All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
If any CoffeeHousers have been feeling despondent about the Tores, I have the perfect tonic: Cameron’s YouTube video released today. In my News of the World column last week, I listed five messages I thought he should give. And he ticked all of them off – and then some. It was one of those biannual
As this morning papers’ show, the Tories know that their spring conference here in Brighton offers them a chance to change the narrative of this campaign, to get back on the front foot. William Hague’s speech, the first big set-piece of the event, tried to frame the choice facing the country at the election as
Both James and Tim Montgomerie felt that William Hague must be more prominent during this campaign and Cameron has reached the same conclusion. Hague opened the spring confernece with a stark, bleak message: “And I say it is that most crucial election because I believe the choice for Britain is as stark as this: it
Actually, there seem to be rather more than six promises Still, the Daily Mail reports on a series of Tory pledges that Dave & Co will roll out this weekend as part of their Get Back on Track plan. Let’s have a look at them: Act now on debt to get the economy moving: Deal
If you had a fiver for every time a Tory speaker today has said ‘five more years of Gordon Brown’ you would soon be rich enough to start worrying about the 50p tax rate. All the speakers in the economy debate stressed how the country ‘cannot afford five more years of Gordon Brown.’ George Osborne
Gordon Brown does not have much of a personal “backstory” but he does talk about his family. When he’s feeling guilty about something, he mentions his father. But today, speaking to the Welsh Labour Party, he again talks about a figure we heard about a few days ago: his grandfather. “Like so many here I
Now that the post-Cold War era has ended it is hard to find small, inspirational states who seek to cement a new-found independence and yearn for what the West has to offer. Georgia looked like such a state until Russian aggression and Tblisi’s behaviour put an end to the country’s westward journey. Ukraine is too
Not to trivialise the story too much, but if this ain’t the headline** in every British newspaper tomorrow then, damn it, the subs should be ashamed of themselves. *So far & thankfully & given the size (8.8) of the quake anyway. UPDATE Sunday 7pm: It seems, sadly, that more lives have been lost than had
George Osborne saved the 2007 Tory conference with a tax cut. He’s recalling that mood today, elaborating on the plans to cut corporation tax which – as James detailed a while ago – will be the backbone of his first budget. Now, you may think: we know all this. Osborne has said he’d cut corporation
Tory spring forum gives David Cameron a chance to regain the momentum. The media will be there in numbers and I suspect that the rumours of an early election mean that it will get more attention than it otherwise would have done. Cameron’s speech is a real chance to show what the Tories are going
Here is a selection of some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson gives some reasons to be cheerful about Cameron and the Tories. James Forsyth has some advice for Cameron, and welcomes George Osborne’s Mais lecture. Peter Hoskin watches Alistair Darling unleash the forces of hell, and observes Brown
A few days ago, BBC Newsnight ran in effect the first live TV debate between the three parties when Secretary of State for Defence, Bob Ainsworth, Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, and Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson Nick Harvey shared a platform at the Imperial War museum. The programme was meant to focus on the main
As the Tories prepare to head to the seaside, Tim Montgomerie has published a ten point plan to get the Tory campaign back on track. The plan is already causing much discussion in Tory circles. His main points are that the Tories need to sharpen their economic message, use William Hague more, sort out the
Well, the Chancellor’s not for budging. Alistair Darling stands by not “some of” but “all of” his “forces of hell” comments. Martin Bright wrote the politics column in this week’s mag, arguing that opponents are intimidated by the political mobsters surrounding Brown, and who Brown encourages a la Henry II. Martin names Charlie Whelan and
Guido’s got the inside track that the Beeb have been told not to take the weekend off, and the Tory lead has been cut to five points in the Telegraph’s Ipsos Mori poll. A five point lead is hung parliament territory and Labour could win the most seats – further evidence, as if any were
Gordon Brown’s interview with the Economist is completely brazen. With a fine disregard for facts, and subsumed amid specious waffle, Brown declares that he’s been consistent on cuts. ‘I believe if you look at my interviews there’s absolute consistency in what I’m saying. We were saying right through the early stages of the crisis that
Brownies galore in our PM’s interview with the Economist. So many, in fact, that I thought I do a quick Fisk: The Economist: The big worry seems to be the deficit—the deficit. What should the message should be? Gordon Brown: I actually think that the first thing that we’ve got to do as a
