Society

Johnson makes his move

So has Alan Johnson taken a first step towards the Labour leadership?  He’s written a comment piece on electoral reform for today’s Times – and the paper reports it on their frontpage with the headline “Johnson seizes intiative over Labour leadership.”  It’s hard to disagree.  While Johnson makes sure to mention Gordon Brown is his article (“Again the Prime Minister is leading…”), the measures he outlines are too strident, and the topic too important, for this to be anything other than an attempt to grab the limelight.  And while I’m not struck by Johnson’s proposed solution – a tweaked version of proportional representation – there are certainly benefits to running

James Forsyth

Time is running out for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions

There is a real danger that Iran acquires a nuclear capability before the US-led coalition works out what it is prepared to do to stop it. As David Ignatius writes in the Washington Post today, there isn’t any attractive solution to this problem: “The quiet, deniable covert activities undertaken so far haven’t stopped the Iranian program, and they’re not likely to do so in the future. There is no magic bullet. The best hope of stopping Iran from making a bomb is diplomacy, backed by the threat of tough sanctions, backed by the ultimate threat of overt military power”. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told

James Forsyth

Will Brown bring Blunkett back?

Patrick Hennessy has an authoritative piece in the Sunday Telegraph about the signs that Gordon Brown is set to recall David Blunkett to the Cabinet. Hennessy reports that Blunkett dined at Chequers with Brown on an evening when Wilf Stevenson, one of Brown’s closest friends and his adviser on ‘engaging with local communities’, was also in attendance. This suggests that Blunkett might be in line to take Hazel Blears’ job at the Department of Communities and Local government.  It is easy to imagine that Brown might view Blunkett as the ideal person to beat back the BNP; on immigration Blunkett likes to talk like a British Sarkozy. Brown might also

James Forsyth

Blair confidant: Tony knew Gordon wasn’t good enough to beat Cameron

The Independent on Sunday reports that Tony Blair has been into Downing Street to advise Gordon Brown. One can only imagine what Blair makes of the mess that the man who spent so long before plotting to take his job is now making of it. But judging by what John Burton, Blair’s constituency agent, writes in the Mail on Sunday, Blair can’t be entirely surprised by the situation: “After his farewell speech at Trimdon Labour Club in May, 2007, Tony told me he knew he would have been able to deal with Conservative leader David Cameron at the next General Election, but he didn’t believe Gordon would have it in

James Forsyth

Speaking out against Bercow

The vast majority of Tory MPs do not want John Bercow to be Speaker; I’ve only spoken to one who favours his candidacy. The Tories complain that Labour’s support for Bercow is a plot to appear bi-partisan while actually being crudely political. Today’s Mail on Sunday editorial is a punchy expression of this viewpoint: “It appears Gordon Brown and the Labour machine are seriously considering the officially Tory – but increasingly New Labour – MP John Bercow for the Speakership. Leaving aside the weirdly flexible Mr Bercow’s questionable qualifications for the post, this plan is actually disgraceful, and a sign that the Prime Minister and his circle have learned little,

Real Life | 23 May 2009

There was something hideously inevitable about the whole thing. I should have known it was going to happen. It was the most obvious thing in the world, when you think about it. I picked up my car from the Peugeot garage, having spent £1,200 on repairs taking two weeks and more arguing with mechanics than the astronauts of Apollo 13 must have had to go through as they were fashioning an escape pod out of the lunar landing module. When they finally brought my car out to me it was all shiny and perky looking. Even the alloys had been polished. It was, to all intents and purposes, perfect. I

Low Life | 23 May 2009

My last day in Australia I spent in Sydney. In the afternoon, under a blackening sky, I took the ferry out to Manly, sat on the beach and wrote a letter to my boy, enclosing a sample of Manly sand between the pages. Then I returned by ferry to Sydney, and on the way back to the hostel I stopped off at a city centre bookstore. While visiting Digger in Kalgoorlie, he’d praised a biography called A Fortunate Life as a classic of Australian literature, and I thought I’d see if they had a copy that I could look at and possibly buy. A.B. Facey was born in the goldfields

High Life | 23 May 2009

New York This being my last week in the Bagel, the butterflies have arrived with a vengeance. Stuttgart, I am told, will be no picnic. Two top judokas, one Japanese, the other German, are in my age group, which I find quite ironic. My boat is named Bushido — the way of the Samurai warrior — and my admiration for the Wehrmacht’s fighting qualities and spirit is no secret. The greatest fighting unit ever — and I include the Spartans, and the US Marines — was Rommel’s 25th Panzer Regiment of the 7th Panzer Division. I only hope the father of the German I will meet in Stuttgart was not

