The new, online incarnation of the Spectator Wine Club has just been launched – you can access it by clicking here, or by using the tab at the top of this page. We’ve partnered with the very best merchants to bring you some of their finest wines at prices to suit your palette. And there are also feature articles, tasting notes, insider tips from wine-sellers, and even a discussion board. To find out more, just read my full introduction here. Cheers!
Gordon Brown ignored the Bank of England’s advice and sold off half this country’s gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 at an average price of $275 an ounce. Last night, gold reached $870 an ounce in after-hours trading in New York.
Life – or rather the BBC – emulates The Wire. Frank Sobotka would, I hope, be proud. Full details here.
There’s some pretty tough competition at the moment for the award for the weakest statement of support for the Prime Minister by a Cabinet Minister. But John Hutton is probably the front-runner for his comments on the Andrew Marr on Sunday. Marr asked Hutton whether he was on the side of the rebels or Gordon Brown. Here’s how Hutton replied: JOHN HUTTON: Well I’m, I’m on the side of the government and the Prime Minister. I’m in the Cabinet. It’s my job to support… ANDREW MARR: So, so… So you would tell those people… JOHN HUTTON: … the work that the Prime Minister is doing and the work that the
The most interesting conversation in Westminster right now is what a new Labour leader could do to restore the party’s fortunes. One idea that could be particularly politically potent is a bold move on tax. Since Labour came to power, the number of people paying the top rate of tax has pretty much doubled. Brown has kept Labour’s 1997 manifesto promise not to raise the top rate of income tax but he has done so at the cost of making more and more people pay tax at the top rate; a typical Brown dodge. This fiscal drag has had the same effect as an actual tax rise and resulted in
Anne McElvoy has some telling details from inside yesterday’s meeting of the cabinet in her Evening Standard column this morning: “It can’t go on for much longer,” says one Cabinet member who described yesterday’s meeting as “excruciating: an embarrassment”. “It’s not just the country that’s not listening to Gordon any longer: the Cabinet isn’t listening to him. Something is going to give. There were people staring at their hands, some scribbling on their papers, someone else on their BlackBerry.” Anything rather than look their own leader in the eye. Mr Brown told his Cabinet that issues about the direction of the party should not be raised until after the present
One of the things that the rebels have got right so far is not turning this into a personal campaign against Gordon Brown. The Labour party is reluctant to dump its leader, they really don’t do assassination, and so the clever thing to do is to coax rather than bully them into it. By this standard, George Howarth’s remarks comparing Brown to Neville Chamberlain are a mistake. On Newsnight, Howarth declared: “He’s so unpopular that no one can remember a time since Neville Chamberlain, after Hitler invaded Norway, that anyone was so unpopular. “And we can’t allow that situation to continue.” This is the kind of remark that might create
My one regret at having retired from the National Health Service is that I no longer receive official circulars. I used for a time to derive a small secondary income from publishing them; and such was their idiocy that very little commentary on my part was required. They spoke for themselves; it was money for old rope. I am glad to say, however, that old friends keep me in touch with Gogolio-Kafkaesque-Orwellian developments in Europe’s biggest employer (now that the Gulag is no more). One of them, a senior doctor, recently passed on to me an email written about him by someone rejoicing in the title of Lead Nurse Manager,
Martin Jacomb assesses the extent of the damage to the banking system so far — and the effectiveness of responses by central banks, regulators and lawmakers Will it be short and sharp, or drawn out and deep, with lasting damage? A recession is upon us, but no one knows its path. Its course and its force are, like Hurricane Gustav’s, unpredictable. It is already more than a year since it all started. Banks everywhere have made enormous losses; some, even important ones such as Lehman Brothers in New York, have collapsed, and more may do so. They are being blamed for the catastrophe. But it is not as simple as
It’s not often a chap gets to shake a hand that has personally accounted for 31 Japs in the space of one battle. But such was your correspondent’s privilege outside the Royal Courts of Justice this week at the launch of a splendidly righteous case demanding fair and just citizenship rights for Gurkha veterans. A tearful Joanna Lumley was there — her father fought with the Chindits as a major in the 6th Gurkha Rifles — as was a typically well-mannered crowd of perhaps 300 ex-Gurkhas and their families. But the stars of the show were the two frail, elderly men sitting impassively in wheelchairs, with their un-mistakable crimson-ribboned bronze
On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’ ‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For the half-second of that pause, I actually wondered whether he was serious. And that was just Monday: since then, things have got really frightening. The former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says the current financial crisis is ‘a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event’, but he’s wrong. There has never been a situation like this:
