Culture picks | 20 February 2009
We’ve just uploaded some culture recommendations from the Spectator’s Arts Editor, Liz Anderson. You can read them here.
Society
Friday
Get ready for the return of shadow cabinet elections
One of the fun things about Labour’s return to opposition will be the return of shadow cabinet elections. Tony Blair never managed to change the fact that the Parliamentary Labour Party elects the shadow cabinet. This is going to cause some mighty ruckuses and put some rather odd people in Labour’s top team. Just imagine if David Cameron’s choice of shadow cabinet members was dictated by the Parliamentary Party. The rules are that Labour MPs get to vote for 19 members of the shadow cabinet, at least four of their votes have to be for female candidates. The results are then published with the candidates ranked in order of popularity,
Brown’s PFI dilemma
Good work by the Times, who are tracking the Government’s continuing problems on the PFI front. If you remember, numerous PFI projects are in danger of collapsing as the banks withdraw funding, and word was that Brown ‘n’ Darling would have to stump up £4 billion of taxpayers’ cash to fill the breach. I’d assumed that would mean the Government hawking more gilts and adding to our national debt, which has all sorts of implications for the off balance-sheet nature of these schemes. Turns out the Treasury may have something different in mind: “Billions of pounds could be taken from council staff pension schemes to bail out the Government’s PFI
Debt Britannia
The front cover of today’s Mail should be stuck on the wall of every MPs’ office in Westminster. It spells out the scale of the national debt burden in the starkest possible terms: £2,000,000,000,000 in big red numerals, with a post-script translating that to £33,000 for every “man, woman and child” in the UK. Thing is, the Mail’s figures – based on the ONS’s release yesterday – are probably a bare minimum. We don’t yet know full extent of the nationalised banks’ liabilities; there’s likely to be more debt-heavy government action over the next year or so; and Brown’s off-balance sheet ruses will add to the burden faced by taxpayers,
Does Brown hate Cameron and Osborne so much that he’d give up his job to defeat them?
Like Steve Richards in today’s Independent, I think it’s highly unlikely that Brown won’t remain Labour leader until the next election. But Richards does spell out an alternative scenario which is news to me: “It is still possible that Brown might go of his own accord before an election, without a new job offer. When things were going badly last time around, he told an ally that he felt guilty about what was happening to Labour under his watch. If he felt a Tory victory could be prevented by his departure he would consider going. I suspect that Brown would do anything to stop Cameron and Osborne securing power, including
Lessons from a great Antiguan Drama
Test match cricket is something else, isn’t it? Patrick Kidd has a splendid line making the point that test cricket is terrific because it is “a game in which it is much more exciting when something almost happens than when it happens all the time.” Granted, cricket’s detractors might cite this as evidence to support their prejudices, but who cares about them? Kidd is right. This was a great test match, conjured from the most unlikely circumstances. Full credit to the groundstaff at the ARG and, of course, to both teams who produced a match that vindicated the idea and reality of test cricket even as one of its greatest
The Adrian Mole Generation Should Step up to the Plate
It’s perhaps a step too far to mix a reference from a popular work of 1980s satirical fiction with a phrase borrowed from baseball in the headline of this piece, but somehow it seemed to capture the situation. With increased speculation about Harriet Harman’s leadership ambitions the time has come for the younger generation of Labour politicians (most of whom are a simillar age to Sue Townsend’s hero) to start sticking their heads aboove the parapet. A name that seems to be emerging as a possible runner is Treasury minister Yvette Cooper. I have often wondered whether we would ever see a husband and wife team in No. 10 and No.
Thursday
Credit Crunch Consequences
I admit it, I didn’t anticipate this one: Shark Attacks Drop; Expert Cites Ailing Economy. [Thanks to reader JT]
The shadow cast by the Davis agenda
Some eye-caching comments from David Davis, speaking at the launch of the Convention on Modern Liberty earlier. Here’s how the Guardian reports them: “I talked to Chris Grayling the day he was appointed to make sure that he was signed up to the what I call Davis agenda, and he is – maybe not quite as passionate as I am but it would be insane to be as passionate as I am on this issue,” he said… …However, Davis said it was the justice secretary, rather than the home secretary who had the “most important role” on the issue of liberties, adding that shadow justice secretary, Dominic Grieve, was “brilliant”.
