All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
So is the ban on smoking in cars with children, backed by MPs this evening by 376 votes to 107 against, a good idea? As James observed earlier, it is fascinating to see how quickly opinions have shifted even in the past few weeks. The PA division lists have 100 Conservative MPs voting against, and only
There is one important line in Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture which shows the Labour leader is trying to come to terms with some of the difficult questions that he knows he must answer before 2015. Labour knows that it will have to close hospitals to improve services. But it also doesn’t really want to
In the past few days it has become increasingly difficult to tell what the Number 10 strategy is for responding to the floods. As one Tory MP remarked to me earlier, ‘there is a whiff of the Hurricane Katrina about Number 10’s handling of the floods. It’s the inconsistency of government comms and policy. First
The pegs are definitely coming out of Michael Gove’s education big tent, although it’s not just the Secretary of State who is pulling them out. Time was when Stephen Twigg could only make strangely consensual-yet-critical humming noises at the despatch box during departmental questions. Now Tristram Hunt is able to find sufficient difference between his
The most remarkable thing about the ban on smoking in cars when children are present, which will pass the Commons later today, is how quickly minds have changed. There’ll be ministers and MPs voting for it today who were dismissing it as absurd nanny-statism just a week ago. What has happened is that MPs, particularly
Ed Miliband is delivering the Hugo Young lecture tonight, and will focus on ‘people-powered public services’. All the briefing so far sets it out to be one of those ‘intellectual underpinnings’ speeches, rather than something that sets the world on fire (although Miliband does, to his credit, have a habit of pulling impressive speeches out
Just when the Lib Dems thought the Lord Rennard row had calmed down, the peer announces that his lawyers have demanded that he be reinstated as a member by Thursday, or he will take legal action. His spokesman has confirmed that a ‘pre-action protocol’ has been sent to the party which notifies it that certain
Nigel Farage has been warning of a ‘deluge’ for some time: it’s just that he was talking about migrants, not rivers. But the Ukip leader is never one to avoid capitalising on a crisis, so here he is yesterday, visiting flood-stricken Burrowbridge. After a hard day’s wading, there’s only one thing a chap can do:
The love-in between Kevin Pietersen and David Cameron continues. As I reported last week, the PM waded into the row over the sacking of the England batsman, and now KP has changed his Twitter picture to this snap of the two of them in happier times. Mr S doesn’t want to stunt this blossoming love,
It is not surprising that the Environment Agency (EA) have come under attack for the flooding in South West England. What is surprising is how long it took people to catch on to the fact that if anyone was to blame, it was the EA, not Owen Paterson. As this week’s leading article in The Spectator
Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the
‘I’ve kept my counsel up to now,’ said Chris Smith, loftily, when he appeared on the Today programme. Perhaps by the end of the interview, in which he managed to distance himself from previous policy pronouncements while defending his staff to the hilt, he wished he’d kept his counsel too. Those opening words suggested that
How many FTSE 100 chief executives support Labour? How many FTSE 250 chief execs back Ed Miliband? Difficult questions for Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, in his outing on the BBC’s Sunday Politics today. Labour’s plan to jack up the top rate of income tax to 52 per cent (up from 47 per cent) has
It’s a week since Harriet Harman claimed it was ‘raining men’ in the Tory party, and yet the debate still rages about whether the Conservatives have a ‘women problem’. Tory backbencher Tracey Crouch has written a forceful piece for the Mail on Sunday on why she felt Ed Miliband’s intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions on
David Cameron seems to be prepared to speak out on certain subjects that many other politicians avoid. This is very welcome. I think it’s about time he took a dig at the Turner Prize. I am unconvinced by the banal installations and grainy videos that consistently win that particular prize. The Prime Minister needs to
Compare and contrast. We have Chris Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, whose shortcomings can now be seen covering 23,000 acres of Somerset. And yet, when visiting yesterday, he did not say sorry (the word he used instead was ‘proud’). He says he sees no reason for him to resign, even when it is clear
Immigration Minister Mark Harper has resigned after being informed that his cleaner was working illegally in this country. Here is the exchange of letters between Harper and David Cameron: Letter from Mark Harper to the Prime Minister 7 February 2014 Dear Prime Minister In April 2007 I took on a cleaner for my London flat.
