media will use any scraps they can find to flesh that narrative out - irrespective of context or relativity.

The Government is chucking (increased) billions of pounds at fighting poverty and preventable diseases in the developing world; ring-fencing the health budget against much opposition (including the Labour and Liberal parties) because, what a surprise, Tories do care about the NHS; protecting Post Offices from further closures.... And the Guardian is kicking and screaming about a million quid for a charity doing a job that local social services probably ought to be doing anyway?

Of course, these hacks aren't going to stop this sort of thing.  So, an apt consideration in present circumstances: the Government must sharpen its communications operation.  Richard Lambert's pronouncements on the economy recently may well have been "pathetic" on some levels, according to Lord Lawson, but his accusation of drift and lack of purpose in the Government's overall message holds a fair amount of truth.

In Much Ado About Nothing (Act V), Claudio says Hero has been "done to death by slanderous tongue."    The Government must sell its strategy and (already considerable) achievements, or journalists will disseminate their own versions of events.   Leave it too late, for the hoped-for freebie frenzy in 2013-14, and the chance of electoral resurrection might have already gone.  Get the message right now - and it has to be now, before the cuts really bite - and you might just be able to take the country with you.

On the Coalition's first Christmas, some advice from Sir Winston Churchill

It is Christmas, so I am home with the family in sylvan, snowy Sussex.  For the next few days, I will be living out a life of repetitive, traditional bliss.  Ah! a chocolate.  Another glass of Chasse-Spleen 1983?  It would be a crime not to.  Darling, do have some more turkey, it will only go to the dog.  If you insist.

Another Christmas tradition is to peruse my parents' bookshelves for something to lose myself in, beside the drawing room fireplace, in front of the tree.  This year, I am re-reading Churchill's history of the Second World War: a collection of six volumes so imperious in composition that it garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.  The opening paragraphs of Chapter II in the first volume, The Gathering Storm (1948), deserve to be quoted at length.  To contextualise, Churchill was at the time a Liberal MP and Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies.

The party stresses which the Irish Settlement had created inside Mr. Lloyd George's Coalition were growing with the approach of an inevitable General Election.  The issue arose whether we should go to the country as a Coalition Government or break up beforehand.  It seemed more in accordance with the public interest and the decencies of British politics that parties and Ministers who had come through so much together and bore a mass of joint responsibilities should present themselves unitedly to the nation.  In order to make this easy for the Conservatives, who were by far the larger and stronger party, the Prime Minister and I had written earlier in the year offering to resign our offices, and give our support from a private station to a new Government to be formed by Mr. Austen Chamberlain.  The Conservative leaders, having considered this letter replied firmly that they would not accept that sacrifice from us and that we must all stand or fall together.  This chivalrous attitude was not endorsed by their followers in the party, which now felt itself strong enough to resume undivided power in the State.

By an overwhelming vote the Conservative Party determined to break with Lloyd George and end the National Coalition Government.  The Prime Minister resigned that same afternoon.  In the morning we had been friends and colleagues of all these people.  By nightfall they were our party foes, intent on driving us from public life.

The passage follows a chapter on the disastrous fallout of the Treaties of Versailles, Trianon and St-Germain, the fallacy of German (or in Chuchillian  parlance, "Prussian") reparations and the failure to stop rearmament.  Reading it now, it wrenches you abruptly from a dry history lesson to the immediacy of Liberal-Conservative coalition politics.  The relevance of Churchill's prose is breathtaking.

There are, of course, dissimilarities - not least that our present Prime Minister is not a womanising Welshman, nor a Liberal or, for that matter, a Whig (careful now, Mr Lawson).  Perhaps, I trivialise.  Yet in a week that David Cameron has given his clearest endorsement yet of some kind of electoral pact in 2015, and the Government campaign in Oldham East & Saddleworth leans weightily in the direction of a Liberal Democrat gain, it is worth highlighting for its mere message that 'we have been here before'.  Not just in the mundane 'Liberals always split' narrative that we are used to reading, but from a very personal, involved viewpoint about what it is like to operate at the heart of a political coalition.

At its most fundamental, Government at the top succeeds and falls on personalities.  For illustration, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were co-authors of New Labour  in Opposition and co-practitioners of New Labour in Government, yet as a result of their irreconcilable personal mindsets the TB-GB's paralysed their administrations (even after Blair departed, stage right).

One month ago, Sir John Major urged the sort of accommodation that Churchill  suggests ought to have taken place in 1922.  It is encouraging that the present incumbent isn't deaf to such advice from two distinguished former Prime Ministers.

It is traditional at this time of year to have to spend time with friends and family you rarely see, for better or for worse.  Sometimes this is a joyous occasion,  yet for others it is one fraught with frayed tempers and stressful endurance.

The coalition family is spending its first Christmas together, and this week internal bickering behind family members' backs threatened to provoke terminal breakdown.  Instead, that family is sticking together.  They don't all like each other and they certainly don't always agree.  Yet they have chosen this course willingly and for honourable, upright reasons, they shall see it through.  If that culminates in an agreement in 2015, however formal or informal, it will not be for lack of contemplation.

It is very evident that this Prime Minister possesses the "chivalrous attitudes" that others in the Westminster playground appear to lack.  Dr Cable might be shorn of a couple of baubles this Christmas, but it is the Barclay brothers who will be receiving a lump of coal.

The Daily Telegraph just refuses to understand its irresponsibility

The Daily Telegraph's latest invidious political intervention is both embarrassing for the Liberal Democrat ministers involved (but not shocking) and another sad indictment on what is left of what is erroneously referred to still as our 'quality' press.

Their only motive can be to injure (and so kill off) the Coalition. Why else reveal in an underhand fashion what we all know to be so? Ministers do, have done, and always will disagree privately. It shows poor judgement to mouth off to strangers about internal Government politics but the predictably shrill reaction has princpially addressed Government 'splits', not the behaviour of Messrs Davey, Moore, Webb and Cable.

The search for internal splits in this Liberal-Conservative coalition is laughable. For who can remember a Government more united in opinion, direction and purpose than this? The Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fail utterly on that count, as did John Major's before them and Margaret Thatcher's. It seems counter-intuitive, but coalitions can forge stronger bonds than single parties, by virtue of shared pains in reaching an accord.

What this little (soon to be as irrelevant as One Direction) episode brings to my mind, however, is less about Government unity (it remains very strong) than the rabid, vicious and insatiable appetite for criticism of politicians by the media and the public, regardless of truths and good intentions. It is criticism for criticism's sake; destructive and irresponsible.

It calls to mind the words of Sir Robert Peel, writing to the free trade campaigner Richard Cobden, shortly after the repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846:

Such a position as mine entails the severest sacrifices. The strain on the mental power is far too severe... But the world - the great and small vulgar - is not of this opinion. I am sorry to say they do not and cannot comprehend the motives which influence the best actions of public men. They think that public men change their course for corrupt motives, and their feeling is so predominant that the character of public men is injured, and their practical authority and influence impaired.

The Liberal Democrat and Conservative politicians who have joined together in Government have done so against many of their insincts, enduring "the severest sacrifices", because it is the right thing to do. Their actions and private thoughts since do not betray "corrupt motives" but the desire to work together in the national interest.

The Daily Telegraph's reaction to this is to injure the arrangement and impair its practical authority and influence. In these present circumstances, it is an arrangement far more conducive to sorting out our country's problems than a minority Conservative Government. We either like that, or we grin and bear it.

Regrettably, it is something that decision makers at the DT, in Peel's words, "do not and cannot comprehend".