Politics Archives

Monday

5 Jan 2015

Steerpike

Exclusive: Prince Andrew will not host government reception in Switzerland

How will Prince Andrew proceed with his official duties, given that he is named in court papers in which he is accused of abusing an under-age ‘sex slave’? The Daily Mail reports today that the Duke of York is expected to host a reception on behalf of the British government for foreign ministers at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland later this month. However, Mr S can reveal that Prince Andrew will not represent the government in any such way. While a final announcement is yet to be made regarding his attendance at the event, word reaches Steerpike that any reception will be hosted in a personal manner, and not

James Forsyth

Team Tory unite (but refuse to answer any questions about their own leadership bids)

The Tories’ front of house team turned up today to try and stoke up a row about Labour’s spending plans. The Tory aim was twofold. First, to try and cement in voters’ minds the idea that Labour would spend too much, pushing up taxes and second to claim that Labour is in chaos when it tries to distance itself from previous spending commitments. The latter is why the Tories are so relaxed about people pointing out that various commitments in their own dossier do not appear in Labour’s official policy prospectus, the one issued after the party’s National Policy Forum. Osborne, Hague, May, Morgan and Javid all came carrying the same

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg’s new year pitch for eternal power

Nick Clegg has clearly had an exciting Christmas. He used his first press conference of the year to talk about people playing footsie, exes leaving late-night voicemail messages, frantic January sales shopping and body parts. He was using all these vivid images, dreamt up while he was working out how to deal with Labour’s ‘decapitation strategy’ in his own constituency, to make a pitch for him to remain in power for as long as possible. Forever, hopefully, but at least after the next General Election. The Deputy Prime Minister warned repeatedly of the risks of ‘having a parliament which is held hostage, every hour and every day and every week,

Alex Massie

Scotland: No Country for Free Speech

Behold, the most offensive tweet I’ve seen in months. You don’t have to be an off-grid anarcho-libertarian freedom-squirrel to see there’s something distinctly unpleasant – even something dystopian – about this. But such, alas, is the temper of our times. Times in which the state’s officers – for such is McPlod – believe they are entitled to monitor your every conversation, your every outburst, your every opinion for evidence that someone, somewhere in Scotland might be offended by your views. Nor is it too extreme to observe that this satisfies, in its essentials, the definition of a surveillance state. Such idiocies are not, of course, confined to Scotland. The UK

Sebastian Payne

Read the two election campaign dossiers from Labour and the Tories

There’s 121 days to go till the General Election and the two main parties have released reports attacking each others plans for the economy. You can read them both here: A Cost Analysis of Labour Party Policy The Tories Claims Don’t Add Up The Conservative’s document outlines how a Labour government would increase spending by £27.1 billion in its first year alone. In his introductory remarks, George Osborne puts forward the ‘simple choice’ facing the British people in May: ‘Ed Miliband’s Labour Party that offers more spending, more borrowing and higher taxes – or David Cameron leading the Conservatives as we continue to work through a long-term economic plan that

Steerpike

Do Cameron and Miliband secretly feel the same way about the EU?

At last, an actual dividing line. Ed has used his first proper speech of the 2015 campaign to declare that his party would never, ever leave the EU: ‘We must demand reform from Europe—a European Union that works better for Britain. But make no mistake: exit from the EU would be a dramatic mistake for our country and our economy. So, whatever the politics, I will not join those who cynically offer exit as a realistic plan for our future or the future of Britain’s working families.’ That should really help Labour shore up their northern heartlands against increasing working-class Euroscepticism and the rise of Ukip. Mr S suspects the Labour leader’s

Isabel Hardman

Parties launch onto General Election roller coaster

It’s the first day back for MPs and even though we are still months, not weeks, away from the General Election, the parties are all already launching themselves down the campaign roller coaster. Ed Miliband is launching his General Election campaign today and the action will start to shift from the now dull and empty House of Commons to seats around the country. Both sides have spent the past few months predicting a dirty and tough campaign, and if today’s diary is anything to go by, they’ll all be utterly shattered by polling day too, with a tough pace to keep. We have a speech from Ed Miliband, a press

