All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It seems the launch of the new Liberal Democrat website is not going very well. Apparently the party of tuition fees and Nick Clegg is ‘untrusted’. ‘What should you do?’, it asks. Lib Dem HQ will be hoping most people do not click ‘Get me out of here!’ come 2015. With their recent overtures to
There are ornately-feathered birds in New Guinea that have less bizarre mating rituals than Labour and the Lib Dems. The two parties need to show that it isn’t impossible to work with one another in a future coalition while also keeping their own supporters reassured that they’re not desperately keen to jump into a bed
I spent yesterday evening in Birmingham with the residents of ‘Benefits Street’, assorted pundits and politicians. It was a slightly rowdy debate for Channel 4, and can be seen here. Since a number of controversial things came up perhaps I can deal with them in order. ‘The programme shouldn’t have been made.’ I felt very uncomfortable
Go to Google Maps and type in Lechlade – the Cotswold town at the start of the navigable Thames. Instead of looking at it on the map, click the ‘satellite’ button in the top right-hand corner of the screen for an aerial photograph, and follow the river west towards its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire
Mr S doesn’t usually notice A List waists, but he wasn’t totally surprised when he heard that Matt Damon was on a diet during the filming of Monuments Men. While your correspondent has no reason to be smug, he will say that Damon wasn’t looking quite his Jason Bourne self. Steerpike was surprised, however, to learn that
Last week the Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology issued an admirable joint report on the floods and their possible connection to climate change, concluding that it is not possible to make such a link. ‘As yet’, it said, ‘there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to
Mark Carney has been a very successful Governor of the Bank of England. Since coming to office in June last year, the British economy has gone from strength to strength. Although Mr Carney can’t take all the credit, on his watch unemployment is falling rapidly and business confidence is at a record high. His appointment and policies have
David Cameron and his political aides are reportedly stalling over reform of stop-and-search powers because they fear it will dilute the Tories’ tough-on-crime message. But this means that Labour, circling like vultures for any waft of political roadkill, have swooped. Yvette Cooper has written to Theresa May offering Labour’s support in getting reform of the
Before the European Elections in May, don’t expect either David Cameron or Ed MIliband to engage with Nigel Farage. Both the Tory and Labour leaders think that the best strategy for dealing with Ukip and its leader is to deny them the oxygen of publicity. Nick Clegg, by contrast, is desperate for a scrap with
Ed Miliband has been singing the praises of New Towns in tonight’s Standard, saying a Labour government would use these developments to help solve London’s housing crisis. He writes: ‘A key plank will be creating new towns in sustainable locations where people want to live, just like earlier generations did in places such as Stevenage
Is the Conservative party doing enough to attract ethnic minority voters? We’ve reported previous pushes by Chairman Grant Shapps and Home Secretary Theresa May to appeal to groups who have centre-right values but are turned off the Tories. But the FT today suggests that the top of the party is struggling to show enthusiasm, with
Pint-sized Tory MP Dominic Raab ruffled the feathers of the powerful with his amendment to the Immigration Bill last month, which forced the government into a humiliating abstention. Raab has a growing group of supporters (who call themselves the Raabels) on the backbenches. His popularity has made an impression in the corridors of power. I hear that
After a couple of weeks of something frightening and bad called ‘campaign rhetoric’ from Westminster politicians, Alex Salmond today tried to reassure Scots that everything would be OK if they did vote for independence. ‘The rest of the UK will never be foreign’ to an independent Scotland, he insisted, sounding rather in favour of another
A recording of a conversation between Alex Salmond and George Osborne has been leaked* to The Spectator. An edited extract follows: Alex Salmond: Scotland and England are different countries. So different, in fact, that we should no longer live together. Our interests have diverged and so must our futures. George Osborne: I do not think that
Nick Clegg’s comments on Radio 4 about the possibility of a coalition deal with Labour in 2015 are significant, not because the Deputy Prime Minister is airing the possibility of the Lib Dems striking a deal with the left rather than the right, but because of his shift in rhetoric. Clegg was perfectly clear in
Personally, I’m now waiting for the Queen to get involved. After all, there’s not much left of Alex Salmond’s independence-but-not-independence blueprint that is left intact. First it was his ‘we’re going to share the pound in a Sterling zone’ claim. That was ruled out by George Osborne (and Ed Balls and Danny Alexander) last week. Then
Jose Manuel Barroso has said before that Scotland would have to apply separately to join the EU if it became independent. But his remarks today on the Andrew Marr Show were far more pessimistic about the prospects of that application being successful. After the three main Westminster parties blew a hole in the reassuring argument
