Politics Archives

Friday

11 Mar 2016

Steerpike

Alastair Campbell is confronted by his namesake: ‘have you got any idea what my life has been like?’

Although Alastair Campbell no longer works in politics, he remains a divisive figure in Westminster thanks to the reputation he earned as Tony Blair’s spin doctor. During this time, Campbell is said to have been instrumental in using spin to win parliamentary approval for Blair’s call to invade Iraq. Still, Campbell appears to think that it’s about time people got over any ill-feelings towards him as a result of this. Speaking at Portland’s Rising Stars party, Campbell gave a speech to the spin doctors of tomorrow. In this, he complained that even though he left Downing Street 12 years ago, he still gets ‘load of sh-t’: ‘I always feel when I’m in

Steerpike

Simon Hughes’ new job brings him back to the Commons

After Simon Hughes lost his seat in the general election, the Liberal Democrat stalwart went from Justice Minister to unemployed overnight. Happily the former Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats has since managed to find work, recently being appointed to cover maternity leave for the Open University’s head of public affairs Laura Burley. However, Mr S understands that Hughes’ new role is the cause of much amusement in the Commons. Parliamentary staffers report receiving calls from Hughes — who built a reputation over the years for being one of the Commons’ more sanctimonious figures — asking if MPs will be attending events relating to the Open University. ‘We usually receive these calls firming up RSVPs for

Charles Moore

There are no easy answers to the EU question

People — nice people, members of the public, concerned voters — keep coming up to me saying, ‘We want to hear the arguments about the EU referendum.’ It sounds a strange thing to want because, since the last years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, the arguments have rarely been out of the news for a week, and jolly boring they often are. But what such people go on to say is that they seek the objective facts and cannot get them from either side in the campaign. They would like some useful fact sheet which answers all their questions. Well, from time to time, papers like the Telegraph and the Times

Isabel Hardman

John McDonnell tries to repair Labour’s economic reputation

What is Labour’s biggest obstacle to getting back into government any time soon? Those who’ve spent any time thinking about the general election result – and the party still doesn’t talk that much about May 2015 – will say that until voters trust the party on the economy, it is not going to succeed. John McDonnell’s team clearly agrees, briefing the media today that the reason the Shadow Chancellor is making a major intervention on the economy as he prepares for the Budget is that voters were wary of Labour on the economy. McDonnell’s speech today sounds remarkably similar to the messages Ed Balls offered before the election, that Liz

Thursday

10 Mar 2016

Peter Jones

Governor Cameron and the Brussels empire

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, made a typically brilliant intervention in the EU referendum debate by arguing that ‘Whoever does not believe in Europe, who doubts Europe, whoever despairs of Europe, should visit the military cemeteries in Europe.’ Cicero made just this point to his brother Quintus, who in 59 bc was about to embark on his third term as governor of Asia Minor (now western Turkey): ‘Asia ought to remember that, if she were not governed by us, she would hardly have been spared the disasters of external war or internal discord. But our government cannot be maintained without taxes, and Asia ought without resentment to pay

The Spectator

Turkey’s blackmail

Looked at from the narrow perspective of how to deal with the lethal business of human trafficking across the Aegean, this week’s deal between the EU and Turkey shows some encouraging signs. Slowly, the EU seems to be realising that the surest way to stop migrants dying in unseaworthy boats is to adopt similar measures to those used by Tony Abbott the former Australian Prime Minister: turn back the boats, and deport those who land illegally. The Australians paid Malaysia to help handle the migrant problem. The EU is paying Turkey more than £4 billion over the next three years to contain 2.5 million refugees. The problem, however, is that

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 10 March 2016

Surely there is a difference between Mark Carney’s intervention in the Scottish referendum last year and in the EU one now. In the first, everyone wanted to know whether an independent Scotland could, as Alex Salmond asserted, keep the pound and even gain partial control over it. The best person to answer this question was the Governor of the Bank of England. So he answered it, and the answer — though somewhat more obliquely expressed — was no. For the vote on 23 June, there is nothing that Mr Carney can tell us which we definitely need to know and which only he can say. So when he spoke to

Isabel Hardman

Can the Leave campaign mount as scary a Project Fear as David Cameron?

