All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Lord Fink has confronted Ed Miliband over his allegation at Prime Minister’s Questions that the peer was engaged in ‘tax avoidance’. In a letter, Fink says Miliband should repeat the allegation outside the House of Commons, or withdraw it. You can read the full text of the letter below. Miliband’s question did seem to go
The Swiss list, or swizz list, dominated PMQs. Ed Miliband was keen to paint Cameron as the beneficiary of ‘dodgy’ donors who craftily side-stepped their tax bills and funnelled the proceeds back to Tory HQ. The stink also enveloped Stephen Green, given a peerage by Cameron, who ran HSBC at a time when it helped
Millionaire hippy Dale Vince OBE has written Ed Miliband a cheque for a quarter of a million to counter the struggling Labour leader’s business credentials. Worth some £107 million, Vince, who founded Ecotricity, claims ‘there’s no way to my mind that the Labour Party is anti-business’. And that’s not the only daft thing he has
The tragedy of the Rab C Nesbitt caricature is that there is a lot of truth in it – Scots do tend to have more problems with booze then those in the rest of the UK. Things are improving: today’s figures show that the alcohol-related death rate for men in Scotland is 29.8 per 100,000 –
First, Wolf Hall upset a number of members of the Catholic faith with its depiction of St Thomas More. The Bishop of Shrewsbury went so far as to claim that it inaccurately depicted More as a villain. Now, the show has managed to anger ardent gardeners too. In today’s letters page in The Telegraph, a
Here’s a preview of Rod Liddle’s column from this week’s Spectator, on the financial plight of The Guardian… One of the highlights of my week comes on a Saturday morning, when I make myself a cup of fair-trade coffee and settle down to read the letters page of the Guardian. My wife usually joins me
The stage was set for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. Just before the session, The Guardian revealed the names of various Tony donors who allegedly had accounts with HSBC’s Swiss bank. Miliband duly went for Cameron over the matter with some of his most personal attacks yet, accusing Cameron of being a ‘dodgy Prime Minister’
A few weeks ago, Boris Johnson posed a question in his residents’ survey for the Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. ‘Which issues are most important for the country as a whole?’ Fifteen subjects were offered for consideration. Not one mentioned defence or security, despite the threatening global scene. There is an election in May. The major
Odd though it may seem, I think I’m with Stephen Fry on the issue of the Baftas. The grand old poof – I mean that in an affectionate, rather than a disparaging or a prejudiced sense – has been criticised for his performance as compere at this fatuous awards ceremony. Too many expletives. Off colour
What seemed this time last year to be a little local difficulty in Ukraine has metastasised to the point where a peace plan drafted in Paris and Berlin may be all that stands in the way of war between the West and Russia. Over the months, many of those watching, appalled, from the safety of
Labour wants to keep up the pressure on the the Tories over the HSBC scandal today. Ed Miliband will inevitably have a go on the issue at Prime Minister’s Questions (though the odds on him mentioning the word ‘chaterama’ are 28/1), followed by an Opposition Day debate on tax avoidance in which the party will
From ‘Compulsory Inoculation’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915: IT is a little difficult to keep one’s patience with the Government’s attitude towards compulsory inoculation. It is a capital example of “Letting ‘I dare not’ wait up ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ the adage.” “The cat would eat fish, and would not wet her feet.”
