Politics

Shortly before setting off on his Australian and Far Eastern tour, Tony Blair had a long discussion with Gordon Brown about the succession. The Chancellor was extremely clear. ‘Brown wanted a handover date by the end of the year,’ says my source, ‘with Brown coming in around the time of the party conference and Blair going out. It was all to be settled by conference.’ This conversation went into the intricate detail concerning the various constitutional and party mechanisms which need to be brought into play to secure a smooth succession. The role of John Prescott was raised. Brown wants Prescott to stay on as Deputy Prime Minister at least

Irwin Stelzer says that Condoleezza Rice’s trip to Britain reflects Tony Blair’s high standing in America and Bush’s need to keep him on side Potholes. America’s ambassador to Britain, Robert Tuttle, was sure that one of the shocks for his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during her visit to Blackburn, would be potholes. Or the talk of potholes. Which will be one of the many differences between America and Britain that her keen eyes and ears will have picked up when this trip is over. Start with potholes. Rice is said to be a great fan of the Beatles, and undoubtedly expected to find at least some of the

By the weekend, the Conservatives had achieved the feat of making their own funding become just as much ‘the issue’ as Labour’s. The papers were full of sharp-looking loans which the Tories, as much as Labour, had received from the capitalist class. The Prime Minister and his allies had succeeded in making any scandal appear bipartisan. So much so that Mr Blair felt safe enough to set up an ‘independent inquiry’ not into how he and Lord Levy had financed New Labour, but into how all parties were financed. His friends were able to put it about that it was time to ‘move on’ and to have a ‘serious debate’.

In the last month Gordon Brown has made two personal gestures to David Cameron. The first was to send flowers to congratulate the Conservative leader on the birth of his son, and the second was to fashion his Budget into a no less direct political message saying, ‘I will destroy you.’ His speech on Wednesday was not about the shape of the British economy, but the shape of the weapon Labour requires to fight the Conservatives. This much was inevitable; what is striking are the tactics which Cameron has developed in counter-attack. His most biting remarks came not in his Budget response, but in an interview last month. ‘With Blair

Close friends of the Prime Minister say that he knows that the cash for peerages crisis goes very deep, and may even finish him off. But they insist that he is ‘determined to fight on, if at all possible’. In the face of formidable evidence to the contrary, the Prime Minister still believes that he is the indispensable man. He was at it again on Tuesday, making a major speech, the first of a series of three, setting out his vision of foreign affairs. Tony Blair is enormously proud of what he has achieved on the international stage. He is sure that he has set a new tone for British

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the Party said ‘peace’ it meant ‘war’, and when it said ‘freedom’ it meant ‘slavery’. Listening to Gordon Brown’s tenth and possibly last Budget speech on Wednesday afternoon, it seemed at times as if he had mistaken Orwell’s fictional masterpiece for a manual for chancellors of the exchequer in trouble. Mr Brown’s central theme that he is working night and day to equip Britain to face the challenges of globalisation was a brilliantly executed yet meretricious exercise in Orwellian Newspeak. The truth is that his record on competitiveness has been abysmal, as demonstrated by Britain’s relegation on every respectable economic league table. To pretend in the

In his Dimbleby Lecture last year, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, declared that ‘policing is becoming not only central to our understanding of citizenship, it is becoming a contestable political issue as never before’. He called for ‘open thought’ and an ‘open debate’. He said it was time for the police service to transform itself into ‘one holistic service’. In most police canteens they probably think that ‘holistic’ is a kind of glue. But Sir Ian is, if nothing else, a very unusual copper. He has the troubled countenance of a regional manager for Kwik-Fit Euro who is failing to make his targets and dreads every call from

Fraser Nelson meets the former chancellor, reborn as Cameron’s ‘ambassador for trust’, who calls for a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems An interview with Kenneth Clarke is not for the asthmatic. His office commands arguably the best riverside views in Westminster, but sights like the London Eye and the Saatchi Gallery must compete with the smoke of his trademark cigar. It is his prop, his muse and egg-timer. When it’s over, I’m out. Luckily it’s a slow-burner and gives an hour for the man whom David Cameron has entrusted to run his Democracy Task Force to describe his remarkable vision for the party’s future. It is finally time, he

On 20 March, the Iraq conflict reaches its third anniversary. Con Coughlin defends the decision to invade, explores the impact of Blair on Bush’s second term — and reveals what Condoleezza Rice thinks of David Cameron Squabbling generals, political score-settling and a country reportedly on the brink of civil war. The third anniversary of the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom this week — which coincides with kidnappings and explosions in Gaza and the West Bank — hardly seems a cause for celebration. The painful and challenging task of rebuilding Iraq after 35 years of Baathist tyranny is far from complete, but that must now take second place to the increasingly