Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What’s next on expenses?

Here is a quick take on some of the questions being discussed in Westminster right now: Are the Telegraph done when it comes to Labour and Tory frontbenchers? The Tories seem confident that there is no more to come out about their top team. The situation on the Labour side is less clear. How will the Lib Dems come out of this? One Tory MP I spoke to on Saturday viewed the Lib Dems as key to how much damage these revelations would inflict on the two main parties. If the Lib Dems can play the clean card, then they could cause real problems for all incumbents who have been

Peter Hoskin

Too little, three days too late

Is Gordon Brown playing catch-up, or is his belated apology over the expenses scandal all part of some cynical plan?  Sure, Cameron dropped the S-word yesterday, so Brown may be scrambling to prevent the Tory leader taking an unassailable lead on the issue.  But it does strike me as odd that he’s waited for the day when Tory expenses are in the spotlight, especially as it was so clearly obvious that some sort of apology was warranted before now.  Could he be slyly suggesting that only the Tory revelations require an apology “on behalf of politicians, on behalf of all parties”; that they’re somehow worse than the Labour ones?  I

Peter Hoskin

We don’t do contrition

If you thought your opinion of Parliament couldn’t sink any lower, then think again.  This morning’s papers contain a couple of grim revelations about how MPs are responding to the expenses scandal, and they certainly fit in with the sorry pattern of denial and evasion that we’ve witnessed so far.  Take the email sent out by the Parliamentary Labour Party to Labour MPs, and covered in the Independent.  It hardly strikes a contrite tone, as it tells them that: “It would be easy for the public to gain the impression from this [media] coverage that MPs are generally claiming excessively or outside the rules laid down by Parliament, which is

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Tories tainted by expenses revelations

There is a danger with these expenses stories that we get inured to them, that nothing shocks us any more. For this reason the shadow Cabinet is benefiting from being featured fourth not first in the Telegraph’s series. The revelations are bad. The actions of Francis Maude and Chris Grayling strike me as most serious. If there are going to be no sackings from the shadow Cabinet over this, and word is that there won’t be, the Tories should at least rethink Grayling’s role as their attack dog, they need someone who is purer than pure for that role. Alan Duncan’s gardening claims were clearly excessive, as even the Fees Office pointed

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Gove: The full story

So has Michael Gove been caught home flipping? What I heard about the latest revelations, it struck me that he mentioned his home moving in an interview with The Spectator back in September last year. The write-up is here, but in the magazine piece I left out his full explanation behind his house move. Here it is:- We lived full time in Surrey Heath and essentially the basic thing was the amount of time I had to spend with my family was so small and getting smaller that we just had to take a decision.  My main aim was how can I maximise the amount of time that my wife and

Peter Hoskin

Now Cameron must act

So the truth is now out on the shadow Cabinet’s expense claims.  Alan Duncan claimed £4,000 of gardening costs.  Gove and Lansley are alleged to have “flipped” their second home designations, as well as spending £1,000s on home furnishings and renovations.  Francis Maude and Chris Grayling have tidy property portfolios going.  And Cheryl Gillan claimed for dog food.  The Telegraph has full details here. Tories will be relieved that the “top three” – Cameron, Osborne and Hague – are adjudged to have “relatively straightforward claims,” although Osborne is said to have claimed for a chauffeur.  So the question now is how the Tory leader responds to the revelations, and whether

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Gove didn’t flip, he moved

I know defending MPs is a hard sell right now, but Michael Gove seems to be getting an unfair rap in the coverage. He is under fire for having flipped his second home designation but he did so because he moved homes. In other words, the property that was his second home genuinely changed. Gove discussed this in an interview with Fraser (he’ll have more on this soon) how he initially tried to live in his constituency full time and then found that simply was not possible with his work and family commitments so moved back to London. He has not sold any properties he brought with taxpayer-supported loans or

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Telegraph on the Tories

The Telegraph has posted a preview of its coverage of the shadow cabinet’s claims, which will feature in tomorrow’s paper. Here are the key points: “Tomorrow the Telegraph will disclose instances where Conservative MPs have gone to great lengths to ensure their country properties are maintained at taxpayers’ cost. One shadow minister has had piping repaired that stretches under his tennis court. Another leading front bench Tory has claimed thousands of pounds for the upkeep of his garden. A senior member of the shadow cabinet claimed for 25 light bulbs to be replaced in his second home in West London. Another has used his designated second home allowance to upgrade

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Moran doctrine

How, you might ask, do these MPs with their snouts in the trough justify it to themselves? Margaret Moran, the Luton MP who has claimed for her partner’s home in Southampton, gave her rationale to BBC1’s Politics Show earlier. MARGARET MORAN: My partner works in Southampton.  He has done for twenty years.  If I’m ever going to see my partner of thirty years, I can’t make him come to Luton all the time. I have to be able to have a proper family life sometimes, which I can’t do unless I have, er, you know, I, I share the costs of the Southampton home with him. ANDREW SINCLAIR: Why should

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Another blow to the Budget’s credibility

The expenses scandal is becoming more depressing all the time. There are no apologies forthcoming and too many politicians want to circle the wagons against any kind of scrutiny. As Jonathan Isaby notes, Theresa May is refusing to say any MP has behaved immorally and is instead “blaming the culture that has grown up in Parliament.” This is a quite shocking denial of the moral agency of the individual, the worst kind of crime is all society’s fault claptrap. As for James Gray, words fail me.     There are, though, other stories developing that are worth keeping an eye on. The News of the World reports that: “In a major snub

