All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
To be fair to Kevin Brennan, he seems to have updated his attack line on Michael Gove since his ‘don’t-call-teachers-names’ press release that Labour sent out overnight. The party’s shadow education minister is now attacking the Education Secretary for inconsistency, arguing that his announcement today on improving teacher training contradicts the decision to allow academies
Why are UK taxpayers paying salaries to terrorists? The answer, as I explain in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, is Alan Duncan. The International Development Minister has been told repeatedly that money provided by the UK taxpayer to the Palestinian Authority’s and its ‘general budget’ is being used to pay salaries to Palestinian terrorists in
EDF’s announcement that it is raising gas and electricity bills by nearly 11 per cent will increase pressure on the government in two ways. The first is that these sorts of hikes in the cost of living mean that while ministers have been cheered by recent pleasing statistics on growth, jobs and inflation, voters might
Michael Gove is announcing tougher tests for trainee teachers today, with calculators banned from maths assessments, and the pass mark in tests for English and Maths being raised to the equivalent of GCSE grade B (which still doesn’t sound that taxing), along with a new test in verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning. The Education Secretary
A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when
To the gardens alongside Parliament, where MPs and their mutts lined up this morning in a bid to win the coveted title of Westminster Dog of the Year. Miniature Dachshunds appear to be the dog du jour among Tory MPs, with three of them competing to be crowned top dog. However, their short legs put
What does the Jimmy Savile case tell us about received wisdom? Over the last few weeks it has become clear that one of the most famous people in Britain was known by very many people to be an active, abusive paedophile. Many other people in broadcasting knew it. People in charities he was associated with
David Cameron’s taunt at Ed Miliband yesterday during Prime Minister’s questions that the ‘good news will keep coming’ was taken by some as a hint at today’s GDP figures, which the PM has early access to. Now the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot has written to Cameron to rebuke him for the
What happens when you get two elderly proprietors, one with a book to sell and the other with a Twitter account? Well, sadly, with Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, the answer is a fairly one-sided fight. Black is enjoying both freedom and the airwaves at present by going on a PR megablitz for his new
David Cameron had lunch with Herman van Rompuy in Downing Street today to discuss the UK’s position on the EU budget. Despite the Prime Minister’s tough talking in public about his determination to veto any real-terms increases in the money available for the multi-annual budget, the Downing Street spokeswoman refused to confirm that there was
I’m delighted to launch today a brand new app for the Spectator on the iPad. We’ve redesigned the whole app from scratch to provide an easier, clearer and more elegant way to read the magazine digitally. Every Thursday morning, the latest issue will be automatically delivered straight to your tablet before it even hits the
The saga of whether Lynton Crosby, the hard-charging Australian strategist who ran Boris Johnson’s successful mayoral campaigns, will join the Cameron operation continues. I understand that contrary to popular belief the obstacle to Crosby coming in is not the money. One senior source tells me that ‘If it was just about money, Andrew Feldman would
Ed Balls has just been given a thorough grilling by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics — particularly on his past assertions that Labour were not running a structural deficit in the years leading up to the financial crisis. Here’s the relevant section of the interview: listen to ‘Ed Balls on the structural deficit, 25
It is strange that the government has chosen to trail a speech by Iain Duncan Smith on an issue popular with voters on the same day as good economic news. The Work and Pensions Secretary has already reached an agreement with Chancellor George Osborne that it is possible to cut a further £10 billion from
While Conrad Black re-entered polite society at Lulu’s in Mayfair last night, the Hospital Club in Soho saw the advent of a new political force. A tie-less Douglas Carswell, the rebellious Tory MP for Clacton, took to the stage to launch his new book The End of Politics and the birth of iDemocracy, a work
David Cameron was right; the good news has kept on coming. This morning’s first estimate from the ONS puts GDP growth in the third quarter at 1.0 per cent. Cue much justified squabbling over what the ‘real’ number is. A significant portion of this growth will be a one-off, post-Jubilympics bounce-back, suggesting slower underlying growth.
