All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
In his first statement as Prime Minister on the steps of No10 Downing Street, David Cameron said that “One of the tasks that we clearly have is to rebuild trust in our political system… yes, it’s about making sure people are in control and that the politicians are always their servants and never their masters.”
As with all bureaucracies of its size and aloof detachment, the International Olympic Committee is blithely indifferent to the very principles it claims to uphold. Its charter proclaims that ‘any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to
Boris Johnson is one of the few politicians in the world able to clamber up on a concert stage in Hyde Park, take the mic, and whip a crowd up into a frenzy as he did last night. If you haven’t seen the Mayor of London sending Londoners wild with excitement while mocking Mitt Romney,
Hilary Mantel has just been long-listed for the Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies, her brilliant follow-up to Wolf Hall, which netted the coveted Booker itself in 2009. We at The Spectator can’t trumpet this enough – you see, Hilary was the first-ever winner of our Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize in 1987. The prize, awarded for ‘the
News reaches No. 22 that rising star of the right Milo Yiannopoulos, of Catholic Herald and tech-world fame, is to be nominated for Stonewall’s ‘Homophobe of the Year’. The news has come as a surprise to the flamboyant Yiannopoulos, who, despite arguing forcefully against gay marriage on Channel 4’s risible 10 O’Clock Live, has never
David Cameron broke with Downing Street tradition today by meeting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Romney might now be wishing that, like François Hollande, he’d been snubbed by the Prime Minister until the elections were over. He started his day with forgetting Ed Miliband’s name, calling him ‘Mr Leader’ instead when the two met.
My blog on last week’s bombing in Bulgaria and convictions in Manchester provoked a response from my colleague Martin Bright which I should like to respond to in turn. In his post Martin writes: ‘You won’t hear me say this very often, but I don’t think Douglas has gone far enough. For once, I think
Revolutions don’t succeed until the capital starts wavering. Bashar al-Assad knows this and has, so far, managed to assert his authority over Damascus and Syria’s second city, Aleppo. That much was true until earlier this week when rebels launched a massive assault on both cities, coinciding with the start of the Muslim holy month of
There’s been a lot of attention over the past few days as to whether George Osborne is too political. But what should really worry Tories is not how political George Osborne is, but how unpolitical Number 10 is. There are far too many Tories who think that politics is something you do in opposition not
A few years ago, comedian Marcus Brigstocke beautifully summed up the national response to the news that we’d be hosting the Olympic Games: ‘“Would you like the oldest, most historically significant athletic competition the world has ever known, attracting athletes from every known nation on the face of the planet to come here and perform
The Lords Commissioner for Standards has cleared Baroness Warsi of allegations that she wrongly claimed expenses for staying rent-free with a friend. Now that this has been cleared up, and Sir Alex Allan has already exonerated her from any allegations of impropriety for allowing a business partner to accompany her, Warsi has a clean slate
One popular prediction swirling around Westminster this morning is that part of the Government’s response to the GDP disaster will be to cut more money from the welfare budget. After all, George Osborne told MPs in his Budget statement that there would need to be a further package of £10 billion cuts in welfare spending
Yesterday’s economic news reminds us of the need for the Government to continue to focus relentlessly on getting our economy moving – dealing with the debt crisis, boosting bank lending to the real economy, and ensuring sustainable long-term prosperity through radical economic reform. One of the key planks of the Government’s reforms is to make
I’m fresh back from the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall where I spent a day prescribing poetry prescriptions to those in need. It was a revelatory experience. Having spent twenty years or so promoting poetic excellence through the Forward Prizes for Poetry and broader access to the art-form through National Poetry Day, I’ve been battling
David Cameron is using the Olympics today to strike a more upbeat tone after yesterday’s GDP gloom. The Prime Minister is speaking at 10am at a global investment conference to pitch for business from 180 chief executives from around the world. Cameron will tell the conference that he is ‘determined that Britain will be on
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Yesterday Nick Clegg published an ‘implementation framework’ for the government’s mental health strategy. This follows his announcement in February 2011 of a ‘No Health without Mental Health’ policy, which has not been delivered and is now fragmenting under the changes being implemented to the commissioning structure of the health service. I have a special interest
