All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
As Westminster clatters back to life after the Christmas break, so the steady stream of invitations land on Steerpike’s mat. Don’t all rush at once, but David Laws will be giving a speech this month at the Institute of Government on ‘effective government in 2015 and beyond’. While this will no doubt be riveting feast
We’ve just had two years of intensive constitutional politics. Time enough, you’d think, for even London-based politicians and commentators to work out how British politics actually works. But if you think that you’d be wrong. Very wrong. Consider our old friend the Barnett Formula. Antiquated and not entirely fit for purpose – it being a
Mark Pritchard, the Conservative MP for The Wrekin, is no longer being investigated by the Met. In a statement, the Met said: ‘A 48-year-old man voluntarily attended a north London police station on Tuesday, 2 December where he was arrested, following an allegation of rape in central London. ‘He returned on bail on 6 January
David Miliband has refused to rule out a return to British politics in an interview with Vogue. Ed’s departed brother has not had much of an impact in New York, and is coy about his future: ‘I don’t know, is the answer.’ Intriguingly he also refuses to praise his brother’s performance as Labour leader: ‘I
Why, do you reckon, was Stephen Fry’s decision to marry another man an item in a BBC radio news bulletin earlier today, right up there with the row over Jim Murphy and the mansion tax? I mean, we’re obviously interested – personally I was completely riveted by the revelation he’s all of 30 years older
Germany is on its feet again, ja, so what can go wrong? This week Good Germans have been taking to the streets to counter-protest the PEGIDA (the Bad Germans) and their ‘anti-Islamisation’ rallies that began in Dresden; Europe’s media is horrified, if also slightly fascinated, with the clear subtext being ‘if the rest of Europe
Your New Year challenge was to submit a poem composed of three haikus that looks forward to the year ahead. The traditional Japanese haiku contains 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules are not always observed by western poets). It is neatly summed up here by the
It’s the private messages Mark Zuckerberg will have sent early in the new year that I’d really like to see. The one to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for instance, which I imagine reading along the lines of: ‘Jeff UO me 1 lol. ;).’ Or to Oprah Winfrey: ‘Yo, O-dawg! BURNNN!!’ Or to Zoella: ‘@zozeebo: Book selling
As an environmentally-minded model who’s not shy of a student protest, Lily Cole would appear to be an ideal recruit for Russell Brand’s revolution. Alas, Cole, who has a double first from Cambridge, has taken issue with the ‘pound-shop Ben Elton’s’ choice of wording. ‘He scares me when he uses the word revolution. I’m not
Is the NHS in crisis, or isn’t it? Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want to use the word, telling the Today programme that ‘there’s a huge amount of pressure’, while Norman Lamb argued that ‘I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis’ but ‘I readily acknowledge that the system is under intense pressure’. Few politicians want to describe
Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s – a claim that has foundations made of something oddly
How will Prince Andrew proceed with his official duties, given that he is named in court papers in which he is accused of abusing an under-age ‘sex slave’? The Daily Mail reports today that the Duke of York is expected to host a reception on behalf of the British government for foreign ministers at the
The Tories’ front of house team turned up today to try and stoke up a row about Labour’s spending plans. The Tory aim was twofold. First, to try and cement in voters’ minds the idea that Labour would spend too much, pushing up taxes and second to claim that Labour is in chaos when it
Nick Clegg has clearly had an exciting Christmas. He used his first press conference of the year to talk about people playing footsie, exes leaving late-night voicemail messages, frantic January sales shopping and body parts. He was using all these vivid images, dreamt up while he was working out how to deal with Labour’s ‘decapitation
Behold, the most offensive tweet I’ve seen in months. You don’t have to be an off-grid anarcho-libertarian freedom-squirrel to see there’s something distinctly unpleasant – even something dystopian – about this. But such, alas, is the temper of our times. Times in which the state’s officers – for such is McPlod – believe they are
There’s 121 days to go till the General Election and the two main parties have released reports attacking each others plans for the economy. You can read them both here: A Cost Analysis of Labour Party Policy The Tories Claims Don’t Add Up The Conservative’s document outlines how a Labour government would increase spending by
At last, an actual dividing line. Ed has used his first proper speech of the 2015 campaign to declare that his party would never, ever leave the EU: ‘We must demand reform from Europe—a European Union that works better for Britain. But make no mistake: exit from the EU would be a dramatic mistake for our
