David Bowie and Michael Rosen - knights of the shires

David Bowie is at Number 1 again, it says in the Daily Telegraph.  Seeing those two names in the same sentence rather sums it up.  I liked Bowie quite a lot in his Hunky Dory period; come to that, Aladdin Sane wasn't bad, or Young Americans, or Low, or Let's Dance.  One could go on.  He still looks effortlessly cool in his 60s.  But he is in the papers (and now in an exhibition at the V&A) because a lot of people my age are in charge there; and in the charts because a lot people my age have the nostalgia and disposable income to put him at the top.  Not much to see here.  Move on etc.

Where does Michael Rosen come into this?  Every now and again the novelist pops up in the Guardian, writing "open" letters to the Education Secretary Michael Gove.  His picture shows a cheery looking elderly man (a year older than Bowie, 1946 to the artist formerly known as David Jones's 1947), rumpled and casually dressed.  I have always liked Rosen when I've heard him on the radio, and I expect I've read some of his books to my children, although offhand I can't remember any of them.  One gathers from his articles that Rosen is not inherently sympathetic to Gove's zealous reforms of the education system.  To put it mildly.

A couple of things strike me about this.  The first and most obvious is, why does anyone think Gove cares what Rosen thinks?  Rosen is not, after all, Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel.  The other one is that Rosen, a teenager in the 1960s and therefore borne upwards on the tide of post-War liberalism, now looks rather old.  To be fair, very few of us have worn as well as Bowie.

Private Eye does a neat line in parody letters from retired colonels living in the Tory shires, but its real-life Sir Herbert Gussets are now largely incontinent, incoherent or dead.  Their opinions die with them.

It is the children of the 60s, the Bowies and Rosens, who are the old buffers now.  

They - we - thought their notions of personal freedom had changed the world forever.  But that probably isn't true.  Like the Eye's Bufton Tuftons, they are merely people who had a view, which will be (and this is the crucial point) superseded by those of younger people, formed in a different age.

Younger people, for example, formed in the age of Thatcher.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

England's humiliation - opera meets rugby

After the interval of last night's Opera North production of Othello in Manchester, an apparatchik came out on stage to make an announcement.  One of the singers had picked up a bad cold in Belfast last week, it appeared; he asked for our indulgence. Another, the apparatchik said, was a little hoarse because he had been "shouting his support for Wales all afternoon".

There was certainly plenty to shout about.  In the Six Nations decider at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium Wales thrashed England comprehensively.  They outplayed us in every department of the game - line out, scrum, breakdown, handling, kicking, decision-making, the lot.  The 30-3 scoreline did not flatter the Welsh.  I found it almost unbearable to watch.  It helped of course that the majority of the crowd - the best part of 100,000 - passionately wanted Wales to win.  Or that their dislike of England borders on the visceral.

What would be the prospects of a similar announcement being made at WNO in Cardiff?  "Joe Bloggs would like you to know that his voice is hoarse because he has been cheering on England during this afternoon's thrashing of Wales".  I can't see it happening personally.  Our desire to stick it up the Welsh is not quite so intense, for one thing; and although the audience at the Lowry laughed last night, a Welsh audience would not have been so kind.  Knowing that, the announcement would not have been made, or perhaps even suggested.

No doubt the Welsh today have some good reasons to feel resentful of the English.  If one disregards events so long ago that Wales, properly speaking, was not yet a nation, I can't think offhand what those might be.  Nationalism - and this is particularly true north of Carlisle - is always the same toxic mixture of sentimentality and fascism - sentimentality because it relies on a historical narrative which is false; fascism because one of its principal motivating powers is dislike of other people.

Here is the truth about the English.  We are actually a bit pathetic.  Particularly middle-class English people like me.  A hundred and fifty years ago we were the workshop of the world, and ruled a great deal of it with a mixture of adventurism, greed and a misapprehension that Johnny Foreigner would be better off doing things the white man's way.  Having expended a great deal of manpower and specie defending Europe from tyranny, we then saw the error of our ways, and gave most of our colonies back.  Nowadays we have neither the resources nor the self-confidence to knock the skin off a rice pudding.  That's why you can say in England that you have been cheering on the biggest rugby humiliation our team has suffered for years and an English audience will laugh politely.

