Politics

So, is Barack Obama a wimp or just another lame-duck second-term President? Maureen Dowd, in her typically sophomoric fashion, appears to believe that the failure to pass gun control legislation shows that the President has not been paying enough attention to Aaron Sorkin movies. Tim Stanley, who at least knows something of how Washington works, suggests this failure reveals Obama as a lame-duck. Today’s New York Times piles on with an article asking, essentially, why oh why BHO can’t be more like LBJ. As is so often the case, a presidential setback must be attributed to an absence of Presidential willpower. The Cult of the Presidency is an eternal flame that can

George Osborne might have used Justin Welby’s comments on the problems with the banks this morning as a sign that he has at least one ally out there, but this afternoon, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman distanced the government from the Archbishop’s use of the word ‘depression’ to characterise this country’s current economic circumstances. He said: ‘The Prime Minister agrees with the point the Chancellor of the Exchequer was making when he was asked that question this morning. What the Chancellor said was that he agreed with the Archbishop’s analysis that we have a slow and difficult recovery because of the problems in the banking system and those are the

Even if George Osborne is right about the problems of a currency union between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK he possesses the uncanny knack of being right in such a disagreeable fashion that one’s loath to give him any credit at all. Still, as an attack dog he has his uses and he has picked an interesting day – St George’s – to come to Scotland to noise up the Jocks. I don’t know if the SNP will mind this too much. The nationalist view, I think, is that people will concentrate more on Osborne’s manner than on the substance of what he is saying. This

The other interesting thing about Ed Miliband’s personnel ‘lurch to the left’ last week was that he appointed Tristram Hunt to Labour’s shadow education team to replace Karen Buck. If CCHQ was excited about Buck becoming the Labour leader’s PPS, then Tory MPs were just as energised today by Hunt’s presence on the frontbench at departmental question time. Andrew Rosindell asked a question about the history curriculum. As Michael Gove came to the end of his answer and Rosindell rose to ask his supplementary question, Tory backbencher David Ruffley started to shout ‘come on, Tristram!’ He repeated his heckling, wiggling his hands in a ‘stand-up-for-yourself’ gesture. Hunt, naturally, didn’t respond,

It’s not a surprise that since the eurozone crisis began, support for eurosceptic parties has risen across the European Union. But behind the noise from leaders such as Nigel Farage and Beppe Grillo, how much of an impact will they have, particularly on next year’s European elections? The party that stole the headlines in the past few weeks was Alternative für Deutschland, but compared with the rest of Europe, Germany is late to the party when it comes to eurosceptic movements. AfD belatedly provides the country with its own anti-hero party. Just 3 per cent of Germans currently intend to vote for AfD according to the latest poll, but another

MPs will debate the government’s preparations for more Bulgarian and Romanian migrants in Westminster Hall today, as another survey suggests that there’s no need to get unduly worried about the lifting of transitional controls. Ministers have in recent weeks managed to calm Tory backbenchers down by making announcements regarding restricted access to benefits and housing, but there’s still sufficient appetite for this afternoon’s debate, led by Mark Pritchard, and a session of the Home Affairs Select Committee tomorrow with the Bulgarian and Romanian Ambassadors and Immigration Minister Mark Harper. Pritchard tells me: ‘EU migration and non-EU immigration is of real concern to many communities throughout Britain given the record numbers who