Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Boris Johnson: greed can be good

Boris Johnson prides himself on being one of the few politicians who gets away with saying the unsayable. He stuck to that theme tonight with his Margaret Thatcher lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argued that greed isn’t a bad thing. He said: ‘But I also hope that there is no

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Hashtag ‘Green Crap’

Loan sharks got a biff on the nose at PMQs today. Cameron wants to cap the sum that each of us can borrow. Ed Miliband was puzzled. This is a U-turn, he said. When he proposed to cap energy bills Cameron called it ‘Marxism.’ Cameron shrugged this off. And he gloatingly invited Miliband to ‘congratulate

Steerpike

Dave, the hairless ‘gringo’

Caitlin Moran once famously described David Cameron as looking like ‘C3PO made out of ham’, while his fans say that he has ‘youthful good looks’. Either way, it does not help matters when the leader of the nation admits that he is unable to grow a moustache. Young Dave was praising his parliamentary colleagues’ ‘Movember’

Nigel Lawson: did I kill Hugh Gaitskell?

I recently did a lunchtime meeting for the Institute of Economic Affairs. They had invited me to make the case for ‘Brexit’ — the departure of Britain from the European Union — which I now believe to be highly desirable. The room was packed and the discussion was refreshingly free of the fanatics, on both

Isabel Hardman

Is László Andor spinning for the Tory party?

Tory MPs are in a funny state of mind this morning. They’re pleased that the Prime Minister has started to give some meaty details of what he wants from an EU renegotiation. But they’re also confused that there seems to be no media operation to ‘soak up’ this new line. There aren’t any ministers hogging

James Forsyth

The EU needs to limit free movement to stay together

David Cameron’s proposals on free movement recognise that the European Union is very different now from what it used to be. When it was essentially a club of rich Western European nations, total freedom of movement was workable. But now that it includes countries whose GDP per head is less than half ours it is

Steerpike

Cui Bono? George Osborne’s video shame

Poor, dear, awkward George Osborne. Just when he seems to be doing things right — the economy, for instance — he gets something wrong. Very wrong. In The Spectator this week, James Forsyth reveals that, at Matthew Freud’s now notorious 50th birthday bash, when Bono and Bob Geldof sang a duet, Osborne insisted on whipping

Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell vows to continue Plebgate fight

So Andrew Mitchell is going to pursue his fight with the police over the ‘plebgate’ row, even though the Crown Prosecution Service said there was insufficient evidence to suggest the officer who claimed Andrew Mitchell called him a pleb was lying. The former Conservative chief whip told a press conference this afternoon that not only

Lebanon is falling apart on its 70th birthday

It’s Lebanon’s birthday this month — 70 years since independence — but no one’s really in the mood to party. Our first birthday present last week came in the form of two suicide bombers belonging to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades who detonated their payloads at the Iranian embassy in Beirut killing 26 people.

Rod Liddle

The world is a safer place, thanks to the deal with Iran

Much though I like and respect Douglas Murray, I reckon he and other Ayatollohaphobes* are wrong about the deal struck with Iran. If Iran’s willingness to negotiate was evidence that sanctions were working, rather than a sudden flowering of the ‘let us all now be frenz’ spirit in Tehran – then the sanctions have surely

Salmond is stuck in the ‘Yes2AV’ trap

‘When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another’, the best way of going about it probably isn’t to write a 670-page document and then snarkily deride journalists who point out the obvious holes in it. As an old romantic,

Isabel Hardman

Influential 1922 Committee chair backs rebel immigration call

The swell of support continues for Nigel Mills’ amendment to the Immigration Bill which would most likely land the British government in court by trying to extend transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants to 2018. I have learned that Graham Brady, influential chair of the 1922 Committee, has now signed the amendment too, and

Isabel Hardman

A funny argument for independence

Is today’s Scottish independence White Paper really an argument for independence? I ask only because the section on currency and monetary policy is essentially arguing for the union. It says: ‘The Commission’s analysis shows that it will not only be in Scotland’s interests to retain Sterling but that – post independence – this will also

Can Silicon Valley ever be replicated in London?

Trying to clone Silicon Valley has been a cornerstone of this coalition’s business policy. Rohan Silva, until recently the PM’s policy guru, spent several years in government and opposition creating the ‘Silicon Roundabout’, an attempt to provide a new leg for the UK’s economy in East London. Depending on who you believe, the East London

Isabel Hardman

Detail vs emotion in the Scottish independence debate

The Scottish government will unveil its case for independence at 10am today. Already the Treasury is warning that voting ‘yes’ next autumn would cost the average basic rate tax payer an additional £1,000 in tax increases. Danny Alexander is also trying to undermine the SNP’s claim that fiscal problems initially experienced by a newly independent

Steerpike

Blow to domestic goddess as cocaine allegations surface

Allegations that Nigella Lawson used cocaine and prescription drugs on a habitual basis have emerged in court today after the trial judge lifted a reporting restriction. Lawson’s former personal assistants Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo are accused of fraud by Charles Saatchi, Lawson’s former husband. The court heard, in pre-trial hearings, evidence for the defence which apparently shows that Saatchi accepts the Grillo

Ed West

When it comes to diversity, most of us vote with our feet

Liberals are almost as likely to flee diversity as conservatives, according to new research by Prof Eric Kaufmann for Demos. Some 61 per cent of white people who were ‘very comfortable’ with mixed marriages (the best indicator of views on race) moved to whiter areas during the period, compared to 64 per cent of those

Melanie McDonagh

Is the permissive society causing pain and harm?

It was a curious coincidence, don’t you think, that the sexual conduct findings that the Lancet published today coincided with the publication of a report from the Deputy Children’s Commissioner, Sue Berelowitz, about child-on-child sexual violence? The two stories were juxtaposed uncomfortably in the news. In the case of the Lancet survey, which is conducted

Nick Cohen

Cultists & communists – too close to us for comfort

Like the whiff of a mouldy madeleine, the statement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) on the expulsion of Comrade Balakrishnan takes you back to a time that is well worth forgetting. ‘Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the Party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities