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Thursday 2 September 2010

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‘Are we having a party? Er…no, it’s just the two of us.’

Thursday, 2nd September 2010

The biggest threat to the coalition

James Forsyth 6:56pm

News has just broken that three Lib Dem councilors in Cheshire have quit the party in protest at the government’s planned cuts. Now, councilors leave parties on a relatively regular basis and this news is hardly going to shake the foundations of the coalition.

But Lib Dem discomfort, and the unbalancing effect it threatens to have on the coalition, remains the biggest single threat to the coalition. A YouGov poll earlier this week had the Lib Dems all the way down to 11 percent, their lowest rating since the last days of Ming Campbell’s leadership. If that number...

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A question of judgement

David Blackburn 6:02pm

Up until today, the Hague-Myers story was confined to scurrilous rumour on Guido’s blog and the occasional cautious article in the Telegraph or the Mail; the rest of the media were uninterested. But, as James notes, Hague’s two extraordinarily frank statements, particularly yesterday’s impassioned denial to ‘set the record straight’, have forced the issue into the mainstream political debate. The personal always becomes political. What of William Hague’s judgement?

John Redwood condemns Hague’s ‘poor judgement’ in personal matters before going on to cast aspersions on his policy judgements,...

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Brown’s plan for the future

David Blackburn 5:08pm

Mr Blair’s former breathless lover will form the fully staffed Gordon and Sarah Brown Foundation, paid for by lucrative speaking engagements, which the Spectator revealed some weeks ago. He has accepted three pro-bono appointments - joining Queen Rania of Jordan’s Global Campaign for Education, working on a new programme to bring the internet to Africa and joining the board of Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. He will also continue to write on the plight of the world’s poor.

Presumably, he won’t now be seeking a spot at...

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Cricket's dilemma

James Forsyth 3:41pm

That the three Pakistani cricketers involved in the spot-fixing allegations have withdrawn from the rest of the tour means that the T20s and one day games will now definitely go ahead. If the accused had played, it would have been hard to see how the matches could have gone ahead and if they had, how they could have been taken at face-value by anyone.

If the allegations against the men turn out to be correct, then the game will have to decide how to punish them. This is going to be...

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Darling: bankers’ super tax failed

David Blackburn 2:08pm

Honesty is an attractive though rare quality in a politician, and Alistair Darling’s self-awareness and morose delivery always grabs attention. Last night, the former chancellor told a conference of bankers that the 50 percent levy on bonuses over £25,000 was a failure. The FT reports him saying:

‘I think it will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after here are very good at getting out of these things and . . . will find all sorts of imaginative ways of avoiding it in the future… what

...

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Access this week's Spectator for free

The Spectator 1:43pm

This week, for one week only, we are making this week’s magazine available to non-subscribers online, courtesy of Saab 95 Saloon.

Click here to access the best written magazine in the English language, featuring Fraser Nelson’s and Bruce Anderson’s verdicts on the Blair memoirs, Ed Smith and Roger Alton on cricket’s latest betting scandal, as well as Taki and Joan Collins on what the future holds for St.Tropez.

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The Today Programme has its Hague cake and eats it too

James Forsyth 12:01pm

The Today Programme this morning demonstrated the problem with putting out an official statement on your private life: it makes the media feel that they have official sanction to discuss the matter. There were three separate discussions of Hague’s statement on the programme this morning. In a classic case of the BBC trying to both have its cake and eat it, one of the segments spent several minutes debating whether they should be talking about the matter at all.

Hague’s problem is that the press is now obsessed with this...

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"The worst-written memoir ever twittered by a serious politician"

Peter Hoskin 10:53am

That's how Bruce Anderson sums up Tony Blair's book in a caustic piece for the magazine. Here's the whole review for the benefit of CoffeeHousers:

'It is bizarre. As he often demonstrated in the House of Commons, Tony Blair knows how to use words. He could also have mobilised a team to help him write his memoirs. Instead, it is all his own work, and the words mutinied. This book is not just badly written. it is atrociously written. For almost 700 pages, Tony Blair stumbles between mawkishness and banality.
Prime

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Coulson under the spotlight again

Peter Hoskin 9:30am

The New York Times Magazine's article about phone hacking at the News of the World comes, it must be said, a little out of the blue. It's over a year since the story last exercised printing presses in the UK – and a year, too, since David Cameron's communications chief, Andy Coulson, was hauled in front of MPs to explain what happened under his editorship of the paper. Back then, he distanced himself from the dubious methods of some Screws reporters, saying that he was neither aware of, nor complicit...