Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Emperor Soros’s new clothes

Matthew Lynn says hedge-fund pioneer and currency speculator George Soros is still a brilliant player of markets — but as a philosopher, frankly, he’s incomprehensible If nothing else, three decades as one of the world’s most successful speculators has taught George Soros how to pitch a book. While the main title of his latest work, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets, might not be the kind of thing to get Waterstone’s managers clearing their shelves, its subtitle — The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means — makes it bang up to date. Even better, Soros rushed it out as a digital download within days of the final words

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Department of Britishness

When I lived in Washington, I sometimes forgot that one of the things I missed about Britain was actually the weather. Sure, there’d be glorious spring and fall days in DC but much of the time the climate was boringly predictable and frequently oppressively unpleasant. The variety of the British climate provides for a refreshing contrast even if such happy thoughts are necessarily fleeting in, say, November or March. No wonder we talk about it so much*. All of which is one way of noting that today – with temperatures still in the giddy 70s – 70% of my British Facebook friends’ status updates concern the weather and either a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

More than half of Labour voters want Brown to quit

The new Populus poll for The Times is going to stoke the mood of panic inside the Labour party. It finds that 55 percent of Labour voters want Brown to go and gives the Toryies the largest lead they have had, 11 points, in the history of the poll. To add to Labour’s woes, only 30 percent of voters trust Brown and Darling most with the economy. It is still extremely unlikely that Brown will be forced out. But the slew of bad news for Brown is going to lead to ever more vocal dissent within the Labour party.  Hat Tip: The invaluable Politics Home

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Gordon can learn from Hillary

If Stephen Carter and his team are searching for inspiration for how to get Gordon Brown back in the game, they should look to Hillary Clinton. Since the beginning of March, she has shown that even politicians who are not naturals and have been in public life for decades can learn new tricks, and that you can turn being written off by the pundits to your advantage. The beginning of the Clinton revival was the realisation that she had two great strengths, her resilience and her policy knowledge. These are strengths that Brown shares and copying the Clinton model would at least get Brown going again. First, like Clinton, he

Matthew Dancona

Clarke lashes out (again)

Charles Clarke, as predicted earlier, has been distributing his article in the new Progress magazine. It is strong stuff: “First, we have to change the conduct of our politics. We should discard the techniques of ‘triangulation’, and ‘dividing lines’ with the Conservatives, which lead to the not entirely unjustified charge that we simply follow proposals from the Conservatives or the right-wing media, to minimise differences and remove lines of attack against us. We should finish with ‘dog whistle’ language, such as ‘British jobs for British workers’, which flatter some of the most chauvinistic and backward-looking parts of British society. We should suspend the black arts of divisive inner-party briefing and

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brownie No.3 – Gordon Brown’s “transitional” 10p tax rate

When Gordon Brown was defending his decision to scrap the 10p tax rate in April 2008, he spoke as if he was avenging a great moral wrong. “I think I should tell the House that 85 per cent of the benefits of the 10p rate go to higher-rate and basic-rate taxpayers, and that 11 million people, mainly the lowest-income people in the country, receive no benefit at all from it… We are determined to take action, because we are the party of fairness tackling poverty.” So why did he introduced this 10p tax with such great fanfare in 1999 if it was so regressive? On Sunday 4 May, he told

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown loses another popularity contest

It goes from tragedy to farce. Madame Tussauds has decided against having a Gordon Brown waxwork amongst its world leaders – he dithered over whether to sit for its sculptors and they got fed up waiting for a reply. “Since then we have had no response and, reflecting the climate after the Government’s performance in the recent local elections, our guests have become decidedly split about whether we should feature Mr Brown at all,” general manager Edward Fuller said.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron dodges the 10p tax issue

Cameron has three times avoided in his press conference answering what a Conservative government would do to help those people stung by the 10p tax. (No, A cock hasn’t crowed). A tough issue for him, and I’ll see if I can do any better as I travel with him on the train to Crewe. He also said he suspects Nicholas Boles (who dropped his own mayoral campaign after being diagnosed with cancer, from which he has now recovered) will keep working for Boris. Bruce Anderson asked yesterday who will play Jeeves to Wooster. Kinder souls may ask who will play Leo McGarry to his Bartlett. Whichever way you out it,

Matthew Dancona

The Labour beauty contest

The beauty contest begins: read Polly Toynbee in the Guardian today and her praise for James Purnell, the arch-Blairite Work and Pensions Secretary who is making a speech calling for Labour to emphasise fairness and social justice. David Miliband also enters the lists this week with a lecture in honour of his father, Ralph. Charles Clarke is expected to intervene (again) shortly. There will be others. I am reminded horribly of the period 1994-7 when the prospective successors to John Major jostled for position, all making speeches coated in plausible deniability but with a core of political gelignite: vote for me as the next leader. The question then, as now,

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Who is Labour’s Chris Huhne?

