James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
You go off to get a sandwich and you come back to find your colleague advocating scrapping Trident, not a good day. Those who advocate getting rid of Trident are, in effect, declaring that they can foresee every strategic threat to this country in the next generation and do not believe that Trident would be
Tony McNulty has been badly damaged by the row over his second home claims. This is a huge blow to the government’s media strategy for the recession. Of all the government’s economic team, McNulty has done the best job of acknowledging the severity of the situation while still defending the government. But if McNulty becomes
A Minister misleading the House is one of the most serious offences they can commit. If any Minister does so anything other than completely unintentionally, they should–and must–resign. So, when an accusation emerges that a Minister has done so it must be cleared up one way or the other. On Saturday, The Times reported
William F. Buckley’s 1955 editorial declaring that the Nation Review “stands athwart history, yelling Stop” is one of the defining texts in modern conservatism. But as David Frum argues, the changes that have happened since 1955 have, on balance, been overwhelmingly for the better: “But think how much worse a place the world would be
The most important story of the day might not be the bank rescue plan in the US or any of the British domestic political stories, but this news from China: “China’s central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary
I suspect the phrase decontaminating the brand makes most Coffee Housers want to decontaminate their screens. But I do think the Cameron strategist who told Conservative Home that ‘Only when the party has decontaminated itself as the party of the rich will we have the authority to attack the size of the state’ is right. Fairly
The supposed Tory split on inheritance tax is big news this morning, making both the front pages of the Mail and the Telegraph and the 8.10 slot on the Today Programme. But as split stories go this one really doesn’t have much going for it. It requires a stretch of even the journalistic imagination to
Iain Duncan-Smith has an op-ed in the Sunday Telegraph previewing the Centre for Social Justice’s paper on prison reform. Setting aside the moral case, one sentence in it makes a compelling pragmatic case for it: “Two thirds of all prisoners are re-convicted within two years and half are re-convicted within a staggering 12 months” Purely
My old friend Carlos Lozada has an interesting interview with David Kilcullen, one of the men behind the successful shift in counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. His remarks about Pakistan rather concentrate the mind: “Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in
Andrew Rawnsley’s column today contains this great little scoop: “A comprehensive spending review was due this summer. Gordon Brown has quietly told Alistair Darling to scrap it.” Rawnsley reports that the review is being postponed because it would reveal that the state of the public finances dictates that there will have to be huge spending
The 45p tax rate for those earning over £150,000 is a political measure not a fiscal one; calculations by the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that it will raise virtually no revenue. Labour desperately wanted to create a dividing line with the Tories over the issue: Labour want to raise taxes on the wealthiest few,
Last week it was David Brooks and William Galston, this week it is Peggy Noonan. In her column today Noonan, becomes the latest figure sympathetic to Obama to worry that he is getting it seriously wrong. Here’s how she ends her piece: “These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In
Over at Conservative Home, Jonathan Isaby has the scoop that Lynton Crosby—who managed both the Tory 2005 general election campaign and Boris’s mayoral run—will run the Libertas campaign in the European elections. This puts him in direct opposition to the Conservative party. Many in Westminster expected that Crosby would return in 2010 to perform the
As this recession drags on, I suspect that three groups—apart from the finance figures who behaved so recklessly—will bear the brunt of public anger: corporations and individuals who avoid tax, those who abuse the welfare state and those public servants who take advantage of their position to unfairly enrich themselves and their families. The politician
Robert Chote, the director of the IFS, has a piece in today’s Times detailing just how bad the state of the public finances is. As Chote puts is, ‘public spending will have to be squeezed and taxes will have to rise’ whoever wins the next election. The real worry, though, is that Gordon Brown trashes
The argument raging in America over the AIG bonuses is basically the same as the one in Britain over Fred Goodwin’s pension. Those responsible for dragging their companies down and forcing the taxpayer to bail them out are receiving huge sums of money. To add insult to injury, the government could—and should—have done something to
The latest set of polls has created some grumblings among Tories, and CoffeeHousers, about the party not being further ahead. Personally, I’m highly sceptical of polls at the moment. British politics has, for obvious reasons, been too unusual in the past few weeks to make a snapshot of opinion that useful. But it is worth
Virginia Postrel’s column in The Atlantic this month makes for fascinating reading. In it, she highlight academic research that shows that the so-called ‘great moderation’ was not down purely to central banks or government policies, as central bankers and politicians wanted to think, but “changes in business practices that occurred for competitive reasons having nothing
Rachel Sylvester’s column this morning contains this revealing statistical nugget: “As Lord Ashcroft told the Shadow Cabinet in a presentation about his private polling some months ago, there are more discontented potential Tory voters who have switched to the Liberal Democrats than the BNP.” This suggests that we are unlikely to see the Tories adopting
Conventional wisdom has it that the governing party recovers in the polls during an election campaign. The theory is that the incumbent party both gests to choose when the election is and benefits from the polls moving from being a referendum on the government to a choice between the parties. But—as Anthony Wells, Mike Smithson
