Politics Archives

Monday

21 Sep 2015

Is that really the best Lord Ashcroft could dig up?

My first reaction on reading the extracts from Lord Ashcroft’s muckraking biography of David Cameron in today’s Mail was, ‘It that it?’ Ashcroft has been digging for dirt about the Prime Minister for the best part of five years, even luring Isabel Oakeshott away from the Sunday Times to wield the shovel, and all he’s been able to come up with is that he smoked cannabis with James Delingpole when he was a student and may have been present while someone else took cocaine at his house. And, of course, there’s the pig story. I’m dubious about the pig episode and I’m better informed than most, having been a contemporary of

Steerpike

Has Lord Ashcroft’s ‘unnamed Tory source’ been reading Hunter S. Thompson?

Today’s news has been dominated by the claim in Lord Ashcroft’s David Cameron biography that the Prime Minister once had intimate relations with a dead pig. Naturally Cameron has been the subject of much mockery, even though the story has come from only one source, who remains unnamed. While Ashcroft says that the MP who told him the story is well-placed, he also adds by a way of justification that ‘it is an elaborate story for an otherwise credible figure to invent’. However, could the source simply be well versed in the writings of Hunter S. Thompson? In his election book ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72’, the writer chronicled his experiences

Ian Kirby

Ashcroft’s pig head ‘story’ would have been thrown out by any tabloid editor

When I was the News of the World‘s political editor, I was on the lookout for stories – and for scandal. That’s what political journalists are paid for. But had I gone to Rebekah Brooks or Andy Coulson when they were editing and said that I had a story about David Cameron’s honourable member and a pig’s head, their first question would be: ‘where’s the proof?’ If I then told them I had it on good authority from an MP who swears he’s seen a photograph but won’t go on the record, I would have been booted out of the office – only after being given a good kicking. As every political journalist

Brendan O’Neill

Oh man, I hope it’s true that Cameron did that thing with a pig. He’d be King of the Lads

Let’s assume that it’s true – that what an anonymous MP told Lord Ashcroft about the young Cameron and a pig is actually true. For what a brilliant blow it would be against the New Prudes, against those booze-dodging, speech-policing, lad-hating media moralists and Twitterbores. I don’t know why Cameron’s PR people are going into meltdown. If the story’s false they should say so. But if it’s true they should put lipstick on this pig: release the alleged photo of the alleged incident, tweet it for bants, and watch Dave’s popularity among yoof soar. Needless to say, Lord Ashcroft’s claim that Cameron once put ‘a private part of his anatomy’ into a dead

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron backs calls to keep Tory party neutral during EU referendum

David Cameron will today support calls from his MPs to keep the Conservative party neutral during the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. The Times reports this morning that the Conservative party board will meet to discuss whether or not the party machine should remain strictly neutral. This would mean the campaign to stay in the EU, which the Prime Minister is expected to support, could not use campaign data gathered by CCHQ, or organise activists using the party’s structures. A Number 10 source tells me that Cameron will be represented at the board, and that his view is that the party should be neutral during the referendum. The meeting

Sebastian Payne

Tim Farron: I’m not a ‘homewrecker’ for Labour MPs

The Liberal Democrats are gathered in Bournemouth for their annual conference and the media hasn’t taken much notice. But according to the party’s leader Tim Farron, it’s the biggest conference since Liberal Democrats came together in the late 1980s. On the Today programme, Farron claimed the party was in a good position, having gained 20,000 new members since the election, and is poised to take advantage of the changing political times: ‘Over the last week and a half, we’re in a situation aren’t we where the tectonic plates of British politics have changed massively and we are in a situation where we alone stand as the one party who are socially just and

Steerpike

Lord Ashcroft gets his revenge on David Cameron: #piggate

Given that Lord Ashcroft and David Cameron are known not to be on the friendliest of terms, the former Conservative Party deputy chairman’s biography of the Prime Minister was never going to be a puff piece. Yet Steerpike suspects that even Cameron will be taken aback by today’s Daily Mail front page: Monday's Daily Mail front page:Revenge!#tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/jU3P3WiGF4 — Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) September 20, 2015 The first part of the paper’s serialisation of Call Me Dave looks into a young Cameron’s days at Oxford university. First though Ashcroft details his feud with Cameron, explaining that their relationship turned sour after he failed to make good on a promise to offer the Tory donor a top job if

Ed West

Whatever happened to critical thinking in foreign policy?

