Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

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

Alpha females

In her cover piece for this week’s Spectator, Alison Wolf describes the divide between ‘alpha females’ and other women. Here are some of the starkest differences, illustrated using figures from her book The XX Factor. 1. The rise of the alpha female. ‘In England, by the age of 16, girls are dividing into two distinct

James Forsyth

Chris Lockwood to join new Number 10 policy unit

Downing Street has pulled off a coup with the recruitment of Chris Lockwood, the US editor of The Economist, to the new Downing Street policy unit. Lockwood is one of the brightest and most insightful people in journalism and one imagines that he wouldn’t have left a prime perch at The Economist if he did

James Forsyth

Local elections: Tory leadership prepares MPs for the worst

The Tory leadership is getting increasingly nervous that the party isn’t sufficiently braced for bad local election results this Thursday. They’re worried that too many MPs assume the party won’t lose much more than 300 seats. The problem is that, for understandable reasons, MPs are treating all of CCHQ’s dire predictions — one source there

Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s Coldplay bid to voters

Whether you like Ed Miliband’s latest party political broadcast depends very much on whether you’re the sort of person who openly weeps while listening to Coldplay. It’s got plenty of the Chris Martin playing Wembley factor: emotional piano music, people saying things like ‘please, give people some hope’, and the Labour leader leaning comfortingly against

CND cannot rewrite its own history

Last week I recorded an edition of Hardtalk for the BBC which has gone out today.  It is a discussion with Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), on the future of nuclear weaponry. The discussion is available on iplayer here. A couple of observations. Firstly, I seem to have

Rod Liddle

Ken Clarke: decent chap, but wrong about everything

Kenneth Clarke has always seemed, to me, a decent sort. By far the most likeable and least lordly and arrogant of those Euro-wanking wets who plagued Thatcher and, later, Major. Nonetheless, he is always wrong. About everything. If you are ever in doubt about where you should stand on a particular issue, find out what

Isabel Hardman

Dealing with the UKIP threat

How do the Tories deal with UKIP? The party likes to split on most issues, and it has got a nice little fault line running across it at the moment on whether to squash the party as ‘fruitcakes’, or, as Conor Burns eloquently argued on Coffee House this morning, engage with the problems and anxieties

How a TARDIS could help the police

If we had a time machine and could take a stroll down our local high street twenty years ago, we’d discover a place alive with activity. As well as shoppers hunting through famous outfits such as Woolworths, JJB Sports and Comet, we might see queues snaking at the local bank branch, someone waiting their turn

Isabel Hardman

Ministers burrow under the ring-fences for spending review

Bids for the 2015/16 spending review will land on George Osborne’s desk today from Secretaries of State across Whitehall. Some, like Iain Duncan Smith and Patrick McLoughlin, are signed up to the idea that their departments need further cuts. McLoughlin, as a former chief whip, prefers to avoid conflict, while Duncan Smith has made it

François Hollande’s great haul of China

François Hollande has just completed his visit to China. The two great socialist nations more or less embraced: ‘I look forward to… working with you to make our relationship closer, healthier and more vibrant,’ said Chinese president Xi Jinping. ‘When China and France agree on a position, we can drive the world,’ Hollande cooed back. Both

James Forsyth

David Cameron and the married couple’s tax allowance

The married couple’s tax allowance is back on the agenda. After Conservative Home’s exclusive yesterday, David Cameron has confirmed that he will introduce one before the end of this parliament. This would allow couples to share a proportion of their personal allowance, lowering the tax bill for those household where one person stays home to

Rod Liddle

The Wright Way

Continuing the domestic bliss/ tv theme, one programme I have not watched so far is The Wright Way. This is a situation comedy about somebody called Wright, as you might have imagined. It is written by the 1980s comedian Ben Elton. The show has already received a slagging from a couple of critics, largely for

What can Obama do about Syria?

Even John Kerry is now confirming what was already long suspected: that Bashar al-Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people. In all likelihood, he has used Sarin nerve agents against rebel held areas in the north. That he would do so is no surprise. This is the most strategically sensitive area in Syria

Melanie McDonagh

Who stands to gain from the Kosovo-Serbia deal? The EU

Britain’s very own EU High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs, Cathy Ashton, has not had a terribly good press after a report from the European Parliament said her department had too many decision-making layers, is top heavy and is indecisive in response to crises. It didn’t help that she was looking for a four

Cricket is more than a game

Does this advert ring a bell? It showed a handsome young man hitting a cricket ball far into the distance. It appeared on the Tube last spring. The tagline read: ‘How far can you hit it, Rory?’ The advert said that the young man was Rory Hamilton-Brown, captain of Surrey County Cricket Club. It urged

Fraser Nelson

The report the Department for Education does NOT want you to read

One of the better policies of this government is its offering massive databases up for public scrutiny. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, argues David Cameron, and outsiders can scrutinise what the government is doing and point to flaws. With commendable openness the Department for Education asked Deloitte to look at its massive pupil database last

Alex Massie

In Praise of Sweatshops

In today’s Telegraph David Blair has a strong and angry piece arguing that we – that is, western consumers – are complicit in or partially responsible for the deaths of nearly 300 Bangladeshis killed when the building in which they worked collapsed. Many will agree with him. This, they will say, is the true price

Isabel Hardman

About that UKIP tax policy…

Nigel Farage was on Question Time again last night. This was hardly unusual, but what was interesting was that the UKIP leader U-turned on one of his flagship policies. When he spoke at a press lunch on Tuesday, Farage accepted that UKIP’s flat tax policy was ‘incomplete’, but that UKIP’s aspiration was to have taxes

Islamophobia is a government priority. What about Islamism?

According to one of his family members Tamerlan Tsarnaev was, among other things, ‘angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.’ His efforts to refute this charge included planting bombs in the middle of a family sports event in Boston, killing – among others – an eight year old boy. The case brings

Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher and the missing votes

There was a startling late entry for the first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher. On the day after she died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he

Maria Miller and Britain’s creative industries need to talk

Everyone seems to like talking about the ‘creative industries’ these days. For arts folk, it gives the impression that what they do is hard-edged and economically viable, it makes geeky people like programmers and software designers sound more interesting and it allows ministers to talk about rather slippery and intangible elements of the economy in