David Cameron’s referendum campaign trail continued today, with the Prime Minister visiting Chester and giving a speech defending Britain’s membership of the European Union. And on the other side his Cabinet colleague Chris Grayling gave a speech warning about the dangers of continuing to stay in the bloc. Neither speech today was particularly angry with the other side – though separately Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott accused the Prime Minister of being ‘desperate to change the subject from his failure to deliver his manifesto promises on immigration’. Cameron’s main Project Fear theme was to accuse pro-Leave campaigners of seeing job losses as a ‘price worth paying’, and therefore to sow further

Steerpike

Watch: Michael Crick chases down Lord Feldman

Michael Crick’s Channel 4 report into Tory election spending has led to an investigation by the Electoral Commission into the hotel bills and advertising bills the Conservatives failed to declare as election expenditure. So it’s safe to say that Crick is unlikely to be the flavour of the month over at CCHQ. In fact Lord Feldman has so far ignored interview requests from Channel 4 when it comes to explaining his party’s spending. So with Feldman not returning his calls, Crick saw his opportunity after he spied the Conservative Party chairman walking in the Westminster area. The story hungry hack sprinted after him, eventually catching Feldman for an awkward exchange. MC: Why don’t

Isabel Hardman

Why are politicians so self-loathing?

One of the poorest lines in Dan Jarvis’s speech this morning was not the pre-briefed line about being ‘tough on inequality, tough on the causes of inequality’, which has already endured sufficient mockery. It was this seemingly innocuous proposal: ‘Let’s be honest – MPs who represent areas along the HS2 route or in the Heathrow flight path have a tough call about whether to vote for these schemes. So let’s take out the politics. Let’s look at new powers that allow the government to refer major infrastructure decisions to the National Infrastructure Commission for an independent decision on whether projects should go ahead.’ Jarvis isn’t the first politician to say

Isabel Hardman

How the coup against Jeremy Corbyn has already happened

Over the past few weeks, talk of a potential coup against Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader has grown, with most expecting some sort of move from some section of the party in the summer. The chance of that move not dying the same embarrassing death as most Labour coups is still pretty slim, no matter how tough the plotters talk about the number of meetings they’ve had. But whatever happens with the official party leadership, there is already a serious coup underway in the party. Dan Jarvis gave a speech to think tank Demos this morning which is being written up as part of his long-term bid to lead the Labour

Steerpike

Watch: Labour’s expelled Trotskyite says he will not ‘condemn’ 9/11

This week Jeremy Corbyn received flak from the Prime Minister during PMQs over the decision by Labour’s NEC to allow Gerry Downing — a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Fight — to re-join Labour. Cameron said he was ‘completely appalled’ by the decision — as revealed by Guido Fawkes — as Downing has previously described the motivation for 9/11 as ‘entirely understandable’. After Labour finally expelled Downing again late last night, he appeared on today’s Daily Politics to fight his corner. In an interview with Andrew Neil, Downing attempted to show why he should be allowed to join Labour. Alas, he appeared to do the opposite as he spouted several alarming

The Spectator

The Spectator Podcast: the deportation game, Osborne’s leadership chances and the Stepford Students

In this week’s cover feature, Rod Liddle and Douglas Murray look at Britain and Europe’s approach to deportation. In Britain, we can’t get rid of jihadis, sex-gang ringleaders and drug lords – so we try to deport old ladies, says Rod. In Europe, it’s worse, says Douglas. Their attitude to migrants is suicidal. Thanks to Britain’s geography and a few sensible decisions by our government, Britain has so far been spared the worst of the migrant crisis. But we should pity most of the other European countries, because they are losing control not just of their borders but of their civilisation and culture. Isabel Hardman is joined by Douglas Murray, and

Alex Massie

Corbyn’s celebrity supporters aren’t just wrong; they’re wrong for the wrong reasons

