All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Like Mr Larison I wish Mr Salam had not cut this paragraph from this (excellent) piece on the popularity of the paranoid style: So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta
There were cold bacon sandwiches on offer at Cameron’s press conference this morning, arranged for 9.15am to get it in before Gordon Brown’s presser with the Iraqi PM (no shoes thrown at Brown), and to time it with the passing of the Coldstream Guards band playing outside. Well, the latter was perhaps a coincidence. But
Yesterday, The Times published an interview with William Hague. Here’s how it reported his views on the defence budget and Trident: ‘The MoD budget was “not immune”. But he again pledged his party to upgrading the Trident nuclear deterrent.’ But today at his press conference, David Cameron said: “having the best replacement there is for
Ross Douthat, the new New York Times columnist, has a smart piece up at The Atlantic arguing that the beginning of the Obama presidency has been the easy bit precisely because his inheritance has been so bad. Here’s the nub of his argument: “Barack Obama hit the trifecta. He’s inherited two ongoing military conflicts; he’s
If they can panic in Washington DC, then, for heavens’ sake, we can have some hysteria here too: The first Britons confirmed to have caught swine flu have been discharged from hospital after recovering. This will obviously disappoint the BBC, who’ve been hoping that Swine flu will make up for the great disappointment that was
I got knocked off my bike on Tuesday night. Ambulance, hospital, general anaesthetic … the whole nine yards. No nerve damage and brain seems to be functioning okay, but hopes of becoming a male supermodel have now been dashed. I was cycling down Holland Park Avenue in West London at around 12.30am, front and rear
This morning, while most of London rushed to work, a few hundred soldiers stood silently in the scorching sun of the Iraqi desert, as the names of their fallen comrades were read out. All 234 of them; 179 British and 46 allied soldiers. The Reverend Paschal Hanrahan led the prayers and said something which I
Over at Comment Central, the Times pair of Danny Finkelstein and Philip Collins – who, for my money, have written perhaps the two finest comment pieces for a UK newspaper so far this year (Finkelstein on Israel; Collins on Brown’s political positioning) – have published their exchange on whether Brown will go before the next
Ben Brogan writes a very useful article in today’s Telegraph, outlining the preparations that the Tories are making for government. He details some of the meetings between shadow ministers and top civil servants; the advice that Michael Heseltine has given the Cameroons (“don’t bother with special advisers”); and William Hague’s directives for the Foreign Office.
Yesterday Gordon Brown told the House about the UK’s new “AfPak” strategy, laying out what can best be seen as a companion piece to the US strategy unveiled by Barack Obama a few weeks ago. (Notice how the US took six pages to say what the UK needs 32 pages for). Britain will boost troop
There’s little more to add to this alarming snippet from the Daily Mail, except to say that the publication of MPs’ expense receipts looks set to become the most damaging scandal of Gordon Brown’s premiership: “Three Labour MPs are said to be terrified that the release of their expenses claims will expose them as adulterers
As every Hitchhikers fan knows, the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. The question about the new tax on the super-rich is framed in a similar way. Will it raise £2.4bn as the Treasury claims? Or will it lose about £800m as the IFS model suggests? All of this – the future
It’s true you know, Barack Obama does want to un-make the United States of America. First he takes a quick cricket lesson from Brian Lara, now he’s reading Joseph O’Neill’s (splendid) Netherland – a novel that is, at least in part, about cricket in New York City. Could anything be more un-American? Of course not.
No-one would argue that Barack Obama is without ego. Then again, that’s also true of most politicians. Mark Steyn, however, objects that Obama “seems to see himself as Nelson Mandela and the previous regime as the old National Party”. This seems a stretch given that the evidence proffered is Obama’s quip that We cannot pretend
I thought the Cameron-Clegg show (or was it the Clegg-Cameron show?) provided us with an interesting new double-act today. Was this the dry-run for the coalition following the next election? The two men didn’t look entirely uncomfortable in each other’s company, I thought. The government’s position on the Gurkhas is so patently unjust that it provided
The shocking thing about the government’s defeat this afternoon is that it can be described as a shock at all. And parliamentarians wonder why they are viewed with, to put it mildly, disdain? Anyone with an ounce of commonsense can see that it is grotesque to tell the Gurkhas that they may fight in the
A truly magnificent piece by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times yetsterday. An extremely nuanced argument, which ends with the following paragraph: “One of Mrs Thatcher’s most famous phrases was: “There is no alternative.” As yet, no major political figure in Britain or the western world has really articulated a coherent alternative to the free-market
A total cheat at PMQs today. It was a swine flu swindle. Only a week has passed since Labour’s manifesto-busting tax-hikes were announced in Darling’s bankruptcy budget and the MPs’ expenses scandal is still pumping out clouds of noxious smoke and yet Cameron allowed himself to be persuaded that the pig-bug business equals a State of Emergency.