Reading Fraser’s posts about the odds on who will succeed Gordon Brown as Labour leader and whether he will be challenged this side of a general election, it struck me that we need to look for Labour’s Chris Huhne or John Redwood: someone who doesn’t have much chance of putting themselves into contention unless they steal a march on their rivals. To my mind, this rules out the Milibands, Purnell and Balls who all probably think that they are better served by waiting. I’d also put Jon Cruddas in this camp, one of his major selling points in a 2010 leadership election will be that he is the clean hands

Peter Hoskin

Boris revisited

Over at the Spectator 180th anniversary blog, we’re holding a mini-celebration of all things Boris.  How did Our Man get on in post-Saddam Baghdad?  What does he think of our Puritanical government?  Find out here and here.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Who’s next?

Ladbrokes has just updated its odds for the next Labour leader. Which of the below names would have the ability to unite Labour against Brown, successfully trigger a leadership challenge, secure union support to depose him, and then volunteer to lead the party into what will probably be an election defeat? And if you were David Miliband’s best mate, what would your advice to him be? David Miliband 5/2 – too young to ruin his career now Alan Johnson 6/1 – likeable, but no ambition to be no1. Ed Balls 6/1 – the PLP would lynch him sooner than Brown. Jack Straw 7/1 – if Straw is the answer, what

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Will Brown go?

“They say that Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930. I intend to be Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1990”- Ernest Bevin The five scariest words you will read in the press today are in The Sun, where Trevor Kavanagh says “I give him six months”. Brown, like Bevin, will have factored in far greater longevity – and I have been relying on him sending at least two more sets of No10 Christmas cards. I’m not saying he deserves to stay (though the longer he does, the longer the next period of Conservative government will be). But how can he go? Here’s my thinking – I’d be

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown bombs on Boulton

I’ve just got round to watching Gordon Brown’s interview with Adam Boulton and it makes his performance on Marr look good. He looked tired and sounded grumpy throughout. Perhaps the oddest thing was how Brown didn’t seem in command of the policy detail. When Bolton asked about helping the poor by just raising the personal allowance Brown seemed stumped. Interestingly, Brown seemed to rule out a reshuffle in the near future. Kremlinologists will note that he passed up an opportunity to defend David Miliband and instead pivoted to praise Alan Johnson’s work at Health. There was a sign of how Brown intends to try and respond to the rise of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Outfoxing Brown

Brown’s breathtakingly bad performance on Marr risks overlooking Liam Fox’s brilliant one. As Andrew Porter has said, word perfect. We see too little of Fox for my liking. Like David Davis, he has an instinctive grasp of low-tax economics and has a wonderful emperor’s-got-no-clothes contempt for Brown’s economic record. “Labour are still caught in this mental rut that Gordon Brown was a great Chancellor, they’ve got economic stability, and if they say it often enough people will believe it,” he said. Quite so. As Allister Heath wrote in The Spectator three years ago, “It seems likely that in due course Brown will be marked down not as one of the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown fails to relaunch

A friend of mine, a BBC producer, sends this text message: “I’m watching the PM ‘relaunch’ from behind the sofa. The slow public death of Mr Brown continues. Painful to watch.” Difficult to disagree too much. My thoughts:- 1)      “It’s been a bad night” he started – woops! Wrong soundbite. That one was for use on Friday morning. He tries again. “It’s not been the best weekend, let’s say” – cue flash of weird smile. 2)      “I think it’s true I’m a more private person in a public arena” – yip, an introvert in an extrovert’s job. But this is just a small part of the problem 3)      “I come

James Forsyth James Forsyth

So, what should Gordon do now?

There’s lots of advice for Gordon Brown in today’s papers. Perhaps, the most interesting comes from Matthew Taylor, a key adviser under Blair. “After waiting a few days to avoid the impression of panic Gordon Brown should do a major interview. In this interview he should announce that he will dedicate his efforts to delivering a very short list of very important outcomes by the spring of 2010. One of these should be about family prosperity and economic stability, one should be about reducing poverty and one or two (but really no more) about key public service indicators. He should say that he wants to be judged on whether he

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Was this actually Labour’s worst result since World War One?

I would like to call on the collective wisdom of CoffeeHousers. I have read everywhere that Thursday was Labour’s worst result for 40 years, whereas it looks to me as if it is the worst since World War One. Here’s why. As far as I can determine, the source for this “40 years” was Tony Travers from LSE. We walked out of the BBC studio in City Hall together on election night, and Tony showed me his book of wisdom – the year 1968 was a freak bad year for Labour in London as it had 28% of the vote (as I blogged earlier). Tony made this point in the

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 May 2008

If, when you read this, Boris Johnson is the Mayor of London, it will, I have just discovered, be thanks to me. When the idea of Boris’s candidacy was first suggested, I spoke on the telephone to Mary Wakefield, who is now the deputy editor of The Spectator. What did I think of Boris for Mayor, she asked. I snorted. ‘Mayor of Henley more like!’ I said, satirically. I cannot now remember why I took this line, but Mary Wakefield relayed it to Boris, who mentioned it, ruefully, to me. Now I read in the newspapers that my words stung him so much that he made up his mind to