Politics Archives

Monday

1 Feb 2010

Cameron grasps at populism out of desperation

David Cameron has said that “burglars leave their human rights at the doorstep” when they break into a house. He added that he wishes to see “fewer” prosecutions of homeowners who defend themselves or their property from intruders. He has not spelled out precisely how far we can go with burglars, whether or not we can tie them to a tree and bugger them, whooping and hollering. Nor has he made it clear what happens to burglars who climb in through an upstairs window; do they still have to leave their human rights on the doorstep, or could they perhaps put them beside the wheelie bin, near the gate? Either

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 1 February 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson argues that Blair’s ultimate legacy is that Britain will be shaped by the world, and asks what to do with IDS? James Forsyth says that Andrew Rawnsley’s book will cause Brown no end of trouble, and says that the Tories are making contingency plans for a second election in 2010. David Blackburn thinks that the Tories could do more to sell their economic policies, and watches aghast as Ed Miliband declares war on reason. Martin Bright asks if Tony Blair may be Labour’s next Prime Minister. Susan Hill on her battles with ME. And Alex Massie

Sunday

31 Jan 2010

Fraser Nelson

Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

It’s striking how Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history, is now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides. This matters politically, because he has – I fear – poisoned the cause of liberal interventionism. I look at this in my News of the World column today. Blair’s Chicago speech of 1999 laid out what I regarded as a bold and coherent foreign policy case. It was time to stop letting genocides happen because they take place within the borders of sovereign states protected by the UN Security Council. I agreed with him when he said that, if the Rwandan genocide happened again, we

Daniel Korski

Could Jacques Chirac add to the Chilcot inquiry?

The Iraq inquiry is making the political weather, much more than Gordon Brown expected. By the time of the general election, every key diplomat, soldier and politician involved in the war will have given evidence. But there are people that have played pivotal roles who should be given the chance to put their views across – not about the war as such but about Britain’s diplomatic and war record. I’m thinking of senior US officials, from President Bush down the hiearchy but also then-French President Jacques Chirac, former UN chief Kofi Annan and so on. I’m not suggesting Sir John Chilcot broaden his inquiry to nor that ‘W’ would come

David Blackburn

It’s war!

Politicians have to shout to be heard over the lurid tale of John Terry’s bordello, but Ed Miliband’s fervour for climate change is sufficiently shrill. He has declared “war” on “sceptics”, who have been rather jaunty of late. As Fraser noted yesterday, the press’ climate change narrative is shifting – scepticism, in its proper sense, is replacing blind subscription. In this context, Miliband’s comments are extraordinary. His intellectual complacency is irritating, his sanctimony nauseating and his hypocrisy palpable. “It’s right that there’s rigour applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming

Saturday

30 Jan 2010

The Spectator

Lies, and damned lies

Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. Tony Blair’s absence has not made the heart grow any fonder. On the not-rare-enough occasions when he returns to our television screens, one feels an instinctive revulsion. Here is the Prime Minister who was as uninterested in economics as he was in the conduct of warfare. He ceded domestic power to an incompetent and reckless Chancellor and he is now accepting £200,000-a-year jobs with the banks with whom his government worked hand-in-glove. No, there is no pleasure in seeing him again. Especially as Britain starts to focus on the mess which he bequeathed. Mere numbers do not do justice

David Blackburn

The Tories need to evoke Micawber

I’ve been flicking through the British Social Attitudes survey this afternoon, and what a conflicted bunch of socially liberal and economically conservative people we are. The British decry the state’s interference in each facet of life and at the same time we are displeased that more has not been done to limit cannabis’ availability. There is no point in extrapolating out of the morass of contradictions: the British people cannot be defined in monolithic terms. However, there is one figure that will worry Mr Cameron: 50 percent want spending and taxation levels to remain as they are; only 8 percent want them cut. The Conservatives remain ahead on the economy,

Alex Massie

Blair vs Chilcot vs his Critics

I’ve a piece up over at the Daily Beast on Blair’s appearance before Chilcot yesterday during which he showed, once again, that he’s the last member of the War Party capable of explaining and selling the mission. All the others have fallen silent (Bush, Aznar) or been discredited (Cheney, Rumsfeld). Only Blair remains. The build-up to Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday before the Public Inquiry investigating the Iraq War was dominated, above all else, by two things: a palpable thirst to see the Prime Minister publicly humiliated and a nagging sense that Blair’s testimony would be anti-climactic. Both expectations proved ill-founded. Protesters outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center chanted

Martin Bright

Tony Blair: The Next Labour Prime Minister?

There has been a general consensus that Tony Blair was a class act in front of the Chilcot Inquiry. Even those who see him as a liar and a war criminal must have been impressed by the way he handled himself – although choosing to show no contrition in a room of people that included the bereaved parents of fallen soldiers was a mistake. I was not a supporter of the war. Like most people in the country I was an agnostic: I hoped the removal of Saddam would lead to a democratic domino effect across the middle east, but I thought it probably wouldn’t. I thought it far more

James Forsyth

Cameron and Osborne must listen to their backbenchers — or face revolt

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When David Cameron and George Osborne move between their suite of offices at the eastern end of the parliamentary estate and the Commons chamber they do so with a pomp that would not embarrass a medieval monarch. A crowd of attendants accompanies them, constantly changing positions but never disrupting the order: staffer, Cameron, staffer, Osborne, staffer. The party moves through the corridors at breakneck speed, heads thrown back, staring into the middle distance rather than looking around at their colleagues. This display certainly succeeds in getting them noticed. But to the Tory MPs whom they march past without even a glance, the whole

