Politics Archives

Wednesday

10 Mar 2010

Tornado in the chamber

It was like a volcano going off. At PMQs today Cameron was calmly dissecting the prime minister’s underfunding of the Afghan war when he quoted two former defence chiefs who’d called Brown ‘disingenuous’ and ‘a dissembler’. Then someone shouted, ‘they’re Tories!’ Cameron lost control. Instantly, completely. His temper just went. White in the face, he leaned his flexed torso across the dispatch box, hammering at it so hard that it nearly disintegrated. ‘Is that it?’ he yelled. ‘Is that what this tribalist and divisive government thinks of those who serve this country!?’ Rippling with anger he demanded that the PM dissociate himself from his backbenchers’ smears. Brown stood up, in

James Forsyth

The Tories will have waves of dirt thrown at them<br />

If you want a flavour of what is going to be thrown at the Tories between now and May 6th, read Jonathan Freedland’s column today. Freedland has a fair point about how Michael Ashcroft should pay tax in this country, in my view no one should be eligible for an honour let alone a seat in the legislature if they are not fully domiciled in this country for tax purpose, but it is all dressed up in the language of the class war. I’ve never met Richard Drax, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to give him this full name, but it seems rather cheap to drag up his family’s involvement in the

David Blackburn

PMQs live blog<br />

Stay tuned for live coverage from 12:00 Memory for Michael Foot and the four servicemen who have been killed in the last week. 12:03: And we’re off. Tory backbencher Richard Benyon wants assurances that soldiers serving overseas receive a postal vote. Brown gives him such. 12:05: Here’s Cameron. He starts with the examination into the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan which suggests that inadquately strong motorised equipment was responsible for their deaths. Prepare for Brown’s Chilcot evidence, contradicted by Lord Guthrie among others, to come under sustained attack. Brown is at his most vulnerable on defence. That said, Brown apologises for the defence minister who suggested that the deaths had

David Blackburn

The Tories’ problems have more to do with branding

Two weeks ago, David Cameron delivered a brilliant speech. It keyed into exactly what Michael Wolff means by the phrase, ‘Cameron is a politician who quells, smooths, conflates, reassures.’ It offered hope and optimism, a future free of the current morass. In that case, why are the Tories still faltering? Cameron rode on the wake of Brown’s incompetence for eighteen months. It was never an exclusively positive endorsement, something of which Cameron was aware. Mandelson, Campbell et al have brought Labour back into the race with a series of well aimed jibes that the Tories haven’t changed. Paralysed by sudden self-doubt in the face of Labour’s resurgence, the battle has

Peter Hoskin

The Budget will be on 24 March

So now we know. Gordon Brown has just announced that the Budget will be on 24 March – which strongly implies an election date of 6 May. Brown could dissolve Parliament on 6 April, the manifestos would be published on 12 April, and then we’d be into the campaign proper. Which means even more speeches, polls and dread speculation than we’re getting now. As for the Budget’s general flavour, we’ll probably get an idea of that today, too. Brown’s currently giving a speech in which he’s brushing over recent tremors in the markets, to say that we are “weathering the storm; now is no time to turn back”. Which comes

Alex Massie

Let us now praise Simon Hoggart

Simon Hoggart remains a treasure. His sketch in today’s Guardian begins thus: It’s going to be an awful campaign, awful. Yesterday we were at Labour HQ (they still have a smart new building in Westminster, but after the election they may move to a scout hut in Streatham) to see a video. It was introduced by the home secretary and by Harriet Harman, glossier than ever. Her eyes were like French-polished lentils. I spoke to colleagues afterwards, and we agreed that she seemed to be staring balefully at each of us. Like a very cross Mona Lisa, her eyes follow you round the room. Alan Johnson has been buried deep

