All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I’m not sure Ed Miliband’s people will be altogether happy that James McIntyre’s Prospect interview with the Labour leader devotes quite so much time to Miliband’s leadership credentials. This is not, I think, generally considered helpful. Mr Miliband says he is “Labour’s biggest critic” to which the obvious rejoinder is “Not while so many of
One of the key factors in this Jeremy Hunt business was always going to be the ferocity of the political maelstrom around him. After a slow start, the Tories have sought to calm it down, offering fulsome support for the embattled Culture Secretary. For their part, Labour have been calling for his resignation from the
I know that this must seem a large claim while so many other rotters still breathe but at least, as questions go, it makes more sense than the one bold Sir Simon asks today: Now everyone is connected, is this the death of conversation? Good grief but, being the charitable sort, you may suppose that
As Pete says, Liam Fox’s piece this morning calling for more supply-side reform is broadly helpful to the Chancellor and has been written with his approval. Strikingly, the former defence secretary — who still has a constituency on the right of the party — goes out of his way to back one of the most
As Paul Goodman suggests, there is something significant about Liam Fox’s article for the Daily Telegraph this morning. It’s not that we haven’t heard similar from the former Defence Secretary before — we have. It’s more that his economic prescriptions are being made, we learn from the Sun, with the ‘explicit approval’ of his buddy
As promised, here’s our exclusive podcast interview with Boris Johnson. He kindly took some time away from running around Marylebone to answer a few questions from CoffeeHousers on collapsing Tube tunnels, boats on the Thames, religion in London, Tube unions, future career plans and his continued love of the Spectator. We hope you enjoy the
Downing Street was seething last night about allegations that there had been meetings between David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch that it had not declared. They know that any sense that they are trying to cover up just how close Cameron was to the Murdochs and News International would be extremely damaging in the current circumstances.
This compilation of President Obama’s gaffes is going viral, as they say. Quite amusing. There’s something satisfying about seeing that ‘President Cool’ isn’t such a smooth operator. Obama is good with teleprompters, but he blunders when extemporising. It’s mostly forgotten that, in the 2008 debates against Hillary Clinton, he often looked and sounded
We take a close interest in Ed Balls and his use of figures here at Coffee House, and it seems that this interest is reciprocated. The Shadow Chancellor has just been on Daily Politics where he revealed himself as a regular reader. He was confronted with some of the facts about spending and the deficit
On the global scale of hackish irritation, the American left’s persistent determination to misdiagnose the reasons behind Britain’s faltering economy cannot be considered the most grievous pundit-crime. Nevertheless, it remains annoying. Here, for instance, is Joe Klein: Word now comes that Great Britain has slipped back into recession after several years of David Cameron’s austerity experiment.
Alex Salmond may feel he got a lot from cosying up to both Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump but, wow, is he paying the price. The front page of today’s Herald captures the First Minister’s problems perfectly. The entire first half of the front, above the fold, is covered with two pictures, one of Mr
Here, CoffeeHousers, is this week’s episode of The View From 22 podcast. Thank you for the continued feedback, we’ve tried to take as much as possible into account. In this episode, Fraser looks at the London Mayoral race and whether Boris can still bag it (0:26), given the downturn in the government’s fortunes. Tanya Gold,
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has kindly agreed to take some questions from CoffeeHousers tomorrow. Sebastian Payne, presenter of our new podcast The View from 22, will pick the best questions, put them to the Mayor and post the audio of his responses on the website later. So, what would you like to put
So who killed the recovery? Ed Balls points to a ‘recession made in Downing St,’ and has gone on a victory tour today. ‘I have consistently warned David Cameron and George Osborne for over a year that going too far and too fast on spending cuts would backfire,’ he says. ‘Arrogantly and complacently they ignored
Testimony A, from Rupert Murdoch speaking to the Leveson Inquiry today: ‘Mr Brown did call me and said “Rupert, what do you know, what’s going on here?”, and I said “What do you mean?” and he said “The Sun, what it’s doing and how it came about”. I said I was not aware of the
Last year I wrote that the Leveson inquiry would suit Jeremy Hunt rather well. He had appointed Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with little previous experience of media law to sit alongside a remarkably undistinguished panel of assessors. They would inflict more blows on the battered cause of freedom of speech, I thought. But they