Sunday

4 Jan 2015

James Forsyth

Cameron avoids a New Year slip-up

In 2010, David Cameron stumbled in his first New Year broadcast interview over the Tory plans for a married couple’s tax allowance. This slip-up knocked him and his party off course and was a harbinger of the disastrous Tory campaign to come. Today, there were no such mistakes from Cameron as he appeared on Andrew Marr. Instead, he stuck to his competence versus chaos message and tried, fairly successfully, to avoid making any other news. In this campaign, we will see a more disciplined Cameron than the one who fought the 2010 election. The Tories are this time, in contrast to 2010, certain of what their message should be. One

Fraser Nelson

And now a porkie from Labour: spending is not (really) heading back to 1930s levels

Another day, another poster – and this time, it’s Labour stretching the truth. The above is the same trick as George Osborne was playing with the deficit. The reader is invited to believe that the Tories would cut state spending back to 1930s levels ‘when there was no NHS’ – or much of a welfare state at all, come to think of it. In truth, George Osborne has (unwisely, in my view) pledged to increase NHS spending if re-elected and overall state spending will be at least five times higher than in the 1930s. So how can Labour get away with this – and how did this deception enter the

Isabel Hardman

What the first 2015 election posters tell us about the campaign

If you want a glimpse of the sort of election campaign we’re facing for the next few months, these posters from Labour and the Conservatives tell you everything you need to know. The Tories want to encourage voters to stay on the (apparently German rather than British and apparently heading nowhere) road to recovery, even if that involves leaping around between different measures of the deficit in order to give the impression of momentum. They want to talk about the economy because that’s their strongest issue. Similarly Labour is staying where it is most comfortable, threatening the end of the NHS as we know it in posters released this weekend.

Saturday

3 Jan 2015

Fraser Nelson

How Osborne’s ‘deficit halved’ claim backfired

So – how did it go? Yesterday, Tory HQ yesterday issued a poster with the misleading claim that the deficit had been ‘halved’ where in fact the reduction has been closer to a third (see below). In election campaigns, a ‘porkie*’ is introduced in stages. It debuts when dropped into a speech or article. If no one complains, it gets used again with a bit more boldness. And if there’s still no pushback, it’ll be used bigger – say, on a poster. As it was with Labour’s £35bn Tory cuts porkie, so it is with Osborne’s ‘halved the deficit’ porkie. But judging by today’s newspapers, the ‘poster’ stage of this

Friday

2 Jan 2015

Steerpike

Osborne targets Vince Cable in opening election salvo

As the General Election limbers up, today saw the first day of proper campaigning with the Tories unveiling their first election poster and George Osborne hitting the road. The Chancellor did not have far to travel though, popping up to Twickenham, some 11 miles from the Treasury. His Twitter feed was in overdrive: It says something about relations at the top of the coalition when the Chancellor chooses to launch the election campaign in his own Business Secretary’s seat. Mr S wonders whether Osborne followed Commons protocol and alerted Vince Cable to the fact that he would be swinging by his constituency?

Steerpike

Nick Clegg: I have a great fanbase

According to a recent YouGov poll, Nick Clegg has an overall rating of minus 54, making him more popular than the hapless Ed Miliband by just one point. While that wouldn’t appear to be much to celebrate, the Deputy Prime Minister seems to actually be in denial about his own standing amongst the British public. In the first ever joint interview he has given with his wife Miriam, Clegg is asked whether his wife’s ‘huge fanbase’ ever causes an issue given that his own reputation has ‘taken a kicking over the past four years’. ‘I also have a great fanbase,’ Clegg replies, looking rather hurt. In the interview, which appears in

Fraser Nelson

Which Tory MPs will repeat the porkie about ‘halving’ the deficit?

