Politics

“Now he and his leader know what it’s like to be people’s second choice,” trilled George Osborne during his recent encounter with Ed Balls over the dispatch box. But might Balls actually have been Miliband’s third choice for the shadow chancellorship? That’s the implication of a delicious little story in today’s Sun, which claims that Miliband first “tapped up” his brother, aka MiliD, when trying to replace Alan Johnson: “A Labour insider revealed: ‘Ed’s people were desperate not to give the job to Balls.’ However, Ed stopped short of offering his brother the job when David made it clear he wanted to stay on the backbenches.” If true, then it’s

Do head over to ConservativeHome, where Tim Montgomerie has put together a comprehensive guide to the revamped Downing Street operation. I won’t spoil its considerable insights here, except to highlight this: “An analysis of papers sent to Downing Street and the Cabinet Office has revealed that just 40% are directly related to the Coalition’s programme. Roughly 30% come from the Whitehall bureaucracy and another 30% from the EU.” James makes the point in his latest politics column that Tory ministers are becoming more and more Eurosceptic as they face the EU in government. That pile of European directives in the in-tray must just be getting too much.

Colonel Gaddafi’s strength appears to be diminishing: Foreign Office sources suggest that the latest YouTube footage suggests that the rebels are now 30 miles from Tripoli, there are reports of Libyan servicemen spiking their guns rather than fire on their compatriots and members of the Gaddafi family have failed to present a united front to the dissent that intends to depose them. But, chaos thy name is Libya. Communications have long been silent, except for the savage drone of state radio, conduit for Gaddafi’s prophesies of victory or martyrdom. Evacuees from Tripoli’s now hellish airport relate a city bristling with arms and testosterone – the fear is that Gaddafi and his dogs

David Cameron’s speech in Kuwait today did not take on his hosts in the way that Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech did. But it was a still fine, liberal speech. The key argument of the speech was that: ”As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse. Our interests lie in upholding our values – in insisting on the right to peaceful protest, in freedom of speech and the internet, in freedom of assembly and the rule of law. But these are not just our values, but the entitlement of people everywhere; of people in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar

Lucky old George Osborne. The British economy is not in “meltdown,” but churning out tax revenue like a fruit machine. Figures out from the ONS today show that the tax haul for January alone was £58.4 billion – pushing the public finances into a surplus £3.7 billion for that month (an almighty £3.6 billion more than expected). If this rate continues (no reason why not, seeing as we’re all getting drunk on Mervyn King’s underpriced debt again), then Citi estimates he will have £8 billion more to play with than expected in the current financial year. So what will he do? Osborne’s decision will tell us plenty about what type

To date, this government has not had much of a foreign policy. Where there should have been grand strategy there has been trade promotion. But this appears to be changing. It is certainly striking that Cameron is the first western leader to visit post-Mubarak Egypt. Cameron himself is, normally, at the realist end of the foreign policy spectrum. But, as one close friend observes, one of the most important things to grasp in understanding the Prime Minister is that Garibaldi is one of his great heroes. As Cameron told Charles Moore, he admires Garibaldi’s ‘romantic nationalism‘. It is not difficult to imagine the Cameron who loves Garibaldi—a man who planned

Aside from official – and provocative – proclamations from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the news from Libya is still arriving piecemeal. The latest reports are that the protestors have prevailed in Zawia, in the west of the country, to add to their “liberation” of Benghazi last night. And there is some speculation that Gaddafi Senior has fled the country, which would certainly reinforce the sense that his power is being whittled down, potentially to naught. As for Britain, the questions about our prior relationship with Libya still hover awkwardly over proceedings, and over the heads of the last government in particular. There was the al-Megrahi deal, of course, as well as