All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Downing Street is trying to play down Sayeeda Warsi’s Eton Mess stunt on The Agenda last night. Asked what his response to her decision to hold up a front page saying ‘Number 10 takes Eton Mess off the menu’, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: ‘Look, I think that was in the light-hearted section of the
Are voters really concerned about how many Old Etonians David Cameron surrounds himself with? Judging by the cutting remarks from Michael Gove and Sayeeda Warsi it matters a lot, but opinion polling tells a slightly different, more troubling tale about how people feel about the ‘political class’. On the Eton question, YouGov recently carried out
Game over: Eddie Izzard has cursed the union. The comedian who once championed equal clothing rights has waded into the debate over Scottish independence, to the horror of supporters of the union. You might imagine that we unionists would welcome a celebrity endorsement – even from a c-lister like Izzard. But he has a dreadful track
Today’s announcement of childcare subsidy, up to the value of £2,000 per kid under the age of 12, is welcome news. As The Spectator argued last week, this is perhaps the smartest single move the Chancellor can make – too many highly-skilled women want to work, but cant afford to as they’d face Europe’s highest
Here’s a piece of confusing medical doctrine: in England, smear tests are offered to women from the age of 25. In Scotland, it’s 20. A couple of months ago, I checked myself in for a smear test, aged 23. The receptionist was easy to convince: ‘In Scotland,’ I said, ‘the age limit is lower. I’d like
Budget day tomorrow, and I’m sure many of you will relish the reminder that you are, in George Osborne’s reported view, ‘successful’ because you pay 40p tax band. It’s better than that, in fact. I know of men who ask their partners to make obscene references about their tax contribution during intimate moments, about how
I like Jonathan Calvert and Heidi Blake of the Sunday Times. I will not pretend they are anything like close friends or family. I doubt if I see them more than once a year. But before you read any further you should know about our acquaintance. It is important for journalists to declare their interests.
The Coalition is trying to make today about childcare after announcing plenty of housing initiatives over the weekend. Announcing different policies in a drip-drip in the run-up to the Budget means they get their own limelight – and that’s fine if you’ve got enough left in the larder once the statement itself arrives. George Osborne
Perhaps we are growing war-weary – weary, that is, of the gathering storm of World War One documentaries on the BBC. There have been so many, not just Max Hastings (for) and Niall Ferguson (against), but Jeremy Paxman keeping the home fires burning and the reheated I Was There interviews with veterans of the conflict whom
Mr S takes embargos very seriously. He respects the convention. An embargo is sacred. Yet the news that Anne McIntosh MP is holding a constituency surgery is so momentous that it took every ounce of my integrity not to share it with you before the appointed time this morning. Most ordinary MPs don’t embargo news
Unsurprisingly, Michael Gove’s FT interview in which he attacked the ‘preposterous’ number of Old Etonians around David Cameron – widely interpreted as a sally on behalf of George Osborne – has gone down like a lead balloon with the Prime Minister. I understand that Cameron had a stern word with the Education Secretary over the
George Osborne is as adept as any gamekeeper at setting little traps in every Budget and Autumn Statement for Labour to fall down. He hinted at a few in his Marr interview yesterday and they were largely the sort we’ve come to expect from the Chancellor on welfare and deficit reduction, but there’s also speculation
Both coalition parties remain scarred by the political potency of Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices. They are determined to do what they can to stop this issue gaining salience again. So, it is telling that Ed Davey and Michael Fallon have both personally signed up to The Big Deal, a new initiative designed
Tory europhiles don’t often come out in the daylight: they normally give the impression they’re frightened that their associations will get grumpy, or that their fellow MPs will try to shout them down. But today the pro-EU group European Mainstream launched their new pamphlet, In Our Interest: Britain with Europe, which takes a stance that
The continued speculation about who in the Conservative party is putting the most effort into preparing their leadership hat to throw into the currently non-existent ring is quite amusing. But it also means that those involved will struggle to have such a moral high ground when they need to lecture backbench colleagues for getting overexcited
Because I spent the weekend moving house and being depressed by events in Cardiff I did not attend the Scottish Conservative’s spring conference in Edinburgh. A dereliction of journalistic duty, perhaps, but also, well, life takes over sometimes. In truth, I didn’t worry about missing the conference. Attending these things can be dangerous. Like journalism,
Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight’s appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of ‘left wing bias’ at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from ‘myths and deception’ and that the ‘BBC is stacked full of right wingers’. Now, now,
HS2 needs to happen, and faster. That’s the conclusion of David Higgins’s report on High Speed 2 out today. As well as backing up the government’s key arguments for the project on capacity grounds — not speed, which he says is a ‘by-product’ — the chairman of HS2 Ltd has made some recommendations for improving
And it doesn’t matter who you are. Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or UKIP it’s all the same. The BBC is hopelessly prejudiced against you. As it should be. Why only this morning we see Owen Jones complaining that, contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the BBC is instinctively biased against
The first and best thing George Osborne could do is start all over again. Of course he won’t and this week’s budget will be another missed opportunity. But each year that passes without real reform is another year wasted. Britain’s current tax code is the product of a century of bodging. Each year the Chancellor
Transport It is ruinous travelling by train these days. Have you tried it? My advice: don’t. Aside from re-nationalising the railways, the Budget could make some gesture of goodwill to the countless people whose entire earnings are being sucked up by our trains. One pal, who isn’t earning much, is commuting from Hampshire to London.
