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Tuesday 9 February 2010

Monday, 8th February 2010

Clegg must resist Brown’s sweet nothings

David Blackburn 9:03am

Gordon Brown is usually at his most patronising when confronting Nick Clegg. Last week, however, hectoring gave way to affection. Brown was almost tender. Of course, this sudden change has an obvious explanation. Brown and Clegg are brothers in arms: devotees of electoral reform, or so the Road Block would have us believe.

Robert McIlveen laid counter-arguments against Brown’s opportunism and Boris Johnson repeats them in his Telegraph column today, concluding:

‘There is one final and overwhelming reason why Britain should not and will not adopt PR – that it

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Sunday, 7th February 2010

Brown wants to discuss nothing besides the middle class

David Blackburn 4:34pm

Aspiration is Gordon’s middle name. The Observer has an extensive interview with Brown and though the classification has changed class remains his obsession: Brown wants to fight the election on the middle classes. He spoke of little else. Education and family policy will be defined by Sure Start, child tax credits and the school leaving age; the NHS will offer yet more choice and unaffordable luxuries, such as one to one care.

It may seem peculiar for a man who is synonymous with stealth taxes, and whose time in government will be...

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The tradecraft of Brown's Morgan interview is bizarre

James Forsyth 3:15pm

If an event is going to have dramatic impact we can’t know it is coming. So the emotional moments in Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan have lost much of their potency through being pre-briefed to today’s papers. It also strikes me as rather bad tradecraft to have let it be known that Alastair Campbell was prepping Brown for this appearance; a detail that was bound to lead to cynicism about whether or not the public is being spun.

The write-up of the interview in the papers also left me wondering how...

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The cuts consensus

Fraser Nelson 11:38am

John Rentoul today puts Trevor Kavanagh and myself in the dock for demanding "massive spending cuts" and concludes that if we "had any power" we would be "about as helpful to Cameron as Sarah Palin was to John McCain" but believes Cameron "will hold to his strategic course". I mean: massive cuts. How crazy is that? Surely only swivel-eyed maniacs would be planning cuts - real, hard-core ideologues - would plan that when the deficit is a mere 13 percent of GDP. Surely?

It struck me, reading this, that John is unaware of the massive cuts which Labour is planning...

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Beyond doubt

David Blackburn 10:53am

For a moment, Andrew Marr had Alastair Campbell by the short and curlies. Marr attacked (that verb is not an exaggeration) Campbell over his clarification to the Chilcot Inquiry, the phrase ‘beyond doubt’ and the possibility that Blair knowingly misled parliament over the strength of WMD intelligence.

Marr was at his incisive and dramatic best. It was the first time I’ve seen Campbell under pressure and he wobbled, his lower lip did so markedly. Perhaps I do him a disservice, but I didn’t buy Campbell’s blubbing act; it was just theatre....

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Saturday, 6th February 2010

Young in favour of elected committee chairmen

James Forsyth 6:30pm

It is interesting that Sir George Young took the opportunity of his interview with The Times this week to reaffirm the Tory leadership’s support for electing select committee chairmen. In the last fortnight, two Tory MPs who would like to be select committee chairmen in the next parliament have complained to me that the leadership is quietly
conspiring against the idea. But Sir George’s words suggest that this is not the case.

Select committee chairmen election should mean that we get a chairmen who is determined to hold the executive to...

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What’s needed now is a modern Conservative party with clear, discernible principles

Fraser Nelson 5:28pm

I'd like to do a final round of responses to comments to my Keith Joseph lecture. It’s easy for debates about Conservatism to be caricatured as being for or against Cameron – and my lecture fits into neither category. I’m a big supporter of Cameron’s, but often wish he’d have more faith in himself: I fear he feels he has to make more short-term concessions than he has to – thus blunting his message of ‘change’. For years, any debate about Tory policy is described in the terminology of Tory civil war circa...

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Rationalism enters the climate change debate

Fraser Nelson 3:47pm

I have been gripped by The Guardian’s climate change investigation and reporting these last few days. We do like to tease George Monbiot but he was one of the first to denounce spinning of the data and science by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit. It’s a mark of his professionalism and seriousness: global warming is a cause important to him, and he resents attempts to misrepresent things by his own side, or by his enemies. The Guardian seems to take the same view, and has sent David Leigh and others out on...

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Parris versus Nelson

David Blackburn 12:30pm

Here’s a question: to be a good angel or a bad angel? We know what Fraser thinks; Matthew Parris differs. Writing in the Times today, he asserts that he would give David Cameron the same advice he offered Margaret Thatcher in 1979: agree a gloriously unspecific manifesto. The details of hard-edged manifestos are ambushed well before polling day; discretion is the better part of valour.

In the immediate circumstances of the Tory wobble both arguments are commendable. The Tories have unwound when trying to supply detail to flesh out their broadly radical...

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