All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg is a fan of Chris Huhne. The Prime Minister would, by all accounts, shed few tears if Huhne had to step down. But I suspect that the deputy Prime Minister will be hoping that tomorrow does not bring any adverse developments for the Energy and Climate Change Secretary.
The other day John Rentoul, that noted Blairite scallywag, suggested David Cameron could improve his lot by binning Andrew Lansley and replacing him at the Department of Health with Michael Gove. I dare say this is true. It would, nevertheless, be a depressing, avoidable error. Mr Gove’s education revolution – built upon Blairite foundations –
In a speech tomorrow, Ed Miliband will call for ‘one nation banking’. The Labour leader will argue that banks have to show that they are part of the society in which they operate. But, perhaps, most interesting is Miliband’s point — previewed in the political column this week — that the behaviour and pay
When David Cameron wielded his veto at the European Council in December many Tories thought this was the beginning of a process of repatriation of powers from the EU. Myself, I thought it would be the high water mark of the government’s Euro-scepticism — and so it has proven. But things are about to get
Like the Peat Worrier and Kate Higgins, I think the headline figures on polls asking Scots whether they fancy independence or the Union are much less interesting than the numbers lurking beneath the surface. For it is these that reveal where Alex Salmond has the upper hand (at least for now) and where he most
Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, will annouce at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning whether or not the Crown Prosecution Service will bring charges against Chris Huhne. If he is charged, it could spark a Cabinet reshuffle — the Energy Secretary is now odds on to be the next Cabinet member to leave, at 4/6 with
John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is our cover boy this week. It’s the Church of England Synod next week, word is that Rowan Williams will be standing down soon, and Rod Liddle is backing Sentamu as his successor. When planning the headline, I thought about calling him the ‘British Obama’. We didn’t use this,
Do we have a right to know why the football manager Gary Speed killed himself, if indeed he did kill himself? I’m not convinced. There’s a typically thoughtful and ruminatively controversial article by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail. Stephen is critical of the inquest into Speed’s death, pointing out that the coroner was less
A very useful contribution from Lord Ashcroft this morning, in the form of a poll he’s commissioned on Scottish independence. What sets Ashcroft’s poll apart from previous surveys is that he asks three different questions to three different sets of around 1,000 Scots. The first is the question Alex Salmond wants on the ballot
The most curious thing about David Miliband’s article for the latest New Statesman — which is causing quite a stir this morning — is that it should appear now. After all, the Roy Hattersley essay that it purports to be responding to was published, so far as I can tell, last September. That’s five months
Today’s White Paper on defence procurement makes disappointing reading for the UK defence industry — and for anyone who believes that one of the lessons of the last few years is that we need a more active industrial policy. IPPR set out the case in a recent report on globalisation, arguing for sustained support for
With HMS Dauntless and now Prince William gliding across the Atlantic to reinforce Britain’s claim on the Falklands, there’s no denying that tensions with Argentina have been raised. But let’s not get carried away. As Admiral Sir John Woodward reminded us last week, the latest round of defence cuts rules out, or at least undermines,
Labour has just marched into the trap that George Osborne set them and voted against the benefits cap — again. As one gleeful Tory says, ‘we’re going to make sure everyone in the country knows how they voted on this.’ I suspect that in every Labour-held marginal that the Tories need to win to
Today’s leaked NATO report on ‘the state of the Taliban’ has generated the predictable responses: excessive attempts by the media to hype it up, and excessive attempts by NATO and the Pakistani government to play it down. What is its true significance? It’s a good scoop, but there is little or nothing in it which
As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re
Miliband is getting the measure of PMQs. Not with respect to Cameron. With respect to himself. He’s learned that his strongest register — sanctimony — will always ring hollow unless it’s attached to a powerful cause. And his gags don’t work. So he’s ditched his team of funny men and wise-crackers and turned to his
As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before Miliband got up, allowing Cameron to press the Labour leader on the issue even before he had started speaking. Tory MPs kept coming back to
<a href=”http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=252781bb42″ >PMQs 1 February</a>