Now that the Middle East is basically moving to Europe after Germany did the national equivalent of advertising a house party on Facebook, it’s worth looking back four years ago to when the ‘Arab Spring’ was beginning, and what might have been done. At the time, you’ll recall, Egypt’s kleptocrat dictator had just fallen and the first protests were beginning in Syria. David Cameron flew to the Gulf where he attacked suggestions that the Middle East ‘can’t do democracy’. As the Mail reported at the time: He rejected the idea that ‘highly controlling’ regimes are needed to ensure stability as violence and protests continued in Libya. He dismissed the idea

Sunday

20 Sep 2015

Sebastian Payne

Twelve disagreements Charlie Falconer has with his party leadership

Charlie Falconer is one of the few figures closely associated with Blairism serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, which isn’t surprising given the new leader’s mandate. In an extraordinary interview on the Sunday Politics, the shadow justice secretary said he was serving under Corbyn because ‘I want to make the opposition as effective as possible in holding the government to account’ — while outlining a long list of policy areas he is at odds with the leadership on. As well as saying he would quit if Labour campaigns for a Brexit, Falconer has revealed no fewer than twelve other areas where he differs with Corbyn and John McDonnell. 1. Leaving Nato Corbyn has previously

Steerpike

Arthur Scargill: Jeremy Corbyn isn’t left wing enough

Ahead of the Labour leadership election result, David Cameron warned that Jeremy Corbyn would take Britain back ‘to the days of Michael Foot and Arthur Scargill’ if elected. Well, a week into Corbyn’s leadership of the party — and several gaffes later — it turns out that there is one small snag with regards to Cameron’s premonition; Corbyn is just not left wing enough. Arthur Scargill — who founded his own Socialist Labour Party after the party changed the wording of Clause IV — says Corbyn is ‘not left wing enough to lure people back to Labour’. Arthur Scargill tells Sunday Politics Yorks & Lincs @jeremycorbyn isn't left wing enough to lure

Saturday

19 Sep 2015

Kate Maltby

Maggie’s great, but can’t the US find an inspiring American woman to go on their banknote?

Banknotes, again. Now it’s America’s turn to suffer the unintended consequences of an ill-implemented campaign to inject some XX chromosomes into currency. In June, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that he was knocking founding father Alexander Hamilton, a self-made, illegitimate boy from the West Indies, off the $10 bill. There’s a nationwide hunt for a woman whose image could replace him: in this week’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush suggested Margaret Thatcher. You can even tweet your own suggestions to the Treasury, with the hashtag #TheNew10. Now, I’m pretty keen on Margaret Thatcher. (If Jeremy Corbyn wants to end the scourge of personal abuse in politics, he could talk to her

Fraser Nelson

Project Fear and the grim legacy of Scotland’s ‘no’ campaign

A year ago today, Britain woke up to find the union saved – but only just. In 10 Downing St, the 45 per cent voting ‘yes’ looked like a victory, and the whole issue closed. I was in my hometown of Nairn that day, in the Highlands, where things looked rather different: after visiting pupils in my old school I wrote that, far from being closed, the debate had just begun. It wasn’t just the depressing closeness of the result, but the way the ‘no’ campaign had relied upon relentless negativity to make its case. As Joe Pike puts it in his fascinating account, the campaign ‘left a kingdom united, but

Charles Moore

Manhole covers are not gender neutral. Does this bother Jeremy Corbyn?

Mr Corbyn’s hobby is manhole covers, on which he is an expert. I was about thoughtlessly to mock this leisure activity when I was prevented by the learned Christopher Howse. He speaks as a connoisseur of a distinct, but related genre — coal plates, which cover coalholes, and are often neglected. In the 19th century, a man called Shephard Taylor sketched 150 coal plates, and these were published as a book called Opercula: London Coal Plates, in 1929. Christopher has now photographed 1,019 coal plates on his mobile phone and tweeted them (#opercula). Despite his preference for coal plates, Christopher is generous about students of manhole covers or (with which they must

Friday

18 Sep 2015

Sebastian Payne

Jeremy Corbyn’s first week as Labour leader: a series of gaffes, u-turns and general chaos

