PMQs footage | 19 November 2008
Courtesy of the essential Politics Home, here’s footage of the leader exchanges from today’s PMQs:
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Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Wednesday
Will Brown call an election in ‘1943’?
Weighing up the prospects of a snap election, Jonathan Freedland makes a pertinent point in today’s Guardian: “But what happens when the immediate mood of crisis passes, and voters ask whether Brown’s frenetic activity actually made any difference? If the answer is not much, he’ll be finished. Yet success might not help, either. Voters could decide that Brown had served his purpose and was no longer needed. Think 1945: it was because Winston Churchill had won the war that Britons felt free to boot him out. So Brown needs it to be 1943 for as long as possible. He needs voters to believe the crisis is ongoing, that we are
Tuesday
Hillary’s Return?
Ewen MacAskill reports that Hillary is indeed going to be Obama’s Secretary of State. His report in the Guardian is entirely unsourced however – which is interesting because MacAskill is not a reckless reporter by any means. Even so, Josh Marshall says he doesn’t believe anything any British paper publishes about American politics. My old friend Toby Harnden has a theory explaining what could have happened: Maybe the almost complete lack of sourcing is a clue. When that happens, what’s usually going on is that a very senior person on the paper has been told something, is certain it’s true and directs that the story be written, without furnishing many
Is Cameron ready to face down Brown’s “health cuts” claim?
Cameron’s announcement today grows more radical the more you study it. I was struck that he didn’t vow to protect health and education spending in 2010/11, as the party has in the past. In my “how to cut £40 billion” guide, my chief recommendation was freezing NHS spending to give the system time to digest the cash which Brown has force-fed it. Some chance, I thought – although it’s the best way to save money, Cameron wouldn’t have the cojones to face down the “health cuts” claim he’d get from Brown. But I seem to have underestimated him. He’s done an interview for Channel Four News, being broadcast at 7pm,
It’s the positioning that matters
Yvette Cooper doesn’t like Cameron’s announcement that he’d spend less than the £680bn Brown intends to in 2010/11. “Unlike the Conservatives, we refuse to abandon people in tough times. The British economy needs a shot in the arm, not a slap in the face.” Except giving people their money back in tough times – as I suspect Cameron will do with the money he saves – is the very opposite of abandoning them. Does she not think the government will be tightening its belt, as all households in Britain are doing? This is what Gordon Brown would call the “wrong side of the argument”. Cameron is finally moving on to
The Tories shouldn’t let Brown provoke a split
Is the Tory right secretly gunning for Cameron? Rachel Sylvester today raises this prospect, and you can take as read this reflects thinking at a senior level within the Cameroons. This bodes ill and suggests someone is worrying that “the Wicked Tory Right are coming for Dave, that explains all the criticism of George, let’s fight them” rather than “we messed up, we have no clear message, let’s sort ourselves out and quickly.” Sure, there are grumbles in the corridors of Westminster but this is several places on the Richter scale away from a kill-the-leader rebellion. I have detected absolutely no anti-Cameron sentiment, and the very idea of an alternative leader is laughable. So
Monday
The Game is the Game
My friend James Forsyth asks a daring question: “Will Peter Mandelson end up a National Treasure?” A crazy notion, you may feel, but not an impossible one! Now, of course, in many respects Mandeslon is a dreadful character, but whereas, say, Alastair Campbell is a mere thuggish bully, Mandelson is a subtler operator who enlivens, rather than demeans, the political game. I suspect the lobby is delighted that he’s back. Who could fail to be amused by the manner in which he smoked George Osbourne this summer, as though the Shadow Chancellor was but a kipper? This was Mandelson as his slimy, effortlessly loathsome best. There was something brilliant in
The world isn’t behind Gordon – however much he wants it to be
One of Gordon Brown’s favourite tricks is claiming he’s pursuing a particular agenda at the behest of a person/organisation above party politics. Hence those endless reviews: Stern on climate change, Wanless on health, Barker on housing – all with parameters set so tight that they were programmed to come out with what Brown thought. I’ll wager that in the Pre-Budget Report next Monday, we’ll hear the same – that this huge deficit (prob £60bn this year and £85bn for 09/10) will somehow be at the behest of the IMF and the world. So if the Tories oppose it, well, they are isolated because the whole wide world wants a fiscal
Just in case you missed them… | 17 November 2008
Here are some of the posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Complete footage of the Spectator / Threadneedle Parliamentarian awards has been uploaded here. Fraser Nelson says that Gordon Brown thinks the truth is hell. James Forsyth warns David Cameron against shifting George Osborne, and suggests that a constitutional monarch should be seen and not heard when it comes to politics. Clive Davis gives his take on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. And Americano outlines Karl Rove’s roadmap.
