All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Politicians have to shout to be heard over the lurid tale of John Terry’s bordello, but Ed Miliband’s fervour for climate change is sufficiently shrill. He has declared “war” on “sceptics”, who have been rather jaunty of late. As Fraser noted yesterday, the press’ climate change narrative is shifting – scepticism, in its proper sense, is
With another poll showing the Tories ahead but not by enough to secure an overall majority, The News of the World reports that the party is making contingency plans for a second election: The idea would be to take action on immigration, householders’ rights and business taxes and then go to the country again seeking
Stories of Gordon Brown’s temper are commonplace in Westminster. But they rarely make it into print. This, though, is about to change. The Mail on Sunday reports that Andrew Rawnsley’s follow-up to Servants of the People contains a string of revelations about Brown’s behaviour. The paper reports that Rawnsley has investigated whether the Prime Minister
What to do with Iain Duncan Smith? The Sunday Telegraph tomorrow says he will be given a Department for Children and Social Justice – an idea that has been in the pipeline for a while now. At first, I was against IDS returning to the front bench given what amazing influence he has had as
Courtesy of Erica Grieder: Good evening, Madame Speaker. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. But I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me last year. It started with the
I’ve been flicking through the British Social Attitudes survey this afternoon, and what a conflicted bunch of socially liberal and economically conservative people we are. The British decry the state’s interference in each facet of life and at the same time we are displeased that more has not been done to limit cannabis’ availability. There
I’ve a piece up over at the Daily Beast on Blair’s appearance before Chilcot yesterday during which he showed, once again, that he’s the last member of the War Party capable of explaining and selling the mission. All the others have fallen silent (Bush, Aznar) or been discredited (Cheney, Rumsfeld). Only Blair remains. The build-up
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