Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Fraser Nelson charts Brown’s Stateside errors, and implores the Tories to reward the strivers. Matthew d’Ancona claims Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur is a chilling masterpiece. James Forsyth points out the shared values of the UK and the US. And Peter Hoskin asks whether purdah only applies to bad news.
Now for four words which, in my experience, CoffeeHousers hate the most: “in fairness to Brown”. Not many other national leaders could have drawn all three presidential hopefuls to meet him in one day. We teased him for having next to no coverage in the American press yesterday, and there’s plenty today. He also struck the right note over Zimbabwe. Okay, fairness over. Here’s what the Washington Post has to say about the Bush press conference: “Times are so bad, in fact, that Brown flew to America on a plane provided by the discount charter company Titan Airways. The stature of the two leaders had shrunk so much that there
Gwyneth Dunwoody – the “Mother of the House of Commons” – died last night, aged 77. I’d recommend you read Michael White’s tribute for the Guardian, from which the following is an extract: “Now that the pendulum has swung towards managerial politics, old stagers like Mrs D who caused trouble are too few. She will be missed. But if she is up there on a cloud today, I expect she is already up on a celestial point of order asking God to make a statement and what does he think he’s playing at.”
George Osborne’s main opponent isn’t Alistair Darling. It’s Vince Cable. As former chief economist at Shell, he’s that rare thing – a politician who knows what he’s talking about. Today he releases an “open letter” saying what I have heard some senior Tories say in private. The charge is that Osborne has come back from Wall St having swallowed what the banks told him in his proposal that that the government should swap mortgage-based assets for government bonds. PoliticsHome has the text. An extract:- “You say the bankers agree with you. Of course they do. It is their job to maximise profits for themselves and lay off risks to someone
ConservativeHome have an exclusive peek at Boris’s second election broadcast. Maybe he’s taken Livingstone’s criticisms on board: this one is zippy, expansive and – gosh – even in colour. To my eyes, it also successfully straddles the boundary between being positive about London and criticising the Livingstone era. Do check it out, and let us know what you think.
Ed Balls plays knight-in-shining-armour today, defending his leader in a Times interview. Here’s what he has to say: “The efforts of local councillors and shadow leaders should not be undermined by this kind of indulgent nonsense. Rather than cause difficulties for the party, Labour will feel that these people should get out on the campaign trail and start fighting the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats… …Anybody who has the strength and conviction to take the tough decisions [Brown] did on public spending in his first two years, resist pressure to go into the euro and deal with fears of recession in 1998 and 2001 shows that he knows how to
As Three Line Whip points out, yet another Labour figure has joined the long, long queue to give Gordon Brown a kicking. This time it’s the Labour MP Ken Purchase, who is less-than-kind about the Government in an ePolitix interview. Here’s what he has to say about Brown’s election climbdown: “I thought that was a serious mistake … The actual event itself, I think was a bit overplayed by the media but it has had this lasting effect of branding Gordon a ditherer. It was a mistake and I thought that older and wiser counsel should have prevailed much earlier – it should have been stopped much, much earlier.” “Older and wiser
The report into the police shooting of Charles de Menezes is now two months overdue. As the Standard reports today, it’s being sat on because of “political sensitivities” surrounding the race for London Mayor – i.e. it could damage Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and, by extension, his great supporter Ken Livingstone. The Met claim this is fair practice – electoral “purdah” prevents public bodies from doing anything which could promote one candidate over another so close to election time. But that came into effect on 10 April. The obvious concern is that the Met had “political sensitivities” in mind before 10 April – and has kept the report back
Context is all in politics and, with the government widely considered to be in big trouble, every piece of bad news is making waves. So, the Labour peer Lord Desai’s observation that “Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was” is going to be headline news for the rest of the day, ensuring that Brown has yet another bad news cycle. Brown also can’t be too pleased with the Reuters preview of his day in Washington which, after noting his scheduled meeting with the three presidential contenders, says this about his meeting with the President: “He then goes to the White House to meet
Whenever Blair didn’t like the heat in Britain he’d jet off abroad. But Brown’s trip to America seems to cast his shortcomings into even sharper relief. My thoughts on the visit so far: 1) Meeting Wall Street figures and pretending to bang heads together about the credit crunch will be recognised as a stunt in America. USA Today has a quote to this effect from Graham Wilson, a political science professor at Boston University. “I’m skeptical that any jawboning has any effect. I’m not sure Wall Street will respond to a British prime minister.” 2) Wilson also tells USA Today “If he wanted publicity in the United States, it’s a rather
Our Prime Minister’s been laying down the law on Wall Street, telling banks that they must be more open about their bad debts. Ok, so it’s good advice – we need to know the full extent of the credit crunch before we can hope to treat it. But the first thought that popped into my head was: he’s hardly one to talk. After all, Brown’s idea of debt-keeping is to keep huge chunks of national debt off the balance sheet. That £100 billion Northern Rock debt? Swept under the fiscal carpet. That £30 billion or so of PFI debt? Likewise. And why? All so the now-valueless sustainable investment rule isn’t
I’ve an op-ed in today’s edition of The Scotsman on the similar fixes Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton find themselves in (right down to rown’s reported willingness to hire Mark Penn) and on how they are ill-served by the prevailing political trends in Britain and America respectively. It’s behind a (tedious) subscription firewall, but the gist of it is: When Gordon Brown meets Hillary Clinton in Washington this week the pair could be forgiven for consoling one another and asking “How did it come to this?” What a difference a year makes. A year ago, Gordon Brown was preparing to grasp the prize he’d waited so many years to hold.
