Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Sunday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s golden error

The price of gold broke $900 an ounce on Friday. So this gives us another chance to reflect on Brown’s calamitous decision to sell British gold reserves at $275 an ounce five years ago. By my calculations his disastrous foray into asset management has cost the British taxpayer £3.1bn so far. Tackled about this on Marr last week, he said he was simply responding to those “asking us to diversify our portfolio of holdings from simply gold to other currencies.” The real, extraordinary story is in this definitive Sunday Times piece from last April.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron’s Sunday best

David Cameron turned in a strong performance on the Andrew Marr show this morning pushing back firmly and effectively against Marr’s suggestion that there was somehow equivalence between Peter Hain and George Osborne’s funding issues. However, as always, the questions about Lord Ashcroft’s status haunt the Tories. The key message that Cameron wanted to communicate was that Brown is a ditherer, he used the word at every available opportunity, and that the Tories have the policy heft to govern. He was generally effective but he still seems slightly unsure of himself when talking about the economy. One has to wonder whether this is why Gordon Brown and Cameron are effectively

Saturday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Overwhelming public support for Tory welfare policies

Fraser wrote the other day about how public attitudes seemed to be moving decisively in favour of welfare reform and new poll numbers,flagged up by Conservative Home, back up this argument.  82% back the new Tory policy that those who have been on unemployment benefits for two years should have to do work in the community if they are to continue receiving benefits.  While more than three quarters of voters, 77%, thinks that unemployed people who live where they do could get work if they really wanted it. It looks like the Tories have a new powerful weapon in their armoury. The key, now, is not to overreach in terms

Matthew Dancona

Clegg steps up

I spent the morning at the LSE, listening to Nick Clegg’s first big speech at Lib Dem leader and then participating in a panel on the issues he had raised. After a scrappy campaign, this was Clegg back to his formidable best. All comparisons with Blair’s Clause Four moment are flawed in one way or another, but this was certainly the moment when the new leader made clear to his party that he intends to take them on and to shake up some of their laziest preconceptions. Try this for size: The last ten years has shown that money isn’t everything. The big questions now are these: how do we

James Forsyth James Forsyth

British politicians should learn from the American primaries: authenticity wins votes

In the British version of the 2008 US election, Gordon Brown is Hillary Clinton: the less talented half of a tempestuous political marriage who attempts to make up for shortcomings with a Stakhanovite work ethic. David Cameron is Barack Obama: the supremely confident speaker who has risen to the top in record time and who is, to his critics, all froth and no latte. Indeed, if successful, Obama’s ascent will have been even more meteoric than Cameron’s (Cameron took just over four and a half years from entering national politics to become party leader). To some, this comparison with British politics is absurd, proof of our infatuation with all things

Alice Thomson

Birth order means more than school or faith

Kirkcaldy High School vs Eton, Highland Scot vs Newbury toff, Edinburgh University vs Oxford. If you are choosing between Gordon Brown and David Cameron that’s what the next election may come down to. Or is there another factor? No one ever mentions birth order. Mr Brown is the classic case. With a younger brother, as well as an older one, he genuinely feels a strong moral duty to do his best for his father (son of the manse as he is) and to compete with his elder brother, who preceded him to Edinburgh University. He wants order and precision, he is conscientious and hard-working, nervous of making decisions and less

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites

What do you give a Prime Minister who wants nothing? The Indian government has been asking itself this for some time, ahead of Gordon Brown’s official visit later this month. The famously frugal Prime Minister would have little interest in any trinket. Presenting him with some casual clothing could be misinterpreted as an impolite sartorial hint. So after much deliberation, Delhi University has been ordered to award Mr Brown an honorary doctorate. The chosen subject: ‘academia and public services’. It is not yet clear whether Mr Brown will accept. The degree might invite unhelpful questions about what, precisely, he has contributed to the theory of public services. True, he stood

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Gordon should learn from Hillary

After Hillary’s remarkable come from behind victory in New Hampshire there have been a lot of jokes about how we can now expect Gordon Brown, and every other ambitious politician, to start choking up in public. Somehow, I can’t see Brown doing this or pulling it off if he tried. However, there is one thing that Brown should learn from Hillary. When her campaign was at its lowest ebb, Hillary embarked on a new strategy of making herself as available as possible. In the last few days in New Hampshire she took questions from the audience, which she hadn’t in Iowa, and allowed the press to talk to her far more

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Hain saga

Ben Brogan has an absolute must read post on this whole business of Peter Hain and the donations. As Ben writes, “For the moment Downing Street’s confidence remains solid, in part because if he goes then so do Harriet Harman and Wendy Alexander. But can Mr Brown, with all his talk of new politics, afford to tolerate having around him quite so many people who claim entitlement to senior public posts while at the same time showing such extraordinary disregard for the basics of electoral law?” Do read the whole thing.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cameron’s real enemy will be the machine