Tuesday

9 Mar 2010

David Blackburn

The prospect of another EU treaty is a huge problem for reformer Brown

It seems there must be discussion about a potential European Monetary Fund, and an organisation to manage Europe’s economies that circumvents Maastricht, to avert future fiscal crises. So much for Lisbon, the treaty to end all treaties. Quite why no one, especially the treaty’s opponents, acknowledged the possibility of a member state’s financial collapse whilst Lisbon was being ratified during the recession is a mystery. However, all that is past. The question for the future is will there be a referendum this time round? Adrian Michaels, rightly, point out that the Tories’ eurowars are likely to be renewed at the most inopportune time for Cameron. But Cameron will offer a

Peter Hoskin

Vaizey drops Cameron in it (again)

Michael Wolff’s portrait of David Cameron in the latest issue of Vanity Fair is well worth reading, even it it’s a weird kind of a beast. Wolff concludes – at the start of the piece, as it happens – that he’s “impressed” by the Tory leader. But then spends the best part of 2,000 words spraying out quotes and observations which will harden the attitudes of Cameron’s detractors, on both the left and the right. Cameron is a “toff”; Boris doubts his “intellectual bona fides”; the Tories have “anti-riffraff” policy on marriage, and so on. Wolff even quotes one Fraser Nelson, saying that he doesn’t “believe for a minute [Cameron]

Peter Hoskin

A warning that applies to the Tories as much as it does to Labour

As James Kirkup says over at the Telegraph, it’s worth paying attention to the credit rating agency Fitch when it says that the UK deficit will need to be cut quicker than is currently planned – to 3.3 percent of GDP by 2015, rather than 4.4 percent. Throw in similar warnings from the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors yesterday, and you’ve got a bunch of testimonies which are broadly supportive of the Tory narrative. You can expect CCHQ to give them plenty of airtime over the next few days. But, lest it need repeating, the pleas from the CBI and others could well be directed

Alex Massie

The DNA Database Con

What the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee gives with one hand: “The current situation of indefinite retention of the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted is impossible to defend in light of the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights and unacceptable in principle,” the committee says in a report published on 8 March 2010. [Emphasis added] It takes away with the other: Although the committee does not want a return to the pre-2004 situation of DNA being collected only on charging and not on arrest, it says that it should be easier for those wrongly arrested or who have volunteered their DNA to get

Alex Massie

Alice in Ulster

A quick coda to this earlier post on the Tories and the Northern Ireland peace process: the approach taken by the Guardian (and others) is that the Tories must be a neutral, honest broker for the process, otherwise the whole thing may collapse. And how must the Tories demonstrate their honesty and neutrality? By chivvying, hectoring, persuading, bullying Reg Empey and the remaining official Unionists to support the deal on the devolution of policing and justice. In other words, by abandoning (at least one sense of) neutrality. This may indeed be a good idea and as good a deal as you’re ever likely to get but the peace process increasingly

Fraser Nelson

Bringing Clegg to the table

My gut feeling is that Cameron will win with a majority. But I had a gut feeling that Carey Mulligan would get Best Actress at the Oscars. When Scotland play rugby, I have a gut feeling that they will win. My gut, alas, has a pretty poor track record. But if I look at the polls, it suggests that Cameron will not win outright, and that Nick Clegg will be needed to form a majority. Today’s daily Sun/YouGov tracker has the Tories with a five-point lead – which suggests that Cameron is 26 seats short of a majority, and that Nick Clegg has just 22 MPs to bring to the

Peter Hoskin

A well-timed change of heart from Lord Paul?

Previously, there were rumblings that Lord Paul was considering quitting the Lords to keep his non-dom status. Today, he has confirmed that he will end his non-dom status and remain in the Lords. If you were being cynical, you might think that there’s been a change of heart so that Labour can ramp up their attacks on the Tories over Lord Ashcroft. But surely Brown & Co. would want to keep their focus on the “serious business” of government, wouldn’t they?

