Politics

Gordon Brown’s new team at Number Ten have received rave reviews. Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer today points out how cabinet ministers who were in despair before Christmas have been given hope by the new Downing Street operation while Fraser has—in these pages—warned the Conservatives not to underestimate the new Brown machine. But this new Brown team can only work if it can come to an accommodation with the old Brown crew; something which Gaby Hinsliff’s masterful piece in today’s Observer suggests is some way off. If any of Brown’s new hires walk away before the election it will be seen as a sign that Brown is done for. As

 The reaction from the liberal-left to David Mamet’s confession that he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal” has been strangely muted — and often hilariously ludicrous. The most priceless piece of bien pensant thinking comes, naturally, from Michael Billington, the Guardian’s tedious, right-on theatre critic.   “I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right,” says the poor dear. “What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.”   Let’s just unravel the massive self-regarding hypocrisy behind that statement. As long as Mamet was writing plays from Billington’s liberal-left perspective, he was a beacon of free-thinking insight and

The Spectator recently ran a letter from Lord Adonis saying the Swedish schools revolution which I said David Cameron would bring to Britain was in fact being delivered under Labour. Huh, I thought, keep telling yourself that – if it makes this whole Brown thing better for you. But today I picked up my local newspaper to find a striking splash: two City Academies run by Kunskapsskolan, the Swedish company I interviewed for my cover piece, are coming to my borough.   Things move quickly. Just last month Per Ledin, the head of Kunskapsskolan, was in his office asking me: “City Academies? What kind of a beast are those?” Now

The issue of party funding is going to run and run with the parties still nowhere near an agreement on it. In an interview with the Telegraph today, Francis Maude makes an astonishing charge about the opaqueness of trade union funding for Labour: “It’s a racket, there are two unions which declare more members paying the political levy than they have members.” If Maude is right, then this is a huge scandal. The Tories, however, will never be on firm political ground on party funding while Lord Ashcroft’s tax status remains unclear. Maude tells the Telegraph he has “no idea” whether Ashcroft does pay tax in the UK and that

It is a definite coup for David Cameron that John McCain saw him as well as Gordon Brown today. It was a significant statement that a President McCain expects to have to deal with both men when in office; he clearly expects Cameron to be PM before 2012. But McCain can help Cameron in policy terms too. Cameron has struggled to come up with an inspiring way to talk about his greenery, it can sound rather too doom and gloomy. McCain offers a solution to this problem. He talks inspiringly about how tackling climate change is going to create jobs not cost them, spur economic growth not constrict it and

For some reason, MPs have been struck by the poetry bug recently.  First there was the anonymously-penned verse attacking the Prime Minister.  And now Theresa May’s got in on the act, reading out her poem on Brown’s staffing problems in the Commons today.  Here it is: “At Downing Street the other day, I met a man sent on his way. Close to Gordon for many years, the PM’s rants brought him to tears. But for all this he didn’t care. He was pleased to see his minister there. He’d been important once, you know. Now Carter told him: ‘You must go.'” I doubt she’ll be winning the T.S. Eliot prize any time soon.  Can CoffeeHousers do