³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

And also an apology, as there isn't any cake left for you. The greedy folks at Newsnight have gobbled up the tasty treat that we specially commissioned for tonight's item celebrating your first year as Prime Minister.

If anybody knows the last time that I'd love to hear from them. None of my anorak colleagues in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Political Research Unit can think of a case, which means it may never have happened before, at least not since 1945.

To slip behind the Greens and the BNP was a dreadful result for Labour, though in percentage terms it was not Labour's worst ever by-election result (as one or two reports have said today). In the Newbury and Christchurch by-elections back in 1993 Labour polled just 2.0% and 2.7% respectively - I remember both contests well, since they were my first election campaigns for Newsnight. And in Winchester, in November 1997, Labour's vote was down to just 1.7 per cent, their modern all-time low (real anoraks can download a ). That contest was only six months into the Blair government, when New Labour nationally was still very popular. But Winchester was a rather strange by-election - a re-run of the May election when the Tories complained about how the Lib Dems had won by just two votes.

Somehow, I suspect this is one of those days when the Lib Dems hope we give them as little coverage as possible - in contrast to their usual complaints! Yet you could argue it was a worse result for Nick Clegg than it was for Gordon Brown. Labour was never going to win Henley in a million years, but there was a time when it would have been a rather good Liberal Democrat by-election prospect - rather like Newbury, Christchurch and Winchester, in fact, which they all won.

For the Liberal Democrats to fare so poorly when Labour's vote was squeezed so heavily, and for the party to suffer a swing to the Conservatives, is really bad news for them - a sign of the big problems the Lib Dems have now that the centre ground of British politics is so crowded, and the Iraq war and student fees are no longer such big issues.

reports that Gordon Brown was touring the Commons tea-room following his relatively successful appearance at Prime Minister's Questions.

Remarkably, it seems, this was the first time Brown had been spotted in the tea-room - a favourite haunt of Labour MPs - since he became prime minister almost .

A common theme of Mr Brown's Labour critics - both Blairites and on the Left - is "He never talks to anyone". Unless he absolutely has to, of course, as during the revolts over the 10p tax cut and 42 days. This, of course, is not the Gordon Brown people were presented with when he stood for the leadership last spring, and was elected unopposed.

Only 34 Labour MPs didn't nominate him (indeed an unreported quirk of that election is that Brown was nominated by a majority not just of Labour MPs, but a majority of ALL MPs on the British mainland - once one strips away the Speaker and his three deputies: 313 nominations out of a total of possible 624 MPs).

Labour backbenchers were convinced last spring they were getting a new leader who would listen to them a lot more than Tony Blair. Party activists felt a lot more comfortable with a leader who was meant to have been steeped in the This Great Movement of Ours and all its traditions - the biographer of socialist firebrand Jimmy Maxton, rather than a leader who was sent to a public school and whose father was an active Conservative. And the unions were certainly convinced they'd see a lot more of Gordon than they ever did of Tony - just as they had when Brown was Chancellor.

All are now bitterly disappointed. One former top Labour official even told me this week that "Gordon and the Labour Party are now totally separated".

Another common point made by both the Blairites and the Left, is that Mr Brown needs to broaden his government. First in choosing a wider mix of ministers - politically, and in terms of backgrounds.

Brown they say, has continued the Blair tradition of choosing his top ministers from the ranks of former Cabinet advisers, whilst letting great talent languish on the backbenches - MPs with long experience of running big local councils, for example, or who have held top-level jobs outside politics.

The bigger point, they say, is that Brown simply needs to listen to his natural party allies a lot more - backbenchers, trade unionists, and even ministers, get them involved in policy making, make them feel part of the process. In short, the argument goes, Mr Brown needs to do what he promised a year ago.

As Gordon Brown approaches his first year in office this coming (27 June), the legal publishers have published an analysis showing, they say, that Mr Brown has introduced 17% more legislation in his first year, than the average number of laws introduced year-by-year under Tony Blair.

