All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Is foxhunting David Cameron’s favourite sport? Does he ‘love it’, as Andrew Marr quoted him as saying on his BBC show last Sunday? As I pointed out earlier this week, no, he doesn’t. The quote in question never actually existed, and certainly not in the magazine that it was attributed it to – the quarterly
On the Andrew Marr show this morning, Ed Miliband fended off questions about any post-election deal with the Scottish National Party. He had two lines of defence. First, he said he wasn’t going to pre-empt the election result and that he was fighting to win the election everywhere including Scotland. Second, he was adamant that
What Ed Miliband lacks in charisma, he is attempting to make up for in polemic. Tragically for the UK’s future, this represents an ‘Americanization‘ of British electoral politics. In all likelihood, its origins are David Axelrod cynically taking a page out of the Republicans’ playbook. Fortunately, repeated screaming of ‘Benghazi’ as if it were a primordial voodoo incantation, is unlikely
Membership of the Conservative Party has halved under David Cameron, leaving him with fewer activists to help him in this election than were available to any of his modern predecessors. So how to fight a Labour Party that has not suffered from the same hollowing out? One answer is to bus in activists, which is being done via Roadtrip2015 — a
In 1914 some 1,500 men from ‘Churchill’s Little Army’, the First Royal Naval Brigade, retreated from the defence of Antwerp to the Netherlands. As a neutral country the Netherlands was obliged to intern any soliders from warring armies that crossed its borders to stop them re-joining the fight. The men were put in the ‘English Camp’ (or ‘HMS
Amidst the hullabaloo of the general election campaign, one thing that has generally gone unnoticed in Britain’s political discourse is the worsening Greek situation. You now have European finance ministers openly talking about the possibility of a Greek default. What has changed is that there is now no goodwill and very little trust between Greece
Lord Ashcroft has released his latest round of marginal polling, looking at some of the constituencies vital to the Conservatives’ hopes of remaining in power. Across the six competitive seats he has polled, there is a swing away from the Tories but this doesn’t mean they will lose them. Three of the seats polled are likely
Our last five Spectator debates have sold out, so we’re adding a new one at short notice – only for our subscribers. It’s an election briefing on Friday, 1 May where James Forsyth and I will go through the campaign as it looks so far, discuss the latest polling (and how to interpret it), what the campaign chiefs are
The Prime Minister’s claim that he supports Aston Villa has never been quite believed by football fans. And today, it seems, he has changed his allegiance – telling an audience (above) that they should support West Ham. CCHQ has not, as yet, come up with an explanation as to why he didn’t say Aston Villa (other
Today is the 100th anniversary of the first landings of the Gallipoli campaign by Anzac troops. The battle to take control of the Dardanelles and Bosphorous to open a supply route to Russia and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war would, in its eight months, leave 130,000 dead. The Spectator was to report the
Gordon Brown is saying some strange things. He is being chased out of Fife by the nationalist genie that he pulled out of the bottle, but snarling at the SNP as he does so. He made an extraordinary pledge yesterday when speaking in his soon-to-be-abandoned home of Kirkcaldy. ‘We can’t wait beyond May 8 so within 24 hours a
If someone accuses you of doing something that you haven’t done, there’s a really easy way of convincing them that you are not in fact guilty. The first thing you can do is deny the accusation. Very clearly, emphatically and categorically. Let me give you an example taken completely at random: ‘Are you accusing David Cameron
As polling day nears, everyone is trying to work out which way undecided voters will break. Contrary to what many predicted, Labour and Ed Miliband have had a pretty decent short campaign, although this hasn’t yet led to a polling lead. But the key question is whether Miliband is winning support from the undecided voters. A recent poll from
Dare Mr S suggest the BBC election website is a little skewed towards the red corner? Miliband’s foreign policy foray leads the hub, yet fails to give much coverage of the fact that his ‘attack’ has been criticised from all sides. Of all the top stories, only one could be construed as vaguely supportive of the Tories,
Can there be anyone curmudgeonly enough to take against Save the Children’s Den Day, a heartwarming event? – actually, make that an entire week, 29 May to 6th June – in which little children are ‘being sponsored to transform their sofa, school desk or even a boring cardboard box into magical super dens. And the money
A friend of mine was notorious at university for photoshopping every single photo of her that went onto Facebook. Every snap in a nightclub or lounging on the beach went through the same changes in RGB levels so that her tan appeared better. And she did look good, at first glance. To those who knew
Northcliffe House was host to a Fleet Street reunion last night, for the launch of Mail executive Robin Esser’s memoir ‘Crusaders in Chains’. After sixty years a newspaper man, Esser’s tome takes us from the glory days to the ‘chilling’ Leveson Inquiry. With inky old-timers Les Hinton, Dame Ann Leslie, Richard Kay and Eve Pollard
David Cameron and George Osborne’s campaigning is focused on seats the Tory party wants to hold onto, while Ed Miliband is taking the fight to seats Labour wants to win from them. That’s the view in Labour HQ, and they’ve got figures to back it up: Since 30 March, when the ‘short campaign’ began, Cameron
For someone who might be about to lose her seat, Jo Swinson seems very perky as she walks the streets of Bishopbriggs in her constituency. The Lib Dem, who is standing for re-election in East Dunbartonshire in Scotland, is busy trying to persuade people who have received their postal votes this week to back her.