A month or so ago my daughter took part in a fantastic evening the Halle put on - a concert performance of Act III of Meistersinger with extracts from the first two acts tacked on at the beginning.  As the opera winds to its conclusion, Hans Sachs utters a famous defence of German art, warning what would happen to Germany if "foreign vanities" were planted in German land.  Knowing how German history turned out, it's impossible to listen to this without a feeling of foreboding, but that doesn't stop the opera being widely performed.

What would be the chances of getting an opera put on in which the word German and Germany were replaced by English and England?  Zero.  No matter how magnificent the music.  And anyway an English Hans Sachs would say, "English art can be jolly nice.  But the best bits are the bits we've borrowed from other nations.  And if they want to bring their art in to our country, we're totally OK with that!  As for foreign culture, that can come in too.  It makes our country so much more interesting and rewarding to have a diverse mix!"

The English are as embarrassed by English nationalism as they are indulgent of other people's.  You could regard this as weakness.  On the other hand perhaps we deserve more credit than we get for disdaining nationalism so thoroughly.  It's good to be good at something after all.  Even if it's not rugby.

PS The scorer of Wales's two tries, Alex Cuthbert, was born on 5 April 1990 in Gloucester.  Yes, that's Gloucester, England.

George Osborne and Mr Micawber

At the risk of trying the patience of anyone who doesn't want to read two blogs in a row about the economy, George Osborne's critics have been annoying me again.  To be clear, old Bumnose isn't my favourite politician either, but perhaps we should judge him relative to his detractors, who look muddled and blinkered.  In particular they make three assumptions about the economy that don't bear examination.

The first is that growth is the only way of judging success or failure of economic policy.  It's not.  It would be good to have growth, but when we are dependent on the gilt markets just to survive from week to week it might be more important to persuade them that we are serious about getting on top of the deficit.  Surely keeping our heads above water is the key?

It's possible to suggest, as Vicky Redwood from Capital Economics recently has, that you might lower the deficit more quickly in the medium term by borrowing more in the short term; but I've never heard her, or any of Osborne's less well-qualified critics, explain exactly how this mechanism works; and in fact Ed Balls seems rather to have given up the more-borrowing-equals-less-borrowing case.

You need to generate more in tax revenue and reduced welfare payments than you lose in the extra interest payments on borrowing right across the public and private sectors, and if it were easy to do, no government anywhere would ever have gone bust.  All they'd need to do was borrow more.

The second assumption Osborne haters make is that out there growth is readily available.  Actually I've never seen any suggestion, beyond the stimulus of the additional borrowing, where this growth is going to come from.  In fact the evidence there is suggests that growth is going to be extremely hard to come by.  Why?  Because during the long years of boom (between 1993 and 2008) most of Britain's - extremely modest - growth came from the additional debt taken on by HMG, by house buyers and by consumers.  All those sectors are now retrenching.

And yet on the left, the right and in the broadcast media commentators assume lazily that growth is there to be had.  It doesn't seem to have occurred to them - or to the vast majority of the general public - that the main drivers of past growth might be exhausted.  I want to get hold of them and give them a good shake.  "Look at this week's manufacturing output", I imagine yelling at them.  "The Eurozone is a basket case.  America is emerging from recession only to face its own fiscal contraction.  Who are we going to export to?"  Criticising Osborne for failing to conjure any growth is a bit like having a go at an explorer for failing to find the Holy Grail.

Thirdly, the Chancellor's foes are guilty of a category error.  They are assuming that our current economic woes are ones that George Osborne - or someone better at his job - could solve, now and without pain.  I think they're wrong.  Our problem belongs in the category of things not soluble in those terms, and possibly not soluble at all.

I think there's actually not much Osborne can do to make the economy grow, and the best he can hope for is to avoid doing something which we can be pretty sure would make things worse.

If you look at the range of advice and criticism the Chancellor is getting, from the Left (borrow more money) and the Right (cut welfare faster), from the Keynesians (borrow more money) and the Hayekites (improve the supply side), it's clear that Osborne's policy - hoping, like Mr Micawber, that something will turn up - is one among many potential alternatives.  Given that no-one knows what is the right thing to do, he is as likely to be right as anyone else.  Leave the guy alone.

