Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The IMF’s damning verdict

Forget the Budget. The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report has just produced the figures Gordon Brown didn’t want you to read: the cost to the UK taxpayer of the banking crisis. The Treasury’s approach is to airbrush banks out of the picture, and kid us on that we’ll get the money back eventually. The IMF gives it to us straight. It estimates (p44, pdf) that when this is over British taxpayers will have the largest bill in the G7. The bank crisis will cost the UK some 13.7% of GDP – which works out as about £190bn (see graph below). The figure for the US is 12.1% and Canada just

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Smile, smile, smile

Finally, Gordon Brown has at last done something to cheer us up – and released what is perhaps the funniest video ever to come out of No10 (watch it after the jump). Now that his dirty tricks unit has been exposed, he’s trying to come across all friendly and cuddly – and has given a video annoucement of his crackdown on Tory second jobs, disguised as a tightening of MPs expenses. He stops short of breakdancing, but only just. He’s addressing a horribly serious issue: the near-fraudulent abuse of expenses by MPs. But he shuffles, waves his hands and beams as if he’s playing Santa at a kiddies party. Occasionally,

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Economic inactivity and the recession

Perhaps the two most dangerous words for any Labour politician to say right now are “green shoots”. Spend long enough in the economic desert and you can hallucinate, and many of the blips right now – an upturn in some property prices, a slight recovery in sterling – could be taken by anxious politicians as proof that the worst is over. But amidst these are genuine good signs. The banking system finally seems to have been stabilised (at cost, yet uncalculated, to the public purse). The fall of the pound has helped stem the fall in exports: Britain has fared better than may other European countries (the joys of a

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 20 April 2009

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson watches Ed Balls struggle against the truth, and reports on Liam Byrne giving his support to Balls. James Forsyth reveals what a broken ballot box tells us about the future of the Labour Party, and wonders whether Labour will greenwash the Budget. Peter Hoskin reports on Smeargate II, and says that the Tories should step around any more 45p tax traps. Dr Eamonn Butler tells us what to expect in the Budget. Martin Bright looks ahead to the Budget. Clive Davis gives his take on the Georgia Gould fiasco. And Melanie Phillips laments the UK’s involvement

Saturday

Guido Fawkes

A Blogger’s Notebook

Having sat patiently on a barrel of digital dynamite for months — the emails from Gordon Brown’s chief spin doctor Damian McBride to Mandelson’s protégé Derek Draper, suggesting Tory smear stories — I light the fuse on Andrew Neil’s BBC Daily Politics show. In an unedifying squabble, I succeed in stitching up the once again infamous Draper on live TV, forcing him to deny that he takes briefings from McBride. Viewers at home may be baffled as to why I am determined to talk about Draper’s relationship with McBride. They may also be bemused by my unflattering Berkeley University T-shirt. The reason for this is to wind up Draper even more:

The Spectator

Lies, damned lies, and emails

In his long preparations for next Wednesday’s Budget, Alistair Darling must have constantly asked himself: could the challenge possibly be more gruelling? The task facing the Chancellor was always going to be formidable: he cannot go on borrowing without limit, amassing undreamed-of fiscal deficits in order to maintain inflated levels of public spending. Indeed, the danger point is fast approaching at which the gilts market will no longer absorb the torrent of new debt, and an IMF bail-out will become a serious prospect. As Frank Field warns on page 10, this Chancellor or his successor will clearly be obliged to put a freeze on day-to-day spending, and take an axe

Thursday

Martin Bright

Worse Still

Just to clarify. I didn’t intend to suggest in my last post that Damian McBride’s smear tactics would have been excusable if they had worked. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was simply trying to explain the thinking behind the operation. The smears were unacceptable in any circumsatnces The Prime Minister’s belated apology suggests that he now knows how toxic this has become. He is right to be angry because McBride has put his government at the mercy of a maverick right-wing libertarian blogger. Quite why he and the people around him became quite so fixated on Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), is completely beyond me.  But they were

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The fall of the masters of the political universe

Every financial collapse in the City you can normally be traced back to a testosterone-sodden trading floor where young men believed a little too much in their own hype. Britain is in the unusual position that both our economic and political collapse can be traced to the same gang – the ones that Gordon Brown assembled in the Treasury. In my cover piece for today’s magazine, I detail the damage they did: to our economy and to the Labour Party. At the heart of McBride’s fall was the hubris, the risk-taking. Imagine being so stupid as to put all those vile smears in an email sent from 10 Downing Street

Wednesday

Martin Bright

It Doesn’t Get Any Worse

The revelations over the weekend about Damian McBride’s pitiful smear campaign have probably delivered the fatal blow to Labour’s chances of winning the next election. The only possible excuse for writing such filth would be that it served the interests of the battle against the Tories. It has had the opposite effect. Most decent people would think twice about voting for a government that permitted such a culture to exist in Downing Street. The poison expressed in McBride’s infantile stratagem has fed back into the bloodstream of the party  he was supposed to be serving (let’s not pretend for a moment that he was acting as a civil servant in this. But the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Glenn Beck and the Useful Idiots at Fox News

David Frum is, once again, spot on. Writing about the ludicrous – and loopy – Glenn Beck and his fantasies of armed resistance against the Obama administration’s “fascism”, Frum points out how useful Beck is to Obama (and vice versa) and how poisonous he and his ravings are to the future of the Republican party: Beck is a comedian at bottom, and he does not want to incite anyone to do anything except stay tuned through the following commercial announcements. But if the Obama press team had consciously designed an Exhibit A for their coming campaign of defamation against conservative America, they could not have asked for anything better than

