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No need to explain why we’re looking back on the resignation of Alastair Campbell for this week’s entry from The Spectator archives. The piece itself is merciless stuff from the pen of Stephen Glover. Alastair Campbell’s redtop values have contaminated our politics, Stephen Glover, The Spectator, 6 September 2003 When I learnt of Dr Kelly’s suicide, my first thought was that he had been fatally drawn into Alastair Campbell’s world. It is what many people felt. It was a reasonable assumption that Mr Campbell or his office or someone responsible to the Prime Minister’s director of communications had deliberately put Dr Kelly’s name in the public domain – with disastrous

The whole Wikileaks scandal reminds me of a recent conversation I had, at his request, with a member of a foreign diplomatic service. The country he represented is a long-standing British ally and I saw no harm in talking to him as I didn’t say anything which I hadn’t said, or wouldn’t say, in print. Most of the chat was the usual stuff: what are Cameron’s prospects, what does he believe, will the Lib Dems last out five years, who are the real powers in Downing Street, what will happen to Andy Coulson, who are the new MPs worth watching etc. I suspect that what we discussed, along with many

Today’s peerage list contains more interesting names than usual. Jullian Fellowes — Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, Snobs — is the one who will get the most attention. It is a sign of how confident David Cameron is feeling that he has risked the reopening of the whole class question. But perhaps, the most intriguing Tory appointment is Patience Wheatcroft. One imagines that she wouldn’t have taken the role unless it was a way to allow her to serve on the political front line. Howard Flight’s appointment to the Lords rights a wrong: his sacking as a candidate before the 2005 election was as unfair as it was hasty. A few

There is no sign of the heir to Blair at the Commons Liaison Committee this afternoon; in fact, David Cameron has been possessed by the ghost of Gordon. So far the Prime Minister’s answers have been cumbersome and statistic-heavy; and his delivery has had the dexterity of a three-legged elephant. He will have expected cannons to the left of him, but to the right as well? If he imagined that Tory backbenchers would coo appreciatively he will have been sadly disabused. Andrew Tyrie, James Arbuthnot and Bernard Jenkin have eviscerated him over the conduct of the strategic defence review. They deplored the culture of leaks and counter-briefing and probed Cameron

The West Wing has an amazing hold over Fleet Street. The TV series has not only taught a generation of British reporters about US politics but even influenced the way that they see the workings of Westminster. Every time centre-right writers think David Cameron is seen as having made a mistake – mistreated his back-benchers, hired a personal photographer or made a foreign policy gaffe – they trot out the same refrain: No 10 needs a powerful Leo McGarry-type chief of staff who can bring the various parts of the operation together from Steve Hilton’s work to Andy Coulson’ operation. An enforcer, a puller-togetherer. I have three arguments against a

Monday is eagle day for the overhaul of government machinery. Ben Brogan explains how the publication of 20 departmental business plans will enable the public to chart the progress of government reform – inaugurating a revolution is transparency, that meme of the moment. I’ve always wondered why the Tories are so keen on touting ‘transparency’. One answer, it seems, is to expose those ministers and departments who are dragging their feet. This instrument of New Politics doubles as a self-protection mechanism, which is especially useful with those dastardly Lib Dems and the odd pugilistic right winger scurrying about. Brogan writes: ‘The plans will spell out the timetables for implementing every

In these grim dark days of austerity and cuts, the coalition urgently needs to find a compelling political narrative of hope and optimism. David Cameron’s Big Society rhetoric occasionally threatens to contain some philosophical depth, but suffers from the same problem as most new fangled analyses of the world. Namely, it is so fluffy that it becomes bewildering.   To the government’s credit, they have managed to prepare the public for the upcoming belt tightening. This achievement is all the more remarkable given the woeful refusal of either coalition party to admit the scale of the fiscal problem facing Britain during the general election campaign.   But softening up public

The electoral reform bill has passed comfortably, by 328 votes to 269. Now comes the hard bit: this bill is going to be deservedly lacerated in committee. The bill drew opprobrium from all sides of the house throughout this afternoon’s long debate, notably from both wings of the Tory party. First, the government has coupled boundary reform to the alternative vote referendum. Peter Hain, Labour’s most articulate attack dog, unleashed his thesaurus and referred to the bill as a ‘smoke-screen for colossal gerrymandering’. He was speaking for his ardently hypocritical and opportunistic party. The government’s motives were not so cynical; it coupled the bill’s two aims to aid swift progress through

Nick Clegg has made this statement on Channel Four News: ‘I have always been open that my personal opinion that the legal base is not justified for our going into war. That wasn’t the view of the previous government, this government as a whole, the new coalition government, doesn’t take a view on the legality of it. But I don’t think it is right for me to enter government and somehow completely airbrush out well-known personal views that I have held and expressed for a very long time. ‘I am the deputy prime minister, I am also a human being who feels with great conviction about things. I don’t think

