All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet could soon lack a Liam Byrne. The shadow work and pensions secretary is expected to announce his intention to run for the position of Mayor of Birmingham — and he’d quit his frontbench job to do so. There is, of course, one significant ‘if’ hanging over his candidacy: it would depend
There’s a new member of The Spectator family, and she’s called Spectator Life. This is our new quarterly magazine focusing all the more civilised aspects of life — the arts, culture, travel, etc — and it comes bundled in, for free, with the main magazine. The first issue is available on newsstands this week, but,
The fuel tanker strike is fast turning into a critical moment. The government, which has surprisingly few friends in the media, desperately needs something to move the story on from pasties and the politics of class. Cameron, also, has problems with his own side. On the World at One today David Davis, deliberately, hit Cameron
The birth of the White Paper on public service reform was a tortuous business — but, now it’s been out for several months, the government is keen to make the most of it. David Cameron is launching an ‘updated’ version today, with a few new proposals contained therein. He also has an article in the
Pasties and jerry cans — who’d have thought that yesterday’s politics would descend into a roaring debate about two such innocuous items? And still the hullabaloo goes on. Most of today’s front pages lead with one or both of the stories, although I’d say it’s the jerry cans that win out overall. Thanks to Francis
The row over the so-called pasty tax is a proxy. It is really a row about whether David Cameron and George Osborne get what it is like to worry about the family budget each week. In truth, I suspect that they don’t. But I think the same probably goes for Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg
Are pensioners doing their bit for the recovery? The agenda of ‘intergenerational fairness’ has arisen in response to the idea that they are not, and ought to be taxed more. Daniel Knowles has made the case, in our cover story this week. Carol Sarler responds to him. In the leader, we reveal some data hitherto
George Osborne’s two fiscal rules have been around since his very first Budget, delivered almost two years ago, so they’re hardly news. But they do underpin much of what he’s done since, including last week’s statement, so they’re also worth knowing about. Fraser touched on ome of the detail in a post last weekend, but here’s a
David Cameron earlier: And Labour’s response:
‘I’ve never seen a government document with a Laffer curve in it before’, declared Ed Balls last week. Well it looks like he might be seeing a lot more of them, if George Osborne gets his way. Yesterday, as James noted, the Chancellor told the Treasury select committee that: ‘I think the Treasury can now,
After last August’s riots the debate became quickly polarised. Were socio-economic factors like unemployment to blame, or was it all down to the individual choices of the rioters? David Cameron and other Conservative ministers knew which side of this debate they wanted to be on. They had been taken by surprise by the riots, initially
There is no PMQs today, so Ed Miliband is filling the time as gainfully as he can with a speech bashing the Tories. Unsurprisingly, he’s making rather a lot of last week’s Budget — particularly the 50p tax cut and the frozen personal allowance for pensioners — as well as of Peter Cruddas’s recent indiscretions.
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com Did you see the presidential candidate Rick Santorum lose his cool with a New York Times reporter? If not, you can watch it above. It was a trivial incident, really, but we live in a trivial media age in which politicians think that embarrassing moments are something to boast
George Osborne’s announcement that the Treasury is going to start looking at the dynamic effect of tax changes is significant. The aim, I understand, is for them to gather data on this which could then be used to work out the costs of various tax and spending changes. This would mean that most tax cuts
At two thirty this afternoon, the Deputy Speaker announced to the House of Commons that the Queen had granted Royal Assent to the Health and Social Care Act. It seemed fitting that the House was debating assisted suicide at the time. The agonies of watching this cursed legislation twitch and stumble its way onto the
So, once again, we face the prospect of disruption at the pumps, as tanker drivers have voted for strike action over their terms of employment. According to the union Unite, their demands are ‘industry minimum standards and industry wide bargaining on pensions, terms and conditions, training and health and safety’. In all, around 2,000 drivers
Should you receive a jail sentence for being an idiot on Twitter? Apparently so! Liam Stacey, the 21 year old who tweeted “LOL, Fuck Muamba. He’s dead” after the Bolton Wanderers’ collapse at White Hart Lane is off to spend 56 days in prison for this and other (unpleasant) “racially offensive” tweets. Cue much outrage
