Ed Miliband’s leadership may be young, but his trickery on the public finances is already well worn. We got it all in his interview with Andrew Marr earlier – and then some. There was the claim that Labour “paid down the debt” (that I dealt with here). There was the claim that Labour’s spending was
As Charles Moore explains in the latest issue of the magazine, the late John Gross achieved the distinction – among many others – of being the “shortest-serving literary editor of The Spectator ever”. For this week’s archival interlude, I have pasted Charles’s account of Gross’s brief appointment in 1983 below, as well as one of
After the result, the spin. We got the first drafts of each party’s response to the Oldham by-election in the dark hours of this morning – but the picture is solidifying now that the sun has risen. What’s clear is that both Labour and the Lib Dems are having an easier time putting on a
And all on a turnout of 48.1 percent. So far as the Lib Dems and Labour are concerned, these numbers probably met expectations. Overall support for Elwyn Watkins has held firm since the general election, but he was always going to struggle to get within 103 votes of Labour once again. While a 10-point victory
Guido and Benedict Brogan have already drawn attention to Paul Waugh’s latest post. But a story this good deserves repeating, at length: “Tory MP Mark Pritchard is not one to swear. In fact he’s ribbed by colleagues in the Tea Room for saying “Schmidt” instead of sh*t. But today, he exploded when the Commons Speaker
Much of Ed Miliband’s Grand Confession on the economy is wearily familiar. I mean, we’ve known his take on the deficit for some time: that the drop in tax receipts from a crumbling financial sector was to blame, rather than Brown’s spending. And to have him argue that Labour should have made the economy less
Last November, I put together a ten-point summary of IDS’s benefit reforms – so why add five more points now? Two reasons. First, it’s worth dwelling on what, I believe, will be one of this government’s defining achievements. Second – and far more prosaic – the Insistute for Fiscal Studies released a report on the
With the Labour party motioning to unseat him, and David Cameron and Ed Miliband speaking out against him, it was always likely to end thus for Eric Illsley. The receipt offender has just issued this statement: “I would like to apologise to my constituents, family and friends, following my court appearance, for the distress and
VERDICT: Woah. If you ever needed a PMQs to brush away the last morsels of festive cheer, then this was it. Every question and answer came laced with some sideswipe or other, and it made for a scrappy exchange between the two party leaders. Both struck blows against each other, but both were also guilty
A potent Tory tag team in the Sun today, as David Cameron and Boris Johnson join pens to take on the unions. The tone of their article is as blunt as anything we’ve heard from them on the matter, particularly the Prime Minister. “Let’s call these threats what they are,” it says about the prospect
After David Chaytor’s conviction last week, the dominoes just keep on tumbling. Today, it was Eric Illsley’s turn to confess to his expenses-related sins – and he did so by pleading guilty to three “false accounting” charges in Southwark Crown Court. Given that he’s still MP for Barnsley Central – although now as an independent,
Forget the voting intentions, the real action in YouGov’s latest poll comes in the supplementary results. There, as Anthony Wells suggests, are attitudes towards spending cuts that will both perturb and hearten the coalition. Let’s take the bad stuff first: “Asked if the government’s cuts will be good or bad for the economy only 38%
Coalition politics sure does throw up some peculiar situations. Take today’s vote on the EU Bill. As part of the horse-trading that’s going on around it, Tory Eurosceptics have put forward a series of amendments to mould the Bill more to their liking. Of these, the most striking is Peter Bone’s suggestion that Parliament should
We all know about the extra features on DVDs: those behind-the-scenes documentaries and deleted scenes that accompany the main feature – often uninformative pap, very occasionally sublime. But what about extra features for books? The trend towards stirring more and more content into a book first struck me when I read a Harper edition of
The truth, as they say, is out: it doesn’t look as though the coalition will be doing much about bankers’ bonuses after all. According to this morning’s Times (£), it’s a case of the Tories getting one over the Lib Dems – and particularly Vince Cable – by not pushing down with more taxes on
As Adam Boulton says, the Oldham by-election has produced another noteworthy moment. And, in this case, it’s one of the smaller parties making the splash. In a press conference in the constituency this afternoon, UKIP confirmed that Stuart Wheeler has joined their party as treasurer. This is, of course, the Stuart Wheeler who gave £millions
My prediction for this week: we’re going to see a whole lot of defiant frontage from Nick Clegg. The last parliamentary session closed with him under attack over tuition fees; this one begins with the possibility of heavy defeat in Oldham East – and he’s got to respond accordingly. Hence his interview on Today this
You’ve probably heard about Alan Johnson’s latest slip-up yesterday. But it’s still worth highlighting the response made by a Labour spokesman – as Dizzy has – because it’s simply extraordinary. Here it is: “We have a Shadow Chancellor who lives in the real world. He knows the difference between a progresive and regressive tax. He
The same, but completely different. That’s the electoral paradox that emerges from a couple of opinion polls on the Oldham East & Saddleworth by-election this morning. The same, because both the Lord Ashcroft survey for the Sunday Telegraph and the ICM survey for the Mail on Sunday produce the same result as in the general
Log it in your diaries, CoffeeHousers: on this day – Friday, 7th January, 2011 – a former MP was sent to jail for abusing the parliamentary expenses system. Yes, David Chaytor has been sentenced to eighteen months for, ahem, “false accounting” his way to £18,000 of taxpayers’ cash. He’s the first former parliamentarian to be