1st Past the Post, the Eurozone and UKIP

Just over two years ago, in February 2011, I wrote about AV, the Alternative Vote, suggesting it amounted to a Second Past the Post system.  Pleasingly, the electorate roundly rejected it.  Our system, for all its faults, tends to produce clear winners and to marginalise the smaller parties.

The consequences of  retaining it are being illuminated by events in Europe, where PR is widespread.  It's been apparent for a while that the damage done to southern Eurozone economies by the currency mismatch with the north is going to be played out in terms of domestic policies.  Mario Draghi's OTR mechanism has put the lid of bond yields for the moment, but austerity is driving up unemployment and increasingly making it clear to the richer nations that there will be a price to be paid in terms of bailing out the south.  On both sides of the divide this is having political ramifications which can only grow.  Extremist parties, mostly on the far right, are flourishing in Greece, Italy has Beppe Grillo and now in Germany there is a new party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), calling for a Eurozone split.  These countries' electoral systems give fringe parties a real chance of power in a coalition government.

It couldn't happen here.  UKIP may be on the rise in the polls, but the most they can do is derail the Tories.  And actually this illustrates a way in which First Past the Post works rather well.  Whether you like UKIP or not, their increasing popularity encourages elements in the Conservative party to demand an adjustment in policy rightwards.  When Labour lost repeatedly in the 80s and 90s it made an adjustment rightwards to accommodate the public.  So when it is said that FPTP leads to monolithic, OK duolithic, politics, that demands at least the observation that the two biggest parties don't remain the same.  They are in fact consistently shifting like trees in a wind to catch the smallest gust in voter sentiment.

PR can of course work much more quickly than this.  I don't like it much, or AV, but it may in the end bring down the Euro.  A consummation, to borrow from Hamlet, devoutly to be wished.

Why I love . . . #5 Jose Mourinho

A strange thing for a Mancunian to be writing, I know, after The Special One's Real Madrid knocked United out of the Champions League last night.  And that dodgy sending-off.  But Jose is irresistible.  To be fair, there's more grey in the hair and more pork in the chops than there was when he did that famous sprint down the touchline after his Porto team did the same thing to United all those years ago.  But he still broods with that air of utter self-possession that those of us who resemble a gibbering peanut would kill for.

Mourinho's record as a manager speaks for itself, but, curiously, I'm not sure how much he actually knows about football.  His real skill - and this is also true of Sir Alex Ferguson - might be in man-management.  Manipulation in other words.  It doesn't matter whether he is a good coach or tactician, because he is a genius at making players want to please him and do their best for him.  Interviewed after the match last night he said, "The best team lost".  Would he have said Madrid deserved to lose if United had won?  I doubt it.  Slagging off your team when they've won reminds me of another big-mouth genius - Brian Clough.  Madrid will be trying even harder in the next round.

And what about Mourinho's way with words?  This is what he had to say about Christiano Ronaldo, returning to Old Trafford for the first time since his departure.  "Mentally it was not easy for Ronaldo.  I played at Stamford Bridge after I left.  Not easy.  I played Porto.  Not easy.  One day I will go back to the San Siro.  Not easy.  One day I will go back to the Bernabeu.  Not easy.  So Cristiano, not easy.  It is not easy".

Upstairs, I hope Harold Pinter's taking notes.

PS About the sending off - the referee can only have been invoking the "serious foul play" law.  That's defined as when someone "tackles an opponent with excessive force or brutality when the ball is in play".  But Nani was not tackling Arbeloa.  Nani was trying to control the ball, and didn't realise Arbeloa was coming until the last moment.

FIFA have muddied the waters by saying "any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force and endangering the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play".  Again, Nani didn't lunge at Arbeloa and didn't use excessive force.  The force came from Arbeloa who was running.  When Nani began his movement the Madrid player was nowhere near him.  Arbeloa in fact runs on to Nani's foot from the side.  Arbeloa then made the most of it.

The referee wrecked a great occasion with a bad decision.  We was robbed.

The Iraq War - Singing and Dancing in the Park

Ever since I started writing this blog in 2009 I have known that at some point I would have to write about the Iraq war.  That was partly because it was bound to crop up as a news item - now is pretty much the 10th anniversary of the invasion - but also partly because it was something I got very exercised about at the time.

