Politics

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

Saturday

The Spectator

The politics of terror

When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that

Saturday

Richard Littlejohn

How greed and hubris led to Blunkett’s downfall

At least this time we were spared the self-pitying squealing about only doing what he had for the ‘little lad’. But even though David Blunkett walked the plank he still refuses to accept that he’s done anything wrong. Maybe the Viagra has gone to his head. It was obvious as early as Tuesday morning that he couldn’t survive. In the end, Tony Blair sacked him for a second time, just as he had been forced to jettison twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson. Blunkett had become an embarrassment, so he had to go. All the usual New Labour guff about this being just an unfortunate lapse in judgment, time to move on, draw

The Spectator

Labour sleaze

Edward Gibbon would recognise it: the air of decadence, the smell of death which hangs over the New Labour empire this week. The impotence of Emperor Blair is a pitiful sight. His protestations of the innocence of Senator Blunkett — which once would have swung the public behind him and turned the condemnation upon Blunkett’s accusers — now inspire contempt. Another who would recognise the position of the government this week is John Major. Several times in the dying months of his government he found himself similarly overwhelmed by charges of sleaze; he would defend his minister to the death, then the minister would be forced to resign anyway. The

John Laughland

Full Marx for George Bush

Ever since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there has been a seemingly endless flow of self-congratulatory comment in the West about how former communist countries — and even some which have remained communist — are gradually westernising and learning the ropes in the capitalist jungle. Very often, these countries’ so-called progress is in fact cultural decline: the advent of bars for transsexuals in Havana, for instance, has been adduced as evidence of Cuba’s ‘liberalisation’. But the equal and opposite movement nearly always goes unnoticed — the way in which the West has itself adopted many of the old nostrums of communism, and especially the twin doctrines of revolution and

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Tony Blair’s City nemesis turns up again and opens fire from a tank

The results tell their own story: Tony Blair 3, Conservative party 0; Tony Blair 0, Rodney Leach 3. As David Cameron and David Davis wrestle for the tattered armband which has already passed from captain to captain three times in eight years, they should ask themselves if they are in the right league. Their apparently invincible opponent has been worsted three times, on what he believed to be his own ground, by a Corinthian from the City who is now limbering up for the next fixture. The ground, as ever, is Europe, and when the new young Prime Minister first trotted on to the pitch, he must have thought that

Andrew Gilligan

A terrifying plan for pre-emptive nuclear strikes

Britain, the Prime Minister will be pleased to learn, once had a nuclear weapon named the Tony. (It was a prototype warhead to be fitted to the Bloodhound surface-to-air missile, tried in the 1950s but never developed.) The record books of our great nation’s early nuclear experiments also yield something called the Peter (appropriately enough, a trigger device for a larger explosion) but, alas, no Alastair, no Gordon (though there was, perhaps in anticipation of the late Robin Cook, another prototype unhappily christened the Pixie). The first-generation Tony, produced by trench-coated chaps with soldering irons in a collection of sheds just off the A340, was reassuringly cheap. Hidden under a

Bruce Anderson

Why Labour has a wary regard for David Cameron

The Labour party is uneasy. For 11 years it has made the political weather. It has set the terms of debate; its intellectual totalitarianism has almost succeeded in branding any non-New Labour position as illegitimate. Now, everything has changed. On the underground, in pubs, people are talking about David Cameron. Though he has hardly done or said anything yet, he has reintroduced excitement to British politics. Some shrewd Labour analysts fear that events have escaped from their control and are not sure how to recapture them. Mr Cameron has been lucky in his timing. He arrived at the moment when a lot of voters were falling out of love with

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 22 October 2005

Does the failure of the Daily Mail to stop David Cameron’s leadership bid in its tracks mark a significant moment in the relationship between press and politics? Fear of the effect of ‘dirt’ on a leadership candidate is always very potent, and there has long been a belief among some Tories that the hostility of the Mail is fatal to a candidate’s chances of success (this despite the fact that the Mail promoted Michael Heseltine in the late 1980s and supported Ken Clarke not only this time but in 2001). So when the Mail decided to get agitated about whether David Cameron had taken drugs at university, and then started

Quentin Letts

The Tories pick a winner

Less than six weeks ago a threadbare group of Conservative MPs, from what one might call the boarding-school wing of the party, assembled in a small, air-conditioned room in Portcullis House, Westminster. Not everyone was punctual. The Commons was deep in recess. The fifth Test against Australia was flickering on television sets around London SW1, Mark Nicholas saying, ‘there’s still plenty of time in this game’. But was there? September-heavy houseflies buzzed against window panes as the team supporting David Cameron’s bid for the Tory leadership excavated their ear wax and pondered a different sort of leader — in the Times. Not only had the recent article praised David Davis

Saturday

Christopher Fildes

Who will look after us in our old age? We’ll have to look after ourselves

An actuary’s life is more fun than it looks. You can make everyone’s flesh creep. Tell them all that their pensions are about to disappear into a black hole. Only the other day some financial astronomers measured the hole at a negative £130 billion and caused a most satisfactory flap. Could our pension funds really be short of so much money? Where has it gone? One answer, of course, is that it has disappeared into the Exchequer and been lost to sight. An incoming Chancellor, eight years ago, identified the pension funds as a soft target for taxation, and since then he has helped himself to their money so freely