‘Osborne’s austerity is killing the recovery.’ It’s a familiar refrain, one that we hear every time there’s bad economic news. And, sure enough, today’s terrible GDP stats have sparked yet another rendition. Take this, for example, from the TUC’s Brendan Barber: ‘The government’s austerity strategy is failing so spectacularly that is has wiped out the recovery
Congress party Pranab Mukherjee’s victory in the Indian presidential election this week allowed the party to exhale for a nanosecond amid the gloom of stalled economic reform and political paralysis. As the country watched the pomp and pageantry of the presidential swearing-in today, the tectonic plates of power in India started to shift again. The Indian
Lord Oakeshott has just sparked some outrage by arguing on the World at One that George Osborne, who he described as a ‘Chancellor on work experience’ should be replaced by Vince Cable. He said: ‘I do think that George Osborne, he’s got no business experience, he’s never worked outside politics, and you know, he’s doing
The PCS decision to call off the strike scheduled for tomorrow lessens the chances of a logistical nightmare of a start to the Olympics. It also means that the government’s challenge to the strike won’t be heard in court. Both sides are claiming victory in the dispute. Government sources are claiming that the union has
Today’s GDP figures are far worse than expected. They mean that the economy has now shrunk for three consecutive quarters. The figures have destroyed the optimism created by the fact that employment and tax revenues are rising. Politically, these figures are undoubtedly a blow to the coalition. Labour is out trying to pin the blame
The ONS’s first estimate of GDP in Q2 of 2012 shows a 0.7 per cent fall on Q1. It’s worth remembering that this is just a preliminary estimate and subject to revision later, but that’s a very big drop — the largest since the beginning of 2009 — driven largely by a big 5.2 per cent contraction
Ed Davey has managed to win his first major battle as Energy Secretary – against the might of the Treasury, no less. James blogged earlier in the week that the battle between Lib Dem and Tory on cutting subsidies for onshore wind generation would be a test of how well the coalition is actually working, and this
The Red Fort in Soho went multi-coloured last night as politcos from across the spectrum gathered to celebrate Keith Vaz’s 25th year in Parliament. Top of the a-list was Tony Blair, fresh from lunch at Downing Street with the Queen. No sign of his wife, again, but his son Euan was pressing the flesh. If
David Gauke was only elected in 2005, but it’s impossible that he can’t remember the Back to Basics campaign, and how well that moral campaign worked out for the Conservative Party. Its 1993 launch precipitated revelations of all kinds of non-traditional behaviour in the party, from affairs to cash for questions. Had the Exchequer Secretary
‘If you treasure it, measure it.’ So Gus O’Donnell said when addressing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics in November. Well, the government has decided it treasures our well-being, and so is determined to measure it. It’s an incredibly tricky task — as I’ve noted before — but it’s a significant step forward that the Office for
It may be unpopular to say, but there is reason to be charitable to Tony Blair and his latest warnings about Islamist extremism. The former Prime Minister gave afascinating interview to Charles Moore in yesterday’s Telegraph where, inter alia, he talks about the challenge of militant Islam. ‘The West is asleep on this issue,’ he tells
Ministers held their daily Cobra meeting this morning to check the progress of the Olympic preparations, with just three days before the opening ceremony. Following the meeting, Jeremy Hunt released a statement – about 15 minutes after the Crown Prosecution Service announced the latest charges in its phone hacking investigation – which started by describing
The Crown Prosecution Service this morning charged eight suspects in relation to phone hacking. These suspects, including Rebekah Brooks Andy Coulson face a total of 19 charges, which I’ve set out below. Rebekah Brooks, Andrew Coulson, Stuart Kuttner, Greg Miskiw, Ian Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup are all charged with conspiring to intercept the
The approach of eurozone leaders to the crisis in their region has so far been a piecemeal, sticking plaster approach. But this morning, calls are growing for big and effective bandages to bind up the wounds before it is too late. Late last night, ratings agency Moody’s warned that the size of those bandages was
To be a racist in Britain, you do not need to cover yourself in tattoos and join a neo-Nazi party. You can wear well-made shirts, open at the neck, appreciate fine wines and vote Left at election time. Odd though it may seem to older readers, the Crown Prosecution Service now regards itself as a
Westminster’s favourite shaggy-haired do-gooder Andrew Mitchell has been spilling his heart out to Total Politics about Maggie: ‘To me, she was a goddess. When she walked down the corridors, I used to stand stiffly to attention and hope she would pass by.’ Far too much information from the International Development Secretary, who is known to
Ed Miliband’s comments in the Independent today were clearly based on the assumption that Nick Clegg will not be around if and when it comes to negotiating a possible Lib-Lab coalition in 2015. Vince Cable has already thrown his fedora into the ring to be the next Liberal Democrat leader, and Miliband backed the calls for a
