All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Liam Fox is in the most invidious position. It is hard enough to secure significant budget cuts against vested interests that maintain anti-competitive procurement; and being at war deepens the task. Cuts of 10 to 20 percent must be made but at the same time Fox acknowledges, in an interview with the Telegraph, that: ‘We
The new edition of The Spectator is out, and I thought CoffeeHousers may appreciate a rundown of what’s in it. 1) Cameron, the accidental radical. James Forsyth’s political column is, as always, choc full of original insights and insider info. James explains how this coalition is far more reforming than anything Tony Blair led –
Seeing Nick Griffin playing the ostracised martyr on television is sickening, and underlines the futility of banning him. Some 8,000 are invited to the Queen’s garden party, there was zero chance that Her Majesty would allowed within 50 metres of him. So his daft blog, asking readers to suggest questions he’d put to the Queen,
Labour’s relentless pursuit of the cancelled Sheffield Forgemasters’ loan is finally paying dividends. The government maintain that the loan was cancelled because the directors did not want to reduce their shareholding. It has emerged that, possibly, the directors did in fact offer to reduce their equity – a point that Jack Straw attempted to make
Ed Miliband will give his second preference vote in the Labour leadership contender to his brother, he tells the New Statesman’s Jason Cowley. The Ed Miliband interview is part of a really rich set of profiles of the Labour leadership candidates. Diane Abbott inadvertently reveals that it is David Miliband who is taking the
Here’s the text of the letter Alex Salmond has sent to Senator John Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There’s nothing new here but it does state, clearly, the essential facts of the matter. Megrahi’s cancer is, again, to be regretted not least because it put an end to his appeal against
David Selbourne is a political philosopher and theorist. This article appeared in the magazine last week; it is an edited version of his speech for a Spectator debate on the motion, ‘Too late to save Britain. It’s time to leave.’‘ Part of me feels that those who have helped to bring the country down —
I sympathise with the Palace, who were put in a tight position by Nick Griffin’s attendance at a Garden Party in his capacity as an MEP. But he should not have been barred unless he had broken the law or was gratuitously offensive, which he has not been on this occasion. Griffin’s attendance at
Never one to miss the bus, Phillipe Sands QC has informed the Guardian that an international court would be ‘interested’ in Nick Clegg’s view that the Iraq War was illegal. Sands continues with his favourite homily: ‘Lord Goldsmith never gave a written advice that the war was lawful. Nick Clegg is only repeating what Lord
David Cameron’s Big Society re-launch continues after his American interlude. Today, he will introduce the national citizens’ service for 16 year olds, which was famously backed by Michael Caine during the election campaign. There is no military element to this national service; the aim is to unite different communities, ages and classes. As a leader
As far back as last September, Iain Martin wrote that Iain Duncan Smith’s plans to reform the welfare system were going to run into trouble over cost: ‘But there is no way these proposals, as drafted, will be implemented by a Conservative government, for one simple reason: they carry an estimated up-front increased cost of
I’m not convinced I share James’s view that David Cameron’s “1940 moment” counts as a howler, far less a “quite spectacular mistake” (and I suspect James doesn’t really think it that either). It’s pretty obvious that the Prime Minister simply slipped-up. I think he knows that in 1940 the United States had yet to enter
Anne McElvoy’s report for the Today Programme on the Labour leadership this morning is well worth listening to. It featured all the usual suspect and some classic moments—Tessa Jowell damming Ed Miliband with faint praise and Ed Balls’ henchmen Charlie Whelan going out of his way to praise Andy Burnham—but the really memorable bit came
David Cameron has just made a quite spectacular mistake. Talking to Sky News he said: ‘I think it’s important in life to speak as it is, and the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner’. ‘We were the junior partner in 1940 when we
I feel for Vince Cable, who has morphed from Sage to Crank in a matter of weeks. Imagining himself as the scourge of the tuition fee, Cable floated the idea of a graduate tax recently. This pre-empted the Browne report into university funding and disregarded the coalition agreement, which states that all questions would be
At last, Nick Clegg got his chance to pretend to be PM today and he used it to give a dazzling impression of Gordon Brown. Opposing him, Jack Straw was off-colour. Hoarse of throat and hunched of stance, he did his best to bring some clarity to Britain’s new mission in Afghan – Operation Leg
Frailty, thy name is coalition. Right? That still seems to be what many people think. Take Simon Heffer’s column today, for instance in which he concludes: Whoever wins – and, at the hustings, the benign mood towards Miliband E is at the moment palpable, precisely because of his low profile during the Brown terror –
