The new Blair

There's a fascinating piece by Stryker McGuire in the current Newsweek on Angela Merkel - "the new Blair". Do read it all, but here's the kernel of it:

Germany's first truly Pan-European leader. Since becoming chancellor in 2005, she has grown quickly in stature. She is presiding over a sudden and extraordinary economic boom that some have dubbed Wirtschaftswunder 2.0—a second industrial miracle, not glimpsed since the golden era of the ' 60s. She's retooled the Franco-German compact that has traditionally run the European Union, establishing that Berlin increasingly calls the shots in the Union, not Paris, as she demonstrated in muscling through her famous EU budget compromise just a month after taking office. She's shaken up the cozy relationship between Germany and Russia that was a hallmark of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. Most significantly, she's repaired her country's relationship with the United States—so much so that Berlin is edging out London as Washington's first port of call on European matters, a shift confirmed even by several senior British government officials. Indeed these officials wouldn't quarrel with the judgment by Spiegel Online: "Merkel is the new Tony Blair."

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Reid's disloyalty?

Paul Linford used to be a fine lobby correspondent and he now writes one of the most thoughtful political blogs. Ever the shrewdy, he has an interesting take on John Reid's departure:

As ever with Reid, there are quite a few theories, and they can be summarised thus.

1. He is genuine. He is coming up to 60, wants to take a break from government, and wants Gordon Brown to have the freedom to bring in his own people as he said yesterday.

Probability rating: 2/10. Reid is a politician to his fingertips, and it just doesn't square with what he said last autumn.

2. With the forthcoming break-up of the Home Office, Reid's role is about to diminish and Gordon was unable to offer him anything bigger by way of compensation. There is some speculation that he might have asked for a combined Defence and Homeland Security brief

Probability rating: 6/10. Gordon would have been happy to keep Reid in Cabinet in one of the two Home Office briefs, but not in a beefed-up role.

3. He has been forced out by some impending tabloid scandal. This is the theory currently running on Iain Dale.

Probability rating: 4/10. Reid has a fairly colourful past but it's unclear to me whny him resigning would make a tabloid newspaper any less likely to print something.

4. He is staging a canny tactical retreat to distance himself from what he sees as the impending disaster of the Brown premiership so that he can live to fight another day after the next election.

Probability rating: 7/10. There is no love lost between Reid and Brown and his decision not to serve could be likened to Iain Macleod's under Douglas-Home in 1963.

My conclusion, then, is that this is an act of deep disloyalty on the part of Reid which will weaken Brown and weaken Labour in the run-up to the next election.

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Bernard is my hero!

I'ev always thought Bernard Haitink one of the most purely musical of conductors. Now he is my hero, too. How I long to give those barbarians who cough and splutter their way through concerts a piece of my mind. Well, Bernard did just that:

Just prior to the hushed cadenza at the end of the third movement, an unfortunate woman in the first row had a sneezing fit. At first Haitink just glared at her. When it continued he turned to her, ever the conductor, and shooed her from the room with both hands. She left.

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Is Giuliani nuts?

This Vanity Fair piece by Michael Wolff on Rudy Giuliani's...how can one put it?...foibles is a fabulously entertaining read.

(via Daniel Finkelstein.)

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You have to love the French left

Genius. There's a French analyst on Sky News at the moment offering his unbiased opinion on the French elections. There is, he tells us, a worrying similarity with the first Bush election in 2000:

You know, the same person has been ahead in opinion polls before the first and second round. And the polling firms are private companies. This is very suspicious.

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Defending Israel better, not attacking Israel for defending itself

Mary Ann Sieghart's Times column yesterday argued that the Winograd Commission's interim report  mans that people who attacked Israel for defending itself against Hezbolah can say 'I told you so'. I intended to deal with her piece today, as its arguments were so confused and so beneath Mary-Ann that it needed taking apart, big time. I don't need to do that now as a withering Melanie Phillips has done just that. Her post needs t be read in full, but here's one of the main points:

Her argument today is singularly ill-judged. The fundamental difference between the strictures of the Winograd Commission and the attacks last year in Britain is that Winograd is concerned for the safety of Israel — while the British attackers were concerned for the safety of Israel’s murderous assailants. Yes, Winograd is devastating, and deservedly so; but the thrust of it is that Israel should have defended itself better, and the manifest incompetence of its Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Chief of Staff have exposed it to greater danger by undermining its reputation for military prowess. The point about last year’s hysterical denunciations of Israel, and the reason so many British Jews got so upset about it, was that Israel was painted falsely as the aggressor (and thus deemed to have no right to defend itself by military means against an act of war); that it was falsely accused of committing atrocities which it did not commit; and that the presentation of the war was effectively dictated to the media by the true aggressors, Hezbollah, whose propaganda of unremitting falsehood was uncritically reproduced as the truth and resulted in an upsurge in the demonisation of Israel and hatred of the Jews. Now Sieghart repeats this libel.

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Surprise! People will pay for good schools (The Times)

I have a column in today's Times on ten years of education under Tony Blair:

We have an apartheid education system in which the barrier is not race but money. Fee-paying parents buy places in the best meritocratic schools, with the best meritocratic chance of securing a place in the best meritocratic universities, and thus the best meritocratic opportunity to get on in life. They compete on merit with their peers. But it is a stilted contest. Only the few lucky enough to have a decent education are able to enter it. The rest, however able they may be, are left behind.

The thread to the past ten years has been Mr Blair’s aim of giving all pupils the opportunity to enter that contest – to increase standards within the state sector so that all children have an equal chance of succeeding. But ten years on, and the apartheid barrier has grown even deeper. Those who can, pay. Those who can’t, stay.

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Doreen Hitler on drums?

My fellow worker here in the Spectator tractor factory has a terrific post on unlikely named musicians: a couple of Stalins, a Lenine and a Mussolini.

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Royal loses it

This is the section of the Royal-Sarkozy debate when she got, as it were, hot under her collar and accused her opponent of immorality. It is also, the polls now seem to show, the moment when whatever chance she had of the presidency disappeared (watch the top clip first):

UPDATE: Oliver Kamm links to an extraordinary interview with Ms Royal. She really does seem to have lost it. As Oliver puts it:

 

I'm a Europhile left-winger prepared to be well disposed to Mme Royal, and I'm fairly certain I know how any responsible politician of the democratic Left would have answered this interviewer. The exchange is extraordinary. To found your electoral claim on stoking fears of violent opposition should your opponent win surely crosses the line dividing prediction from incitement. It's beyond negative campaigning: it's actively inflammatory, and I hope Mme Royal's standing suffers appropriately.

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Idiots

If you're a connoisseur of goalkeeping cock-ups, Peter Briffa has five beauties on his site here.

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