Politics

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

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Russell Brand: an adolescent extremist whose hatred of politics is matched by his ignorance

So, I recommend a trip to Sri Lanka. Wonderful place. Go now before everyone else does. Being (almost entirely) offline for a couple of weeks is a blessing too. But even good things come to an end. Which brings me to Russell Brand. Fair play to the New Statesman. Their decision to ask Brand to “edit” an issue has brought them all the publicity they could have hoped for. It would be churlish to begrudge the Staggers that. Celebrity sells. Or, at least, wins attention. Which is fine. Plenty of people seem quite enthused by Brand. Even if they disagree with his diagnosis of contemporary ills they enjoy the sight

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Coalition parties near a deal on energy bills

The good news for the Cameroons on energy is that it looks like they’ll get an agreement by the Autumn Statement to take at least some of the green levies off energy bill. The bad news is that this means that the debate sparked by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices for 20 months if elected is going to continue until, at least, December 4th. An agreement between Cameron and Clegg on energy bills does now appear to be close. The Lib Dem anger at Cameron using PMQs to try and bounce them into a set of concessions has been replaced by a fast-moving negotiation. As one senior Number

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

‘Abandoning the North’: the new emotional HS2 debate

David Cameron insists that a project like high-speed rail needs cross-party support. That may well be sensible, but his desire for Labour to retain its support for the new line is founded more on the necessity of getting the legislation through Parliament, rather than a great belief in parties working together on the big things. The fact is that Cameron needs Labour votes because yet again he cannot rely on his own party, the party of government, to push the bills through. Labour obviously scents blood, not just because there’s sport to be had in making a Prime Minister squirm and plead for the Opposition’s votes, but also because dropping

Friday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Farewell Jack Straw

It is a shame that we will be losing Jack Straw at the next election. He has just announced his attention to stand down from a seat he has occupied for more than 30 years. I always rather liked him. He seemed – you know – sort of human, and his instincts were usually right, certainly over Iraq, even if he did cave in. So, we might add, did the majority of the country cave, at the time, under that welter of disinformation. He was misled as everybody was. He once came into the Today prog when I was still editor and, in the Green Room, I mentioned to him

Eric Joyce

The saving of Grangemouth will expose just how much power Unite has over Labour

So Grangemouth is safe, after Unite changed its mind and urged the company to implement the very ‘survival plan’ that it so fiercely rejected to begin with. Scotland’s commentariat have almost universally seen the episode a matter of how a wealthy owner of a private company is able to throw his weight around.  The Labour Party, too, has unequivocally supported Unite, the union whose strike threat led to the plant’s closure in the first place. The party has proclaimed as evil the billionaire with a yacht and the lack of accountability of private companies.  The thrust of discourse in Scotland has been that Unite may not have handled the issue very

Steerpike Steerpike

Boom turns to bust for Gay Hussar

Is it the end of another yet another political eatery? Tory favourites Shepherd’s, the Atrium and St Stephen’s Club in Westminster have shut up shop. Now the Gay Hussar, a famous Labour hangout in Soho, is up for auction. Not even the ample appetite of Charles Clarke, a regular, could keep the place afloat. The Hussar was the scene of much plotting over the years, and it is decorated with cartoons of Labour figures. As former Tribune editor Mark Seddon recommends: ‘How about a diners’ co-op?’

Thursday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

MPs still fracked with nerves about shale gas incentives

In the days before Ed Miliband went all Marxist/brave on energy (delete as tribally appropriate), the debate around energy was more about fracking than it was about freezes. Shale gas has taken a back seat while ministers wonder what on earth they can do about bills to take the wind out of the Labour leader’s sails. But the political problems haven’t gone away. The debate is still about whether the incentives on offer are enough for local communities to accept fracking pads in their area. MPs whose constituencies sit atop the Bowland Shale don’t think the government is offering enough, and have continued to tell the Prime Minister that. He

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Growth is not enough — the Tories must show they’re not the party of the rich

The mood was grim when David Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers convened for a crunch meeting on 4 February this year. The economy had shrunk in the final three months of last year; the country was on the verge of a triple-dip recession, unprecedented in modern times. The government was in dire political straits. Those present discussed the situation with appropriate solemnity. But the tension was broken when Rupert Harrison, the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser, passionately declared that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn. Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, chuckled and joked that he would take a note of that confident

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Zoë Wanamaker: We need more giants like Obama

It’s all true about Zoë Wanamaker. She’s like a wood-nymph from the Tolkien franchise. Pixie features, nut-brown eyes, a mischievous tight-lipped smile and a warm cackling laugh. Next week she makes a guest appearance at the Hampstead Arts Festival to discuss her acting career. Had she heeded the advice of her parents — Sam Wanamaker and the Canadian actress Charlotte Holland — she might never have followed them on to the stage. ‘You don’t want to go into that. It’s full of disappointment and rejection,’ they told her. ‘Do something else. Get a proper job.’ Wanamaker’s idea of a proper job was to become a painter. ‘I went to art

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s 30-minute warning to the Lib Dems on energy bills

The Lib Dems are cross this afternoon about David Cameron’s PMQs announcements on cutting back on green taxes in energy bills. They are mainly cross because they were only given 30 minutes’ notice of the new policy before MPs crowded into the Chamber for the session, and are insisting that ‘nothing concrete has been agreed’. A source close to Nick Clegg told Coffee House; ‘Generally you would hope that an announcement of government policy would not be handled in this way. There was a quad discussion about this but nothing detailed was put forward and nothing concrete has been agreed.’ The source dismissed briefings from Tory sources that ‘one way

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Cameron is a buffoon who might as well eat his own manifesto