Michael Howard appeared on today’s Daily Politics and laid into Ken Clarke’s ‘caricature’ of a policy to reduce prison places. There is, Howard argues and John Denham supported him, a correlation between increasing the number of those incarcerated and a fall in crime. In other words, prison still works. Howard criticised Clarke’s ‘rather foolish’ denial
Nick Clegg comfortably got through his first appearance standing in for David Cameron at PMQs. He was helped by a poor performance by Jack Straw, who made Neil Kinnock look like a model of concision. As Clegg said mockingly at one point, ‘that wasn’t a question it was a sort of dissertation.’ In his final
Stay tuned for coverage of Clegg’s first PMQs from 12:00. 12:02: He’s off, the first Liberal to answer Prime Minister’s Questions since the ’20s. He lists the dead from Afghanistan. A tricky one on cuts in the capital schools budget from the MP for Gateshead. Clegg is clear: we should be under no illusion, Labour
John Bercow will need to be in good voice today. For this is the first time that Nick Clegg has stood in for David Cameron at PMQs and he is bound to get an almighty barracking from the Labour side. At the moment, Labour MPs seem to reserve nearly all their disdain and anger for
Liam Fox is anticipating the Strategic Defence Review, preparing the services for what will be extremely bad news. Britain will not engage in large scale operations in the immediate future. The Telegraph reports that officials intend to reduce the number of strike aircraft, warships and tanks. Future strategic emphasis will be on maximising firepower and
A powerful editorial in New Scientist about Muir Russell’s report into those emails leaked from East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. It does not quite call Russell’s publication a whitewash, but comes fairly close. Its main point of contention is that there have been three inquiries into the Climategate farrago and “incredibly, none looked at the
Gordon Brown will be seething, and with some justification: he never got photo-ops like these with Barack Obama. Shots of a cosy chat in the Oval Office are usually reserved for Benjamin Netanyahu, following the latest impasse between Israel and America. The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to repair the damage it did
A while back, in the aftermath of Senator Robert Byrd’s death, Jonathan Bernstein looked at West Virginia’s unusual shift from a state that, in Presidential elections, tended to be more Democratic than national trends to being more Republican than national trends might warrant. I think this is interesting since it allows one to look at
Jonathan Freedland has some nice things to say about the Big Society (still a terrible name, of course) so it’s only fair to say some nice things about his column too: there’s some good stuff in it and Freedland is right that the ideas behind the notion aren’t owned by any one political party. Indeed,
A Lord Ashcroft poll of marginal seats suggests, intriguingly, that the Tories could do as well—if not better—under AV than first past the post. Now, this is, obviously, just one poll. But it is the first one that looks the effect AV would have in all the various types of marginals. My first reaction to
A little odd, and certainly inconvenient, that al-Megrahi still lives and breathes. Then again, Scotland’s a notoriously unhealthy place and a bit of desert air probably did him some good. Ensconced in Washington, David Cameron will have taken some flak for the Lockerbie bomber’s compassionate release, for which he has the perfect riposte: terrible business,
No one, especially me, has comprehended the Big Society in its entirety. As far as I can gather, the state will shed some of its bureaucratic armour, but there is no clue as to where it will be dispensed. Writing in today’s Times, Rory Stewart, whose constituency contains one of the ‘Vanguard Communities; attempts a
A good deal of excitement on the left today as YouGov’s polling suggests the coalition’s “honeymoon” has ended. The government’s approval rating is now just +4 (41% approve of its performance, 37% disapprove). I don’t know why anyone should be surprised by this. Not only was the budget astringent, the coalition has launched any number
The indispensible Anthony Wells has news of the latest You Gov poll. Voting intentions are by the way at this stage of the parliament, but the Tory lead holds at 7 points on 42 percent. Of far more interest is the narrowing gap of those in favour of the alternative vote. As Anthony notes: ‘Up
As Brother Blackburn says, David Cameron’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today is a little better than the usual boilerplate trotted out on these occasions. This was perhaps the most refreshing bit and a welcome slap to the media-nonsense that invariably surrounds US-UK relations: Finally, there are those who over-analyze the atmospherics around the
It remains a hope, but Hamid Karzai wants his country to control its own security by 2014. Karzai echoes the MoD’s stance – revealed at the weekend courtesy of a leaked internal communiqué. Surely this is more than coincidence? 2014 would seem to be NATO’s preferred withdrawal date. At last, the politicians have dispelled some
A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece for the magazine about the debate over the Schonrocks, a family living in south London who allowed their two children – aged five and eight years – to cycle to school unaccompanied. The school had told them to desist from this practice because it was dangerous.