After the last election, there are now more first time MPs than there have been for decades. How has this affected the government?

The key point is that there is now a huge cohort of young MPs who have no chance of becoming ministers in this Parliament, not least because cabinet is now split between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. After the expenses scandal, a lot of the safe seats that the parties use to parachute favoured candidates into Parliament were flushed out, so the new MPs tend to feel like they got in on their own, rather than through the party machine – they aren’t easily cowed. The main consequence of this is that there’s a lot more intellectual foment going on; there are many new factions debating public sector reform and regulation, asking how to adapt to a post-boom Britain in which the old mix of social democracy and deregulation doesn’t work any more. It’s an unrulier, more intellectual Parliament.

How are the Conservatives and Lib Dems adapting to a coalition?

First, it’s worth saying that it’s really voters who are failing to adapt to a coalition. No one understands power-sharing; voters claim that they like it in abstract but, at the same time, say that they don’t want politicians to compromise their beliefs, despite the fact that you can’t have one without the other. Within the coalition, the main issue is the tendency among some Tories to blame the Lib Dems for the failure of right-wing policies on Europe and immigration, but really, they’re just using them as a proxy for reality. The government hasn’t withdrawn from the EU or banned immigration because they’re unrealistic and unworkable ideas, not because of the Lib Dems. At the same time, there is fear among hardcore Conservatives that Cameron is using the Lib Dems for cover as well. They worry that he uses compromise within the coalition as a pretext to get away with advancing the centrist, relatively liberal policies that he actually believes in. Clegg and Cameron’s inner circles are quite close in terms of policy, which is creating a lot of suspicion on the fringes.

Whatever happened to Cameron’s Big Society?

I think that the wisdom of crowds showed through here; everyone sensed that something just wasn’t quite right with the Big Society, that the idea of using charities and volunteers to take over public services just didn’t quite add up. What was missing was that the entire programme depended on privatisation to work, which Cameron wasn’t brave enough to admit. Now we’re seeing a backlash as the privatisation elements of reform to everything from the NHS to forests come to light, which Cameron spent more time trying to hide than to justify. Ultimately, no one believed that ‘society’ would take over government business, because it simply wasn’t true. The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election? The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.

The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election?

 The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.nment business, because it simply wasn’t true. The Liberal Democrats have probably lost their core vote. How are they planning to survive the next election? The Lib Dems did well as a rallying point for protest votes for a while, and although they have lost the student and eco-pacifist voting blocks, they want to believe that the coalition has given the party a chance to prove that they are more than just a protest party. Party insiders say that if the economy recovers it will prove that they are competent in government, but nicer than the Conservatives. They argue that softer, liberal Tory voters, who don’t hold particularly conservative values but don’t trust Labour’s economics, really belong with the Lib Dems, but are afraid of wasting their votes. The Lib Dems hope to draw in at the next election by proving in government that they can actually run a country. Whether they manage to do so will determine whether the party can make it through the next general election.

According to Joseph Bast, the University of Oxford should be ‘ashamed’ for associating itself with ‘a bungling thief and scientific fraud’. Bast is President of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute; the man accused is Dr Peter Gleick, a renowned expert on water resources and climate change. Gleick posed as a Heartland board member to solicit evidence for claims that the Institute was preparing to ‘muddy the waters’ on climate science.

Gleick’s frustration with the anti-climate lobby is understandable. Particularly in the US, climatologists face an uphill struggle to persuade an apathetic public. But, the way Gleick gathered his ‘evidence’ has cast doubts on its authenticity: he has even been accused of forging one of the documents he obtained. Gleick’s actions were at best naïve, at worst stupid and illegal. Worse still, he contaminated the debate he was trying to advance. His actions have given what Heartland calls ‘limate realists’ real ammunition, and they have seized upon it. In doing so, a purely scientific debate has been dragged out of science and into politics, a move especially damaging because it is gleefully trumpeted by climate sceptics. The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker triumphantly gloated ‘supporters of the Cause will stop at nothing.’ What do we expect the average reader to infer? That climate scientists are desperate, misbegotten swindlers. Gleick is grievously at fault for damaging the cause for, and debate over, climate science. He has destroyed the integrity of thousands of scientists at a stroke, and that is a heinous mistake to make.

However, there is an important second point. There is no evidence Gleick is a ‘scientific fraud’. Despite what Heartland might say, his scientific – and I stress the scientific – views are in good company. Just ask the Royal Society, the foremost organisation of British scientists. They know there’s no debate on the fundamentals of climate change. Gleick’s private decisions may have been stupid, but that does not mean his professional work – peer-reviewed and examined by the rest of the scientific community – is also in doubt.

