All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It didn’t work. But it was a good idea. David Cameron prepared an ambush for Ed Miliband at PMQs today. The trouble was he attacked the Labour leader for a vice he himself has mastered with conspicuous aplomb: question dodging. Miliband is clearly in trouble. He’s using his only remaining strength, the NHS, to prop
Speaking at a south London primary school this morning, Nick Clegg firmly reiterated the Lib Dems’ equidistance between the two other major parties. Before an assortment of public-sector workers, Clegg attacked the potential ‘reckless borrowing’ of Eds Balls and Miliband, as well as George Osborne asking ‘the working poor to bear the brunt’ of cuts.
If you’re going to sell out to the establishment, you might as well do so on an industrial scale. As the PM told the Guido Fawkes blog’s ten -ear anniversary party at the Institute of Directors last night, via video link, ‘what better way’ to celebrate ‘rejecting’ the cosy political classes than a posh dinner
One of the best arguments against European political integration is the people with whom British political parties end up allied in the European Parliament. For reasons of parliamentary influence and, let’s be frank, money, British parties don’t want to sit on their own, so instead sit as part of broader European groups. Now, all of
The Catholic bishops of England and Wales are to hold an inquiry into the case of the Rt Rev Kieran Conry, he of the two (or is it three?) girlfriends, who resigned as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton when he had a crisis of conscience caused by the tabloids knocking on his door. Displaying their celebrated transparency,
This is a sneak preview from tomorrow’s magazine: Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning down. A consortium said it could power 2.5 million houses in Britain by 2018 with solar energy generated in southern Tunisia. The Bank of England indicated that
This diary first appeared on Apollo Magazine’s website. Monday, 13 October There was something weird in the London air, and it wasn’t the rain. E-mails from PRs were hitting my inbox like the salvo from a battery of Gatling guns, and I’d already bumped into one art critic on the point of nervous collapse. ‘Just. Don’t,’ she shot
Today’s PMQs was an NHS stale-mate. David Cameron went after Labour on the NHS in Wales, demanding that Labour agree to an OECD inquiry into the NHS there, while Ed Miliband claimed ‘you can’t trust this Prime Minister on the NHS’ – a more personal attack than his usual charge that you can’t trust the
Remember this time last year, when Jeremy Hunt decried the ‘national shame’ of neglected old people suffering from undiagnosed dementia? The health secretary lamented that fewer than half of dementia cases are ever diagnosed, and promised ‘to make a big change.’ His initiative got rave reviews at the time. Now that the details are in,
From The Spectator, 24 October 1914: On Thursday the police authorities throughout the country arrested a large number of enemy aliens. Most of them were persons of military age. We have dealt with this problem and also that of spies elsewhere, and will only repeat here that the country will support the Government in any
Connections between Iain Duncan Smith and NFL players may be few and far between. But Mr S is pleased to have discovered one. Colin Kaepernick, an American football quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, has referenced IDS’s famous soundbite in his Twitter bio: There’s nothing else included in his bio, so Mr S can only assume
Last week’s market tremor, provoked by renewed fears of eurozone stagnation and a slowdown in global growth, was serious enough for IMF chief Christine Lagarde to feel the need to pronounce, in her most soothing tone, that it was ‘maybe at this stage an over-reaction’. But if you were listening to the Today programme on
Imagine if David Cameron actually meant it. Imagine if he really did follow through with his implied threat to campaign for Brexit in the absence of better terms from Brussels. You can picture the televised address. An oak-panelled background with a large union flag hanging sedately in the corner, the PM with that furrowed house-captain
According to an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, sanctions-hit Moscow intends to slowly move the finance of state companies and political players away from London, Zurich and Frankfurt toward Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. ‘We think we can match what we lose from the West with what China offers,’ the adviser told
From The Spectator, 24 October 1914: The Germans, as we write, have got as far as Nieuport, which is, roughly, south-west of Ostend. There they have come into the “sphere of influence” of eleven British vessels, including three river monitors bought by the Admiralty at the beginning of the war from Brazil, for whom they
Not long to go now before a middle-aged Christian woman, Asia Bibi, is hanged in Pakistan for allegedly having said something disparaging about the prophet Mohammed, peace and blessings be upon him etc. Exactly what it was she said about old Mo’ isn’t entirely clear. Something a bit snippy, I would guess. She’d been arguing
What a godsend to Ukip José Manuel Barroso must be. On his recent short visit to the UK he not only managed to tell the British public that limits to immigration (desired by the overwhelming majority of the British public) would be ‘illegal’. He also managed to tell us that if we left the EU,
It is a bold approach but, who knows, perhaps it is just crazy enough to work. I mean, what could possibly go wrong with a strategy on immigration best summarised like this: UKIP ARE RIGHT. DON’T VOTE FOR THEM. Thank heavens for Ed Miliband, eh? He’s the Tories’ last, best, weapon. What a cheery thought that is.
