The Harman and Hague duel
Here’s footage of the back-and-forth between Harman and Hague in PMQs earlier:
Politics
Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Wednesday
Where are Britain’s unexploded sub-prime bombs?
Of all the scary economic forecasts we’ve heard recently, perhaps the most chilling is the idea that we’re nine months behind America on the credit crunch. What would it mean for us? And what political effect might it have? In tomorrow’s magazine, George Bridges, former campaigns director for Cameron, does for us what politicians do for themselves at election time. He has asked Experian, the credit rating agency, to trawl its vast database and list sub-prime penetration by constituency. Of the 200 worst affected seats, all but 14 are held by Labour. It is, as George puts it, “a punch in the financial solar plexus for those Brown has purported
The insiders give the Tories the edge
The Politics Home Index, a poll of 100 political insiders which has just launched, is going to provide a fascinating insight into what the Westminster Village is thinking. Earlier this week, the panel were surveyed on what they expected the result of the next election to be—the results, provided exclusively to Coffee House, make for encouraging reading for the Tories. 34 percent predict a Conservative majority while 32% expect the Conservatives to be the largest party in a hung parliament. By contrast, only 13 percent say the Labour party will have a majority and 22 percent think Labour will be the largest party but fall short of an overall majority.
Bertie Ahern resigns
Bertie Ahern is to step down from his twin role as Irish taoiseach and leader of the Fianna Fáil party on May 6th. He’s departing under something of a cloud – his personal finances are being sifted through by a corruption tribunal, although he denies any wrongdoing. History, though, will most likely remember him for his role in the Irish peace process. I’d recommend Three Line Whip’s excellent coverage.
Harman holds her own at PMQs
A bit of a damp squib, really. Harman held her own against those PMQs titans that are Hague and Cable. And all my anticipatory drooling was for nought. Hague opened by congratulating Harman on being the first female Labour MP to lead the House at PMQs. An invite for Harman’s only cringeworthy moment, as she inquired why Theresa May wasn’t opposing her. She suddenly came over all Oprah-esque – handing out “sisterly advice” and asking whether Tory women are to be “seen but not heard”. The patented Hague Joke soon followed, and it was a good one. If Harman dons the appropriate attire for all occasions – a stab-vest when touring
Ken Livingstone has no shame
Ok, so Political Betting covered this yesterday – among others – but the words “Magpie Mayor” emblazoned across the front of last night’s Evening Standard reminded me to give it a Coffee House mention. Basically – as this Standard article details – Ken Livingstone is planning to steal Boris’s policy ideas, including that of the “Payback London” scheme. Worse still, Ken unabashedly admits to this. Here’s what he had to say in a debate the other night: “I’m stealing your policies. What sort of idiot, when they hear a good idea, wouldn’t take it on board?” Does Ken really think this will ingratiate him with Londoners?
By design, not by accident
Simon Heffer serves up a bracing cup of invective in the Telegraph this morning. His message is that we shouldn’t be too quick to label the Government “incompetent”, as doing so suggests they’ve reached this point by accident rather than by design: “The element of deliberation and deliberateness in what Labour has done makes an accusation of incompetence, or carelessness, seem wide of the mark. Things were meant to be this way. Labour has pursued policies, be they social or economic, for ideological reasons: and when they fail, as so many have, it has not been because of slipshod administration. It is because that was how things were always going to
Politicians boasting about the women they’ve slept with is not candour: it’s spin
Another terrible night spent tossing and turning, racked with worry over whether or not I have ever had sex with Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democratic party. It is not something I remember doing and on the face of it, both of us being heterosexual, it seems highly unlikely. But one can never be too sure. Given Mr Clegg’s singularly ectoplasmic tenure as leader of his party it seems to me possible that we may have had some desultory form of intercourse without my even knowing about it. He might have slithered in and then out again, wraith-like, while I was oiling the garden shears in the shed,
A chance for the Lords to justify their existence
Like, I suspect, most Spectator readers, I saw no need for Lords reform in the first place. The old chamber functioned perfectly well, as even Labour was forced to admit. But the party took the view that, while it might work in practice, it didn’t work in theory. The hereditary principle, Tony Blair declared, had no place in modern politics: a strange argument, striking as it does directly against the monarchy and indirectly against all property. And so, with no very clear idea of what they wanted, ministers blundered into the current settlement: an appointments system which disproportionately elevates toadies, public-sector groupies and quangocrats. From Labour’s point of view, fair
Tuesday
Department of the Wrong End of the Stick
Setting aside the issue of whether or not a House of Lords committee can accurately be considered “influential”… Record levels of immigration have had “little or no impact” on the economic well-being of Britons, an influential House of Lords committee has said. Well, that’s not the point. Or at least it’s not the point as far as I’m concerned. What about the immigrants themselves? Couldn’t we rejoice in their economic advancement and, one supposes (via remissions from immigrant workers), that of their home countries too? Couldn’t that be be something to be celebrated? The world doesn’t stop at the water’s edge after all and in an age in which we
More misery for Clegg
Nick Clegg’s in line for more misery over Europe. Today, Lord McNally announced that Lib Dem peers would go against Clegg’s orders by not abstaining from the upcoming referendum vote. Instead, they’re set to vote against a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Many of the pro-referendum brigade had pinned their dwindling hopes on the Lords. But McNally’s revelation makes it extremely unlikely that the UK will get the say it was promised. In a way, then, Clegg will get the outcome he wanted. Although his grip on the Lib Dems has been shattered in the process.