Happily, I couldn’t find a photo of Steve Nicol’s miss against Uruguay in 1986. Could there be anything dafter, yet still wearisomely predictable, than the news that the polis have warned an Aberdeen shop that dares to sell “Anyone But England” t-shirts* in the run-up to this year’s World Cup finals that said items might
Increasingly I suspect that George HW Bush may be one of the most under-rated American presidents since the Second World War. Politically, sure, he wasn’t the smartest, sharpest or smoothest and some of his greatest achievements – most notably the management of post-Soviet eastern europe – owed something to a policy of what was, in
This is irritating but should not come as a surprise: Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN. Despite Britain’s close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined
At the beginning of this week the key figures in the Tory election campaign gathered together in Notting Hill to try and work out what was going wrong with the Tory campaign, why the Tory lead has halved since December. Our cover this week attempts to answer this question. My take is that the problem
He’ll have to because nobody else will. As Robert Peston says ‘Poor RBS, poor Britain’ – today’s figures are catastrophic. Peston’s been digging and the news gets worse: ‘But perhaps the most chilling numbers are these: we as taxpayers put in £25.5bn of new equity into this bank last autumn, the second instalment of the
One of the odder aspects of contemporary politics is the amount of attention lavished upon the goons at the BNP. Anyone would think they were about to win the election. But they’re not. Nevertheless, grant Nick Griffin and his pals this: they’ve managed to hijack the debate – such as it is – on immigration.
First the tragedy, then the farce: if there was something dark, perhaps shocking, about last weekend’s bullying allegations, then the latest Rawnsley revelations veer towards the hilarious. They’re centred around Brown’s efforts to oust Tony Blair, and the Guardian covers them here. I won’t pre-empt your enjoyment of them, except to highlight this passage from
Don’t you think that ‘The Ship Money Movement’ is a more appropriate name for a British anti-tax forum? You know, given the connotations of ‘Tea Party’ in these climes? Titles are instructive, and, as James wrote yesterday, the British right has a growing fascination with its American counterpart. Perhaps I’m over doing it, but it
Liam Byrne has caught the Brown bug – not for raging in his underpants you understand, but for fiscal conceits. Tony Wright, the Public Administration Select Committee Chairman, called Liam Byrne (and the opposition as well) to task for misleading the public on the dire effects of cuts. Wright may be proved right: frontline services
The latest issue of the Spectator is published today. Inside, James Forsyth argues that the Tories’ situation is now verging on critical; Martin Bright says that Brown’s henchmen are the problem; and Rod Liddle says that bullying has become the latest Public Sector growth industry. If you are a subscriber you can view these articles
All of a sudden, the Big Banks are Big Politics again. And who’d have it any other way, on the day that the 84 percent taxpayer-owned RBS announced losses for 2009 of £3.6 billion? And that’s alongside a bonus pool for its staff of £1.3 billion. Yep – however hard they try, the exorcists of
Does it matter if this story is actually true or not? It’s clearly going to be a movie soon. All that needs to be decided is the casting: A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain. An international arrest warrant has been issued for
Bob Gates’ criticism of european defence shortcomings yesterday was couched in unusually harsh terms. Then again, NATO faces an uncertain future and there’s a growing sense in the United States, I think, that europe is failing to lift its weight when it comes to defence matters. As Gates pointed out just 5 of NATO’s 28
Jeb Bush that is. And, it’s fair to say that he doesn’t seem enormously enthusiastic about Palin’s political prospects: My personal belief is that for Governor Palin to be a successful candidate for higher office, she needs to take this charisma she has and also add to it some depth of understanding of the complexity
The obsession of British politicians – and political journalists – with American politics is often mocked. But there’s a clarity to American political messages that is often missing in this country. So it is good to see George Osborne borrowing a line from the Reagan playbook, and pointing out that people are now worse off
Frank Field was characteristically forthright on the Today programme this morning. “I don’t believe, given the strains (on the economy), we will be able to maintain an open door policy without serious unrest on the streets,” he said, and this brings me to a Sunny Hundal article on the media’s approach to the BNP. Hundal
‘Any closer and they’ll start kissing,’ said Cameron. The PM and his beloved chancellor were seated side by side at PMQs today, chatting showily throughout. Their rhubarb-rhubarb conversation was intended to quell the rumours of civil war in Downing Street. The ploy misfired. Two men conversing don’t both speak at each other simultaneously. But that