A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking Hyde Park. The flat had been the scene of much recent political activity, used as a den by Gordon Brown who would invite his allies around and plot his personal strategy, pausing only to watch the football and eat pizzas. But that night the Labour guests had cleared off, and the then Tory Europe Minister was treated to the disorientating experience of being served supper by the butler of a Labour MP. As the conversation turned to the inevitable Labour victory, Mr Robinson said how
Alan Powers on Parliament Square Does nobody love Parliament Square? Days before the Mayoral election, Tristram Hunt called it a ‘terrible place: inaccessible, ugly, polluted and grotty’ in the Guardian. When the Mayor of London cancelled the scheme for pedestrianising at least two of the roads around the square within days of his election, there was dismay that the still-unpublished plans for its improvement should be abandoned. If the proceedings within the Palace of Westminster are sometimes absurd, this parallel drama on the street outside was equal in sound and fury. Could commentators distinguish between the square itself and the traffic that circulates around it? Hunt failed to look beyond
Today’s episode of the Sarah Palin chronicles comes via Matt Yglesias who asks: I continue to be baffled as to how moose hunting, which surely almost nobody in the United States does given what a small portion of the country is within moose range, has been construed as an all-American hobby. I assume Matt is being arch here, since really this is not something that should baffle him or anyone else. Hint: the moose is not the heart of the matter. It’s the hunting that counts and, of course, the unapologetic, natural way Palin talks about hunting and outdoor life. It’s not a ploy or a fatuous attempt to curry
Gordon Brown’s reply to David Cairns’s resignation letter ends as follows: I will always respect the views of others both in the party and the government but believe that both function best when we show unity. Gordon Brown This strikes me as a revealing choice of words. Brown doesn’t say the party and the government work best when they are united but when they show unity, a subtle but important difference. Maybe I’ve been staring at this for too long but it does seem that Brown is accepting that the party and the government are divided about his leadership but arguing that it is best not to talk about it
One of the striking things about this uprising is how the plotters keep framing their positions perfectly—evidently some people in the Labour party haven’t forgotten what the party learned from Blair, Campbell and Mandelson. On Saturday, Joan Ryan presented her request for nomination papers as a matter of party democracy. Today, David Cairns’s resignation letter contains an argument that is going to resonate with an awful lot of the PLP. Cairns says that he wasn’t in favour of people requesting nomination papers in the first place, but now that the leadership issue is out in the open the Labour party cannot go on pretending it doesn’t exist. Ultimately what might
The one thing – apparently – saving Brown’s skin since the start of the “rebellion” last Friday is the fact that he has the backing of the entire Cabinet. But how far have they really backed him? Here’s a list of comments (or – tellingly in some cases – lack thereof) made by all Cabinet members since this all started. I’ll let CoffeeHousers decide how many of them are ringing endorsements of the PM… Unequivocal support: Ed Balls: “Everyone in the Labour Party knows that if you don’t stick together and you’re not unified, then you can’t succeed. I don’t think there’s anyone in Cabinet who disagrees with that…No one on the doorstep is
I have a sneaking feeling that the cabinet ministers Gordon Brown should be most worried about are Douglas Alexander and Des Browne. Both are former Brown loyalists who have been shabbily treated by their boss. If either of them turned on the PM, it would prove that this is not a Blairite plot or a Southern rebellion but a movement of those who have come to realise that Brown is simply not up to the job. Douglas Alexander has been frozen out by Brown, made to carry the can for the election that never was. Those who stayed up watching the BBC’s coverage of Glasgow East will remember how close he
Nick Robinson has some well-informed speculation up on his blog that David Cairns, the Minister of State at the Scotland Office, is the minister who is planning to resign. Cairns a friend of Siobhain McDonagh, who got this ball rolling.
Steve Richards declares that the “Labour Party is in the worst of all possible worlds” in his column this morning. It is hard to disagree with him. The actions of the rebels have brought the leadership question into the open and made it the dominant topic in political discourse yet there aren’t enough of them to bring down the PM. But, equally, Brown is too weak to reassert his authority. So, the leadership speculation will run and run. It is the prism through which everything Labour does will be seen. But, as Steve argues, those who want to bring down the Prime Minister should want to put something in his