Bast claimed that ‘Linus Pauling and Edwin Hubble must be spinning in their graves’, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps, instead, they’d recognise a man who has acted foolishly, but whose scientific work is part of the effort to understand the changes in our world like never before. Oxford is the university of Edmund Halley, one of the first scientists to study the world’s atmosphere. I’m sure that, like Hubble and Pauling, he’d know good science when he saw it.

So, let Gleick come to Oxford. Let him speak to students as the eminent scientist he remains. Perhaps at the same time he can give a brief lesson in the right and wrong ways of meeting your opponents. 

A war correspondent is no stranger to dangerous situations and near death experiences. Yet when Tim Butcher said that he was planning to retrace the journey of Victorian journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley through “Africa’s broken heart”, the Democratic Republic of Congo, old Africa hands told him that it was “suicidal”.

However, a desire to truly understand the nation that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gripped Butcher, made stronger by his personal connections – Butcher’s mother had sailed down the Congo on an African tour in the 1950s, and Stanley’s expedition had been sponsored by the paper Butcher worked for, The Daily Telegraph. He tells me, “I never felt that I had a genuine understanding of the region. That feeling niggled.”

It was, then, Butcher’s “sheer, bloody-minded curiosity” that drove him to write a will and travel to the Eastern border of the Congo in 2004. From there he journeyed almost 2,500 miles to the Atlantic Ocean, by motorbike through Congo’s volatile Eastern badlands, and then down the mighty Congo River, much of it in a dugout canoe.

Butcher’s second journey was marginally less “suicidal”. But following the route that Graham Greene immortalised in Journey Without Maps through war torn Sierra Leone and Liberia, 350 miles of it on foot, can hardly be called safe. It was a “stone in my shoe” that drove Butcher there too, after the deaths of his journalist friends Kurt and Miguel in Sierra Leone, and being compelled to stay out of Liberia after receiving death threats from Charles Taylor’s regime. Having been “shit scared” in West Africa, Butcher wanted to confront his fears.

Reading about Butcher avoiding Congolese soldiers in Blood River, and walking through “Africa’s Killing Fields” in Chasing the Devil, I was captivated by both the audacity of his adventures, and the simple humanity with which he brings the places he travelled in to life. And it also strikes me throughout our conversation just how normal and modest Butcher is. “I blush slightly when comparisons are made with the explorer generation. The Congo journey took less than two months. Many people do three years cycling round the world – in Liberia I only walked for 32 days.” Butcher does admit that he has “an extreme form of comfort zone”, and is “more risk tolerant than others”, unsurprising given that he was a war correspondent for twenty years.

After graduating in PPE from Magdalen College, Butcher “made coffee for the Telegraph foreign desk”, before reporting on conflicts all over the world, including stints as the Telegraph’s correspondent in Africa and the Middle East. “One of the thrills of it [being a war correspondent],” he tells me, “is seeing things at their most raw, the artifice stripped away, purely good and purely bad. I saw love, decency, survival and empathy, but also evil.”

I ask Butcher whether he ever felt close to death as a war correspondent, and he admits that he did at times, but adds, “I was the writer type…the cameramen are the most insane as they have to point camera at the actuality, whereas a writer can hide under the bed.”

“You work the law of averages, you cross a front line at 2am, as every soldier in the world is asleep at 2am in the morning. You take the fuse out of your vehicle so your brake lights don’t show.”

Butcher recounts being the first to walk across the front line in his last war, in Gaza in 2009. “The IDF, they kill Western journalists, Western NGO workers. I was terrified as I walked across this half mile of rubble, with the beam of a battle tank following me. You know they’re watching you. It’s a little bit like Saving Private Ryan.”

There is also plenty of luck involved in escaping unscathed. Butcher tells me how he felt “very safe” when embedded with British soldiers in Iraq in 2003. Yet a helicopter which he had been told to get out of just before take off, crashed five minutes later, killing everyone inside. Now married with two children, Butcher tells me that reporting on conflicts, “is a young man’s game, for people who don’t have kids, who don’t have partners.”

You need energy and flexibility, he says, and, in advice given to him by “a particularly wise, old sage”, you must “never miss breakfast”. But the cardinal virtue of journalism, Butcher says, is when you are “modest enough to know you don’t know anything, and curious enough to make that situation better”.

However, unlike reporting, Butcher describes how writing Blood River gave him “a sense of being in control of my own destiny”. He tells me, “The absolute high ground as a journalist is to be able to write what you want. That’s absolute heaven…Once you’ve been to 125 refugee camps in 6 different continents, what is going to blow you away, make you thrilled?”

