Politics Archives

Sunday

9 Jun 2013

Tim Yeo pulls out of media appearances after Sunday Times sting

Tim Yeo was due to appear on Sky News’ Murnaghan programme, and on the BBC’s Sunday Politics this morning. But he’s just pulled out of both interviews, where he would have been asked about the Sunday Times’ story alleging that he coached a witness to his own select committee on the right answers. Yeo denies that he behaved improperly and told the newspaper that he had never offered parliamentary advice or advocacy. What will be interesting about the fallout from this latest round of allegations is whether politicians use it to advance their own pet theories about how parliament needs reform, or whether they examine what the particular allegations were. While

Charles Moore

First Mercer, now Yeo – isn’t it time politicians tried to entrap journalists?

Now that it has become commonplace for the press to entrap MPs and peers, why don’t our legislators try to turn the tables? I suggest that ministers sidle up to journalists (secretly filming them the while) and offer them honours. They should hint that the honour is conditional on favourable coverage, and agree to meet again in six months. In between, they should track what the journalists write, and then, when they have trapped their victims, expose the pattern. Another trick would be for politicians to get friends to pretend to be businessmen offering journalists money or freebies to place products in their stories and features. These tactics would get

Saturday

8 Jun 2013

James Forsyth

Prism controversy will deepen coalition divisions over the snooper’s charter

GCHQ’s use of the US monitoring system Prism is threatening to turn into a major political row. Douglas Alexander is demanding that William Hague come to the House of Commons to explain what GCHQ was doing and what the legal basis for it was. But this controversy is going to have an effect on coalition relations too. It is going to intensify Liberal Democrat opposition to the measures included in the Communications Data Bill. This comes at a time when David Cameron has decided, as he made clear in the Commons on Monday, that the measures in it are needed. In the United States, the Obama administration is pushing back

Hugo Rifkind

The snoopers’ error

Eeek! The snooper’s charter is back from the dead! And still, for some reason, its advocates don’t seem able to grasp that the objections stem not from what they want to do, but from the manner in which they wish to do it. It’s not about your web history, they say, or your browsing habits or anything like that. Rather, again and again, they use the analogy of telephones. The idea is that the law currently facilitates monitoring when terrorists or criminals ring each other, but not when they Skype each other or send emails. And, as Theresa May keeps telling us, all they want to do is bring the

Friday

7 Jun 2013

Sebastian Payne

David Cameron is no longer more popular than his party

For the first time, David Cameron is trailing behind his party, according to the latest polling from Lord Ashcroft. Labour has long struggled with this problem, but as the charts below show, voters now also feel more favourable towards the Conservatives than they do to Cameron himself: The PM’s allies within the party have long argued he is their greatest electoral asset, and this would make any attempt at removing him a folly. Now this is no longer the case, the dissenters have a whole new round of ammunition to fire at the leadership. Cameron need not utterly despair — he’s still the preferred option to Miliband as Prime Minister

Isabel Hardman

Mutually assured silence: a cross-party 2015 election strategy

The Institute for Fiscal Studies gave one of its cheering presentations today on quite how miserable things are going to be for a good while longer. Today’s event was on the forthcoming spending review, but the IFS and Institute for Government also offered some predictions about the long-term economic picture. In a briefing note, the two organisations warned that we are likely to have not one but two austerity elections. It said: ‘If the UK experience proves to be as drawn out as the Canadian one, we should expect not just 2015 but also 2020 to be an austerity election. Spending reductions are set to be a long-term feature of

Duncan O'Leary

Ed Miliband’s welfare plans will hit young people. Here’s how he could fund them fairly

Ed Miliband thinks a contributory principle in welfare is the way to show voters that his party supports a ‘something-for-something’ approach. Yesterday he proposed to restore that principle, with higher entitlements for those with good records. This was at the heart of the Beveridge settlement, but has been diluted by successive governments, the current one included. Labour has to show that it can pay for this sort of system, though, and Miliband’s answer is to raise the hurdle for contributory welfare, so that claimants must have worked longer than the current two-year period to qualify for the contributory benefit. The implication is that more people will go straight through the