A sound objection to David Cameron’s welfare reform policy is raised today by Richard Littlejohn. Norman Fowler took him out to Washington and Baltimore in the 1980s when he was a Labour Correspondent to show him workfare, and pledged to introduce workfare to Britain. Nothing happened. “If Thatch couldn’t force it through, it’s not going to happen now,” he says today. It’s unclear just how hard Thatch tried – but it’s true that the Cameroon team may underestimate how hard it is to get the civil service to do anything. The drawback of a long period of Opposition is one forgets the frustrations of government – and you enter the

Matthew Dancona

Gordon’s roof

Today’s speech by George Osborne attacking Gordon Brown’s record for economic competence is an important development in the rolling out of Tory strategy. The charge that Gordon is not up to the job is not new, of course, but this is the first time it has been put at the heart of the Conservative attack. The notion that the PM failed to “fix the roof while the sun was shining” will be central to the Cameroon assault on Brown’s credibility. How things change. A year ago, the worry among thoughtful Tories was that the election would be a battle between change (Cameron) and competence (Brown): their fear was that, as

Thursday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Premium Politics

Sam Coates, over at his splendid new blog, writes that the Tories have been indulging in some clothes stealing by adopting the Lib Dem idea for a pupil premium for poorer children. I’ve no doubt that Sam is right about what motivated the timing of the announcement, but it is my understanding that this has always been part of Tory thinking on the issue. James O’Shaughnessy, the Tory head of policy, was an enthusiastic advocate of such a scheme when he was at Policy Exchange and Michael Gove has long been supportive of the idea.  As Comment Central points out, the Tories haven’t yet explained how large the premium would

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown goes nuclear, repeatedly

Is Gordon Brown running for the world record on the number of times a story is announced? His “revelation” that Britain will continue with nuclear power is something this government announces almost on a quarterly basis, to show how it is taking tough decisions. No serious policy analyst ever thought Britain would go nuclear-free – and ministers would say so in private, promoting various stories over the years. Blair started to detail the agreement in private briefings around the 2005 Labour conference – which I wrote up in October 2005. A cursory cuts check shows this story in The Times in both November of that year and May 2006 and

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown does a Hillary (again) – and fights back

An angrier Brown was in front of us today, holding handwritten notes for his exchanges with Cameron rather than anything given to him by No10. He would scribble furiously, and went on the offensive – asking Cameron whether he supports ID cards for foreign nationals. It seemed a bit daft at PMQs to hear the PM ask questions of the Opposition leader so often, but it won’t be repeated on TV and he needs to show the House he is on the attack. Cameron appeared to say yes, but it wasn’t clear. Those normally ashen Labour faces lit up.   Brown again brought up Cameron’s role “as the principal adviser

James Forsyth James Forsyth

McCain’s first step to the nomination

John McCain’s commanding win here makes him, remarkably for a candidate who was written off for dead last summer, the favourite to be the Republican nominee in November. To be sure, he still has obstacles to come most notably his difference with the Republican base on immigration and the distrust that some of the more conservative sections of the party feel for him. But he now has the momentum to win Michigan, which would finish Romney off, and once has done that he is left facing Mike Huckabee and Giuliani who have their own more serious issues with sections of the Republican party. The victory speech McCain delivered tonight was

Allister Heath

The economy in 2008: chilly showers but no hailstorms

Allister Heath forecasts that Britain’s economy will suffer less than America’s, but that homeowners and consumers will still feel the pain — and blame it on Gordon Brown First, the good news: there will be no recession next year in Britain. But while avoiding ‘the Big R’ will be some cause for celebration, the overall outlook for 2008 remains bleak. The economy will not shrink but it won’t grow by much either. And there will be plenty of pain to go round. House prices will fall noticeably, which means that most members of the property-owning majority will become poorer — the first drop in wealth levels in more than a

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Gordon and Alistair show

It was the Gordon and Alistair show today, rather than the Brown press conference. And Darling did far more than the intro. He jumped into answer questions, with his message – that HMS Britain was built by Labour to weather a world economic storm. He detailed meetings with world leaders, as if to try and hammer home his point that innocent Britain is caught in a world economic problem, not our fault guv, etc. Anyway, here are five thoughts on each of them… DARLING 1) “Right across the world, this will be a difficult year”. But few face a UK-style slowdown. The average OECD economy grew by 2.7% last year

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The truth behind inflation

Is Brown right on inflation? TGF UKIP appeals for help: is it correct to say as he did in the Observer and on Marr that inflation is 4% in America, 3% in Eurozone and 2% in Britain?  I was thinking of Fisking the interview – but soon worked out it would be longer than the transcript. And perhaps Brown’s statistics are not supposed to be taken literally, like John Prebble’s books or the EU’s accounts. But for those who care, here’s the story on inflation.   It jerks around a lot, and Brown is lucky to have Britain in a dip and America in an upswing last month. The figures

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown’s back – and doing a Hillary

Don’t mention the relaunch! That will be the motto today as Gordon Brown embarks on his, ahem, new year initiative kicking off with a big speech on health . Cameron is ahead of him: he made his health speech last week. Also Brown is off to India and China later this month (or so they say; Brits are the last to be told about their PM’s plans), where Cameron and Osborne made their visit last month. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on Brown’s 8.10am Today interview. 1) Health Personalisation of NHS service, he said, will provide the “doctor you want, time you want, hospital you want”. More than 25