All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The Spectator isn’t in favour of many taxes, but we are calling for a mandatory insurance premium for banks. Depending on which version of the FT you picked up today, it seems the banks are agreeing to this too. But are they agreeing to a tax, or a fee? Even the FT isn’t sure –
If we needed a reminder not to get overly excited about small variations in the opinion polls, it comes today with two surveys from the same pollster taken at pretty much the same time which return slightly different results. The YouGov survey for today’s Telegraph has the Tories on 38, down two, Labour on 31,
If Tony Blair were to go to the newsagents to day to see how his performance is being reported on the front pages, he’d be in for a pleasant surprise. He does not feature – certainly not in the biggest sellers. The extra-curricular activities of John Terry make the the lead story on the Mail,
There has been a general consensus that Tony Blair was a class act in front of the Chilcot Inquiry. Even those who see him as a liar and a war criminal must have been impressed by the way he handled himself – although choosing to show no contrition in a room of people that included
Warrant Officer Mac McGearey, who serves in the Royal Tank Regiment and is due to ship out to Afghanistan in June, has a blind daughter who contracted meningitis when she was just three days old. This left her blind and suffering from, one gathers, a range of other disabilities. At first Ciara, who is now
No doubting this. Apparently you need to win an election to become Coroner in New Orleans. This is good news since it has produced the strangest attack ad I’ve seen in ages: By way of background: The spot portraying [Dr Frank] Minyard as a Frankensteinian crazy was paid for by Dwight McKenna, MD, a convicted
One of the charming things about National Review’s blog The Corner, is that one never knows what will irritate someone next. Then again, almost anything and everything Obama does annoys some of the Corner kids. Today’s example: not going to Mars! For real: Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration plans to scrap funding for voyages
The next set of GDP figures are going to play a key role in the election campaign. They are due out on April 22 with polling day expected to be a fortnight later. Brown desperately needs a good growth number so that he can try and make the case that his policies have steered Britain
Jacqui Smith has given a rather reflective interview to Andrew Neil, which you can see on the BBC News Channel this weekend, in which she concedes that she’s likely to lose her seat. But, to my mind, the most interesting thing about the interview is how frank she is about how Blair was bundled out
Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week Fraser Nelson reveals Blair’s real crime. James Forsyth says that the Tories’ Northern Ireland talks had nothing to do with electoral advantage, and reviews the economy’s anaemic recovery. David Blackburn thinks it will take decades to stimulate social mobility, and says that
After the London conference, it is clear that “talking to the Taliban” will become part of the strategy in Afghanistan. But the conference left a number of important questions about what this means in practice unanswered. Talking to the Taliban is not a new idea. Even though he expelled a British and Irish diplomat for
Iran. That’s the news story which poor Mr Blair is trying to spin to the panel – but they don’t pick up on his hints. It would have all been all right in Basra – he’d like to say – if it hadn’t been for those pesky Iranians. As Prime Minister, if he blamed Iran
Oooh, there’s just been a wonderful exchange at the Chilcot Inquiry. Baroness Prashar was asking some kindergarten questions about military planning. She barely mentioned Geoff Hoon’s evidence that the MoD was chronically under-funded and short of equipment before, during and after the conflict, and merely concentrated on ‘visible military planning’, or the lack of it
Michael Crick reports that Owen Paterson is seeking an urgent conference with Sir Reg Empey (the UUP leader) after revelations that the UUP held secret talks about a possible electoral pact with the DUP. If the story stands up, the UUP/Tory pro-Union and anti-sectarian alliance is dead. Crick writes: ‘Some in Belfast think that the
Not so good for John Rentoul: it’s WMD time and Blair’s body language spoke volumes. His movements were almost involuntary. The glasses were on and off, the brow furrowed, the head wagged and jagged in the manner of an amphetamine junky going cold turkey, and the hands were more intrusive than Andrew Marr’s. In round
So far so good for John Rentoul: Blair’s walking it, but there have been intriguing moments. The suggestion that Blair’s foreign policy was motivated solely by vanity is false. The former Prime Minister’s thinking is extremely coherent. That is not to say that he is right nor to deny his obvious vanity, or to overlook
So, what do we make of round one? Blair looks younger, in a strange way. A shorter haircut. But all those thespian mannerisms that I had forgotten about are still there – and are being used to full effect. A complete mastery of his facial expressions – which, for Blair, do the communicating. He can
On Today this morning, Nick Robinson said that Tony Blair would point to improvements in infant mortality and the like. Today then cut back to the studio where a reporter analysed this claim. The reporter disputed the validity of this claim and said that sanctions had ‘skewed’ the numbers. But the sanctions were a consequence
This week has seen confirmation that social mobility has stagnated, that the economic recovery is dangerously anaemic and that peace in Northern Ireland is threatened. Yet a conflict that was declared won nearly 7 years ago has been ever present on the frontpages. Bagehot is not at all surprised that the Iraq war remains definitive:
It’s possibly the most important whistleblowing site in the world, but Wikileaks has suspended activity due to lack of funds. Azeem Azhar of Viewsflow has aleady set up a Facebook group to raise support for the site, which won the Economist 2008 Freedom of Expression Award and Amnesty International’s 2009 New Media Award. The site has been
Oh dear. George Osborne and his guru, Richard Thaler, have been at Davos. This means, sure as eggs is eggs, that there’s a piece celebrating behavioural economics on the way. And, yup, it duly arrives in the Guardian today. I’ve mentioned the Nudgers before and few people doubt that there are some useful ideas that
When Charlie Brooker is on form he’s pretty good you know.
