Government

If the Tories win power (still a big “if” these days), William Hague will walk into King Charles Street, be greeted by the FCO’s Permanent Secretary Peter Ricketts, meet his new staff and be briefed on the Office he will lead and the foreign challenges Britain faces. There will be plenty on his plate. Calls from foreign dignitaries, preparations for forthcoming summits, a discussion of key priorities, and suggestions for how to reorganise the machinery of government. There will also be a need to prepare the FCO’s contribution to a cost-cutting exercise.      But there ought to be an early discussion about how the world is changing and the

So what’s Alistair Darling up to?  When I first heard his “forces of Hell” comment last night – his description of those briefing against him from inside No.10 – I half suspected it was all part of Downing Street’s grand plan.  You know, trying to defuse the bullying story by being honest – up to a point – about Brown’s premiership, and then claiming that everything’s alright really.  A bit like Peter Mandelson saying he took his “medicine like a man” – only with greater poetic license. Now, though, I’m convinced that this wasn’t part of No.10’s script.  The clue is in the hurried, and ridiculous, denials that have been

With even Michael Portillo predicting a hung parliament, what would Britain’s post-election government actually look like if the Tories did not secure an over-all majority.   The Tories could form a minority government, hoping to persuade enough MPs from other parties, but principally the Liberal Democrats, to vote with them on the key issues. Such a government would be inherently unstable, lurching from vote to vote and dependent on the relationship between a Prime Minister Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, as well as between George Osborne, the would-be Chancellor, and Vince Cable, who many think is a more qualified potential occupant of No 11. Party leaders would

Earlier this week I asked what Obama’s experience could teach a Cameron government. At the same time, there has been a well-argued debate in The Times about whether the Tories should go negative or not. There is one point where the two issues converge – and that is in how a newly-elected government should deal with the country’s economic legacy. Once in power, a Tory government will be tempted to be optimistic, to point to the sunny uplands. General Colin Powell said “positive thinking is a force multiplier” and the Cameron team come across as natural adherents to this viewpoint. There is also the fact that the modern Tory agenda

President Obama was going to be different. He was going to learn from Jimmy Carter’s failures. He was going to avoid Bill Clinton’s fate. Like his well-run campaign, Obama’s tenure in the White House was going to be cool, calm and effective. If Clinton failed by sending an over-cooked healthcare reform to Congress, Obama would succeed by leaving the details to lawmakers. If McCain’s campaign was psychodrama, Obama’s administration was going to be all collegiality.    It did not work out that way and now the knives are out for Obama’s team. First there was Ed Luce’s piece in the Financial Times. Now Leslie H. Gelb, a veteran DC insider,

Has another dividing line faded into the sand?  It sure looks like it, going off this Times report on how both Labour and the Tories are considering hiking VAT to 20 percent.  If you recall, it was thought that Brown blocked Alistair Darling’s plan to introduce the rise in last year’s Pre-Budget Report – and all so he could attack the Tories over reports that they would do similar.  The PM will find it a lot harder to stage that attack after this morning. A few weeks ago, the rumour was that Labour would make keeping VAT at 17.5 percent a “main election pledge”.  Whether that pledge now appears, or

Gordon Brown is a creature of habit. Every morning at 7:30 he holds a telephone conference with his cabal of Shakespearean fools, who review the papers for him. I imagine a scene of domesticity, of coffee and muffins, an adoring wife and child milling about offering tactile affection – a hand on the shoulder, a kiss on the head. But then again Brown is a latter day John Knox and this morning he must have sat in pale fury as an aide summarised the extract from Lance Price’s latest book, published in the Independent. Price, Andrew Rawnsley and Peter Watt share the same lexicon. ‘Unforgivable’, ‘not a nice place for

If you want to understand what the Cameroon’s are thinking, Danny Finkelstein is essential reading. He used to work with them and he thinks like them, there is almost a mind meld between him and them.  His column today is all about why it would make more sense to actually separate out parliament and the executive and elect the head of state. I’m rather sympathetic to this point of view, but I don’t think the Tories will do anything this radical even if they talk about it in private.   One thing they might well do, though, is have ministers who aren’t members of either the Commons or the Lords.

Gordon Brown is usually at his most patronising when confronting Nick Clegg. Last week, however, hectoring gave way to affection. Brown was almost tender. Of course, this sudden change has an obvious explanation. Brown and Clegg are brothers in arms: devotees of electoral reform, or so the Road Block would have us believe. Robert McIlveen laid counter-arguments against Brown’s opportunism and Boris Johnson repeats them in his Telegraph column today, concluding: ‘There is one final and overwhelming reason why Britain should not and will not adopt PR – that it always tends to erode the sovereign right of the people to kick the b––––––s out.’ The Lib Dems have been

Strange that there’s really only one major political point arising from Gordon Brown’s interview in the Standard today.  But, then again, maybe that is the point.  Like the PM’s interview with the News of the World a few weeks ago, the emphasis is far more on the personal than anything else: his relationship with Sarah Brown, the death of his daughter Jennifer, his upbringing, and so on.  We even learn why his handwriting is so bad (“due to the way he was taught to write at school,” apparently).  And with a TV appearance alongside Piers Morgan in the schedules, it does seem that Brown is keen to present a more

So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying, ‘I had to decide, I had to decide.’ And indeed that’s how he behaved. But that is not meant to be our system of government.” The sofa was barred to all except Bush and the Cabinet exercised collective ignorance. Even Brown was left to brood over cups of coffee and macaroons with Clare Short. Short’s

Over at Three Line Whip, Ben Brogan takes me to task for criticising the Owen Paterson’s attendance at the Marquess of Salisbury’s shindig. ‘But it seems a stretch to lambast Mr Cameron for doing his job as a unionist politician, which should be to find political ways to ensure Sinn Fein doesn’t end up the winner as the result of the failure of Unionism in Northern Ireland to get its electoral act together.’ The Conservatives are a Unionist party so there is no objection to their attending, especially as the Unionist cause is so disorganised. My objection was to its secrecy. Iris Robinson will tell you that there is no

Two weeks ago, Barry Sheerman opened a second front against Brown’s premiership by attacking Ed Balls’ appointment of Kathleen Tattersall to Ofqual without a pre-hearing before the Schools select committee. Brown had introduced a requirement that recommended appointments to offices that reported to Parliament be scrutinised by legislators prior to confirmation of their appointment. Sheerman, with characteristic venom, referred to a “sleight of hand”. This afternoon, Balls defended himself and his permanent secretary, arguing that the committee did not object to the appointment when it was made in July 2008, and any rate the pre-hearing was not operational then. I don’t know whose memory is accurate. If Balls is correct

Remember Peter Watt? No one in Team Brown did either –and that, it now turns out, was a big mistake. As general secretary of the Labour Party when the Blair-Brown handover happened (and cash-for-honours was in the air) he was in a brilliant position to know what went on. And, after being abandoned by all of them, he has a motive to tell. His revelations are pretty explosive, but this jumps out at me the most – from Douglas Alexander, the man everyone thought was Brown’s little Mowgli raised by a fellow son-of-the-manse in the jungle of politics. This is what Alexander (the would-be co-ordinator in the election that never