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Clarke saves knockout punch for Tory Stalinist
Everyone says the battle over immigration and asylum seekers is set to turn vicious and mean-spirited, full of anger, hatred, bare-faced political opportunism and ill-concealed racism.Well, it doesn't look that way yet. The two principals - Charles Clarke, the new home secretary, and David Davis, his shadow - are two political bruisers, though both resemble boxers who have seen better days. They can't get on to celebrity TV shows and the market for men's deodorants has moved forward. ("Men! Roll the great smell of Charles Clarke under your arms!")
Mr Davis is rumoured to beat himself up just to keep in shape. Mr Clarke has the air of a geography teacher with a bad hangover.
We expected some ferocious debate but we were unlucky. The exchanges were mild, if occasionally sarcastic. Mr Davis did say that the plans were "confused, weak and chaotic", but this is the cooing of doves, the political equivalent of a football fan suggesting the ref needs an eye test.
Mr Clarke was announcing the government's five-year plan to control immigration. (Why, asked several Tories, had it taken ministers eight years to come up with a five-year plan?)
The government claims the Tories raised immigration as an issue only because they were afraid the public would be so impressed with the five-year plan that they would vote Labour in even greater numbers than they did the last two times.
The Tories say Labour has suddenly pulled its finger out because their focus groups show the opposition winning sheaves of votes. Both sides accuse the other of shameless cynicism, and they're both right.
Mr Clarke told us that we were to have a points system, an announcement greeted with harsh laughter, since this has been Tory policy for some time. When the home secretary announced that we could not exist "in Fortress Britain" they laughed again, because that is exactly what they would like to do. If you could crenellate the white cliffs of Dover and pour boiling oil from the embrasures, they happily would.
And when he brought us the glad tidings of the "multi-agency Reflex Taskforce," they fell about in ersatz hysteria, since everyone knows that "taskforce" is just a form of words that makes a committee sound more dynamic.
Mr Davis only needed to point out this was just the latest in a long line of desperate attempts by the Home Office to do something about immigration, even to discover how much of it is going on. Nobody knows, and over the past few years the Home Office hasn't shown the faintest sign of finding out.
Everyone was so anxious not to say anything that might be construed as racist that the whole discussion had the gingerly feel of angry men having to pick their way through a barbed wire fence.
We got just one flash of the old Charles Clarke when Peter Lilley tried to goad him. The ex-minister said that last year there had been 150,000 lawful immigrants into the UK. Was this "too high, too low, or just right"?
"I do not have a view," said Mr Clarke, airily. "For the very good reason that I do not have, like him, a Stalinist view, that it is right for the government to decide exactly how many people should work in each sector of the economy... "
What a magnificent put-down - for an old leftie like Charles Clarke to call one of Margaret Thatcher's greatest admirers a "Stalinist"!
She must be turning in her grave, or would be, if she were dead yet.