Or, a rare instance in which Alastair Darling and I appear to be in agreement. Me, this morning: What is Gordon Brown’s ministry for? What does he want to achieve that his party could not achieve in its first ten years in power? Again, the answer is hard to discern. As with Mrs Clinton there is an unfortunate whiff of entitlement about Brown. He doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister because he has a compelling, sweeping vision for the future but because, well, because he’s waited a jolly long time and it’s his turn to be Prime Minister. But that’s not enough. Is there anything actually there? It’s hard to
Sam Coates flags up this classic photograph.
The blogs are alive with Alistair Darling’s observation from China about what the government needs to do: “But we have also got to make sure that in other areas we sharpen ourselves up, that we have a clear message of what we are about.’” Darling’s comments fit Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe perfectly, ‘a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.’ With the government well behind in the polls and being constantly battered by bad news stories, it would be bizarre if the Chancellor thought everything was going well. But saying out-loud that the government needs to sharpen up is just inviting the opposition and the press to pile
(CoffeeHouse regular Tiberius asked that we write something on this, so here goes…) Jacqui Smith’s created a bit of a political storm today, over her announcement that 300 extra police will be directed towards combating terror and radicalisation. The Tories claim this is in “blatant breach” of pre-election campaign rules. After all, most of the areas which would benefit from these police are up for grabs on May 1st. Are Labour naughtily splashing public cash to influence local voters, and thereby boost their poll results? One indication of the Government’s intentions might be that there was no mention of these extra police in the recent National Security Strategy. This document was
Today’s Evening Standard leads with the headline, “Suicide bomb backer runs Ken campaign.” The Standard alleges that Azzam Tamimi, who is a leading figure in the Muslims for Ken campaign, is on record as both praising suicide bombing and suggesting that he himself would be prepared to be one. “If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself I would do it. Why not?” If this quote is accurate, then Ken must disassociate himself from Tamimi and accept no help from his organisation.
Gordon Brown’s visit to the USA shows that his team really has developed the reverse Midas touch. The Embassy has secured meetings with all three presidential candidates and on home turf to boot, an impressive demonstration of diplomatic clout that few countries—if any—could match. But by arriving at the same time as the Pope, the Prime Minister has guaranteed that he’ll be over-shadowed. (Tomorrow’s US front pages are going to be dominated by pictures of the Pope blowing out the candles on his birthday cake at the White House). As Pete notes, Brown’s Wall Street Journal op-ed is hardly likely to make any American mist up—as Tony Blair’s speeches so
The total lack of interest surrounding Gordon Brown’s visit to the United States is a testament to how shamefully detached from the Iraq project Britain now is. Back in the hey-day of the Bush and Blair relationship, the arrival of the British Prime Minister the week after Congress had held hearings on Iraq and the President had outlined his strategy for the next few months would have been a major event. But now it is little more than a footnote—Brown makes page A12 of The Washington Post while The New York Times does not deem his landing worthy of even one column inch. In the highest reaches of the Brown
The idea is for Brown to take America by storm – to reinvigorate the special relationship, and all that. However, it’s not started well. Our Prime Minister’s had a few transportation issues, and the Pope’s stolen his thunder in a major way. And today – just to confirm that he’s no natural statesman – Brown writes a painfully dull article in the Wall Street Journal. It reads like the appendix to one of his Budgets – a six-step plan to a “renewed and extended” relationship between the UK and US. Here are some of those steps: “First, I am proposing moving cooperation between our universities at a far higher level… Fourth, building on