All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
We all know that Peter Mandelson enjoys the limelight, but this – from Kevin Maguire’s column in the New Statesman – is taking things to a whole new level: “Set your videos for Mandy: the Movie. I hear that the resurrected Prince of Darkness is to star in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Eager to share his
Given that homosexuals are permitted to serve in the armed forces of, I think, every NATO country bar Turkey and the United States and that none of these countries have reported any great difficulty as a consequence of ending this discrimination, it’s hard to see how lifting the ban on gays serving in the military
I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much
If you read the press after Clare Short’s testimony to the Iraq inquiry you would be forgiven for believing that there are only two ways to judge the Iraq War – whether it was legal or not, and whether Tony Blair lied. But while these are important issues, they get in the way of another
The Legg report is about 240 pages, if you can manage it. But the message you can take from it is short enough: there’s going to be plenty more public anger with our political class. Guido’s post here should tell you why. But, suffice to say, there are MPs paying back up to £42,458. There
The latest issue of the Spectator 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. A selection of articles have been made available, free, for all website
Consider the expenses wound well-and-truly reopened – not that it ever really closed in the first place. Sir Thomas Legg’s report into the matter will today identify around 350 MPs who have to return a total of about £1 million in dubious claims. What’s more, in his introduction to the document, Legg is set to
I have many more enthusiasms than convictions (in any sense of the word) but I am certain about some things and enthusiastically so. Cricket and tobacco, for instance. They’re as natural a fit as ham and eggs. If the government really wants to clamp down upon smoking they should probably consider banning cricket – for
Still, if we want to talk about cynicism I offer you, as Exhibit A, Daniel Pipes who believes, apparently seriously, that Obama can rescue his Presidency by going to war with Iran: He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the
It’s not the Coroner’s race in New Orleans, but this GOP ad in California is still pretty special. In the race for the GOP Senate nomination it seems that the problem is, as Jon Chait points out, that Tom Campbell isn’t a sheep. And that’s bad. Very baaaad. (Sorry.) Among his crimes? Thinking that California’s
A reader asks for a comment on the Scottish Budget “debate” at Holyrood. Well, I’m always sometimes happy to oblige: It passed. OK: the Tories and the Greens supported the SNP in return for promises to publish details of government expenditure online and set up an independent budgetary review commission (Tory demands) and bung more
So the former roadblock is now a born-again reformer – and, like most born-again types, he wants everyone to know about it. Writing in today’s Guardian, Gordon Brown sells his proposal for a referendum on the alternative vote system as “a rallying call for a new progressive politics.” And, from there, he gallops through written
I suspect that when we look back at this year, we might conclude that today’s PMQs was a turning point. David Cameron has had a poor January but today he was back on form, winning – as Lloyd Evans says – PMQs for the first time this year. Perhaps more significantly, there was real noise
Lord Guthrie had it right with his well-directed expletive: Gordon Brown just doesn’t get defence. His record, both as Chancellor and PM, leave him vulnerable to criticism on the subject; but today, Brown has been confronted by a khaki-clad nightmare. After suffering his first reverse at PMQs for months, beaten decisively by a beautifully executed
As we all know Her Majesty’s Armed Forces have spent the last seven years fighting in far-flung parts of the world. Their deployments have hardly been uncontroversial. So you’d think that the release of a new Green Paper on the “way forward” for the armed forces might be a moment of some interest and,
Some readers, Andrew, Reihan and a couple of other bloggers all argue, to one degree or another, that this post is depressingly cynical* [typo fixed]. It wasn’t meant to be! I wasn’t meaning to endorse Republican obstructionism, rather I was trying to point out that, viewed from a GOP perspective, a policy of knee-jerk opposition
Dave bounced back today. After a couple of lost months he showed up at PMQs and gave a thoroughly convincing display. Shrewd tactics, sound principles, headline-friendly quotes and some decent gags. The Chilcot Inquiry is proving a handy prosecution witness in the case against Brown. Cameron quoted a fistful of top generals who believe the
If you’re worried about the national debt burden, then what follows is one of the scariest graphs from the IFS’s Green Budget. It extrapolates from the government’s current plans and assumptions to work out when debt may get below 40 percent of GDP again. The answer, as you can see, is sometime in the early
