Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Call the committee to order

It’s committee chairmanship season in Westminster, and there are two noteworthy battles. Michael Fallon and Andrew Tyrie are scrapping over the Treasury Select Committee. The FT summarises the pros and cons of both. Fallon, who served as John McFall’s deputy, remains the front-runner, but the cerebral Tyrie has an impeccable record as an economist, committee member and constituency MP – I grew up near Chichester and Tyrie deserves credit for tackling the city’s perennial flooding problems; and, for what it’s worth, he won the Spectator’s backbencher of the year award again last year. I understand that Tyrie has the requisite number of backers, as well as ties with Nigel Lawson,

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 1 June 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the bank holiday weekend. Fraser Nelson charts the rise and fall of David Laws. James Forsyth laments a disaster for British public life, and ponders the Labour leadership contest. David Blackburn considers the attendant irony in Lord Prescott, and thinks the Telegraph’s latest expenses campaign is misjudged. Daniel Korski offers some names for Downing Street to consider for its defence council. Rod Liddle fought the laws and the laws won. And Melanie Phillips condemns an attempted terrorist outrage.

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Labour leadership contest continues

With the Coalition facing its first major test, it is easy to forget that there is a Labour leadership contest going on. But there are two interventions in that race worth noting this Bank holiday weekend. First of all, Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rurtherford have anessay in the New Statesman  sketching out a ‘new covenant with the electorate.’ It would be based around the ideas of an ethical economy, reciprocity and liberty. The piece will make Cruddas’ many admirers in the Labour movement regret that he’s not running. What’ll be interesting to see is which of the declared candidates picks up his ideas and runs with them. The other is

David Blackburn

Talking Balls | 31 May 2010

This brightened the day. Alastair Campbell, courtesy of his complete diaries, on Ed Balls: “Ed Balls spoke drivel, a never-ending collection of words that just ran into each other and became devoid of meaning.”

David Blackburn

Arise Lord Prescott

It’s John Prescott’s birthday – or Lord Prescott, as he will soon be. How odd of JP to don the ermine, given that he is on record saying that he hates titles, flunkery and ‘flooding’ the House of Lords with appointees – a practice in which he and Blair excelled as it happens.  He appeared on the Today programme this morning to defend his lordly person and was emphatically unintelligible. Listen to it; it’s a classic. You know Prescott’s the EU’s environment ‘rapporteur’? Terrifying.   John Humphrys objected to Prescott’s hypocrisy, but if Prescott doesn’t want to retire from public life then he must sit in the Lords. Which is an argument for

David Blackburn

Stop the press! Danny Alexander didn’t break the law

There’s something Galsworthian about Danny Alexander, the man of property. A downy press secretary for the Cairngorm National Park bought a south London hovel in 1999, re-designated it his second home in 2005 when he became an MP, and the Bright Young Thing then sold it in 2007 for £300,000. The dashing Cabinet Minister’s recent mortgage claims of £1,100 per month suggest an existence amid more salubrious environs – Volvos, delicatessens and Oxfam. Alexander didn’t cheat his way to Cheam, or wherever he lives. ‘There is no suggestion that Mr Alexander has broken any tax laws,’ opine the authors of this morning’s expenses expose. Alexander was liable for capital Gains Tax courtesy

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Avoiding Groupthink

I hope CoffeeHouse readers will forgive the attention I am heaping on the Afghanistan War these days, but the campaign is moving into a decisive phase with a July donor’s conference in Kabul that Hillary Clinton is reportedly attending, a “peace jirga” scheduled to consider plans to negotiate with the Taliban and only a year to go before the first US combat troops begin heading home. No 10 is now letting it be known that the Prime Minister, his key Cabinet ministers, generals and aides will gather shortly to discuss the mission. A sort of condensed Obama review of the UK contribution. Besides the Afghan experts already in the Crown’s

Saturday

David Blackburn

David Laws resigns

It was inevitable, but this is hugely regrettable as Laws is a star performer and I feel he has been the victim of a media gay-hunt that belongs to a bygone era. The sums of money involved are slight in comparison to some, and there are arguments that other ministers should resign for having committed similar or worse offences and for having shown markedly less contrition. But it is refreshing that a minister would resign over a personal transgression with haste and dignity.  His successor is understood to be a Lib Dem, probably Chris Huhne or Jeremy Browne. Huhne made his money working on hedge funds so he is a more or less a like for like replacement. I’m uncertain he shares Laws’s enthusaism for the Tory position

David Blackburn

The transparency revolution

David Cameron has made his first podcast since becoming Prime Minister. There are a couple of noteworthy points: he didn’t name-check any Lib Dems (a slight if perhaps telling oversight); and he reiterated his call for a ‘transparency revolution’, allying accountable public services with a new style of open politics. The coalition will ‘rip-off the cloak of secrecy… and rebuild public trust in politics.’  Oh the difference a day makes. Recorded on the train down from Yorkshire yesterday, pithy catchphrases such as ‘by the time we’ve finished, they (politicians) will have far, far fewer places to nowhere to hide’ sound a little insensitive today. But I’m nit-picking. It’s an excellent spiel: clear,

Daniel Korski

Organising for national security

Four weeks into the new government and the National Security Council machinery is still being put in place and ministers are still getting read into their briefs. The visit by William Hague, Andrew Mitchell and Liam Fox to Afghanistan was important, despite the brouhaha over the Defence Secretary’s comments. Such a visit was simply not imaginable under the Brown government. On the other hand, insiders say there is no real difference yet from the NSID committee that Gordon Brown created and the National Security Council that David Cameron has convened – except that the latter meets weekly, producing a torrent of tasks for officials. Permanent Secretaries are meeting regularly to

David Blackburn

Lib Dems split on CGT

There was a time when Vince Cable held the Liberal Democrats in thrall. Those days may come again, but for the moment (until this morning at any rate) David Laws is the new Gladstone. In yet another example of Laws’ value to the right side of the coalition, he hints that he opposes Cable’s CGT measure. He told the Times: “There are all sorts of possibilities and there are some ingenious thoughts in John Redwood’s letter. Even though I’m a Lib Dem and I think this issue has to be dealt with, we need to think all of those things through … we’re not trying to be unfair to people.

