James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
David Blunkett’s attempt to be helpful on 42 days is a classic: We’ve hit a rock bottom in my view and we can only get… climb out of it, so I think that, whilst it would be yet another knock, it would not be a knockout blow
Clive has footage of the Tube riot on the Circle Line which is well worth watching to get a feel for what went . Harry’s Place (link via Stephen) calls on the Met to prosecute the organiser. This seems wrong-headed to me. The only people to blame for what happened were those who turned the
Over at Red Box, Sam Coates runs down what the brothers appear to want for bailing Labour out of its present financial difficulties: 1. Windfall tax for energy companies (floated by both Dubbins and Simpson) 2. Legislation to require companies to carry out equal pay audits, to close the gap between male and female pay
Nick Clegg is the subject of The Independent’ s ‘You ask the question..’ feature today. His answer to this question is particularly interesting: Who was a worse PM, Blair or Brown? Saurav C, by email Clegg: Blair was more wrong, Brown’s more incompetent. Now, I may be reading way too much into a pithy response
A selection of some of the posts made over the weekend: James Forsyth argues that the blame for the violence on the Tube on Saturday nights rests not with Mayor but with the perpetrators and highlights Peter Oborne’s analysis of the sorry state of Labour’s finances. Clive Davis notes how The New York Times’ reviewer
Tonight, Jacqui Smith will address the Parliamentary Labour Party. Brown will not attend the meeting but he has outlined the compromises he is prepared to make in an article for The Times this morning. Brown stresses both the complexity of modern terrorist plots and how rarely this power would be used. As someone who is
The behaviour of those protesting the booze ban on the Tube last night was disgraceful. Those who assaulted Tube staff and police officers should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The reaction of the RMT, though, is bizarre. Rather than pinning the blame on the perpetrators, it has decided that it was
This May saw fewer US military casualties in Iraq, 18, than any previous month in the war. It also saw the Iraqi government take significant steps to becoming a truly national government; successfully taking on the Shi’ite militias in Basra and Sadr City. As The Washington Post writes in its lead editorial this morning: “Iraq
On Tuesday night after the last vote in the Democratic primaries has been cast, Obama will speak in the very hall in which John McCain will accept the Republican nomination in September. It is a smart move by his campaign as it pushes the general election story-line front and centre, relegating Hillary Clinton to the
The story that Gordon Brown personally calls members of the public who write him critical letters gets more bizarre with the news in today’s Guardian that he has apparently being doing this since 1997. This suggests that he can’t be calling that many people as otherwise this would have surely leaked out before now. Someone
Peter Oborne’s column in The Daily Mail reveals just how bad Labour’s financial position is. As Peter notes, there are doubts as to whether the party can be deemed a ‘viable going concern.’ Incredibly, there is a real chance that the Labour party might actually go bankrupt and that members of the NEC could find
National Journal has an eye-opening cover story this week on the extent of China’s e-espionage. The piece reveals that US intelligence officials believe that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was probably responsible for the 2003 power cut that blacked out much of the east coast of the US. The whole piece is well worth
Stephen McCabe, the Labour whip who was in the charge of the Crewe and Nantwich campaign, has written an article for Tribune on his experience. The headlines will be grabbed by McCabe’s claim that there was no ‘toff strategy’ but more interesting is how he explains Labour’s defeat. “Nor could we stem the drift from
The warning from the departing American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan General Dan K. McNeill that Pakistan is once more pursuing the failed strategy of trying to strike a deal with militants needs to be heeded. The consequences of the Pakistani approach can be seen in the fact that attacks in eastern Afghanistan were
Tim Montgomerie flags up how the targets culture is distorting policing priorities with arresting a child for stealing a chocolate bar treated by the police as being as important as arresting a murderer. There’s little doubt that the police are going for the low hanging fruit when it comes to meeting targets. Indeed, the only
The headlines figures in today’s YouGov poll are disastrous for Brown, the historical comparisons are humiliating—even under Michael Foot the Labour party never sank this low in the polls, but what should really worry Brown about this poll is that he and Labour now trail Cameron and the Tories on every question. Downing Street has
The last couple of days have flagged up problems that are going to bedevil McCain and Obama respectively in the general election campaign. McCain is going to have to run in the shadow of an extremely unpopular president from his own party. At every opportunity, the Democrats are going to try and tell people that
When I saw this story I had to check the date but it is not an April Fool, Gordon Brown really is cold calling members of the public who write him critical letters. PR Week, where else, reports that this is Stephen Carter’s latest ‘brainwave’: ‘Carter thought it was a good idea to have Brown
Let’s assume that, as currently seems likely, the Labour party loses the next election by a fairly substantial margin. The question then is does Labour conclude that the best route back to power is trying to knock the Tories off the centre ground or tacking to the left. As Matt notes, the temptation for a
Fraser Nelson and Charles Moore report from Afghanistan. Rod Liddle explains how Britain can win Eurovision. Irwin Stelzer previews the US election and Bryan Forbes asks when did we start treating all motorists like criminals? In the books section, Magnus Linklater assesses Hugh Trevor-Roper’s posthumously published book on the invention of Scotland. Also do read
