Society

Monday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What kind of Labour MP had never heard of Damian McBride until Smeargate?

Guido flags up the news that Damian McBride is facing expulsion from the Labour Party. His local MP, Rudi Vis, has said that he supports expulsion and that he has “never even heard of [McBride] before”. Now, I’m sure some Coffee Housers will be applauding Vis, who has been the MP for Finchley and Golders Green since 1997 and is standing down at the next election, for having kept his distance from McBride. But it strikes me as almost negligent for an MP to support someone for leader of their party without knowing anything about the people they surround themselves with. If you want to understand who Brown is, look

Peter Hoskin

How much fiscal tightening will we see?

One of the questions doing the rounds in Wesminster today is whether Alistair Darling’s £15 billion of efficiency savings represents all – or most of – the fiscal tightening that will be in Wednesday’s Budget.  So far, the reports coming out of the Treasury are inconclusive, although it’s worth pointing out this passage in the FT: “[A] wait-and-see approach, Mr Darling is likely to argue, will give a future government more time to restore prudence to the public finances without killing any economic recovery. The Treasury believes that economic uncertainty is so great at the moment that it makes no sense to set a detailed strategy for deficit reduction when

Elizabeth Truss

Budget 2009: The waste myth

Peter Gershon, David James and many others have scoured government for rare prey; wasted expenditure that no-one wants. And there are indeed signs that a culture of plenty, and a lack of cost control, has generated fat in Whitehall – the many new subdivisions of the Communities department testify to that. However, the unacknowledged truth is that the majority of government expenditure has taken place for a reason, however spurious, and there will be objections if it is taken away by what economists describe as the “losers”. In our new report “Back to Black”, Reform argues that politicians will have to go beyond waste to achieve necessary reductions; tackling programmes

James Forsyth James Forsyth

IFS: Past performance suggests that a 40p top rate would generate more revenue than a 45p one

The latest release from the Institute for Fiscal Studies is going to restart the whole 45p rate debate: “If people respond as they did to the last set of changes to the highest income tax rates, in the late 1980s, then the new 45% band will actually reduce the Government’s revenue slightly, as the existing 40% income tax rate is the one that would generate most revenue.” This confirms that the 45p rate is about politics not revenue. But it doesn’t change my view that the leadership is right not to engage on this issue. If the Tories announced that they would repeal a new 45p rate on those earning

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ex Labour Cabinet Minister: Brown is ‘the biggest liar in modern politics’

It is no secret that there is real hatred between some ex-Blairite Cabinet Ministers and the Brownites. But this quote in Trevor Kavanagh’s column shows just how poisonous relations are: “We’re down to 26 per cent, but there is nothing to stop it going lower,” said an ex-Cabinet minister. “We are in freefall. “People accused Tony of telling lies but Gordon is the biggest liar in modern politics. “The question on election day will be: Do you want Brown for another five years? Millions and millions of voters are going to say NO.” The problem for Labour is that the press will eat up this kind of quote, counter-quote stuff.

Peter Hoskin

Darling’s £15 billion to keep up appearances

So Wednesday’s Budget will feature some £15 billion of spending cuts.  Here’s how the Times reports the latest bit of early information: “The Treasury has already said it is seeking efficiency savings of £5 billion by 2011. Mr Darling is expected to say that should be extended by a further £10 billion over the following three years. There will be huge implications for public-sector jobs as ‘back office’ functions are pared back. Only frontline services such as education will have budgets protected.” You sense this is a rhetorical device, as much as anything; an opportunity for the Government to say that they’re taking the “tough decisions” to “get our economy

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Brown’s rage at Blair’s victory

Tales of Gordon Brown’s temper are not uncommon in Westminster. Some, I am sure, have grown in the telling. But this one from Tom Bower, who wrote a prescient biography of Brown, has the ring of truth about it: “Witnesses to Brown’s reaction to defeat for the Labour’s leadership in 1994 mentioned his volcanic temper, with him kicking a television set broadcasting ITV’s report of Blair’s victory. Senior Treasury officials after 1997 reported his volatile moods – smashing computers on to the floor or kicking furniture – when the spotlight shone on his weaknesses.” I’m reluctant to read too much into Brown’s fits of temper, there are people who are

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Byrne backs Balls

My, how Balls is rattled. He has made Liam Byrne throw his body in front of the bullets with a statement declaring that he co-chairs those Wednesday afternoon attack meetings. Not that he’d regard them as such. Here are his words, with my thoughts: LB: “The Sunday Times’ write-up of the weekly meetings I co-chair with Ed is not only inaccurate, it’s nonsensical and pretty offensive.” FN: The many other details the No.10 whistleblower provided are accurate, we presume. And seeing as the nature of these meetings are so contested by No.10, what about releasing a list of attendees and isues discussed to lay the matter at rest? LB:  “In

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Quote of the day | 19 April 2009

Alastair Campbell’s commentary on the activities of the Brownites has been full of wonderfully barbed comments, but I think this one takes the biscuit: “I see both Alistair and I appear in a list of people allegedly smeared or briefed against by a unit run by Ed Balls. All I cay say is if so, I was unaware of it.”