Ed Miliband led on the economy at PMQs. But he was only warming himself up for the main event. Leveson dominated proceedings. David Cameron lamented the ‘disappointing’ news that the country has slipped back into negative growth. ‘It’s all bluster,’ crowed Miliband. ‘His plan has failed.’ This recession was made in Downing Street, he said,
I suppose one should not be surprised that so much of the reaction to the first round of voting in the French presidential election has concentrated on Marine Le Pen. Fascists (or neo-fascists) are always good copy; far-right parties led by women are even better. Nevertheless, like so many other dramas there is less to
In his statement to the House of Commons, I heard no answer from Jeremy Hunt to the most serious question about his handling of the whole News Corp bid: how did Frederic Michel appear to know what Hunt would say to the Commons before he said it? If he was being given a steer on
PMQs 25 April
There’s been a resignation this morning, but it is not Jeremy Hunt’s. Instead, it’s his special adviser Adam Smith. Smith’s departure before Hunt’s Commons statement at 12:30 is designed to put a firebreak around the Secretary of State. In his resignation statement, Smith declares that ‘the content and extent of my contact was done without
As of today, we now have four years’ worth of GDP figures since the UK first went into recession — and they don’t look pretty. By this point in the 1930s, we’d already fully recovered from the Great Depression. This time, we’re still more than 4 per cent below where we were at the start of
This morning brought the economic news that the coalition has been dreading: the country has double dipped. Now, this is based on preliminary figures which may well be revised up. But, as Pete says, the political impact of this story will be huge. The government’s handling of the economy has now been caught up in
Or at least technically-speaking it did. The figures released this morning suggest that the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year, which is the second quarter of shrinkage in a row after last winter’s 0.3 per cent fall. The numbers are tiny, but the politics is huge. It’s a
Since I wrote my earlier blog, I have been contacted by Tories who are supportive of Jeremy Hunt. One minister argued to me with eloquence and passion that Hunt was not someone who would do anything improper and that would become clear when he faced Leveson. Another Tory told me that ‘Hunt is an absolute
Here’s the full statement: ‘Now is not a time for kneejerk reactions. We’ve heard one side of the story today but some of the evidence reported meetings and conversations that simply didn’t happen. Rather than jump on political bandwagon, we need to hear what Lord Justice Leveson thinks after he’s heard all the evidence. Let
Further to that last post, Leveson released more than 100 pages of News Corp correspondence this afternoon. Alex Salmond features in four emails sent by Fred Michel, the Murdochs’ chief lobbyist and PR guy: 1. 1/11/10 – Libdem MP, former Sky employee, with major Sky customer centres in his constituency and around will contact Vince
One thing to be kept in mind as we consider the extent of the government’s links to News International is that it helps explain why neither the Telegraph nor Mail groups are wholly in favour of David Cameron and his ministry. It is, I think, fairly clear that the Conservative leadership was happy to accede
For the first time since August last year, Ed Miliband’s net approval rating with Ipsos MORI is higher than David Cameron’s. That marks quite a turnaround in the last few weeks: in January, Miliband’s rating was 25 points lower than the PM’s. Cameron’s ratings are now at their worst point ever.
If anyone doubted just how dramatic the Murdochs’ evidence to Leveson was going to be, then the five hours of testimony today have settled that argument. In the process, they have also turned Jeremy Hunt into the political equivalent of damaged goods. It is now hard to see how he can be Secretary of State
Good stuff from the TV naturalist Chris Packham, who is usually sound on most issues. Firstly he disputes the reports of urban foxes attacking people in their homes. Don’t believe it, he says. No, me neither. We will be reading more of these crazed psychotic fox attack reports in our newspapers now that summer is
The Eurocrisis may be nagging at our political class, but it’s got nothing on the Leveson inquiry. Today has been James Murdoch’s turn in the hotseat, and it has produced some of the most explosive testimony so far. There was the claim that, contrary to previous Tory insinuations, Murdoch Jr did chat about the BSkyB
Holland and Hollande; they’re the non-identical twins that are causing palpitations across Europe today. Holland, because the country’s Prime Minister yesterday resigned after failing to agree a package of cuts for his country’s budget. Hollande, because he’s the socialist candidate set to win the presidential election in France, probably eroding that country’s commitment to fiscal
Of all the cockamamie ploys favoured by this government, House of Lords reform is close to being both the most pointless and the most aggravating. Iain Martin hints at this in his recent Telegraph post but he is, in the end, too kind to the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the sort of wheeze favoured