All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
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.
Whitehall has turned into the lobby of the UN General Assembly, as dignitaries gather to give NATO’s Afghan campaign renewed impetus. Will it all amount to much? It depends. In this piece for the magazine E!Sharp I set out my stall: ‘[if the conference] is to achieve anything more than fill out the evening news,
Yesterday, I wrote that Jack Straw’s savagery in response to Goldsmith’s original advice bespoke of personal animosity. That may well be so, but Goldsmith’s testimony reveals that he was long convinced of his initial advice’s validity. Blair was exasperated with his friend’s stubbornness: “your advice is your advice,” he said pointedly. Yet eventually Goldsmith changed
Of all the misunderstood phrases popular in Washington, one of the most frequently cited is Teddy Roosevelt’s observation that the Presidency is a bully pulpit. This is often, perhaps even usually, understood as an expression of Presidential power. When the Commander-in-Chief speaks, the country listens and when he decrees that something must be done, Washington
Hague for prime minister? According to one of the wilder Tory theories, a hung parliament could force a humiliated Cameron from office and put the trusted Hague into Number 10 at the head of a coalition government. On today’s showing Hague has lost his hunger for power. With Brown in Northern Ireland on Superman duty,
If Tory policy in Northern Ireland was based around electoral advantage, as their critics have been insinuating these last few days, then they never would have attempted to get a new political force off the ground there. Rather, they would have waited for the election result and then, if necessary, made a deal with a
I remain unpersuaded that there’s much point to the Chilcot Inquiry and the stramash over Lord Goldsmith’s interpretation of the legal case for toppling Saddam does little to change that. Paul Waugh has a nice, if somewhat scathing, summary here. But the case against the war’s legality is a) pretty irrelevent now and b) rests
12:00: Stay tuned for live coverage. As Gordon Brown is still in Northern Ireland, Harriet Harman will face William Hague today. 12:03: Tory John Whittingdale opens up with Army compensation, a hot topic over the summer. Harman replies that these issues are being addressed by Ainsworth and the MoD. 12:04: Will the government do more
Boris Johnson has resigned as Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, apparently because he could not devote enough time to the job. The deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, replaces him. This is a marginally embarrassing turn of events for Boris and the Tories. It’s a puerile point but Boris still has the time to
Another pallid dawn brings more statistics proving that Britain is riven by inequality – ‘from the cradle to the grave’, concludes the Hills report. Unless the offspring of professionals pursue a peculiar urge to be writers or enter Holy Orders, they will bequeath ever greater advantages to their children. For those in converse circumstances, Larkin’s
I should have known that the news was too good to be, you know, true. Turns out that all the excitement about the Unted States dropping its disgraceful ban on the importation of proper haggis is somewhat premature. A spokeswoman from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service emails to “clarify”
The Chilcot Inquiry has at last disclosed something novel: Lord Goldsmith believed at one time that a second UN resolution would be a pre-requisite for legitimate military action. Goldsmith may well have been right, but not on the grounds he stated. A letter from Jack Straw reveals that Goldsmith misunderstood the wording of 1441. For
Over at Three Line Whip, Ben Brogan takes me to task for criticising the Owen Paterson’s attendance at the Marquess of Salisbury’s shindig. ‘But it seems a stretch to lambast Mr Cameron for doing his job as a unionist politician, which should be to find political ways to ensure Sinn Fein doesn’t end up the
Sometimes government leaks tell the public what they did not know. But sometimes leaks just confirm what everyone knew. The view held by the US ambassador in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai “is not an adequate strategic partner” and “continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden,” will come as no surprise to anyone. But
The longest recession suffered by any major country in this cycle seems thankfully to be drawing to an end, even if only by the narrowest of margins. Such has been the severity of the downturn though, that, as the above chart shows, GDP has fallen back to the levels of mid-2005. The economy is basically
The London Afghanistan conference is meant to appoint a civilian NATO coordinator to help align the counter-insurgency effort. The well-respected British ambassador in Kabul, Mark Sedwell, is a front-runner (as, incidentally, was Geoff Hoon until he plotted against Gordon Brown). If the press just publish the news, many questions will go unanswered. That’s not right.
So Britain did grow in the fourth quarter of last year but only by 0.1 percent. Many on the Labour side had hoped that the moment that the country started growing again, Brown would be able to go on the offensive; arguing that his handling of the economy had steered Britain through the crisis. But
I’m a monarchist- and much more keenly so than I was as a young chap – but the way this Daily Mail story is written is so ghastly and gawd-help-us that it almost makes one doubt the sense of having a non-elected head of state… Prince Philip has been spotted doing his bit for the
The union of irreconcilables was unlikely to last: power-sharing in Northern Ireland is on the verge of collapse. Where once Blair and Ahern would descend on Stormont as a couple of charismatics, today Gordon Brown and Brian Cowan face an enormous and unenviable task. They deserve support: both governments have been courageous in their approach
On the Today Programme this morning, Sarah Montague kept pressing Sammy Wilson of the DUP on whether his party would enter into an electoral alliance in certain seats with the new Conservative and Ulster Unionist grouping. Wilson suggested that the DUP would stand but would welcome it if other unionists stood aside. But that’s not