The Turf | 23 May 2009

Mother of Parliaments? More like the Ugly Sister of Parliaments these days. But without an expenses system like a roulette wheel permanently fixed to pay up, how can the rest of us find the money to have our moats cleared and our helipad hedges trimmed? As usual the Twelve to Follow relies on a scientific mix of racecourse bar gossip, blind hope and Timeform’s Racehorses of 2008 (£75 from Portway Press, Halifax, West Yorkshire WF2 9LP). Sir Michael Stoute’s yard is stuffed with distinguished animals like Conduit and Patkai. We might get better prices though on Confront, a one-time Classic hope who made an impressive seasonal debut winning a Newmarket

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 23 May 2009

Monday Dave wants an estimate. Says he wants us to ‘bottom line it’ for him. This is tricky. We’ve been ringing round constituencies all weekend and seats are coming up all over the place. Jed says we may have to bring in another A list. We’re going to need Cleanskins. More young women and people in their twenties with limited experience of all walks of life. More young women… more young women… Should I stand?!?! Where should I stand?!?! I would need a Surrey seat. But that doesn’t look so impossible any longer. Mr Gove seems to be hanging in. But what about Mr Grayling? Can’t believe I’m thinking like

Mind your language | 23 May 2009

William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time: I come along where wide-horn’d cows, ’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs, Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls. The milking time in which MPs have now been detected has already spawned two words, one of them being flip. It is quite distant in meaning from the action of Barnes’s cows’ tails. In the 17th century, 200 years before Barnes’s time, flip had appeared from nowhere as an alternative to fillip, meaning ‘a flick with finger and

Letters | 23 May 2009

Black as he is painted Sir: Taki is a wonderful man but his lament about Conrad Black (High Life, 16 May) cannot pass uncorrected. Conrad Black’s defence did not suffer because he was forced to rely on ‘friendly Canadian lawyers’. One lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, is Toronto’s top fraud defendant, while the second lawyer, Ed Genson, ranks among Chicago’s very best criminal defenders and would be offended to be called Canadian. In the event, both performed remarkably well, demolishing several key prosecution witnesses. Black pleads that he did not have sufficient money to hire better lawyers, but his filings with a Canadian court show that he still possesses a fortune, not

Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 23 May 2009

I flatter myself that I’m a Vegas insider, but in fact I’m just a regular sucker I am spending the entire month of May in Las Vegas making an American television programme and I am not having a good time. Before embarking on this trip, I indulged in all sorts of fantasies about what might happen to me in Sin City. Would I be ‘discovered’ by Steve Wynn who would give me the opportunity to reprise my one-man show at the Bellagio? In fact, the most banal and utterly predictable thing has happened: I’ve become addicted to gambling. According to the American Psychiatric Association, a ‘pathological gambler’ typically displays the

Dear Mary | 23 May 2009

Q. As a boy I was taught to stand up when a lady enters or leaves the room or indeed when she leaves and returns to the table in a restaurant. I have a new girlfriend and am moving in slightly different circles these days and wonder whether I might inadvertently be ‘giving offence’ to any feisty feminists by maintaining this practice. What is your advice, Mary? I.B., London SW3 A. It would be an unusually aggressive feminist who would take you to task for this heritage act of courtesy. Should there be aggro, however, just defuse the tension by blaming your age and claiming the habit was so deeply

King rains on Brown’s parade

An intriguing little story in the FT about the worsening relations between Gordon Brown and Mervyn King.  Apparently, our Dear Leader doesn’t like the downbeat rhetoric that the Governor of the Bank of England is deploying: “There is growing irritation in Downing Street and the Treasury towards Mr King. The prime minister and Alistair Darling, chancellor, have been left fuming by the governor’s interventions, most notably after his downbeat assessment this month of the economic outlook, a viewpoint pounced on by the Conservatives. Although Mr King’s forecasts were broadly similar to those set out by Mr Darling in last month’s Budget, the governor’s gloom-laden press conference at the launch of

Fraser Nelson

Andrew MacKay to step down

Only this morning, Andrew MacKay said that he would stand for election again – but after a conversation with David Cameron he has now decided to stand down at the next election. The open meeting he held had several calls for him to go, and there was talk of a petition. The grassroots momentum was significant. This, make no mistake, is a personal loss to David Cameron who relied on MacKay to be his eyes and ears in the backbenches. That Cameron has been prepared to say goodbye to Mackay shows that he’s prepared to lose people who matter to him – as well as those, like Douglas Hogg, who

James Forsyth

It’s ending in America

As the whole expenses scandal rumbles on, the economic crisis has been knocked off the front pages. But it hasn’t gone away. Today there’s an interesting article in the Washington Post saying that while the worst is over in America, the recession in Europe will be longer and deeper. (The numbers the Post mentions about Britain are particularly grim). Here are the key paragraphs of the article: “Nine months into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the free fall in the United States appears to be giving way to a more measured decline, but economists are struggling to find a steady pulse in European and other industrialized nations,

James Forsyth

What ungrateful ducks

From Sir Peter Viggers’s statement on his failed attempt to put a floating duck island on expenses: “it was never liked by the ducks and is now in storage.” Hat tip: Conservative Home