The thing about Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters is they’d be funny if they weren’t so pathetic. Or is it the other way round? I can never remember. Last night something called the #JC4PM Tour rolled in to Edinburgh. Featuring the likes of Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Charlotte Church and sundry other artists who are not necessarily household names in even their own households, this was supposed, I think, to be a Red Wedge for our times. But since they only sold 350 or so tickets for a 2,000 seat theatre it was more of a Red Splinter. Obviously I did not attend myself. But Buzzfeed’s estimable Jamie Ross did sacrifice his evening for

Martin Vander Weyer

The Budget: what to expect from the Chancellor

What’s in next week’s budget? Not much, apparently. ‘Cabinet sources’ have been quoted saying that ‘George has been told not to rock the boat’ ahead of the Brexit referendum, and that’s why he backed away from a grab on pension relief for higher earners; likewise he may yield to pressure from his backbenchers not to treat cheap petrol as an opportunity to raise extra fuel duty from motorists. He’ll probably have to talk his way out of a downgrading of growth forecasts by the Office for Budget Responsibility (‘global headwinds’, naturally) and a modest overshoot against his own borrowing targets — but those are the most entertaining parts of Osborne’s

James Delingpole

Want to leave the EU? You must be an oik like me

If you need to know how properly posh you are there’s a very simple test: are you pro- or anti-Brexit? Until the European referendum campaign got going, I thought it was a no–brainer which side all smart friends would take. They’d be for ‘out’, obviously, for a number of reasons: healthy suspicion of foreigners, ingrained national pride, unwillingness to be ruled by Germans having so recently won family DSOs defeating them, and so on. What I also factored in is that these people aren’t stupid. I’m not talking about Tim Nice-But-Dims here. I mean distinguished parliamentarians, captains of industry, City whiz-kids, high-level professionals: the kind of people who read the

Michael Henderson

Anarchy in the EU

It is 40 years since the band in which Paul Cook banged the drums, the Sex Pistols, detonated a bomb called punk in post-war Britain. The shards are still visible. ‘We didn’t have a manifesto, but we wanted to shake things up,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know how much we would shake things up. Music, art, design, films, books. Punk is part of our social and cultural history.’ We’ve come a long way from 1976, when Johnny Rotten and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ put the pestilential Pistols on the front pages, and a prime-time television exchange with Bill Grundy, the celebrated ‘fucking rotter’ interview, kept them there. The band were

Irwin Stelzer

Americans for Brexit

Because Americans love Britain, and because we are a presumptuous lot, we often advise the United Kingdom on its foreign policy. And not only the UK, but Europe. Successive US administrations have urged European nations to form a United States of Europe as an answer to the question attributed to Henry Kissinger: ‘Who do I call if I want to call Europe?’ The latest such unrequested advice was offered to your Prime Minister by no less a foreign-policy maven — see his successes in Libya, Middle East, China, Crimea — than Barack Obama. The outgoing president informed David Cameron that his administration wants to see ‘a strong United Kingdom in

Harry Mount

Looking up an old friend

As far as I know, there’s no word in the English language for feeling both terrified and smug at the same time. That’s how I felt when I gave a recent talk to my old school, Westminster, from the pulpit in Westminster Abbey. The talk was about how guilty I felt at taking the Westminster Abbey for granted when I was a boy there in the 1980s — the abbey being the school chapel. I worked out that I’d been to the abbey 400 times when I was at school. Well, to be precise, that’s 400 minus the number of times I bunked abbey — which I began to do

Wednesday

9 Mar 2016

Isabel Hardman

Humiliation for Osborne as Government defeated on Sunday trading laws

In the past few minutes, the government has lost its attempt to relax Sunday trading laws in the Commons 317 votes to 286. The rebellion has been brewing for months, with ministers playing a game of chicken with angry Tory backbenchers right up to the vote. A last-minute attempt by George Osborne to stave off the rebellion by proposing a series of pilots of the relaxed rules, tabled as a manuscript amendment in the middle of the morning, failed when the Speaker rejected it. This has not helped Osborne’s standing amongst MPs, with some remarking that the whole exercise had shown that the Chancellor had still not learned what the