Breaking: Tory MP Douglas Carswell defects to Ukip
In the past few minutes, Tory MP Douglas Carswell has announced at a special press conference that he is defecting to Ukip. listen to ‘Douglas Carswell defects to Ukip’ on Audioboo
Politics
Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Thursday
David Cameron’s next big European mistake
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_28_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Isabel Hardman and Mats Persson discuss Cameron’s European way ” startat=830] Listen [/audioplayer]David Cameron loathes European Union summits, and with reason: they seldom go well for him. He has been ambushed by the French, betrayed by the Germans, seduced by the Swedes and even outsmarted by a Luxembourger — Jean-Claude Juncker, whom he tried to stop becoming President of the European Commission. He’ll meet them all again this Saturday, in Brussels, as they begin divvying up the plum jobs under Juncker’s presidency. As usual, the odds are stacked against Cameron. By now, every EU member has nominated a commissioner to work in Brussels for the next five years.
The SNP’s ‘cybernats’ are a modern political scourge – with the zeal of converts
The first ‘yes’ campaign volunteer knocked on my door towards the end of last year. She was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. I glanced at her dog-eared tally sheet — in my old block of 40 flats, only three residents had said they would vote no. In this neglected pocket of Edinburgh there are men who roll up their tracksuit bottoms to show off their prison tags. It is made up of decaying towers and pebble-dashed tenements. The people here are going to vote for change. Who can blame them? Now that I have moved to a more genteel suburb outside of the city, a further three yes
Wednesday
Exclusive: 74 MPs support campaign against Bercow’s clerk appointment
The cross-party group of MPs opposing John Bercow’s appointment of Carol Mills as Clerk of the House have now submitted their early day motion designed to stop the Speaker going ahead without scrutiny. The motion is co-sponsored by Tory Jesse Norman and Labour chair of the Backbench Business Committee Natascha Engel. Coffee House understands that 66 MPs from the three major parties have signed the EDM (all the more impressive given MPs are still on recess) and at least a further eight MPs will support the call for a debate on select committee pre-hearings before any appointment is made. The list of those 74 MPs who support this campaign is
Tuesday
Breaking: Boris Johnson to stand in Uxbridge
Boris Johnson has confirmed that he is going to apply to be the Conservative candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. His announcement comes on the same day that Nigel Farage is expected to be confirmed as the Ukip candidate for South Thanet, which suggests that the Conservatives are keen to use Boris as their anti-Farage weapon. More to follow…
Not Tonight, Darling
Well that was a gubbing. No doubt about it. Alex Salmond won last night’s debate against Alistair Darling just as thoroughly as he’d lost their first encounter. Sure, some Unionists tried to put a cheerful spin on it – “We’ll take that” one senior Labour figure told me – but don’t you believe any of it. Salmond, as predicted, was much better than he had been in the first debate. Darling, as predicted, was much worse. File this encounter in the drawer marked reversion to the mean. Darling had many problems last night but among the greatest was the fact he’s not a Tory. Time and time again Salmond stuck him
Revealed: the cross-party motion to stop Bercow in his tracks over clerk appointment
With just a few days before the House of Commons returns for the autumn term, the revolt against John Bercow’s plan to appoint Carol Mills as Clerk of the House is growing. Coffee House has seen a motion that a cross-party group of MPs plan to table to stop the Speaker in his tracks. The motion, which I understand has the support of more than 50 MPs from all three main parties, including PPSs, does not attempt to block the appointment, but simply calls for a pre-appointment hearing and report (which could lead to a recommendation that Mills not be appointed). It says: ‘That this House believes that the recommendation
Salmond and Darling’s Jeremy Kyle debate reinvigorates campaign
Both camps in the Scottish independence debate have now has their shock: Alex Salmond was shaken to be beaten by Alistair Darling in the first debate, while a confident Darling seemed shaken last night that the First Minister wasn’t giving identical answers to the questions he repeated from his initial victorious round. As we discussed on our View from 22 special podcast last night, it is very difficult to predict the impact of a resounding victory last night for Salmond on the final result. listen to ‘Scottish Independence Debate special – with Isabel Hardman, Alex Massie and Fraser Nelson’ on Audioboo
Monday
Boris Johnson is not fit to be leader of the Tory party, never mind Prime Minister
Awkward, especially here, I know, but there you have it. But, look, if any other high-profile politician were suggesting the burden of proof in criminal trials should be switched from the accuser to the accused we’d be properly – in both senses – appalled. So we should be appalled that Boris suggests in his Telegraph column today that anyone travelling to Iraq or Syria should be presumed a jihadist unless and until they can prove otherwise. The state will not have to make a case you convict you but you must make a case to avoid conviction. And, lo, centuries of criminal law are undone. Worse still, I think, Boris considers this
Friday
Cameron has silenced the only minister who understands Islamism
Only one person sitting around the cabinet table truly understands how Islamism works – and David Cameron has silenced him. I’m referring to Michael Gove, who in addition to studying radical Islam for many years was waging war against it in British schools – often surreptitiously, in order not to alert the enemy. The defenestration of Gove was the most cowardly act of Dave’s premiership. That fact was underlined yesterday when A-level* students started trolling the former education secretary because, thanks to him, they no longer get an automatic A* just for turning over the paper at the beginning of the exam. As chief whip, and not even a full
The growing campaign against John Bercow’s choice for Commons clerk
