Across the pond

I finished my last post, which predicted Laws would resign before the weekend was out, shortly before I joined my wife and our guest  for dinner. After dinner I went in to the BBC web site to discover that he had fallen on his sword while I was eating the organic salmon. He showed great dignity in the brief statement he made to the television cameras. And he evoked a sympathetitc response from this morning’s Sunday newspapers. Even those who hate the LibDems did not dance on his grave. Hopefully, after a suitable period of penance he may even be able to retturn to this government if a suitable vacancy arrives in a year or two.

Meanwhile Cameron and Clegg have acted promptly to fill the gap before the markets open on Monday. Danny Alexander is a greenhorn as far as the City is concerned. But he has  the guts to stand up to George Osborne, his new boss. He was widely applauded by his own LibDem colleagues and the Cconservatives for his work on the team which negatiated the coalition terms. And he is not totally ignorant of matters economic. His Oxford degree was Philosophy, Politics and Economics, a degree which led many of my contempories into a succesful career in journalism and/or politics.

Alexander was known to be disappointed in the cabinet job he actually got, Scottish Secretary, which offers little hope of doing anything effective, given devolution and the power of the SNP north of the border. He is replaced by Michael Moore. Not THE Michael Moore but the 44 year old  son of an Army chaplin in Northern Ireland. He moved to Scotland at te age of 5, and went to Edinburgh University, not Oxbridge. That should help him in Scotland, but it does nothing to dilute the elitist majority of this cabinet. Most of the students I taught with a first degree from Edinburgh did not have a trace of a Scottish accent, even those born and bred in Scotland. They had as much difficulty understanding the Gorbals accents of some of  the Glasgow graduates as I did.