Perhaps, the most damning thing about the CIA Inspector General’s report into the Agency’s performance into the run up to 9/11 is that even after George Tent concluded that the United States was at war with terrorist organisations petty turf wars between the intelligence agencies continued. Take this dispute between the CIA and the National
Have we entered a post-American age in Europe? That’s the argument of this Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker. It argues that what Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy all have in common is a desire not to be defined by their relationship with the United States. So, Brown is cooling things so
“Boris Johnson is by far the most right wing candidate ever to be presented by a major party for Mayor of London.” This is how the Compass dossier on Boris starts. But the sentence is actually fairly meaningless as there have only been two elections for Mayor of London and the Tories fielded the same
John Lloyd has a typically thoughtful op-ed in the FT today about how we should teach history in schools and how we can create a sense of nationhood that fits this post-devolution, multi-ethnic country. Lloyd argues that the problem with Gordon Brown’s belief that an emphasis on liberty, equity and democracy can unite the country is that
Mark Penn is the pollster of choice for those politicians who still believe in the third way. He advised Tony Blair on how to win a third term in 2005, advice that cost Labour £530,372, and is now a key part of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So his new tome, Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind
The Guardian reports today that Compass, the leftwing pressure group, has compiled a dossier accusing Boris of being “Norman Tebbit in a clown’s uniform”. Well, now: I admire Norman and hate clowns with equal vigour, and so find this an intrinsically distasteful notion. But the strategy adopted by Compass – namely that Our Candidate is
The FT’s look at how the British deployment in Basra got to where it is today is well worth reading. As the FT notes, the reason the British force in Iraq was reduced so quickly after the invasion from 45,000 to 26,000 is that the military is simply not big enough to support such a
If you’re planning to listen to a Royal Recovery on Radio 4 this morning at nine, repeated this evening at half nine, about how the Royal family came back from the death of Diana do read Matthew d’Ancona’s account of making the programme in this week’s Spectator. Matt concludes that the monarchy has surived because”the
Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd is hardly the first decent Christian family man visiting from out-of-town to find himself in a New York strip club. These things happen when a man is away from his wife and family in a sinful place like New York. Rudd, a devout Anglican who cites Deitrich Bonhoffer as
One of the things that has been strained to an intolerable extent since 9/11 is the compact between the British people, represented by their government, and the armed forces. We are now in a situation where the military is fighting two wars on a peacetime budget. When injured servicemen and women return home they are
Michael White has a fun post up on which political memoirs really were worth the advances that their publishers paid for them. Which raises the question of which politician’s autobiography would you pay to read? Top of my list would be Peter Mandelson. He is the most psychologically interesting of the New Labour founding fathers.
If you want an example of how government comes up with ways to waste our money, just consider the story in The Sun today of ‘The WAG’s Guide to Travel’ penned for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Jermain Defoe’s girlfriend Charlotte Meares. A quick call to the FCO confirms that Ms. Meares was paid
Of all the characters in the cash for honours scandal, only one was unfairly maligned: John McTernan, Blair’s last political secretary. He was in No 10 but not of No 10: a disarmingly honest and straightforward chap in a rogue’s gallery. I gather he is now back in government, and will tomorrow be named special
If you want an example of how government comes up with ways to waste our money, just consider the story in The Sun today of ‘The WAG’s Guide to Travel’ penned for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Jermain Defoe’s girlfriend Charlotte Meares. A quick call to the FCO confirms that Ms. Meares was paid
Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun today contains one of those facts that makes you stop and re-read the sentence to make sure you’ve understood it correctly. Kavanagh calculates that, “Getting rid of half [the 200 new quangos New Labour has created] would let us abolish income tax for everyone earning under £20,000–and still leave
David Cameron sounded the right note in his back-to-school interview on the Today programme this morning. As Fraser has so consistently called upon him to do, the Tory leader put the “broken society” at the heart of his autumn campaign, while refusing the invitation of Jim Naughtie to endorse knee-jerk crackdowns on the drinking age.
One of the key things to watch in the European referendum debate is the position of the Liberal Democrats; their support for a vote last time round was crucial to the government conceding one. Ming Campbell, however, seems unlikely to repeat the call. Speaking on the Westminster Hour this evening, he said that having compared
We’re always being told that bringing the Olympics to London will turn us into a nation of athletes, getting us all off the couch and onto the running track. But there’s no evidence for this claim; no other Olympic host city has seen a sustained rise in sporting participation after the games. To make things
EU vs US Sir: Irwin Stelzer can’t have it both ways (‘Now we know: Brown is a European, not an Atlanticist’, 11 August). If Gordon Brown is going to have to give up his independent foreign policy when the EU reform treaty comes into force, so too will Nicolas Sarkozy. So neither a British nor
John Prescott is getting £300,000 for his memoirs which will be called Prezza: Pulling No Punches and ghosted by Hunter Davies. Davies, having worked on the Wayne Rooney and Paul Gascoigne autobiographies, will probably find Prescott a refreshingly intelligent subject. Interestingly, Davies says that Prescott “realises that he’s got to tell the truth. He knows