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s localism epiphany

Just because Labour has been taking a big dose of reality this week doesn’t mean the party is now refusing to make the most of any botch job by the Coalition. So we’ve come to the funny situation where the Opposition party famed for its centralised approach to planning which failed to build enough homes in any year is taking the high ground on housebuilding. The Telegraph reports that Shadow Communities and Local Government secretary Hilary Benn now believes ‘local communities should decide where they want new homes and developments to go and then give their consent in the form of planning permission’ and that ‘we have to make localism

Thursday

6 Jun 2013

The Spectator

Letters: sheep pay for themselves

Why Ukip aren’t extremists Sir: I don’t wish to be rude to Matthew Parris (‘Why Ukip is a party of extremists’, 1 June), but he should think carefully before labelling civilised citizens as extremists. It’s a silly word to use given what real extremists get up to these days, but the important point is that a growing majority of perfectly sane voters see current UK politics as baby steps meandering around a leftward-curving path to decline; and long for some good old-fashioned radicalism to wake everyone up. For many ordinary people, the real lunacy lies not in the Ukip manifesto but rather in our courts’ slavish submission to the ECHR,

Peter Jones

Imperial Athens and imperial Brussels

Last week Matthew Parris argued that Ukip was ‘extremist’ because its supporters thought of the EU’s ‘methods, despotism and oppression of them and their daily lives as barely distinguishable from those of the Soviet Union’. All right, if Mr Parris insists; but not all ‘despots’ are like Stalin. We entered the EU voluntarily, but as this column noted a few weeks ago, Athens quickly turned a voluntary agreement among Greeks in 478 BC to keep the Persians at bay into something like a tyranny under Athenian control. In 429 BC Pericles acknowledged this, arguing that Athens had no option but to continue down that path ‘because of the danger from

Steerpike

Nice day for a Westminster wedding

Hearty congratulations are in order for Aidan Burley, the naughty Tory MP and Britain’s biggest fan of the Olympic opening ceremony. The Cannock Chase MP popped the question in Sri Lanka, to a fellow Tory, his twenty-four year old researcher Jodie Jones, for what will be a true blue Westminster wedding. Mr Steerpike is fascinated to hear any plans for the stag night.

Steerpike

Where was Lord Adonis during those 5 days in May?

Andrew Adonis is in the loop. At least that’s the impression you might get from 5 Days in May; his account of the various coalition discussions after the 2010 election. His viperous comments about Nick Clegg suggest he was ‘inside’; but word from the corridors of power says otherwise. A little birdie tells me that Nick Clegg saw neither hide nor hair of his lordship on any of those five days in May.

Isabel Hardman

How Ed Miliband avoided open warfare on welfare

For months, right-wing politicians and commentators have been licking their lips waiting for the Labour party to face up to reality. We all assumed that the sort of speeches delivered by Ed Balls and Ed Miliband this week, in which the two men abandoned the party’s commitment to universalism and promised to cap welfare spending, would send Labour into orbit. There was even a revolt in the Commons which appeared to be a harbinger of doom about Labour and welfare. So where’s the open warfare? Sure, Peter Hain spent most of Monday having a grump into various cameras and microphones about the winter fuel payment. But the party has stayed

Steerpike

Michael Gove’s naked ambition

High politics can be a grubby business. To a backstreet Westminster pub last night to watch Michael Gove fill the re-election coffers of Tory MP Tobias Elwood. The Tory party likes Michael Gove, and Michael Gove evidently likes the Tory party (unlike David Cameron, who can barely conceal his contempt). The education secretary worked the room with ease, wit and joie de vivre. Soon, the Gove stand-up show was in full-flow. One attendee asked how Gove deals with Andrew Neil’s tough Sunday interviews. ‘Oh, I just imagine him naked,’ replied Mr Gove. Leadership wannabe, Adam Afriyie may want to adopt this technique, assuming he braves the line of fire again.

