I fear it is all going to end in tears when someone puts our own punctuation habits under the microscope, but before it does I have exciting, related news to report.

I have blogged before about the fall-out amongst Cotswold Conservatives following their big losses to the Liberal Democrats in May’s local elections, including their fear that they are seen as “toffs legislating for toffs”.

Now, however, I have got hold of a copy of their full election post-mortem, and therefore have seen not only the full list of reasons Cotswold Conservatives have come up with for their electoral hammering, but also the order in which they have placed them.

Number one is a familiar one from post-mortems in all parties – blaming another part of their party for not giving them enough support. Further down the list are other factors, including the toffs problem, raising parking charges and the controversy over the council spending £19,000 on a magician.

But wait, what sneaks in at the top of the list, above all those, and in fact coming second only to blaming other parts of their own party?

It is this: “Grammatically incorrect literature”.

I salute the electors of the Cotswolds for their exacting standards when it comes to deciding who to vote for.

Note: Of course, any spelling or grammatical errors in this post are deliberate irony, ok?

There is a council by-election campaign underway in Shortlands ward, Bromley where the excellent Anuja Prashar is the Liberal Democrat candidate. (So excellent, I’ll forgive her for organising a raffle once that broke all my Lib Dem raffle rules.) She has been campaigning against council plans to axe the lollipop ladies at two local schools and, as part of that, presented a petition signed by 283 residents to the council.

And then things started being done differently…

For the first time, Bromley Council decided to respond personally and directly to all the signatories on a petition, posting out a letter to all of them – using council stationery and council postage – from the relevant Conservative Cabinet member, Colin Smith.

A very generous soul might think that perhaps Bromley Council had been planning to start writing directly to every petition signer and it’s just chance this started during a council by-election campaign in response to a petition organised by a rival candidate. Oh and that the council wanted to spring a pleasant surprise on everyone which is why that decision had been kept secret.

But even such an extremely generous soul might struggle a bit when it comes to the text of the letters. For what is in them? Not simply a reply on the issue of the petition, but a defence of several other controversial council policies, none of which were mentioned in the petition and even promoting the council’s work in other areas.

The Chief Executive has been asked to explain what his council is up to and the District Auditor has been asked to investigate.

So it is with After the Coalition which is very different in tone and hope for the future from last year’s Which Way’s Up? by Nick Boles. The contrast is there in the sub-titles for the two books. Boles had “The future for coalition Britain” whilst the five authors behind this volume have gone for “A Conservative agenda for Britain”. Last year the talk was of a possible long-term coalition; this year it is about an impatience to get into a majority government which is purely Conservative.

All five authors – Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss – were newly elected last year, giving a hint of who might be the future stars of the Conservative Party. Between them they have also already written five other books. Indeed, it is books more than blogs which are helping to raise the profiles and make the reputations of a new generation of MPs. For a variety of reasons, high quality blogging by MPs has never taken off in the UK outside a handful of honourable exceptions.

Despite the authors’ clear desire for a 100% Conservative government, they wisely avoid political controversy by emphasising that this book is about the world after 2015 rather than a coded call for an end to the current coalition government before then.

Much of the policy content is unsurprising for something from Conservative MPs, such as calls to cut taxes, reduce trade union power, trim the BBC and increase jail sentences.

Notable too though are the signs of a changing Conservative Party, including strong support for action on climate change, a belief that same sex couples and single parent households should be supported, not condemned and a call for the Conservative Party to reclaim the idea of social mobility.

Even if the particular policies talked about in the book get overtaken by events, the overall picture of a part-old part-new Conservative Party painted by this book is likely to be a useful guide to that party’s ideological future.

You can buy After the Coalition: A Conservative agenda for Britain from Amazon here.

Well, the claim was for his office where staff work. So quite why would someone want to pick on an employer providing toilet roll (and soap! yes, soap! the sheer luxury!) for his staff?

But perhaps that’s how CCHQ works and the staff there are so used to having to bring their own toilet paper in to work that they don’t see why anyone else should have it provided by their employer? After all, that’s the only logical and fair explanation so it’s bound to be the right one. I’m sure.

THE Scottish Conservatives were plunged into a fresh crisis last night after a sacked election candidate said he had been denied natural justice by the party’s “dysfunctional” leadership.

Malcolm Macaskill, who was dumped as the leading candidate in Glasgow last week, said his treatment would cost the party £1 million, because his friend, Tom Coakley, a former footballer who made a fortune in property, had now withdrawn a pledge to give the Tories £100,000 a year for a decade.