At PMQs today, the Tories’s energy policy went bi-polar. The Conservatives now seem to touch both extremes of the debate. For eight years they’ve presented themselves as a gang of happy tree-huggers who applaud every green subsidy going. But today David Cameron announced his plan to ‘roll back some of the green regulations and charges’. John Major started it all. Yesterday he lurched back into front-line politics by suggesting that energy companies should pay a windfall tax this winter. Otherwise, he said, the poor will have to choose between starving or freezing to death. Number 10 called this bombshell ‘interesting’. Ed Miliband asked David Cameron if John Major was now

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron ‘lost’ PMQs, but he’s moving into a better position on energy bills

David Cameron took a pasting at PMQs today. Ed Miliband, armed with a whole slew of lines from John Major’s speech yesterday, deftly mocked the Prime Minister. Cameron, faced by a Labour wall of noise, struggled to make his replies heard. At one point, he rose to his feet thinking Miliband had finished, only for the Labour leader to contemptuously signal at him to sit down. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron v s Miliband on energy prices’ on Audioboo But Cameron did announce some policies today that might offer him a way out of the energy hole he’s currently in. First, he made clear that he wants to scale back the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

PMQs silence on Grangemouth benefits SNP

Ed Davey is currently answering an urgent question in the Commons on the Grangemouth petrochemical plant. He urged Ineos and Unite to return to talks, describing the failure of the negotiations as ‘regrettable’. As the questions from backbenchers to Davey continue, it’s worth noting that there wasn’t a single mention of the plant at Prime Minister’s Questions, even though the closure of that plant will lead to around 800 people losing their jobs. Ineos estimates that around 10,000 jobs rely indirectly on the factory. The SNP have already picked up on this silence, and can quite easily argue that it shows that Westminster doesn’t care about jobs in Scotland. Even

Steerpike Steerpike

Who’s the real whiff-waff wuss, Boris?

That London Mayor has some cheek. In today’s Daily Mail, Boris suggests that our occasional diarist Pippa Middleton has wimped out of the ping-pong match she challenged him to in the Spectator earlier this year. ‘We have offered dates’, he says, ‘she has chickened.’ Au contraire, Boris. Here’s what really happened. The Spectator hounded Boris’s office to arrange the contest at our offices in 22 Old Queen Street, but Team Boris insisted that the match should be held at a venue of their choosing. Fine, said Pippa, who is a good a sport. Eventually a date was agreed — 12 September — but BJ pulled out. Fair enough, he’s a busy

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sir John Major and the Number 10 vacuum

When Ed Miliband announced his eye-catching energy policy, Tory MPs hoped that their party would respond in kind with something similarly interesting to voters but that would really work. They hoped this would underline that the Conservative party is the party of government, while Miliband was only suitable for opposition. George Osborne’s conference fuel duty freeze and his noises about green taxes and levies on fuel bills reassured many of them, but Sir John Major’s intervention yesterday has highlighted the vacuum caused by a refusal by Number 10 to engage with what one strategist described to me as ‘the footling little things’. One MP said after Major’s speech: ‘Number 10

Tuesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Boris imitates Dave

Is Boris trying to imitate David Cameron? The Mayor of London usually likes to leave the Prime Minister wriggling awkwardly by stealing any show going, but today Boris seemed to be taking a leaf out of his rival’s book. Both men have recently fessed up to needing glasses, and at his select committee appearance today, the Mayor seemed to be emulating Cameron by awkwardly taking his new eyewear on and off throughout the session.

Steerpike Steerpike

A mysterious Patten emerging

Lord Patten, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, rarely looks thrilled when being scrutinised, but he was particularly grumpy in front of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee today. He said sullenly that Rob Wilson, the tenacious Tory MP, has written to the BBC some 64 times in the past year with Savile-related questions. Wilson is famed in Westminster for his Watsonian commitment to letter-writing and truth-seeking, so Patten’s jibe fell flat. Meanwhile, Patten was unable to answer questions regarding the continuing mystery over why key evidence about ex-BBC Director General Mark Thompson was excluded from Nick Pollard’s £3 million review of the BBC’s handling of the Savile affair. (Readers

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

In areas of weakness, Labour can only complain that the government isn’t tough enough

Much of the coverage of today’s Immigration Bill has centred around those controversial ‘go home’ vans, now ditched because they only sent one person home. Theresa May told the Commons this afternoon that ‘we won’t be rolling out the vans, they were too much of a blunt instrument’. In response to a question from Keith Vaz, she said: ‘What I said to the right honourable gentleman is I didn’t have a flash of blinding light one day and walk into the Home Office and say, I know, why don’t we do this?’ What I have done is looked at the interim evaluation in relation to the vans. There were some

Ed West Ed West

The Leveson Test – separating the ‘Decent Left’ from ‘the Idiots’

If the Leveson Inquiry does nothing else, then it has at least provided a useful guide to the British Left for those of us on the saliva-speckled wastelands of British conservatism. Political tribes are complex but occasionally one issue will neatly divide a movement into easily identifiable clans, of which press regulation is one. And on one side you have one part of the British Left, the liberal tradition that values the liberty of all as a starting principle, and on the other the radical tradition that sees press freedom as a way for the rich to monopolise power. We might call them ‘The Decent Left’ and ‘The Idiots’; and

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

‘Now we’re relevant’: Lib Dems see free schools row as ‘win’

The Lib Dems are coming in for a beating this morning from the Tories over Nick Clegg’s decision to go public with his thoughts on the flaws and limitations of the free schools programme. Rachel Sylvester and James Chapman both have very strong briefings from Conservative sources about the Deputy Prime Minister’s comments, while the Lib Dems are annoyed both that there is such a fuss about a new plank in the differentiation strategy and also that they have apparently held this policy for a long time. Sources close to Clegg are highlighting that the Lib Dem spring conference backed a motion supported by the leadership which called for all