Politics Archives

Wednesday

24 Feb 2010

True romance

‘Any closer and they’ll start kissing,’ said Cameron. The PM and his beloved chancellor were seated side by side at PMQs today, chatting showily throughout. Their rhubarb-rhubarb conversation was intended to quell the rumours of civil war in Downing Street. The ploy misfired. Two men conversing don’t both speak at each other simultaneously. But that scarcely mattered. The session was the rowdiest and least illuminating of the year so far. At times it was noisier than the Pamplona bull-run. Cameron began by trying to elicit answers about the appalling mortality rates at Staffordshire Hospital. Brown adopted his cenotaph grimace and reeled off a list of inquiries, investigations and disciplinary sanctions

Peter Hoskin

And what about Ed Balls?

Two related points, worth repeating. The first from Ben Brogan: “Mr Brown is on surer ground on a narrow point, in that in all likelihood he did not explicitly order his Eighth Circle chums to unleash hell against Mr Darling. Then again, he didn’t need to. His reaction to the Chancellor’s Guardian interview will have had the required Henry II effect. If Dave wanted some sport [in PMQs], surely, he should have asked whether Ed Balls ordered his friends to undermine Mr Darling. He wanted the job after all, and as has long been realised, there was what amounted to a Balls operation within the Brown operation designed to promote

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 24 February 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage from 1200. 1200: Alistair Darling is sat next to Brown. How cosy. 1201: And we’re off. Brown starts with condolences for fallens soldiers – sadly, seven names to read out. 1202: Labour MP Jamie Reed asks Brown for reassurances that the public will one day see the taxpayers’ cash that’s been pumped into the banks. He gets in a dig at George Osborne’s public shares plan. Brown responds by banging on about the G20. 1204: Cameron now. He leads off with a question about the deaths at the Stafford Hospital – asking whether a private inquiry is sufficient to tragedy and the public interest. 1206:

Rod Liddle

Too early to panic at Tory HQ

Some more nasty opinion poll news for David Cameron, with an ICM poll showing the Tory lead down to seven per cent. “Hung Parliament Looms as Tory Support Crumbles” was the splash in The Guardian, which you might have predicted. You might have predicted Michael Heseltine wading in to the debate too, suggesting that the Conservatives cannot win the next election outright (he’s been a real help to so many Tory leaders, hasn’t he?). I think it’s too early to worry very much, if you’re a Conservative: Daniel Finkelstein seems to have it just about right here. Polls show the national share of the vote, but it’s seats which win

David Blackburn

Ashcroft has unleashed hell in the marginals

Alistair Darling’s sudden and poetic ejaculation is sure evidence that the government is a rabble of warring tribes. Against such opponents, the Tories should win, and win big. Daniel Finkelstein is adamant that they still could. He states the obvious: polls are general and do not account for specifics in key marginals. In-built boundary bias created the assumption that Cameron needs an 11 percent swing to win a majority of one. Finkelstein rubbishes that thesis; parties that win by 11 points win landslides: ‘In 1997 Mr Blair’s Labour built a new coalition, winning support across social classes. They therefore won in suburbs and prosperous towns that had always voted Tory

Peter Hoskin

Darling throws one hell of a spanner into No.10’s election works

So what’s Alistair Darling up to? When I first heard his “forces of Hell” comment last night – his description of those briefing against him from inside No.10 – I half suspected it was all part of Downing Street’s grand plan. You know, trying to defuse the bullying story by being honest – up to a point – about Brown’s premiership, and then claiming that everything’s alright really. A bit like Peter Mandelson saying he took his “medicine like a man” – only with greater poetic license. Now, though, I’m convinced that this wasn’t part of No.10’s script. The clue is in the hurried, and ridiculous, denials that have been

Tuesday

23 Feb 2010

David Blackburn

David Miliband would set the people free

What is it about the Blairite passion for abstract nouns? I ask, not out of facetiousness, but because I want to know what they mean by loose terms such as ‘empowerment’. David Miliband joins James Purnell among the progressive left’s thinkers who are reimagining the relationship between state and citizen, and he gave a concept heavy, substance light speech to Demos this afternoon. I’ve read it a couple of times and can’t get my head round it. Peering through the glass darkly, the central concept is attractive: Miliband wants to give more power to the people. Some valid policies season his argument. For instance, the 1 week cancer pledge would

Peter Hoskin

How not to calm the bullying row

Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, probably thought he was being helpful to Gordon Brown by describing Christine Pratt as: “this prat of a woman down in – where’s she from, Swindon?” But, erm, he wasn’t.

David Blackburn

Brown the victim

As Pete points out, the longer the bullying story runs the more chance there is that the public sympathise with Brown, as they did over the Jacqui Janes story. Now Ed Balls is playing the sympathy card for his mentor, saying that Brown has been deeply hurt by these false allegations. Whatever next? Damian McBride breaks his retreat in a seminary and says: “Brown’s the loveliest man I’ve met, never hurt a fly guv, honest.” The preposterous and the distasteful hang above this latest twist, but Downing Street’s spin operation remains terrifyingly focussed. Yesterday saw the destruction of Christine Pratt’s credibility – she didn’t deserve such a barracking but most

Martin Bright

The Row Over Brown’s Temper Just Got Weirder

The sight of two unelected members of the legislature and John Prescott lecturing Andrew Rawnsley about political propriety on Newsnight last night was one of the more surreal moments of the past week. Lord Steel in particular has very little right to the moral high ground as a longstanding member of the board of General Mediterranean Holidings, the company owned by Nadhmi Auchi a British-based Iraqi billionaire convicted of fraud in the French Elf-Aquitaine scandal in 2003. This business of bullying in Downing Street just gets weirder all the time. Whoever allowed the combined might of Downing Street’ spin vultures to swoop down and peck at the bones of the

Rod Liddle

Tower block of bollocks

The Channel Four television programme Tower Block of Commons, which concluded last night, may have been a stupid and opportunistic idea, but it may too have one beneficial outcome. No matter how reviled and loathed are our politicians, set alongside some of the untermensch featured in this show they appeared paragons, saints, beacons of decency. The idea, of course, was to humiliate the politicians as much as is humanly possible and – as they kept asking – “see how they cope”. But it wasn’t enough simply to quarter them with poor people who work long hours for low wages, or people who have recently been made unemployed and were desperately

Peter Hoskin

The bullying story keeps on rolling, but will it affect the polls?

