All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Ed Balls knows how to talk to bankers. Having been Gordon Brown’s right hand man and City Minister under the last government, he is well known in the Square Mile—and far more popular than you might think. Earlier this month, Balls was to be found having lunch at HSBC’s private bank in St James. He
‘No cuts!’ said banners held at the march on Whitehall today. Well, the Treasury is listening. It has pushed state spending to £732 billion this year, up from £673 billion under the last year of the Labour government. So why the fuss? My guess: lefties like to march and call for the downfall of governments.
George Osborne is drawing up plans for a northern ‘supercity’, in the hope that it might rival London and rebalance Britain’s economy. Neil O’Brien discussed the idea of a supercity in The Spectator in December 2012, before going off to advise Osborne. My career in politics nearly ended the day it began, when I was
David Cameron has not had the best of weeks. At home, he is engaged in a mucky fight with the former government aide Dominic Cummings and abroad he is facing defeat in his attempt to stop Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming president of the European Commission. But in the papers today, it is Ed Miliband who
David Blunkett has announced that he’ll be standing down at the next election. ‘It is clear that the leadership of the party wish to see new faces in ministerial office and a clear break with the past,’ he said — I’m not sure if that’s a coded reference to Miliband’s unfinished purge of those who
There is a tendency in Britain to think we are alone in our national madness. So I thought I would cheer everyone up on this lovely weekend by pointing out that one of the big stories in the Netherlands this week has been whether or not a pro-ISIS demonstration should be allowed in the Hague. The demonstration
Ed Miliband is in Wales with the Shadow Cabinet today, and they’ve been busy praising the Labour government there for ‘leading the whole of the United Kingdom into economic recovery’. It’s interesting that the Westminster Labour party is so keen to hang out with Welsh Labour, as doing so simply allows the Tories to attack
It’s a row that won’t go away, after Mr S revealed yesterday that the PM had labelled Dominic Cummings a ‘career psychopath’, Michael Gove’s former special adviser has hit back, blogging: “At the PolEx party (18/6), Cameron said that I am a ‘career psychopath’. A) No10′s first reaction was to decide not to react to my
It’s tempting given the optimistic mood on the Conservative benches at the moment to think that everything is just great with the economy. Not so, according to today’s borrowing figures from the ONS, which show that government borrowing was higher than expected: George Osborne borrowed £13.3bn in May, up £0.7bn from the same month last
So England are out the World Cup; the Three Lions rolled over – and we can expect plenty more gloomy Anglo introspection about failings over the coming days. But Alex Salmond must be even more gutted than anyone south of the Border. Over at SNP HQ, they would have been cheering England’s boys on like
Oh come on internet. Pull yourself together. Michael Fabricant has tweeted about punching a woman and people are going mad. It’s a silly thing to tweet, but does anyone doubt that? It’s simply hyperbole, flounce, floridity. That’s sometimes what it takes to get noticed on Twitter. Plenty of people are guilty of this trope. Let’s not
Yesterday evening, I returned home, made a cup of tea and slumped down to catch up on the day’s news. A piece on Twitter caught my eye. Posted by Channel 4, it was titled ‘#Jihad: how ISIS is using social media to win support’. Click. Soon I was learning about how ISIS was calling for
I thought you might enjoy watching this debate between me and two eminently sane, rational and balanced women. If you haven’t seen it already. My publishers were anxious I should take part in order to promote my book, Selfish, Whining Monkeys. I said to them: ‘But it’s Channel 4 News. They won’t have read the
We have just had a second intelligence failure on Iraq. The speed and extent of ISIS’s sweep into the country took the UK governnment by surprise. Whitehall was not alone in this. As I reveal in the magazine this week, when representatives of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff came to London recently, Iraq was
The Syro-Iraq war, as the firestorm should probably now be called, rages on, with the sword of Damocles hanging over us in Britain. Some 400 British Muslims are fighting with ISIS – only 150 fewer than the number of Muslims in the whole British Army – and we can be pretty sure of blowback when
The pundits will be doing some quick revisionism. Far from ‘making progress’ if not being “quite the finished article” (© everyone), England has performed less well than they did in the last tournament in which we took part and when everyone agreed we were shite. In fact so far this has been England’s worst ever
4.06 am, that’s what it was when I was woken up. Last time this week I think it was a bit after three. And by the same bloody car alarm. The thing went off just long enough to wake me up and unsettle my seven year old. Why? I mean, why is it my business whether
