Politics Archives

Friday

16 Nov 2012

Lord Ashdown: Get out of Afghanistan quickly

The headline on Lord Ashdown’s piece on Afghanistan in today’s Times (£) will please Lib Dem strategists. ‘This awful mistake mustn’t claim more lives.’ It allows the Lib Dems to play the anti-war card: we are the party that will bring Our Boys (and Girls) home. The strategists could take plenty of other lines from Ashdown’s quotable article. ‘All that we can achieve has been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost… Our failure in Afghanistan has not been military. It has been political.’ Ashdown’s analysis echoes that of prestigious think tanks such as the Centre to Strategic and International Studies

James Forsyth

Labour hold in two by-elections but turnout low

So far, the election results are as expected. Labour has comfortably held Manchester Central and Cardiff South and the Tory candidate has been elected as the Police and Crime Commissioner for Wiltshire. But turnout has not been good. In Manchester Central it was under 20 percent, the lowest by-election turnout since the war according to the BBC. While in Wiltshire, only 16 percent of people bothered to vote in the Commissioner contest. so far, it looks like yesterday was not Super Thursday but Stay-at-Home Thursday.

Thursday

15 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Election night: It’s all over bar the counting

Tonight is election night but there’s not much counting going on. The Corby by-election count doesn’t start until tomorrow morning and Wiltshire is the only place where the Police and Crime Commissioner votes are being tallied up over night. But we should get results in the next few hours in Manchester Central and Cardiff South, two safe Labour seats where the MP is standing down to run as a Police and Crime Commissioner. Most of the media attention will focus on Corby. It is, indeed, a bellwether seat. But it is worth remembering that this is mid-term and a Tory defeat here would not tell us that much, especially given

James Forsyth

Another sign that CCHQ is moving on to an election footing

Today brings yet another sign that CCHQ is gearing up for the long election campaign. After yesterday’s news that the party has chosen the forty seats it intends to target at the next election, I now hear that talent is being moved out of Whitehall and back to Millbank to beef up the team there. Giles Kenningham, one of the most effective Tory spin doctors, is taking leave from the Department of Communities and Local Government, to head up CCHQ’s media operation following Susie Squire’s secondment to Downing Street. Kenningham joined the Tories from ITV in 2007. In the 2010 election, he was one of the two Tories who took

Alex Massie

Will supporting gay marriage help the Tories? It’s all a matter of location, location, location. – Spectator Blogs

Do pollsters and pundits actually understand how British elections work? I sometimes wonder. Take, for instance, the debate concerning whether or not supporting gay marriage might win the Conservative party more votes than it loses. The Prime Minister says there are polls that suggest it would. Not so fast, retorts ComRes’s Andrew Hawkins. He argues: Your letter of 19 October 2012 to The Rt Hon Cheryl Gillan MP states that “a recent poll by ComRes found that 10 percent of current Conservative voters say that the policy [to legalise same-sex marriage] would make them ‘less likely to vote Conservative’ compared with 7 percent saying it would make them ‘more likely

Rod Liddle

Margaret Moran: an MP too depressed for prison

Are you happy that the former Labour MP Margaret Moran, who swindled more than £50,000 from the taxpayer in rogue expenses, will escape a custodial sentence because she is ‘depressed’? It is a sort of reverse catch-22 for miscreants who have held some sort of high public office (which an MP still is, I suppose). Their fall from grace and humiliation can be assessed to have had such a startling impact upon their mental state that they are considered ‘too ill’ to be banged up. Imagine that you are a skagheaded member of the untermensch up before the courts on a charge of aggravated burglary amounting to, let’s say, £50. Do you

David Blackburn

Lord McAlpine speaks out

Lord McAlpine has just given an incredibly moving interview to BBC Radio 4’s World at One. He talks about how the false accusations affected him. He said, ‘It gets into your bones, it gets into your soul. There’s nothing bad as this you can do to people.’ The damage, he said, could not be repaired because of the British proverb ‘that there is no smoke without fire’. As Andrew Neil tweeted moments ago, ‘Many should be hanging their heads in shame – and not just at BBC!!’ You can listen to the whole interview here: listen to ‘Exclusive interview with Lord McAlpine – The World at One’ on Audioboo

Melanie McDonagh

George Osborne’s combination of austerity and social libertarianism is repellent

George Osborne’s spirited bid in The Times (£) earlier this week to appropriate the Obama victory for the Tories is a curious mirror image of the Labour Party’s arguments to the same effect. Both ignore the reality that the US is the US, not us, and Obama is Obama; formulas for election success aren’t a peel-off/stick-on tattoo, to be transferred between one body politic and another. But the article was interesting for what it told us about the Chancellor himself, quite apart from a slightly nerdy obsession with American elections. The fifth and decisive point in his piece was all about how social liberalism plus fiscal conservatism was the key

Fraser Nelson

Eurozone enters double dip recession

The Eurozone is now in recession – this, at least, is what is implied by today’s avalanche of dire economic data. Eurostat has not (yet) made this calculation; but Capital Economics has. Take into account the relative size of the Eurozone economies who have declared figures and it suggests a fall of 0.1 per cent for Q3 which, which, coming after the contraction of 0.2 per cent in Q2, would meet the test for recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth). So, like Britain, a double-dip recession. Greece and Portugal are still in meltdown. The Germans are doing okay, with growth of 0.2 per cent for Q3. This is mainly

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Britain vs. Germany, kicking the Lib Dems and the BBC 28

Are Britain and Germany heading for an almightily clash over the future of the EU? In this week’s Spectator, Christopher Caldwell argues that Angela Merkel has had enough of Britain’s position and is out to give David Cameron a kicking over Britain’s lack of solidarity with her nation. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson explains the significance of about is about to happen: ‘The [problem is the] extent to which Europeans don’t understand us, they can not get that for Britain, it is an issue of sovereignty. They keep thinking well the Brits don’t want to agree the next budget, let’s give them a few sweeteners —

