It is probably worth mentioning that I was not alone. Three other first-time Tory councillors were elected to the council, while three sitting Tories were defeated. Shrewder minds than mine will be analysing these results over the coming months, but I think there are some important lessons to be learned from my experiences:

a. There is no substitute for knocking on doors and meeting the voters. They do not like being asked to vote for people they don’t know and appreciate the personal visit. Many residents told me I was the only candidate who had called on them.

b. The anti-Conservative tide that swept away so many seats in England was flowing north of the Border, but in many cases I found that residents simplay wanted to be re-assured that the party was on the right track and just needed more time to sort out Labour’s toxic mess.

c. Residents were not interested in wild promises or fudge. They understand that better services cost money and would rather have taxes frozen than raised to pay for utopian schemes. They appreciate the need for sound financial control and, similarly, they don’t want trite answers to hard questions.

d. Although many residents expressed anger or disappointment with the performance of the Coalition government at Westminster, they accepted (when it was put to them) that local politics were totally separate from national ones.

e. The vast majority of voters are against Scottish Independence. Many older ones are very frightened by the prospect of leaving the United Kingdom. There is no shame about being a Unionist.

So Conservatives can win if they work hard and seek to understand the position of the voter, who often feels frustrated and ignored by the decision makers.

My concern is that the debate is being led by politicians rather than ordinary voters. As a result, people will tend to line up according to their party political inclinations, rather than assess the proposals on their merits. And this plays into the hands of the slippery Mr Salmond, who is by far the most popular (and wily) politician north of the border. Many of those who voted SNP last year did so because they wanted Salmond as first minister – not because they wanted an independent Scotland.

My experiences of working for the “No” campaign (against joining the Euro) and the campaign for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty provide helpful lessons. The key one is that there needs to be a unified, non-party-political campaign against independence, which means that whoever heads the campaign – Mr Unionist – should not be a politician. Ideally, he or she should be a succeassful businessman or respected academic.

There is no reason why the political parties can’t be seen to support the Unionist cause but English-sounding voices from south of the border should be banned if possible. Salmond would like nothing better than to portray the referendum as a chance to free Scotland from the colonial English yoke, so the arguments in favour of the union must be made by Scotsmen and women.

And we urgently need someone to produce some positive arguments in this respect. So far, the Unionist arguments have been (a) independence would be a disaster for Scotland, (b) if not a disaster then very difficult (c) Scotland would have to accept its share of the national debt and the RBS toxic assets and (d) the Scots’ standard of living would suffer if they left the UK. These may well be true but they are so negative. I want people to vote for staying in the union because they recognise it as a good thing.

People should certainly be told what the consequences of leaving the union would be, but that is no more than half the story. They need to know WHY Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom. And I don’t think phrases such as “we’re stronger together” are the answer. The Unionist campaign must explain why we are stronger together.

The problem is that, after 300 years, the benefits of union are taken for granted and are so much of our daily routine that we need to be reminded what exactly they are. If this campaign succeeds in making all of more aware of just how beneficial the union has been – and still is – then the whole exercise will not have been wasted.

Nevertheless, it is probably not the most serious threat to our economy. That dubious honour must, in my opinion, go to Iran. Until last weekend, there had been very little coverage – and even less analysis – of what is going on in that part of the Middle East.

While we all know that Iran has a very serious nuclear programme which no-one belives is for purely peaceful purposes, many are unaware that there is actually a low-level war already going on between Iran and Israel. On the one hand, Iran has been supplying Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza with increasingly sophisticated rockets and, on the other, Israeli intelligence is widely believed to be behind the assassination of four Iranian nuclear scientists (the latest one today), explosions at a number of military sites and the development of the Stuxnet computer virus, which has slowed down Iranian nuclear progress.

Currently US forces are in Israel “on exercise” and US warships are in the eastern Mediterranean. Iran has been test-firing missiles and is talking about closing the Straits of Hormuz if she is attacked. Given that about a third of the world’s oil supplies are shipped through the Straits of Hormuz, it is easy to see how their closure could disrupt the global economy. In fact there has already been a sharp hike in the oil price on the back of these fears.

The reality is that Iran is almost certain to become a nuclear power sometime this year. Even if Israel launches a pre-emptive strike against a reactor, it is unlikely to be able to destroy the country’s whole nuclear infrastructure. So at the very least, we can expect more disruptive behaviour from Tehran and, quite possibly, the situation could spiral into military conflict. That will do infinitely more damage to the global economy than Greece’s likely exit from the euro.

Not a very happy note with which to open my blog for 2012. But forewarned is…

It’s all rubbish, of course. Like most scares, there’s very little likelihood that any of it will happen. Significantly, those leading the attack on Cameron’s veto are the same ones who were predicting economic armageddon ten years ago when they were urging us to adopt the euro. As Digby Jones helpfully pointed out yesterday, it didn’t happen then and it almost certainly won’t happen now.

