Gordon brown

It’s Budget day tomorrow, and as James Forsyth put it recently, George Osborne will never have a better time to do bad things. The Labour party is a complete mess, the quality of scrutiny will be pretty ropey. So if he’s going to pull a fast one, now’s the time. Gordon Brown’s budgets were famous for having a lollipop (a goodie, briefed out to the press) and several weasels (nasties, heavily disguised in the small print). Now, Osborne may well be honest about his good and bad news tomorrow. But his Treasury staff, schooled by years of Brown’s shenanigans, may have persuaded him that the best way to deliver bad news is to

Ed Miliband was praised for his integrity by George Osborne after he returned to the Commons and gave a speech so soon after his election defeat. Although the Conservatives have been happy to pile on the praise towards their old foe, Mr S suspects their enthusiasm will begin to wear thin by the end of the week. The former Labour leader is to dip his toe back into frontline politics by leading a commons debate tomorrow on Hatfield Colliery, the Doncaster coal mine which is closing this week leading to the loss of 430 jobs. Judging by Miliband comments so far on the mine’s early closure, the Tories will be in for a rough

Gordon Brown has popped up in the Guardian today to warn that the evil Tories are going to destroy the Union. The former Prime Minister laments in an op-ed the government’s attitude towards Scotland and calls for a ‘constitutional convention’ to figure out the ‘rights and responsibilities of citizens’ in different parts of the Union. If we don’t, Brown warns, the Union is in big trouble: ‘No union can survive without unionists and, after an election in which, to head off Ukip, the Conservative and Unionist party presented itself as the English Nationalist party, it is clear that the union is on life support … It is London’s equivocation over Scotland that is becoming

With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall is the only one who has passed. On yesterday’s Newsnight she was straightforward: yes, Labour did spend too much. Yvette Cooper, by contrast, said on Radio 4 this morning: ‘I think there were things that we were spending wrongly on, there were issues that we would have been spending money, too much money on –

David Miliband has just given a brutal interview to BBC News in which he took a few more words to say ‘I told you so’ about the way his brother led the Labour party. Some of the worst lines were about their relationship, with David saying of Ed that ‘we remain in touch’, as someone might talk of a former colleague who they occasionally email, and that the two ‘remain brothers for life and that’s something that has to be kept’. It’s one step away from saying ‘you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family’. Politics aside, there is something horrible about watching the often beautiful relationship

Gordon Brown is saying some strange things. He is being chased out of Fife by the nationalist genie that he pulled out of the bottle, but snarling at the SNP as he does so. He made an extraordinary pledge yesterday when speaking in his soon-to-be-abandoned home of Kirkcaldy. ‘We can’t wait beyond May 8 so within 24 hours a Labour Government will trigger an emergency plan to tackle hunger in Scotland and immediately pay £1 million to ensure food banks across Scotland are better stocked. This is odd: why not give cash to English ones too? Or can they wait beyond May 8 because they’re, em, English? Mr S has asked about, and there

Given that Gordon Brown has hardly been seen in the Commons since losing power five years ago, it was a bit rich of him to say goodbye now. But the SNP uprising has started — it looks set to claim his own seat of Kirkcaldy — and so he’s off. In his final speech to the House of Commons today, he lamented the gradual breaking apart of the UK which was, of course, started by his own party. After indulging in niceties towards Parliament as an institution, the Speaker and his constituents, Brown promised to devote his efforts away from Westminster to ‘the idea of Britain’ and attacked the Conservatives’ plans to

The most remarkable poll of the week was the one which suggested the British public find Ed Miliband more of a toff than David Cameron. It takes something to out-toff an Old Etonian with a patrician air and liking for green wellies. But is it so very surprising? Ed has, after all, just shown himself to be on the friend of wealthy idlers, by hinting that the brunt of tax rises in a Labour government would fall instead on those who work for a living. Ed Miliband began well in the last Prime Minister’s Questions before the election. He noted David Cameron’s direct answer to James Landale’s direction question on his future as

Sarah Brown has teamed up with Astley Clarke to bring out a bracelet to raise funds for her Theirworld children’s charity. At the jewellery launch at Mondrian London, the company’s founder Bec Astley Clarke described how she first met Brown. ‘Eight years ago when Astley Clarke was a slightly smaller business, I was sitting at my desk looking at web orders that had to be dispatched that day, and I got quite excited. One of the dispatches was going to none other than number 10 Downing Street. I thought to myself  “that is so sweet, the Prime Minister has taken time out of his busy schedule to buy his wife a romantic

Why isn’t Ed Miliband at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference? Ed Balls tried to defend his boss this morning as he arrived at the event, saying it was ‘getting a bit trivial’ to ask who was attending which conference. The Shadow Chancellor said: ‘Ed Miliband has spoken at this conference a number of times… They’ve got me and Chuka Umunna and this has been tabled and agreed for months and months and months. We’re setting out Labour’s position. As I said it’s the position of me and Ed and Chuka and the whole of the Labour party. Ed has spoken at the conference many times before.’ To be

Gordon Brown is holding an adjournment debate on the union this evening, which comes after an Ashcroft poll which shows precisely what danger the union is in. If today’s polls were tomorrow’s election result, the SNP would have 55 out of 59 seats in Scotland. It’s even set to lose Coatbridge, where it picked up 67pc of the vote at the last election. Yes, all this will help the Tories in the short term: Cameron needs the SNP to destroy Labour in the north and the SNP need Cameron in No10 – remember, their political model is based on grudge and gripe. Without a villain, Alex Salmond won’t have a pantomime. But back

Alex Salmond is losing his voice but that’s not going to stop him from talking — I doubt that anything would, or could. I meet him in the Savoy, after The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards (he won top gong) and he orders a hot toddy — setting out the ingredients just in case the Savoy Hotel is too English to know how to make one. No one talking to Scotland’s former first minister today would have any idea that his political dream was clearly rejected by Scottish voters just three months ago. He is relishing the SNP surge and the likelihood of his party holding the balance of

Say what you will about Gordon Brown — and plenty have over the last 24 hours — but there is one achievement even his harshest detractors can not critique: he broke the Oxford mould among modern Prime Ministers. Since the Second World War, Oxford University has produced the majority of Prime Ministers, outstripping the rest of the country’s institutions and even their arch rivals Cambridge. Aside from those who didn’t go to university (John Major, Jim Callaghan and Winston Churchill), Brown has so far been the only non-Oxford PM since 1945 — instead he went to Edinburgh: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/CSz9t/index.html”] Despite Oxford’s long history of churning out Prime Ministers, it was not always

Tonight Gordon Brown announced he will stand down as an MP at the next election. Current political leaders have been paying tribute, with Ed Miliband calling his old boss a ‘towering figure’, while David Cameron said he was ‘someone dedicated to public service and has worked very hard for other people’. Even those who worked with Brown accept in their tributes to their former boss that he wasn’t perfect, while pointing out the good they felt he did in his long spell in frontline politics. So what were Brown’s good and bad bits? Spectator editor Fraser Nelson and our political editor James Forsyth pick one of each: Fraser Nelson Good: He

It’s being reported that Gordon Brown has decided not to fight the next general election. Odd timing, you might think, he’s had almost five years to make up his mind – so why bail now, just four months away from the dissolution of parliament? Such a delay puts his successor at a distinct disadvantage, with only a few weeks to become established in the constituency. The Sunday Mirror dutifully reports that a friend of Brown saying he wants to “go out on a high” after saving the union. I’d point to another factor – the extraordinary resurgence of the SNP (described by James Forsyth in this weeks magazine). This means that Brown might actually