Politics

Well, folks, the 2012 model of Ed Miliband looks and sounds rather like the unfancied 2011 model. Just compare the New Year message that he released today with the one that he issued a year ago; the similarities are plenty. His main argument this year is that the Tories are the party of gloom — resigned to years of stagnancy, unemployment, pestilence, etc — whereas Labour are the party of a bright new future, there to show that ‘optimism can defeat despair’. Or, as he put it at the end of last year, ‘Even in these tough times, we must keep the flame of optimism burning.’ There are some differences, though.

The Christmas weekend was, I’m sure you noticed, rich with political incident. And yet, from continued turbulence in the Middle East to continued turbulence in Chris Huhne’s career, few things stood out as much as the protests against Vladimir Putin in Russia. They were, by most reasonable estimates, the largest in that country since the fall of the Soviet Union. And they add to the wave of disgruntlement that has been swelling since even before this month’s disputed parliamentary elections. The wave, of course, hasn’t broken yet. But few seem sure about how far it will travel and how much change it will wreak. The best article I’ve read on

 It is an eternal and reassuring fact of human nature that when an editor announces that he is stepping down from a great publication, there is not the slightest interest in what he plans to do with his life, or even who he was. I have received many phone calls from friends and colleagues since announcing last Friday that this would be my last edition, and they only want to know one thing. ‘Who is taking over?’ I wish I knew myself. But since the white smoke has yet to go up, I thought I had better write a general welcome to whoever you are out there. I propose to open

Officially, of course, the answer to that question is William Hague – who has put in some decent work since assuming office, particularly during the Arab Spring. But, still, I ask it because, following the European Council, Nick Clegg seems to have usurped the Foreign Secretary’s role in a number of key areas. It was the Deputy Prime Minister who engaged the newly-elected Spanish leader, for example. It was also Clegg, not Hague, who was instrumental in bringing German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to Britain on a ‘we still love you’ visit yesterday. And when it comes to phoning European leaders to press a UK position, it is the Deputy

Under cover of discussing the Open Society and its enemies, Nick Clegg today set out his personal agenda for the next year of this government. Indeed, Clegg’s speech to Demos earlier was perhaps the purest distillation of his politics since the big set-piece number he delivered at the Lib Dem conference in 2008. It contained many of the same themes as that earlier speech: ‘social mobility’, ‘civil liberties’, and ‘democracy’. And it added a couple more for good measure: ‘political pluralism’ and ‘internationalism’. The Deputy Prime Minister described these five political impulses as ‘the source of my liberalism’. As for the specifics, there was Tory-baiting to be found in Clegg’s

A few months after the coalition was formed, I went for lunch with a close ally of Nick Clegg. After an hour or so of discussing what the coalition’s agenda would be, this Liberal Democrat said to me: ‘now, David Cameron can’t really be serious about this marriage stuff, can he?’ When I replied that I thought he was, he looked at me with total incomprehension. He then launched into a speech about how no ‘liberal’ could possibly want to see the state promote marriage. This is the thinking that lies behind Clegg’s latest attack on the idea of tax breaks for married couple; it has become an identity issue