Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

Can Scotland make it on its own?

What would an independent Scotland’s public finances look like? ‘Good, actually,’ says the SNP as they present their ongoing case for independence. They like to claim that, discounting the rest of the UK, Scotland was in surplus for ‘four out of the last five years’ — it’s Westminster, not Holyrood, that can’t manage the public’s

Lloyd Evans

The anti-academies club

‘Anyone here from the Spectator?’ Last night a packed meeting at Downhills Primary in Haringey began with this ominous query from the chairman, Clive Boutle, who leads a local campaign against academies. Seated at the side of the hall I kept quiet. ‘No one?’ said Boutle, ‘Great, we’re safe.’ The meeting had attracted about 800

James Forsyth

Miliband tries to get his message heard

Ed Miliband is trying to do something interesting today. He is attempting to answer the question, ‘what’s the point of Labour when there’s no money left to spend?’ This is the problem that Miliband has been grappling with since winning the leadership and there’s no easy answer to it. It seems that today Miliband will

What to expect in New Hampshire

Tonight’s New Hampshire primary is very unlikely to provide the sort of razor-thin margin we saw in Iowa last week. Mitt Romney looks assured of a comfortable win – Nate Silver’s poll-based model (above) gives him a 98 per cent chance of victory. If one of the others did somehow beat him, it’d be the

Romney hit from all sides on investment career

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_evS-T-c35M I noted on Saturday that one of the main attacks the Democrats are employing against Mitt Romney revolves around his 14 years as head of Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm which he co-founded. The argument is that Romney made a fortune as head of a company that was responsible for the closure

Cutting immigration won’t help youth unemployment

Reading the papers today, you could be forgiven for thinking that MigrationWatch’s new report was a smoking gun against immigration. Here we have a study that links immigration to unemployment, in the face of nearly all previous research that has found no such link. However, looking at the MigrationWatch piece itself, it quickly becomes clear

The Burma trail

Foreign policy specialists have been confused about how to categorise the coalition. Is it neoconservative, given its backing for the Libyan rebels? No, says no less a figure than the Prime Minister. Is it realpolitical, given the PM’s willingness to make up with Russia and court China? Most No.10 officials would wince at such a

Enter, David Miliband?

‘Every day, in every way, it’s getting worse for Ed Miliband.’ That’s what I said last Thursday, and it has been more or less borne out since then. Friday, of course, brought that Twitter embarrassment. Saturday, the subsequent headlines, as well as Miliband’s unconvincing attempt to push back against them. Sunday featured some of the

Rod Liddle

Is Worrall Thompson getting off lightly?

I see that the famous midget cook, Antony Worrall Thompson, has been cautioned for having nicked some wine and cheese from the Henley branch of Tesco. Indeed, it seems he was filmed tucking some Cathedral City Cheddar or something inside his bag on new fewer than five separate occasions. It’s been a tough few years

Alex Massie

Cameron’s Caledonian Gamble: Unwise and Unnecessary

So. it looks as though David Cameron is following the Spectator’s advice not mine. What a nincompoop! But if the reports are correct then Cameron is playing us for fools. That is, there’s nothing wrong with suggesting a referendum on Scottish independence be held sooner rather than later; adding conditions to it is a different

James Forsyth

Obama enjoys the high life

Amidst all the talk of Tony Blair’s post-office earnings, it is interesting to read in The Times of Barack Obama’s post-presidency ambitions. In Jodi Kantor’s new book on the Obamas, the president is quoted telling old friends of the couple that: ‘When I leave office there are only two things I want. I want a

Just in case you missed them… | 9 January 2012

…here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson asks why Ed Miliband stopped his brother becoming Labour leader. James Forsyth looks at the implications of HS2 on the Cabinet, and reports on Cameron’s latest attempt to redefine fairness. Peter Hoskin says Miliband’s position is under increasing threat, and asks

Cameron’s balancing act over Scotland

The Cabinet is meeting about 5 miles away from Downing Street today, at the Olympic Park in Stratford. But its collective mind will be on a patch of land another 270 miles further on still. Yep, Scotland and Scottish independence are the matters at hand today. According to the Beeb, David Cameron and his ministers

