Society

Thursday

4 Dec 2008

Reid tells Smith how he’d have done things differently

No real bombshells in Jacqui Smith’s statement on the Damian Green affair earlier (video here). She pushed the same lines that we’ve heard from her throughout the past week: that it was right to involve the police; that she didn’t know anything about the arrest; that the leaks coming from the Home Office are a “serious matter” etc. etc. As Andrew Sparrow points out, the most eye-catching moment was an intervention by John Reid. The former Home Secretary’s been relatively quiet over the past few months – but he popped up with a point of order during the Speaker’s statment yesterday, and today he hurled this barb in Smith’s direction: “I have to

James Forsyth

Washington or Whitehall whispers?

As Matt reflected just after Obama’s election win, both David Cameron and Gordon Brown desperately want to be and be seen to be Barack Obama’s best friend. There’s a bit of a blow to the Cameron campaign today with a New Statesman story about how Obama branded Cameron a ‘lightweight’. But a close read of it suggests that the sources for this claim might be in Whitehall not Washington: “Instead, I have been told, Obama exclaimed of Cameron after their meeting: “What a lightweight!” He apparently also asked officials about Tory Euroscepticism. Soon, word about the rather awkward encounter between the two self-professed candidates of change made its way quietly

Lisa Hilton

Faithful to infidelity

Oscar Wilde said that one of the charms of marriage was that it made a life of deception essential for both parties. I agree; the opportunity to commit adultery is surely one of the few advantages of wedlock. Yet so zealously monogamous has our culture become that infidelity is agreed upon as the last taboo. It is the one crime that, all nice people concur, is Absolutely Unforgiveable. Amidst all the prurient judgments cast on poor Gordon Ramsay and his alleged mistress Sarah Symonds, the consensus is that he has committed a dreadful evil and that The Woman Pays. Sure you can accuse Ramsay of hypocrisy, if you think that

Peter Hoskin

Put your questions to Theresa May

Theresa May – the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons, and MP for Maidenhead – has kindly agreed to a Q&A session with Coffee House. Just post your questions for her in the comments section below. And, next Monday, we’ll pick out the best ten and put them to her. She’ll get back to us with answers a few days later.

Peter Hoskin

The Speaker’s inaction does not make him unaccountable

Steve Richards puts it pithily in today’s Independent: “The Speaker ‘was told’ the night before about a possible arrest. Did he not consider cancelling his plans and asking a lot of questions? Did the Serjeant-at-Arms not consider asking questions as she ‘was told’ what was going to happen. This is a saga that exposes incompetence, as well as a lack of proper accountability.” The key point in all this is the Speaker’s near non-involvement in the raid on Green’s office – he happily outsourced every single bit of responsibility to the Serjeant of Arms. Now he’s trying to outsource the blame to her too. But, to my mind, his non-involvement

Wednesday

3 Dec 2008

Alex Massie

On Evangelicals and the American Future…

Hurrah for Alan Jacobs at the fabulous American Scene for alerting me to this excerpt from Laura Miller’s new book in which she visits Wheaton College, Illinois. (Wheaton is Billy Graham’s alma mater and the college at which Jacobs teaches.) Miller’s book is about how a religious sceptic can still lose themselves in Narnia, but it’s her comments about evangelicals that concern me here: I arrived at a different historical moment, just before the midterm elections of 2006 took Republican hubris down several notches. By that time, the GOP had enjoyed control of the White House and Congress for six years. The religious right claimed responsibility for a decisive portion

Alex Massie

Bush 2016!

Seriously. Well, not impossibly. Perhaps. Weirder things may have happened*. Yup, Jeb Bush is apparently considering running for Mel Martinez’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. I imagine Jeb would win handily. These days I think people forget that Jeb was the Bush who was supposed to be President. One of the hinge moments in recent American political history is election night 1994** when George W won the Texas gubernatorial race and Jeb lost his race to become governor of Florida. By just 63,000 votes. If memory serves, Bill Minutaglio writes in First Son (still, in my view, the best book about Dubya’s pre-White House life) that W was furious that Poppy and

Alex Massie

The Death of Ink

Another sign of the times: every single employee of the Glasgow Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times was sacked today and told to reapply for their jobs (on changed – that is, less favourable – terms and conditions of course) if they hope to have some sort of a future in newspapers. Or at least at the Herald Group. Early indications are that the company wants to cut the workforce by something like 20%. But journalists and readers alike should not fret: Managing director Tim Blott said: “We are creating an efficient operation fit for the 21st Century which will provide even more compelling and unique content for readers of

Alex Massie

Mexico Dispatch

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times: At least 38 people have been killed in Tijuana since Saturday, nine of them decapitated, in escalating drug-related violence that appears to have left in tatters a Mexican military offensive launched two weeks ago. To which NRO’s Mark Krikorian responds: “Better Get That Fence Built”. I suppose that’s a point of view, but a more rational response might be to rethink the drug policies that have a) been such a success in Colombia and b) are now being exported to Mexico. That might do more good than fretting about the possible impact all this might have on the American border.

