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As the effects of last week’s European Council become clear, debate about the rights and wrongs of David Cameron’s diplomacy hinge on one question: were his demands ‘reasonable and modestly expressed’, as a source in No 10 put it to me? Everyone knows that there were chronic failures in the run-up to the meeting itself.
News of the antics of Aiden Burley and his friends at a Nazi-themed stag party in France made me think about the strange ways some Tories like to have fun. When I was at university in the mid-1980s the Tories were in their pomp. My time at Cambridge was sandwiched between the two Thatcher-era landslides
Ahoy Londoners! This Thursday, the good people at the Adam Smith Institute are holding a pre-Christmas cheer-fest at which your blogger will be speaking. It’s titled 2012: The End of the World As We Know It?* and the panel comprises Douglas Carswell, Brendan O’Neill, Jamie Whyte and, er, me. It all kicks off at 6.30pm
He came to talk to me about British Euroscepticism, and I did my best to explain. I said it was far stronger in England than Scotland for nationalist reasons, and that although Labour MPs were, in general, mildly Eurosceptic — Brown would not take us into the Euro, for instance — Euroscepticism was a passion
Reading through the paper’s this morning, it’s even clearer that we didn’t learn much from that marathon Europe debate yesterday. But here are my thoughts, anyway, on where it leaves us: 1) Ed Miliband lacked credibility from the outset. As Malcolm Rifkind put it, he’s had three days to work out whether he’d have signed
Welcome to the world of journalism, Nick Davies. So the cops in Surrey told you the story was true — or so you claim. The cops at the Yard told you it was true — or so you claim. Every aching bone in your reporter’s anti-Murdoch body told you it was true. But there was
As someone who finds the Cult of Reagan a depressing, even nauseating spectacle, I doff my hat to Victor Davis Hanson for this paragraph published at National Review Online: I hope the present primary race does not keep descending into monotonous boasts of who is the more Reaganesque of the candidates, in which we do
Let us hope they are. A wailing letter to the editors of the Lancet, signed by Stanton Glantz and other anti-tobacco fanatics, complains that the Dutch government “is all but closing down its tobacco control operations”. One can only hope this is the case and wish that other governments might follow suit. Apparently: It would
One December in the 1930s, with Britain reeling from the Depression, Lord Wakefield of Wakefield House took out a full-page announcement on the cover of The Spectator. It was an appeal to ‘all men and women of goodwill’ to help 3,693 boys and girls in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. ‘For many of them
Has Mervyn King’s downwards trend in inflation, promised for over a year now, finally arrived? After all, going by today’s figures, inflation has now dropped for two months running. CPI inflation is at 4.8 per cent, and RPI is at 5.2 per cent. What’s more, we can expect them to fall even further once the
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh when reading about Australia’s latest cricket crisis and, reader, I’ve no heart of stone. Much more of this and we’ll have to wonder if the Aussies really deserve a five test series these days. The present crew are, apparently, “The Lowest of the Low”. To
video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player This was, by some margin, the most talked about moment of Saturday night’s Republican debate. Accused by Rick Perry of changing a passage in his book advocating an individual health care mandate, Mitt Romney stretched out his hand to the Texas Governor and said ‘I’ll tell you what, ten thousand
In the end your view of the battle for the Republican party’s presidential nomination comes down to the degree of confidence you have that Republican voters, especially but not exclusively in the early primary states, remain capable of remembering that the election that matters takes place in November, not the spring. If you doubt they
This is a question that meets the classic definition of John Rentoul’s famous-to-them-that-ken series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No. That is, the people asking the question think the answer is Yes when in fact it is No. This question, like many of the SNP’s other witticisms, is the brainchild of Angus Robertson,
The text of David Cameron’s statement on the European Summit was clearly designed as balm for the coalition’s wounds. He devoted a large chunk of it to defending Britain’s membership of the European Union in a clear effort to reassure the Lib Dems about the future direction of European policy. But this effort was rather
I have just been at the Conservative Friends of Israel Business Lunch, which can best be described as a triumphalist ‘smugfest’ in the wake of David Cameron’s bulldog moment in Europe last week. The Tory leadership should be very wary of this moment. We have just entered a period of unprecedented political division in this
While the debate over Europe rumbles on, it’s worth highlighting one bright spot in the OBR’s recent document of doom which has largely slipped past Westminster’s radar: by their forecasts, we will pay the EU £2 billion less this year than we were expecting to in March. Instead of the £9 billion ‘net contribution to