This, despite the fact that Mr Brown's last autumn was pretty short, and, according to many commentators, pretty thin. Perhaps it reflects an initial burst of enthusiasm under the new Brown premiership. I suspect not.

One might expect Sweet and Maxwell, as legal publishers, to be rather pleased by this apparent legislation inflation. But far from it. And the more laws Parliament passes each year, then inevitably the less time our MPs and peers have to scrutinise them properly.

Does more mean better?

According to Sweet and Maxwell's figures, the amount of legislation passed by Parliament has been rising steadily over the last 30 years. Gordon Brown's 2,823 new laws in his first 12 months - eight a day - show a 64% rise on the Thatcher premiership, when she passed a mere 1,724.

The interesting thing is that much legisation, notably in the field of criminal justice, is merely repealing laws that were passed only a few years earlier.

The big question of course, is whether more means better? On the contrary, many would say.

The former Conservative Chancellor Lord (Geoffrey) Howe once argued there ought to be a strict overall limit on the amount of legislation there is - so that every time a government passed a new law they would be obliged to repeal something else.
But that, I suppose, would require a new law.

The Labour peer Lord Ahmed strenuously denied to me tonight rumours which have been circulating at Westminster for several weeks that he is about to defect to the Conservatives.

"I'm not going anywhere," he told me. "I would never leave the Labour Party. I've been a member of the Labour Party for 32 years, and may this continue for another 32."
Lord Ahmed says the rumours have been fuelled "over the last three years" by a Labour minister whom he describes as a "sad loser".

Lord Ahmed would be a significant catch for David Cameron, who has been notably unsuccessful in attracting high-level recruits from the Labour Party.

It is being suggested at Westminster that Lord Ahmed may be enticed into joining the Conservatives by his friend Baroness (Sayeeda) Warsi, who was appointed to David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet last summer as the party spokesman on communities, and given a peerage.

Ahmed and Warsi, who are both Muslims, went on a joint mission to Sudan last September to bring back the teacher Gillian Gibbons who had been imprisoned for allowing her class to call a teddy-bear Mohammed.

"It is complete nonsense," Ahmed insists. "I have known Sayeeda Warsi and her father and mother for a long time. There is no way Sayeeda Warsi or David Cameron could get me to join the Conservative Party."

Lord Ahmed says, however, that he does intend to join the Conservatives in the Lords in opposing the government's legislation to allow terrorist suspects to be detained for up to 42 days.

This week the Justice Secretary Jack Straw announced plans to limit the amount that Parliamentary candidates can spend in the period before an election is called, to just .

This will please many Labour MPs in marginal, and not-so-marginal, seats who have been terrified recently about the effect of Ashcroft money. The billionaire Conservative deputy chairman Lord (Michael) Ashcroft relates in his recent autobiography how before the 2005 election, when he held no official position in the Conservative Party and was acting solely in a private capacity, he devised a strategy of channelling large sums of his own money to target seats - many millions of pounds in total.

The cash was doled out according to the seats' winnability, and according to whether he personally thought the local Conservative campaign was being run effectively. And he claims a strong correlation between the seats he funded and where Conservative MPs were elected in 2005.

Difficult to police

Now, since he became a deputy chairman, Ashcroft's pre-2005 strategy has become official Conservative Party policy. These days, however, it's no longer really accurate to call it "Ashcroft money", since the Conservatives are raising big sums from all sorts of other people, and Lord Ashcroft doesn't need to fund the party on anything like the scale he once did, if at all.

The trouble is that history shows that election spending limits like these are incredibly difficult to police, and if any party wants to exceed them, they will almost certainly get away with it - though Mr Straw is also promising to tighten up policing procedures.

Way back in 1997 I made a film for Newsnight about the Wirral South by-election, and claimed that Labour had spent several hundreds of thousands of pounds on that successful campaign, at a time when the spending limit for a by-election was only about £30,000. (Indeed Jack Straw himself appeared in the film, when I asked him whether the cost of his rail fare to Wirral would appear in Labour's spending accounts). I also said that the Liberal Democrats had abused the spending limits in other by-elections, and the Conservatives too, though probably on a lesser scale.

