Politics Archives

Sunday

27 Jan 2013

Tony Blair and David Miliband warn Cameron: voters are not to be trusted on Europe

Frustrated with David Cameron? The perfect remedy lies in your newsagents today. Tony Blair has a a piece in the Mail on Sunday and his aspirant jedi padawan, David Miliband, has one in the Sunday Telegraph. Both serve a refreshing reminder of the stale, elitist, failed thinking that David Cameron swept aside with his historic referendum pledge last week. Having taken a break from frontline politics, both Blair and Miliband might have returned with fresh ideas for connecting Labour to the voters it alienated. Instead, both seem to have spent their time hanging out with business jet-set and, increasingly, speak as their envoys. Blair opens his piece by telling us how his

James Forsyth

Europe Minister won’t give renegotiation specifics

There’s ‘no secret plot to get Britain out of the EU’ declared David Lidington on the Sunday Politics. In an interview with Andrew Neil, the Europe Minister was determinedly vague on the issue of what powers the next Conservative manifesto will seek a mandate to repatriate. But he made clear that the free movement of people is not going to be part of the renegotiation nor will Britain seek the right to strike its own trade deals with other countries. Having given the speech, David Cameron and his team don’t want to give a running commentary on what they might or might not seek to change about Britain’s terms of

Rod Liddle

David Ward, Israel and the Holocaust

David Ward, a Liberal Democrat MP, is in trouble with his party bosses. He chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to indulge in a bit of anti-semitism, suggesting that the very Jews who suffered under the Nazis in death camps were now meting out the same treatment to the poor old Palestinians. I am not sure why he is in the doghouse: this sort of reflexive Jew-baiting lies just below the surface of most of the supposedly principled anti-Israeli posturing among his party colleagues. Not least those who feel the need to appease vast swathes of Muslim voters – Ward’s constituency is Bradford East. It’s good to get it out in the

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg leaves door open to Lib-Lab coalition

Nick Clegg was careful in his interview on the Marr show today to leave the door open to a Lib-Lab coalition – which bookmakers regard as more likely (4-1) than another Con-Lab coalition (6-1). It was interesting that so much of his description of coalition referred to himself: He told Sophie Raworth: ‘I’ve never, ever seen any of this as an issue about what one individual thinks of another individual. It is really all about what the British people think about the parties who are asking for their votes. David Cameron and I said lots of disobliging things before the last general election, disagreeing with things you’ve just highlighted. We

Isabel Hardman

Adam Afriyie ‘coup’: a false start for the stalking horse

The camp supporting backbench Tory MP Adam Afriyie in a possible leadership bid have been busy, managing to get whispers of their planned coup into three Sunday newspapers (the Sun on Sunday, The Sunday Times, and the Mail on Sunday). Whether or not Afriyie is a popular backbencher who managed to soothe colleagues over toasted teacakes in the Pugin room, and whether or not he’s the ideal person to lead the Tory party after Cameron, the timing for the Windsor MP of the plot appearing in print couldn’t be worse. This time last week, it wasn’t difficult to find a clutch of MPs who would gloomily mourn the direction their

Saturday

26 Jan 2013

Carole Stone

The view from Davos: Boris Johnson’s economic adviser on infrastructure

As the speaker for yesterday’s Davos British business leaders’ lunch, Boris Johnson had the audience in his hand in his usual colourful way. I grabbed his very new Chief Economic Adviser, Dr Gerard Lyons, former Chief Economist at Standard Chartered, on the way out. How did he think we are doing economically? He told me the last big economic gathering was the IMF last October in Tokyo. There, he said, the mood about the global economy was pessimistic, but now, three months later, the mood had improved, if only slightly. There was more confidence about China and the US but still a lot of caution about Europe. Many continental economies, he

Douglas Murray

The EU must change | 26 January 2013

I have been out of the country for a couple of weeks and away from the sweet furore of the internet. I’ll be posting in the coming days on some of the bigger things which have gone on while I have been away. In the meantime, readers who are interested can read here a piece of mine published last week in Die Welt. Written before David Cameron’s recent pronouncements, it is an attempt to explain the legitimate reasons for British EU-scepticism to a German audience.

