Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
This Thursday watch the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards on Spectator.co.uk. The awards ceremony from Claridge’s Hotel in London will be broadcast live with the welcome speeches running from 1 to 1:10pm and the awards from 1:50 to 2:30 pm. The awards will be presented by last year’s winner John Reid and hosted by Matthew d’Ancona, editor of the Spectator.
Gordon Brown’s Mansion House speech tonight will be pored over for hints about the direction of British foreign policy. As Jackie Ashley, a columnist normally sympathetic to the Prime Minister, writes in The Guardian, “Brown’s “vision” for foreign policy remains even more opaque than his domestic vision.” There is no desire in Downing Street for the Brown premiership to become as defined by foreign policy as Blair’s was. But as Tim Hames argues in The Times the moment of decision coming down the track on Iran, means that Brown might well have to make a fundamental choice on foreign policy before the next election. To date, Brown seems determined not
The Tories will be encouraged by the latest ICM poll which puts them at 43%, up 3 on the last one. Labour are steady at 35% with the Lib Dems on 15%, a drop of 3 points. The poll indicates that the Tories would likely have a small overall majority and is the highest level of support for them in an ICM poll since 1992. Gordon Brown’s challenge is to find a way of wrestling the momentum back from David Cameron. This poll suggests that the Queen’s speech failed to do that.
I had always expected a major Brown backer to start selling shares in our PM. But I would never have guessed it would be Sir Ronald Cohen, who is supposed to be the PM’s chief fundraiser. But you’d hardly notice it: “Adviser to Brown praises Cameron” whispers the Guardian on page 10 (and longer interview on p29). Turns out Cohen is appalled by the bungled Budget and capital gains tax rise. He then tells it like it is: “All of a sudden, what looked like a one-horse race is now a two-horse race…. If you said to me today am I concerned about the possibility that a Conservative government would
Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation. In February 2006 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UN Secretary General’s chief of staff, was interviewed by Claudia Rosett at the UN, and found himself increasingly furious at the line of questioning about his housing arrangements in New York. Malloch Brown had caused controversy with his decision to live on the smart country estate of George Soros, the financier who forced Britain out
Moscow There’s no reason to be afraid. The growl of the Russian bear is worse than its bite. Forget the new generation of ballistic missiles that can punch a gaping hole in Washington’s defensive shield before it’s even been built. Ignore all those creaking Tupolev-95 Bear nuclear bombers testing the response times of the RAF’s Typhoon interceptors over the North Sea. And fret not about plucky little Putin’s heroic foray into darkest Persia, where he defied an assassination plot so that he could scheme with that crafty Iranian apocalyptist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At heart the Russians just want to be like you and me, easy-going, consumer-driven Europeans whose idea of the
A policeman once told me, over lunch in the House of Commons canteen just off Westminster Hall, that the problem of immigration would be sorted for good and for all, very soon. ‘The chill north wind, from Odin’s Land, will exterminate the scum we have brought to our shores,’ he said, equably enough, and then went and queued up for some pudding behind Michael Meacher. I was left to muse upon his words. I don’t think he meant that the immigrants would all succumb to hypothermia. The invocation of Nordic mythology suggested to me that my lunch companion was a shade to the right of centre, indeed a cross between
Gordon Brown managed to keep a straight face last month when he claimed that he was abandoning plans for a snap election because he needed time to spell out his ‘vision for change’. The rest of the country, it must be said, was laughing at this nonsense, knowing full well that it was polling evidence that had changed the Prime Minister’s mind. But let us take Mr Brown at his word: he explicitly invited the electorate to judge him not only by his competence, but by the scale of his ambitions and political philosophy. The Queen’s Speech on Tuesday was intended to impress voters with its sheer sweep, as well
It took the Queen only eight minutes to read the speech Gordon Brown’s advisers had prepared for her and even she looked bored by the end of it. The Prime Minister may have waited ten years for this chance to set the parliamentary agenda, but one searches this Queen’s Speech in vain for any sense of direction or drive. It was a compendium of mainly old policies, in which a wider ‘vision’ was always difficult to discern. Instead, it was a speech remarkable for what it did not contain. Gone is the sense of adventurism. Under Tony Blair, the Gracious Speech gave notice of his next series of battles with
Next weekend is the 40th anniversary of Harold Wilson slashing sterling’s official value from $2.80 to $2.40 and telling us the pound in our pocket had not been devalued. It was a disaster, Wilson later confessed in his memoirs: a national shame that interrupted the Swinging Sixties. And now the pound has risen above $2 to its highest level for more than quarter of a century and we rejoice at sterling’s strength, gloating over the dollar’s misfortunes. That $2 is ‘high’ when Wilson devalued the pound to a then record low of $2.40 shows not only that today’s rate is a blip in a long-term slide from the pre-war rate