Martin Bright

A Ray of Hope and the Budget for Jobs

Three pieces of essential reading today.  Ian Kirby’s allegations in the News of the World placing  Labour General Secretary Ray Collins in meetings about the Reg Rag website;  Jonathan Oliver  Isabel Oakeshott and Jon Ungoed-Thomas”s analysis of the Damian McBride smear scandal in the Sunday Times (Oliver himself has long been a target of the Brownites) and Heather Stewart and Larry Elliott’s interview with Alistair Darling in the Observer.   It has been my concern for some time that briefing from next door would distract Darling from the job in hand. But the interview suggests he has kept his eye on the ball: housing, jobs and young people have to be the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Balls contra The Truth

Is the trail leading to Ed Balls? It seems that it was more than James and myself who found his “Damian who?” interview on Radio Four outrageously implausible. It was enough to have someone inside No10 tell all to Isabel Oakshott from the Sunday Times. It was Balls, he says, who recruited McBride from the backwater of the customs and VAT division.  And Balls who started using McBride as a personal spin doctor. I say in my News of the World column that Balls would use the Thatcher Room in No10 to chair those political meetings on Wednesday afternoon, which McBride would often attend. The more Balls fakes ignorance of

Peter Hoskin

The Tories should step around any more 45p tax traps

More and more details are emerging about this week’s Budget, including this eyecatching snippet in today’s Sunday Times: “Darling is also considering new postelection tax rises, which could include beefing up the planned supertax on higher earners. Last year the chancellor announced the introduction in 2011 of a 45% top rate of income tax for people earning more than £150,000. Darling has come under pressure from Labour colleagues to reduce this new top-rate threshold to £100,000 – a move that would lead to higher tax bills for 500,000 high earners.” Once again, this would set a 45p tax trap for the Tories – if Cameron & Co. stand against it,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Balls takes a beating

As Pete noted last night, Ed Balls is being drawn into the heart of the row over the political culture of Brown’s inner circle. An editorial in The Sunday Times declares: “when a senior minister seeks even greater power through being at the heart of a smear campaign, it is time to cut him down – particularly if he is not yet competent to perform the job to which he so desperately aspires. This, in essence, is the case against Ed Balls, the schools secretary” The Mail on Sunday reports that the infamous Wednesday meeting was a source of tension between Mandelson and Brown. Unless someone who attended this meeting

Saturday

Alex James

Slow Life | 18 April 2009

Possibly, the shoe was where it all started to go wrong for us as a species. Possibly, I say, the shoe represents the end of paradise. Possibly, we donned our size 12s and stomped right out of Eden. There we’d been, running barefoot through the trees with the sun on our faces, reconnecting with mother earth at every stride, a part of it all, part of a vast system that fitted us perfectly, until that very moment we stepped out of the invisible glove, out of the sensual world and into our shoes. Certainly, I’m happiest in bare feet, with nothing in my pockets. I mean, kick off your shoes

Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 18 April 2009

I’m virus aware. For example, I don’t touch door handles in public lavatories. If they’ve got in-swinging doors, I time my exit to coincide with someone else and let them grasp the handle. And I never, ever, touch the rubber handrail on Tube station escalators. Imagine what hundreds of thousands of commuting fingertips deposit on one of those during the course of a day! I suppose the paranoia is a leftover from my nursing days. Once you learn about the mechanics of infection, you hear it in every stranger’s cough or sneeze, and see it on every hotel TV remote. I’m always conscious, too, of the 40,000 potentially infectious droplets

Taki

High Life | 18 April 2009

New York I crossed the river last week and went into the heart of darkness. Unlike Conrad’s hero, it took me about 15 minutes by train, and there I was, right in the midst of a city bloated with squalor, oily storefronts, dilapidated tenements, vacant courtyards, and trash-strewn lots. I was the only white man in the station as I watched the arrest of a black hobo by two humongous black police officers. As the hobo was being led away, he screamed at me, ‘Give me a hundred dollars,’ and then broke up in hysterical, drunken laughter. It was three in the afternoon, and I had gone to Newark to

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 18 April 2009

Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks ‘trying to convince the banks to renegotiate the structure of the loans’. This encroachment by convince on to the territory of persuade has been going on for most of my life. It happens all the time now, but I do not feel moved to frighten the dog each time I detect it. My husband, I

The Spectator

Letters | 18 April 2009

Liddle’s Lent Sir: As someone who is employed by and works within the Church of England I have been waiting 20 years to see an article like Rod Liddle’s (‘The C of E has forgotten its purpose’, 11 April) appearing in a major British publication. He is accurate in nearly everything he says. The current church is sadly lacking in leaders of any serious Christian commitment, passion or confidence in the gospel. It is as if they prefer any religion to the Christian one, which they have pledged to ‘defend and stand for’ in their ordination vows. Bring back Bishop Nazir-Ali and sack the liberal self-loathing secularised bishops! Revd Richard

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 18 April 2009

Monday This is just silly. Why won’t anyone tell me what Dave didn’t have? I only asked if it wasn’t a verruca but Poppy got v cross and said: ‘Dave does not not have a verruca!’ in a really aggressive way. ‘Well, what wasn’t it then?’ I asked. ‘He didn’t not have athlete’s foot did he?’ Thought this was reasonable question but was locked in Austerity Room for three hours before Jed ordered my release. By then they’d had all the exciting briefings, including the one about boot polish I was so looking forward to. Why do they always keep this sort of stuff from me? I can cope with

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 18 April 2009

Armando Iannucci’s satirical movie about New Labour is a tribute to the Iron Lady It is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory on 4 May and, not surprisingly, the tributes have already begun to pour in. Most of these are from the usual suspects, but I was pleased to see that Armando Iannucci has joined the ranks of those paying their respects. Not that he meant to, of course. But his latest project — a satirical film about politics called In The Loop — turns out to be an unintentional paean to the Iron Lady. As fans of The Thick of It will know, Iannucci is an