Tom Richmond: Johnson must stamp his authority to win respect

Next week will prove whether the new Labour leader is right – the Hull MP's response to the comprehensive spending review will set the mood for the rest of the Parliament as he takes on the "aristocratic" Chancellor George Osborne.

Johnson's human touch should have a far greater impact with voters than an elongated row about statistics. Having not been a Treasury minister in the last government, it will be difficult for Osborne to pin the blame on him for the record deficit.

The Shadow Chancellor's biggest problem, however, will come from within his own party.

There are three reasons for this.

First, Johnson was being undermined by those close to Morley and Outwood MP Ed Balls, the man who wanted to be Shadow Chancellor, before his appointment was even confirmed. They were saying that the Hull MP was "lazy" and was not good with numbers – a point Johnson laughed away by saying, on the night of his appointment, that he was off to purchase an economics guide for beginners. Self-deprecation and humour are priceless political commodities.

Second, Johnson was not Miliband's first choice. The job, says Labour insiders, was offered to Balls's wife Yvette Cooper, the Pontefract MP. She turned it down, ostensibly because she thought it would guarantee that the role would be filled by her other half.

The Labour leader showed a ruthless streak by calling Cooper's bluff; she was made Shadow Foreign Secretary, a role unsuited to her abilities, and Balls was overlooked. If Johnson flounders, both his colleagues, and rivals, will attempt to exert their high-spending influence.

And, finally, Johnson has to convince the public that his is not a short-term appointment until Miliband has a better understanding of the motives, and agenda, of Balls and Cooper. He's already been dubbed the "caretaker" by the Tories.

Until recently, it was not certain that he would stand in the Shadow Cabinet elections. He's 60 now. He will be 65 if this Parliament runs its course. If Labour wins, he would probably be expected to serve a full-term as Chancellor which would take him up to his 70th birthday.

Is Johnson, a balanced man with many interests outside politics, really going to stay the course for the next 10 years? That is the question which both he, and Labour, must answer as they prepare their response to the spending cuts – or the belief will grow that Johnson is holding the fort until Balls and Cooper are in a position to command greater public respect.

HAVING finished a distant fourth (out of five) in Labour's elongated leadership contest, Andy Burnham, the party's new education spokesman, clearly has an elevated idea about his own self-importance.

He used a football analogy to describe, in the Commons, how he had taken over the role from Ed Balls, the Morley and Outwood MP.

Burnham described how he, and Balls, were the "strike force for the parliamentary football team – he softens up opponents and gives me the bullets to finish them off".

I didn't realise that football was now a sport solely for soldiers. Fair play to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, for this sensible response to a pathetic intervention: "It says something about the approach towards playing fair that he regards a Tommy gun as an appropriate thing to bring on to the football field."

MANY, myself included, are bemused by Wakefield MP Mary Creagh's elevation to the Shadow Cabinet, and her new environment brief given that most of her West Yorkshire constituency is not exactly on the frontline of farming.

The reason, I'm told, is David Miliband's negotiators wanted his brother Ed to ensure places at the top table for two supporters of the former Foreign Secretary – the Don Valley MP Caroline Flint, now Labour's local government supremo, and Creagh.

DAVID Cameron and Nick Clegg should be careful before cosying up even further to their new pensions guru John Hutton, the former Labour minister.

Hutton was one of the three defence secretaries who served under Gordon Brown – and was, therefore, presumably culpable for some of the bureaucratic chaos, and out-of-control budgets, that the coalition has had the misfortune to inherit from Labour.

NO wonder Yorkshire business leaders have so many concerns about the legitimacy of GCSE exams, and their failure to equip students for the real world. Questions on a recent GCSE maths paper sent to me by a reader include: "A digital television costs 850. The price is reduced by 8 per cent. Calculate the reduced price."

It's hardly rocket science.

IT speaks volumes about declining standards of customer care that TV licence fee staff have been issued with a manual informing them that people are likely to be making a complaint if they use words like "idiots", "shambles" or "useless".

Basic common sense would suggest that these terms require no further explanation. Yet this has not prevented the powers-that-be from producing a 964-page official handbook for staff for administering the BBC fee.

Though many will decry the chronic waste of financial resources here and also argue that this epic publication, which has more pages than Tony Blair's memoirs, reflects the declining quality of the BBC's output, two serious points need to

be made.

First, what does it say about the treatment of aggrieved viewers in the past that such a guide has now been produced? And, second, how does this reflect upon the quality of staff who are dealing with the public's complaints?