All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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.
George Osborne has talked of simplifying the tax system for years, and today he launched the OTS, The Office for Tax Simplification. The OTS will be chaired by Michael Jack, s Treasury minister in the Major government, and John Whiting of PWC and Chartered Institute of Taxation. The OTS looks suspiciously like a quango, but
I’ve spent the morning contending with the WSJ’s Heath Robinson-esque subscription service so you don’t have to. Inside the paper, David Cameron explains what the Special Relationship means to him. 1). The Special Relationship is close and robust because British and American values are essentially the same, which explains why our national interests are often aligned: ‘The
Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham Perry Bar, has put down a significant question for Theresa May: ‘Mr Khalid Mahmood (Birmingham, Perry Barr): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent reports she has received on (a) investigations undertaken by members of the US Congress and (b) materials held by
There are some British politicians who are obsessed with American politics, who could at this moment tell you who is most likely to pick up the open Senate seat in Colorado or pride themselves on their ability to name every Republican and Democratic vice presidential nominee since the war. But David Cameron isn’t one of
Most of Tim Yeo’s proselytising on climate change must be resisted. He calls for a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions in the short-term, which would paralyse Britain’s already geriatric economic competitiveness. He also endorses a policy that would push consumer energy prices to punitive levels in the hope that their behaviour is moderated. And he
Michael Gove may be a pip-squeak but he has an imperious voice and that formidable quality of both sounding and being enormously clever. With a faint note of arrogance, he bossed a potentially difficult interview on the Today programme this morning. Tired of defending himself against Ed Balls’ dishonest maxim that what’s good for bureaucratic
The Washington Post today publishes the first part of its series on the intelligence bureaucracy that has grown up in the United States since 9/11. The Post has been working on this report for two years and what it reveals is not pretty. There are more than 1,200 government organisations working in this area and,
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
Cameron’s Big Society Blitzkreig is underway, and he says that he hopes to ‘foster a new culture of voluntarism, of philanthropy and social action’. So far so good. As Fraser noted yesterday, there is a long and generous history of philanthropy in Britain; success will depend on the government transforming a culture of private charity
Must admit I’m thoroughly enjoying the government’s fury that decent, white, Christian, blind people keep getting chucked off buses because Muslims object to them. Apparently there is something in the Koran warning that if you brush up against a blind person, or get his saliva on your hand, it is haram – which means no
…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend. Fraser Nelson critiques Chuka Umanna’s comedy economics, and explores the statist underpinnings of DfID. James Forsyth analyses Mandelson’s miscalculation and says that the Tories are right to push through education reform. David Blackburn notes that the Afghan war is now subject to 2