James Forsyth

This poster is why Number 10 is so confident Clegg will stay solid on union curbs

Given all the coalition tensions over Clegg supposedly reneging on his promise to back childcare reform, it is surprising how confident Number 10 is that he’ll stay the course on the curbs on the trade unions in the lobbying bill. When I asked one senior figure there why they were so sure that the Lib Dem leader wouldn’t change his mind, I was told to remember that every time Clegg went back to Sheffield and his constituency he was met by a Unison-backed poster branding him as ‘Cleggzilla’. This source continued, ‘If you’re on the receiving end of that you’re all too aware of union power. That pain is very

Fraser Nelson

Billy Bragg may not like it, but the Conservatives are the new workers’ party

Ed Miliband argued this morning that the Labour party ought to be more focused on people working. ‘The clue’s in the name,’ he said. The irony is that Labour gave up on working people some time ago, and used the boom to keep five million Brits on out-of-work benefit while foreign-born workers accounted for 99.9% of the rise in employment. The Conservatives, with their revolutionary Universal Credit, want to make work pay – and save lives rather than save money. I tweeted earlier on today that the Conservatives can be seen as the new workers’ party. This drew a response from the two of the left-wingers I most admire: Polly

Alex Massie

Syria: What has changed to make western intervention a necessary or realistic policy?

Peter Oborne is back in his David-Cameron-is-not-Disraeli-he’s-mad mode this week. He accuses the Prime Minister of losing the plot over Syria. As always, the ghosts of Iraq stalk this debate even though the two problems are scarcely comparable. For that matter, I’m not sure it is fair on Cameron to suggest that, after Libya, the Prime Minister has become war-crazy. Yet I was also struck by something the estimable Tim Shipman reports today: Mr Hammond was recently present when backbenchers suggested that the Tory leadership could do with ‘a small war’ to distract attention from party discontent over Europe and gay marriage. ‘It had better be a very small war,’

Isabel Hardman

Childcare row becomes more about Coalition and less about the policy itself

It is not an enormous surprise that Nick Clegg has confirmed that he will block the government’s plans to relax ratios for childcare providers. The Tories working on the plans seemed entirely resigned to losing them a month ago. But what is interesting is that this row is becoming the new boundary reforms for the Coalition. It might not have long-reaching political effects like the demise of those changes to constituencies, but this is now an argument about process, who-did-what-when, and who-definitely-didn’t-say-that-at-all. The Tories are annoyed, once again, that the Lib Dems are briefing the demise of these proposals before the whole package to reduce the cost of childcare has

Sebastian Payne

‘Sometimes a single event will soar out of its immediate context’ — 50 years since the Profumo affair

Fifty years ago, John Profumo resigned as Secretary of State for War following revelations of an affair with Christine Keeler — who was allegedly also involved with a Soviet spy. At the time, the affair was seen to represent the pinnacle of sleaze and contempt for the British establishment, and turned out to be hugely damaging to the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan. Digging through the archives in the basement of Old Queen Street, The Spectator’s leader from the 13 June 1963 issue, entitled ‘What are we?’, perfectly portrays the shock of the Profumo affair. It also speaks of the malaise hanging over Britain at the time and the immediate impact for

Christopher Howse

Notes on…London’s secondhand bookshops

After seeing the Dalai Lama receive an award at St Paul’s Cathedral, I thought I’d look in at some secondhand bookshops around the British Museum on my walk home. They had all gone. Gone the neat shop in Museum Street where I bought David Knowles’s Great Historical Enterprises; gone the untidy shop in Coptic Street where I first bought a Cresset Press edition of Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Gone the smart end of the market, Frew Mackenzie (next to Cornelissen the artists’ colourmen) where two big folios of the beastly Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 1723, 1734, chipped at spine ends, was the