Politics

…here are some of the posts made over the weekend at spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson picks apart the British reaction to VP nominee Sarah Palin and shows how another Brown critic gets struck by lighning. James Forsyth questions whether Nick Clegg’s tax plans will appeal to his party’s supporters and shows that Stephen Carter won’t go without a fight. Peter Hoskin thinks Harriet Harman might have found a better way to quell leadership speculation and wonders whether Labour have any alternative to Brown. Clive Davis maintains that opposition to Palin is not necessarily sexist. And Americano looks at Sarah Palin’s pragmatism and explores Obama’s plans for education.

The story’s familiar by now. A poll comes out; it puts the Tories 20-ish points ahead of Labour; and it contains a whole load of below-the-headline findings which are personally damaging for Gordon Brown. Today’s Independent/ComRes poll certainly follows that pattern. It has the Tories on 44 percent, Labour on 25 percent and the Lib Dems on 17 percent. But the sting for Brown is in findings such as that 20 percent of people like Labour but not him, whilst only 8 percent like him but not his party. And that 34 percent of Labour voters say that they’d vote Labour in spite of Brown, and only 3 percent say

One of life’s difficulties, I have found, is that it keeps throwing up questions to which there is no indubitably correct answer. This means that the exercise of judgment is perennially necessary: and there is hardly a moment’s respite from this burdensome imperative. Alas, where there is judgment there is error, or the possibility of error. No one can be right all the time. Of nothing is this truer than the vexed question of child abuse. Not to see it where it exists has terrible consequences for the child; to see it where it does not exist has terrible consequences for the parents or the others accused of it. I

Politicians, like novelists, are obsessed by posterity. Practitioners of the here and now — tomorrow’s headline, the latest poll, the next electoral hurdle — they nurse secret and often vainglorious hopes that their greatest plaudits will come in the future. Before New Labour swept to power in 1997, senior Blairites used to joke about the need to get ‘their betrayals in early’. Now, 11 years later, as the government disintegrates painfully and publicly, Cabinet ministers are rushing to get their side of the story across, to make excuses, and to pass the buck. Few political interviews have been parsed so closely or caused such an instant storm — financial and