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Special advisers do good work too

The McBride affair may have a dangerous side-effect – and that is blackening the name of special advisers. I am in the minority position of wanting to see more of them in Whitehall, and here’s why. McBride’s problem was his behaviour, not his status. The current suggestion that the real problem is his SpAd status – and not the instructions from dhis master – is a clever piece of self-exculpatory spin from Brown. We should not fall for it. And it’s also an insult to the many other SpAds who do good, honest work. I imagine many CoffeeHousers baulked at that last bit – but “good, honest spad” is not

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The McBride affair is a portent of the coming struggle for Labour’s soul

One can only imagine what went through Alistair Darling’s mind last weekend, as the scale of the McBride affair became evident. In his Budget next Wednesday, the Chancellor faces a political mission which was already next to impossible before the email story broke. Now his task has become downright laughable in its scale. To produce a budget with the economy in freefall is hard enough. But to do so with the government disintegrating all around you is scarcely worth attempting. In theory, Damian McBride’s resignation was simply the departure of a spin doctor, already relegated to a ‘back-room’ role. But nobody with the slightest knowledge of the Brown court believes

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

BREAKING: Tom Watson to make a “personal statement”

I hear Tom Watson is about to make a “personal statement” which should clear up how much he knew about Red Rag and Damiangate. Last time I looked, Guido didn’t have any crosshairs trained on him – but we’ll see.  UPDATE: He isn’t going to resign, I’m told. But expect a statement tonight.

Matthew Dancona

Gove’s prophecy

Hat tip for political prophecy to Michael Gove who, in October 2007, provided the best analysis of what makes Gordon tick yet delivered by a senior Tory, and one which is even more impressive in the light of the McBride Affair  In a speech to the Bow Group, Gove dissected the (then newish) PM’s flaws to devastating effect, comparing Brown’s shortcomings to those of leaders past such as Lloyd George, LBJ and Mitterrand. Idealism, sincere initially, falls victim to the methods used to win and retain power: “…in order to win power, in order to hold it, in order to manage affairs, in order to woo public opinion, that idealism

Andrew Neil

Brown let the dogs out

When you keep a kennel of attack dogs then I guess you can’t entirely claim ignorance or absence of responsibility when one of them bites several passers by. That explains why Gordon Brown’s apologetic non-apology for the attempted muckraking of Damian McBride has failed to satisfy not just the Tories but many Labour supporters too.   After all, though McBride was fired for plotting to slime leading Tories, it is Labour politicians who have more often suffered at the hands of his dark arts — even supposed Brownite loyalists such as Douglas Alexander were victims. So many Labour MPs were as pleased to see McBride get his comeuppance as were

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Has the damage limitation worked?

So, has the spin operation worked? McBride’s quick depature had three objectives. 1. Close down the story. This seems to have worked: today’s news doesn’t have many more developments. If tomorrow’s papers have nothing new, then Damiangate may not last until Wednesday. This would be, in the circumstances, the best possible outcome for Brown as there is a far more dangerous aspect to this story as yet unwritten: how the tactics exposed by McBride’s emails (ie, character assassination) were the weapon used by Team Brown to take out his potential rivals for No.10. This time, the Tories were the target – but similar tactics were used to destabilise a long

Alex Massie Alex Massie

If politics were more like the internet… that would be a good thing

If it weren’t such fun despising Derek Draper one might have to pity the poor man. James has already highlighted one part of his latest post, but here’s another noteworthy, if sadly delusional, passage: Maybe this affair will encourage the whole blogosphere, right and left, to commit to a new start, where offensiveness and personal attacks are avoided and debate is elevated not dragged down into the gutter? Maybe this can be a turning point at which we all redouble our efforts to tap into the internet´s positive potential rather than allowing its more peurile aspects to come to the fore? But that won´t happen without many many more people

Matthew Dancona

The line-up remains the same

Yesterday, as the McBride resignation story raged, a distinguished former Labour minister asked me a rhetorical question: why is it always the same faces coming back? Derek Draper, Damian McBride, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Charlie Whelan: all have supposedly resigned, disappeared from the front line, retired to explore new careers – and yet, here we are, in 2009, a decade and a half after Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party and the faces remain the same. In this line-up, McBride, who only became a political adviser officially after the 2005 election, is very much the new boy. The answer is to be found, like so much wisdom, in

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How much does Damian McBride’s disgrace actually matter?

The first thing to say about the downfall of Damian McBride is, of course, how entertaining it is. Gordon Brown’s machine has deserved this kind of comeuppance for years. These are, and always have been, thoroughly disreputable people and, while there are plenty of people in the Labour party who might be wondering today why they’ve tolerated the McBrides of this world for so long, the questions don’t end there. After all, McBride and his ilk depend upon the connivance of the press to operate effectively. There’s something amusing too about seeing the press do its finest Captain Renault impression, declaring itself Shocked! that this is the way that Downing

Martin Bright

And So it Came To Pass…

It’s Easter Sunday and I have better things to do than think about sleazy emails. I’m unlikely to be able to post again about this again today, but I have much to say on the subject and Iain Dale in the Mail on Sunday has already quoted my previous comments about the thuggish company the Prime Minister sometimes chooses to keep. This is very serious for the Prime Minister, especially now Charlie Whelan’s name has been associated with the emails. The Tories have asked Gordon Brown to apologise and he probably should. I have always marvelled at the latitude Brown gave to his lieutenants. This has allowed him to distance himself, if