All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
There’s an interesting subplot to yesterday’s prisoner exchange in Syria which has not received as much attention as it should. While government and rebel forces were busy swapping captives (more than 2,000 in total), little has been made of the role played by aid group IHH in brokering the deal. The group came to prominence
Good grief. Are we supposed to be surprised that senior officials at the US State Department take the view that Britain should, all things considered, remain a member of the European Union? Of course not. Are, however, we supposed to be shocked by Foggy Bottom’s impertinence in saying so? Apparently so. Of course, if the
We’re delighted to be back with a bang for the first Spectator podcast of 2013. This week, our political editor James Forsyth discusses David Cameron’s long-delayed speech on Europe with Mats Peerson, director of the Open Europe think tank. Will the Prime Minister manage to keep his party together over a renegotiation? Will Angela Merkel
Whilst I have been a vocal supporter in Parliament of the need to tackle childhood obesity, I am by no means a shining example. My childhood was fuelled by sugar and E numbers that had me running around convinced that one day I would be a professional cricketer, or the next Gary Lineker, inspired by
At 9 o’clock this morning, journalists all over the country were fiddling with their radios excitedly. Nick Clegg was about to start his first LBC phone-in, and they were gleefully waiting for the Deputy Prime Minister to huff and puff his way through half an hour of enraged callers. There was even a live high-definition
Coffee House readers won’t be surprised by the Independent’s report that Michael Gove has been telling friends he has no objections to profit-making schools: he explained his position on the matter at length to Fraser in December. Then, the Education Secretary said he was keen for the one profit-seeking school in this country, IES in
Steerpike is back in this week’s Spectator, and here’s a little taster from Wapping: James Harding, the ousted Times editor, left with a £1.3 million payoff in his pocket and the praise of Fleet Street ringing in his ears. But why did he go? A chap who polishes the executives’ shoes at News International tells
Andrew Marr is recovering from a stroke in hospital, the BBC has said this evening. We at Coffee House wish him well in his recovery. The BBC’s statement on Andrew Marr’s condition: “Andrew Marr was taken ill yesterday and taken to hospital. The hospital confirmed he has had a stroke. His doctors say he is
David Cameron’s big Europe speech is now less than a fortnight away. It will be, I suspect, the most consequential speech of his premiership. When you look at the challenges involved, one can see why the speech has been delayed so many times. Cameron needs to say enough to reassure his party, which has never
Seemed a good idea at the time. Ed Miliband decided that the progress report published by the Coalition is a ‘secret audit’. At today’s PMQs he accused Cameron of sneaking it out in order to dodge bad coverage. Poor old Ed. He can’t read the chess-match more than one move ahead. The PM gave the
He might want to stay Prime Minister until 2020, but who will succeed David Cameron once he’s gone? In this week’s Spectator, Bruce Anderson offers his own tip for the next Conservative leader: David Cameron has announced that he would like to stay in No. 10 until at least 2020. That is excellent news for
If the past few weeks are any indication, conservative Republicans learned very little from the 2012 election. While the party’s establishment tries to claw its way back from defeat, tea partiers and neoconservatives have decided to double-down on obstructionism. Less than a week after nearly derailing the fiscal cliff negotiations, tea partiers threaten to drive
Ahead of a major Spectator debate on the implications of the Leveson report, Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi explains why he supports a statute-backed system of press regulation. Yesterday’s mid-term review included the statement ‘We will continue to work on a cross-party basis towards the implementation of the Leveson Report on press regulation’. A welcome reminder
While Ed Miliband wasn’t exactly Mr Pugnacious today at PMQs, one of his better blows was when he read out the promise in the Coalition Agreement to ‘stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS’ and asked whether that would be on a list of broken promises in the audit of government achievements. Labour always sees
Finally, the copper-bottomed, unvarnished Programme for Government Update, aka the Secret Audit, has landed. You can read the full document here, but in summary, it’s not immediately very helpful. It is laid out as a point-by-point ‘analysis’ of how the government is meeting its pledges in the Coalition Agreement, but the wording is such that
No one could call today’s PMQs illuminating. Ed Miliband led on the whole embarrassment of a Downing Street aide being snapped with a memo about whether to release a full audit of the coalition’s performance. There followed some not particularly sharp PMQs knock-about. Miliband claimed the ‘nasty party is back’ while Cameron bashed Labour for
Number 10 officials have been working on the mid-term review since the autumn, with what the Prime Minister’s spokesman described today as a ‘long-term intention’ to publish the awkward annex. But even though the review itself was delayed from the real mid-term point of the Coalition to this Monday, it doesn’t seem to have given
Alex Salmond is back in Bute House, refreshed and chippered by a much-needed holiday. If 2012 was a year in which the Referendum Guns were first deployed it was still, in the end, something of a phoney war. At the risk of exhausting an easily-exhausted electorate, 2013 should see more action. This week’s column at
The Coalition’s decision to publish a Mid-Term review reminded some of Tony Blair’s ill-fated annual reports, which strangely stopped appearing after 2000. Blair’s last report embarrassed him because it contained mistakes: the danger of this document was that while lauding the government’s progress to date, it might also have to accept a number of failures.