Let me explain.  I supported the invasion.

Feel free to stop reading now. But if you do, reflect on how closed your mind is.

To be clear, at the end of 2002 when the possibility of invasion was first mooted, I was fervently against it too.  In fact I wrote a tongue in cheek letter to the Guardian pointing out that if the Blair government was looking for a country to invade which had treated some of its citizens disgracefully, which undoubtedly had weapons of mass destruction and which was in breach of UN resolutions, it need look no further than Israel.

I suppose I started to change my mind when the poverty of this position became apparent.  Our government might well have been inconsistent in its choice of foes, but as so often in life it was not enough merely to accuse them of hypocrisy for targeting Iraq but ignoring other countries' transgressions: I also had to decide which position to support - to invade or not to invade.

Sometime after the war I read Ian McEwan's novel Saturday.  Like most of McEwan's work it is a book flawed by glaring plot implausibilities, but in its description of the day of the anti-Iraq war demonstration as seen through the eyes of the surgeon Henry Perowne it has the priceless merit of ambiguity.  On its least interesting level it is a story of a psycopath stalking Perowne's family, but it is a book which examines other aspects of Perowne's life with a kind of hyper-lucidity.

The scene which struck me at the time was the argument Perowne has with his daughter.  She has just returned from the anti-war March filled with righteousness, to find Perowne not only dismissive of the protestors' case but contemptuous of her unawareness of the consequences of not going to war.  "If the price of getting rid of Saddam is war", he says, "then the price of no-war is Saddam".  Of course a massive row ensues, analagous to the similar ones I had had with my wife and friends, every single one of whom - bien-pensant Lefties like me - opposed the war.

The really striking thing was that the anti-war faction had not grasped the nature of the choice being presented.  The choice was not as the protestors apparently believed between one thing self-evidently good (no-war) and another self-evidently bad (war).  The choice was between two bad things.  We were being asked to decide which bad thing we preferred.

But it wasn't just that the antis had misjudged the kind of dilemma the invasion presented; it was also that they felt so pleased with themselves.  They really did think they occupied the moral high ground under a cloudless sky.  On the other hand I felt that the decision to oppose invasion should have been an absolutely agonising one.  Their smugness was, I felt, symptomatic of a failure to look at the issue squarely.  And this in turn was a consequence of fear.  This was the fear that George Bush and Tony Blair might be right.

It seems to me now a decade later that three issues should dominate discussion of the invasion.  The first is whether it did enough good to justify the undoubted harm it did.  The second is what it tells us about our domestic politics.  The third concerns international law.

As far as the first is concerned you might start by measuring how many people were killed during the invasion and its aftermath.  Estimates have run into millions at the more hysterical end.  Handily, there is a website dedicated to counting every single named individual known to have died - iraqbodycount.org.  Today it stands at about 120,000 deaths.  To be clear, the bulk of the deaths occurred in about 2006/7, three years after the invasion.  Now 120,000 is an awful lot of people, even spread over ten years.  But it's not enough to say how terrible this is - to criticise the invasion persuasively you also have to demonstrate the alternative would have been better.

But here the alternative would have been to leave Saddam in place.  What would that have been like?  Well, probably quite like it was in the years up to 2003.  You can start trying to find out about this by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq, a page on which the eye scrolls down past atrocity after well-documented atrocity to an extract from the New York Times which sums it up nicely.  "(Saddam) murdered as many as a million of his own people, many with poison gas.  He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more.  His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead.  His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. . .  Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,0000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion.  Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000."

And yet this was the regime that those against the war felt it better to leave in place.  I find that very hard to explain.

What would have happened to Iraq in the Arab spring?  Well perhaps there would have been an uprising.  If so, an awful lot of people would have been killed - look at Syria today.  Perhaps more likely Saddam would have kept control.  And after him, one of his psycopathic sons; and after that some other Ba'ath party strongman.  To paraphrase Orwell, "If you want a vision of Iraq's future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

What about our domestic politics?  The most common charge against the Blair government is that it exaggerated the claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and deluded the electorate into supporting the war.  I found this baffling even at the time.

