Politics

As the Cabinet meets in Southampton today there is one issue that will be strictly off the agenda: the Brown legacy. I have it on very good authority that Gordon and those around him will not even allow the subject to be discussed in case it suggests that he knows the next election is lost. People coming to him with new ideas are told not to use the “L word”. I think this is very unwise. How can the Prime Minister expect anyone to come to him with innovative recession-busting ideas unless they can talk in terms of the legacy such projects will leave behind? No. 10 needs to get real.

…here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson says that David Cameron needs to level with the public, and observes that Jade Goody’s dying wish indicts the British education system. James Forsyth urges British politicians to start talking about Iran, and notes that Gordon Brown still believes. Peter Hoskin previews a flurry of government activity, and comments on the extent of Allen Stanford’s fakery. Alex Massie picks up on Polly Toynbee’s Captain Oates analogy. Martin Bright asks whether anyone feels sorry for Tessa Jowell. Clive Davis jots another entry in his notebook. Melanie Phillips wonders whether there’s been an American addition to the Islamists’ armoury.

Francis Elliott’s story in The Times this morning is well-sourced and identifies the dangerous faultline that runs through the Labour Party right up to the Cabinet. Francis reports that Lord Mandelson is (once again) considering ripping up the equality legislation announced inthe Queen’s speech because of fears of its effect on small businesses during the recession. He will do so in the face of fierce opposition from Harriet Harman, but surely calculates that the mood of the country (and certainly the business community) will be with him. The trouble is that this blows a hole in what remains of the New Labour political settlement. During the good times ministers were able to

Geraldine James, recently notorious as the breast-feeding mother in Little Britain, talks to Tim Walker about her role in Howard Barker’s Victory Geraldine James’s agent telephoned one day and asked if she would care to play an over-protective mother. And he added there was something that she ought to know: it involved breast-feeding and, ah yes, the recipient would be a man in his thirties. The distinguished stage and screen actress has always liked surprising people and that was why, after she had seen the script, she agreed to appear in the ‘Bitty’ sketches in Little Britain — although not, she hastens to add, with her own breasts. ‘Everybody assumes

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics The worst thing about this week for Gordon Brown is that no one has bothered to dub it his worst week ever. Normally, a few days which saw a Prime Minister receive the succession of blows that Brown has suffered since Saturday would lead to forests being chopped down and extra barrels of newsprint being ordered in. But we have now reached a political moment where it can be revealed that the government is reduced to querying David Cameron’s name when it appears on Number 10 party guest lists, a key government policy adviser defects to the Tories, someone ‘quite close to the

David Cameron’s path towards power has been long and winding, and may twist and turn yet more before the general election. Tony Blair’s march to Number 10 between 1994 and 1997 was relatively linear. Mr Cameron, in contrast, was underdog in his party’s leadership race in 2005, wobbled badly in the summer of 2007, recovered after the election-that-never-was and then faced a resurgent Gordon Brown as the scale of the global downturn became clear last September. In the course of this political rollercoaster ride, it has been easy to lose sight of what ought to be the most important fact in British politics: namely that Mr Cameron is still likely