Much confusion on the digital grapevine, last night, about YouGov’s latest daily tracker poll. Turns out, it doesn’t have the Tories leading by twelve – but, rather, the positions are unchanged from the poll in the Sunday Times. So that’s the Tories on 39 percent, Labour on 33, and the Lib Dems on 17. A six point gap between the two main parties. The poll was conducted between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning – so, after the bullying story broke, but, perhaps, too soon for it to have filtered through to the public consciousness. Even so, Labour will be encouraged by what they see. A below-headline question has more people

Monday

22 Feb 2010

Alex Massie

The Torture Party’s Desperate, Flawed Logic

I’ll say this for the Torture Advocates: they’re increasingly creative in their justifications for torturing prisoners and in their attempts to suggest that anyone with any qualms about any of this secretly wants the Bad Guys to win. Granted, this leads them to some strange positions. Here, for instance, is Victor Davis Hanson: It is time critics made the case that targeted assassinations fall within the legitimate bounds of a war in which we are properly engaged, while the water-boarding of three confessed terrorists was morally unacceptable torture of no utility and contrary to any of our own past protocols concerning apprehended and non-uniformed belligerents. Otherwise, their exercise in moral outrage

David Blackburn

Rawnsley’s indictment of the entire Brown government is lost amid a smokescreen about bullying

Ministers are a fickle bunch. It is striking how many have come out in support of Gordon Brown today; they were much more bashful on the afternoon of the Snow Plot. The government has been galvanised and today is a rare glimpse of what a truly united government might resemble. Cynics would intimate that this sudden cohesion validates Rawnsley’s observations, not only about Brown’s swivelled-eyed rages but also his government’s immediate descent into faction after the election that never was. I’m with the cynics. Rawnsley’s more sensational exposes have masked the narrative of disintegration. It is this – as much as the fact that Labour installed unopposed into office an

Daniel Korski

A Cameron-Clegg government

With even Michael Portillo predicting a hung parliament, what would Britain’s post-election government actually look like if the Tories did not secure an over-all majority. The Tories could form a minority government, hoping to persuade enough MPs from other parties, but principally the Liberal Democrats, to vote with them on the key issues. Such a government would be inherently unstable, lurching from vote to vote and dependent on the relationship between a Prime Minister Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, as well as between George Osborne, the would-be Chancellor, and Vince Cable, who many think is a more qualified potential occupant of No 11. Party leaders would

Alex Massie

Bullying is the Least of Gordon’s Problems

I assume, in accordance with the stale conventions of our time, that the Prime Minister’s treatment of his staff will soon be dubbed Bullygate. But I think we all knew that Gordon Brown is, shall we say, a difficult man to work for. So I broadly agree with Jonathan Pearce’s take: the character of the man matters but it’s hardly the best reason for thinking a change of Prime Minister overdue. Meanwhile, as so often, there are few scenes more entertaining than the British press indulging its appetite for humbug and hypocrisy. Indeed, what with his penchant for screaming foul-mouthed abuse at subordinates and for flinging phones and anything else

Fraser Nelson

Some reasons to be cheerful about Cameron and the Tories

By way of a response to the comments on my post yesterday, here are some reasons to be cheerful about Cameron and the Tories. The poll lead dropping to six points is indeed a wake-up call, and Cameron probably worked out a while ago that things were going a bit Pete Tong. Indeed (Short the UK), there are signs that he has already started to act. Look at last Monday: three strong election videos, without a politician in sight. The perfect remedy to the Tragedy of Cameron’s Head poster. The policy of allowing management buy-outs of government departments is bold, radical and entirely in keeping with Cameron’s general policy of

Rod Liddle

Isn’t Gordon Brown being bullied?

Just a thought, but isn’t the National Bullying Helpline guilty of bullying the Prime Minister? I think I will ring its freephone number claiming to be Gordon Brown and explain that I am currently being bullied by a prominent anti-bullying charity, can they suggest a course of action. Quite clearly what the aptly-named Pratts, the bossess of this charity, has done is breach confidentiality, which is about as serious as it gets for an anti-bullying organization. That’s why its patrons are either in the process of resigning or distancing themselves from the whole caboodle. I have the suspicion that this is one of those Tory attacks which will badly misfire

James Forsyth

Cameron’s first response to the bullying question

Cameron just got the question on Brown and bullying. His reply was well pitched, right tone of voice and all that. But it contained the suggestion that Sir Phillip Mawer, who polices the ministerial code, should be asked to investigate. This is the last thing No 10 wants, it just wants this to go away. But I suspect Cameron has just given the story a nudge along.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron kicks off the transparency agenda

Here I am, in a cavernous “space” in East London, for a conference on the Post-Bureaucratic Age – or “See-Through Government,” as Guido more evocatively put it. David Cameron has kicked things off with a speech on the issue, and there’ll be talks and panels throughout the day. It’s like Glastonbury for policy wonks. So how was Cameron? Well, he’s normally at his snappiest and most persuasive when he talks about all this tech stuff – and today was no exception. All the usual lines about “handing power to the people,” and eroding “the dull, stultifying presence of state control,” made an encouraging appearance. And he outlined what this would