Why?  Well firstly, everyone believed Saddam had such weapons anyway - the circumstantial evidence, from the massacre at Halabja to the dodging of the UN weapons inspectors, was overwhelming.

Secondly, paradoxically, no-one believed the dodgy dossier.  I spoke to many people who opposed the war.  Not one was taken in by the dossier.  I never met anyone who believed it.  People pretend now that it made a difference, but it made none whatsoever.  They believed in the WMD anyway because of the circumstantial evidence.

Quite often people say to me, "Well the war might have done some good, but it wasn't sold to us on that basis.  It was sold on the basis of weapons of mass destruction".  But that isn't true either.  Of course the focus was on WMD, but Blair also sold it on the basis of regime change.  I saw him on Newsnight on 6th February, taking questions from a hostile studio audience.   "But the one thing I hope we can all agree on", he said, "is that Saddam Hussein is in a different category from virtually any other regime in the world in terms of his use of appalling repression against his own people, external aggression against other people and the fact is, he is the one power in this world that has actually used chemical weapons against his own people. . . the people that have suffered most from Saddam are the Iraqi people themselves . . . I mean I spoke to ten Iraqi exiles the other day, who were women, who described to me, not just the deaths of members of their family, but the appalling human rights abuses, torture, the fact that they were still, some of them, under threat of death - living abroad - from this guy.  I mean, you know, this, this is not a humane regime . . . "

But let's assume the antis are right, that we were lied to, and the lies made a difference.  Undoubtedly this would have been A Bad Thing.  But if there is a special place in hell for politicians who have lied, it will be a very crowded place.  For me, the opprobrium reserved for Blair verges on the hysterical.

His opponents seem to think his deceit, real or imaginary, is a kind of get-out-of-jail card which saves them from thinking about the wider issue of whether the war did any good.  But that only works if you think considerations of domestic politics trump removing a vile dictator and his retinue of thugs and torturers.  It doesn't do it for me.

What about international law?  Didn't Blair and Bush flout the UN Charter by the invasion?  It was surprising how many people thought so.  A lot of people who had never been nearer a legal textbook than a visit to their conveyancing solicitor became experts overnight.  "This illegal war", they used to say.  How did they know?, I wondered.

Now I am not an international lawyer, but I have practised law and at the time I did a bit of research about this.  The first thing to say is that the discipline of international law predates the UN Charter by the best part of a century.  No-one knows whether the Charter replaces it or runs alongside it.  In fact if you can say anything certain about international law, it is that there is not much certain about it, for the very good reason that there is not much jurisprudence.  The law concerning theft, for example, is long-established and litigated every day: it's rare that an issue of law comes up to puzzle the judges.  But areas of certainty in international law are much fewer and further between.

If someone tells you he knows the invasion of Iraq is illegal you can be pretty certain that he is a bullshitter.  Even if he is an international lawyer.  Some of them think it was; some don't.

A family friend of ours is a leading human rights lawyer, a kind of latter day Mark D'Arcy.  At the time of the invasion he wrote an article in the Guardian setting out the case against the invasion.  It was detailed and sounded authoratative.  Of UN Resolution 678 he wrote that it only authorised such force "as was necessary to restore Kuwait's sovereignty".  Interested, I Googled the resolution.  It said no such thing.  It actually authorised "all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area".  Recognising that for a lawyer this was a loophole big enough to drive a tank through,I emailed our friend wondering why he had not referred to it.  He didn't reply.  I have never pressed the point.  I wouldn't want to embarrass him.

Two things arise from this.  One, the war may have been illegal; but it may not have been.  We'll probably never know.  The second one refers to the UN Charter itself.  After the invasion Kofi Annan gave a speech in which he acknowledged that the Charter itself might be defective.  It was set up after the war, in circumstances where two of its signatories, the USSR and China, wanted very much to minimise the possibility of sanction on the basis of things governments did to their own populations.  That's why the Charter focuses instead on prescribing actions governments take against other countries.  It's arguable that an invasion of Nazi Germany in 1938 to protect its Jewish population might have been illegal under the Charter, for example.  Annan said the Charter might have to change.  It hasn't.

