Politics Archives

Saturday

4 Aug 2007

The promise Boris must make if he is to become mayor of London

Boris Johnson could make a great Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, and a great mayor of London. But he’ll need to get the pitch right. I’m afraid the first thing he’ll have to do is steer well clear of The Spectator. Boris Johnson could make a great Conservative candidate for the London mayoralty, and a great mayor of London. But he’ll need to get the pitch right. I’m afraid the first thing he’ll have to do is steer well clear of The Spectator. This splendid and in the best sense rather exclusive institution is the worst possible base from which to make a serious appeal to the much-put-upon citizens

Friday

3 Aug 2007

Alex Massie

Two tribes go to war: progressives and, er, liberals…

This eyebrow-raising quote comes from Ezra Klein: “Insofar as there’s a tension between the army and progressives, it’s cultural and ideological…Progressives are quite skeptical of using military force, if not of those who make up the military ad that creates his own frictions. To say that the argument is between progressives and the military is to personalize what’s actually an ideological dispute. The issue is much more about differing conceptions of the use of force and our capability and responsibility to carry out certain missions than it is about the groups involved. The same arguments and tensions and frictions occur between progressives and the liberal hawks.” Really? But what happens

Alex Massie

Why Wes Clark failed?

Wes Clark is, once again, doing well at YearlyKos. One of the oddities of the 2004 election was the feebleness of Clark’s campaign. True, he lacked political experience and that showed, but even so the lack of focus and the strategic failures of his campaign were palpable. Then again, not everyone would have been surprised. I’ve been reading Alastair Campbell’s diaries this week and came across this passage, dating from the Kosovo war: Sunday April 18, 1999: TB [Tony Blair] saw [Charles] Guthrie [Chief of the Defence Staff] and he basically levelled and said we were likely to have to put in ground troops… Guthrie called me later and…[his] assessment

The Spectator

What Cameron can learn from Canada

The Conservative Home team are currently touring the Anglosphere and reporting back on the state of conservatism in these countries. This week’s report is on Canada under Stephen Harper (pictured) and makes for interesting reading considering the Tories current predicament. After all the Canadian Conservatives came back from a defeat far more crushing than 1997. To my mind, the key lesson the Tories can draw on from the Harper-led Conservative revival is his success in building internal coalitions on issues. This is something that the Cameron project has been bad at. For instance, lots of Tory members are inherently suspicious of all the talk of global warming. Yet, Team Cameron has

The Spectator

Summer reading for Gordon

Matt notes in his report on Brown’s US trip this that Gordon Brown has, thankfully, abandoned the intellectual lazy assumption that poverty causes terrorism. But Brown should still get hold of a copy of What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism by the Princeton professor Alan B. Krueger before he heads off to Dorset on holiday. Krueger through a careful analysis of the statistics debunks the notion that poverty and terrorism go hand in hand. Indeed, it is amazing how this idea—which has no evidentiary support—has become the received wisdom. The link that Krueger finds is not between terrorism and poverty but terrorism and an absence of political freedom. All

The Spectator

Fighting words from Cameron, but he’s picking the wrong fight

Some strikingly martial language from Cameron who is now promising to “give the government a bare knuckle fight over the NHS”. What a shame that his strategy is to do this on behalf of the unions, rather than the patients. There is still time to rewrite his dismal NHS policy. Brown is dumping the Blair reform agenda: power to the patients, not the producers (or the “professionals” as the Tories now lovingly call them), should be Cameron’s mantra. But this fighting talk is a welcome change of tone.

The Spectator

Have you seen this man?

Iain Dale has his monthly table of shadow cabinet media mentions up and as always it makes for interesting reading. Amazingly, Peter Ainsworth, the Tory environment spokesman, got a mere 57 mentions in July despite the 24/7 media coverage of the floods. Indeed, his Liberal Democrat opposite number Chris Huhne got more attention than Ainsworth as did 18 of his shadow cabinet colleagues. The numbers also show the need for the shadow cabinet as a whole to up its game. Currently, David Cameron gets more press than the 31 members others of it combined. While if Nick Clegg was a Tory he’d be eighth in the table. All of which

The Spectator

Guardian: Brown planning Spring ’08 poll

The Guardian has a story in today’s edition suggesting that Gordon Brown has pencilled in spring 2008 as the time for an election. Apparently, campaign professionals are being sounded out about working for the campaign with polling day planned for sometime before May 1st. This date would have the advantage of short-circuiting the Cameron project without Brown risking a backlash from the country for calling an election just because he’s ahead in the polls that he might face if he went this autumn. What are your predictions for what the result of a spring ‘08 poll would be?

Thursday

2 Aug 2007

Fraser Nelson

I want the Conservatives to win next time because…

We have a winner in our competition to say, in a sentence, why a normal voter would wish for a Conservative victory. It shows what a fix Cameron is in that so few Tory-supporting people could come up with a good reason for him to be Prime Minister. There were some hilariously cruel suggestions, but we needed a useful one. And here it is… “I really want the Conservative party to win the next election because only the party that created modern British society can truly be trusted to know how to fix it.- TMS” I love this. A great reminder that the Conservatives liberated Britain from the 1970s morass,

James Forsyth

The back story to the Cameron-Miraj showdown

Martin Bright has some great detail on the lead up to the Cameron, Miraj row. Here’s the key passage: “I understand that at a meeting this year Cameron himself urged Miraj to accept to fight another marginal as local Tories were becoming increasingly hostile to the imposition of non-white candidates. Sayeeda Warsi, now shadow minister for community cohesion, also found it nigh-on impossible to find a seat. In Warsi’s case, Cameron nominated her for a place in the Lords, which may explain the discussion between Cameron and Miraj about peerages.” Considering that Cameron also requested the meeting, not Miraj, and that the purpose of it was to discuss an article attacking the leadership

