Not long before midnight on Tuesday, a mood of dogmatic certitude overcame the throng of British MPs, ministers and journalists assembled at the traditional election-night party at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. We knew that John Kerry had won, and dismissed with knowing contempt the warnings of our hosts — whose election, after all,
While the world’s eyes have been on polling booths in the back streets of Ohio, the British political scene may appear to have been becalmed. But it isn’t so. In the past week a couple of notable salvoes have been fired in the direction of the government’s economic policy, which by rights ought to inflict
Very few political decisions achieve nothing but good: one of them was the abolition of exchange controls exactly 25 years ago. This week the Adam Smith Institute rightly marked the anniversary with a dinner at the St Ermin’s hotel. Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor who masterminded the stroke, reflected on how monumental the judgment — so
Next Tuesday an unhappy choice confronts the American people. To suffer a gloating Mark Steyn. Or to endure the sight of a jubilant Michael Moore thumping the air in the belief that he has just personally saved the world from military and ecological disaster. Grim though these alternatives are, with heavy heart we are minded
I was brought up near Warminster in Wiltshire, and love this quiet, unassuming country town. Its proximity to the Salisbury plain has ensured it the role of local garrison, a position viewed with at best mixed emotions by the locals. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Royal Irish Rangers, unable to serve back home, incessantly
You can’t please some people. The Daily Mail has spent the Blair years complaining about the nanny state. But when the government finally comes up with a measure to add to the gaiety of the nation, the Gambling Bill, the Mail suddenly turns nanny itself. ‘Gambling with our futures,’ it whined last week. ‘Trashy glitter
Two weeks ago, in the course of an interview with the Observer, Tony Blair claimed that he had already said sorry for issuing false information about Iraq. This is what he said: ‘We’ve apologised for the information that was given being wrong.’ I have since ransacked government statements, but found no trace of any apology.
The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute’s silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day,
For some time it was not polite to utter the phrase ‘core vote’ at a Conservative party gathering, or within earshot of those loyal to the leadership. It referred, after all, to people who believed taxation was theft, who despised the European Union and all it stood for, who venerated the monocultural society and saw
The newsreader Martyn Lewis once complained that there is not enough good news on the telly. To judge by his forays into literature, he would quite happily have presided over a Nine O’Clock made up entirely of dog and cat stories, but he had a point. When there is a spot of bother anywhere in
Two salient facts define the national political predicament this autumn. The first is a growing sense of disquiet about Tony Blair. Experts often speak of the lack of ‘trust’ which shows up in opinion polls. But there is more to it than that. People are beginning to sense that there is something rum about this
The most revealing part of Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour party conference was when he said, ‘modern life is being perpetually stressed out. You can do more, travel more, consume more, live longer but nothing stops still. It’s always changing.’ Possibly some psychoanalyst could tell us that it is the cry of a leader
If Lord Woolf is discovered ’orribly murdered in his cellar, the editor of the Daily Mail may well find himself helping police with their inquiries. There will certainly be a motive: the Lord Chief Justice is not a popular figure with the self-professed keeper of Middle England values. In response to his lordship’s proposal to
We have been told from time to time that one reason why the Prime Minister has been so slow in ‘reforming’ the House of Lords is that he feels it is important to have it, but he cannot decide what form it should take. It is important, it is said, for all those reasons why
The chief recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’eda is not George W. Bush but Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch EU internal market commissioner. Speaking last week on the possibility of Turkey joining the EU — and thus Muslims one day coming to outnumber Christians within it — Mr Bolkestein commented that were this to come to pass ‘the
Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned this week, so he says, in order to spend more time with his family. Or maybe he was peeved at some of the comments made about him by his colleagues. What is certain is that he didn’t resign for the reason he ought to have done: that
It was beyond a shadow of doubt an outstanding silly season, the best by far in recent years, with an excellent crop of stories. Leaving aside the daily tragedies in Iraq and Sudan, too heartbreaking to ponder for long without giving way to despair, August delivered some fine material: the emergence of the Notting Hill
To the parents of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died in 2000 after being battered by her great-aunt and great-aunt’s boyfriend in a seedy Haringey council flat, the disciplinary procedures employed by British local government must seem to take place in a parallel universe. On Wednesday morning, listeners to Radio Four’s Today programme were
The impeachment of Tony Blair would form a fitting end to a prime ministership which opened with the promise to be ‘purer than pure’, but ended in the arrogant deception of the British people. This ancient form of trial, which has lain disused but not defunct in the armoury with which we defend our liberties,
One of the key reasons why New Labour has been successful for so long is its ability to destroy or marginalise opponents. The techniques used are ruthless. Those who challenge government orthodoxy are smeared, discredited and rubbished as liars. Their motives are questioned and their characters assassinated. Normally, in the quotidian frenzy of political debate,