Politics

After perhaps the quietest leadership race in recent political history the Spectator/Threadneedle Newcomer of the Year has not disappointed us. I thought Nick Clegg would win by a mile: in the end his 510 votes are testimony what was (in my view) a superior campaign by Huhne (whom I underestimated). But the real winner was Vince “killer” Cable, who has had just enough limelight to shine and not so much that he’s had time to flop. He’s an economic expert on the economics brief: it shows what happens in the rare occasion where politicians have some expertise in their given area. There’s talk that Huhne would have moved Cable. I

The Lib Dem leadership result will be announced this afternoon and the general feeling in Westminster is that Nick Clegg has won, although folk aren’t ruling out an upset. The first test for Clegg will be whether he beats Chris Huhne by a more comfortable margin than Ming Campbell did in 2006, when the score in the final round was 57-42. Clegg’s next challenge will be to seize the news agenda, something that he was surprisingly poor at during the leadership contest. As Charlie Kennedy argues in The Guardian today, Vince Cable has been particularly good at this as he did not have to worry about his long term prospects

A Republican debate in Florida in late November marked this electoral season’s debut of Adolf Hitler, that reliable presence in American presidential campaigns. The Arizona senator John McCain, struggling to draw even with the garrulous ex-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the Mormon technocrat (and former Massachusetts governor) Mitt Romney, decided to burnish his pro-war credentials. The problem was, there was almost nobody to burnish them against. Seven of the eight candidates on stage had vied for months to outdo one another in their lock-stock-and-barrel support for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. That left Ron Paul, the 72-year-old, ten-term congressman from Texas, to bear the brunt of McCain’s wrath. Paul

The last Lord Ribblesdale, who died in 1925, is remembered chiefly as the subject of a remarkable portrait, known as ‘The Ancestor’, by John Singer Sargent. For those who enjoy the byways of social history, this tall, unmistakably aristocratic figure in late-Victorian hunting garb is also remembered for other things: he was a celebrated amateur boxer capable, it was said, of knocking out any man in the House of Lords; he was a long-time denizen of Rosa Lewis’s louche Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street; George Bernard Shaw is believed to have used him as the model for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion; and he surprised London society in 1919 by marrying