Well, I don’t know how José Manuel Barroso came across in the broadcast accounts of his address to Chatham House today but in person the man was geniality itself and rather impressive with it. He shares the mildly irritating tendency of EU bigwigs to attribute to the European Union developments that would have happened without
At his press conference this morning, Nick Clegg told Jason Groves, ‘Do you really think Washington is going to bother picking up the phone if we can’t even punch above our weight in our own back yard?’ This must be one of the most absurd bits of political hyperbole in recent years. There’s an argument
The ‘windfall tax’, a concept introduced in the UK by the Blair government, is by definition a one-off seizure of revenue from a profitable industry, to fund an invariably unprofitable but popular project. It has been justified as putting ‘right a bad deal’ on the excesses of profits of unpopular industries. Between 1997 and 1998,
Robert Peston was recently at Lincoln’s Inn for the launch of schools charity Primary Futures, which all sounds very worthy. He started off apologising for looking scruffy, then spoke at some length about the problems he has with private schools. He thinks they are divisive. Plus, they promote inequality and research shows inequality holds back prosperity.
Who enjoys all that calorie counting? If you hate diets but love the idea of losing a bit of weight, these quick fixes might just help you shift a few pounds – or prevent you from putting on any more. Get enough shut-eye. Research has shown that people who are sleep-deprived eat a lot more
From The Spectator, 24 October 1914: EVIL practices, when they concern the relation of the sexes, are often allowed to fester into scandals, and even to bring moral and bodily ruin, before ordinary English men and women can induce themselves to speak of them. The newspapers lately have contained many allusions to the presence of
The British recruits who have joined Isis are not exceptions. They flourish in a culture in which it is so commonplace to offer support to authoritarian regimes and movements that few bother to condemn it. Free speech ought to mean the freedom to challenge and criticise in all except the most tightly defined circumstances. Instead
Everyone’s favourite unelected European was doing the broadcasting rounds this morning, popping up on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show to tell David Cameron that he can forget any plans to cap the number of EU immigrants in Britain. Here’s what José Manuel Barroso had to say:- “Any kind of arbitrary cap seems to be not in conformity with
Ken Clarke is one of the biggest beasts left in the Tory jungle. He had been a fixture in every Tory government since Ted Heaths time until Cameron retired him at the last reshuffle. But Clarke is clearly deeply concerned with Cameron’s strategy at the moment. On Tuesday night, at a meeting of the
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics.” startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are ‘disappointed’ with the inability of the Synod
The heroic Kurdish resistance in Kobane rightly commands headlines. A larger disaster, however, looms in Iraqi Kurdistan where – absent urgent action by the UN and Iraq – thousands of vulnerable people who fled from the Islamic State (Isis) could die in weeks from cold-related illnesses. It was comfortably warm in the Kurdish capital of
From The Spectator, 17 October 1914: The siege of Antwerp has been a minor tragedy in a quarter to which few probably gave a thought. The authorities of the Antwerp Zoological Gardens, before the bombardment began, felt compelled to destroy all the dangerous animals in their cages. They could not contemplate the possibility of beasts
In a 1978 interview to mark her third year as leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher addressed public concerns with immigration, stating that ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped’. Goodness knows what word she would use to describe the situation we face today. Anyone who has knocked on
Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence. At
‘Thanks be to God’, as we Catholic children used to say with heartfelt enthusiasm as Mass was over for another week. The most divisive meeting of Catholic bishops since Vatican II has ended – and no real damage has been done. Except, I’m sorry to say, to the reputation of Pope Francis. No real progress
Labour wants the next election to be about the NHS, one of their strongest issues. Party strategists have been struck by how it has been rising up voters’ list of concerns and now want to keep it there. Ed Miliband’s pledge today that Labour will ensure that people who fear they have cancer are seen