I don’t suppose these petitions do much good, but they may make us all feel a little better about ourselves. Muhammad Asghar is a lunatic living in Pakistan, thus scoring about as low as it’s possible to get on life’s first two throws of the dice. He is a paranoid schizophrenic and recently proclaimed himself
The Conservatives were never going to win the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election. But the way the party has spun its third place is slightly depressing. The Times today quotes a party source saying: ‘This is a safe Labour seat with the largest council estate in Europe. It’s not on our marginal list.’ Now, this
Spectator literary competition No. 2837 This week let’s have a poem about the horrors of a reunion dinner. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26 February. The recent invitation to give a classic of children’s literature the hard-boiled treatment produced a flood of entries that were a joy
Prince Harry’s disdain for the media is well documented; but it was William who got grumpy today, telling Guardian journalist Robert Booth: ‘Why don’t you put your notebook down and give us a hand with the sandbags?’ Booth offered to help: ‘But when your reporter agreed to help, aides stepped in and said it would
One of the more unpalatable news stories of the week was the survey by West Yorkshire councils that seemingly innocuous food was made up of all sorts of things that either weren’t what they claimed to be, or weren’t very much like food at all. It’s another sign of the food problems that this country
It’s 25 years since the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued history’s worst Valentine’s Day message to author Salman Rushdie, during that momentous spring when communism began to topple in Poland and Hungary, the world wide web was invented, and the Iranian leader issued in a new age of religious tension. The background is full of paradoxes
Alex Salmond is now a man without a plan. He is offering Scots a future of uncertainty and instability. Threats of a debt default leaving Scotland and Scots with a bad credit rating. No idea which currency we would be transitioning to. By contrast if Scots want to know the benefit of remaining in the
You know, when the pope went on in his recent encyclical about how the family ‘is experiencing a profound cultural crisis’ he wasn’t half right. His reflection that ‘the individualism of our postmodern and globalized era favours a lifestyle which … distorts family bonds’ came to mind when I got this very special Valentine’s press release from
What are Boris Johnson’s real chances of becoming Tory leader? I examine the Mayor of London’s standing with Conservative MPs in my Telegraph column today – and it is fascinating how polarised opinion is about the Mayor in the Tory party. His supporters insist he is the only hope for the Conservative party, while those
A reader sends me a card for sale in Scribblers in the King’s Road, Chelsea. It depicts two slices of cheese standing vertically on their thinner ends. On both, black beards and eyes are crudely superimposed, and above them two gold rings form haloes. The caption says ‘Cheeses of Nazareth’. The joke is pathetically bad,
Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t all that bright. Sixteen per cent of us have an IQ below 85 – that’s about the level of intelligence you need to need to drink through a straw. And even a high IQ is no a guarantee of success. According to a study cited by Professor Joan
So Ukip did come second in the Wythenshawe by-election (and Labour won, of course). David Cameron says the 4,301 votes (17.95% of the vote and a 14.5% swing) that John Bickley won wasn’t ‘the sort of break through that people were talking about’. The Prime Minister, who saw his own party pushed into third place
It’s that time of year again, where The Spectator‘s circulation figures are out – and our success continues. In October, I announced that we had more than one million unique visitors in a month. This week, we passed the 1.3 million mark with more than 3.2 million pageviews — something even I didn’t expect. Here’s how
‘If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the pound’, the Chancellor said this morning. In a speech aiming to blow a hole in the SNP’s campaign, George Osborne has set out why sharing the pound isn’t on the cards for an independent Scotland. Here are the key points from his speech,
One of the risks for Theresa May in her battle with Number 10 over reform of stop-and-search powers is that the Home Secretary loses some of the capital she has built up with BME voters over the plans. Last summer, black newspaper The Voice ran an edition suggesting that Labour could be losing the black
Ukip’s autumn conference made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was supposed to be a showcase of how grown up the party is these days, but it ended up being about Godfrey Bloom calling women ‘sluts’ and hitting a journalist. In the conference hall, Nigel Farage bounded onto the stage to a strange
Could it be Bodie and Doyle? Perhaps Starsky and Hutch? Morse and Lewis? Whoever provided the inspiration, someone in Downing Street has clearly been watching too many old TV cop shows because what George Osborne’s performance today was the final part of an old-fashioned good cop, bad cop routine. Last week David Cameron stayed in London