James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
The new issue of Time magazine has a couple of interesting pieces on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The magazine reports that US counter-terrorism officials have decided that the way they are most likely to catch bin Laden—who some in the CIA think many only have months to lives because of kidney disease—is to
Matthew Parris and Charles Moore both have important columns in their respective papers today about the Lord Chief Justice’s remarks. Matthew eloquently sums up what is most worrying about the argument made by the Archbishop of Canterbury and supported by Lord Phillips: the second claim that Lord Phillips endorses is more dangerous. Decoded, Dr Williams
The vote on Thursday night not to fix the broken system of MP’s expenses was a disgrace; it was the kind of behaviour that brings politics into disrepute. It was mostly Labour MPs who blocked this change with 33 ministers and Brown’s bag carriers voting for the wrecking amendment despite the Prime Minister himself suggesting
There is no doubt that Ray Lewis’s resignation is embarrassing for Boris Johnson but I rather feel that sections of the media are rather overreacting to it. Listening to the Today Programme this morning you would have thought that the accusations against Lewis discredited the whole idea of community work. Ross Hawkins, the Today correspondent, said
Something that I would recommend all Coffee Housers do if they get the chance is to walk the Freedom Trail in Boston. It is brilliantly laid out and gives you a real feel for the spirit of the 1776. It also makes you realise how very British their reasons for rebelling were; as the old Cambridge
The Lord Chief Justice’s speech last night at the East London Muslim Centre was, to put it mildly, unhelpful. His point that English law allows people to arbitrate disputes under a pre-agreed set of rules is legally correct. But if the Lord Chief Justice is to step into such a sensitive area he should have
Last week we asked you what small proposal you would like to see in David Cameron’s first Queen Speech, after Fraser outlined what the big ticket items would be in the magazine. We received lots of good ideas and I’d very much like to see, as TGF UKIP suggested, a new set of military hospitals built.
Labour MPs trying to defend the indefensible John Lewis list resorted to pathetic class war attacks last night. Ian Austin, the PM’s bag carrier, reportedly told George Osborne to “F** off you toff”—Austin claims that he actually said “It’s all right for you millionaires.” All of which makes it rather ironic that one of the
Now that Andy Murray is out of Wimbledon, we can turn our sporting attention to the coming Test series between England and South Africa. It should be a cracking series, as the South Africans probably have the slightly better side, but England have home advantage. After two rather unsatisfactory series against New Zealand, it will
The confusion that underlies the government’s attitude to testing is illustrated by the interview with Ed Balls in this week’s New Statesman. Martin Bright and Suzanne Moore press Balls on whether children are being stressed out by being tested too much, to which Balls replies: “No seven-year-old should ever know they are doing SATs.” Balls
I’ve just got round to reading the Christopher Hitchens piece on being waterboarded which everyone is talking about. It is definitely worth a look, it deals fairly with both sides of the argument. Hitchens sums up the case that the proponents of waterboarding make thus: As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man
A fortnight ago Peter Oborne wrote in his cover story on Zimbabwe about how “The Munich-based company Giesecke & Devrient continues to supply, unhindered, truckloads of large denomination banknotes. This enables Mugabe to bribe his army, police force and irregular militias but only accelerates the total collapse of the economy.” Giesecke & Devrient also manufactures
If you haven’t already done so, do read this morning’s Times editorial on the Conservatives. It argues, correctly to my mind, that the Tories should not be satisfied to win the next election simply on the back of the public’s disappointment with Labour. It concludes that Cameron’s “challenge is to offer British voters a real
David Ignatius’s column this morning in The Washington Post on covert efforts to pin back Iranian attempt to establish hegemony in the Middle East, contains this fascinating detail: Saudi Arabia has taken a tougher stand to oppose what it sees as Iranian meddling in the region. There are reports out of Syria, for example, that
‘Yes, I think there are,’ replies Scott McClellan, George W. Bush’s former press secretary, when I ask him if he thinks there are others like him who followed Bush from Texas to Washington but who are now disillusioned. McClellan was one of Bush’s Texas loyalists — he had served the then Governor in Austin, worked
Michelle Cottle flags up a fascinating stat, 55 percent of the 30,000 plus firearms deaths in America in 2005 were suicides. I would have thought that murders would have made up the vast majority of these deaths but homicides only actually accounted for 40 percent of the total.
Cherie Booth, aka Mrs Blair, was giving evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee this morning. One of the MPs asked her what she would do to combat knife crime if she was Home Secretary for the day, to which she replied: “I think this idea of taking the glamour out of crime and making
Try as I might I can’t get overly excited about Wimbledon—I’m more of a football and cricket man. So Boris Johnson’s column this morning on why England under-achieve at football caught my eye. Here’s the nub of his argument: we should now launch a merciless Kulturkampf against every feature of modern Britain that is inimical
Over at Three Line Whip, Rob Winnett points out that David Cameron really needs to decide what to do about Caroline Spellman before the Haltemprice & Howden by-election. If Spellman is forced out once David Davis has been returned to Parliament, it will be hard for Cameron not to take the opportunity to bring Davis
The New York Times’ big splash today on the hunt for Osama bin Laden is well worth reading in full as it deals with the more important question of what Al Qaeda is capable of now. Here are the two key paragraphs on this point: Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda