Politics

What is Vince Cable up to? He is on manoeuvres, keeps making attempted power grabs from George Osborne. Barely a week passes without him rattling the cage to which Cameron and Clegg have confined him  – that is, the unwieldy and yet fairly powerless Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. For all its bulk, the department doesn’t really do anything. It has the universities brief, which is important, but it is certainly not an economics department as Cable was pretending last week. “It is a bit like the German economics ministry and the finance ministry,” he claimed. “Two departments, working in parallel.” As if. Cable may like economics, but he

Last week, Europe’s foreign ministers gathered in Sarajevo under much fanfare – and did very little except issue a repetitive press release about the region’s future in the EU. The only highlight of the event was William Hague’s speech, which was excellent.   Enlargement, however, is deeply unpopular among European elites, and the gathered foreign ministers seemed to be acutely aware of how little the market will bear by way of new ideas and initiatives.   So the ideas I put out in a brief in the run-up to the summit for improving the EU’s accession process went nowhere. Only Austria and Estonia openly defended proposals at the meeting. Germany

The boat the Israelis peacefully intercepted was called Rachel Corrie  – named after a young American protester accidentally killed when  offering herself as a human shield in Gaza. Her name became immortalised, some 30 songs have been written for her, a London play named after her and a film last year. But another Rachel, completely forgotten, is Rachel Thaler – a 16-year-old British citizen murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002. Only one British publication has ever mentioned her: The Spectator. Here, below, is Tom Gross’ article from 22 October 2005: ‘Dead Jews aren’t news: British newspapers care greatly about some victims of the Israel army, says Tom Gross,

I wonder if the Labour leadership contenders worry that the previous generation’s forthcoming memoirs have created more excitement than them? I would be. The insipid campaign has laid bare the paucity of talent on Labour’s benches, and the party’s ideological exhaustion. No serving Cabinet minister lost their seat at the election; Tony Blair aside, the Milibands and Ed Balls are the best Labour has. That’s a grim prospect if your colour’s red. Ed Balls has the panache of a Vauxhall Zafira; and the two Milibands are trapped in a Beckettian whirl of meaningless jargon, convinced that using abstract nouns is a mark of vital intelligence. It isn’t; it’s irritating, and

On Thursday, Andrew Mitchell rolled out the government’s first overseas aid initiative – a transparency watchdog – and took to the airwaves to explain the idea. It makes particular sense in a downturn to ensure that taxpayer’s money is well spent but also to give voters the feeling that independent assessments are carried out to guarantee value for their money.   On Newsnight, the International Development Secretary ran into a criticism, often voiced by the aid community – that the Conservatives are too willing to “militarise” aid or to “politicise” it. He dealt with the criticism  robustly – but I want to have a go too. Because while these are

George Osborne’s Asia trip has now been rounded off with a meeting of the G20 finance ministers in South Korea and he is now heading back to Britain and his Budget preparations. The trip must be marked up as a success for Osborne. In its communiqué, the meeting implicitly endorsed Osborne’s two major moves since becoming Chancellor, cuts this year and the setting up of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility:  ‘We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions’ No one can doubt that the Tories have comprehensively won the argument for in-year cuts. With a growing domestic