This year’s must-have Christmas present is a small rectangle of plastic, the size of a credit card. It costs E129,000, or a little short of £100,000 at current rates of exchange. Well, actually, it was last year’s must-have for those who consider themselves really up with the zeitgeist, but a NetJets card is still a pretty cool accessory to flash around and impress your friends. It says you can whizz around the globe at short notice in one of the company’s fleet of small planes; the E129,000 ‘entry level’ card, a sort of base-metal Barclaycard, buys you 25 flying hours, enough to flip across the Atlantic and back, and have
This should have been Boris’s gig, of course. Our former editor’s perilous journey into the heart of the Scouse soul was a penance of sorts for that notorious Spectator editorial. But amid the media scrum, he didn’t have much chance to do anything but murmur a few defensive sorrys, hair flapping in the angry breeze. Closure wasn’t achieved. A Liverpool City Life from the great man’s pen might have made things better — or worse — but his thoughts have turned to London and good luck to him. Liverpool, meanwhile, has moved on too and I’m delighted to report that The Spectator remains substantially less loathed here than the Sun,
The real reasons behind the timing of Lord Drayson’s resignation are beginning to seep out. Writing for Comment is Free, Robert Fox reveals that Drayson had intended to stay until the summer but brought forward his departure because of No 10’s refusal to sign off on a new defence industrial strategy which was designed to address a shortfall in the procurement budget of around £10 to £15bn over the next decade. What it all boils down to is how badly underfunded the military has been in recent years. Between this year and 2011, as Robert Fox notes, defence spending as a percentage of GDP will drop 2.3 to 2.1%. Everyone
Nick Clegg went on Political Betting this morning to answer questions from the site’s users. Most of his answers were fairly standard, but he did hint that Lord Carlile might have the Lib Dem withdrawn from him under his leadership if he carried on advocating an extension to the 28 day pre-charge detention period.Here’s the exchange: Q: The Liberal Democrat peer, Lord Carlile is being quoted by the Government as a supporter of an extension in the 28 days detention. If you were Leader of the Liberal Democrats what would you do about a peer actively working with the Government contrary to the party’s policy? A: Alex and I have
The row over the influence of Lord Ashcroft takes another turn with a story in The Guardian this morning about whether or not Lord Ashcroft has returned to the UK and is now paying tax in this country. Labour and the Lib Dems are keen to stoke up this issue and David Heath, the Lib Dems’s constitutional spokesman, tells the paper: “No one should take a place in the legislature of this country who doesn’t pay taxes in this country. If he has reneged [on his agreement] it’s very simple: he should no longer be a member of the House of Lords. He has a stark choice. He has given
For all their woolly policies, the LibDem are dirty fighters, as anyone who has seen them campaign will attest. So it was only a matter of time before its leadership election turned vicious. Chris Huhne has dropped off press releases demanding that his rival Nick Clegg seeks corrections from newspapers who have suggested he’s in favour of education vouchers. Clegg repudiated the idea of vouchers, says Huhne, at a hustings meeting last weekend. All this, of course, makes me all the more favourably inclined towards Clegg. There’s nothing illiberal about school vouchers, and the idea chimes squarely with localism and empowering people rather than the state. It’s ideas like this
The internecine warfare at Respect just took another turn with George Galloway denying that he has left the party. There now seems to be a bitter dispute between Galloway’s faction and the Socialist Workers Party about which group is going to have to be the one to actually break away. The SWP are claiming that Galloway’s decision to hold a rival party conference suggests that he is the one who has left, while Galloway’s lot are refusing to budge.
Tara Hamilton-Miller has a great little blind item in this week’s New Statesman: A shadow secretary of state, who shall remain nameless, decided to sing and briefly weep to a Radiohead song in a northern university student union (determined, clenched, porcine fist punch ing the air during the rocky bit). She sang with such feeling that even the greasy left-wing undergraduates in the smoky basement were moved enough to keep the experience private. Over to you, Coffee Housers
Respect is finally collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Daniel Finkelstein reports that George Galloway has kicked out the Socialist Workers. However, this is only the beginning of the fun. Danny points to a statement posted on the party’s website: Dear Members, Respect has been locked out of its head office. Overnight the locks were changed on the Respect national office. This action excludes most National Officers, the national office staff and the majority of Respect members who support them from their own organisation’s headquarters. All one can say is that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer party. It is a good job that they have a leader
It was supposed to be the big day when Gordon Brown put the case for detaining terror suspects for up to 56 days and took on his backbenches. Instead he, um, bottled it. Jack Straw was sent out to open the debate on Home Affairs (called by the Tories) and Jacqui Smith closed it, talking about how she wants a consensus and hasn’t decided on 56 days at all. David Davis speech on civil liberties was strong stuff, rather wasted on the triviality of a debate where the government has very little to tell us. But then again, who was Brown going to get as his witness to call for