Peter Oborne

Only literary theory can explain the life-changing success of David Cameron

MPs returned to Westminster this week during a spell of hot, sultry weather more characteristic of late July than mid-October. They sweated up in the corridors, mopped their brows in the chamber, sat in shirtsleeves on the Commons terrace (apart from the Liberal Democrats, who at first did not return at all; the recall of Parliament at the end of a 10-week break was a therapeutic ‘away day’ for party spokesmen. To be fair to Charles Kennedy, his absence was barely discernible). Tony Blair added to this troubling sense of unreality. President Talebani of Iraq has been in town. The Iraqi President and the British Prime Minister called journalists to

Vernon Bogdanor

The Tories need a genuine liberal

Vernon Bogdanor says that David Cameron is the only Conservative who can read the nation’s mood and respond to it In the 1960s Harold Wilson sought to make Labour the natural party of government. Tony Blair seems to have succeeded in doing so. The Conservatives have now been in opposition for eight years, their longest period out of government since the days of Asquith and Lloyd George before 1914. Never before, during the period of mass suffrage, have they lost three consecutive general elections. Moreover, at no stage since 1997 have they appeared credible as a potential party of government. That is bad, not only for the Conservatives but also

Saturday

Peter Oborne

David Davis has suddenly acquired the air of the runner-up

Despite well-meaning efforts by Francis Maude, Theresa May and Alan Duncan to cast a pall over the occasion, Blackpool 2005 turned out to be the most life-enhancing Tory party conference in recent years. With 6,000 members present, it provided a pleasing reminder that vigour and enthusiasm survive among the grass-roots. Meanwhile, a series of outstanding speeches from the platform demonstrates the remarkable depth of talent within the parliamentary party. The first revelation was awesome: David Cameron. Every so often in British politics a star is born, and this happened last week. There has always been much to like about Cameron. But there was every reason to suppose that the same

The Spectator

Cameron’s task

Many Conservatives will have left the party’s Blackpool conference with their feelings about the leadership contest transformed. As the horses enter the final stretch, the pulses of the punters are unquestionably quickening, and the smart money must surely be moving on to David Cameron. It is no disrespect to the other contenders to say that his star has risen the furthest over the last week. It may be that readers do not uniformly share the ecstatic sensations of Bruce Anderson, whose nunc dimittis may be found on page 16, but it is now the Cameron campaign that has momentum, a development that is obviously congenial to this magazine, since The

Bruce Anderson

The next Tory Prime Minister

On Monday morning, a tense young politician was rehearsing a speech. The performance was less than fluent; the delivery was far too fast. The youngster’s peace of mind did not benefit from his growing awareness that he was being overheard. A number of journalists had managed to slip into the hall. Twenty-eight hours later, the rehearsal turned into the live performance. David Cameron had decided to speak without notes or an autocue. The previous day, Malcolm Rifkind did the same, but Sir Malcolm has been one of the two or three best speakers in Britain for the past 20 years, since he was David Cameron’s age. When Mr Cameron dispensed

Dominic Midgley

Oiling up to the oligarchs

Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash A senior member of the Chamber of Commerce in Moscow once said that any mention of the word ‘oligarch’ had the average Russian reaching for a gun. That’s because much of the population is furious at the way the national wealth was passed to a handful of hustlers in a series of sweetheart deals with Boris Yeltsin. In London, however, the word ‘oligarch’ produces a very different reaction, inspiring an enterprising collection of opportunists to reach for the telephone. Like the impoverished heirs to dukedoms who married the daughters of rich Americans in

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 October 2005

If you are not part of the ‘selectorate’, you feel annoyed at the suggestion that Gordon Brown can become prime minister by acclamation and without a general election. It is not so much that another candidate might be better — though I rather like the look of Alan Johnson, the Trade and Industry Secretary — it is just that a party’s choice of leader is a very different thing from running the country. The country should decide on the latter. Of party leaders since the war chosen while in government only Harold Macmillan could be accounted any sort of success. The others were Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan and

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

An economic cyclist’s upbeat view of British manufacturing

Everyone seems to be talking about bicycles. This week’s eye-catching initiative from the Department for Transport is a scheme to turn Brighton, Aylesbury, Derby and Darlington into cyclists’ utopias, at a cost of £1 million per town. Meanwhile, more and more people have taken to cycling in London since the July bombings — an observation that had its status as a new cliché confirmed by an airing in one of Bird and Fortune’s Islington dinner-party sketches on Channel 4. And the BBC Panorama reporter Stephanie Flanders made cycles (geddit?) the motif of her assessment this week of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship. To illustrate the fate of British industry on Gordon’s watch,

Stephan Shakespeare

Clarke’s advantage fades away

YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare on how the public would view the four candidates — if they were all better known Up to now, polls on the Conservative leadership have been flawed in a fundamental way: they have tried to gauge public reaction to a group of candidates, when one of them is much better known than the rest. But this contest is about the future — about how they might be regarded after they become leader, when the public gets to know them better. And so YouGov and The Spectator designed a poll to get some vital added insight. First, we asked 4,000 people representative of the UK electorate how likely

Peter Oborne

It could all come down to one speech

The annual party conference has been the occasion of the destruction of a Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, within very recent history. But more than 40 years have passed since a leader was last created at a conference. That was back in 1963, also in Blackpool. Representatives had already gathered when news came through that the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was severely ill and had determined to stand down. It was far too late to bring events to a halt. The conference went on but ceased to be the well-ordered and deferential affair beloved of party managers. On the contrary, as Quintin Hogg at once spotted, this was a hustings.