Politics

Today’s Andy Davey cartoon in The Sun (click at the bottom of this link to see it) deserves to go on Darling’s fridge. Because two more pieces of data have just come out which can be confused for good news. One is that personal insolvencies are at a lower level than 2006 and, next, that manufacturing prices rose 1.5% in January. Both are freakish mirages, in the desert of Darling’s misery. The personal insolvencies in 2006 were pumped up artificially when new laws made it easier to declare yourself bust. The far more important indicator is company insolvencies, and they are especially worrying. They’re up 55% to the highest level since 1994 – but,

I’m at a seminar with David Cameron and Michael Gove on education reform, a favourite subject of ours here in Coffee House. Cameron’s pledge was unequivocal: “A great education reform bill will be a very big part of the first months of a Conservative government”. There are about two dozen people here to discuss what that will mean, a few Swedes, and many good points. Cameron stayed for about half an hour, yet even in that time some fascinating views were expressed. Two main themes: what Cameron is planning, and why it may not work.  Here are some of the points I’ve jotted down: 1. Gove says that in countries

So how significant was Gordon Brown’s claim in PMQs that the world is in a “depression?” Those accustomed to his word-mangling wrote it off as another verbal slip. But as Dizzy points out, the world’s press were less sanguine. As a result No10 has spent much of the day trying to explain that we have a Prime Minister who mangles his words. And perhaps his slip was Freudian because it fits a trend. The other day, Stephen Timms, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, told the Commons:  “Today, we are in a recession—the first to hit the UK since the early 1990s and face some of the harshest economic conditions

So why was Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister, carrying Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in his bag when he came to see Gordon Brown? My hunch is that his aides found it contained a perfect description of the man he was about to meet. I reprint Smith’s almost Nostradamus-style description here. This is Brown in a nutshell: The “man of system” is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in

The prospect of a “British Jobs for British Workers” controversy will have haunted Gordon Brown long before he came up with the soundbite. He will have known, way before Fleet St did, that immigrants had taken (or created) 81 percent of British jobs. He’ll have known – as he paid for the bills – that at least 5m Brits have been on various out-of-work benefits since 1997 despite his claim to have tackled unemployment. While morally deplorable, this situation was politically manageable as long as there were enough jobs for those who want them. But in a recession, when Brits start to compete with the 6.2m immigrants for these jobs,

Predict in haste, repent at leisure is a sound maxim for all pundits. I have also long thought that there has been a bipolar quality to much writing about Gordon Brown – exaggerated savagery when his fortunes are waning and equally daft euphoria when they pick up (June 2007, September 2008). So I did not draw my conclusions in tomorrow’s Sunday Telegraph column lightly: namely that Labour has lost the election and that David Cameron is our next Prime Minister. It is not as if the Tories have been on a particular roll or Cameron more than usually to the fore. And yet the polls this week have been remarkably