All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
It’s not something I’d thought about but, in a certain way or looked at from the right perspective, it’s a good question: What happens to your pet when the Rapture comes? Happily, After the Rapture Pet Care are here to help: It’s only $10 a month! Now it’s true that cynics might say that this
There’s an interview with Gordon Brown today in the Mirror about his relationship with his mother. As you might expect given the subject, it is hardly an interrogation. Indeed, it manages to make Piers Morgan’s questions to him resemble the final part of the Frost Nixon interview. But what caught my eye was this note
Here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the past week. Fraser Nelson says that, love him though he does, the Fink just isn’t cutting it. James Forsyth believes the Tories have to fight dirty, and explains why Adeela Shafi didn’t get a namecheck. Peter Hoskin is pleased that the Tories’ new poster
The recession has been intellectually thrilling, and I write that without a note of sarcasm. First, politicians argued as to whose understanding of Keynes was greatest; and now they’re in Keynes versus Hayek territory, over the timing and depth of cuts. The Chancellor and his Shadow have marshalled the various authorities who support their respective
Has Alastair Campbell lost his touch? In his heyday, Labour’s spin was mesmeric, with the godlike Campbell blowing smoke and manipulating mirrors. Now their tactics are as obvious as Britney Spears. Having prepared the ground with Piers Morgan last weekend, Brown will attempt to divert attention from the dreadful state of the economy; his government’s
Oh dear. The Evening Standard reports that Harriet Harman trod on Sir Thomas Legg’s toes and forbad him to publish claims that the fees office had turned down. Harman queried the ‘appropriateness’ of extending the enquiry beyond wrongly approved claims. English is a wonderful language and ‘appropriate’ has a number of nuances. The fees office
The news that James Purnell is to stand down is a shock. It is clear that Purnell was disenchanted with Brown’s continued leadership and with the direction in which the Labour party was heading. Purnell was marginalised in parliament and his much vaunted alliance with John Cruddas came to nothing. Plainly, he believes that he
Earlier this week I asked what Obama’s experience could teach a Cameron government. At the same time, there has been a well-argued debate in The Times about whether the Tories should go negative or not. There is one point where the two issues converge – and that is in how a newly-elected government should deal
Labour have certainly come out of the traps snarling and gnashing this morning. For one, they’re making the most of two letters in the FT, signed by 60 economists, which ostensibly support their position on the public finances. And then there’s Gordon Brown’s speech to European leaders, in which he implores them to tackle the
When a denial elicits this headline: “No 10 denies naked Gordon Brown called aide C-word” What is in and not in Andrew Ranwsley’s new book, which The Observer starts serialising this Sunday, is the talk of Westminster. There’s much speculation about whether the stories that were in the Mail on Sunday a few weeks back—including
I must be one of the very few people who would genuinely like to see David Cameron give another speech on chocolate oranges. There was much mockery of it but it contained a very important point: there are some things that a business can do that have negative externalities to which the appropriate response is
Bravo Sir Nicholas Winterton! It’s pernicious that no one will pay for me to travel First Class. As two separate scions of the same upper crust, it is mine and Sir Nicholas’ birthright. The country is going to the dogs with all this plebeian impertinence. It’s like turning up at the airport and being asked
Readers of the magazine will be familiar with Michael Heath’s series of ‘Flash Gordon’ cartoons, based on the life and sulks of our glorious Prime Minister. Well, now it’s got a successor – ‘Dave’ – which, naturally enough, focuses on the Tory leader and would-be PM, Mr Cameron. Here’s the first of them, from this
One of Israel’s most potent weapons has been the mixture of awe and fear with which its spy services are held. Now that Mossad is suspected of killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, and using fraudulent British passports in the process, newspapers will dredge up stories about the Entebbe Raid, the killing of Black September by
As Fraser said earlier, we’ve got a great piece by Mihir Bose in the latest issue of the mag on British football’s debt crisis. I would normally say that non-football fans should look away now, but the story is so redolent of the entire financial crisis that it’s worth any CoffeeHouser’s time. What you’ll find
£4.3bn in the red, that is the gruesome fact of the government’s January accounts. Never before has the government borrowed money in January, usually a month of surplus as self-assessed income and corporation tax receipts line government coffers. Analysts forecast a surplus of £2.8bn, denoting just how bad the situation is. This is an exact
The new issue of The Spectator is out today, and here are a few highlights. We’ve led on football, for once, with cover image by Mark Summers of David Beckham in the England away strip. Here are my top five features: 1. The very strange death of English Football. Mihir Bose, former BBC Sports Editor,
Brace yourselves. There’s going to be poll after poll after poll in the weeks leading to the election. And the onslaught starts in the Sun today, with the first of their YouGov daily tracker polls. It is also the first to be conducted in the aftermath of the Brown and Morgan interview. So what’s the
Family visiting = a few days off from blogging. Normal service to resume soon. Meanwhile, this is the view looking west down the Loch of the Lowes in Selkirkshire. This is James Hogg country and the Ettrick Shepherd is the subject of a memorial statue on the hillside above the loch.
