All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Bang! ‘Mr Schuringa then saw a ‘burning object’ – which he said resembled a small, white shampoo bottle – between the student’s legs. Mr Schuringa said: ‘It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs. I pulled the object from him and tried to extinguish the fire with my hands then threw
The Ed Balls leadership cart is revving up a gear. He wants to position himself as the main mover behind the election campaign, now that Gordon Brown is dead in the water. It was his plan to stop Darling jacking up VAT to 20 percent, so he can accuse the Tories of wanting to do
I have some advice for CoffeeHousers hungry for the latest evidence about the guy who tried to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight: go to the American press and their websites. They are 100% free to pursue these stories: the press in Britain isn’t. Not any more. The suspect suffering second degree burns in hospital, named
So, dear and gentle reader*, here’s wishing you a splendid and very merry Christmas. Thanks for being here this year and for all your comments and contributions to this blog. It’s not the same without you. Anyway, here are Shane and Kirsty performing one of the few Christmas songs worth a damn. *Not actually
Barring major political catastrophe, Coffee House will be falling silent over the next few days as we all celebrate Christmas. Many thanks to CoffeeHousers for your contributions over the past year. We hope you enjoy a happy holiday. If you’re looking to fill your time, then Paul Johnson’s and Lloyd Evans’ pieces from the Christmas issue of
The Tories have missed a trick in responding to the predictable news that Gordon Brown won’t be giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry until after the election. William Hague has just said that it stinks. He should have followed up by listing the questions Brown should be asked – highlighting the extent of his personal
There’s a story in some of today’s newspapers that evil Cypriots are murdering our robins and eating them. Crucially, for me, it does not say which Cypriots. The Greeks and Turks have the second and third worst cuisines in Europe (the Scotch are at the bottom) and there is not much to choose between them.
The Guardian’s interview with David Willetts is a decent preview of the Tories’ forthcoming green paper on family policy, and is neatly summarised by Jonathan Isaby here. Although I have my doubts about some Tory thinking in this area, there are a few encouraging ideas in there – such as relationship guidance schemes modelled on those provided by
One of the surprises of the Tory leadership campaign in 2005 was how David Davis bested David Cameron in the TV debate between the two men. Those involved in Cameron’s preparations for that debate blame Cameron’s poor performance on how Michael Gove knocked Cameron’s confidence in the run up to it. Gove was Davis in
A hefty one-two punch in the continuing “Have Gordon and Peter fallen out?” story, this morning. The Telegraph has quotes suggesting that Mandelson is “upset” and feels “disposed of” by Brown. And Sue Cameron of the FT details a specific rift between the pair, ending with the observation: “I hear Lord M is not happy,
It’s that time of year. There’ll be only a little blogging here until Christmas is done for one more time. So here, as the season demands, is a wee quiz to keep you occupied. You could, I suppose, google some of the answers but where’s the fun or satisfaction in that? So don’t google. No
Just realised that today is the twentieth anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s death. Only twenty years! Seems like it should be longer, somehow, since the finest cricketer to have won the Nobel prize for literature finally gave in to the temptation of not going on. Then again, most of the old boy’s best work did belong
The latest Comres poll for the Independent indicates, as if we needed telling, that the Tories are yet to seal the deal. It’s far from panic stations – the lead remains at 9 points – but there are two figures that prove where the Tories are going wrong. The majority of respondents feel that a
The spin machines are gearing up as we amble towards an election, and strategists’ latest hobby-horse is self-defence. Following the sentencing of Munir Hussain, Alan Johnson admitted feeling “uncomfortable” about Judge Reddihough’s decision. Never one to miss the bus, Chris Grayling went further and faster, suggesting that householders should be immune from prosecution unless they
As the perfect end to the political year, the three wise men of our main political parties have brought the newborn infant of our renewed parliamentary system the gift of a televised debate. This could actually be quite exciting. David Cameron was soundly beaten by David Davis in at least one of his leadership debates
The Daily Mail sets about David Cameron in its editorial today. It accuses him of “insulting voters’ intelligence”, tells him to “avoid the PR men, spivs and trashy celebrities with whom he has taken to mixing” and advises him to “spend less time with his spin-doctors, worrying about his image and trying to be all
We’ve been experiencing a few technical difficulties on Spectator.co.uk today, which means some of you may not have been able to access the site. We hope that things will be fully fixed shortly.
