Politics

It’s hard to overestimate the significance of Tuesday’s Budget. George Osborne’s statement won’t just determine the course of our economy for the next few years, but also the political life of this government. Spending cuts and tax rises may not inevitably “fracture the coalition,” as Peter Oborne puts it in the Mail today. But they certainly have the potential to. Happily for the coalition, the current political mood is so geared towards fiscal restraint that there will be little immediate opposition to Osborne’s general plans.  That will come once the effects of spending cuts are felt in individual constituencies  – months, even years, down the line. But there are a

I doubt David Cameron will have many better days in government than this. Considering the government cancelled a hospital project yesterday, today has passed as one long photo-op, free of incident. It began with Theresa May banning a radical Islamist cleric, Zakir Naik, displaying a resolve that eluded her immediate predecessors. The papers were full of Cameron’s ‘coup’ in Brussels yesterday; the only major news story that might have unnerved Cameron was the FT’s research into Tory immigration policy, which the FT calculates will hit growth and raise taxes. It was too esoteric to hit the TV screens, so too the cuts in arts funding. It must have been a

American politics often plays like a bloodsport, but the appearance of BP’s Tony Hayward before a congressional hearing today has been in a league all of its own.  Things were already looking decidedly brutal at the start of the morning session, when Hayward was subjected to a solid hour of attacks and accusations from the committee’s members before giving his own testimony. But since then we’ve had everything from pictures of oil-coated birds to protests from the crowd. It has been a compelling, if unenlightening, theatrical event. For his part, Hayward has been neither convincing nor all that unconvincing.  His demeanour is suitably contrite, but his answers have been too

I knew it was time for me to leave the Scottish Parliament press corps when I was in Deacon Brodie’s Tavern one night and pulled into a game of “name the top ten sexiest MSPs”. On my first day there, September 2000, the journalist next to me was in trouble for headbutting a politician in the pub the night before. It’s an unusual place with antics that make Westminster look like a nunnery: I remember one set of political awards where a Labour MSP drunkenly set fire to the curtains and was imprisoned. I feel sorry for the poor members of the general public who come into contact with these