I have often wondered why those against the war were so ready to ignore the bleedin' obvious, most egregiously the wicked nature of Saddam's regime.  I have commented elsewhere on this blog that the film In The Loop, devoted as it is to the Dodgy Dossier scenario, never once mentions him.  My own tentative theory is that whereas Saddam was a comedy dictator in a far away country of which they knew very little, George Bush was a pantomime Texan villain who had stolen an election and, being a right-winger, stood for everything they hated.  Similarly, Tony Blair was a man in whom they - we - had all placed our political faith, a man who had led Labour back from the wilderness.  How dare he betray us in this way?

For me, the Iraq war opened up political cracks that have since widened a good deal.  If the Left could think so limply and so dishonestly about Saddam, what did it say about their thinking elsewhere?  From 2003 onwards I was freed from the tribalism which had allied me to Labour all my adult life.  For this I have been berated by friends and family as a conservative; but actually I have changed my mind, whereas many of them doggedly retain the political views they had at 19, when the world was a very different place and their understanding of what was going on it was nothing like as well-informed or experienced.  I don't see myself as conservative.

I see the antis as people in something like the Kubler-Ross stages of grief.  We have had anger, we are having denial.  In the end I think we will get acceptance.  Here is Martin Kettle, the Graun's chief leader writer, in its op-ed pages last week: "it needs saying that . . . there is a fair amount of good news coming out of Iraq these days, as well as the bad stuff".  Another No Really moment there.  I expect I will live to see Kettle recant, if he dares: almost alone amongst Guardian journalists, Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch came out in guarded support of the war.  Aaronovitch, evidently marginalised, left shortly afterwards.  Cohen is still writing for the Observer, and today has written as pertinently as ever on the foreign policy consequences of liberal interventionism and post-Iraq refuseniks like President Obama.

If it was naive of Bush and Blair to imagine a democracy could be created in Iraq without bloodshed, it is naive of their opponents to judge post-Saddam Iraq by the very same standard.  Democracies are not created without pain.  As the American writer Alan Wolfe wrote, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard".

Finally, in his Observer piece, Cohen too quotes from Ian McEwan's Saturday.  "Why is it amongst those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam", Henry Perowne asks his daughter.  "He's loathsome, it's a given", she replies.  "No, it's not", says Perowne.  "It's a forgotten.  Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"

Eastleigh, Triple A and Triple Dip

On Saturday I was nattering with a friend who works in the City.  We were climbing a mountain in Scotland at the time.  Did he think the UK would lose its AAA rating, and if so what difference would it make?  Possibly, and probably not much, was the reply.  The gilt markets are not as febrile as equities.  While equity markets operate on sentiment and rumour, the state of a government's economy is plain from the published figures, and the gilt markets can see as well as the ratings agencies what's going on.  The agencies, in other words, aren't telling us anything we don't already know.  Sterling has not slumped on the news, or not yet.

If Moody's had had a little more patience I wonder what they might have made of the latest ONS figures, released yesterday.  We have not yet had a triple dip recession, and the ONS now thinks we might well not have had a double dip one either.  First estimates of GDP only use about 60% of the data, and as the other 40% comes in the view can change.  While the first quarter of 2012 showed a fall in output, it was only 0.1%.  The rise in the third quarter was a whole 1% (the Olympics) and only the last quarter showed a marked decline (at 0.3%).

Interestingly, if you strip out the effect of North Sea oil field closures for maintenance at the end of of 2011 and 2012, the economy did not double dip at all.  And it turns out that the final quarter 2012 dip can be accounted for by the extra bank holiday.

Now of course there are ifs and buts, statistics and damned lies, but this appears to show that the onshore economy grew slightly in 2012, which might explain why unemployment, traditionally a lagging indicator, continues to fall.

In the Guardian this news featured only as an aside in the parliamentary sketch.  It was entirely absent from the news and finance pages.  The Torygraph splashed it, naturally.

George Osborne has lost face over the AAA withdrawal, but he will take some comfort from the ONS figures.  If he can just get a little growth in the first quarter of 2013 and avoid talk of a triple dip, he may feel the worst is over for his Chancellorship.

On the other hand for the Tories, judging by the result of the Eastleigh by-election this morning, it looks as if the worst is yet to come.