Politics

Crafty old Ed. After a week on death row, he was expected to arrive at PMQs and do the decent thing. Drink down a foaming cup of hemlock and depart the political stage for good. But Ed is made of sterner stuff than many of us realised. He was cunning, passionate and articulate today and his performance will have steadied the nerves of his anxious troops. It all began oddly. As soon as Miliband stood up he was greeted by a slightly over-done chorus of cheers from his backbenchers. This absurdity prompted a burst of satirical catcalling from the Tories. They knew this would be fun. Cameron would run rings

After last week’s performance and this weekend’s headlines, Ed Miliband needed a win at PMQs — and he got one. Knowing that David Cameron would attack him over the fact Labour will vote against the welfare reform bill this week, Miliband had a string of questions for the Prime Minister on the detail of the bill and whether people recovering from cancer would lose the contributory element of their benefits. The issue was both wonky and emotive. The fact the questions were about cancer meant that Cameron couldn’t deliver his usual string of put downs to Miliband. Indeed, when one Tory backbencher heckled him, the Labour leader shot back that

Labour’s simmering resentments and self-doubts have been boiling over recently — and today is no different. Compare and contrast The Sun’s interview with Tony Blair with Andrew Grice’s article on Ed Balls in the Independent. For Blair, Labour ought to be claiming more credit for their preparatory role in some of the coalition’s reforms, such as the Academies programme. For Balls, they ought instead to be dodging blame for the state of the public finances. As Grice reports, “Ed Balls has rejected demands from allies of Ed Miliband that he admit Labour spent too much when they were in power.” From the rest of the piece, the shadow chancellor’s position

The American journalist Michael Weiss wrote recently, “Tony Blair can’t be a war criminal. If he were, George Galloway would support him.”  The joke works on the assumption that the backers of despots in the West are always from the Dostoevskian dregs of extremist politics: wild and frothing men, far from the polite and sensible mainstream in which the British establishment resides. With Bashar al-Assad committing war crimes against his own people, ask yourself what kind of man wrote this article in that eminently respectable journal of international affairs, Foreign Policy. As the Arab spring reached Syria at the beginning of April, he began the piece by warning readers that

Paul Waugh is tweeting that Number 10 is stressing that, pace this morning’s front pages and Lord Freud’s comments yesterday, the benefit cap remains. This is not surprising: the benefit cap was always a statement of values more than anything else. As George Osborne said at Tory conference, it was designed to ensure that, “No family on out of work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work.” The cap was designed to say something both about the Tories’ values and those of its opponents. If Labour opposed it, they would put themselves on the wrong side of the whole welfare/fairness debate. It is