New year, new porkies from Conservative HQ. It has opened 2015 with a poster that involves a deception (above): ‘the defict halved’. It’s a relatively small deception: the deficit has been reduced by a third (see graph below) just as David Cameron was saying only a few weeks ago. But this poster makes a more important, and more depressing point: the Tory leadership is prepared to use dishonesty as a weapon in this election campaign. Here’s how I suspect it all unravelled. George Osborne invented the porkie: that you can say ‘the deficit has been halved’ if, when challenged, you later claim that you’re referring not the deficit, but to a

Thursday

1 Jan 2015

The Spectator

Reasons for Ed Miliband to be cheerful (we had to stretch a bit)

Election omens Reasons for Ed Miliband to feel confident in 2015: — Only three parliaments since 1945 have run to their full five-year term. The subsequent general elections, in 1964, 1997 and 2010, all resulted in a change of government. But John Major did hold on in 1992, having gone to the country four years and ten months after the last election. — In four elections since 1945, the three main parties have been led by MPs who represent constituencies in each of the three countries which make Great Britain: 1970, 1979, 1983 and 1987. The Conservatives won them all. This year’s election, assuming no change of party leadership between now and

The Spectator

What David Cameron must do to win (properly this time)

Almost exactly five years ago, the Conservatives fired the starting gun for a general election — and shot themselves in the foot. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ said the poster, next to a picture of an airbrushed David Cameron. ‘I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS.’ What on earth did it mean? No one seemed sure. As early as January 2010, it was horribly clear: here was a muddled party, preparing to fight an election campaign with a muddled message. Little wonder it ended in a muddled election result. This time, it should be different. The Tories have a professional, Lynton Crosby, running their campaign. He should be able

James Forsyth

Even Ukip don’t dare break the unhealthy consensus on the NHS

There’s an irony about Ukip’s rise. Nigel Farage party’s popularity is driven by a widespread sense that the main parties are all the same. Yet in the past four years, the differences between the Labour party and the Conservatives have grown substantially, on issues from the size of the state to an EU referendum. In an election year you might expect parties to converge in the centre ground as they chased swing voters. It won’t happen this time. Labour is determined to stop left-wingers defecting to the SNP and the Greens, while the Tories, who have long had their own issue on the right because of Ukip, believe that their

Matthew Dennison

Elizabeth is about to become Britain’s longest-reigning queen. Here’s how she’s changed monarchy

On 24 September 1896 Queen Victoria was given a present of a paper knife, and expressed herself ‘much delighted’. The handle was set with overlapping gold coins each bearing the portrait of a British monarch. The uppermost coin bore an image of Victoria herself; the one beneath it, that of her grandfather George III. As Victoria recorded in her journal, 23 September 1896 was ‘the day on which I have reigned longer, by a day, than any English sovereign’. She had exceeded George III’s record of 21,644 days on the throne and, unlike her grandfather, remained of sound mind (if you overlook her taste in interior decoration and her views

Lara Prendergast

Low life’s Limpopo legend

‘You’ve got a lot to live up to,’ said the ranger. ‘The last Spectator journalist who stayed here was Jeremy Clarke. He made quite the impression.’ Like some sort of Zulu legend, our ‘Low life’ columnist’s time at Shambala game reserve is now talked about around the campfire — or braai as it is known in South Africa. ‘I heard he commandeered a safari vehicle and set off to find a drinking hole,’ said one of the camp staff. ‘He held a wet T-shirt competition,’ said another. ‘All the local women were very impressed.’ Apparently even Douw Steyn, who owns the reserve, still reminisces about Jeremy’s time there. You might not

Wednesday

31 Dec 2014

Rod Liddle

The Today programme is already ‘diverse’ – despite what Lenny Henry thinks

Did you enjoy the BBC Today programme this morning, guest edited by the, uh, comedian Lenny Henry and featuring interviewees and journos who were exclusively from ethnic minority backgrounds? I meant to, but some weird narcosis kept me in bed and stopped me turning the radio on. So I can’t judge the content. There have been the usual and predictable complaints that choosing presenters and guests exclusively for their skin colour is itself racist. Well, yes. But that battle was lost a long time ago. The irony of course is that Today – certainly when I was editor and probably even more so now, I would guess – had a