Politics

It’s Tuesday, so it’s time to sift through Rachel Sylvester’s column for juicy quotes.  In her latest, she saves the best for last: a Cabinet minister saying that “It’s up to the brotherhood now”.  No, not that brotherhood – but the brothers Miliband, Ed and David.  The intimation being that they need to take over from Brown – and sharpish. There’s been plenty of speculation about the Milibands recently, so this latest titbit shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.  But, to my mind, it’s interesting how this minister packages Ed and David together – as the “brotherhood”.  It has generally been assumed that one or the other wouldn’t

It’s not just death and taxes you can depend upon – you can also be absolutely certain that the Labour Party will, at every opportunity, take precisely the wrong decision about the BNP. You may have seen Fraser’s blog about Labour MPs voting not to allow democratically elected BNP MEPs into the House of Commons. It is a convention that our European Union representatives are allowed the use of Westminster facilities, but not one which Labour will extend to the BNP for the simple reason that they do not like them. One of the first members to sign up was Andrew Dismore, MP for Hendon, who has a long and

Why argue your case when you can smear your opponent’s name? According to this morning’s Telegraph, that’s the approach that a group of MPs are taking over the Sir Thomas Legg letters. The plan they’re apparently considering is to use parliamentary questions to find out details such as Legg’s pay, his team’s expenses and how much they’ve spent on media advice. One Tory MP tells the paper that there are “legitimate questions” about these things.  Hm. It’s not only a pernicious strategy, it’s also stupid.  Even if MPs manage to uncover some sort of hypocrisy on Legg’s part, do they really think it will divert public anger away from them? 

Just what was in Barry Sheerman’s coffee this morning?  So far today, the schools committee chairman has used a couple of media appearances to a) call Ed Balls a “bully”, and b) criticise all three party leaders – including Brown – for their “cowardly party leadership” over the Legg review.  Punchy stuff, which makes you wonder whether he’ll be the de facto “Get Gordon Out” candidate for PLP chairman, after all.

Paul Waugh reports that 5 ‘refusenik’ Labour MPs are threatening to trigger by-elections over Brown’s reluctance to curb Sir Thomas Legg’s retrospective cap. Clearly, Brown is in an invidious position – it is conceivable that Labour will lose these by-elections in any event, but Brown would be committing very protracted and very painful electoral suicide if he demanded that Sir Thomas retract his demands. Brown is indecisive when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing in his favour, so God knows what agonies the Hamlet of Kirkcaldy is wrestling with at the moment, and I suspect most of us would have died of old age if the refuseniks

Everyone knows that Martin Luther King had a dream. It featured eloquent, high-minded ambitions about little white girls and little black girls playing together in harmony. Alex Salmond has dreams too. In an utterance that should have resulted in immediate committal, he compared Kenny MacAskill to Mahatma Gandhi, and then, with the rhetorical panache of a Scottish Judge Jeffries, told the SNP conference that he wanted to see “Westminster dangling from a Scottish rope”. As visions of the future go, capital punishment is not as appealing as Dr Luther King’s evocation of Christian brotherhood; but, in the event of a hung parliament, Salmond’s dream might be realised.     Salmond’s experience

Up to now, MEPs can use Westminster’s facilities; but, yesterday, Nick Brown tabled a deplorable motion in the House of Commons – to ban Nick Griffin from parliament. Just in case there were any doubt, Andrew Dismore spelled it out, saying Brown’s motion would “mean that the newly elected British National Party members would not be allowed to get into this place. Most Members are of the view that that should be the case.” I bet they are. But why? Whose fault is it that Griffin was elected in the first place? As I argued in the News of the World a while ago: if I had my way, I’d base Griffin

Brace yourselves. According to the Guardian, Brown is about to sell himself as a Great Reformer: “Brown, the cabinet sources say, decided in the past few weeks to adopt a tougher pro-public sector reform stance, in order that his defence of the state in the face of recent attacks on big government by David Cameron does not become confused with complacency about the current performance of the public sector.” Despite the sensibleness of the reform argument, I can’t imagine that Brown will make much headway with this. For starters, he has that “Roadblock to Reform” label, and Labour’s patchy record on public service reform, hovering over him like the proverbial

And so it gets even messier. Today’s Telegraph reports that HMRC are conducting formal investigations into the tax affairs of 27 MPs. You see, expenses claims are only supposed to be tax-free provided that they’re wholly necessary for Parliamentary work. And, as we all know by now, quite a few of our, ahem, honourable members haven’t been following that requirement – so they may owe some cash to Her Majesty’s tax collectors. It probably won’t be enough to fill the black hole in the public finances. But it’s a start. They’ll be something deliciously perverse about this if any of those MPs investigated are also among those who claimed for