All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Speaking of politicians worthy of your support, here’s Senator Rand Paul doing his thing: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is holding up a vote on the Defense Authorization Act until he gets a vote on his amendment affirming the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution and the indefinite detention of Americans. […] Paul’s amendment would give American
John Prescott’s trials continue. There will be a run-off between Prescott and the Tory challenger, Matthew Grove. This has been quite a turn around, with Grove staging a late charge in the race for first preference votes when the rural East Riding area was called in his favour. He displaced the independent candidate, retired copper
Michael Gove, the most important and successful Aberdonian politician since, well, since I don’t know actually, is also that rarest of things: a grown-up cabinet minister. He knows the importance of praise. Consider this passage – highlighted by John Rentoul – from a speech he gave on Child Protection this morning: Just as the Labour
Could George Osborne be in line for a genuine windfall? The Chancellor is getting quite good at conjuring fake ones (Post Office pensions, raiding £35 billion from the Bank of England) but he has yet to sell the 4G licenses. This could be more significant than next month’s mini-Budget. The stunning success of Ireland’s 4G
More people are interested in low turnout than turned out to vote at yesterday’s PCC elections; that is the story of the day so far. The figures quoted are baleful, ranging between 12 and 24 per cent (Harry Phibbs has a good guide). This makes elections to the European Parliament look popular. Indeed, one polling station in
The headline on Lord Ashdown’s piece on Afghanistan in today’s Times (£) will please Lib Dem strategists. ‘This awful mistake mustn’t claim more lives.’ It allows the Lib Dems to play the anti-war card: we are the party that will bring Our Boys (and Girls) home. The strategists could take plenty of other lines from
So far, the election results are as expected. Labour has comfortably held Manchester Central and Cardiff South and the Tory candidate has been elected as the Police and Crime Commissioner for Wiltshire. But turnout has not been good. In Manchester Central it was under 20 percent, the lowest by-election turnout since the war according to
The problem about relative poverty is precisely its relativity. The child poverty index, which measures whether a family’s income is below 60 per cent of the average, is a case in point; when incomes go down, bingo, so does child poverty. Which means that one sure fire if controversial way to improve the Government’s child
The case of Adrian Smith, the Christian the Trafford Housing Trust demoted for politely expressing his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook, is one of the most disgraceful I have come across. Much will be written about the contempt for freedom of speech and conscience Mr Smith’s po-faced and prod-nosed employers showed. Mr Justice Briggs
The papers and media are full of the news that Israel has killed a Hamas leader in the Gaza. Why did this happen? Where did it come from? Is it not yet another example of the blood-thirsty Zionists doing their worst? If you read most of the British media that may well be what you
Tonight is election night but there’s not much counting going on. The Corby by-election count doesn’t start until tomorrow morning and Wiltshire is the only place where the Police and Crime Commissioner votes are being tallied up over night. But we should get results in the next few hours in Manchester Central and Cardiff South,
Today brings yet another sign that CCHQ is gearing up for the long election campaign. After yesterday’s news that the party has chosen the forty seats it intends to target at the next election, I now hear that talent is being moved out of Whitehall and back to Millbank to beef up the team there.
Do pollsters and pundits actually understand how British elections work? I sometimes wonder. Take, for instance, the debate concerning whether or not supporting gay marriage might win the Conservative party more votes than it loses. The Prime Minister says there are polls that suggest it would. Not so fast, retorts ComRes’s Andrew Hawkins. He argues:
Are you happy that the former Labour MP Margaret Moran, who swindled more than £50,000 from the taxpayer in rogue expenses, will escape a custodial sentence because she is ‘depressed’? It is a sort of reverse catch-22 for miscreants who have held some sort of high public office (which an MP still is, I suppose).