The real Tory celebration of David Cameron’s veto will be on Wednesday. Then, behind closed doors, Cameron will address the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers. With no Lib Dems present, the Tories will be able to thump the desks and be rude about the EU without worrying about what their coalition partners might think. But
Could it be an accident of timing that the government, in the shape of Sarah Teather, is announcing an expansion of the pupil premium today? Or is it part of a careful response to David Cameron’s adventures in Euroland? In any case, the Lib Dem-devised scheme to help the poorest pupils will be extended in
…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson says Cameron’s veto will not leave Britain isolated. James Forsyth thinks the UK’s ‘influence’ in the EU is overrated and reports on Nick Clegg’s attack on Tory eurosceptics. Peter Hoskin examines the Lib Dem response to Cameron’s move, and picks ten
It’s no surprise that David Cameron’s actions in Brussels last week appear to be popular with the voting public, but it is significant nonetheless. The Times is carrying a Populus poll today (£) which suggests just how difficult Labour and the Lib Dems will find it to recapture ground over the Continent. 57 per cent
This morning the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) told us that the climate summit in Durban, which concluded over the weekend, has been ‘heralded a success’. As they say, the ‘talks resulted in a decision to adopt the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol next year in return for a roadmap to
After months of delay, and much hounding by The Spectator’s Select Committee Chairman of the Year, Andrew Tyrie, the Financial Services Authority has finally released its report into the wheezing collapse of RBS in 2008. At 452 pages it is a behemoth of a document, and too much for me to have fully digested yet.
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which — providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency — you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
This week’s European Council meeting has been analysed by diplomats and commentators alike, but a number of issues have not been brought out as clearly as they need to be. The first is that Britain will now achieve political advantage, at the cost of economic setback, if the euro collapses. Although the government insists both
It is starting to feel like the build-up to the AV referendum again, if not worse. No longer the casual bonhomie of the coalition’s early days, but a great show of mutual distrust and loathing between the Lib Dems and Tories. There was Nick Clegg’s interview on the Marr Show earlier, of course, which James
Nick Clegg has just given a quite astonishing interview to Andrew Marr in which he accused David Cameron of being incapable of getting a good deal for Britain because of pressures from within the Conservative parliamentary party. When Marr asked him if things would have been different if Lib Dems had been in Brussels, Clegg
The EU veto that Cameron pulled in the early hours of Thursday morning has been widely misunderstood on all sides. Here are the 10 most common myths: 1. Because of Cameron’s veto, Britain lost a seat at the negotiating table. Not true. The UK was never itself going to take part in the Merkozy pact
This week’s Bookbencher is Kwasi Kwarteng, MP for Spelthorne and author of Ghosts of Empire which was published by Bloomsbury this summer and reviewed by Douglas Hurd in The Spectator in September. He chose a refreshing mixture of fiction and non-fiction, but surprised us with his choice of the literary character he’d most like to
David Cameron’s decision, in the wee hours of Friday morning, to make clear that he would veto the proposed treaty change will have many far-reaching effects. One is that other European leaders know that Cameron is prepared to follow through on a threat to veto. As Charles Moore says in The Telegraph today, the dynamic
The word ‘isolation’ is used a lot in today’s newspapers, as if Cameron walking away from the ongoing EU implosion were a self-evident disaster. Pick up the Guardian and you see Britain cast as a leper, a status conferred on her thanks to a tragic miscalculation by a Prime Minister whose sole aim was to
What now? That’s the question. This morning it looks not like 17 versus 10, but like 1 versus 26, which is a cold and lonely place for Britain to be. But it is also the right place to be. David Cameron asked for a little and got less. He had to act as he did
So, not only are school examinations so easy these days that they could be passed with some comfort by a plate of processed cheese, but the exam board people give the kids the answers as well. This is but one reason why our school leavers are, in the main, pig ignorant. When the Education Secretary
Lost in the hub-hub of Labor’s National Conference was an election result which lays bare the true state of Australia’s oldest political party. The historian Troy Bramston has reported that in the ballot for Labor’s national presidency only 11,665 party members bothered to vote. This represents an average of 78 members for each Federal electorate,