Ed Miliband says that the veto was pointless because the fiscal union between eurozone countries has been agreed anyway. But the Government was never opposed to fiscal union, the veto was intended to block a new EU treaty, which included fiscal union and did not provide safeguards for Britain’s key interests. And, like it or not, the City is one of our core interests, accounting for between 10% and 20% of GDP.

However, in the real world, outside the rarified atmosphere of Brussels, the eurozone crisis remains unresolved. Fiscal union is undoubtedly an important tool but it is probably too late to end the current crisis. So I still expect Greece and possibly Portugal to default, adding to the stresses on the remaining eurozone countries. This turmoil will inevitably have a negative impact on the UK and, unfortunately, the consequent fall-out will undoubtedly be blamed by some (and reported by the BBC) as the result of Britain’s “isolation”. My advice is: keep a large pinch of salt handy whenever you hear the prophets of doom sounding off.

Which brings me to his track record in the UK.  As other commentators – notably James Delingpole and William Shawcross in The Spectator – have already observed, Murdoch has had a hugely beneficial impact on the British media: He saved The Sun, broke the stranglehold of the print unions, has subsidised The Times and patiently invested millions of pounds in BSkyB before it started making profits.

So why is he so loathed by the BBC, the Guardianistas and other holier-than-thou liberals? I think the answer must be because he and his publications oppose virtually everything they hold dear: the EU, regulation, immigration, multiculturalism, big government et al.  That doesn’t make Murdoch right but his titles have been highly effective at articulating an alternative view to that of what Delingpole calls the “smug, metropolitan bien-pensants who run the BBC”.  And I think smug is exactly the right word – particularly with regard The Guardian.   While it has been throwing up its hands in horror at the illegal hacking of voicemails, how does it think it got hold of the Wikileaks material? Quite simply the paper was handling stolen goods.  And then it put people’s lives at risk by publishing the information. 

I am not trying to exonerate the News of the World journalists who indulged in hacking.  They broke the law and deserve to be punished.  But I think it is fair to ask why everyone has decided to make a fuss about it now.  Certain journalists have been obtaining information illegally for decades and probably much longer.  And it’s been common knowledge.  We all knew that the Squidgy tapes were obtained illicitly and that private detectives were paid to rummage through people’s dustbins in search of information.  But I don’t recall MPs demanding an inquiry then.   So what’s changed – apart from Rupert Murdoch deciding to ditch Gordon Brown and support Cameron?

There is a powerful stench of hypocrisy pervading this whole witch hunt.  It is completely beside the point to argue that Murdoch was too powerful and needed to be brought to heel or that his tabloids were/are trash.  It was Blair, Mandelson and Alistair Campbell who fed the illusion of News International being the Westminster power broker, by courting Murdoch and his editors.  But the truth is that newspapers do not influence significantly the results of elections – Murdoch’s skill has been to identify the way the wind is blowing and then support the winning side.  Thus in 2010, the Sun supported Cameron in London but in Scotland it supported Labour.

Rupert Murdoch has never claimed to be a nice man (although many of those who have worked closely with him like him enormously and his PA has been with him for 50 years), but he is running a business empire not standing for parliament. 
The recent behaviour by some MPs in their aggressive cross-examination of James Murdoch has been repugnant. Tom Watson, in particular, was totally out of order in calling Murdoch junior a Mafia leader. I’m afraid the publicity generated by this business has gone to their heads. Perhaps we could stop televising select committee hearings. That might discourage some of the more puerile grandstanding.

I’m sorry to bang on about the Eurozone, but the extraordinary efforts of the member countries to bail out Greece in order to protect their precious project beggar belief. Full marks to those Slovak politicians who last night dared to point to the emperor’s lack of clothes, but it still seems likely that their victory will be overturned by the end of the week in a new vote.

Let’s just look at the facts: Greece is bust and the team from the IMF and European Central Bank auditing Athens’ progress in implementing the conditions of the last bail-out deal agree that not enough has been done. So what happens? the powers that be decide to let them have a few more million euros anyway.

In the real world, you don’t solve your debts problem by borrowing more money. So why should we think that this works for governments? We now have a totally bonkers situation where the rich northern European countries are pouring umpteen billions of taxpayers’ euros into a bottomless pit to maintain the illusion that the Eurozone works.

All these shenanigans might be quite entertaining if their ramifications were not so serious. The costs of sticking bandaids over the gaping fizzures in the grandiose European edifice are likely to tip the whole continent back into recession. Money spent bailing out banks or bankrupt economies cannot be spent on financing businesses. And recession in the EU, which is the UK’s biggest market, will inevitably adversely affect British companies.

So I’m afraid it’s going to be a while longer before we see what Norman Lamont used to call the green shoots of recovery.

Given that the target cap on inflation is meant to be 2% and CPI is already rising by 4.5% a year, a repeat dose of QE could take inflation to at least 6%, which would be disastrous for those on fixed incomes and would probably trigger a wave of unaffordable wage claims.

QE has been regarded in some quarters as a silver bullet, whereas it is actually more of a poison pill. Please Bank of England ignore the voices of the Sirens.