The economy is out of recession. It grew by 1 per cent in the third quarter of this year, which is the fastest quarterly growth rate since 2007. This positive number makes it a lot easier for the coalition to claim that the economy is ‘healing’. Expect to see ministers heading to TV studios to
So it’s official: the UK economy grew by 1 per cent in the third quarter of 2012, according to the ONS’s preliminary estimate. That’s significantly better than the consensus forecasts. As all the politicking and pontificating begins, there are a few caveats worth keeping in mind:- 1. It’s just an estimate. As I showed yesterday,
What is going to happen next with the BBC Jimmy Salvile saga? In this week’s magazine cover, Rod Liddle blames institutional problems within the organisation and predicts there will be plenty of buck-passing to come. Fraser Nelson says in this week’s View from 22 podcast that although he sympathises with the decision the BBC took,
Whether or not he did accidentally suggest that he knew what tomorrow’s GDP figures will be at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron did have a jolly good point about the way Labour responds to good news on the economy. He told Ed Miliband: ‘It’s only a bad week if you think it’s bad that unemployment’s
Will it be 0.5 per cent? 0.8 per cent? 1 per cent? Whatever figure the ONS tells us GDP grew by in the third quarter of 2012, there’s one thing you can be pretty sure of: it won’t be the actual amount GDP grew by in Q3. In the past 51 years, just 12 of
Goodness, he’s enjoying himself. Ed Miliband is brimful of confidence these days and he handles himself like a master juggler at PMQs. He flicks out deft gags and acerbic asides while keeping the central question in the air. He’s having fun. And it’s a pleasure to watch. Greatly helpful to him is the government’s pledge
For years Scotland has been waiting to see when his luck would run out – well, now it has. Alex Salmond: gambler, tipster, political animal and First Minister now has another moniker: author of the country’s first scomnishambles. Yesterday marked, without doubt, the First Minister’s worst day in office. First, he lost two MSPs. Left-wingers Jean Urquhart
David Cameron was in a particularly irritable mood at Prime Minister’s Questions today. But he did what he needed to do and made clear that ‘prisoners are not getting the vote under this government’. It seems there may be another Commons vote to further demonstrate the will of the House on this matter. If there
Last week David Cameron found himself in trouble after Prime Minister’s Questions over a slip of the tongue about energy bills: this week he’s managed to get himself into trouble over what looks like yet another slip of the tongue at PMQs. The Prime Minster appeared to suggest that tomorrow’s GDP figures, which are under
Nick Clegg is giving a speech this evening in which he will try to re-sell the Liberal Democrats as friends of business. Admitting that he hasn’t ‘said enough’ about the party’s pro-business policies, he will tell the guests at Mansion House: ‘Many in the corporate world do not – automatically – see the Liberal Democrats
The issue of prisoner votes has turned into a question of trust between David Cameron and his backbenchers. Most Tory MPs well remember that the Prime Minister’s initial intention was to comply with the Strasbourg court’s ruling; he only changed his mind after seeing how strong feelings were on the issue on the Tory benches
And so the Savile stuff rumbles on with George Entwistle’s singularly unimpressive performance before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. It still seems to me that the bosses are being evasive over the issue of pressure applied, or otherwise, to the Newsnight editor Peter Rippon. Someone is hiding something, I think. But
Quantitative easing isn’t an eternal elixir of economic health. That was the admission from Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King last night at a speech in Cardiff. Sir Mervyn said there were limits to the BoE’s policy of printing money to buy bonds, which could not ‘continue indefinitely’: ‘One thing we can see clearly
Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher promises to be the most important British political book in decades. Tonight, we got a preview of it when Charles delivered the Centre for Policy Studies’ second Margaret Thatcher lecture. The subject was Thatcher and Europe. I won’t say too much about it because we’re running a version of
It has been a disastrous day for the Scottish National Party. Its majority at Holyrood has been cut to just one this morning after two MSPs – Jean Urquhart and John Finnie – quit the party in protest at its decision at its conference in Perth this weekend to end its opposition to Nato. Then
Finally, some good news for the government – the public seems unconcerned by its recent difficulties. In spite of plebgate and George Osborne’s train ticket dominating this weekend’s papers, polling out today shows the Conservatives have managed to reverse their voting share decline in the wake of their party conference. The Populus/Times poll places the Tories
George Entwistle seemed rather mild-mannered at his first appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning. But after listening to him for two hours, MPs were starting to suggest that the BBC director general was making a quietly savage attack on one of his juniors. It will be astonishing if, after Entwistle’s
I’ve written a piece for today’s Scotsman noting that there are some parallels between Scotland’s independence stushie and the pre-Iraq War rammy a decade ago. Only this time it’s the nationalists who are, if you will allow the comparison, the neoconservatives. Just as pro-war advocates back then (and I was one of them) cheerfully labelled