Fraser Nelson

As Basra slid towards hell, Blair looked the other way

It’s a mistake to focus on the dodgy dossier, says Fraser Nelson. Blair’s real crime was to invade Iraq with no strategy, no understanding of the Islamist factions and no qualms about leaving Iraqis to the mercy of death squads There has always been a faction of the Labour party that wanted Tony Blair in the dock for the Iraq war — no matter how pointless it would be. This was the sole purpose of the Chilcot inquiry. Gordon Brown agreed to it simply to assuage his backbenchers, and the whole exercise was intended to be more a mischievous distraction than an inquisition. But almost by accident, the inquiry has

Michael Burleigh

It’s time to tackle student Islamists

Waffling on about free speech and forming committees is no way to deal with nascent terrorists, says Michael Burleigh. Let’s hope the Tories do better What would a Conservative administration do about the radicalisation of Muslims at British universities? It is a question voters must be asking, given the swell of disturbing reports about student terrorists in the press. Last weekend, it was revealed that British students have been visiting Somalia to fight for the extremist group Al-Shabab (‘The Youth’), while the Sunday Telegraph reported that Yayha Ibrahim, an extremist preacher barred from America and Australia, was planning a speaking tour of British campuses. This just weeks after underpants bomber

Hugo Rifkind

Will a Brown bombshell at the Chilcot inquiry win Labour the election? Place your bets

I have a theory about Gordon Brown and the Chilcot inquiry. It’s a bit half-baked, but you shouldn’t mind that. You want a fully-baked political theory, you don’t come around here. You want the Parris page for that, or one of those Nelson or Forsyth bits up front. Back here you get the leftovers. The off-cuts. The sort of analysis you might get if you imprisoned a renegade unit of soldiers from the Los Angeles underground in a shed full of odds and ends, and told them they wouldn’t be let out until they produced a column. Held together with whimsy, and references you won’t really get if you’re not

Matthew Parris

The purpose of being unable to remember what’s on the tip of your tongue

The phenomenon I’m about to describe will be infuriatingly familiar to older readers, but will have been encountered by people of any age. Even in childhood we meet it, and as we grow old it happens more and more often. So common is the experience that it would surprise me if there was any language and culture that lacked an idiomatic expression to describe it. Spanish certainly has one: ‘En la punta de la lengua.’ So does French: ‘Sur le bout de la langue.’ The Poles, I’m told, say ‘Na koncu jezyka.’ In Wales they say ‘Blewyn tasod.’ All these idioms refer to the same thing. In English the curious

Martin Vander Weyer

Reputations rise and fall, but Lord Richardson deserves a City statue

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman of Lloyds Banking Group — making a similar observation in David Kynaston’s great history of the City: ‘I think his personality was such that he seemed to be quite tall but he wasn’t. Very elegant; very imposing. A God.’ Lord Richardson died last week, aged 94, and Bischoff must be one of the few bankers

Friday

29 Jan 2010

David Blackburn

Gordon’s off the hook, for the moment

Oooh, there’s just been a wonderful exchange at the Chilcot Inquiry. Baroness Prashar was asking some kindergarten questions about military planning. She barely mentioned Geoff Hoon’s evidence that the MoD was chronically under-funded and short of equipment before, during and after the conflict, and merely concentrated on ‘visible military planning’, or the lack of it to be precise. Blair is much more assured after lunch than he was immediately before, and gave one of those of those “Trust me, I’m Tony” spiels about the armed forces’ readiness. He added earnestly, “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister,”

David Blackburn

Further trouble in Northern Ireland

Michael Crick reports that Owen Paterson is seeking an urgent conference with Sir Reg Empey (the UUP leader) after revelations that the UUP held secret talks about a possible electoral pact with the DUP. If the story stands up, the UUP/Tory pro-Union and anti-sectarian alliance is dead. Crick writes: ‘Some in Belfast think that the Conservative-UUP pact is now effectively dead, and that Conservative leader David Cameron will be forced to announce its demise within the next few days.’ It may be that the UUP and DUP merely discussed breaking the deadlock at Stormont. But this story and the Hatfield House talks emphasise how the sectarian DUP undermines the coherence

David Blackburn

Blair on the rack

Not so good for John Rentoul: it’s WMD time and Blair’s body language spoke volumes. His movements were almost involuntary. The glasses were on and off, the brow furrowed, the head wagged and jagged in the manner of an amphetamine junky going cold turkey, and the hands were more intrusive than Andrew Marr’s. In round one, Blair was as languid as Dirk Bogarde; he was more like Daniel Day-Lewis second time round. That said, the line holds. As Iain Martin notes, it is extraordinary that Blair “didn’t focus a great deal” on the intelligence he received. But he argued, I think fairly, that Hussein’s deliberate obstruction of Blix was suspicious,

David Blackburn

Blair, the Special Relationship and the Clash of Civilisations

So far so good for John Rentoul: Blair’s walking it, but there have been intriguing moments. The suggestion that Blair’s foreign policy was motivated solely by vanity is false. The former Prime Minister’s thinking is extremely coherent. That is not to say that he is right nor to deny his obvious vanity, or to overlook that this may simply be Blair in matinee idol mode. But he subscribes to an ideology. He stated, once again, that he saw 9/11 as an attack on “us”, not just America. The language is redolent of Samuel P. Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations. Blair perceives a band of religious fanatics and a crucible of oppresive

Fraser Nelson

A composed and calculated Blair takes round one

So, what do we make of round one? Blair looks younger, in a strange way. A shorter haircut. But all those thespian mannerisms that I had forgotten about are still there – and are being used to full effect. A complete mastery of his facial expressions – which, for Blair, do the communicating. He can torn on anxiety, bemusement etc on tap.The quizzical look, the mock concern. The pause, as he thinks about something (or pretends to). It wouldn’t surprise me if he was faking the slight shaking of the hands which Joey Jones at Sky has just picked up. We have seen the usual Blair lawyerly hair-splitting habit: