James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
There’s a trailer playing on Radio 4 at the moment for Decision Time. It’s a new show in which Nick Robinson looks at how tough political decisions are made. In the trailer, Nick Robinson talks about the aim of the programme and then says the first programme will look at public spending. His sign-off is:
Too often, politicians on the right, wrongly and short-sightedly, cede the moral high ground to the left. Conservatives in Britain have been particularly guilty of accepting, or at least not disputing, the left’s claims to moral superiority and merely arguing that their approach is more effective. One result of this is when the left manages
Amidst the torrent of bad economic news, people want to know where the growth will come from once this crisis has passed. It would be foolish to imagine that we can go back to the status quo-ante, that financial services and property can again drive the British economy as they did during the late 1990s
British Conservatives can tell Republicans at least one thing about recovering from electoral rejection: don’t believe that what makes a media product successful will do the same for a political party. For years, the Tories looked at the popularity of The Daily Mail, a brilliantly produced newspaper, and imagined that if they could ape its
A statistic in today’s Daily Mail reveals just how badly comprehensives are failing their pupils. “They educate only seven per cent of pupils, but independent schools produce more teenagers with three A grade A-levels than all our comprehensives put together. More than 10,000 pupils at fee-paying schools achieved three As last year. But among those
There’s a great scene in the BBC’s Margaret when Willie Whitelaw says after Margaret Thatcher has humiliated Geoffrey Howe, ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’. One feels much the same way about Alistair Darling. Darling might, according to Treasury civil servants, be rather out of his depth in the job but he has tried
The government’s signature policy for dealing with the Islamist challenge inside Britain is the Prevent policy. But Prevent is aimed only at preventing violent extremism. For this reason, it has—as a phenomenally important pamphlet from Policy Exchange, which will be released tomorrow, argues—done little to counter extremism and in a disturbingly large number of cases
Peter Hain makes a double-intervention this Sunday: an article in The Independent and an interview in The Sunday Telegraph. Both are couched in terms of trying to be helpful but—as Martin notes—they undoubtedly position Hain to the left of Brown. Hain has no intention of totally burning his bridges, he tells Melissa Kite that if
There’s an intriguing entry in Chris Mullin’s diaries, this Sunday sees the final part of the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of them, from January 2004. “To the Parliamentary Party, where there was discussion about the next Queen’s Speech. Ann Cryer [MP] said we needed a managed immigration policy, based on ability to find jobs; not
The story is out. For days there’s been gossip in Westminster that the Prime Minister had a Brown out on the plane to Washington, losing it when journalists asked him if he was going to apologise for the mistakes he had made as Chancellor and Prime Minister which have exacerbated this crisis. Now, Simon Walters
Barack Obama’s sit-down interview with The New York Times, the first he has granted the paper since becoming president, contains this exchange: Q. Mr. President, we need to turn it to foreign policy. I know we have a review going on right now about Afghanistan policy, but right now can you tell us, are we
“Attacks are at the lowest level since September 2003, falling 70 percent since last March.” So reports The New York Times in its latest piece on the situation in Iraq. The level of progress in Iraq since the US changed strategy in early 2007 and surged troops into the country has been quite remarkable. If
I bumped into a Labour MP the other day and he asked me a good question, why is Harriet Harman the only one getting it in the neck for her leadership positioning? Several other members of the Cabinet clearly have an eye on a post-election leadership contest, notably Ed Balls, but they aren’t receiving anywhere
Matthew Parris’s column brilliantly skewers the utter predictability of the policy announcements coming out of Number 10. “Much the same may be said of the problem-solving programme known as Mr Brown. Focus-grouping tells him voters are angry that top British bankers have been paying themselves fat salaries and bonuses. Key words in these reports trigger
Two stories in the papers today illustrate just how badly placed Britain is to get through this recession. In The Times, Patrick Hosking speculates about the possibility of Britain losing its triple A credit rating now that the Bank of England has resorted to quantitative easing. He notes that Moody’s has said that Britain’s triple
Gordon Brown has absurdly high expectations of the political boost he will get from this week’s trip to Washington and the G20 summit in London next month, says James Forsyth. It is David Cameron who stands to be the likely beneficiary of the special relationship The ‘legacy’ might be an extremely touchy subject in Downing
There’s a rumour doing the rounds in Washington, which I mention in the magazine this week, that the reason Gordon Brown was invited to address a Joint Session of Congress is that the Obama administration isn’t yet ready to have a detailed conversation about the agenda for the G20. This is largely because the Treasury
With Gordon Brown appearing doomed the level of chatter about the Labour leadership contest that will follow the next election is increasing, Fraser did his political column on it this week.One of the more intriguing ideas out there, which Allegra Stratton floated on Tuesday, is that Cruddas and Purnell might team up on a ‘Stop
There is a crisis in Britishness right now. Much of it has been brought about by the doctrine of multi-culturalism, you can’t have both mass immigration and multi-culturalism, so it was good to see Dominic Grieve setting out his opposition to it this week. Grieve’s views on community cohesion issues have been a cause of
The British Crime Survey shows that most people do not have confidence in the ability of the police and their local council to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. Only 46 percent of people in England and Wales do, according to the survey. In a way this is not surprising, you see the police on the