It’s the first day back for MPs and even though we are still months, not weeks, away from the General Election, the parties are all already launching themselves down the campaign roller coaster. Ed Miliband is launching his General Election campaign today and the action will start to shift from the now dull and empty
Since Ian Katz took over as editor of Newsnight, an illustrious roll call of staff have left the flagging current affairs show, including presenters Jeremy Paxman and Gavin Esler. Now, one of Katz’s newest recruits has jumped ship. Mr S hears that Newsnight deputy editor Rob Burley has handed in his notice. Burley is leaving
Purely for the purposes of argument, it would be handy if Ched Evans had said sorry for the rape for which he was convicted. He hasn’t, for the simple and sufficient reason that he believes he is innocent and is challenging his conviction. So in this case, it’s not possible to argue for a repentant
In 2010, David Cameron stumbled in his first New Year broadcast interview over the Tory plans for a married couple’s tax allowance. This slip-up knocked him and his party off course and was a harbinger of the disastrous Tory campaign to come. Today, there were no such mistakes from Cameron as he appeared on Andrew
Another day, another poster – and this time, it’s Labour stretching the truth. The above is the same trick as George Osborne was playing with the deficit. The reader is invited to believe that the Tories would cut state spending back to 1930s levels ‘when there was no NHS’ – or much of a welfare
If you want a glimpse of the sort of election campaign we’re facing for the next few months, these posters from Labour and the Conservatives tell you everything you need to know. The Tories want to encourage voters to stay on the (apparently German rather than British and apparently heading nowhere) road to recovery, even
So – how did it go? Yesterday, Tory HQ yesterday issued a poster with the misleading claim that the deficit had been ‘halved’ where in fact the reduction has been closer to a third (see below). In election campaigns, a ‘porkie*’ is introduced in stages. It debuts when dropped into a speech or article. If
1. Late Rembrandt, National Gallery (15 Oct – Jan 18) (see image above) Some achievements, and some exhibitions, are virtually beyond criticism, and this is one: a superb assortment of works by a supreme artist. 2. Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy (Sept 27 – December 14) A revelation – to the British public at least –
Well, thank God they made it. The Ezadeen, formerly a livestock carrier and now adapted for its human cargo of 360 people, has arrived today at Corigliano Calabro near Lecce. The Italian coastguard, which brought the vessel into port, has been conspicuously humane in its treatment of the refugees. The newborns are to have the
As the General Election limbers up, today saw the first day of proper campaigning with the Tories unveiling their first election poster and George Osborne hitting the road. The Chancellor did not have far to travel though, popping up to Twickenham, some 11 miles from the Treasury. His Twitter feed was in overdrive: It says
According to a recent YouGov poll, Nick Clegg has an overall rating of minus 54, making him more popular than the hapless Ed Miliband by just one point. While that wouldn’t appear to be much to celebrate, the Deputy Prime Minister seems to actually be in denial about his own standing amongst the British public. In
New year, new porkies from Conservative HQ. It has opened 2015 with a poster that involves a deception (above): ‘the defict halved’. It’s a relatively small deception: the deficit has been reduced by a third (see graph below) just as David Cameron was saying only a few weeks ago. But this poster makes a more important,
There’s something so depressing about the newspapers’ tips for sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions that to shield yourself from boredom and irritation, you may decide not to make any at all. But they can be rather romantic; the diplomat Harold Nicolson had a tender affection for resolutions, much preferring them to Christmas. How far
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 2 January 1915: The first German aeroplanes which have visited us since the beginning of the war appeared on Thursday and Friday of last week. On Thursday week, about eleven o’clock in the morning, an aeroplane circled over Dover and dropped a bomb, which fell in a garden
From ‘The War and the New Year‘, The Spectator, 2 January 1915: THOUGH the corning of the New Year makes, and could make, no difference at the front, it does present a convenient opportunity for taking stock of the military situation. The year 1915 finds the Allies and their enemies in a condition approaching stalemate.
Did you enjoy the BBC Today programme this morning, guest edited by the, uh, comedian Lenny Henry and featuring interviewees and journos who were exclusively from ethnic minority backgrounds? I meant to, but some weird narcosis kept me in bed and stopped me turning the radio on. So I can’t judge the content. There have
Politicians really are quite unfortunate people, aren’t they? Always being misinterpreted. It’s almost as though they speak another language (some Commons debates suggest they do, anyway) and journalists wilfully translate them wrongly. Today Tony Blair has claimed that his remarks about a lefty Labour party losing to a right-wing party have been ‘misinterpreted’. This is