James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
Labour’s loss of Glasgow East will put rocket boosters under the speculation about Gordon Brown’s future. If Labour under Brown can’t win in Glasgow East, where can it win? MPs are now away from Westminster which makes plotting more complicated. But after this result, various Labour MPs are going to be seized by—to borrow a
Tony Woodley, the joint general secretary of Unite, has an op-ed in Friday’s Guardian demanding that Gordon Brown declare that “Blairism is dead”. Woodley claims that “Brown has one last window of opportunity. Face down the Blairites within. Clear the apologists for the big bonus brigade out of the cabinet and make Labour once more
The coverage is increasingly tilting to the idea that the SNP has pulled off a remarkable upset in Glasgow East. The SNP MPs being interviewed are sounding confident while the Labour MPs are on the defensive. I’ll now be surprised if Labour hold on. For the record, turnout was 42.5 percent.
On Newsnight just now, Michael Crick—who is at the count in Glasgow East—reported that the result is going to be very close. The Guardian is reporting a rumour that the SNP has won. If Labour has lost its 25th safest seat, then Gordon Brown is in even bigger trouble than we thought.
‘Politics stops at the water’s edge’ is one of the most frequently invoked rules in US politics, so giving a campaign speech overseas carried a risk for Obama. However, he carried it off fairly well and his campaign will have been delighted by the visuals; the paean to America with which he ended the speech
Liz Brockelhurst, who marked Key stage 2 papers for a decade, has done a great piece for the magazine this week on the marking process for Sats. She points out that the “marking process itself was also dictated by idiotic rules, designed to help children scrape through.” Two of the examples that Liz gives, illustrate
MPs who return from canvassing in Glasgow East are full of talk about the broken society or the challenges of urban regeneration, depending on which party they belong to. But Kevin Maguire rather wickedly reports that the Labour deputy leader had a very different experience: “To the Glasgow East by-election, where Labour foot soldiers swap
The minutes of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority board meeting on the 21st of May have just been published and they show a complete failure by the board to engage with the Sats crisis. This meeting occurred just after David Laws, the Lib Dem education spokesman, had questioned Ed Balls in the Commons about the
If I was a reform-minded Labour MP trying to persuade my like-minded colleagues to move against Gordon Brown, these are the arguments that I would deploy: Things are as bad as the polls suggest: The latest ICM poll (which Pete blogged earlier) has the Tories on 47, twenty points ahead of Labour. Electoral Calculus predicts
One could almost feel sorry for Gordon Brown on reading that Barack Obama will meet Tony Blair in London on Saturday morning. Blair excels at this kind of grip and grin occasion and one can easily imagine footage of Obama and Blair beaming at the cameras as Obama pays tribute to Blair’s work in the
Downing Street has just released the names of all those who have received official hospitality at Chequers. Most of the Cabinet are on the list but there are some notable omissions. It is rather surprising that the Chief Whip and the deputy leader of the Labour party have not been entertained at the PM’s country
The news that Pete just posted about how the odds on Labour winning Glasgow East have shortened is, perversely, bad news for Gordon Brown. Labour holding Glasgow East is now priced into Brown’s share price and so he’ll get no bounce from Labour avoiding defeat. However, if the SNP were to pull off a spectacular
Only someone wearing ideological blinkers could claim that the surge has not transformed the security situation in Iraq and provided the space necessary for political progress. So, it is depressing to see Obama claiming that – even knowing what he knows now, and after seeing the progress in Iraq at first hand, and being briefed by
The Speaker has ordered Ed Balls to the Chamber to answer questions about the whole Sats debacle. The question is who will enjoy watching Michael Gove skewer Balls more, Tory MPs or Balls’s enemies on the Labour benches.
One of the more disgraceful aspects of the Sats scandal is Ed Balls’s attempt to deny all responsibility for the fiasco. Michael Gove rightly roasts Balls for this in The Guardian this morning: “Balls is keen on accountability when it suits him. He has used the power of his office to harry successful faith schools
Anthony Browne, the director of Policy Exchange, is going to work for Boris Johnson as the Mayor’s policy director. This means that the job of running the most influential think tank on the centre-right is now up for grabs. Given Policy Exchange’s influence on the Tory leadership—James O’Shaughnessy went from being head of research at Policy
At some point, dire poll ratings begin to undercut a Prime Minister’s standing on the international stage as other leaders decide that there’ll be a new PM along soon so there’s no point in investing that much in the relationship. Gordon Brown appears to have already reached this point if Barack Obama’s comments are any
One of the things that has come out in the Sats scandal is how there was a complete failure to do due diligence on ETS, a company whose track record did not inspire confidence. It now turns out that even after the problems with Sats had begun to emerge, the Immigration Service approved the use
One of the many reasons the world should worry about Iran going nuclear is the danger that Iran will sell the technology to raise cash; not an unlikely prospect given the shaky foundations of the Iranian economy. As Dan Gillerman, Israel’s outgoing UN ambassador, points out to Newsweek, Pakistani politicians have already come under pressure
One of the most frequent complaints that you hear from those who have served in Afghanistan is that DFID is simply not fit for purpose. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stuart Tootal, the commander of 3 Para who recently quit the army, gives a depressing example of how the DFID bureaucracy puts obstacles