It’s the halftime coffee break here at the launch of the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget, so I thought I’d send CoffeeHousers a quick update. But first, just to be clear, that’s green meaning green, not green meaning environmental. This is the IFS’s annual, different-hued version of the Treasury’s Red Book. It’s their overall
Today’s PMQs will be another skirmish in the battle for fairness. All three parties know that there is no more potent word in British politics at the moment than fairness and they all want to be its champion. But what will make PMQs interesting today is that Cameron and Miliband each have a powerful weapon
‘A double-digit shellacking’. That’s how Gingrich endorser Herman Cain described Mitt Romney’s 14-point win over Newt Gingrich in last night’s Florida primary. It has certainly helped Romney get over the drubbing Gingrich gave him in South Carolina ten days ago, and recertifies him as the presumptive nominee. A big Gingrich win would’ve blown the race
If Scotland can claim independence — and a ‘geographical share’ of the oil regardless of population — then why can’t Orkney & Shetland? It’s the Up Helly Aa festival in Lerwick tonight, where men dress up as vikings and set a longship ablaze. Not a very Scottish festival, but when your nearest city is Bergen
The removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood serves the coalition’s political purposes. It shows them being tough on a bad banker and reminds everyone that these problems happened on the last government’s watch and that Alex Salmond was cheering on RBS’s bid for ABN Amro. There are even some in government who are up for a
So poor old Fred Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood. Apparently, betting big on a Dutch bank and getting it catastrophically wrong means you end up bringing the honours system into some kind of disrepute. At this point let me remind you that Alan Sugar has a peerage. As with the question of bonuses
And so Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood. Here’s the Cabinet Office statement (and some of my previous thoughts here): ‘It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled. This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on
If you wanted proof that Cameron has softened his stance towards Europe since the hard chill of December, then just look to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg, unlike then, was sat next to the Prime Minister as he gave his statement to the Commons this afternoon. And the questions that followed from the likes of
If Muhammad won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Or so goes a saying popularised by Francis Bacon. It seems Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, has taken this to heart and decided to move his entire Department — DfID — closer to the Foreign Office, MoD and, of course, No 10.
It looks like Dave’s still made of Teflon. Even after the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent and the unemployment rate rose to its highest point since 1995, the public still think his party is better at handling the economy than Labour. And the Tories’ lead on what is by far the most important issue
It looks like Fraser was right to question Vision Critical’s recent Scottish independence poll. That poll surveyed just 180 Scots and found 51 per cent saying they would vote ‘Yes’ to Alex Salmond’s referendum question – ‘Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?’ – and just 39 per cent saying ‘No’. Today, Ipsos MORI
Ed Miliband is not naturally a eurospectic, but he certainly sounded like one during his appearance on ITV’s Daybreak show earlier. ‘I’m very concerned about what David Cameron has done,’ he said in reference to the PM’s equivocation over Europe yesterday. ‘He’s sold us down the river.’ Whether this is Miliband committing towards the sort
When this week began, Newt Gingrich was the clear favourite to win tonight’s Florida primary. He’d just beaten Mitt Romney by 13 points in South Carolina and two new polls put him 8 to 9 points ahead in Florida. Momentum was on his side, Romney was facing criticism over his tax returns, and he’d have
For some time now we have been told – by the editor of this magazine among other, less distinguished, commentators – that David Cameron and the Downing Street machine view Scotland as a rum, far-off place about which they know little and which, on the rare occasions they pay attention to it, perplexes them mightily.
One of the flaws of Tory modernisation was that it was never interested enough in pounds and pence. Social issues, the environment and public service reform were what the modernisers specialised in, not economics. But tonight’s Macmillan lecture by Nick Boles, one of the most intellectually influential modernisers, is devoted to the subject of how
Most Spectator readers have probably heard by now of Alain de Botton’s latest, Religion for Atheists, in which he argues that the benefits of religion are too great to be confined to believers — not least because he wrote the Diary column for this week’s magazine. And for those who haven’t yet read about the