The Spectator

The challenge for Boris

There is both a must-read and a must-hear on the Boris for London front this morning. First the must-read, Matthew Parris‘s column in this week’s magazine on what Boris needs to do to win. His thoughts on how Boris could prove that he’ll put city above party are particularly smart. While the must-hear is Ken talking about his likely challenger on The Today Programme. He conceded that Boris is the most formidable opponent that he’ll face in his political career but he also previewed his line of attack on him, declaring that Boris was to the right of Norman Tebbit. Red Ken is half-way through Boris’s entire oeuvre at the moment so expect

The Spectator

The revolution enters a new phase

Philip Gould’s memo laying out what Gordon Brown needs to do to win an early election makes for fascinating reading. Especially notable is Gould’s belief that elections can’t be won on ‘schools n’ hospitals’ or ‘investment versus Tory cuts’ any more. He writes that: “There is no doubt that the political landscape is changing: Crime, terror, immigration and so on are now the dominant issues. Underpinning these concerns is a growing sense of the power of events beyond our control – globalised economies, international terror, community disintegration and so on….However, public services and the economy are still important, about equal and just below security.” Yet, what would concern me most

Wednesday

1 Aug 2007

The Spectator

A cheeky idea

The BBC are reporting that Ed Davey, Ming’s chief of staff, is floating the idea of his officemate Lembit Opik running for mayor of London. This strikes me as a rather desperate attempt by the Lib Dems to get someone with Boris or Ken level name recognition on the ballot. But there’s no denying that Opik’s presence would further liven up the contest.

Matthew Dancona

Travels with Gordon

Editor back online – I have been in the States with Gordon’s travelling party, and fascinating it was, too. Though an evangelical convert to blogging, I thought on this occasion I would break my own rule (Always Be Posting) and save my thoughts for a full report in tomorrow’s magazine. In any case, mobile phones don’t work at Camp David, a naval facility where the Marines take no nonsense from British hacks fussing over their laptops and Blackberries. Suffice it to say that the trip was an unmissable experience, watching a new Prime Minister and his gang settling into their roles with all eyes upon them. You can read my

The Spectator

Brown to America: I love your country

One of the fascinating things about Brown’s trip to the United States is how while he has kept his relationship with President Bush workmanlike he has been effusive about America in general. Last night on NBC news he told the anchor Brian Williams: I love your country. I mean I’m, I’m a great supporter of everything that you’ve tried to do. And I look at the history of the United States and you’ve got people who came to this country, built a great country. If Blair had said this there would have been irritation in this country about his supposed sycophancy but Brown’s remarks seemed to have passed without comment. (Admittedly, they were rather

Tuesday

31 Jul 2007

Alex Massie

Progressives vs Liberals: or why the Bush years are not a revolution in foreign policy affairs

As so often I’m late to a brouhaha. The vexed question of the day is whether American Democrats should call themselves Progressives or Liberals. Well, the former has some advantages, not the least of which being that it would allow Adam Smith’s admirers to reclaim the liberal banner and wave it with ever-greater gusto. Still, it’s noticeable that the discussion has revolved around such trendy notions as labelling and framing. Where policy has got a look in it’s been in terms of the party’s domestic agenda. But Progressivism was scarcely silent on foreign policy either. Indeed, when I hear the term I’m reminded of Speak softly, but carry a big

The Spectator

Tony’s last act or Gordon’s first triumph

Tony Blair will not take a bow for this one, and you can bet Gordon Brown won’t give him credit. But it looks like his plan for a peacekeeping operation in Darfur is finally going ahead – pretty much as the draft whose details were released on the day he stood down envisaged. It was a Blair initiative, but is already being spun as a “Brown coup”. An impression which, I feel sure, the Prime Minister will not rush to correct. But as someone said, there’s no end to what you can achieve if you don’t care who takes the credit.

The Spectator

Brown’s poverty of thought

I simply disagree with those who criticised Gordon Brown’s Camp David performance in this morning’s press. He struck me as assured, and eloquent. But he has just let himself down in New York, banging on about his last-century approach to poverty reduction. He wants to give Africa the remedy he prescribes for Britain – borrowing a huge pot of cash, then resorting to hand-outs. Not for him the free trade recipe which has transformed Asia. Brown’s instincts lead him to see overseas aid as a government-to-government task, rather than a people-to-people task. The fact is, world poverty has never been lower thanks to the people-to-people miracle of global capitalism. If

The Spectator

Just as far as we can

“We’ll have as much spine as we possibly can, under the circumstances.” This response by Hillary Clinton to an activist calling on her to show some spine by endorsing federal funding for a needle exchange programmes is incredibly revealing of the Clinton campaign mindset. The Clintons’s electoral success has been based on this approach of not going to the mat on issues that they perceive as vote losers and ultimately peripheral. Following their disastrous handling of the gays in the military issue right at the beginning of Bill’s first term in 1993, they basically passed on all this kind of cultural politics. Indeed, in 2004 Bill Clinton even encouraged John

The Spectator

Where Brown agrees and disagrees with the neo-cons

Rachel Sylvester has a typically astute piece in today’s Telegraph on how Brown differs from both Blair and Bush. Here’s the key section: “Mr Brown is different – not just from Mr Bush but also from Mr Blair. While Mr Bush and Mr Blair see the world in black and white, Mr Brown observes more pragmatic shades of grey. For him, foreign policy is based on a “global hub”. His moral compass is strictly for domestic use. When he cites neo-Conservative writers such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q Wilson with approval, it is their sense of national moral purpose that he admires, rather than their views on international affairs.