David Blackburn

The Treasury Secretary, his secret gay lover and the coalition’s first scandal

Even a general election could not shorten the expenses crisis’s shadow. The Telegraph has the scoop that David Laws apparently abused the second home allowance between 2006 and 2009, claiming tens of thousands of pounds for rooms owned by his long-term partner. MPs have been banned from leasing accommodation from their partners since 2006. Spice is added to the scandal in that Laws escaped exposure during last year’s witch hunt because he did not disclose that his landlord, James Lundie, was also his lover. Laws and Lundie have been involved since 2001; their attachment was kept secret from family and friends. Laws’s defends his actions as being designed to guard

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The coalition may be united, but in the Commons its adversarial politics as usual

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics In this era of ‘new politics’, one might have expected a new, more consensual style of debate in the Commons chamber. But judging by the opening days of the debate on the Queen’s speech, we have got quite the opposite. MPs are keener than ever to shout each other down, to cheer their own side and barrack the other. The one difference from the last parliament is that many of the new Labour MPs make their point by clapping rather than bellowing the traditional ‘hear him, hear him’. Oddly enough, it is the coalition — the very apogee of this new more consensual

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Unions need a voice and HSBC needs a chairman: I name my candidates

The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. These days, the public associates the brotherhood of organised labour chiefly with the bizarre antics of the highly politicised Unite union, with its warring and tweeting joint general secretaries and its out-of-control airline cabin crew branch hellbent on destroying their own livelihoods by driving BA to bankruptcy in a dispute over travel perks. Yet at a time when jobs are at the top of the political agenda — the impending loss of them in the public sector, the urgent need to generate more of them, with

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

An Old-Fashioned, Modern Government

In some senses, and for all its reforming zeal, this is something of a throwback government. David Cameron’s own views and preferences have, I think, mellowed with time to the point that he is now in some respects the kind of Tory who might not have been altogether out of place in the era of Harold Macmillan. Something similar might be said of Nick Clegg. Again, Liberal Unionists for the win. And then, of course, there’s the man of the moment, David Laws. The new Chief Secretary to the Treasury is the fastest-rising star in this young ministry. How pleasing it is to come across this kind of thing in

Peter Hoskin

Sir Menzies Campbell: Cameron and Clegg look like brothers

Surprise, surprise – Menzies Campbell doesn’t sound 100% taken with the coalition in interview with Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend.  This is, don’t forget, the man who encouraged the Lib Dems to seek a deal with Labour at the last minute.  And here he claims that he “would have found it very difficult to make the kind of arrangement with David Cameron that Nick Clegg has obviously found so easy.”  He adds that: “…there is this determination to make [the coaltion] work and nowhere is that more obvious than in David Cameron and Nick Clegg.  I mean, they are quite extraordinary, the extent to which their views coincide

Peter Hoskin

Cameron creates cover for cuts

David Cameron’s speech today was, in many respects, the one he needed to make: the clean-break speech, which trashed Labour’s record on the economy while also outlining how the coalition would deliver us to the sunny uplands. As it happens, it was also quite effective: a blend of policy specifics and punchy rhetoric.  And while we’d heard many of those specifics before – corporation tax cuts, reduced regulation, carbon capture, etc. – they cohered here as they rarely have done before. The most earcatching apsect of the speech, though, was the emphasis Cameron placed on government intervention.  Yes, there was a solid core of small state fundamentals.  But the PM

Peter Hoskin

Laws unto himself

Wondering why David Laws put in such a convincing performance when defending the government’s cuts at the dispatch box on Wednesday?  This little detail from Allegra Stratton’s excellent profile of him might help explain: “A friend confirmed that for the past six months, as the official Lib Dem party line decided on by Vince Cable was no cuts, Laws had been telling friends he believed the markets wouldn’t tolerate it. ‘He has been saying privately the cuts have to start straight after the election,’ they said.”

Peter Hoskin

Was last night’s Question Time a preview of how the coalition will deal with the media?

All kinds of hoohah about last night’s Question Time, for which Downing St refused to put up a panellist because of Alastair Campbell’s involvement.  If he was replaced with a shadow minister, they said, they would happily get involved.  But, as the excutive editor of Question Time explains here, the Beeb wasn’t prepared to go along with that.  So Campbell got to lord it up in front of the cameras. For the reasons outlined by Guido and Iain Dale, it was probably a slight mis-step by the coalition – but not one, in itself, that will have any important rammifications for them or the public.  For while it’s not the

Peter Hoskin

Encouraging early signs for the coalition

Was the delayed ballot in Thirsk and Malton a referendum on the coalition government?  If so, the result released in the early hours of this morning will greatly reassure David Cameron and Nick Clegg.  The Tory candidate Anne McIntosh won the seat with 52.9 percent of the vote (up from 51.9 percent in 2005), and the Lib Dems came second with 23.3 percent of the vote (up from 18.8 percent).  Labour were pushed way down into third place on 13.5 percent (down from 23.4 percent). So, over three-quarters of the vote for the two coalition parties. I’d be hesitant to draw any firm conclusions from a one-off election, conducted under