James Forsyth

The Serjeant at Arms has to go

It is hard to see how anyone can have confidence in the Serjeant at Arms. It is incredible that having been warned that an MP might be arrested and that the police might search a Commons office, she did not think to check what the rules and precedents surrounding this were. This is nothing less than a dereliction of duty on her part. Some on the left are trying to claim that she is a victim of sexism and maybe some of her critics are sexists, but it is hard to see how anyone can think that she has performed her duties competently. It was telling that Harriet Harman—who no

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s mortgage surprise

A quick, capsule review of the Queen’s Speech debate in the Commons: Cameron was at his rapier-like best, while Brown performed his typical dodge-the-question act. But the PM did have one trick up his sleeve, and quite a big trick it was too. He announced an agreement between the Government and the UK’s 8 largest banks, by which downturn-hit homeowners will be entitled to defer their mortgage interest payments for up to 2 years. The Government will guarantee against any losses that the banks would otherwise suffer because of this. It’s odd that this got no mention in the Queen’s Speech itself (I suspect the plan was to unsettle the Tories

James Forsyth

Speaker’s ‘regret’ leaves Brown isolated

Michael Martin came close to apologising to the House when he said that he “regrets” that police entered Parliament and searched Damian Green’s office without a warrant. Tory grandees including Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith pressed the Prime Minister on whether he too regretted that all this had happened without a warrant. Brown was left looking rather lonely as he repeated his pre-packaged line that he respects the police’s operational independence. It’ll be interesting to see if Jacqui Smith will go further than this when she addresses the Commons tomorrow. During Cameron’s speech, the interventions of several Labour MPs show that they wanted to pull Cameron into this affair;

Peter Hoskin

The Tories fight back

The Tories aren’t going to take Peter Mandelson’s claims lying down, if Dominic Grieve’s interview with Sky News is anything to go by. The shadow home secretary has just said he thinks Mandy is unfit for office: “This morning, Lord Mandelson has been banging on about national security. We don’t believe there is any national security angle to it at all. This is fantasy land, being spun by Peter Mandelson. This is what worries me so much. The political element keeps on creeping back in. I don’t trust Peter Mandelson. I don’t think he should be in political office, I don’t think he’s fit for it.” Many will be sympathetic to Greive’s

James Forsyth

What Mandelson is up to

Over at Three Line Whip, Jame Kirkup muses whether Peter Mandelson has taken a vow never to give a dull interview. Certainly, from a hack’s point of view, Mandelson makes for great copy. But it is Mandelson who is getting the most out of this relationship at the moment. I suspect that Mandelson realised he was going to be covered in exhaustive detail on his return whether he liked it or not. His skill has been to turn this coverage to his advantage by using the press’s fascination with him to get his message across. He also understands how the 24:7 nature of media coverage and the rise of the

Lisa Hilton

Holla, ye pampered jades…

At risk of sounding like Glenda Slagg, don’tcha just hate those mealy mouthed drink aware advertisements which are crawling all over the Tube? You know: “Party this weekend – it was a party, right?”. Because we all need to feel just that little bit worse right now. What people seem to forget is that bingeing Britain is not a modern phenomenon. But until the temperance movement came along and encouraged everyone to die of cholera, no-one used to worry about it. Dr Johnson recalled that in his youth all the respectable people of Lichfield got drunk every night and no-one thought the worse of them for it. And at least

Peter Hoskin

Ceremony, bills and a joke

Nothing especially exciting to report on State Opening day yet. The Queen’s delivered her Speech, leading with the line that “My Government’s overriding priority is to ensure stability of the British economy during the global economic downturn” (see full text here). And Dennis Skinner’s delivered his traditional “joke”, asking whether there are “Any Tory moles in the Palace?” Much more likely that any fireworks will come later, when we’ll see both Michael Martin’s statement on the Damian Green arrest and Parliamentary debate over the Government’s legislative programme. P.S. Good point from James Kirkup on the deemphasising of constitutional reform.

James Forsyth

The political backdrop to the Mumbai attacks

For any CoffeeHouser trying to understand the relationship between Lashkar-e-Taiba—the group that are believed to have been responsible for the Mumbia atrocities—and the Pakistani government, I’d thoroughly recommend Steve Coll’s post over at The New Yorker. This section seems to sum it up: “On the one hand, the group’s bank accounts remain unmolested by the Pakistani government, which gives Lashkar quite a lot of running room; on the other, the group resents the accommodations reached between Pakistan’s government and the United States. Clearly, Lashkar knows what it must do to protect the Pakistan government from being exposed in the violent operations that Lashkar runs in Kashmir and elsewhere. For example,

Peter Hoskin

Bare-knuckle rhetoric from Mandy

Peter Mandelson’s performance on Sky earlier was remarkably venomous. Here’s the main thrust of it: “I also have to say I think that for many Conservatives, it is a self-serving smokescreen, behind which to hide their own apparent collusion with a Home Office official who was allegedly systematically leaking Home Office papers to the Conservative Party, in order to pursue his own personal political ambition… …I would like to know from the Conservatives whether their frontbench and their leader knowingly colluded with that civil servant in riding a coach and horses not only through the Civil Service code but also through the law.” Putting aside the strength (or weakness) of

Peter Hoskin

The Queen’s Speech: what to expect

What can we expect from the Queen’s Speech; the centrepiece of today’s State Opening of Parliament? So far as policy is concerned, it’s doubtful whether there’ll be any surprises. The Times has a great round-up of the measures likely to be contained in what’s being spun as a “fairness” programme, and most have been trailed weeks and months in advance of today. Perhaps one thing to look out for is the emphasis that’s placed on welfare reform. It’s top of the Times’s list of measures, but there has been some rumbling on the Westminster grapevine that Brown would play it down – or perhaps even jettison it – because it’s

Lloyd Evans

‘They treat me more like a devil than a god’

Lloyd Evans finds that Bernard-Henri Lévy is not the ageing French dandy of caricature but a serious intellectual with views on everything from Barack Obama to the Muslim veil Oh goody. He’s late. Every journalist wants the interviewee to miss the appointment, if possible by several hours. It gives us the advantage and obliges our subject to apologise or face being lacerated in print for the transgression. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy arrives 35 minutes after the agreed time and greets me with a disarming combination of lightly salted regret and a plausible excuse. In France, Lévy is so famous that he’s known by the simple acronym BHL, like a furniture