Rules of politics

One of the major rules of politics you often hear is "pick your fight" - make the arguments something that your party can succeed on.

This week, David Davis has managed to pick one doozy of a fight - one that can portray them as fiscally responsible, protecting civil liberties and democracy and, most startling of all, not being nasty.

The cartoon bad guys in this one are the IT industry, in the form of the director general of the umbrella body "Intellect", one John Higgins.

The story is this - Davis has reiterated that a campaign policy of the Tories would be to scrap the ID card. Therefore, the IT industry would be sensible to bear in mind that should Labour not win the next election, then contracts for ID cards will not be required.

Mr Higgins comes out with the full evil-business-lobby mode, stating that IT companies could build in extra costs to cover this risk - basically insisting that corporate contracts and profits should come ahead of the democratic process.

One question that springs to mind over this - if the IT business lobby is this blitheringly inept, is it because they don't lobby that much, or because they've previously had everything handed to them on a plate?