Politics

Later on today, Downing Street will reveal all of David Cameron’s meetings with newspaper / media proprietors and editors since the election. This is a welcome move, transparency is the best disinfectant and by getting the information out there it will end speculation about precisely how close he was to various people in News International. But one detail has already leaked out and will cause controversy: Andy Coulson was a guest at Chequers several months after he quit the government. In some ways this is no great shock, Coulson — as Cameron said at last Friday’s press conference — is a friend of the Prime Minister and someone whose advice

Britons are becoming increasingly eurosceptic, according to YouGov. I have previously predicted that could leave the union; but there is another option. Following the eventual resolution of the euro crisis, the EU may evolve into a much more asymmetric arrangement, with a small group of European states integrating in some areas, while other states remain outside. On the surface, this does not look like anything new. The EU already has many different levels of integration. The Schengen agreement and the euro are examples of this and the Lisbon Treaty holds out the idea of more such multi-speed arrangements. However, after the euro crisis, these will be different from those that

By rights, Labour ought to walk next year’s mayoral election. But all is not going to plan. The latest polls put Boris ahead; one conducted at the end of last month even had him 7 points clear. Labour’s problem is Ken Livingstone. As Jonathan found recently, a full fifth of Labour voters in London say they would prefer Boris to be mayor rather than Ken, an extraordinary statistic. Livingstone is also seen as dishonest in comparison to Boris. His opportunism often contributes to that perception — for instance, his attempt to tar Boris with the filthy Murdoch brush earlier this week was the most transparent piece of hypocrisy. Andrew Gilligan

The latest issue of the Spectator features an article in qualified defence of Rupert Murdoch by William Shawcross, author of Murdoch: the Making of a Media Empire. In it, Shawcross writes: ‘Simon Jenkins, now a Guardian columnist, wrote before the current horrors that Murdoch ‘is the best thing that ever happened to the British media and they hate it.’ He was right. There are obviously many things wrong with Murdoch’s group, but without his epic victory over the print unions in the 1980s, there would be far fewer papers in Britain today. Murdoch means pluralism…Who else would have subsidised the huge losses of the Times, an excellent paper, for so

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has responded to Rupert and James Murdoch rejecting their request to give evidence to them, by issuing a summons. My understanding is that parliament cannot compel them to attend because they are not British subjects. But others think that as long as they are in the country they can be forced to come to parliament. That a select committee chaired by Margaret Thatcher’s former political secretary is prepared to issue this summons shows how much the standing of the Murdochs has changed in the past ten days. MPs are pretty much united in their fury that News International figures failed to give proper

The British Crime Survey is published today and the Home Office had prepared for the worst. For months now, figures close to Theresa May have been expressing their fear that the combination of Ken Clarke’s liberal prisons policy and economic hardship would cause a rise in crime for which the Home Office, graveyard for so many political careers, would be blamed. Today’s figures will have eased their disquiet somewhat, insulating them from Labour’s critique that police cuts are endangering society. The headline is that crime in England and Wales has remained stable over the last year, except for a 14 per cent spike in domestic burglaries according to the British