Out foxed

BTW I couldn't agree more with Fraser:

Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. 

...The Tories badly need to hammer home this narrative – what I have called the “reign of error”. It’s happening to Greenspan in America already. Osborne is doing a fine job, but we need all the Shadow Cabinet rubbishing Brown’s record every chance they get, with the effortless and fluency which Fox managed today.

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They're doomed. Doomed.

Sorry I've not been able to post since Friday. 

Albeit unintentionally, I've had to look at the election results with some distance. To state the obvious: it's an unmitigated disaster for Labour. Worse, it's not Labour per se which has been clobbered: it's Gordon Brown.

Those of us who long argued that, pace Meghnad Desai, Brown was put on the earth to show how good Tony Blair was, can say 'I told you so'. But that doesn't get anyone very far. What's striking now is that the evidence is clear, overwhelming even. Brown is unelectable, and so long as Labour sticks with him it is finished. Over. Buried. 

As for the idea that he needs to change: purrrrrlease. Brown can't change. He hasn't morphed into a different Brown as PM: he is exactly what he has always been: incompetent, over-rated and barely...

Continue reading...

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Our wonderful NHS

I'm sitting with my wife at the doctor's surgery. Her appointment was for 3 10. It's now 4, with no sign that she's anywhere near being seen.

The whole point of this post is that this casual contempt with which patients are treated is not remotely out of the ordinary. No one blinks an eyelid at an hour's delay; the receptionist certainly doesn't even think it worth mentioning, let alone apologising.

Let it be said again - it can never be said too often: the NHS is not merely grotesquely inefficient and the most ridiculous anachronism. It is also fundamentally immoral. Were we to have gone to my usual, private, GP, we'd have been treated not as a burden on the smooth running of the practice but as a customer who needs and deserves to be treated with respect. The time has long since come when everyone should be given the power of the purse string, and the NHS rebalanced to give power not to the doctor but the patient.

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I haven't a clue

A couple of people have asked me why I haven't given my forecast for the elections today: will it be Boris or Ken?

I am not in a pollster's office. I do not have any special access to opinion polling. I'm typing this in my study in Finchley. I am sitting with a (lovely) view of my garden. I've been out for a nice lunch with friends. Now I'm home again. 

How on earth do I have any special insight into what the result will be? 

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Harry's Place

Cor.

All singing, all dancing, all new. And better than ever.

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