George Monbiot isn’t everyone’s cup of char, not least in these parts. I don’t write much about climate change because the subject* bores me and so I’m happy for Monbiot to promise that the end of the world is just around the corner and I don’t spend too much time worrying about it. I suspect,
I don’t pay enough attention to the Liberal Democrats to be certain about this but today may have been Nick Clegg’s best day as leader. The announcement that there will be not one but, god help us, three debates between Gordon Brown and David Cameron and that Clegg has been invited to participate as an
So there we have it. There will be televised election debates between the three main party leaders during the next election campaign, after all. The first will be on ITV, then there’ll be one each on Sky and the BBC. Talk about good TV for political anoraks. Like Tim Montgomerie and Mike Smithson, I suspect
So health care has its 60 votes and, since there are, depending upon how one classifies Joe Lieberman, 60 Democrats in the United States Senate all those votes are Democratic votes. No Republican crossed the aisle. At this point you might be forgiven that this is how politics is supposed to work: the side with
Ken Livingstone has added fuel to the fire that Fraser started with his News of the World column revealing that Peter Mandelson was being talked about as a possible Labour candidate for Mayor of London by saying that he had been warned to expect a challenge from Mandelson. But it strikes me that Livingstone might
James Macintyre is well connected among Mandelson’s associates and he discloses that Gordon Brown agreed to back Mandelson if he chose to board the Eurotrain once more. Macintyre describes the revelation as a ‘demonstration of the supportive dynamic between what were at one time bitter enemies’, that’s true, though Brown would scarcely brand his right
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
It’s the most straightforward dividing line the Tories could draw: “Tories good, Labour bad”. But it’s still striking to see it deployed quite so bluntly as in George Osborne’s Telegraph article this morning. His point is that four more years of Labour will lead us to ruin, whereas a Conservative government would pull us out
Balochistan grabbed your attention this week? I thought not. It’s in Pakistan and the ethnic Balochs – especially pro-secessionists – suffer the most appalling persecution from the Pakistani government and military. I know about this only because I received one of my regular emails from the Peter Tatchell Human Rights Watch organization (which is basically
…here are some posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Fraser Nelson wonders whether Peter Mandelson is planning to run as Mayor of London, and laments the pessimism of the left. James Forsyth says that David Cameron plans to lighten up, and outlines Gordon Brown’s PR dilemma. Peter Hoskin sets out the dangers with a
Is Greece too big to fail? When the Eurozone project was up and running, its taxpayers were promised: this was not a system where they’d have to bail out a badly-run country like Greece or Italy (or Brown’s Britain, were we members). But this rule (a clause in the Lisbon Treaty) is being torn up
Gordon Brown is in an odd position when it comes to PR. As a Labour tribalist he hates it. But he knows that it could be very useful to him as he attempts to save his job. There was huge pressure from within the Labour party on Brown announce a referendum on PR for polling
The Tories’ 17 point lead in this morning’s Observer Ipsos-Mori poll has got tongues wagging. The headline figure is that confidence in the economy, and by extension the government’s management of it, has collapsed since the PBR. Just 32 percent of voters believe the economy will improve in 2010, compared to 46% last month. The politics of debt
The government has sued for peace. The Observer reports that in the face of lobbying from the drinks industry, the government has dropped its mandatory code on the sale of alcohol, which Gordon Brown first brewed-up during the local election campaign. Labour excuses the u-turn on the grounds that vulnerable pubs and drinks retail industry
So who or what is to blame for the failure of the Copenhagen gathering to achieve what most people hoped for? Polly Toynbee says that the nature of politics is to blame. Personally I blame U2’s Bono. I don’t blame him for the failure of world leaders to agree a legally-binding agreement, of course. But
I’m not sure what is worse. The two-and-a-half year prison sentence handed down to homeowner Munir Hussain for hammering a robber over the head with a cricket bat (and the fact that the man who robbed him and tortured his family got off with a supervision order), or the profusion of impeccably middle class libtard
When Mandelson said in his Spectator interview that he plans another 15 to 20 years in politics, what could he have meant? Now that his European career is over, there is only one decent post coming up for a Labour figure in the first half of the next decade – and I float the latest