Cameron & friends
A perennial problem for Opposition leaders – and particularly those that have never been in Government – is how they put forward their party’s defence credentials. They haven’t been in the high-level security meetings; they don’t have access to all the confidential data; and they haven’t made any of the key decisions. Why in a time of crisis should the public depart from the status quo? On the surface, Cameron’s speech today was about how NATO should evolve for the 21st Century. But he also used it to reassure voters about the Tories’ security nous. His method for doing that? Name-dropping. Here’s one passage that jumped out at me: “The blunt truth is
The failure of Brown’s third way
Steve Richards has a typically excellent piece in today’s Independent. In it, he paints Brown’s effort to push through longer detention times for terror suspects as another instance of Blairite grandstanding. Unfortunately for Brown, though, it’s left no-one happy: “Last summer, when he was successfully portraying himself as the apolitical father of the nation, the debate over detaining suspects without charge must have seemed politically attractive. Probably, Mr Brown calculated that he could succeed where Mr Blair had failed, reinforcing another part of his pre-election strategy of appearing more Blairite than Mr Blair. Right-wing newspapers would support him. The move was popular with voters. The Tories would look “soft” on
April Fools?
The hallmark of this ridiculous government is the difficulty one always has on 1 April trying to discern which newspaper stories are April Fools. The Guardian tickles our ribs in suggesting that Carla Bruni is being recruited in Brown’s Government Of All the Talents as some kind of fashion tsar. Is that so much more incredible than the real-life attempt to recruit Fiona Phillips, the GMTV presenter, and offer her a peerage and place in the Department of Health? We had a story last week saying that only 34% people believe official statistics, according to official statistics. This is the only tool one has to spot the real stories. They
A present from Harriet to Boris
Will the gaffes ever stop coming? Just a matter of weeks after Jacqui Smith admitted she has police protection when walking around London, the Daily Mail have caught out Harriet Harman for wearing a “stab-proof” vest whilst touring Peckham, in her own constituency. The image is gold for Boris, particularly as he majored on violent crime at his campaign launch yesterday. Meanwhile, Harman did further damage with her agitated performance on Today this morning.
Immigration nation
A Lords’ committee today claims that record levels of immigration have had no economic benefit for the UK. But what about that £6 billion figure the Government likes to wheel out? According to the committee report (pdf. here), it’s misleading. What should really concern us is how immigration affects the living standards of the existing population. By that measure, there’s been hardly any improvement. Things may even have got worse. In response, the report suggests a cap on immigrant numbers. Just like Tory policy. The Immigration Minister Liam Bryne swatted the accusations and proposals away on the Today programme this morning. But this report is the third in recent weeks to lambast
Monday
Trimming government
Was Alan Milburn on to something? When he proposed slashing Whitehall by a quarter in his interview with me for this week’s magazine – on the grounds that you can only take bureaucrats’ power away if you send them away – I imagined he was just stirring things to be mischievous. But now Matthew Taylor, former No10 policy chief, has proposed slashing the number of ministers by a quarter and, as Three Line Whip reports, No10 has slapped him down: “The Prime Minister is quite happy with the number of ministers he has got in his Government”. I’m with Milburn and Taylor. A Conservative government should ask itself searching
Harman vs. Cable
As James reported last week, Harriet Harman will be standing in for Brown at Wednesday’s PMQs. Her Tory opponent will most likely be William Hague. And now Red Box confirm that she’ll also be faced by Vince Cable. Harman against a Hague ‘n’ Cable tag-team? One shudders to think…
Another considerable lead
More encouraging news for Boris, on the day that he formally launched his mayoral campaign. The latest YouGov / Evening Standard poll puts the Spectator’s candidate 10 percentage points clear of Ken Livingstone. He also leads Ken on second preference votes. Admittedly, it’s a bit down on his 12-point lead of two weeks ago. But at least it proves that wasn’t a freak result. The tide is certainly in Boris’s favour. UPDATE: Over at Red Box, Sam Coates wonders whether Boris might scrap the congestion charge.
Come and get me
Charles Clarke’s interview in The Independent is good value. He lets rip with his now trademark straight talk, declaring that he’s “frustrated that Labour does not seem to be doing enough to offer real solutions to the major problems of the future, nor be convincing about our capacity to overcome the challenges we face” and criticising Gordon Brown for “allowing a sense of indecision to develop.” But, interestingly, he issues a ‘come and get me’ call about returning to government in response to a question from one reader: “Would you ever take a Cabinet position under Gordon Brown? Richard Collins by email Yes, certainly but any such appointment is a