With less than two weeks until polling day, it’s nice to see that Ed Miliband has discovered foreign policy as an important issue worth discussing. The Labour leader will attack the Tories today on a failure of post-conflict planning for Libya which has contributed to the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. The Conservatives have decided
For the first time in this campaign, foreign affairs are not only being discussed but also dominating today’s agenda. Ed Miliband is set to criticise the coalition’s record on foreign policy, putting at least some of the blame for the Libyan migrant crisis on David Cameron. To help guide you through the melée of stories
With the Queen’s birthday honours fast approaching, future awardees can take inspiration from Joan Collins on the suitable number of events required to celebrate one’s damehood. Writing in this week’s issue of The Spectator, Collins reveals that she attended not one but seven events in total. However, things got off to a questionable start when her husband Percy
As the Liberal Democrats fight for survival in the general election, word reaches Mr S that things in the yellow camp may be even more dire than first thought. Mr S received this Lib Dem leaflet from one of his sources, the small print of which seems totally incomprehensible. Surely things can’t be so bad that the
The opinion polls almost veered towards a trend today. ComRes/Daily Mail report in their latest poll that the Conservatives are four points ahead on 36 per cent, while Labour is on 32 per cent. Survation/Daily Mirror also put the Tories four points ahead on 33 per cent and Labour on 29 per cent. Alternatively, the latest YouGov/Sun poll has Labour two points
So farewell then Lutfur Rahman. On Thursday the Islamist-aligned Mayor of Tower Hamlets was found guilty of electoral fraud. The poll in which he was ‘elected’ has been declared void and he has now been barred from office. There is much to be said about this and the implications for British democracy as a whole
Anyone who has spent some time travelling on Southeastern’s packed-to-bursting commuter lines – elbows in the back and heads tucked under armpits – will no doubt today be cheering on the Transport for London commissioner Sir Peter Hendy: London’s commuter services are, as he says, ‘shit, awful’ and like ‘the wild west’. Hendy singled out
No speech that Ed Miliband has made over the past five years has generated so much derision on the right as when he divided capitalists into ‘predators and producers’. That was because everyone knows there is a lot of truth in Ed’s analysis. And worse, the legal system seems to support the predators. Today, a
The first rule of Fat Club is: don’t talk about Fat Club unless you are yourself ‘big and beautiful’, or what most of us would call ‘grossly overweight’. Or just plain ‘fat’. Otherwise it’s as much of a no-go zone as the salad bar at a Weight Watchers’ meeting. So it didn’t come as much
In the Daily Politics education debate just now on the BBC, Tristram Hunt declared that it was acceptable for an Education Secretary to send their own child to private school. Under questioning from Andrew Neil, Hunt said that it was fine in ‘certain circumstances.’ The other members of the panel—including Nicky Morgan and David Laws—then
Bashing the rich has become trendy. Last night, the Spectator hosted a debate at the Guildhall School of Drama on whether the rich have contributed their fair share to society, or if we should ramp up wealth taxes. It’s a very emotive topic and each of the speakers made a solid case for and against the motion:
This has, I think we can all agree, been the most stage-managed election ever. Nobody on a soap box, no punches thrown, no bigoted women. Just a seamless marathon of national messaging that starts with the Today programme and ends with Newsnight. It is the regional media, however, that feels the iron grip of the
I’ve just witnessed an extraordinary moment on the campaign trail in Edinburgh. No, it’s not this, but a political party leader talking to a real voter. This is Ruth Davidson, Tory leader, talking to a random voter in Edinburgh. I know he was a random voter because I ran after him to check. You never
Nobody’s perfect, are they? The IFS found something to criticise today for all the parties — the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and SNP — whose tax and spending plans it has examined. The main charges are of leaving questions about spending and borrowing unanswered: The Conservatives ‘have not been completely explicit about exactly what level of borrowing they would
The economic good news continues. Until now, the Achilles’ heel of the recovery was weak tax revenue – in part deliberate, as Osborne’s tax cuts meant the thousands moving into work got to keep more of their money. But figures out today (pdf) show that the tax haul was up 5.3 per cent in the