Politics

I’ve been reading Chris Mullin’s entertaining diaries and was interested to be reminded that David Cameron was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, chaired by Mullin. The Tory leader doesn’t feature often in the diaries, but here’s what Mullin has to say: November 15, 2001: “We have an impressive new Tory on the committee – David Cameron, a young, bright libertarian* who can be relied upon to follow his own instincts rather than the party line.” April 9th, 2002: “More than once, when we reached an impasse, David Cameron came to the rescue. The more I see of him, the more I like. He’s bright, personable and refreshingly

The brutal truth about politics is that a whole career can often be telescoped into a single defining event. The judgement of history can be particularly cruel on  unlucky Prime Ministers. Ted Heath’s reputation is dominated by the 1972 miners’ strike, Jim Callaghan is synonymous with the “winter of discontent” and Anthony Eden, perhaps the most ill-starred of all post-war PMs, will be forever associated with a single word: “Suez”. All those years of vaulting ambition, grinding thankless work and genuine public service reduced, in the end, to those two damning syllables. And how thin sometimes is that line between success and failure. Who remembers John Major for his remarkable

Why are people surprised that two soldiers and a policemen have been murdered in Northern Ireland? One of the key parts of the ‘peace process’ was the Patten report on policing. This recommended the disbandment of the RUC. The part of the RUC which caused most offence to republicans was the Special Branch. As a result, almost its entire body of expertise has been destroyed, and many of its individual former members brought under suspicion of loyalist ‘collusion’ by the authorities. So the new Police Service of Northern Ireland (the word ‘force’ is not permitted, of course) knows terrifyingly little about the activities of dissident republicans. This is why the

How would the SNP have delat with the banking crisis? The FT’s Jim Pickard points out that “This is a valid question. The rescue of the Scottish banks has cost British taxpayers an estimated £2,000 per household. If Scotland was independent, the figure could have been closer to £13,000. How would it have coped?“ Mike Russell, the minister for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, replied: “It would have been slightly different, it would have probably been done in co-operation with other countries…we would have done it in partnership with everyone involved.” Now perhaps the ECB might have helped and perhaps the Nationalists could have rustled up some cash from

Apologies for missing a day of blogging, but I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out how my idea for a New Deal of the Mind might work in practice. There seems to be some momentum growing around the concept of harnessing this country’s celebrated talent for creativity and innovation during the downturn. We are at severe risk of losing a generation of intellectual capital if we don’t turn our attention to deciding what the army of unemployed will do during the recession. They can’t be allowed just to sit it out. Like everyone else it seems, I have been reading up on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s. I

An interesting, and telling, line from Jonathan Powell’s article on why we should not over-react to the latest outbreak of Republican violence in Northern Ireland: Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were determined to carry the Republican movement into peace as intact as possible. They moved slowly to avoid the traditional split and lost very few volunteers along the way. Unusually, the British government agreed with this approach. Instead of trying to encourage divisions, as in the past, we hoped they would carry the movement with them because we wanted to make peace once, not many times with many different groups. And we wanted to ensure that a capable and credible