All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Even so soon after President Obama’s reelection, speculation over who might replace him in January 2017 is already in full swing. Here are the early favourites, as judged by Ladbrokes: Republicans: Paul Ryan: Nominee 5/1, President 12/1 The Congressman from Wisconsin has gained national prominence as chair of the House Budget Committee and more recently
Over the summer, the balance of probability nudged away from a Cameron win towards a Miliband win in 2015. The collapse of the boundary review deal lifted the bar for Cameron, who might have struggled anyway. The Cameron operation – for all of its strengths elsewhere – has proven weak at campaigns. Failing to win
On the Sunday Politics just now, Grant Shapps confirmed to Andrew Neil The Spectator’s story that 20 of the 40 Tory target seats at the next election are Liberal Democrat held. Shapps stressed that it was nothing personal about the Liberal Democrats but just a reflection of what needed to be done if the Tories
The Sunday Papers and the broadcast shows are packed with accounts of Britain’s fractious relationship with the European Union, and what that means for David Cameron. The Observer gives space to a poll, the headline of which says that 56 per cent of Britons would ‘probably or definitely’ vote to leave the EU against 30
After months of will he/won’t he, Lynton Crosby has decided to join the Cameron clan. The Sunday Telegraph reports that the Australian strategist behind Boris’ two victories has signed up as a consultant to run David Cameron’s re-election campaign. The efforts to secure his return were described in the political column in this week’s Spectator: ‘Later this month,
On Monday, the government is set to announce its alcohol strategy. It is expected that this will call for a minimum unit price of 40p. As Graham Wilson reports in The Sun, this idea is a personal favourite of the Prime Minister but opposed by several influential members of the Cabinet. These ministers worry that
It may be less than a fortnight since the 2012 US elections, but it’s never too early to start speculating about what might happen in the next ones. So here’s a quick first look: 2013: New Jersey and Virginia (and Massachusetts?) It may be an off-year, but there’ll be at least two — and possibly
The Coalition Agreement states: ‘We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties.’ The Justice and Security Bill, which returns to the Lords on Monday, contains measures
How is David Cameron planning to get re-elected? If he couldn’t win a majority against Gordon Brown in 2010 then why should he do so much better after five years of flat growth and shrinking living standards? The Police Commissioner elections have been another reminder that, for all their other merits, the Cameroons are not
The latest offensive between Israel and Hamas may only just have begun. But already a set of the usual lies have entered the British coverage. Let me pose a few questions to the people who are propagating them. 1) Why are Hamas firing into undisputed Israeli territory? The territory that Hamas are firing rockets into
1). Independents and the changing face of politics. The election of 12 independent police commissioners (at the latest count) in Dorset, Gwent, North Wales*, Hampshire, Warwickshire, West Mercia, Kent, Avon & Somerset, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Surrey and Gloucestershire is cause for celebration. The aim of elected Police and Crime Commissioners is to localise power in communities,
Of the three main parties, Labour will be happiest with today’s results. They’ve won Corby, the contest that was always going to get the most media attention. But, I think, there are things to worry all three parties in the results. Last week, Labour sources were talking about how the big two tests for them
Large protests have gripped parts of the Jordanian capital, Amman, today in a country where criticism of the king is punishable by three years in prison. King Abdullah has been careful not to repeat the errors of Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian crackdown which quickly escalated matters in neighbouring Syria. So far, Jordanian police have adopted a
Few politicians have put as much thought in to the team around them as George Osborne. He is a collector of talented people. Unlike most Tories, he has gone outside of CCHQ and parliament for nearly every senior appointment he’s made. But I understand that after Christmas he’ll be losing one of the most important
Labour have won Corby from the Conservatives, and with a larger swing than most pundits were predicting. Its majority of more than 7,000 means that Labour now holds the seat with a larger majority than it did after the 2001 election. The Tories are already pointing to several factors to explain the scale of their
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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