Why increase aid to Afghanistan by 40pc when troops are dying from a lack of body armour and helicopters? The pledge to not just protect but vastly increase the aid budget is one which, polls show, leaves the public puzzled.  I was on the Politics Show with Jon Sopel, who was putting to Andrew Mitchell some very sharp questions about all of this. Why build schools in Afghanistan, but cancel them in Britain? Worse, in fact, DFID has a habit of building schools but not finding teachers for them – its ideology states that teaching should be a job for central government, just like it is in Britain. The Afghan

It’s all going swimmingly. David Cameron is almost as popular as Gordon Brown was in August 2007. A worrying omen perhaps, but for the moment the government’s honeymoon is in full swing. It’s quite a bash, and many of the coalition’s initial detractors admit to being pleasantly surprised by Cameron and Clegg. Iain Martin is positive, though he maintains a learned scepticism. Fraser Nelson can see a possible re-alignment of British party politics, and today Martin Kettle gushes about Cameron the ‘man of grace’. I’m not sure what a ‘man of grace’ is, but Cameron’s languid charm and opportunism are effective. Kettle writes: ‘[Cameron] recognises that he is delivering a

In this exchange from the “Yes, Minister” TV series Sir Humphrey welcomes the newly-appointed James Hacker to his department. ‘James Hacker: Who else is in this department? Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well briefly, Sir, I am the Permanent Under Secretary of State, known as the Permanent Secretary. Woolley here is your Principal Private Secretary, I too have a Principal Private Secretary and he is the Principal Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. Directly responsible to me are ten Deputy Secretaries, 87 Under Secretaries and 219 Assistant Secretaries. Directly responsible to the Principal Private Secretary are plain Private Secretaries, and the Prime Minister will be appointing two Parliamentary Under Secretaries and you

I doubt David Cameron will have many better days in government than this. Considering the government cancelled a hospital project yesterday, today has passed as one long photo-op, free of incident. It began with Theresa May banning a radical Islamist cleric, Zakir Naik, displaying a resolve that eluded her immediate predecessors. The papers were full of Cameron’s ‘coup’ in Brussels yesterday; the only major news story that might have unnerved Cameron was the FT’s research into Tory immigration policy, which the FT calculates will hit growth and raise taxes. It was too esoteric to hit the TV screens, so too the cuts in arts funding. It must have been a

It still looks like your TV set is on a horizontal flip when you see Cameron at the government dispatch box. Even more disorientating to see Chris Huhne on the front bench and Nick Clegg beside Cameron – making supportive facial gestures on areas he agrees with (pupil premium), and looking quizzical on areas on which he does not (marriage). Cameron’s performance shows that Britain has just had a tremendous upgrade in the eloquence of its Prime Minister: his performance was no better than as Leader of the Opposition, but still at a high standard. Without Brown’s henchmen leading Labour, their backbenchers were disorientated. But still rather numerous: Labour has

Is the new government marching across scorched earth?  They certainly claim so, and now they seem to have the civil service backing them up.  Speaking to the Beeb this afternoon, Jonathan Baume, the leader of a civil service union, said that senior civil servants had written “letters of direction” to Labour ministers in concern at the spending decisions they took in the final months of their government.  As Baume put it: “It’s not a decision that is taken very often to ask for such a letter of direction, which is why it is regarded something of a nuclear option. So when it happens it tends to be a big spending

So now the coalition stretches as far as Labour, with the news that Frank Field is being lined up as an anti-poverty advisor for the government.  In itself, this is an encouraging development: Field is one of decent men of Westminster – committed, informed and passionate.  But when you look at it beside the Tories’ other appointments in this area, then it really becomes exciting.  Field, IDS, Grayling and Lord Freud – all are deeply knowledgable about the welfare reform agenda, to the point where it’s difficult to think of many more impressive teams in recent political history.  So perhaps there is hope for this most difficult of policy areas,

Spare a thought for poor Theresa May. Judging by the reaction so far, she now faces the unenviable task of shouldering almost everyone’s preconceptions about Tory women in government – with Caroline Spelman, Baroness Warsi and the lower-profile Cheryl Gillan for back-up. She will no doubt continue to disappoint feminists and irritate reactionaries, and she will do so while responsible for the notoriously unwieldy Home Office, which has rapidly taken over from the Department of Health as the ministry where political careers go to die. Representation in politics does matter. It is not unreasonable to claim, as Katharine Viner did in Thursday’s Guardian, that “democracies simply don’t work unless they

One of the most interesting questions is whether the Tories and the Lib Dems will be able to move from the talking points to the action points. Besides Ken Clarke, Francis Maude and William Hague none of the ministers have any previous government experience. They know government from the outside, from the sidelines, from parliamentary questions but not from the inside. It will be really interesting to see how the Cameron-Clegg government copes not just with the issues where they can set the agenda – like police reform – but where the Goverment is mugged daily by reality – like Pakistan or Yemen. I suspect they will find Labour acted