It has also been reported that a second major Tory donor, John McGlynn, the airport car park magnate, no longer wants to contribute to party funds in protest at the treatment of Macaskill…

Macaskill, 51, was selected by Tory activists in Glasgow last year to head the party’s regional list for the Scottish elections, making it all but certain he would have become an MSP this May.

However, in a CV he circulated to members, he described himself as a successful businessman, omitting two bankruptcies and a court action against him for unpaid income tax.

He was the second Conservative candidate to quit as Iain Whyte, had pulled out from standing for Maryhill and Springburn after realising he would have had to stand down from the Lothian health board and, under a change in the rules, would not necessarily have been reappointed after the election.

But he wasn’t the last Tory candidate to go for a third one has also pulled out:

David Meikle withdrew in Glasgow because he felt that his allegations of vote rigging on the list for the city had not been sufficiently investigated.

The complaints centre on the Conservative Rutherglen’s Association, whose membership shot up by about 150 members from a starting point of 17 in the months before the selections for Conservative candidates took place.

My local constituency, Hornsey and Wood Green, certainly is closed to new members – it was recently wound up altogether, and I’ve heard that other party organisations in north London are in trouble (admittedly not Tory heartlands). All I get for my party membership are bulk emails from “David Cameron”, “William Hague” and “Baroness Warsi”, all of which now go straight in the junk filter with emails from Nigerian fraudsters.

This is an account of senior political figures and their political, policy and media manoeuvrings. The public feature very rarely (unlike in Deborah Mattinson’s memoirs from the Labour side), except in aggregate in voting figures or polling results and even then only occasionally. Despite the majority of voters in the election which put David Cameron into first place in May 2010 being female, women only rarely feature save in the form of Mrs Thatcher or changing party candidate selection rules.

If you take as given that very narrow focus, the book is extremely well executed with a clear narrative style packed full of detailed interview accounts from the main participants. Generally both sides of the argument are put when it comes to assessing personalities, with David Davis and Chris Grayling being the only two senior Conservatives whose reputations come out worse at the end of the book than at the start.

Overall the book’s message is that the Conservative modernisers got it right, and where they didn’t it was for not pushing on effectively enough with modernisation. As that is not a message someone such as ConservativeHome’s Tim Mongtomerie would agree with the absence of a serious consideration of the different strategies available to the party is a shame.

Missing too is any real sense of quite who David Cameron is, deep down. The book quotes him saying, “I think you’re right that it took me quite a long time to get here [to the moderniser viewpoint], but let’s hope that, like slow cooking, the result in the eating will be much better, stronger and more convincing” yet subsequently there much cooling, warming, cooling and yet more rewarming of Cameron’s approach to modernisation.

The book thins out too as we get to 2009 and then 2010, though both of these drawbacks are to a degree inevitable given the lack of perspective that seeing Cameron in power for several years will give future authors. Those future authors, and students of the period, will I am sure however be grateful for the detailed, readable account from one perspective of the Conservative fall and rise packed as it is with so many interviews with the key figures.

If you are the sort of person interested in why William Hague gave up on modernisation midway through the 1997 Parliament or how Iain Duncan Smith went from rebel to leader to outcast to Cabinet Minister, then this is the book for you. Along the way there are the delights of quotes such as the one from ex. Australian Prime Minister John Howard to William Hague: “You know, William, there’s only one thing harder than the first year in opposition … It’s the second.”

You can buy Back from the Brink: The extraordinary fall and rise of the Conservative Party by Peter Snowdon from Amazon here.

Also available on YouTube here.

(For my other posts on party political broadcasts, including move clips, see my Party Political Broadcasts page.)

It’s a tremendously well put together piece, using music in a powerful and ironic way (at a time when Labour was trying to wrest the reputation of being the patriotic party from the Conservatives) and built around showing the viewer the leading figures of another party celebrating at their own party conference. Showcasing your opponents in this way doesn’t usually work, but they were unusual political times. The broadcast’s impact will, I suspect, be much less now for people who didn’t live through the politics of that era, though even so it helps explain some of the very strong emotional reactions to political events since the 2010 general election.

When watching, keep an eye out for how Ken Clarke used to be a high profile unpopular Conservative cabinet minister. Repeatedly losing the Conservative Party leadership, but doing so with grace and humility and without in-between times plotting, has helped transform his public character in the intervening years.

Also available on YouTube here.

(For my other posts on party political broadcasts, including move clips, see my Party Political Broadcasts page.)

That poster was only one part of a wider “New Labour, New Danger” publicity campaign, which also included this party political broadcast from late 1996:

(Also available on YouTube here.)

For my other posts on party political broadcasts, including more clips, see my Party Political Broadcasts page.