The Tories are having a great and terrible day
So far as the Tories are concerned, today’s brought news of both the extremely encouraging and extremely ominous variety. The good news is all for the short-to-medium term. For instance, there’s been the constant drip, drip, drip of Labour leadership speculation, which undermines Brown’s position within his own party. And then, this afternoon, there’s been a damning indictment of Brown’s economic approach from the CBI’s Richard Lambert. Here’s what he said: “The government appears to have been fighting a series of forest fires rather than building a platform for economic recovery. There’s little sense of a coherent strategy about what’s happened to date … It’s hard to remember – let
The British Foreign Secretary gets stood up
Jason Cowley’s profile of David Miliband in the New Statesman is an engaging read. But one line in it stood out to me: “we waited for a group of Indian politicians to arrive for dinner (in fact, only two of the expected nine turned up)” How did it come to this, a British Foreign Secretary, and we are after all a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the fifth largest economy in the world, is not considered worth turning up to dinner with? This is more worrying than anything else that I’ve heard about Miliband’s (disastrous) India trip. It suggests a decline into irrelevance. PS I’ve put in
Stanford Calamity? Only for Antigua, not for cricket
There’s some good stuff in Michael Henderson’s column on the so-called Stanford debacle* today, even if he indulges himself with a rather rosy,soft-focus view of cricket’s past. The ideal of the village green bathed in evening sunlight with the vicar standing as umpire and children playing by the boundary and all that is a powerful, enduring image for sure but this English arcadia is only one thread running through the game’s history. A history that has been tougher, more scandalous and, often, meaner, than Henderson’s cosy view would have one believe. That’s to say, the sport’s history is well-stocked with cads and frauds and bounders and Allen Stanford is but
Is the Yvette Cooper for leader rumour really a kick at Balls?
The Evening Standard’s scoop that Yvette Cooper is being urged to stand as a ‘stop Harman’ candidate has sent the Westminster bush telegraph into overdrive. The speed with which the Cooper story is spreading is proof that we have now entered the stage of Labour party’s decline where no rumour is too far-fetched to be dismissed. Although, it is only fair to point out that the makeover and media training Cooper has had have worked; she has gone from being one of the worst frontline Labour performers to one of the best. Her intellect—if not her judgement—should also not be in doubt. Treasury civil servants say she has a far
Johnson tries to scratch the “Cameron veneer”
Alan Johnson’s sure putting himself about. After interviews last week with the Sunday Times and with Fraser in our own magazine, he’s now got a comment piece in today’s Guardian. Aside from the exaggerations it contains about Labour’s record on public service reform, it makes a rather odd argument. Johnson’s first point is that Tory health policy is beholden to provider interest and too light on reform – which is, to some extent, true. But – perhaps mindful that the same things could be said of Labour’s approach on education – he then goes on to attack the Tories’ transformative schools model for basically being too heavy on reform. Here’s the
Brown’s take on Harman
The rest of Labour seems sure that Harriet Harman is on manoeuvres, but Gordon Brown was adamant yesterday that there’s no truth to the Westminster gossip. He’s lying, I thought; it’s not as though he’d admit his deputy is undermining his position. But then this in today’s Telegraph: According to one key adviser, [Brown] does not believe reports that [Harman] is jockeying for position – not because he believes she is devoted to his cause, but because “he just thinks it’s preposterous anyone could even consider Harriet could lead anything”. Whether it’s true or not, the Harman story now has an irresistible momentum. Quotes like that above, while designed to
Wednesday
The Spectator Inquiry–Part Two
We’ve had a great response to our call for help in The Spectator’s wiki-inquiry into the causes of the recession. Our hope is to draw on the collective wisdom of our readers – and we’ve received plenty of it already. So here is the second draft of our inquiry. Please bend it, shape it, any way you want it. Suggestions very much still welcome – on what we can add and, just as importantly, remove: we don’t want to overcomplicate this. If you made a suggestion earlier that is not incorporated and you think it should have been, please leave a comment saying so. If you want a question inserted
Headline of the Day | 18 February 2009
It’s a rather terrible story, but this AP headline is a keeper: Berserk chimp heard during frantic 911 call as owner pounded him with a shovel. It wasn’t the chimp that called 911…
Scrapaccino
Peter Mandelson’s outburst about the chairman of Starbucks is set to go down in political folklore as the bookend to the mushy peas guacamole tale. (Before I’m corrected, I know it wasn’t actually Mandelson who said it, but that is the legend and, as they say, print the legend). The spiritual leader of New Labour attacking the head of the company that brought lattes and cappuccinos to middle Britain feels like the end of an era. But to be serious, it is interesting that Mandelson got so riled by what the foam man said. I suspect that Jane Merrick is right in her analysis: “the strength of his words in the
The Politico Future
At the New Republic, Gabe Sherman has a fun piece about the rise and rise of Politico, DC’s in-house paper for political intrigue and gossip. There’s plenty to consider: Politico is essentially a web-paper that carries ads in a small circulation print edition circulated on Capitol Hill and K Street. At the moment – though they say this is changing fast – it’s the print edition that makes the profits. Nonetheless, as a niche, but obsessed, audience there’s no doubting the impact Politico has made. The most entertaining bit of the piece is the sniffiness with which “old media” regard this whipper-snapper: Politico’s pace and self-promotion has irritated some in
The Obama administration must pursue a unified Iran policy
The greatest foreign policy challenge the Obama administration faces is Iran. The problem posed by Iran is compounded by the sheer number of ways in which Iran is a problem for the US. First and foremost, there is Iran’s nuclear programme. But then there is also Iran’s support for Shiite extremists in Iraq, its role as the major backer of the rejectionists of Hamas and Hezbollah and its desire to make life even more difficult for the US in Afghanistan. This makes policy coordination essential, it is no use the US pursuing one policy in one area only to undercut it elsewhere. But Michael Crowley’s excellent piece on Hillary Clinton’s