All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
If you want to know why party managers don’t like open primaries look at page 26 of today’s Guardian. There Sarah Wollaston, the GP who won the Tory open primary in Totnes, warns that Andrew Lansley needs to watch out if his NHS reforms are not to turn into privatisation by the back door. The
Here we go. Spurred on by Pete earlier, it’s time for that essential, although often regrettable, end-of-year ritual. Not the prosecco-fuelled partying, but rather something with far more embarrassment potential: predictions for next year. That’s right, amateur guesswork dressed up as serious-ish journalism. Some scribes are better at this than others. Ex-blogger Iain Dale hit
If you want to know what British politics will sound like in 2011, then just read David Cameron’s and Ed Miliband’s New Year messages one after the other. They share a lot of the same words, but bounce along to different, if familiar, drumbeats. According to Cameron, next year will be “very difficult,” due to the
And so another year passes, replete with the usual misadventures, follies and debacles. Of course there were better moments too but this is no time to be dwelling on those. Anyway, thank you all for your company here this year and may the New Year bring you great joy and encouragement. See you again in
The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and
With 2011 promising to be another difficult year in Afghanistan, my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten – a noted scholar of the region – has decided to do something to help. He is organising to get some charcoal to refugee families from Helmand, who have fled the fighting between NATO and the Taliban and now live at a makeshift refugee camp
New Year’s Eve, a time to dwell upon Things to Come – so I thought I’d mine CoffeeHousers for their predictions for 2011. We went through the same process with some friends of The Spectator for the recent Christmas issue, and I’ve pasted their responses below to get you started. And that’s not all: the most
The Lib Dem manifesto committed the party to a fully elected House of Lords. The Tory manifesto talked about a ‘mainly-elected’ second chamber and in 2007 David Cameron voted for ‘the other place’ to be 80 percent elected (interestingly, George Osborne voted for a fully elected Lords). The coalition agreement committed the government to a
The Spectator is out today, with a cover story that I would commend to CoffeeHousers. Failure to learn from history usually condemns a nation to repeating its mistakes. That’s why we should be nervous that no one seems to have worked out what caused the crash. Little wonder: the guys doing the analysis are the
The situation in Cote D’Ivoire is heating up. It has the potential either to herald a new future for West Africa, based on democracy, regional cooperation and a rejection of ethnic mobilisation; or to showcase the continent’s violent and undemocratic past. Hitherto there have been signposts pointing in both directions. On the one hand, Laurent
Over on Coffee House my colleague Dan Hodges notes that a large chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party has come out against AV, and speculates that their stand will help the “No” campaign. So it may, but he is missing the true danger to the “Yes” campaign, which lies with its friends rather than
Yesterday’s announcement that 114 Labour MPs, including 5 shadow cabinet ministers, will be voting ‘No’ in next year’s Alternative Vote referendum isn’t exactly a ‘game changer’. But it has certainly shifted the terms of debate within the Labour party. Over the past few weeks a perception had been developing that adoption of the AV system,
This year was so rich in stories – Expensesgate, the election and historic coalition, the Icelandic volcano, General McChrystal’s dismissal, the Pakistani floods, Haiti’s earthquake, Greece’s near-collapse, the Will n’ Kate engagement, Wikileaks, the Chilean miners and so on – that it is hard to pick just one story. Looking back over the year, however, I think
The coalition’s attempt to talk to two audiences at once is on full display today. The Times reports on the appointment of the Tory Lord Heseltine as a growth czar and his warning against bashing the bankers. Meanwhile, The Guardian reveals that Simon Hughes, the deputy Lib Dem leader, is to be the coalition’s access
On Boxing Day, Fraser blogged on whether the iPad and other mobile devices will save British journalism. His view peered into the future, but what about the market today? Fraser points to The Times’ Christmas Day edition, the first of the paper that was available purely in electronic form. Along with Apple and News International’s iPad-only ‘Daily’
David Brooks, the great New York Times columnist, recommends the best essays of the year every Christmas. His selection this year includes a brilliant essay by Anne Applebaum, of this parish, on Hitler, Stalin and Eastern Europe. It makes you realise quite how bloody the Eastern Front was—‘On any given day in the autumn of
Ed Miliband’s proposal to cap party donations at £500 – thereby restraining the huge one-off union payments that sustain Labour – certainly looks radical enough. But, as any fule kno, surface appearances can be deceptive. As Jim Pickard explains in an insightful post over at the FT, the result would be a system that affects
Downing Street may have dismissed as “complete nonsense” a newspaper report that the coalition was considering inviting David Miliband to become British ambassador to Washington. But the former foreign secretary is one of a few younger British politicians with international standing and while it would be odd to appoint him to a government job –
Remember this petition to have Gordon Brown resign as Prime Minister? It secured 72,222 signatures in the end: not quite enough to have it debated in Parliament under the coalition’s new plans, but enough to make you think. I mean, will we see parliamentary debates about whether Dave and Nick should step down at the
Courtesy of Alan Johnson’s interview in the Independent today: “Both [Ed Miliband and Johnson] have accepted that it is ‘inconceivable’ that the 50p tax rate won’t be needed at the time of the next election.” Or, in other words, Johnson and Miliband have reached compromise over their divergent positions on the 50p rate.