In the slew of polling data that has come out to mark Obama’s 100 days, two numbers stand out to me: 81 percent of Americans like Obama, that’s 30 percent more than support his policies. This is a result of several things: his personal manner, the fact that people appreciate the historical significance of having
Parliament has handed away too many of its powers in recent years and the behaviour of too many of its members have brought it into disrepute, but today it did the right thing in standing up for the rights of Gurkhas. To my mind, any Gurkha who served should have the right to live here
Good news. The Lib Dem motion to extend equal settlement rights to all Gurkhas has just been passed in the Commons, by 267 to 246 votes. Nick Clegg, too often a figure of fun in Westminster, deserves a great deal of credit over this. By contrast, Gordon Brown positioned his government on the wrong side
A well-informed friend of mine, in the medical world, has been dealing with this swine flu scare, and I thought I’d pass on what he has to say. The good news: this is not the end of the human race. Swine flu is contagious, far more so than the H5N1 bird flu, when you pretty
Apologies for the ad at the beginning.
Brown begins with a tribute to the solider who died in Afghanistan. Bill Cash then asks Brown when he next intends to do a ‘comedy turn’ on YouTube. An irritated Brown bats it back. Brown announces in a reply to a question about swine flue that there are three more confirmed UK cases. One school
One of the many odd aspects of Gordon Brown’s expenses gambit was why he came out with a proposal that was bound to be mocked as paying MPs just to turn up. It would only have been worth the Prime Minister coming out with his own proposals before the official review and before he’d consulted
Opposite their interview with William Hague, the Times offers a useful insight into the Tories’ electoral strategy: “The increasing likelihood of victory for the Conservatives at the next election has prompted the party to consider diverting resources away from seats it believes are already in the bag to those previously regarded as unrealistic prospects. They include seats such
The headline-grabber from William Hague’s interview with the Times seems to be his admission that “it is likely that [the Tories] are going to be able to win the next election”. But this section rather caught my eye: “And for the first time he hinted that a referendum could still be promised in the Tory
Eric Ellis questions whether Kevin Rudd’s plan to make Australia the West’s most ‘Asia-literate’ country has anything going for it except geography An old friend of mine, a self-made corporate tyro embedded at the Big End of Sydney, asked me recently why I bother writing from miserable, crisis-racked places like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and
Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT’s op-ed page since in addition to Ross there’s David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that
The defection of Arlen Specter is a nice momentum booster for Obama on the eve of his 100th day in office. To be sure, by switching parties Specter has saved himself a debilitating primary fight and pretty much guaranteed himself re-election in a state that is becoming increasingly Democratic. But even if the move is
This story, via Sky, is too bizarre not to mention: “A Serbian union official has chopped off his finger and eaten it in a protest over wages to show how desperate he and other workers are. ‘We, the workers have nothing to eat, we had to seek some sort of alternative food and I gave
Well, you gotta hand it to them. The Republican party’s base finally got rid of Republican-In-Name-Only Arlen Specter. The Pennsylvania Senator has had enough and isn’t going to take it anymore. He’s now a Democrat. And so, a heretic was cast into the wilderness and the conservative movement offered great hosannas of joy. Better to
Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican Senator from Pennsylvania who faced a primary challenge, is switching to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate.
You’ve got to hand it to Cameron, he gave a smooth response to a question about Boris becoming PM on BBC Radio London earlier: “Why shouldn’t he be ambitious? I think it’s great and it does not worry me at all. I’m a Conservative, I think competition in all things is good including for