Fraser Nelson

Why The Guardian has got it wrong – on cuts and on Boris.

‘George Osborne is under pressure to tear up his austerity programme after Boris Johnson called on the government to drop its ‘hair-shirt, Stafford Cripps agenda,’ reports the delighted Guardian today. Even Boris is against it! Even he can see that the obvious solution to our debt crisis is even more debt! Except, as you’d expect, it’s all nonsense. Kamal Ahmed at the Telegraph got it right: Boris’s problem is with Osborne’s language: talking about pain, rather than recovery. He quotes Boris: ‘We need to junk the rhetoric of austerity and be confident. I will be unveiling a seven point economic plan to drive jobs and growth in London which drives the

Alex Massie

Scottish Tories: It’s Time To Man Up – Spectator Blogs

Ruth Davidson became leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in large part because she was the candidate favoured by the party establishment. Where Murdo Fraser suggested – rather too boldly as it turned out – the party should fold its tent and start again under a new banner, Davidson preferred a more cautious approach. Moreover, she said it was time to “draw a line in the sand” on the matter of transferring further powers to the Scottish parliament. A little more than a year later it seems as though that line has been washed away by the tide. Perhaps it was a mistake to draw it in the

Friday

25 Jan 2013

Carole Stone

The view from Davos: Cameron’s mad to talk about leaving the EU

‘Cameron’s speech on Europe is badly timed; we must stop this endless European bickering when facing such huge worldwide political challenges’. That’s the view of Neil Selby, the London-based Director of Executive Education for the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business but who at the moment is, like me, here in Davos. ‘Let’s think instead of the links we can make with East Asia’, he tells me. It’s very disconcerting: while in Britain most columnists and commentators seem to be congratulating Cameron on his big Europe speech, here at Davos there’s no enthusiasm. Most of the people around me think the emphasis was all wrong. At a lunch on East

Isabel Hardman

Claire Perry interview: Leaving internet on at night is as reckless as leaving the front door unlocked

Claire Perry, the determined MP for Devizes, is very, very determined not to be set up as a 21st century Mary Whitehouse. Her job title, as the Prime Minister’s adviser on preventing the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood, might suggest the Tory MP is yearning for a more innocent bygone era. But she’s insistent that she isn’t anti-porn, or even a mother who snoops on her children: ‘I’m in no way the Mary Whitehouse of this,’ she tells me as she sits under a washing line in her office decorated with children’s artwork. ‘I am in no way old-fashioned, this is not some kind of anti-porn crusade. Amongst consenting adults,

Luke Smolinski

Every tabloid’s worst nightmare

What would George Orwell write about today? asked the Guardian. Here’s our nomination: an EU report that recommends giving the EU more powers to sack hacks, regulate the press and dole out subsidies to ‘good’ journalists, a pan-European press and failing newspapers. The report is called ‘A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy’. Be very afraid. Its preamble cites the misconduct of certain British journalists, before the report recommends a set of EU-sanctioned media regulations. All EU countries should have ‘independent media councils’ set up to investigate complaints, it says, and these media councils should police newspapers to make sure they have strict codes of conduct, prominently displayed

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron disagrees with Nick Clegg on capital spending

Nick Clegg was apparently just being self-critical in his House magazine interview when he said the Coalition hadn’t got it right from the beginning on infrastructure. Those close to the Deputy Prime Minister are insisting that though speaking out on economic policy remains unusual in the Coalition, he was simply pointing out what has actually happened, with the government now offering more on capital spending. But at this morning’s lobby briefing, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman didn’t exactly take that same tone. ‘The Prime Minister’s view is that it was the right decision to have made,’ he said, pointing to increases in infrastructure spending in the last two autumn statements.