Class never quite goes away as an issue for the Tories, for the simple and sufficient reason that it matters. Lately it was Michael Gove stating the obvious, that the Prime Minister mixes mostly with people with backgrounds like his own…a perfectly human impulse, but not a good look, the Old Etonian coterie. Now David
Is the world now being fed a bit of disinformation from the Malaysians over the fate of that missing jet, flight MH370? We are now told that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a ‘fanatical’ dissident, a supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has once again been jailed under Malaysia’s homophobic laws for
So, the government plans to create a new ‘garden city’ in Ebbsfleet, Kent, with 15,000 new homes. Yesterday’s announcement by George Osborne has been widely praised. The local Tory MP is enthusiastic. Boris Johnson tweets that it’s ‘great news.’ The best critique Ed Balls can muster is that it’s all ‘too little, too late.’ Labour
Sir David Higgins wants the northern end of HS2 built quicker, as a means of selling the benefits of the ‘north-south’ line to those who remain sceptical about the new line. You can read his full report on High Speed 2 here, but it’s worth considering the position of one of the biggest groups of
Every year the Budget comes and goes, amid a flurry of live blogging and urgent blog posts at The Spectator. And almost every year, the papers are full of the minutiae which make for entertaining headlines. So this year, I say: Please, no more pasty taxes. They just lead to days and days of stupid headlines,
Who votes Ukip? It’s a question psephologists have been trying to answer for years but Nigel Farage had a clear response on the Sunday Politics today: not just disaffected Conservatives. Based on research by Lord Ashcroft, Farage boasted that ’new Ukip’ — a party which is ‘a lot of more professional, a lot more smiley,
George Osborne was on Andrew Marr this morning announcing support for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent and the extension of Help to Buy on new build homes until 2020. The Tories hope that these policies will show both that they are planning for the long term and that they are supporting aspiration.
George Osborne and Ed Balls have gone head-to-head in the media – the former in The Sun on Sunday and the latter in The Sunday Mirror. The two also appeared on the Andrew Marr Show. Neither man said anything new, at least not in terms of the grand narrative, which is scarcely surprising because the
Today’s Sunday Times has news which would be laughable, if it were not to plausible. That George Osborne intends to pour some more petrol on the property market fire next week by extending his discredited Help To Buy equity loan scheme – in effect, a flagrant example of politicians using taxpayers’ money in an attempt
To start on a glamorous note: subsidised bus fares for those in full-time education outside London. I turned 16 in the same year my dad turned 60, and just as I had to pay full (and, in Oxford, whopping) bus fares, he got a free bus pass. At 16 you’re now obliged by law to
Pretoria I panicked one morning when I couldn’t find the 24-hour Oscar Pistorius Trial channel on my hotel TV set. Naturally I’d done a mountain of my own research, but I’ve come to rely on the channel for titbits of background information to enhance my own breakfast reports ahead of a new day’s evidence. They
Simon Jenkins has written a bizarre piece in the Evening Standard. As well as answering that, I’ll explain a few others things about it. Unfortunately, he has completely misunderstood the basics of the universal free school meals fiasco. He writes: ‘Gove decided, by a deal with Nick Clegg, that running every school meant insisting every child have
Viviane Reding is a bit of a favourite among UK ministers. The European Commissioner for Justice has a knack of making such a good case for reform of Europe with her interviews and policies that Conservatives – and indeed Ukippers – are quite content for her to intervene as often as possible. This week, she’s