Saturday
Tell the truth and Brown thinks it’s hell
Gordon Brown says he “regrets” George Osborne’s “partisan talk” warning that we may have a sterling crisis on our hands – his implication being that the Opposition should be supporting him, the Father of the Nation. In fact, there has never been a greater need for full-blooded, disrespectful, combative, full-on scrutiny of what he says. I suspect the main reason Brown “regrets” what Osborne said is because Osborne is right. I haveblogged before on what should be known as the 2008 devaluation of sterling. It gives the lie to Brown’s theory that Britain has a strong economy well-placed to fend off this “contagion” from America. That the pound has
Parliamentarian awards – complete footage
We’ve uploaded complete footage of the recent Spectator / Threadneedle Parliamentarian awards ceremony. You can watch it here.
IQ2 debate: ‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’
It was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady proposed the motion by taking us on a graphic tour of Amsterdam’s red-light district which he’d visited ‘in an anthropological capacity’. The spectacle of hungry-eyed men sloping from door to door with their moist tongues lolling from their mouths had convinced him that buying sex was demeaning to all concerned. ‘Thinking about sex in the same way as buying a ticket degrades your humanity.’ Mutual desire should be the essence of sexual relationships. Anticipating his opponents’ arguments he examined the notion that courtship and marriage are morally identical to
The Republicans are where the Tories were in 1997
A week into the Obama honeymoon it is debatable who has the bigger headache, the Democrats, who have been celebrating every day like it’s election day, or the Republicans, who have to work out how to rebuild their party. How and how quickly the GOP rebuilds at both the state and federal level will have a profound impact on British politics as the Tories have, to an underappreciated extent, taken to leaning on the Republicans for policy ideas in recent years. The headline election numbers were bad enough for the Republicans — Obama 365 electoral college votes, McCain 173 — but the details were even worse. The Republicans saw their
Friday
The Hillbilly Vote
The day after the Presidential election Matt Yglesias spotted this map that shows the counties across the country which swung towards John McCain this year. As you can see, there aren’t that many of them. But what’s interesting is where they are: Matt quipped that, “You can see why John McCain’s principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves.” Andrew Sullivan agreed with Matt: “Ah, yes, Appalachia and Arkansas. Obviously concerned about marginal tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year, I suppose.” Now, clearly,
What would you cut?
It was in the 1996 Budget that the Conservatives made a mistake they have yet to recover from, they began to say “investment” rather than “spending”. With that rhetorical shift they accepted Brown’s logic that the more money spent by the state, the better. Now that Brown’s spendthrift, debt-concealing policies have led Britain into recession it is the perfect time for the Tories to think again – and start saying what they would cut. I lay out a few proposals in my cover piece for this week’s magazine, arguing that freezing the health and education budgets would free up £6bn and £4bn a year respectively. As Tessa Jowell rightly says, the London
Reminders
Today’s your last day for submitting questions to Francis Maude. Just write your questions for him in the comments section to the relevant post. We’ll put some of them to the Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office this evening. Also today, the recently-launched, online Spectator Book Club will be hosting a live chat with the Booker-nominated author Philip Hensher. You can take part from 19:30 tonight. Click here for more information.
Thursday
An American PMQs?
Peter Suderman endorses the idea that life in Washington would be considerably improved if the American president were subjected to some kind of equivalent of Prime Ministers’ Question in the House of Commons. By life, I mean, of course, the quality of political entertainment. And given the dreary nature of most of what happens on the Hill – or in the White House Rose Garden for that matter – one can see why many Americans find the idea appealing. And yet, it’s hard to see quite how any American equivalent would work. PMQs is not, it should be said, quite what many Americans think it is. That is to say,
MPs to Media: You’re On Notice
This week’s (latest) head-in-hands, what-the-hell-is-going-on? moment comes courtesy of the Intelligence and Security Committee at Westminster. The Independent reports that: Britain’s security agencies and police would be given unprecedented and legally binding powers to ban the media from reporting matters of national security, under proposals being discussed in Whitehall. The Intelligence and Security Committee, the parliamentary watchdog of the intelligence and security agencies which has a cross-party membership from both Houses, wants to press ministers to introduce legislation that would prevent news outlets from reporting stories deemed by the Government to be against the interests of national security. The committee also wants to censor reporting of police operations that are
Should Osborne remain Shadow Chancellor?
There’s a great deal of rumbling on the Westminster grapevine about George Osborne’s position in the Tory party. The FT set the ball a-rolling yesterday, with an article on the “dinner table” ire aimed at the Shadow Chancellor. It contained a juicy quote from a Tory MP, claiming that Osborne “was a good chancellor for the good times – now he’s lost credibility”, as well as an outline of a “reshuffle scenario” whereby William Hague is moved to the Shadow Chancellorship, with Osborne heading to an “enhanced party chairman role”. That’s been followed up by posts across the political blogosphere, as well as an article by Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph
Wednesday
Quote of the Day
David Davis, in an interview with the New Statesman: “I mean you know what it’s like, you’ve worked here, making a speech in the House of Commons is a very good way to keep a secret.” There’s some interesting stuff too, on Afghanistan, civil liberties and David Cameron.