The evidence is that there is a positive link between women in leadership  and business performance, so if we fail  to unlock the potential of women in  the labour market, we’re not only failing those individuals, we’re failing our whole economy.

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A Conservative, David Cameron, and in the Daily Mail of all places. (He’s right, by the way.)

Normal service is however resumed with the top comment under the piece at the time of writing:

What nonsense. I know this won’t be popular with the feminists, but the only way to rescue the economy, is for women to get back into the home.

But it looks a bit less impressive when you take a look at who is on the Honours Forfeiture Committee – five senior civil servants – and how they do their business, “the Committee normally conducts its business by correspondence”.

“I’ve asked five of my civil servants to write to each other” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?

David Cameron has been lobbied by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, on the need to rewrite the government’s flagship benefit reform to help children suffering as a result.

Clegg proposed a series of changes to the £500-a-week cap, including exempting current claimants, in an attempt to ameliorate some of the worst consequences of the change, which critics claim will make 40,000 families homeless by making their current homes unaffordable.

It is understood Clegg made his appeal during a meeting attended by the chancellor, George Osborne, and Danny Alexander, chief secretary of the Treasury. Cameron asked the Liberal Democrats to return with more details on how the changes could be made.

The significance of the quartet mentioned in the report is that this ‘quad’ meets to settle major points of disagreement between the two coalition parties. For them to be discussing the issue means it isn’t just a passing idea but a point of serious consideration.

You can read the full story here.

But let the Prime Minister unilaterally pick the date of the general election just to suit his or her own election prospects? Of course, no problem – that is the British way. Or rather, that was the British way. Courtesy of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 the idea that one person or party can unilaterally fix an election’s date just to maximise their own chance of winning is no more.

Fixing the date of the next general election (and future ones) outside the control of the Prime Minister was a central part of the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition agreement because it was a way of guaranteeing the five-year deal. Otherwise the risk for the smaller party is that at any point the larger one can suddenly pull the rug out from under an agreement and call an election. No doubt it helped sweeten the pill for Conservatives that Gordon Brown had recently come under fire for dallying with different election dates, making fixed-term elections look rather more attractive to some Conservatives. Restricting the powers of politicians is always more appealing to politicians when it is the other side they imagine being restricted.

The ‘fixed’ part of the new rules is pretty fixed, but not completely set fast in legislative Araldite. As with fixed-term rules for other legislatures (including Scotland’s) there are caveats for cases where there is either wide cross-party agreement or no one can form a government.

Caveat number one is that the House of Commons can vote for an early election – but the number of votes ‘for’ must be equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House (including vacant seats). That means 217 votes are guaranteed to block an early election. Both Labour and the Tories have more than 217 votes, so an early election under this caveat can only happen if both major parties agree. Forget the idea that Cameron might face a politically bountiful time and try to cut and run for an early election – if the timing is good for the Conservatives, it would be bad for Labour, meaning Labour could and would block it.

However, there is a second caveat: an early election also happens if the House of Commons passes a vote of no confidence in the government (by a simple majority) and then fails within fourteen days to pass a motion of confidence in a new government.

We only get an early election if no one else manages to form a government. Can you imagine a scenario in which the Liberal Democrats decide both to oust Cameron and block Labour from power, either by voting against Labour or by abstaining? Perhaps if the Liberal Democrats were running away in poll position in the opinion polls. But even as a Liberal Democrat member of over twenty years standing, I’ll happily bet that we won’t be in that situation for a good while (the loyalist in me adds, “yet!”).

This leaves just one option that results in an early general election: Lib Dems vote to oust the Tories and vote for Labour in a confidence motion, but the minor party and other MPs gang up in sufficient numbers to join with the Conservatives and overcome the combined Labour/Lib Dem vote. This would cause a general election – but what is in it for those minor party MPs? The threat of doing so gives them a great negotiating position from which to extract concessions from Labour, but it is a negotiating power that is lost the moment the threat is exercised – and can easily be counter-productive. A parliament with a simple one party majority, which of course could happen after an early election, would give minor parties even less leverage.

The very simple version of all this: even if you think it likely, possible or just about conceivable that the Liberal Democrats would at some point vote to oust the Conservatives from power ahead of 2015, it isn’t a general election that would result.

And from the weekend, here are the highlights of Nick Clegg’s interview with Andrew Marr, followed by my own views. BONUS FEATURE: A huge David Cameron glaring down at me.