Harold Wilson’s remark that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ has never been more apt than at the beginning of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The hopey-changey rhetoric that lead him to victory last Saturday has inevitably given way to a more traditional form of compromise politics. While Corbyn’s debut at the Dispatch Box was the high point of his first week as Labour leader, the rest of his time has been devoted to fighting fires — literally in one incident. Women in the shadow cabinet: Sky News’ Darren McCaffrey revealed how the first Corbyn shadow cabinet was put together last Sunday and how the Labour leader attempted to deal with a lack of

Fraser Nelson

Jeremy Corbyn appoints convicted arsonist Mike Watson as his education spokesman

Given that Jeremy Corbyn is a Hamas sympathiser with an IRA sympathiser as his Shadow Chancellor, I imagine he didn’t think too much about promoting a little-known Scot named Mike Watson. He is a Labour peer, who now takes a place in Corbyn’s frontbench as education spokesman. He is also a convicted arsonist, who quit the Scottish Parliament in disgrace after being caught drunkenly setting fire to a set of curtains during the Scottish Politician of the Year ceremony 2004. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison, which he served in HMP Edinburgh. Watson’s undeserved rehabilitation says much about how Corbyn is having to scrape the very bottom of the barrel for people willing to serve

James Forsyth

Is Boris preparing to take a big political risk?

One Boris supporter asked me this week, ‘How bad do you think things are?’ The thing under discussion, it quickly turned out, was Boris’s leadership prospects. Among his camp followers, there is growing concern that Boris is being left behind in the leadership race. The Mayor’s chances have certainly taken a knock in recent months. First, the Tories winning a majority exploded the argument that they needed someone with Boris’s ‘beyond politics’ appeal to win outright. Then, Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader changed the calculation about the 2020 election for the Tories. Suddenly, a safety first approach – eg a non-Boris one – seems much more appealing. But there are

Tim Finch

The ‘big society’ could offer a solution to the refugee crisis

At first the government was slow to react to the refugee crisis, but now things are starting to happen. It’s less than two weeks since David Cameron said Britain would take in an extra 20,000 Syrian refugees, but this week Theresa May promised that the first of them will be arriving ‘in the coming days’. Given the logistics of resettlement, this turn of speed is impressive. But if the pace of the response has picked up, the scale of it still remains disappointing. Having ruled out taking in any refugees who’ve already reached Europe, even as an emergency measure, the government really should look to increase the number it’s prepared to

Alex Massie

Unionism’s referendum triumph has proved as bitter as it has been short-lived

Nicola Sturgeon got one thing right this morning. A year on from the independence referendum, Scotland’s First Minister allowed that the plebiscite “invited us, individually and collectively, to imagine the kind of country we wanted to live in”. The answer, you may be surprised to be reminded, was Britain. Surprised, because it has since become commonplace to observe that the losers have become winners and the winners losers. Scotland, everyone agrees, is a changed place even though (almost) everyone agrees that the country would still reject independence were there another referendum next month. (The economic questions that hurt the Yes campaign so badly last year are, if anything, harder to answer

Steerpike

Watch: Mhairi Black plays ‘My Heart Will Go On’

Mhairi Black won millions of fans with her maiden speech in Parliament criticising George Osborne over his cuts to the welfare system. However, today she has offered the nation a glimpse of her softer side, professing her love for Titanic. In a somewhat bizarre interview with Jon Snow, Black plays My Heart Will Go On — the theme from the blockbuster film — on a piano which just happens to be in the interview room: “I’ve always been obsessed with Titanic…it’s one of the few areas of my life there’s not politics”. The SNP’s Mhairi Black MP spoke to Jon Snow on the anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum. Posted by Channel 4 News on Friday,

Freddy Gray

John McDonnell’s slick performance on Question Time was worthy of Tony Blair

Hats off to John McDonnell. We’ve all been fretting about how the Corbyn gang would cope against the media slick Tories. We all think that, despite the appeal of conviction politics, a shadow chancellor such as McDonnell will be eaten alive by the Tory front bench. John McDonnell’s performance on BBC Question Time last night suggested otherwise. Question Time is a good test for politicians: they have to look and sound passionate while saying nothing much at all. McDonnell did exactly that, and with gusto. He masterfully shrugged off his ‘joke’ about killing Margaret Thatcher. When asked about his support for the IRA, he managed almost simultaneously to apologise and to