Ill prepared, ill suited and irrelevant — that’s the conclusion a new report on Britain’s cyber defences. In a scathing analysis, the House of Commons Defence Committee’s demands the government take the cyber threat more seriously: ‘The Government needs to put in place — as it has not yet done — mechanisms, people, education, skills, thinking and
Republicans objecting to Chuck Hagel’s nomination to serve as the new US Defense Secretary have only themselves to blame. Having run Susan Rice out of the running to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, there’s no way President Obama could stomach losing a second high-profile nomination before he’s even formally accepted his second term.
If you haven’t seen it yet, this video of Piers Morgan interviewing a lunatic is good value for a few minutes: He is the butt of many jokes, Morgan, and I suspect the Americans like his rather bumptious public school schtick more than we do. He is, however, a very good interviewer indeed, both in
Not long ago Westminster wags nicknamed Sir Jeremy Heywood, Downing Street’s top Sir Humphrey — ‘Wormtongue’ after Tolkien’s poisonous power behind the throne in the Lord of the Rings. Since being tasked with investigating the Andrew Mitchell affair (and managing to miss the glaring differences between the CCTV footage and the police notes long before
The Europeanisation of American politics continues apace with President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defence. Known for his dovish views on Iran, his opposition to the war in Iraq, and scepticism of America’s relationship with Israel, Hagel’s nomination is a contentious one. Obama’s first term cabinet was a diverse one, with the
The real problem with the Big Society (and I speak as someone who has written in favour of the idea) is that it was a vaguely-defined description that was turned into a vaguely-defined aspiration. As with so much of the Conservative Party’s agenda it turned out the project was infused with a nostalgic right-wing utopianism.
Reports of his return to frontline politics certainly seem to have woken up David Miliband. He has given a very energetic speech in the Commons this afternoon in the Welfare Uprating Bill: so energetic, in fact, that he managed to steal poor Sarah Teather’s rebellious thunder, speaking directly after the former Lib Dem minister. Shortly
The benefits debate in Westminster will rage on long after today’s vote in the Commons. It’s not just a straight row between the government and opposition over who is really on the side of hard working people, nor is it just a debate within the two governing parties. It seems that divisions are now opening
The battle-lines over the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill — which faces its second reading in the Commons this afternoon — have been drawn. Labour has tied its opposition to the Resolution Foundation’s analysis showing that the bulk of the policy will hit working families. As Ed Balls put it last week, ‘Two-thirds of people who
One of the amusing inclusions in yesterday’s otherwise anodyne Mid-Term review document was the promise that the government ‘will provide for a vote in the House of Commons on the Boundary Commission’s proposals for changes to constituencies’. If yesterday was a renewing of vows, some of them have been rather watered down since the Coalition
The Welfare Uprating Bill won’t fall into difficulty when it has its second reading in the Commons today, but with around five Lib Dem MPs expected to vote against or abstain on the 1 per cent rise in benefit payments, it’s going to be a lively debate. The Conservatives are focused on making the debate
The coalition has worked very hard, taken tough decisions, worked in the long-term interest of the country for short-term political gain. That, if you can’t summon the energy to read all 46 pages of the Mid-Term Review, is its surprising verdict on the Coalition so far. But the document also sets out plans for the
The Cameron/Clegg press conference did not teach us very much — save that the chemistry between the two is as good as ever, that they can still finish each other’s sentences and exchange bad jokes. The Prime Minister’s bad joke related to one of the comments under his interview with Matthew d’Ancona yesterday where he
For anybody who needs reminding of how stupid ‘clever’ people can be, can I recommend Guido’s post on the Ralph Miliband lecture series? Each year the London School of Economics still holds an annual commemoration of the dead Marxist now best known of as the father of David and Ed. Much that has gone wrong
‘We have reduced the deficit by a quarter in just two years’ — the coalition’s mid-term review. True. But when Gordon Brown proposed to do precisely the same in Labour’s last budget, George Osborne criticised him for not moving fast enough and endangering the economy. The ONS shows that public sector net borrowing was down