But if you want the news that has long term significance, they have got it wrong. Three other current events are the ones that really matter.

What really mattered at the Euro-summit

The British veto is being hugely over-played in its significance – it did not stop events and it did not even reshape Britain’s relations with Europe. All it really did was throw a harsh light on what was already happening.

The actual significance of the summit was the latest, most extensive and more desperate attempt to save the Euro. Judging from initial reactions by economists and the financial markets, this time a Euro summit may just have pulled it off. It has not already been written off as a failure which, compared to other summits on the same theme, already makes it more successful than most.

The cost of failure, of a collapsing Euro and economic chaos, would be huge. The cost of success is turning out to be just as massive – a major ceding of political power by national governments to central European arrangements.

In the midst of an economic crisis this may – just – get political and popular support across the continent as the least-worst option, but it stores up a massive political problem when future domestic political arguments are ruled out because “Europe won’t allow it”.

What may be good news for the European economies in the short-run will be even better news for populist, extremist and anti-European parties, not to mention ones that are all three, in the longer run.

Climate change

If that was not gloom enough, throw in the Durban climate talks. Ironically, at the same time as the Euro-summit divisions, in Durban a British minister – Chris Huhne – successfully worked with European colleagues to present a united face to the world and successfully see through a deal. A weak and limited deal, but not the complete failure which looked likely for long periods of time.

As The Economist summaries the Durban deal:

Its terms—assuming they are acted upon—are unlikely to be sufficient to prevent a global temperature rise of more than 2°C. They might easily allow a 4°C rise. Yet with many governments distracted by pressing economic worries, the deal was as much as could have been expected from Durban; perhaps a little more.

Syria

And the third story which should be catching the headlines ahead of the Cameron veto? Local elections. In a foreign country. Not usually the mix that catches the headlines or has long-term significance. But Syria’s local elections could be another step towards the ousting of its bloody dictatorship. The results are nearly certain to be rigged, but the very act of rigging will itself feed further discontent.

Events in Syria are not just a footnote to the Arab Spring – ‘and a few months later, one more country…’. Syria’s role in backing extremists in other countries, its influence in Iraq and Lebanon, its closeness to Iran – those factors all make Syria’s future important.

Ironically, Syria was due to be discussed at the Euro-summit, getting bumped for the Euro discussions and so missing the opportunity for European countries to start to match their humanitarian rhetoric with more effective action.

Whether it is the nightmare (or, if you are a neo-Con, the splendour) of Iranians and Americans shooting at each other as conflagration leads to international interventions or the more hopeful turn of a more democratic Syria starting to help fix rather than cause problems in Lebanon and Iraq, either way Syria’s future matters to far more than only Syrians.

The big issues

The Euro, the global climate, peace in the Middle East – those are the big issues at stake. Who said what to whom in a 4am phone call between Cameron and Clegg is pretty small scale by comparison.

For them something drastic was needed to stop the dreadful arrival of conflict three generations in a row, each time on a bigger, longer and bloodier scale. Moreover, the wars were not started despite popular opinion, for they were all popular to start with.

That background helps explain two of the defining features of the European project – the determination of French and German politicians to stick together with each other and a sense that whilst democracy is good and welcome, and a vital antidote to the grotesque internal horrors of the early twentieth century dictatorships, the European project is about binding countries together rather than about giving people more democratic control over international affairs.

Add in another, far more recent, event – Brown winning out over Blair in keeping Britain out of the Euro (the closest Britain got to joining, for under Major that was never likely) – and Britain’s isolation after the last Euro summit is no sudden departure but rather a sudden, stark reminder of the quieter trends that have long been going on. The summit did not create those trends, however sharply it illustrated them.

Germany and France are, for reasons of history and economics, desperate both to stick together and to save the Euro. It was never essential to do more than try a bit to make nice to a country that is outside the Euro and whose largest political party has so often been hostile to so much European work. A country, moreover, whose leader chose to take his political party out of European alliance with mainstream continental parties and who had done precious little alliance building over the previous years with the key sources of power.

When France or Germany can wheel in Britain as an ally in their jostling with each other, Britain can exert some successful leverage, but fundamentally a different history and being out of the Euro has always made it the dispensable one of the trio.

More crafty negotiation by Cameron might have avoided the stark outcome of the summit, but the failure of his negotiating tactics did not cause the rifts. It simply shone a sharp light on the long standing political dynamic at the heart of Europe.

