Politics

I’m normally fairly sceptical about the value of celebrity endorsements. I can’t imagine that if, say, Frank Lampard urged people to vote Tory at the next election it would make much of a difference. But the exception to this rule is Oprah Winfrey, the American chat show host who is going out to stump for Barack Obama this weekend. She’s already filled an 80,000 seat football stadium in South Carolina for the campaign and she’s enabling Obama to reach voters he otherwise wouldn’t.  To get a handle on just how much Oprah matters to her fans and how much influence she could have on the race consider these two statistics:  “A

If I was Gordon Brown, one of the things that would worry me most is how much more relaxed Labour figure are becoming about expressing unhelpful thoughts. Just today we have Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former chief strategic adviser, telling The Guardian that the Brownite handling of donor-gate has been “inept” and that it’s “too early to say that the position for the government is terminal” and a minister who was dropped when Brown came to office confiding to a Sky journalist that he thinks the government is a ‘disaster.’ There’s also pressure on Brown from the opposite end of Labour’s ideological spectrum. This week’s New Statesman cover is a

Tony Blair recently complained of how in Britain people think of politicians as nuts if they talk about God. But Blair was a lot better off than Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts who is running for the Republican presidential nomination. Tomorrow, Romney is delivering a speech which could be entitled why a Mormon can be president too. The polls show that Romney’s Mormonism is a serious electoral problem for him with as more than one in four voters saying they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon candidate in some polls. To compound Romney’s problem his main rival in the must-win for him Iowa caucuses is Mick Huckabee a Baptist

One inevitable consequence of donor-gate is that Labour will find it even more difficult to raise money. If things were hard after the whole ‘cash for honours business’, just imagine how much worse it will be now. For a party, that’s £20,178,392 in debt this is a serious problem. Guido, though, has found a silver lining for the Labour bean-counters. As all the deputy leadership candidates were required to give 15 percent of all money raised to the Labour party, Peter Hain will now presumably have to write Labour a cheque for 15 percent of his unregistered donations. Does this mean, though, that Harriet Harman’s indebted campaign can get a rebate for

The monthly Cameron press conference is far more congenial than Brown’s. Coffee is offered at the door, together with biscuits made by the chef in downstairs kitchen. But for all that, it’s quite thinly attended and short (30 mins). Cameron called every journalist in the room by their first name, being utterly at ease. I guess one of the purposes of these briefings will be to strike a contrast with Brown, who only knows a handful of journalists.. Cameron had an entrée for us. He announced, statesman-style, that he’d just spoken to Sayeeda Warsi in Sudan and could confirm the pardon of Gillian Gibbons. No one cared. All questions were

Last week events drew forth plenty of “worst week ever” headlines in the Sunday papers. But there is reason to think that this week could be even worse for Gordon Brown. First, there’s the situation in Scotland where Wendy Alexander’s position looks increasingly untenable. Second, there is the fact that David Abrahams has no intention of going quietly—articles in the Guardian on Saturday and the Independent on Sunday are hardly suggestive of a man trying to keep his head down. While his comments about who knew about how he was funding the party have been phenomenally damaging. Third, the question of who in the Labour party knew about how Abrahams