And the emotional toil of war reporting eventually begins to take its toll too, he says. “I remember seeing a child carried in Kurdistan, Saddam’s Iraq, in April 1991…like a wax doll, pale skin, cold, eyes glazed and marbled up. I remember coping with that.

“But in the Hizbullah War in 2006, my child was about 9 months old. I saw 24 people killed in the same house, and one little boy was exactly the same age as my son. Having children and a partner makes it very, very difficult to carry on. When I was younger, I was able to be more dispassionate, but not now.”

Writing books, then, is Butcher’s current passion, and he enthuses, “You skate over the surface as a journalist, but writing a book you go vertical instead of horizontal.” Butcher describes himself as the “biggest pub bore on Graham Greene”, telling me that he can “correct Greene’s mistakes in his own autobiography”. But while Butcher’s books are rich in historical detail, he says that he aims to “try to understand to the journey of the place itself.”

“My personal journey is a device to hook people in, to get to a journey which is much more interesting, which is the journey of the people…I use history to bring it alive.”

Butcher’s next project, Gabriel’s Rage, will take him on foot across the Balkans, retracing the journey of Gabriel Princep, “the angry young man who fired the shot that changed history” when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, sparking the First World War. The project, Butcher says, is “touching on some wonderful territory”, and he intends to do the conflicts of the Balkans “a bit more justice” than merely being “unspellables versus unpronounceables”.

Returning to the subject of his current books, I ask Butcher what he thinks now about Africa after his experiences, and he tells me how “all over Africa I found an incredibly strong spirit to survive, in astonishing depravation and poverty.” He points to the successes of Africans living in Britain, “running the NHS”, and playing Premier League football, in contrast to Africa where “if you are the tallest poppy you will be cut down”.

Butcher is realistic in his assessment of the continent, explaining, “In Britain it took us hundreds of years to slowly and bloodily learn the lessons of working together. Africa hasn’t learnt that lesson yet.” Yet his optimism is palpable as he refers back to the “inspiring, humbling, energetic, cool” people he met on his journeys, and tells me, “I hope I’m realistically confident that one day their voices will be heard.’

Facts of the matter

Sarkozy has been left in second place by Francois Hollande; Mechelon, a borderline Stalinist,who campaigned on a promise of a revolution to rival the uprisings of not just 1968 but 1789, failed to breach the 10% mark. The mainstory of the campaign was the record-breaking pile of votes scooped up by far right parties. Agrim 1 in 5 votes went to the National Front, a gang of maghreb-bashing loons who have spruced themselves up with a metropolitan sheen under new leader Marine Le Pen. British coverage of the election has been drawn to the National Front, if only because they’re the only political bloc who aren’t miserably depressed about the entire business. The Guardian interviewed dozens of French voters about the election, and managed to coax no more of an assessment than ‘well, I voted’ from a fair few; the only motivation for leaving the house to vote seems to have been the chance to express total contempt for Sarkozy as a person, a sentiment that appears to be the only thing holding the country together.

Print it on gold

Tim Stanley, writing in a great column for the Telegraph, says that Sarkozy’s desperate groping for right-wing votes has allowed Le Pento to strut the political stage like a sane, mainstream candidate, casually ‘lighting her Gauloise with a burning Koran’ as she goes. The president’s campaigns against burkhas and gypsies ‘have detoxified talk of French civilisation and barbarian invasions, allowing people to vote for the Front National without any sense of shame’. He warns against liberal overreaction, however, and dismisses Le Pen as a ‘race-baiting opportunist’ who will sink back into the bitter sidelines of French politics within months, like her father before her. He makes good points; The National Front will never become a real fascist movement, too wedded to media spectacle and one-day protests to be anything more than a protest vote.

Wouldn’t wrap chips in it

The Mail dove headfirst through the looking glass this week and endorsed the National Front, for essentially no reason beyond the fact that they are anti-EU, and warned that this may be the last French election before the Eurocracy dissolves the French state. Also, Le Pen has made adequate efforts to ‘regulate the political instincts of her party’ and move on from the past (apparently). Sure, Le Pen hasn’t called for immigrants to be driven with sticks and torches into the Mediterranean, but only because she knows she doesn’t have to. Voters know what the National Front stands for, and can tell what Le Pen is ‘really thinking’ when they listen to her sanitised lectures on ‘French civilisation’. Still, even the Mail has the wit not to try to make everything EU-centric, noting sagely that ‘Carla Bruni has had so much Botox she looks like a chipmunk’.