All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
After a summer of discontent, David Cameron must be counting his blessings this morning. He has broken his holiday because Colonel Gaddafi is about to fall. Rebel forces swept into Tripoli’s Green Square overnight and members of the regime were captured as Gaddafi’s militia vanished into the night. Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, who was being
If David Cameron breaks his holidays yet again, you’ll know it’s because he expects Gaddafi to be a goner pretty soon. It’s been a busy old night in Tripoli, with Twitter reports suggesting that Gaddafi is already dead. Mind you, William Hague et al have learned to treat Twitter reports with a mountain of salt.
It’s no surprise that 70 Tory MPs have formed a Eurosceptic group, as the Sunday Telegraph reveals today. They are the modernisers now. The new Tory intake are strikingly robust on all this: by and large, their idea of political balance is a picture of Thatcher on the wall and Jacques Delors on the dartboard.
Europe will be one of the political issues of the autumn. The government expects another round of sovereign debt crises in the autumn and these will add urgency to the Merkel Sarkozy plan for ever closer fiscal union between the eurozone members. Nearly every Tory MP and minister I have spoken to is instinctively sceptical
The end is nigh for the Mad Dog, or so reports suggest. After what Alistair Burt described as ‘substantial’ NATO bombing overnight, rebel ground forces began to lay siege to the Libyan capital this morning. According to ABC, the assault has come at three points around the capital. It was a concerted effort by all
A set-to has broken out this morning over the Human Rights Act. David Cameron has declared that he is going to fight the Human Rights Act and its interpretation. Cameron writes: ‘The British people have fought and died for people’s rights to freedom and dignity but they did not fight so that people did not
It is spookily appropriate that I read Chris Mullin’s splendidly candid and revealing 2005-2010 diaries in the aftermath of the Blackberry riots, where dysfunctional families are a popular topic of conversation. Because, in the final death throes of Tony Blair’ faltering tenure and Gordon Brown’s psychiatric episode at Number 10, they were running a dysfunctional
Tony Blair has dropped in to write an article on the social context to the recent riots. It’s insightful, especially as a testament of his failings in government. At the close of his premiership, he says, he’d realised that the acute social problems in Britain’s inner cities were “specific” and could not be solved with
The escalating crisis in Gaza and Sinai is worrying. Egypt is to recall its ambassador to Israel after 3 security personnel were killed in confused scuffles after an Israeli bus was bombed near the Sinai border; the Israeli embassy in Cairo has also been the scene of ill-tempered demonstrations and vandalism. Israel denies responsibility for
What’s the most important geo-political event of this century? Most people would say 9/11. The Foreign Secretary believes that it is the Arab Spring. But in The Times today (£), Emma Duncan makes a persuasive case for it being the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Duncan argues that Lehman Brothers’ fall has three claims to be
Police in Birmingham have released this extraordinary footage of people firing shots at lines of police officers during the riots. As Iain Duncan Smith says in this week’s magazine, the riots were a wake-up call. This video shows what looks like gangs, about three dozen of them in masks, not just trashing buildings but discharging
Congratulations to David Miliband on his appointment to head up the ACEVO commission on youth unemployment. He is exactly the right man for the job and may be able to effect more genuine change than he could have done as leader of the Labour Party. A good starting point would be Polly Toynbee’s column in
Public Enemy Number One, the unlikely figure of Dr David Starkey, is back in the papers; this time writing in the Telegraph to meet the cacophonous heckles that followed his appearance on Newsnight. Starkey begins with a viperous assault on Ed Miliband’s view that his comments were “disgusting and outrageous”, pointing out that black educationalists
The English Defence League marches are heinous, but tolerated by the English authorities. Not so in my homeland, where the Scottish Defence League have been told by Edinburgh council that they cannot hold a march where they’d hoped to be joined by 200. Part of me welcomes this news: Scotland has its social ills (mainly
Anyone looking for a good blast of common sense on a Saturday morning should read Eric Pickles’ interview in the Telegraph. In it, he responds to much of the kite-flying by the Liberal Democrat left in recent weeks. In an exchange that will have many of his Cabinet colleagues nodding along in agreement, Pickles criticises judicial activism
The news that the national debt is even larger than it appears ties a knot in the stomach, limiting, as it does, the state’s ability to cut taxes. Andrew Tyrie has called time on the PFI bonanza, but in many ways this intervention comes too late. Back during the financial tempests in the autumn of
Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the last week. Fraser Nelson has a web exclusive of his magazine interview with IDS, and notes that inflation has risen yet again. James Forsyth laments the missed opportunity to transform, and compares Cameron and Miliband’s responses to the riots. David Blackburn examines Merkel and Sarkozy’s