James Forsyth

Why the battle over Downhills Primary School matters

Downhills Primary School in Haringey is fast becoming a political battleground. Before Christmas, David Lammy, the local MP, a bunch of union leaders, left-wing opponents of education reform and Labour councilors wrote to The Guardian complaining about Michael Gove’s plans to convert primary school with poor academic records into academies. In the New Year, Michael

Ed under siege — and under threat

There was a fun game we used to play during Gordon Brown’s premiership: counting the number of ‘buck up, or we kick you out’ ultimatums that Labour MPs delivered to their leader. There were, suffice to say, a lot of them. And tallying them up illustrated two things: the constant, sapping pressure that the Brown

James Forsyth

Cameron’s fairness agenda

The politics of the ‘undeserving rich’ is again dominating the news this morning. David Cameron tells the Sunday Telegraph that ‘The market for top people isn’t working, it needs to be sorted out’. While the Mail on Sunday reports that George Osborne is planning to create a new criminal offence of ‘criminal negligence’ that could

Democrats ready to face Romney

As James said yesterday, Mitt Romney is well on the way to becoming the Republican nominee. He is virtually certain to win New Hampshire on Tuesday – Nate Silver’s projections give him a 99 per cent chance of victory – and he’s odds on in South Carolina and Florida too, which would give him a

Rod Liddle

A very ethical Christmas

Here’s another one, part of an occasional series in these parts, of people from the newspapers who are, for often undefinable reasons, really, really annoying. Not always undefinable, mind. This is from a feature in the Guardian’s weekend magazine about what people got their kids for Christmas. First they speak to the parent, then to

James Forsyth

Will high-speed rail mean a new Welsh Secretary?

The decision on whether or not to proceed with the HS2 rail link is expected on Tuesday. Given all the legal issues involved, the government is not making any public comment on the matter. But all the signs are that it will get the go-ahead. There will be quite considerable opposition to the projects from

Fraser Nelson

The Miliband puzzle

So why did Ed Miliband stop his brother being leader of the Labour Party? As each month of his uninspiring leadership passes, it becomes more of a puzzle. In today’s Guardian interview, we learn that he can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 90 seconds. Perhaps David Miliband took two minutes, leaving Ed to regard him

Bookbenchers: Pamela Nash MP

The first Bookbencher of 2012 is Pamela Nash, MP for Airdrie and Shotts. She tells us what she likes about Roald Dahl and surprises us with the book she’d most recommend. Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment? Eight years behind everyone else, I am reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About

Rod Liddle

Abbott’s hypocrisy

I would have more sympathy for Diane Abbott if she hadn’t used precisely such ‘racist’ indiscretions against other people in the past. Not least me, frankly. I hope she might begin to see how absurd the whole business is. But I have the horrible feeling she will think herself an innocent who has been wrongly

It’s not about you, Ed

One thing you learn in life is that most people have no idea how they are perceived by others. This is particularly true in Britain, where we don’t generally feel it is polite to tell people what we think of them. Politicians and public figures therefore find themselves in the unusual position of having opinions

Miliband comes out swinging

After being mostly absent in an embarrassing week, which culminates in today’s Sun headline of ‘Block Ed’ referring to the Labour leader’s Twitter gaffe yesterday, Ed Miliband has emerged with a self-assured interview in the Guardian. In parts, he is even boastful. Miliband declares himself ‘someone of real steel and grit’ and brags ‘I am

From the archives: The great Ronald Searle

Earlier this week we ran a blog post by our cartoon editor Michael Heath, marking the death of the Ronald Searle. As an accompaniment, here’s the interview that Harry Mount conducted with Searle for The Spectator two years ago: ‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’, Harry Mount,

The week that was | 6 January 2012

Here are some of the posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the past week: Fraser Nelson highlights the plight of Christians in Nigeria, and says that poverty should concern us more than race. James Forsyth previews the coming battle over the undeserving rich, and says that Lord Glasman’s target was the other Ed. Peter Hoskin says

The scale of Clegg’s Lords challenge

Tucked away on page 15 of today’s Times, there’s an insightful story about Lords reform (£) by Roland Watson. And it’s insightful not just for the new information it contains, but also for the familiar truth it confirms: reforming the House of Lords is going to be one helluva difficult task. You see, while both