Nick Cohen

David Cameron marries a Rothschild

In the Jewish joke a matchmaker calls on a poor tailor living in a Tsarist shtetl in the middle of nowhere. He tells the old guy that he wants to arrange the marriage of his middle daughter to the heir to the Rothschild fortune, no less. The tailor isn’t impressed. He cannot marry off his middle daughter until he has married off her older sister, he says. He does not want his beloved girl to move far from him, and everyone knows the Rothschilds live in Paris and London. In any case, he is not sure about this Rothschild fellow: he has heard he is irreligious and a drunk. The

Isabel Hardman

Will Cameron’s EU speech help his drive for gay marriage?

The government’s gay marriage bill is published later today, after receiving its first reading in the Commons yesterday. How it’s received by the Tory party will be an interesting indication of just how powerful David Cameron’s EU speech was this week. When Maria Miller unveiled the ‘quadruple lock’ to protect the Church of England from being forced to conduct same sex ceremonies, she did so into a febrile Commons. In the tearooms, MPs quarrelled or shook their head at the exodus of stalwart Conservatives from their constituency parties. But the Prime Minister’s speech gave the party such a shot in the arm on Wednesday that the atmosphere is currently very

Thursday

24 Jan 2013

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 January 2013

In which forthcoming by-election does one candidate’s election address boast that he was the ‘last Captain of Boats [at Eton] to win the Ladies Plate at Henley in 1960’, while one of his rivals says that, at Harrow, ‘unfortunately I did not cover myself with academic glory’? The answer is a by-election among the Conservative hereditary peers. Under the Blair reforms of the Lords, the hereditaries elected their own 92 representatives, and the then Lord Cranborne (now Lord Salisbury) persuaded Labour (who saw the whole thing as an interim measure before abolition) to permit by-elections — which was foolish from their point of view, because, without replacements, the hereditaries would

The Spectator

Cameron speaks

It was almost worth the wait. The substance of David Cameron’s speech on Europe was disclosed in this magazine a fortnight ago, but his delivery was excellent. He offered a clear-headed and almost touchingly optimistic vision of the type of union that the British public would find acceptable: one based on free trade, not bureaucratic diktat. One where power can flow back to countries, not be leached from them. And one founded on genuine popular consent, rather than broken promises and dodged referenda. Such a settlement would be nothing more than what the British signed up to when last consulted. The Prime Minister based his speech on the most important

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg: We made a mistake on infrastructure spending

The GDP figures for the final quarter of 2013 are out tomorrow morning, and with them will come the usual round of commentary from government and opposition. They’re not expected to be good: Citi predicts that the ONS’s first estimate will show a contraction of 0.1 per cent in Q4. So perhaps that’s why Nick Clegg decided to get in early and taken a shot at his own government’s economic policy this evening. Speaking to Paul Waugh and Sam Macrory in the House magazine, the Deputy Prime Minister had the following to say: ‘If I’m going to be self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into

James Forsyth

Cameron & co relieved by Merkel reaction to speech

Angela Merkel’s statement yesterday was a big fillip to David Cameron’s European strategy as it suggested renegotiation was possible. One senior government source called it ‘as good as we could have hoped for’. I understand that Merkel and her officials have indicated to the Cameron circle that they want Britain to stay in the EU and are prepared to consider Britain’s concerns. But Merkel does not wish to look like she is interfering in British domestic politics; she doesn’t want to appear to be endorsing the Cameron approach. Secondly, she does not yet know how much room for manoeuvre she has. If after this autumn’s federal election, she is Chancellor of

Isabel Hardman

After party political porky pies, Number 10 admits debt is rising

Finally: Number 10 admits that far from ‘dealing with debt’, the government is seeing it rise. This morning the Prime Minister’s spokesman was grilled on the party political broadcast that horrified Fraser last night in which the Prime Minister said ‘we are making progress. We’re paying down Britain’s debts.’ Fraser has explained the reality – that Cameron is in fact increasing Britain’s debt by 60 per cent – in this post with two unnerving graphs, and the Prime Minister’s spokesman conceded that ‘the debt as a percentage of GDP has risen’. Asked whether the Prime Minister understood the difference between the debt and the deficit, he said: ‘Yes, he does.’