A few weeks ago Ed Miliband was the leader under pressure. There was, absurdly, talk of leadership challenges if things did not improve. But now all the pressure is on Nick Clegg, he’s the one facing stories about whether he can cope. Whether the unforgiving media spotlight stays on Clegg or not will be determined
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
Just as at the turn of 2010, economic growth is going to be big news in 2011. Back then, the question was when we would return to any growth at all. Now, it’s more about how fast our recovery can be. So just how fast can it be? If you notice, Labour have fallen very
How do cricket players get on with touring abroad over Christmas? Mike Atherton, the former England captain, penned an article on the matter for our Christmas issue in 2004. With England currently taking it to the Aussies in Melbourne, I thought it would be a good time to excavate it from the archives: Some like
There’s so much junk on the box at Christmas that yesterday I tweeted a link to a seven-minute video that I thought would be much more memorable: an American’s film on England in Christmas 1940. The film is above, and speaks best for itself. The great thing about Twitter is the response: positive and negative.
Their lowest total at home against England since 1936. Perth is looking like a blip, not a fundamental change in the series. More later, i dare say, but consider this an open thread to talk about the cricket. I fear my brother’s French girlfriend – present at the MCG for her first ever day of
Yesterday, The Times produced its first Christmas Day edition for more than a century – since, that is, newsagents started taking that day off. The jewel in that edition was a wonderfully spirited piece from my Spectator colleague Matthew Parris about the importance of paywalls. I fervently believe in them, and regard them as the
To help that Christmas lunch go down, here’s a sprinkling of Christmas films selected by the incomparable Mark Steyn in 2004. To see more of his writing for The Spectator click here. Otherwise, just read on… Christmas Classics, Mark Steyn, The Spectator, 18 December 2004 ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house/ Not a creature was
A more scientific view of proceedings, courtesy of a Yale professor writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue in 1994:What do you mean ‘Happy Christmas’?, Robert Buck, The Spectator, 17 December 1994 It is the time of year when the pursuit of happiness is at its most frantic. People believe they should be happy in the
Hope y’all have a splendid day that delivers all you want or, more reasonably, could sensibly hope for. Here’s the best (non-religious) Christmas song of them all:
By way of a Christmas aperitif for CoffeeHousers, here’s Jeffrey Bernard enduring the festive season for his Low Life column in 1988: Eastern Promise, Jeffrey Bernard, The Spectator, 17 December 1988 Speaking as a man with little faith I find this whole business of Christmas one hell of an inconvenience. It must be even worse
Happy Christmas to you all. It may well be that, as the Muslim poster campaign in London has it, we will all require abortions as a consequence of seasonal revelry, and that the festival itself is evil. But at least, when the relatives arrive and Strictly Come Dancing with that fabulous jackanapes Vince Cable, we
Barack Obama has had a great couple of weeks. First DADT was repealed and then START was ratified by the Senate, safeguarding a major Obama foreign policy initiative In truth, both issues are peripheral to voter concerns. To them, the jobless recovery is what matters. New figures show that the unemployment rate in the US has
It’s Christmas Eve, and the Daily Telegraph have wrapped up their sting operation in time for tomorrow. The final victims are the Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne and the children’s minister Sarah Teather. As it happens, Teather gets off without blemishing her copybook: her greatest indiscretion is to claim that Michael Gove is “deeply relieved”
