Politics

When Europe’s finance ministers meet for a group photo, it’s easy to spot the rebel — Anders Borg has a ponytail and earring. What actually marks him out, though, is how he responded to the crash. While most countries in Europe borrowed massively, Borg did not. Since becoming Sweden’s finance minister, his mission has been to pare back government. His ‘stimulus’ was a permanent tax cut. To critics, this was fiscal lunacy — the so-called ‘punk tax cutting’ agenda. Borg, on the other hand, thought lunacy meant repeating the economics of the 1970s and expecting a different result. Three years on, it’s pretty clear who was right. ‘Look at Spain,

It took the Tory party 15 years to recover from the bad blood created by Margaret Thatcher’s forced resignation. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that five years on, the bitterness from Tony Blair’s being pushed out of office has not yet subsided. Phil Collins, who was a speechwriter to Blair, has today written a scathing piece about Tom Watson, the leader of the so-called curry house coup against Blair. Collins accuses Watson of putting the ‘occupation of internal power’ in the party by his faction above the interests of the Labour party. Watson, who is Labour’s election campaigns coordinator, exerts a huge influence over Labour’s internal processes and candidate selection,

In his cover piece for this week’s magazine, Neil O’Brien describes the great divide between London and the rest of the UK. One of the main differences he highlights is in their economies. He says: ‘In inner west London, economic output per head is £110,000 a year. In an important sense, these people are not living in the same country as the inhabitants of Gwent or the Wirral, whose output is just a tenth of this.’ In fact, London is set apart not just from those two poorest areas, but every other area in the country. You see, the second richest area — Edinburgh — has an output per head

The big question in British politics right now is what happens when the voters are dissatisfied with all the three main parties and their leaders. According to a recent opinion poll, David Cameron’s approval rating is now down to minus 27. According to the invaluable Anthony Wells, this is the lowest it has been since Cameron became Tory leader. But the PM’s numbers look positively healthy compared to Miliband’s (minus 41) and Clegg’s (minus 53). Dissatisfaction with political leaders isn’t the only indicator that people aren’t happy. As I report in the column this week, senior Downing Street aides have been much struck by polling showing that more than 40

It seems David Cameron’s found a neat way of needling his coalition partners over their resistance to the so-called ‘snooper’s charter’. Last week, Nick Clegg insisted on proper pre-legislative scrutiny before any expansion of surveillance powers goes ahead, while a group of Lib Dem MPs wrote a letter in the Guardian declaring that: ‘It continues to be essential that our civil liberties are safeguarded, and that the state is not given the powers to snoop on its citizens at will.’ And Lib Dem president Tim Farron told the BBC that his party is ‘prepared to kill’ the proposals ‘if it comes down to it’. ‘If we think this is a

Bruce Anderson has written a typically trenchant piece today describing the Tory party’s treatment of John Major as ‘the most unworthy, the most shameful, period in Tory history.’ Based on both how close Bruce is to those around David Cameron and my own conversations, I would say that this is a verdict that many in the Tory leadership would agree with. Indeed, the way in which Major was treated by some Tory backbenches has informed — often with calamitous consequences — Cameron’s approach to party management. Take, for instance, Cameron’s effort straight after the election to neuter the 1922 Committee and turn it into the Conservative Parliamentary Party. This move was

One of the media’s vices is to assume that the public are as interested in stories about journalism as journalists are. This always makes me slightly reluctant to write about the Leveson inquiry – more fascinating for my trade than to anybody else. But the Leveson inquiry is about to enter its political phase which, I think, makes it more relevant. Politicians will start appearing before it from towards the end of next month and, as I say in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron is scheduled to face the inquiry which he created in mid-June. Six other Cabinet ministers are expected to be summoned before the inquiry. For Cameron,

George Osborne indicating that he is open to him and other ministers having to publish their tax returns is testament to two things. First, the Tory leadership, who know how crucial a Boris victory in London is to the Cameron project regaining momentum, is keen to keep the pressure on Ken Livingstone over his tax affairs. They have no desire to let a row over whether they’ll publish theirs distract attention from the problems of Labour’s mayoral candidate. As Osborne himself stresses in the Telegraph interview, “The reason we are talking about this now is that this is a smokescreen for Ken Livingstone’s tax affairs. Let’s not take the focus