Peter Hoskin

Move over, Darling

Ok, I know – deckchairs, Titanic, and all that.  But a reshuffle rumour in this morning’s papers is still worth mentioning.  Both the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Mirror are reporting that Brown could take the “nuclear option” of moving Alistair Darling to the Home Office, and installing someone else as Chancellor.  As the Telegraph puts it: “If Mr Darling was moved, sources said, the new Chancellor was likely to be either Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary; David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary; or Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary. The source said: “Alistair will have had two of the toughest years one could possibly imagine as Chancellor. There is a case

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour spent £1.2 million on the election that never was

Unsurprisingly, expenses stories dominate the Sunday papers. But an interview with Peter Watt, the Labour Secretary General during the Blair-Brown handover who had to resign over the Abrahams affair, caught my eye. Watt’s main point is that he was left hanging in the wind by Brown but his comment about the election that never was strikes me as important: “No matter what anyone says, the election had been called and was then cancelled. We had been working on it for weeks. We spent £1.2m in immediate preparations” Brown’s bottling of that election and his inability to concede and move on from that proved that Brown couldn’t change, that he couldn’t

Saturday

Melissa Kite

Real Life | 9 May 2009

Being a naturally negative person I make it my business to subscribe to something called ‘Marty Dow’s positive-thought service — We can change the world one thought at a time!’ These are nice little ‘affirmations’ which arrive in my personal email exhorting me to breathe, fill my thoughts with light, visualise myself as a child of God, and so on. The other day a particularly inspiring thought arrived, all about making a conscious decision to think of a world filled with love and hope. I did the guided meditation which followed, relaxing, letting go of past experiences, releasing the old patterns, becoming open to God’s design for me. The problem

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 9 May 2009

I met Digger 30 years ago in a plastics factory. We put in 12-hour shifts on adjacent injection moulding machines, which is a good way to get to know somebody, and we knocked about together after work, mainly in pubs, for a year or so, and then I went away and we lost contact. Six weeks ago he sent me an email. He’d recently taught himself computer skills and gone online and he’s getting in touch with all his old English buddies, he said. He was living in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, working for a mining company. He takes geologists into the outback, sets up their camps and generally looks after

Taki

High Life | 9 May 2009

New York We had a preview of sultry August here last week, with temperatures going as far up as 93° Fahrenheit in Central Park, filled to the brim by girls in their summer dresses, and others less modest in their tiny bikinis. For some strange reason, one doesn’t notice men in their summer best, not that men dress nowadays for a walk among the magnolias and cherry blossom. Summer is etched in my psyche as the time for girls. The acrid tang of heat emanating from the sidewalks, the breezes of late afternoon, the whiff of perfume of a passing beauty all help. Summertime was a dress rehearsal of coming

Robin Oakley

The Turf | 9 May 2009

There are trainers who greet winners by noisily embracing their owners, planting smackers on everything in sight from the horse to the clerk of the course and suddenly becoming voluble blood brothers with racing writers they have previously shunned like slugs in their lettuce. And then there is John Oxx, the Irish maestro from whom a significant display of emotion is a brief adjustment of the tie knot or a ruminative stroke of the chin. After his unbeaten Sea The Stars had won last weekend’s 2000 Guineas in a thrilling race from Brian Meehan’s Delegator, Oxx was as quiet, courteous and painstaking as a Classics professor. Immediately he declared the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 May 2009

Thirty years, almost to the day, after we greeted our first woman Prime Minister, we greet our first woman Poet Laureate. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, who was careful not to press the sex point, Carol Ann Duffy describes her own appointment as ‘a historic day for women’. She says she wants 300 years of female poet laureates, to balance the past three centuries of males. She has lots of ideas about ‘the vocation of poetry’, and wants to use the laureateship to get her fellow poets into schools, preach about how homosexuality (she is a lesbian) is ‘a lovely, ordinary thing’ etc. I fear that the post may suffer from what

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 9 May 2009

A heads-up is one of those slangy terms that are disreputable not from their semantic content but from the company they keep. It is a cliché in the mouths of dull management types. The meaning has changed in its short life. Currently it means ‘an informal briefing’: ‘I’ll just give you a heads-up on the development of the budget compliance procedure.’ It used to mean ‘an advance warning’. As with most clichés, the origin of the dead metaphor is unknown to its users. It seems to be from aeronautics. A head-up visual display was one by which a pilot could read his instruments without averting his eyes from the course

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 9 May 2009

Monday Good job we don’t do negative campaigning any more. If we did we’d have to start a unit called Blears Smears! As it is, in this post-McBride era, we are simply setting up Operation Ginger Whinger. Much more professional. We need to combat any potential threat from the tiny, squeaky woman even if it does seem unlikely that she could lead a government. It is curious, isn’t it? A once mighty party coming up with a man who waves a banana and a miniature person on a motorbike as candidates for the leadership. There’s something suspicious about how rubbish it is. Nigel says he’s sure they’ve got someone sensible

The Spectator

Letters | 9 May 2009

Taxing questions Sir: Fraser Nelson writes (‘A tale of two Gordons’, 2 May) that internal Treasury documents justify the 50p tax rate on the basis that ‘Karl Marx’s progressive tax structure was designed so that the tax burden was heaviest on those who were most able to contribute’. Certainly, Labour spokespersons daily repeat this cosy doctrine about the taxation of the rich, in exactly these words. But where is Marx supposed to have said it? For Marx, the demand for progressive taxation was purely part of his revolutionary programme to destroy existing social institutions, not to make them fairer. In his time, the most that reformers were demanding was that