Politics

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

Friday

Matthew Dancona

Gordon’s roof

Today’s speech by George Osborne attacking Gordon Brown’s record for economic competence is an important development in the rolling out of Tory strategy. The charge that Gordon is not up to the job is not new, of course, but this is the first time it has been put at the heart of the Conservative attack. The notion that the PM failed to “fix the roof while the sun was shining” will be central to the Cameroon assault on Brown’s credibility. How things change. A year ago, the worry among thoughtful Tories was that the election would be a battle between change (Cameron) and competence (Brown): their fear was that, as

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Premium Politics

Sam Coates, over at his splendid new blog, writes that the Tories have been indulging in some clothes stealing by adopting the Lib Dem idea for a pupil premium for poorer children. I’ve no doubt that Sam is right about what motivated the timing of the announcement, but it is my understanding that this has always been part of Tory thinking on the issue. James O’Shaughnessy, the Tory head of policy, was an enthusiastic advocate of such a scheme when he was at Policy Exchange and Michael Gove has long been supportive of the idea.  As Comment Central points out, the Tories haven’t yet explained how large the premium would

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown goes nuclear, repeatedly

Is Gordon Brown running for the world record on the number of times a story is announced? His “revelation” that Britain will continue with nuclear power is something this government announces almost on a quarterly basis, to show how it is taking tough decisions. No serious policy analyst ever thought Britain would go nuclear-free – and ministers would say so in private, promoting various stories over the years. Blair started to detail the agreement in private briefings around the 2005 Labour conference – which I wrote up in October 2005. A cursory cuts check shows this story in The Times in both November of that year and May 2006 and

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown does a Hillary (again) – and fights back

An angrier Brown was in front of us today, holding handwritten notes for his exchanges with Cameron rather than anything given to him by No10. He would scribble furiously, and went on the offensive – asking Cameron whether he supports ID cards for foreign nationals. It seemed a bit daft at PMQs to hear the PM ask questions of the Opposition leader so often, but it won’t be repeated on TV and he needs to show the House he is on the attack. Cameron appeared to say yes, but it wasn’t clear. Those normally ashen Labour faces lit up.   Brown again brought up Cameron’s role “as the principal adviser

James Forsyth James Forsyth

McCain’s first step to the nomination

John McCain’s commanding win here makes him, remarkably for a candidate who was written off for dead last summer, the favourite to be the Republican nominee in November. To be sure, he still has obstacles to come most notably his difference with the Republican base on immigration and the distrust that some of the more conservative sections of the party feel for him. But he now has the momentum to win Michigan, which would finish Romney off, and once has done that he is left facing Mike Huckabee and Giuliani who have their own more serious issues with sections of the Republican party. The victory speech McCain delivered tonight was

Allister Heath

The economy in 2008: chilly showers but no hailstorms

Allister Heath forecasts that Britain’s economy will suffer less than America’s, but that homeowners and consumers will still feel the pain — and blame it on Gordon Brown First, the good news: there will be no recession next year in Britain. But while avoiding ‘the Big R’ will be some cause for celebration, the overall outlook for 2008 remains bleak. The economy will not shrink but it won’t grow by much either. And there will be plenty of pain to go round. House prices will fall noticeably, which means that most members of the property-owning majority will become poorer — the first drop in wealth levels in more than a

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Gordon and Alistair show

It was the Gordon and Alistair show today, rather than the Brown press conference. And Darling did far more than the intro. He jumped into answer questions, with his message – that HMS Britain was built by Labour to weather a world economic storm. He detailed meetings with world leaders, as if to try and hammer home his point that innocent Britain is caught in a world economic problem, not our fault guv, etc. Anyway, here are five thoughts on each of them… DARLING 1) “Right across the world, this will be a difficult year”. But few face a UK-style slowdown. The average OECD economy grew by 2.7% last year

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The truth behind inflation

Is Brown right on inflation? TGF UKIP appeals for help: is it correct to say as he did in the Observer and on Marr that inflation is 4% in America, 3% in Eurozone and 2% in Britain?  I was thinking of Fisking the interview – but soon worked out it would be longer than the transcript. And perhaps Brown’s statistics are not supposed to be taken literally, like John Prebble’s books or the EU’s accounts. But for those who care, here’s the story on inflation.   It jerks around a lot, and Brown is lucky to have Britain in a dip and America in an upswing last month. The figures

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s back – and doing a Hillary

Don’t mention the relaunch! That will be the motto today as Gordon Brown embarks on his, ahem, new year initiative kicking off with a big speech on health . Cameron is ahead of him: he made his health speech last week. Also Brown is off to India and China later this month (or so they say; Brits are the last to be told about their PM’s plans), where Cameron and Osborne made their visit last month. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on Brown’s 8.10am Today interview. 1) Health Personalisation of NHS service, he said, will provide the “doctor you want, time you want, hospital you want”. More than 25

Saturday

The Spectator

This week’s magazine – An Apology

An apology Yesterday the Spectator experienced production problems with this week’s issue. This has unfortunately resulted in some errors: namely that the last two words ‘Middle East’ are missing from the William Shawcross article and the Michael Gove article, as featured on the front cover, was not included. Please click on this link to view the Michael Gove essay. Please accept our sincere apologies for these errors that have occurred.  We at The Spectator wish you all a prosperous 2008