A woman has been banned from every bookshop in the country after stealing £56 worth of magazines and Plasticine from a branch of WH Smith in Hartlepool. (Hartlepool Mail) The developers of a mosque on the site of a former pub in Sneinton, Nottingham, are seeking fresh planning permission after it was found to be
The row over sentencing rioters has morphed into a row about prison numbers and safety. Cathy Newman has been issuing a steady stream of tweets all afternoon, revealing that the Ministry of Justice is concerned about overcrowding and safety in prisons and young offenders’ institutions: an internal memo discloses that 2 convicted rioters have been
There has been a dramatic turnaround in the military situation in Libya. The rebels are now within 30 miles of Tripoli and the consensus is that Colonel Gaddafi’s days are numbered. The rebels have taken the strategically vital town of Zawiyah, which lies on the road between Tunisia and Tripoli, upon which Gaddafi relies for
What, I suspect, would infuriate Sally Bercow most is if there was a complete media blackout over her appearance on ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother. As she made clear on entering the house, her whole aim is to annoy what she calls the ‘establishment.’ But at the risk of playing Bercow’s game, it’s worth debunking one argument
Jon Huntsman was never likely to win the Republican nomination anyway but this Tweet suggests he’s decided to say “Sod it, let’s just have some fun.” These views are fine inside the Beltway and in Foggy Bottom but they butter few parsnips out in the country. Here again, the suspicion lurks that Huntsman 2012 is
The most ostensibly boring things often turn out to be of critical importance. PFI falls into this category. The Treasury Select Committee has demanded substantial and immediate reform of the scheme. The committee’s report lambasts the government for overusing PFI to keep costs off departmental balance sheets and calls for much greater transparency to ensure value for money. An estimated £67
Even after 10 years, Afghanistan still has the capacity to shock. Details of the attack on Kabul are vague, but it seems that a posse of Taliban fighters dressed in “military garb” walked into the offices of the British Council and the United Nations; three people were killed in the ensuing explosions and fire-fights between
Iain Duncan Smith has given a detailed interview with the Spectator and the full-length version is online. Right now, beyond David Cameron and George Osborne, he has the most important job in government. There is some really interesting and innovative stuff here despite the unnecessary British jobs for British workers dog-whistle politics. IDS is right
The recent rally on the markets is now the most distant memory. Stocks continued to fall today amid concerns about the European sovereign debt crisis, negligible growth figures in the developed world and cooling Asian economies. Robert Peston has an excellent account of the causes and effects of the latest rout. Banking stocks were brutalised,
This England cricket team is rather like the great German football sides of the past: a collective rather greater than the sum of its parts. Hard, determined, efficient, ruthless, organised and together. There’s quality too, for sure, but that’s not what stands-out. They thoroughly deserve their success. Nevertheless, their success comes at a price. Or,
Who are the forgotten victims of the economic malaise that has beset the West? Martin Vander Weyer’s business column in a recent issue of the Spectator is a lament for the middle classes. The modest fruits of their honest labour are being quietly obliterated by forces they cannot hope to resist. The piece is infused both with
Will Straw takes issues with Fraser’s post on the matter of just how many “new” jobs have been filled by foreign-born workers. As Straw says, foreign-born is one metric, British-national another. If you measure these things by the latter yardstick then, apparently, 69% of new jobs in the last year have been filled by non-UK
There’s a pessimistic mood in Westminster at the moment, a sense of gloom about the economic prospects of the West. The government expects there to be another round of the European sovereign debt crisis this autumn and believes that the problems of the eurozone will take at least a decade to resolve. No one I’ve
The press’s tendency to feature female students receiving their A-Level results rather than their male counterparts is coming in for a fair bit of ribbing today. The Guardian diary yesterday revealed quite how far some schools are prepared to go to get their pupils on the front page: “And yet eyebrows were raised at Diary
There’s a lot of bad news around, but some things are going right in Britain. Sales of The Spectator are on the rise again, for the first time in four years. Pretty soon, if the trend (and our luck) holds, more people will be buying the magazine than at any point in our 183-year history. I
The Eurozone Tobin tax announced on Tuesday by Merkel and Sarkozy is intended to reduce market volatility. It could have the opposite effect, and, if introduced in Britain, could cripple Britain’s financial sector, a new report by the Adam Smith Institute says. Based on the example of the “pure” Tobin tax that was implemented in
The Gap Year has been declared dead. It’s A-levels day today, and the annual scramble for university places has been intensified ahead of next year’s tuition fees rise. According to this morning’s Times (£), the last count had 669,956 pupils sprinting after 470,000 vacancies. An estimated 50,000 students with adequate grades will not enter higher