James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
The pre-conference coverage today is dominated by a marginals poll which shows the Tories on course for a 70 seat majority down from 146 this time last year, a Tory proposal on elderly care and the likely Irish yes vote and interviews with Osborne and Hague. Osborne receives a thoroughly positive write-up from the Mail;
That the Irish referendum result will be announced on Saturday afternoon is not, to put it mildly, ideal for the Tories. If as expected the Irish vote yes, it will be almost certain that the Lisbon treaty will be ratified by the time of the next election (the Czech delay is not expected to last
The red flag has been sung and the delegates are heading home. But no one I’ve spoken to believes that this conference has really changed anything. Labour is still heading for defeat at the next election. Perhaps, the biggest thing to come out of this conference is that Labour’s relations with the media are
If there was an award for most improved conference speaker it would go to David Miliband. Last year his lacklustre effort helped put an end to his putative leadership challenge. This year he showed delegates why he might be up to the job of being Labour leader after the next election. He has dropped his
Tony Woodley of the Unite union just received a huge cheer for coming to the podium and ripping up a copy of The Sun while laying into ‘Australian Americans’ who come to this country and try and tell us how to do politics here. There’s no doubt that the feeling here in Brighton is that
The news that the Sun was endorsing the Tories deflated the mood of conference last night. And Labour hang-overs can not have been improved by Brown’s performance on Sky today, which Pete referenced earlier. The Prime Minister was clearly irritated by Adam Boulton’s line of questioning, using the phrase ‘let me finish’ more than any
Labour always likes to contrast Gordon Brown’s substance to David Cameron’s shallowness. But the briefing note that is sitting in the press room to explain the policies announced in Brown’s speech is, shall we say, rather brief at just three pages.
The mood here in Brighton is pretty flat. In contrast to last year, no one really believes that Gordon Brown’s speech has changed anything. I’m sure he’ll get a bit of a bump in the polls: a YouGov poll finds that 63 percent of viewers thought the speech was good or excellent. But Labour still
Labour activists don’t have much in common with Republican activists but they seem to agree on one thing: the media are loathsome. The hostility towards journalists from the delegates this week reminds me of being at Republican gatherings in 2008. When someone stood up at a fringe meeting yesterday and introduced themselves by saying ‘I
Tonight offered the opportunity to compare and contrast the two Miliband brothers as they were interviewed one after the other by Steve Richards. Any comparison of their performances should recognise that Ed Miliband has the far easier brief. He gets to sound bold and green and the vast majority of Labour members agree with what
You would have got long odds on it in the 1990s, but Peter Mandelson is now a conference darling. His hugely hammy performance delighted the hall and earned him a prolonged standing ovation. Since he has returned to British politics, Mandelson has sought to deliver enough good lines to write his own story. He deliberately
1204: The hall is relatively full for Darling. He starts off by talking about the big choice that faces the country, saying we have learned in the last year what a difference a government can make. 1206: Darling is trying to do the populist banker bashing, but his delivery is not right for it. From
Andrew Marr asking Gordon Brown if he was on anti-depressants was a real surprise. When I first heard that Marr had put this question to Brown, I thought there was a possibility that Labour aides had let it be known that the Prime Minister would like the chance to shoot down these rumours. But Brown’s
I must admit that I’m taken aback that Andrew Marr asked Gordon Brown if he was on anti-depressants in his interview with him this morning. (For the record, Brown said that he wasn’t). Do Coffee Housers think the question was appropriate?
Today’s papers give us an idea of what Labour’s new dividing line with the Tories is going to be. Labour will find money for eye-catching but not too costly initiatives such as the cancer pledge that the papers have reported on this morning. These pledges will be financed by taking money from the less sexy parts
Throughout Labour conference, the Tories will be trying to promote the message that the conference shows Labour is on the way out. Expect the Tories to pump out lots of statistics about how the number of delegates attending is down, how there are fewer commercial stands, lobbyists and the like. The other thing the Tories
James Forsyth invites you to submit nominations for the Spectator Readers’ Representative in our Parliamentarian of the Year Awards ‘MP in Public Service Shock. Politician found to be honest and hard-working. Wife standing by him.’ As the MPs expenses scandal dominated the front pages for month after month, one half expected to see a headline
New York The reaction of the Obama administration to the discovery of a secret, underground Iranian nuclear plant strongly suggests, as the Washington Post points out, that the administration has given up on engagement. Attempts to engage with the Iranian regime were always likely to be futile. But Washington had to show the international community, and
The news that General Andrew Mackay has quit over the government’s failure to properly equip the Afghan mission is significant. For one thing, it will have ramifications for the UK US military relationship. Mackay is the British general from whom General Petraeus feels he has learnt the most; Petraeus affectionately called him the “King of
The news that Max Clifford is now involved in publicising the story of Baroness Scotland and the illegal cleaner is another blow to an already bruised Labour party. One of the last things that it needs is the beginning of its conference being overshadowed by a story that combines the two toxic issues of political