A tough message on welfare is one of the ways that both Labour and the Tories think they can win in 2015. Ed Miliband upset some on the left yesterday with his plans to freeze child benefit and dock jobseekers’ allowance from under-21s not in employment or training, while the Tories constantly trumpet the gains
President Obama has just announced that the US is prepared to launch strikes against ISIS in Iraq if the situation on the ground requires it. The US will send up to 300 military advisers to the country. It is understood that they will provide intelligence on what targets US air power should hit. But Obama stressed
Earlier this year, Nigel Evans discussed in The Spectator how there’s no way to live down a rape allegation, true or not. Yesterday Ben Sullivan, the President of the Oxford Union, had the rape charges against him dropped. As I came into Parliament last Thursday, I swung by the newspaper stand to take a brief
How many seats will the Conservatives take from the Lib Dems at the next election? According to Lord Ashcroft’s latest polling, a dozen or so Tory-Lib Dem marginals look set to change hands. Surveying 17,000 voters in 17 seats*, Ashcroft has found the Lib Dems’ share has dropped by 15 per cent (compared to eight per cent
Never mind Tony Blair and his denials over Iraq. As our government contemplates its response to the latest crisis in Iraq, now may be the moment for a different Prime Minister to admit to another grave error. Will David Cameron concede that he might have been wrong to have intervened in Libya? Until recently, the
Rigorous welfare reforms for the under-25s must be combined with targeted tax breaks. That’s the best way to get young Britain going and galvanise the new electorate. For keen observers, Ed Miliband’s speech on welfare may sound familiar. Last November Labour dropped plans — to scrap benefits for the under-25s — like a hot potato
Former CIA director and US Army General David Petraeus is in town hosted by the Henry Jackson Society. But that’s classified. For some reason Petraeus is being very shy in front of journalists (well, most journalists). The event in the House of Commons this afternoon is being held under the Chatham House Rule. All media,
There must be an election in the offing because the PM was out and about last night looking for a manifesto. He addressed Policy Exchange’s (PX) annual summer bash in Westminster College Gardens. It was a gag a minute. He cracked rotten jokes about pig semen, and claimed that he was one of the founders of
It seems as if the author Jeanette Winterson might have a bit of a pest control problem. ‘Rabbit ate my parsley’, she tweeted, ‘I am eating the rabbit.’ Accompanied, of course, by step-by-step photos of said rabbit, from skinning to Aga. Fair enough, many might say. At least she was sensible enough to eat the
Generation Y – are they really a jilted generation, or do they have absolutely no reason to be complaining about their lot? This was the question posed at Tuesday night’s Spectator debate, with the motion: ‘Stop whining young people, you’ve never had it so good’, and chaired by Toby Young. It all kicked off with
Will computers make humans redundant? It might be the biggest question of our time. Last night Spectator Events, in partnership with Microsoft, hosted a panel discussion to answer the question ‘Will Artificial Intelligence put my job at risk?’ A fascinating and wide-ranging conversation about the technological revolution ensued. The Spectator’s chairman Andrew Neil was joined by
The social media exchanges of British jihadis in Syria and Iraq, as just revealed, are perfectly riveting, don’t you think? Fancy worrying about things like where to leave your luggage and internet connections when you’re a jihadi. There’s scope here for TripAdviser. But when it comes to jihadists from Britain, I’d rather like a bit
Did you threaten to overrule him, Paxman? Did you threaten to overrule your editor when he told you that he was going to let you finish your career in such an embarrassing fashion? Did you? Answer the question. Did you threaten to overrule him? Did you? DID YOU? You should have. A friend of mine
The last Labour government oversaw a major expansion of support for families, with new investment in childcare, tax credits, maternity leave and children’s centres. Despite this investment, the left still struggles to demonstrate its ‘pro-family’ credentials and to affirm its backing for parents and committed family relationships. Too often, this leaves us conceding important political
It is a wicked thing to revel in someone else’s misery. Trouble is, occasionally it can’t be helped. So – bye, bye Spain! I think I would have traded England winning tonight (and therefore prolonging the agony) for Spain’s magnificently rapid exit from this world cup. Oh, Chile – you brave sons of Pinochet and
Why do Iraq’s jihadists keep on coming back? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Freddy Gray (1 min, 29 sec) examine why groups such as ISIS have a habit of disappearing, losing their territorial gains and reappearing more deadly than ever. What can the West do, if anything, to combat the ISIS
A watch isn’t necessarily something that you think of as being a feat of engineering. But there is far more to a watch than meets the eye. Underneath its face, a vastly complicated machine is silently chugging away. In that way, Patek Philippe are very similar to their products; a simple Swiss brand on the