All you want from Europe is free trade, cheap flights and the Eurovision Song Contest – the rest is bureaucracy. One of the contest’s many strengths is its generous, expansive definition of ‘European’. Its soft power is awesome, and effective. It reaches out to countries banging on the door of the West – nations the European Union
Labour is launching its women’s campaign tomorrow, and Guido has discovered that part of this special campaign is a special battle bus. A pink bus. A pink bus with ‘Woman to Woman’ on it. This is odd, from a party whose MPs are quite keen on campaigning for gender neutral toys and which lent its
Following my earlier story about the Tories deciding they can only rely on Lib Dems who are ministers to form a coalition majority after the election, I have learned that the rebellious backbench problem is worse than it first appears. The party has run out of MPs suitable to work as Parliamentary Private Secretaries. For
Under George Osborne, borrowing costs have fallen to record lows – as data released by the Bank of England today shows. And this, rather than pretending that he has been helping savers, should be his line of attack – after all, when borrowing costs are down so is the interest savers can earn. The effect Osborne’s cheap
Entering ‘Politicians are…’ into the Google search bar brings predictable results. Well, mostly. In amongst ‘liars’, ‘scum’ and ‘all the same’, Google suggests ‘lizards’: David Icke’s reptilian illuminati are still in the spotlight. Number five on the list is predictable: politicians are ‘out of touch’. Minding the gap has been central to British politics for
The Green Party have finally admitted that their numbers are a bit squiffy. No, not their bonkers universal minimum income plans, rather their artificially inflated membership data. Mr S has been digging around these figures since the Green leader Natalie Bennett boasted their membership had hit 52,000, yet he was assured – on the record
Why isn’t Ed Miliband at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference? Ed Balls tried to defend his boss this morning as he arrived at the event, saying it was ‘getting a bit trivial’ to ask who was attending which conference. The Shadow Chancellor said: ‘Ed Miliband has spoken at this conference a number of
As part of David Cameron’s efforts not to appear as the leader of the party of the posh, the Prime Minister is rarely seen in black tie. Last night’s Black & White Ball was no exception, with guests told to dress in ‘winter cool’ for the lavish Grosvenor House bash. Mr S isn’t sure what ‘winter cool’ looks like but judging
One good thing has come out of the fuss over the pope’s comments about it being ok to smack your children (so long as their dignity is maintained); it has flushed out the former Irish president, Mary McAleese, as tiresomely conventional in much the same way as her predecessor, Mary Robinson – the very incarnation of PC.
Jeremy Bowen’s half-hour long interview with Bashar al-Assad is being heavily trailed by the BBC this morning. And while it has little that is new it does provide an interesting insight into the Syrian President’s current situation. The main story from it is Assad’s confirmation that there is some line of communication between the Syrian
With the Tory’s Black & White Tie Ball to prepare for yesterday, it’s understandable that the brains at Conservative HQ may not have been 100 per cent focussed. This could explain why an error on the website appeared to reveal the party’s non-target seats for the election. Images of the varying candidates on the Conservative website showed in the
Tories in Downing Street have concluded that they cannot rely on the support of any Liberal Democrats who are not ministers after the General Election, Coffee House has learned. Even though most talk of how a Tory-Lib Dem coalition would work focuses on the number of seats each party would win, I understand that the
From The Spectator, 13 February 1915:
It’s the Black & White Ball tonight, a lavish Conservative fundraiser at which David Cameron tries to milk as much cash as he can from squillionaires – while trying, somehow, to avoid being seen as the leader of the party of the rich. It’s a hard line to walk, which is why there is a strict
Have the Tories benefited from Labour’s week of misery? In Lord Ashcroft’s latest national poll, the Conservatives are now three points ahead of Labour — up from 30 per cent in last week’s poll. The Green Party are down to six per cent, the Lib Dems are up slightly to nine per cent and Ukip
One month on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre, free speech is still under attack. The outpouring of public revulsion at the bloody silencing of ‘blasphemous’ cartoonists after the attack was inspiring. It was a visceral display of support for the right to speak one’s mind – as crudely, offensively and blasphemously as one chooses –
In the aftermath of last month’s Paris atrocities there was a remarkable piece in one of Denmark’s leading papers signed by more than a dozen prominent Danish Muslims. It said that France, like Denmark, is a country where there is freedom of speech and freedom of religion and that writers and cartoonists had every right,
Shocking news belatedly reaches me that the Labour MP Margaret Hodge has pulled out of the race to become the next Mayor of London. I am not sure how London will cope without this colossus, but there we are. She said: ‘I actually think the time is right for us to have a non-white mayor.’
After the Scottish referendum campaign, the Union could probably have done with a period of calm. But it is not going to get it. Who gets to form a government at Westminster after the next election could turn on what happens in Scotland and how many seats the SNP wins. This fact is making both
Why has political correctness proved so enduring? This is the subject of cover pieces in The Spectator by Brendan O’Neill and Damian Thompson, which follow an article by American liberal columnist Jonathan Chait on the subject. We tend to think of political correctness as something from the late 1980s and early 1990s but in the
After being told by the Tories that he has ‘questions to answer’ on the BBC story about HSBC, Ed Balls has decided to tell the Tories that they have ‘questions to answer’ on the story too. The Speaker has just granted Shabana Mahmood an urgent question in the Commons demanding that the Chancellor answer Labour’s
After the late Bob Hoskins was left out of a tribute montage at the Baftas, many people took to Twitter to vent their anger. The comedian David Baddiel went so far as to suggest the academy were showing bias against working class actors as a result of the omission. Now Hoskins’ daughter Rosa has spoken out, saying that her father would