Rudy Giuliani in Iowa: Asked at a community meeting here whether he considered waterboarding torture, Mr. Giuliani said: “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.” I think what that means is that if the Iranians were to waterboard a captured US pilot it would be
I’m normally slightly sceptical of the value of Early Day Motions; too few of them justify the £627,000 that they cost the taxpayer in 2005/6. But one put down today by Paul Goodman and Michael Gove, two of the most decent men in the House, makes an important statement: “This House, recognising that freedom of
Anatole Kaletsky has a cracking column in The Times today about Gordon Brown’s political difficulties. One point is particularly worth noting: Brown doesn’t know how to triangulate. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were geniuses at triangulating because they knew it wasn’t simply splitting the difference between left and right but finding, cliché alert, a third
The speculation over whether President George W. Bush will order strikes on Iran before he leaves office in January 2009 will ramp up another notch with the news that the Bush administration is requesting $88 million to alter B-2 Stealth bombers so that they can carry the largest conventional bomb yet developed by the US military. These
Oh, this is going to be fun. Adam Boulton, writing in the New Statesman, says that Tony Blair and David Cameron will indeed be holding a meeting soon. Apparently, Blair wants to brief Cameron on his role in the Middle East. The substance of the meeting might be high-minded and Blair is—as Fraser reports in
One of my favourite themes is the power of metrics. The party who chooses the right yardsticks shapes the debate: something Labour understood early on, with their specific definition of “child poverty,” hospital waiting times and unemployment. An example jumps out at me today with the abortion debate. The Times strikingly visualises what we’re talking
When it comes to winning the peace few people know more than Paddy Ashdown so his warning that Afghanistan is “lost” is particularly alarming. The Telegraph quotes him setting out the consequences of defeat: “I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will
When Gordon Brown first announced the outsiders he had recruited to his ‘ministry of all the talents’ there was much chuckling in Westminster about whether Digby Jones or Mark Malloch Brown would be the first minister to be sacked. Early on, Malloch Brown moved into pole position with an insufferably pompous interview in the Telegraph
Most people chuckled at California when it elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. But the sheer competence of the state government’s reaction to the appalling wild fires that are sweeping the state suggest that Arnie is much better at his job than many professional politicians. Certainly, as Newsweek points out, the contrast to Katrina could not be
More Labour glum faces today, and much for them to be glum about. Cameron opened on a good theme: Brown’s plans to confiscate budget surpluses accrued by prudent schools. Cameron used this as an allegory for Brown’s statism, versus Tory localism. “Why does he think he knows how to use the money better than the
The military success of the surge in Iraq has been quite astonishing but much remains to be done on the political front. Part of the reason for this is that Iraqi politicians like to go right up to the wire, as they at every stage in the political process since 2003, before reaching an agreement. Still
In The Guardian, Gordon Brown asks the world to focus itself on Burma today as Aung Sui Kyi’s 12th year under house arrest draws to and end. The Prime Minister’s op-ed is full of noble sentiments and fine words but it inadvertently reveals the gap between words and actions when it comes to Burma. When
David Frum reads Robert Draper’s Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, and reports [emphasis added]: If he [Bush] has anything more to say, it will have to wait for later. But my guess is that he has nothing to say. What Ulysses S. Grant said of himself is true of George W. Bush:
I’ve a piece in the new edition of The American Conservative looking at Rudy Giuliani’s trip to London last month – a trip designed to make Rudy seem like an international statesman who can claim, however implausibly, to be the heir to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Hmmm indeed. It was an audacious gambit that
A splendid Daily Telegraph obituary of Sammy Duddy, a, er, colourful figure in Loyalist paramilitary circles: Sammy Duddy, who died on October 17 aged 62, had a rather unusual curriculum vitae for a member of the Loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in having been a drag artiste who went by the stage name of Samantha.
A bar worth making the effort to visit: DC grants first exemption to its brutal ban on smoking in pubs.
I highly recommend Ryan Lizza’s dissection of Mitt Romney’s campaign in the current issue of The New Yorker. If, after eight years of presidential overstretch, you’re looking for a period of calm and a President who might adopt a more restrained view of what he might be able to achieve, might I suggest that a
The constitutional settlement created by New Labour is clearly iniquitous. But what is interesting about the current debate is that it is based around the higher public spending per head in Scotland, which existed before devolution, not the West Lothian question. I always though that the devolution chickens would come home to roost when some
I’m just out of the Public Administration Select Committee meeting with John Yates. No revelations, but a clear clash of cultures – and philosophies. Tony Wright, the PASC chair, said that cash-for-honours has been going on for years. “It’s the way of the world,” he said at one point. So why, they wanted to know,
Imagine a new city the size of York or Portsmouth being built every year for 30 years. This, according to the Office of National Statistics, is what’s happening for the foreseeable future with immigration: forecasts are up from 145,000 to 190,000 a year. That’s net immigration, so the actual number of newcomers will be over