Society

Monday

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

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 18 April 2009

Q. Have you any ideas on how to deal with recurrent offenders in the party-present line? I have an old and intimate friend who always brings a present almost insultingly slight, but, more seriously, also invariably well past its sell-by date. One small jar of pickle was two years too old. Other old friends contributed to an important birthday bash a splendidly packaged bottle of whisky which on opening turned out to have been half-consumed. My view has always been that these little trials must be borne in silence (and with gratitude for being given anything at all); obviously to retaliate with out-of-date or used goods would be simply to

Peter Jones

Ancient & Modern | 18 April 2009

Damian McBride, the latest spawn of the Campbell, has notable forebears in the infamous delatores, or informers, of the Roman empire. They too worked with passionate servility to suck up to the emperor of the day by bringing to his attention those who might be considered dangerous to him. A trumped-up charge of treason would be brought against the victim, followed as often as not by his exile or death, an invitation to commit suicide being the preferred option. The great historian Tacitus sketches the typical delator for us in the person of Caepio Crispinus. He was assistant to the governor of Bithynia, Marcus Granius Marcellus, and brought an accusation

Peter Hoskin

Smeargate II: the dots get joined

Seems like Guido had his crosshairs trained on some other Labour insiders.  Tomorrow’s Sunday Times and News of the World are both running stories which implicate other members of Brown’s coterie in the plot to smear top Tories. According to the NotW report, a new email reveals that Ray Collins – the general secretary of the Labour party – chaired a meeting about the Red Rag website in Charlie Whelan’s office.  Whelan, Damian McBride, Derek Draper, Andrew Dodgshon and, ahem, the Mirror’s Kevin Maguire also attended.  Sounds like quite a crowd.   While the Sunday Times targets the Schools Secretary, no less: “ED BALLS, the schools secretary, used Damian McBride,

Martin Bright

The Last Word on the Katwala-Cohen Row… I Hope

Shiraz Maher, the former HIzb-ut-Tahrir member turned thoughtful opponent of Islamist ideology has made his position clear on Harry’s Place. I commend this article to anyone who wants to understand why large sections of the left have got themselves into a terrible muddle over this issue. Maher was the author of a report on radical Islam for the right-of-centre think tank Policy Exchange. The row erupted because he told Nick Cohen that he could never have written such a report for a left-wing think tank. This is the key paragraph: “The real issue  is how a liberal society responds to the challenge of ‘entryist’ groups who    seek to Islamise the public and political space. This

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What a broken ballot box tells us about the Labour party’s future

I expect that the selection of a Labour candidate in Erith and Thamesmead would normally be of limited interest to Coffee Housers. But the contest there, which has had to be suspended because of a broken seal on a ballot box, is a sign of the coming internecine war in the Labour party. Erith and Thamesmead has Georgia Gould, the 22 year old daughter of Philip Gould Blair’s pollster, competing with a candidate backed by Unite, the union that Charlie Whelan works for. The fact that even with Labour still in government this contest has become so fractious suggests that after a heavy defeat Labour’s internal discipline might come close