Ukip’s campaigning team has been working so hard to make it into second place in Wythenshawe and Sale East that when I arrived at their very purple shop in Sale town centre yesterday, the big panic was not so much a shortage of leaflets as a shortage of clean pants. One of the staffers has
Should Britain’s foreign aid budget be raided to help homes hit by the flood? There are plenty calls for this today, making the splash of the Daily Mail (below). A local MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, says:- “We send money all over the world now we need to give people down here the hope that they will
Spectator literary competition No. 2836 This week you are invited to come up with suitable collective nouns for the following: tweeters; hackers; hoodies; WAGs; environmentalists; bankers; MPs; contrarians. Entries to be emailed, please, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 19 February. The recent call for extracts from the adolescent diary of a well-known public figure, living
Now look, as Tony Blair would say, homophobia is bad. Very bad. But does that mean we have to turn the Sochi Winter Olympics into a sort of global gay pride event, simply because Russia has passed a not very pleasant law against teaching children about homosexuality? Apparently it does. Every right-thinking hack on earth, it
Downing Street comms supremo Craig Oliver texted ‘could this be the start of a beautiful new relationship?’ to a Telegraph executive when Tony Gallagher departed as editor of the once staunchly Tory broadsheet. It seems that Michael Gove did not get the memo, though. Gove dropped by Telegraph towers on Buckingham Palace Road yesterday to
There has been a lot of comment about a recent Michelle Goldberg piece in the Nation on feminism in social media and how incredibly unpleasant feminists are to each other. That is not entirely surprising, in one sense. All political ideologies are wracked by internal struggle, especially those that reach an impasse in their goals.
I got a text from a mischievous friend in London this morning. ‘David Cameron has asked me to ask you not to leave the UK. We would miss you all awfully if you did and the Olympics were jolly fun with you on board,’ it said. I don’t think this was quite what the Prime
When it emerged that there was horsemeat in cheap burgers, some people thought it might spark a revolution in the British meat industry. Now that the public are more aware of the ins and outs of it all – the complicated and murky supply chains, the potential drug contamination, the images of badly-wrapped frozen meat
David Cameron’s speech on the union this morning prompted many questions. Why was he in London? Why were there so many empty seats in the Olympic velodrome? Etc, etc, etc. But Mr Steerpike wants to know why the speech was peppered with song lyrics. ‘We don’t walk on by,’ said Dave – unlike Dionne Warwick.
I have my criticisms of the Obama administration, but it does seem to have the right idea about the European Union’s diplomatic efficacy. His top diplomat for European and Eurasian affairs, Victoria Nuland, has been taking a lot of stick after she was caught on tape (or hacked, as we Brits would call it) discussing the
I’m in Wythenshawe and Sale East today with Ukip’s by-election candidate John Bickley. I’ll have a full report of the party’s exploits later, but for the meantime, here’s a chat I had with Bickley about the campaign. listen to ‘John Bickley: ‘If there was an Olympic medal for hypocrisy, Labour would win gold’’ on Audioboo
Talking to Barbara Taylor about her new madness memoir this week, it’s clear that Britain does not have a glorious history when it comes to dealing with mad people. But The Spectator has always stood up for them, arguing in 1844, for example, that ‘the custody of lunatics ought to be like that of children
At the Lee Valley Velopark today, David Cameron gave a speech where he called on people across the UK to speak out for the UK and against Scottish independence. Here’s what he said:- listen to ‘David Cameron’s speech on the importance of Scotland to the UK’ on Audioboo I want to thank Glasgow Caledonian for
David Cameron will tell Scots this morning that the UK wants Scotland to stay a part of the Union. That he’s giving this speech at all is being read in some quarters as a sign that he’s at least underwhelmed by the show put on so far by Better Together leader Alistair Darling. The PM’s
Whether it wants to or not, Washington has a role to play in the UK’s EU debate. Eurosceptics and Europhiles constantly wrangle over what the US position is on Brexit, splitting hairs interpreting State Department officials’ carefully worded remarks in order to claim victory for their side. The latest episode in this running saga sees
Danny Alexander offers his ‘dead body’ to stop a non-existent tax cut. David Laws accuses Michael Gove of thwarting some imagined plan on school inspectors. Each day seems to bring a fresh attempt at Liberal Democrats finding a new reason to thwack the Conservatives – while the Tories cheerfully take it. Britain’s government is starting
What are the Coalition parties going to do for the next few months in the run-up to the general election? Judging by the way the Liberal Democrats have behaved this week, they’re going to spend a great deal of time talking about Michael Gove, which isn’t encouraging for anyone who got a little bored of