William Shawcross

We are at war with hatred, fanaticism and despair

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, points out that with Benazir Bhutto, they killed ‘a spectacularly visible woman’ who, whatever her flaws as a political leader, was astonishingly brave in fighting — uncovered, unveiled — for politics ‘and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists [the jihadists], floats over the human face of women’. Lévy suggests that Benazir’s name should now become another password ‘for those who still believe that the good genius of Enlightenment will win out over the evil genius of fanaticism and crime’. But the Enlightenment will be lost unless we all realise that we have to fight for it. First of all we have to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Brown, like Major, is falling prey to the media’s habit of linking unrelated stories

Before Christmas, on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, Sir John Major gave his thoughts on politics ancient and modern. Since leaving Downing Street Sir John has been sparing with his public appearances, and because he has always commanded personal respect and has a fair-minded way of talking, these occasional interventions get attention. The moderation of his language, however, should not distract us from the sharpness of his views. What attracted the headlines this time were Major’s pointed remarks about ‘sleaze’. He said that in the case of the present government, but not (despite media impressions) his own, sleaze had become ‘systemic’. He did not deny that during the last years

Con Coughlin

Musharraf may now be the last best hope of Pakistan

Forget Iran, forget North Korea, forget the emerging Chinese superpower and forget the resurgent nationalism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Even before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Pakistan was the country that arguably posed the greatest challenge to the West’s security. Now it is an even greater challenge. Pakistan is the first Muslim country to have acquired nuclear weapons. Her nuclear arsenal was developed in the 1970s by Benazir’s father, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, to protect the country from the possibility of attack by India. Whether Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is maintained purely for self-defence could now become a moot point, particularly if the Islamists make a strong showing in the forthcoming Pakistani elections —

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Is Brown finished?

“I think Brown’s character, specifically the lack of charisma or warmth will prevent him being able to bring it back. When problems hit Brown will never be able get away with a winning smile and a “I’m a pretty straight sort of guy” or “well, John is John”, he can’t charm he was out of problems, can’t convince people that, whatever has gone wrong, he is fundamentally a decent chap doing his best. Neither has he yet shown any ability to project a vision or purpose for his government that the public can relate to, perhaps in other circumstances that wouldn’t matter, competence would be enough, but to differentiate himself

Wednesday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s challenge in 2008

Jonathan Freedland has a typically smart piece on what Gordon Brown needs to do in 2008 in this morning’s Guardian. Freedland writes, “We will not vote on him this year, but after only six months in office – three that saw him soar, three that saw him plunge – we will form a settled view of him in 2008. If the Mr Bean tag sticks, he will be finished. He needs, at the very minimum, a few solid months of steady, unruffled, even dull competence: no more Northern Rocks, missing discs or tangled donations. Desperately required is a spell of quiet, so that the serial misfortunes of the autumn come

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

We have a winner!

It’s a big ask, but someone has to write the worst article on the presidential election. Daniel Pipes steps up to demonstrate why the Republican party deserves to lose next year. This is how his faux-concerned piece on Barack Obama for Front Page begins: “If I were a Muslim I would let you know,” Barack Obama has said, and I believe him. In fact, he is a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is not now a Muslim. But was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim? More precisely, might Muslims consider him a murtadd (apostate), that is, a Muslim

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown needs help, but he won’t take it from the Blairites

Few columnists can claim to understand Team Brown better than Jackie Ashley, so her Guardian column this morning on this weekend’s Blairite overtures is particularly interesting. Ashley writes that Brown “is probably tempted to pick up this olive branch and use it to give the Blairites a thrashing.” But she warns the Prime Minister that this would be the wrong thing to do and that he needs the Blairites’s help “to find new ways to reconcile liberty and security, and to express them in ways that most people approve. He needs to find new ways of reaching out to older voters: at the next election the majority of voters will

Saturday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Could Cameron have survived an autumn election?

I was on BBC Radio Four’s Talking Politics today with Anne McElvoy of the Standard and Michael White of the Guardian – and Dennis Sewell in the chair. During it I made a point which I had thought uncontroversial: how close Cameron came to political destruction last autumn.   My theory is that if Brown had called that election, he’d have won. Cameron bluffed beautifully at Blackpool: his Etonian fearlessness saved him and his party. But his bold new policies would not have withstood the scrutiny of an election campaign (especially the back-of-the-envelope figures about non doms). A defeated Cameron would have had to quit, and the topic of discussion

Wednesday

Andrew Neil

Party Non-Etiquette

I gave two big Christmas bashes this year, one in London, one in New York. Both included friends who are celebrities, such as Joan Collins, Michael Winner, Tina Brown, Harry Evans, Candace Bushnell, Michael Heseltine and Emily Maitlis, as well as many more friends and colleagues who are not celebrities but who are always a joy to see at the holiday season.   Both parties were a great success, at least judging by the attendance and the jovial atmosphere: no doubt the plentiful booze and canapés contributed. I certainly enjoyed them. But a couple of things have struck on the post-party haze.   First, the paltry number of folks who