Lord McAlpine has just given an incredibly moving interview to BBC Radio 4’s World at One. He talks about how the false accusations affected him. He said, ‘It gets into your bones, it gets into your soul. There’s nothing bad as this you can do to people.’ The damage, he said, could not be repaired
George Osborne’s spirited bid in The Times (£) earlier this week to appropriate the Obama victory for the Tories is a curious mirror image of the Labour Party’s arguments to the same effect. Both ignore the reality that the US is the US, not us, and Obama is Obama; formulas for election success aren’t a
The Eurozone is now in recession – this, at least, is what is implied by today’s avalanche of dire economic data. Eurostat has not (yet) made this calculation; but Capital Economics has. Take into account the relative size of the Eurozone economies who have declared figures and it suggests a fall of 0.1 per cent
Are Britain and Germany heading for an almightily clash over the future of the EU? In this week’s Spectator, Christopher Caldwell argues that Angela Merkel has had enough of Britain’s position and is out to give David Cameron a kicking over Britain’s lack of solidarity with her nation. On the latest View from 22 podcast,
Leaving aside the moral implications of the scandal which caused General Petraeus to resign as head of the CIA, this is an issue which demands serious attention from the American defence establishment. We know that Petraeus’ alleged mistress Paula Broadwell is said to have accessed his emails, and that she sent threatening emails to another
One of the things to watch for as tensions escalate between Gaza and Israel is the extent to which Ismail Haniyeh’s authority is eroded within the Strip. Hamas is clearly responsible for launching a number of missiles into southern Israel, yet it does not have a monopoly on the violence. Salafi-Jihadist groups such as Jund
The front page of today’s Washington Post shows a picture of the BBC’s Jihad Masharawi holding his dead 11-month-old son, an innocent victim of Israeli action against Hamas’ paramilitary targets following months of indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilians in southern Israel*. The Post’s front page reinforces the fact that Israel has a public relations problem when it retaliates
Douglas Murray’s latest post is a rum ‘un indeed. He asks us to believe that Barack Obama’s “foreign policy boasts” are unraveling now that the American election is usefully out the way. I must say that the evidence for this is thin, not least since it seems to rely upon 1. A reported Iranian attack
What a lot of things President Obama seems to have been holding back until after his re-election. Each day brings something new. There has been the news of an attack by Iran on a US drone in the Persian Gulf. Then there is the Petraeus affair – known about for months, but only leading to
What’s the test of success of the Police & Crime Commissioners policy? It is, surely, whether the 41 individuals who will be elected tomorrow succeed in cutting crime and antisocial behaviour, and rebuilding public confidence in policing. This is not, however, the test which the BBC – and others – intend to apply. Their correspondent
One of Britain’s leading pollsters has written to the Prime Minister to rebuke him for misleading his supporters over whether the Conservative Party would suffer in the polls if they legislated on gay marriage. The Spectator has seen an incredible exchange of letters between the Prime Minister, the former Welsh Secretary, Cheryl Gillan, and Andrew
The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count
Former Chief Whip Andrew ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell has been reflecting on his salad days. In an interview with Cambridge University’s alumni magazine, which one presumes was given some time before the row with a Downing Street police officer which ended his career, Mitchell recalls his arrival at Jesus College in 1975: ‘I came here straight out of
This time tomorrow, the country will be flocking to the polls to select their first ever police commissioners. Or at least some of them will. Turnout has long predicted to be low, but the latest analysis by Sky’s psephologist Michael Trasher suggests it will come in between 15 and 20 per cent. Such a figure would
Today brings yet another set of reminders for Numbers 9, 10 and 11 Downing Street about how difficult maintaining party discipline is going to be. First, there’s The Guardian story about Chris Heaton-Harris trying to use James Delingpole and the threat of him running as an anti-wind farm candidate in Corby as leverage to toughen
As students at Oxford University, we are told repeatedly by tutors, proctors, and the Chancellor himself that we’re not allowed to do much outside our degree. We cannot do more than eight hours of paid work a week, and extracurricular activities are monitored carefully by colleges, who can revoke your right to do them at
Today’s employment figures don’t contain much new to shout about. The number of people in work — although it rose by 100,000 on the previous quarter — is actually down very slightly from last month’s record high (but still above the pre-recession peak, just). Unemployment fell by 49,000 from Q2 to Q3, although that’s well
Oh, Ireland! You knew it would come to this. Today’s Irish Times carries the appalling story of the death of Savita Halappanavar, a dentist in Galway, who died in hospital largely as a consequence of being denied an abortion. As the paper reports, Mrs Halappanavar: [P]resented with back pain at the hospital on October 21st,
Earlier this week my wife called to make a GP appointment for our daughter, who has been experiencing some worrying tummy pains. Middle of next week she was told, earliest. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t call at 8 o’clock,’ the receptionist chided. ‘We had several slots then, but now they’ve all gone.’ Silly us for
What’s wrong with supporting James Delingpole? Ask the Guardian: it has had a tremendous amount of fun exposing the Tories’ campaign manager for the Corby by-election, Chris Heaton Harris MP, appearing to support The Spectator’s very own James Delingpole. The paper has obtained video recorded by what it describes as an ‘undercover Greenpeace reporter’ of Heaton-Harris telling