The campaign against Speaker Bercow’s plan to appoint Carol Mills as Clerk of the House is growing on the Tory backbenches. Coffee House has today been contacted by a series of Conservative MPs keen to emphasise the rise in opposition among their number. They claim 10 Tories have joined the campaign this morning and that more are ‘very concerned’ and considering joining what appears to be a loosely co-ordinated backbench push against the appointment taking place without a pre-selection hearing. One opponent says the swell in numbers has taken place because the revolt is now clearly cross-party rather than simply Conservative enemies of Bercow. The MP added: ‘No-one likes the
Why Britain is poorer than any US state, other than Mississippi
Now and again, America puts its inequality on display to the world. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and we have seen it again in the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white police offer shoots dead a black man, after having stopped him for jaywalking. Britain’s police don’t have guns, so these scenes are unthinkable to us. But American-style inequality? We have plenty of that too, we’re just better at hiding it – as I say in my Telegraph column today. I came across a striking fact while researching this piece: if Britain were to somehow leave the EU and join the US we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the
The ‘Buckingham Bonaparte’ is cornered
With the interventions of former Speaker Betty Boothroyd, ex-ministers — including Jack Straw, Malcolm Rifkind and Margaret Beckett — and the Clerk of the Australian Senate, Rosemary Laing, it is becoming increasingly hard for John Bercow to spin the fight over his choice for the replacement Commons clerk as a row with his ‘usual suspect’ critics. Yesterday’s Times leader could not have been any clearer: ‘Mr Bercow has done some good things as Speaker, and some of these would not have happened without his prickly personality. He has not minded irritating the executive by allowing more time to debate topical controversies. Yet he should beware of thinking that annoying everyone means he must be
Thursday
Spectator letters: India’s forgotten soldiers, James Delingpole’s happy father, and a defence of public relations
Worth the candle Sir: I was saddened by Charles Moore’s account of the Westminster Abbey candlelit vigil marking the centenary of the start of the first world war (The Spectator’s Notes’, 9 August). At each of the four quarters of the Abbey (representing the four corners of the British Empire), he notes, there was one big candle and one dignitary assigned to snuff it out. He was ‘niggled’ to be in the South Transept, where ‘our big-candle snuffer was Lady Warsi’. Baroness Warsi had been chosen to represent the upwards of one million men from the Indian subcontinent who took part in the Great War. The Indian army was possibly
Asylum seekers are dying in British ports. It’s time we looked after them properly.
The tale is now familiar: shouts are heard from inside a freight container and police are called. A cargo of human beings is discovered, some gravely ill. This happened last Sunday along the Thames at Tilbury docks. Thirty-five Afghans were discovered. One of them, Meet Kapoor, was already dead. Days later, 15 Kashmiris and Eritreans were found on a lorry pulled over in Somerset, dehydrated but alive. Dozens of people are now being found each week in these kinds of circumstances. It is not just economic migration: the Afghans found in Essex were Sikhs, for example, a group singled out for repression under the Taleban. Once they must have hoped
It’s time we contemplated the possibility of a post-conflict Kurdistan
There’s a curious aspect to the debate – or what passes for it – about Britain getting involved in military action against the Islamic State. Isabel Hardman put her finger on it in her piece in this week’s magazine, identifying the defeat of the PM’s bid to take action in Syria for his reluctance to take military action now in Iraq. As she says: ‘This post-Syria timidity frustrates many of Cameron’s own MPs. Even under the new leadership of Michael Gove, the Tory whips made no efforts to sound out backbenchers on where they stand on a British response to the so-called Islamic State’s brutal campaign in Iraq. If they
The Matter of Scotland: Try, try and try again.
PG Wodehouse, who was only the twentieth century’s greatest English-language novelist, once remarked that there existed just two ways to write: “One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” I feel something similar about theatre. I can – and do – enjoy a comedy or farce and, blimey, there’s always room for laughter in this – or any other – world. But, in general, I prefer my theatre punishing and draining and liable to leave you exhausted and feeling like the marrow’s been sucked from your bones. I don’t go to
David Cameron’s fog of war
It was clear that things were going wrong for David Cameron when he had to say that his position on Iraq was ‘very, very simple’. To use that phrase was to admit that things had become very, very muddled. They remain so now. The Prime Minister started the week with a robust line on the bloodshed in Iraq. He declared the start of a ‘generational struggle’ against Islamic extremism that would last for ‘the rest of my political lifetime’. Michael Fallon, his Defence Secretary, gave a Churchillian address to airmen in Cyprus, informing them that the British mission in Iraq was not simply humanitarian and would probably last for months.
Revealed: The Pope’s war with the Vatican
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Damian Thompson and Freddy Gray discuss Pope Francis’s plans” startat=904] Listen [/audioplayer]If you want to understand how Pope Francis is planning to change the Catholic church, then don’t waste time searching for clues in the charming, self-effacing press conference he gave on the plane back from South Korea on Monday. It’s easy to be misled by the Pope’s shoulder-shrugging interviews and impromptu phone calls. On his return flight from Rio last year, he said, ‘If a gay person seeks God, who am I to judge?’ What did that mean? Then there was that mysterious telephone conversation with an Argentinian woman apparently telling her it was OK to receive
Wednesday
Cry Bradford, for George and George
It’s going to be the battle of the Georges in Bradford West at next year’s general election – and Mr S reckons it could be a worth keeping an eye on George Grant, the Tory candidate selected for the seat on Saturday. After helping to launch the Libya Herald, the country’s first post-Gaddafi English language newspaper, Grant was forced to flee in 2013 when his investigative work into Benghazi’s extremist militias made him the target of abduction threats. Which is a somewhat sounder tale of adventure in the region than those of his Bradford West opponent, George Galloway – not least the Respect MP’s cosying up to the late Saddam Hussein. And it could well be