The markets have traditionally not looked too carefully at sovereign debt. But that seems to be changing. At a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, people were asked to vote what was most likely to cause the next crisis. More than 50 percent of them, 50.7 to be precise, named sovereign debt far
News reaches me of a surprising meeting in the lobby of Portcullis House today, Goldie Hawn — of Private Benjamin fame — swept in to Westminster wearing big shades and more fur than a member of the Household Division. She was in the Commons to meet with Michael Gove’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings. Gove’s
Barack Obama and George W Bush might not have much in common, but you can certainly argue that their speechwriters do. One of the limitations of set-piece events such as the State of the Union is that, in the end, many of them are pretty similar. Certainly, you can bet that the same ideas will
Gordon Brown is a master of connivance. I never understood that he is contriving the EU’s destruction until hearing of Baroness Ashton’s glorious exploits. Agnes Poirier reveals all in the Times. CND’s sole attraction was that its protesters went home every evening and never worked weekends. Alas, the EU is for twenty four hour party
As President Obama might put it, let me be clear: the Daily Mail is a terrific newspaper and one may admire its professionalism and the talent of its journalists (some of whom are friends, of course) without necessarily agreeing or even sympathising with its worldview. But, if you were to only read the Mail you
The Tories should gain little from what is a Labour dominated affair, but the Chilcot Inquiry is doing the Tories a vicarious favour by succeeding against the odds. The government’s refusal to disclose the full range of relevant documents frustrates Chilcot, but it also compounds the impression that Downing Street has contrived to restrict the
As Tony Blair prepares to sit in the dock tomorrow, I suspect he knows he’ll walk it. The focus is on the case for war and how it was spun – which will be his Mastermind specialist subject. Nor will anything new be uncovered. As one of the journalists whose summer holiday was eaten up
The prospects of a deal in Northern Ireland seem to be receding. If the talks and, therefore the executive, do collapse, it will show how foolish it was of Jonathan Powell to try for this peace of the extremes. Powell decided that rather than spending hours negotiating with the UUP and the SDLP, the quicker
The latest issue of the Specatator is published today. If you are a subscriber you can view it here. If you have not subscribed, but would like to view this week’s content, you can subscribe online here, or purchase a single issue here. For all his talk about devolving power, Mr Cameron has as Tory
The Lancaster House conference commences this morning and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has penned a stupefyingly worthy article in the Times, playing the same old tunes about the intention to ‘improve governance, fight corruption and bring Taleban fighters back into society if they are ready to lay down their arms.’ The Afghanistan mission has
Well that was long. 70 minutes in fact. And, as the genre demands, there was a considerable gap between Presidential rhetoric and anything that is actually likely to happen. Do you really believe, now that Obama has promised this, that American exports will double in five years? Of course not. Ezra Klein has a useful
The talks on devolving peace and justice in Northern Ireland are in trouble. The Prime Minister has left without a deal being signed, having been there far longer than he intended. But as the talks continue, it is worth remembering that that both DUP and Sinn Fein are benefitting from the focus on this issue.