What the British government asked for at the European summit was not unpalatable to ardent pro-Europeans – Sarah Ludford MEP called it “reasonable” and Graham Watson MEP went one step further to call it “perfectly reasonable”.

But starting with that negotiating list, Cameron’s tactics at the summit did go off the rails, especially in turning down of the deal suggested by the President of the European Council only then to see the whole room turn against Cameron. Talking to people who saw Cameron’s support team after the talks broke down, they seemed genuinely shocked that they negotiating had turned out so badly and senior Liberal Democrats have been extremely critical of Cameron’s negotiating tactics at the summit. That the Lib Dem Deputy Head of Press has been retweeting today’s Independent story about Clegg’s fury over how Cameron conducted the talks is a pretty strong steer as to how accurate that story is. As one Lib Dem told The Observer:

He could not believe that Cameron hadn’t tried to play for more time. A menu of choices wasn’t deployed as a negotiating tool but instead was presented as a take it or leave it ultimatum. That is not how he [Clegg] would have played Britain’s hand.

But if you have allies who want talks to succeed with you as part of the outcome, when you dig yourself into such a hole people come to help pull you out. That is what would have happened if France or Germany had got into a hole. In Britain’s case, people did not come rushing to pull Britain out, instead they were happy to walk away from the hole.

As for the fallout, it is riddled with ironies. If the summit’s fiscal deal works and saves the Euro, that will continue the trend towards Britain being the outsider, but avoiding economic meltdown on the continent will be good news for our own economy. If the deal fails, then Cameron’s unwillingness to back it will look better, but the cost to the British economy will be great.

And that is what really matters and is really at stake at the moment: the Euro and the continent’s economy. The summit has not broken Britain’s position in Europe. Whether its steps are enough to save the continent’s economy from being broken is the big question. On that, the jury is very firmly still out.

UPDATE:

Here’s the coverage from this morning’s BBC TV about Nick Clegg’s reaction to the summit and then an interview with myself. I do like the big picture of a glaring Cameron staring down at me part way through…!

I have said for months that it would be best to avoid arcane debates about treaty change altogether and if we had to proceed down that road, it would be best to do so in a way that did not create divisions in Europe.

The demands Britain made for safeguards, on which the Coalition Government was united, were modest and reasonable. They were safeguards for the single market, not just the UK.

There were no demands of repatriation of powers from the EU to Britain and no demands for a unilateral carve-out of UK financial services.

What we sought to ensure was to maintain a level playing field in financial services and the single market as a whole. This would have retained the UK’s ability to take tougher, not looser, regulatory action to sort out our banking system.

As a lifelong pro-European, I will continue to argue within Government and with our European partners that where changes now occur, it is essential that the integrity of our open European single market is kept intact and that we work together on the long term problems of competitiveness within the EU on which millions of people’s jobs depend.

Chris Davies MEP:

Far from keeping Britain strong, Cameron has ensured that we will lose our influence at the top table.

By seeking to protect bankers from regulation, he has betrayed Britain’s real interests and done nothing in practice to help the City of London.

The fear now must be that we will increasingly lose the opportunity to affect decisions being taken that are bound to affect us.

(Note the contrasting views on what events mean for UK financial regulation.)

Sarah Ludford MEP:

What I understand is that David Cameron wanted financial services decisions to be quite rightly taken by all 27, for the European Banking Authority, which is one of the regulators, to stay in London, and for eurozone transactions to be able to carry on in the City of London as you would expect and not just have to be in the eurozone.

Those were reasonable demands, so I think President Sarkozy has not been helpful, but I think David Cameron, as I say, has been saddled with the deeply unhelpful weight of the europhobes.

Vince Cable:

And finally, Nick Clegg in this evening’s news:

UPDATE: I’ve now blogged a more detailed analysis of the post-summit fallout and Liberal Democrat reactions.

Sons and daughters of any future UK monarch will have equal right to the throne, after Commonwealth leaders agreed to change succession laws.

The leaders of the 16 Commonwealth countries where the Queen is head of state unanimously approved the changes at a summit in Perth, Australia.

It means a first-born daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would take precedence over younger brothers.

The ban on the monarch being married to a Roman Catholic was also lifted.

Good news for Lynne Featherstone’s work on this issue, even if the BBC’s report slightly over-eggs matters as different governments now have to make their own domestic arrangements to change their own rules. But they are all signed up to making those changes.

Remember, by the way, that it was only back in April when David Cameron was dragging his feet on the issue in the face of pressure from Nick Clegg.

Which is just what he wants.