Hats-off to Dick Puddlecote and Chris Snowdon for being quick to notice the latest absurdity being considered by the Commons health select committee: plain packaging for alcohol. Yes, really. The committee is holding a consultation on the government’s “alcohol strategy” (and how depressing it is to contemplate the very existence of such a thing) as
Excellent blog by James Delingpole in the Torygraph on the vexed question What Has Happened To The Archers? Under the aegis of someone called Vanessa Whitburn, the long running Radio Four serial has been turned from an amiable soap about rural people and the gentle inconveniencies with which they battle, into a vision of the
If you get the incentives right, the rest should follow. So Liz Truss’ push for a subject premium should be applauded. If sixth form colleges received more money for pupils studying Maths, it is reasonable to assume that they would encourage more of them to do it. At the moment, colleges receive more money for
Writing with the optimism of a high-Victorian liberal, John Stuart Mill said that the only legitimate restriction on freedom of speech was to stop the direct incitement to a crime. He picked the example of corn dealers. The 19th century poor hated them. They made inflammatory accusations that the dealers were enriching themselves by keeping
Introducing Ed Miliband, Labour’s best hope since Tony Blair. Oh, I’m kidding, of course — but it’s still striking that, this morning, Labour have their biggest lead in a ComRes poll for seven years. And the size of the lead? Ten points, but it could be even bigger. The Peter Cruddas revelations fell right in
I have always thought Francis Maude was a rather decent chap on the moderate side of Tory politics. He has worked valiantly to drive the Big Society agenda from the Cabinet Office. He has the good hair of a classic Conservative MP of the old school. But he gave the game away when he talked
A truly repellent piece by Cristina Odone in the Telegraph in which she argues for NHS-rationing by liefestyle and wealth. That’s not quite how she puts it, for sure, but her suggestion that (middle-class) pensioners are losing out to (lower-class) fat people and that something should be bloody done about this is the kind of
Briefly: not content with producing the worst kit in British Olympic history Stella McCartney returns to the well of drivel to tell us that: “I was aware of the fact that it’s [the Union Flag] something that might be overused in the build-up to the Olympics, in taxis, on cushions and mugs, so I wanted
According to John Rentoul, the combination of the budget and Cam Dine With Me* has shunted Labour into a ten point lead in the opinion polls. Tuesday’s Independent/ComRes poll puts Labour on 43% (+3) and the Tories – as you may have worked out by now – on 33% (-4). How to spin this? 1.
Jocky Wilson, who died on Saturday night aged 62, was a very Scottish sporting hero: short, fat and toothless he was touched by equal measures of brilliance and self-destruction. Darts is glitzy now but back in its 1980s pomp it needed no rock music or scantily-clad dancing girls to lend an air of semi-ironic gladiatorial
A small silver lining for David Cameron in the ‘cash for access scandal’: on a quieter day, today’s report on the coalition’s replacement of control orders with ‘Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures’ (TPIMs) might have got more attention. The report, published by the Independent Reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC, makes for difficult reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajuq5u3IoSQ As leaders from 53 nations gather in Seoul for the second Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama spoke of his ‘vision of a world without nuclear weapons’. It’s a vision he described during his 2008 campaign, and which was later the focus of his 2009 speech in Prague. Today, as then, he talked about the ‘obligation’
It now seems as if Downing Street is moving towards releasing a list of Chequers guests. This is belated recognition of the fact that their best hope of getting beyond this story is to get everything out there. But as Francis Maude’s feisty performance in the Commons demonstrated, the Tories are not short of mud
While the #cashforcameron scandal (as it is being called on Twitter) rumbles on, the calls for state funding of political parties are increasing. But as James said yesterday, and as I argued on Sky News afterwards, this is not the answer — and it seems that the majority of the public agree. Yesterday’s YouGov poll had
The key thing to watch for during Francis Maude’s statement is the Lib Dem reaction. At the moment, the Tories can rebut Labour’s criticisms of them by pointing to both union funding and the Ecclestone affair. But if their coalition partners start turning up the volume on this story, then the Tories are in a
14 July 2010, dinner at No.10 Anthony and Carol Bamford Michael and Dorothy Hintze Murdoch and Elsa Maclennan Lord John and Lady Sainsbury Andrew Feldman Jill and Paul Ruddock Mike and Jenny Fraser Michael and Clara Freeman 28 Feb 2011, dinner in the flat David Rowland and Mrs Rowland Andrew and Gabby Feldman 2 Nov
One distinct feature of the ‘cash for access’ row is that we’ve seen it all before. And not just the glutinous mix of politics and money, but also the debate over what should be done to fix it. Last November, Sir Christopher Kelly, chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, released a report