Hamish McRae’s column today contains news of a warning that I had not seen reported elsewhere: ‘The capital markets division of Royal Bank of Canada yesterday put out a ranking of sovereign risk – the risk that a country cannot repay its debts. Ireland and Greece came at the top, as you might expect, followed
The Falklands are sovereign British territory and must be defended. The Times reports that Argentina’s President Kirchner has issued a decree (how quaintly autocratic) that all ships sailing in waters claimed by Argentina will require a permit. Presumably, that includes Desire Petroleum’s rig, which is en route to drill for an oil field comparable to
Following the success of the ‘I’ve never voted Tory’ spoofs, Tim Montgomerie has launched My Labour Poster and welcomes your contributions. I imagine it’ll receive po-faced censure from CCHQ, but Cameron&Co will be privately thrilled if activists get it up and running.
Every few years we unearth another hospital scandal in which we discover, all too late, that many patients have needlessly died. On the face of it there is no common theme to these failures: the bug clostridium dificille at Stoke Mandeville, possibly similar infections at Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells; emergency admissions at Mid-Staffordshire, and possibly
The media are obsessed with a Tory crisis. And why not? It’s a good story. The Telegraph is cheerleading the circus. It gave exhaustive coverage to the absurd hen-fight in Westminster North; on Monday it reported on more ‘rumblings and grumblings’ in the shires; yesterday, their subject was David Cameron’s heavy handed response to the
There is only one way the Tories can lose the election and that is if it becomes a referendum on them rather than a choice between them and the government. We are in such an anti-politics moment that the electorate is unlikely to give a positive endorsement to any politician or political party. This—not the
President Obama was going to be different. He was going to learn from Jimmy Carter’s failures. He was going to avoid Bill Clinton’s fate. Like his well-run campaign, Obama’s tenure in the White House was going to be cool, calm and effective. If Clinton failed by sending an over-cooked healthcare reform to Congress, Obama would
James Purnell envisages a society of ‘empowered’ voters left to make decisions for themselves. It is an attractive concept – individual responsibility displacing state directives will save money and, providing those running the institutions are competent, improve public services. Writing in the Times, Purnell acknowledges that these concepts can become lost in the abstract terms
The parliamentary pass system is supposed to be strictly adhered to in order to stop lobbyists and interest groups getting undue access to politicians (indeed I recently received a slap on the wrist for not updating the journalists’ register of interests immediately after I left the New Statesman. And quite right too). Guests of passholders
The transparency agenda is one of the most exciting things about the Cameron project but it is an idea that is hard to explain. But David Cameron’s speech to TED last week—video above, is the best expression of it that we have had yet. When you think about the changes Cameron is proposing—publishing government spending
Sir Richard Branson may often personify a leering joke, but, as Steve Richards observed this morning, this election is descending into a personality contest. Branson remains a symbol of British entrepreneurial success: his endorsement is crucial and I expect to see this story splashed across the right-wing tabloids tomorrow. The Standard quotes Branson saying: “I
The City had hoped that Britain would export its way out of trouble. Dream on City Boys: Britain’s trade deficit is £7.3bn. It is perverse that the Thatcher government is blamed for manufacturing’s decline. Certainly, deficits were a feature of the Thatcher years but Labour came to power with a £1.8bn trade surplus and the
The headline might almost be word association, but when it comes to Twitter the devil makes work for idle thumbs. Guido points out that tweets cannot be edited once posted. Labour whip David Wright has previous with labelling the Tories ‘scum’, and he maintains that on each occasion he has fallen victim to a would
The news that the CPI rose to 3.5 percent doesn’t seem to have affected the markets, but the cost of living is soaring. Mervyn King has written to Alistair Darling predicting that inflation will fall back to the benchmark 2 percent over the course of the year, and that the current explosion is a result
I couldn’t let today pass without a response to Danny Finkelstein. We do agree on the ends, but not the means. And, as he says, this debate mirrors one about the methods of reform. So, let¹s go through his points. 1. ‘I am afraid I think Fraser overestimates (a lot) how politically difficult this is