Politics

The Britannica blog has been running a rather good forum on Diana and the cult of celebrity. Theodore Dalyrmple’s contribution challenges the sentimentality that has come to surround her in death. “In the orgy of demonstrative pseudo-grief that followed her death, Mr Blair said that the people had found a new way of being British. Indeed so: they had become emotionally incontinent and inclined to blubber in public when not being menacingly discourteous. They had come to believe that holding nothing back was the way to mental health, and their deepest emotional expression was the teddy bear that they were increasingly liable to leave at the site of a fatal

You can watch the Newsnight special with David Cameron here. In it, Cameron confirms Fraser’s earlier report that the Tories will not, thankfully, be stopping all airport expansion. Cameron put in a fairly strong performance. He handled Stephanie Flanders line of questions about whether he felt that she, an unwed mother, should get married or not particularly well. He also did a good job of emphasising that there is nothing inconsistent with modernisation in being tough on crime. Tim Montgomerie has thoughts and analysis here.

John Rentoul points out in a typically sharp column in today’s Independent that Gordon Brown has benefited from the low expectation surrounding his arrival at Number 10. There had been so much said about Brown’s weaknesses that the commentariat had almost forgotten about his strengths and totally underestimated how adept Brown would prove at turning “his pathologies into assets.” However, the tide may have turned with the poll that put Brown ten points ahead. It has become a benchmark that subsequent polls are being measured against. So, today’s poll which shows Labour up by five—which is not bad, considering that the Tories were leading by five in the same poll at the end of

In my Sunday Telegraph column today, I argue that statistics cannot reflect cultural sensibilities, especially in the wake of a horror such as Rhys Jones’s murder. But if crime statistics are to be brandished at such a time let them at least be accurate. The Sunday Times reports that – contrary to Jacqui Smith’s claim that gun crime is falling – Home Office figures (which exclude incidents involving air weapons) show a fourfold rise since 1998. As David Davis says in his letter to the Home Secretary: “One clear fact on gun-related violence is that if you don’t count it, you won’t be able to tackle it.”