A noteworthy observation from the IFS’s Rowena Crawford, here at the Green Budget launch: “We’ve never had three consecutive years of public service spending cuts, let alone the five years we’ve got forecast ahead.” She also pointed out that, if Labour extended its pledges to ringfence certain areas of spending until 2015, the cuts for
Stay tuned for coverage from 12:00. After a torrid month of self-inflicted wounds, this is a battle Cameron has to win. 12:01: And we’re off. Brown remembers the two soldiers killed in Afghanistan recently. 12:02: Question about £50,000 for the Prime Minister’s office. Brown says it’s the first he’s heard of it. 12:03: It’s Jacqui
It’s back to the British Museum for public finances anoraks. After George Osborne’s speech here yesterday, the IFS are this morning presenting their Green Budget (that’s green in colour, rather than green in outlook). It’s the mid-session coffee break, so I thought I’d fill CoffeeHousers in on what’s been said so far. The bottom line
I’m in Brussels where the only news is Obama’s cancellation of a trip to Madrid to join an annual EU-US confab. The FT’s Gideon Rachman explains the anxiety caused by the decision: ‘There is no doubt that the Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU (You thought it had been abolished?
When the Tories talk about enabling any group that wants to, to set up a school and be paid by the state for every pupil they educate, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how this would work in practice. We have got used to such a top-down education system, where the state provides the schools
So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying,
These days, Peter Mandelson is the only Cabinet Minister who ever seems to do anything to spread a little joy and happiness about. If it weren’t for him this might be the most depressing government in living memory. Take, for instance, his reaction, to Georgie Osborne’s speech on the economy today: “I have read George
The worst column I’ve read* today was written by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen who, I think, likes to style himself some kind of liberal. Note: this doesn’t mean he’s my kind of liberal. Anyway, here’s how his execrable piece begins: There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel
On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with Sir Ian Kennedy’s judgements on those MPs who have appealed against Sir Thomas Legg’s judgement of how much they should repay. The Commons will also be publishing a record of all lunches, dinners and receptions MPs held for outside groups in the Palace of Westminster
According to Laura Kuenssberg, Lord Stern is not an official advisor but confirms that he is consulting with the Tories on their climate change policy. As Iain Martin notes, what bizarre timing. The UEA and IPCC scandals simmer and Ed Miliband recently declared war on reason – which has almost certainly reduced James Delingpole to
The debate about cuts so far lacks any numbers, so I thought CoffeeHouses might like some. Contrary to what he claims Darling is planning cuts – but he just didn’t print the spending totals in his Pre-Budget Report (lack of space, one presumes). The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which produces its Green Budget tomorrow, has
I doubt His Holiness and I would hit it off, but he is right that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill would impose strictures upon religious communities that run contrary to their beliefs. The coalescence of British and EU anti-discrimination law is but an immodest garment for trenchant ideology. Harman’s bill strives to subjugate individual freedoms, such
Gordon Brown’s proposal to bring in a referendum on electoral reform has a beautiful symmetry with Tony Blair’s pledge to do exactly the same thing in the 1997 manifesto. That pledge never came to pass, once Mr Blair discovered the usefulness of a majority of 178, compared to dealing with the Lib Dems all the
I’m afraid I did not detect a “new economic model” in George Osborne’s speech. He has said he will “eliminate “a large part” of the deficit (ie, the amount that debt goes up by) over the next parliament. In questions, he kept repeating this phrase: “a large part” – and which is woolier than Labour’s
Voltaire praised the English for their boldness: “how I like the people who say what they think”. The slow and steady contraction of the polls continues, and Rachel Sylvester is convinced that the Tories must embrace risk and revoke ‘health-and-safety politics’. She writes: ‘Increasingly, his pronouncements seem designed to grab a headline rather than challenge
Front page of the Independent: “Vote of no confidence in Tory economic policies”. As headlines go, it’s one of the worst the Tories have had for a while – even if, as Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson point out, it’s kinda misleading. Truth is, the Indy’s ComRes poll finds that 82 percent of people want