Nobody complained

Months after that film was broadcast I was told by a Labour campaign insider that I'd greatly underestimated how much the party had spent in Wirral South, and that the true figure was about £750,000. Another source who should have been in the know, told me that Labour spent about £500,000 on their unsuccessful Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election campaign in 1995. Now these were high-profile by-elections, conducted over just a few weeks, and anyone with any understanding of election campaigns would have seen that Labour was abusing the spending limits (and that the other major parties did so in other campaigns). But nobody complained; nobody investigated; and each time the parties concerned got away with it.

OK, they were breaking the law, but the police always say it's not their job to investigate unless someone makes a complaint, and then they're pretty reluctant. Nobody does complain, because its hard to prove, and the major parties won't ever cry 'foul' because they all know they've been just as guilty themselves in the past. As for the Electoral Commission, established since 2000, they've neither the resources nor inclination to investigate such matters.

So in all likelihood, whatever the new law says, political parties will get away with it if they want to spend more than £12,000 a year in the run-up to the next election.

Many party professionals are expert at massaging their accounts, and transferring expenditure from one activity to another. Who is to say how many leaflets were really distributed, how many posters erected, how many phone calls made, or whether full-time staff were concentrating on just one constituency or working for the party in general.

The new limits look more like a sop to keep Labour backbenchers happy, and upset the Conservatives - which they will - than an effective attempt to limit pre-election spending.

It has to be said that Caroline Spelman is not a hugely important member of David Cameron's front-bench team.

Indeed, Mrs Spelman, who is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner John Lyon over paying her nanny from her Parliamantary Staffing Allowance, must be one of the least significant chairmen the Conservative Party has ever had. She's certainly no Cecil Parkinson or Chris Patten, who were very senior confidants of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Most of the party chairman's roles have been taken by other people - George Osborne as political strategist, Lord Ashcroft as campaign strategist; Oliver Letwin on policy co-ordination; Chris Grayling on broadcast interviews and all-purpose attack-dog; and now Eric Pickles in running local campaigns.

But there's one very good reason why David Cameron will want to hang on to Caroline Spelman. He needs every woman he's got - and more.

Remember that pledge he made some weeks ago that a third of his government would be women. Rather rash, I thought. So far, he's not doing very well in meeting that target. And he has no women in really senior positions, to compare with Jacqui Smith's position at the Home Office.

His 32-strong Shadow Cabinet contains seven women, but only four in the Commons. The two most senior are Caroline Spelman and Theresa May (Shadow Leader of the House). The two others in the Commons are the charming but unknown Cheryl Gillan, in the utterly insignificant job of Shadow Welsh Secretary; and Theresa Villiers, who is widely reckoned by almost every Tory I meet to be doing a pretty poor job in covering Transport. Then in the Lords, Cameron has Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones (security); Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (community cohesion) and Baroness Anelay (Lords Chief Whip).

Two women widely tipped for promotion to the Shadow Cabinet are Maria Miller (currently a schools and spokesman) and Justine Greening (part of Osborne's Treasury team). Apart from them he has only twelve other women in his front-bench team - seven from the Lords and five from the Commons.

In total he has 21 women on his front-benches in both houses, but just eleven in the Commons.

If David Cameron is to fulfill his pledge that his government will be one third women, he will quickly have to promote a lot more females from the backbenches, or prepare to appoint a lot of women to ministerial jobs who will only just have been elected to Parliament at the next election.

I've been fascinated by politics ever since joining the school debating society at the age of 11. But I've always been rather uncomfortable with what I see as the rather cosy world of Westminster politicians and journalists. A former Newsnight editor once described me as a "Molotov cocktail journalist". That's a bit far-fetched these days, but I do try to do my own thing, and not worry too much what people say or think.

My guiding rule is that in any story there's usually something the politicians would prefer the world not to know. My job is to find that out.