Peter Hoskin

Charlie Whelan’s role in Labour’s election campaign

If you want a sense of how much work Charlie Whelan and Unite are doing on behalf of Gordon Brown, then I’d recommend you read Rachel Sylvester’s column in the Times this morning. There are the millions of pounds in funding, via the taxpayer, of course. There’s Unite’s “virtual phone bank,” canvassing votes for Labour. And then there’s Whelan himself – now almost as involved as ever with the Downing Street operation, and “working closely” with Douglas Alexander on Labour’s election campaign. This is, I remind you, the Charlie Whelan who was copied into the Smeargate emails, and whose other indiscretions are better described by Martin Bright and Nick Cohen,

Alex Massie

An encouraging poll for the Tories?

Over the course of the past year some people have, from time to time, been wise enough to remind us of just how difficult it will be for the Tories to win a majority. That’s a consequence, of course, of their past anaemic performances (and a further reminder that the base is far from enough) and of the way that the current constituency boundaries are stacked against them. Nevertheless, I suspect many of us have under-estimated those warnings thinking that this Labour government is so-clapped out and unlikeable that surely the electorate will turn on them. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption even if it might also have been premature at

Monday

8 Mar 2010

Peter Hoskin

Labour and Tories level in marginals poll (but look to the swing)<br />

I know, I know – there are only so many polls a reader can take. So I’ll spare you the details from tonight’s YouGov poll, or the Opinium poll in the Daily Express. But this Populus poll in the Times is worth highlighting, if only because it seems to be attracting the most buzz. It has Labour and the Tories both on 38 percent across 100 marginal seats. Neck and neck – or so it seems. But as Anthony Wells points out over at UK Polling Report, what really matters is which marginals this poll covers, and what the swing is. In this case, the marginals are those numbered 51

Alex Massie

When is George W Bush not the villain? When David Cameron is.

Not the least of the entertainments* between now and polling day will be seeing how the Guardian manage to keep up their exhausting warnings of the dire consequences that will inevitably follow any Conservative victory. Nothing but nothing will be too trivial for the paper and that’s fine: free press and all that. The best so far was the suggestion that the Tories are extremists who favour US-style gun laws so their youthful paramilitaries can storm NHS hospitals to control costs by executing anyone a) who voted Labour or b) looks like they might have voted Labour. Today’s effort is only marginally less ridiculous. Apparently the Northern Ireland “peace process**”

David Blackburn

Yet more good money after bad

So, the government is tying the taxpayer to £11bn of new IT contracts before the election, making the Tories’ planned immediate IT cuts very expensive. Is this latest example of a scorched earth policy? Or Labour ‘getting on with the job’? With the polls narrowing, I can’t see Labour setting a fiscal booby-trap that they could well have to de-fuse. But there’s the rub. Brown scorches the turf beneath his feet as he governs: he cannot stop spending money. An £11bn bender is irresponsible in this climate, plus Labour has a baleful record on IT contracts. It has bungled a staggering £26bn on flawed IT systems, many of which were

Peter Hoskin

Voter turnout is still higher in Iraq than in the UK

Ok, so it’s down on the 75 percent achieved in 2005, but it’s still striking – encouraging, even – that voter turnout was at 62 percent for the recent Iraqi general elections. That’s higher than the 61.4 percent for the last UK general election, and, lest it need saying, we didn’t have to deal with deadly bomb and mortar attacks. With the “chasm” between voters and the political class as it is, in this country, you suspect that our turnout figures will be even smaller this time around.

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 8 March 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson asks what it does it matter if Samantha Cameron voted Labour once. James Forsyth notes that Sir John Major accuses Brown of conduct profoundly unbecoming a Prime Minister, and argues that the Lib Dems’ electoral rhetoric will make it much harder for them to make a deal in the event of a hung parliament. Peter Hoskin watches Cameron deliver a spot-on speech, and wonders if Nick Clegg’s latest intervention will save Labour a post-election Brown leadership. Mark Bathgate wants a serious economic debate. Martin Bright believes that Cameron must show a ruthless streak. And Alex Massie