James Forsyth

To win the next election, the Tories must crush the Liberal Democrats

On the wall in Conservative Campaign Headquarters is a clock counting down the days, hours and minutes to the next election. It is so large that anyone who enters for the next 901 days won’t miss it. The party is now on an election footing, as the clock is intended to demonstrate. Grant Shapps, the new chairman, had it installed as soon as he was appointed to inject a sense of urgency into CCHQ’s work. Talk to people there and in Downing Street and you would think the election is only months away. They regard David Cameron’s conference speech as having kicked off a long campaign. They speak of ‘election

Christopher Caldwell

Merkel’s sovereign remedy

‘Europe is speaking German now,’ said Volker Kauder, parliamentary chairman of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party, about a year ago. He was urging Britain to back Merkel’s plans for saving Europe’s rickety banks and state budgets. Last week, the Chancellor herself arrived in London to dine with David Cameron and deliver the message in person. Cameron is in a tricky spot. The summit to determine the EU budget for the next seven years will be held on 22 November. A coalition of opportunistic Labour MPs and dug-in Tory rebels has just passed a non-binding amendment in parliament urging that the government accept nothing less than a cut in

Rod Liddle

Welby’s impossible task is to lead the opposition to gay marriage

The new Archbishop of Canterbury has the cleanest-shaven chin I think I have ever seen on an adult male human. It is as if, in an attempt to rid himself of even the vestigial suspicion of facial growth, he has shaved twice with a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo™ razor, and then applied those molten wax strips that women use these days on their front bottoms — for reasons of hygiene and personal comfort, we are assured. I am not saying that Justin Welby actually does this, or has it done to him by some attendant vicar, merely that it looks that way. Exfoliating wax strips are certainly not something one

Wednesday

14 Nov 2012

Nick Herbert

Who are the BBC to question the legitimacy of Police & Crime Commissioners?

What’s the test of success of the Police & Crime Commissioners policy? It is, surely, whether the 41 individuals who will be elected tomorrow succeed in cutting crime and antisocial behaviour, and rebuilding public confidence in policing. This is not, however, the test which the BBC – and others – intend to apply. Their correspondent Danny Shaw told the Today Programme this morning that ‘the initial verdict on the success of the PCC experiment will hinge to a large degree on the turnout ….’ Setting aside the throwaway line that giving people a vote is an ‘experiment’, this is surely a deeply contentious comment. Who, you might say, are the

Steerpike

Exclusive: David Cameron accused of misleading over gay marriage polling

One of Britain’s leading pollsters has written to the Prime Minister to rebuke him for misleading his supporters over whether the Conservative Party would suffer in the polls if they legislated on gay marriage. The Spectator has seen an incredible exchange of letters between the Prime Minister, the former Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, and Andrew Hawkins, the CEO of the polling company ComRes. Since being sacked in September, Gillan has become one of the Prime Minister’s more vocal critics and recently slammed the government’s gay marriage proposals. Responding to Gillan in a letter that was then leaked to the Pink News, David Cameron relied heavily on polling data from ComRes

James Forsyth

Spectator exclusive: Tories ‘top 40’ hit list includes 20 Liberal Democrats

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat. If you’d done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary, has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling

Steerpike

The ‘disappointment’ of Andrew Mitchell

Former Chief Whip Andrew ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell has been reflecting on his salad days. In an interview with Cambridge University’s alumni magazine, which one presumes was given some time before the row with a Downing Street police officer which ended his career, Mitchell recalls his arrival at Jesus College in 1975: ‘I came here straight out of the army – literally direct from Brize Norton. I drove up with my four boxes of worldly possessions, unpacked and then lay on the bed.’ That army career (an eight-month short service commission after leaving Rugby School), gets multiple mentions: ‘having arrived straight from the army’ he ‘had very short hair [and] stood up straight.’

Sebastian Payne

They’re nearly here but still, no one cares about elected police commissioners

This time tomorrow, the country will be flocking to the polls to select their first ever police commissioners. Or at least some of them will. Turnout has long predicted to be low, but the latest analysis by Sky’s psephologist Michael Trasher suggests it will come in between 15 and 20 per cent. Such a figure would be the lowest of any election in modern times (outside of London). As the Electoral Reform society notes, the current record stands from 1998 at 25 per cent. Much of the apathy towards these elections can be blamed on poor public understanding of PCCs. Although a marketing push has been underway in the last few

James Forsyth

Another headache for the Tory whips

Today brings yet another set of reminders for Numbers 9, 10 and 11 Downing Street about how difficult maintaining party discipline is going to be. First, there’s The Guardian story about Chris Heaton-Harris trying to use James Delingpole and the threat of him running as an anti-wind farm candidate in Corby as leverage to toughen up the party’s position on the issue. Then, there’s the letter signed by 15 Tory MPs calling on Cameron to make a transferable tax allowance for married couples part of the 2013 Budget. In a sign of where a lot of the trouble will come from in the coming months, the lead signatory to the

Tuesday

13 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Abu Qatada and the who governs Britain question

No government ever wants to look like it is in office but not in power. This is why this country’s inability to deport Abu Qatada is causing such concern in Conservative circles. David Cameron will be well aware of the symbolism of the issue. In his conference speech this year, he boasted that “For years people asked why we couldn’t get rid of those radical preachers who spout hatred about Britain while living off the taxpayer……well, Theresa May – a great Home Secretary – has done it – and she’s got Abu Hamza on that plane and out of our country to face justice.” Today, Cameron declared himself ‘completely fed

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