Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. This
After so deftly avoiding any Iraq inquiry at home, Tony Blair will be cursing his luck to have walked straight into one in Washington. His talks with President Bush were planned months ago: it was a ‘happy coincidence’ (as his spokesman said through gritted teeth) that it should coincide with publication of the long-awaited Baker
A television channel has reached a sorry state when the structure of its ownership is more exciting than what it broadcasts. Yet this is precisely what has happened to ITV, whose appalling programming schedule has become a low-rent joke, making real the parodies of the BBC’s Little Britain. The problem is not that ITV strives
When Ernest Bevin was appointed to run Britain’s wartime economy, he saw his chance to fix policy for decades. When Ernest Bevin was appointed to run Britain’s wartime economy, he saw his chance to fix policy for decades. ‘They say Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930’, he declared. ‘Well, I will be
The 23rd annual Threadneedle/ Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch took place last Thursday at Claridge’s. The prizes were presented by the Rt Hon. David Cameron MP, Leader of the Opposition. Welcoming Mr Cameron, Matthew d’Ancona, the editor of The Spectator, observed that, in less than a year as Conservative leader, he had dislodged Beckham
The assassination on Tuesday of Pierre Gemayel, Lebanon’s industry minister, was another brutal blow of the axe to the cedar tree that gave its name to the nation’s so-called ‘revolution’ last year. That uprising was triggered by another death — the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri in February 2005 — and
Since Labour came to power, there has been a hugely important social trend that almost no one mentions. The institution of the two-parent family — whether married or unmarried — has been disintegrating at a speed seen nowhere else in Europe. The proportion of children living with lone parents was 19 per cent when Tony
When Her Majesty The Queen delivered her first speech to mark the opening of Parliament after the election of Tony Blair, she said, ‘My government intends to govern for the benefit of the whole nation.’ New Labour apparatchiks hugged themselves with glee, considering it a great victory that the monarch should read out such an
The US mid-term election results have many lessons, but one of them, as Christopher Caldwell argues on page 14, is that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is over, and that it has been lost. This reflects a broader, bone-deep fatigue in the West with the war on terror generally: a perception that
The most famous political quotations come not from politicians but the wickedness of headline writers. Although Jim Callaghan never said ‘Crisis? What crisis?’, the phrase stuck because it seemed to sum up perfectly his psychological denial during the Winter of Discontent. It was a newspaper, not Thomas Jefferson (or even Thomas Paine), which declared ‘that
The publication of the Stern report on the economics of climate change was a deeply significant political punctuation mark. On Monday Tony Blair declared that the document was ‘the most important report on the future which I have received since becoming Prime Minister’. Yet it will not be Mr Blair who faces the formidable task
There is something comically surreal about the ten-year plans Tony Blair has commissioned across his Cabinet. A Prime Minister who will not last another ten months is asking his Cabinet to agree a strategy in four areas of policy. No one engaged in the process is in any doubt about its futility. Soon Gordon Brown
On Monday the debate over climate change enters a new phase. Sir Nicholas Stern, who heads the Government Economic Service, will publish his review of the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the Chancellor in July 2005. At last the debate on the environment will shift definitively towards the real choices facing the
The perfect political U-turn is formed by an arc that curves so gradually that it is difficult to perceive any change of direction. Even now it is hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the British government gave up on Iraq. But in Westminster the mood change is discernible and the new direction clear. An inflection point
It is now all but orthodox to say that Britain must get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Irrespective of its constitutional propriety, the declaration by General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, that we should withdraw ‘some time soon’ has been widely welcomed as a much-needed blast of honesty. On the
The idea of cultural wars is as alien to the British nation as the word Kulturkampf is to the English language. In America, of course, such conflict is routine, as parties clash over issues like gay marriage, abortion and affirmative action. But Britain has never had much time for such confrontation. From time to time,
The Korean nuclear crisis marks the bankruptcy of one style of post-Cold War diplomacy and should be the midwife of wholly new methods. It is not only essential that Pyongyang itself be punished for its flagrant act of provocation. The crisis must be resolved in such a way that no other rogue state is tempted
The House of Commons has scarcely been back a week and already opportunities are falling from the sky for David Cameron. Government failures are spectacular and ubiquitous. Prisons are overflowing, hospital wards are closing and unemployment is rising. Casualty rates are high in Afghanistan and Britain has effectively lost Basra to warring militias. On every
Those Tories coming to David Cameron’s first conference as party leader in search of detailed policies were always going to be disappointed. It is only ten months since Mr Cameron took the helm. Tony Blair’s first ten months as Labour leader were dominated by an internal party struggle over Clause 4. And one would have
For the first time in perhaps a decade, not a drop of blood has been shed on the floor of a Conservative party conference. What was for so many years a vicious gladiatorial arena this week turned into a serene botanical garden. According to precedent, this should have been the conference when David Cameron faced protest from