Politics

If anyone wants to know how rattled Downing Street is by the hammering that Gordon Brown now regularly receives at Prime Ministers Questions they should read this story in The Sunday Times. It reveals that civil servants are being instructed to spend more time thinking about what topics might come up at PMQs and to find ‘good third-party endorsements’ for government policies including from opposition politicians. It is true that PMQs isn’t the be and end all of politics—if it was Prime Minister Hague would be riding high in the polls—but it does help determine the mood at Westminster. Today’s poll which shows Labour marginally ahead of the Tories isn’t seen as

David Cameron’s speech in Berlin today on foreign policy advocated a cautious, liberal conservative approach to foreign policy. It is very different, at least in tone, from the foreign policy vision that he set out when running for leader.  The sound bite from today’s speech is ‘national security first.’ Leaving aside the unpleasant historical associations that the phrase has, it is so intellectually outdated as to be meaningless. We can’t have national security—even in the very narrowest sense of the word—in this country, while foreign-funded religious institutions try to convert young British Muslims to a perverted form of faith that sees opposition to the British state as a religious duty and British

I’m normally slightly sceptical of the value of Early Day Motions; too few of them justify the £627,000 that they cost the taxpayer in 2005/6. But one put down today by Paul Goodman and Michael Gove, two of the most decent men in the House, makes an important statement: “This House, recognising that freedom of speech within the law and freedom from violence and intimidation are indispensable preconditions of a free society, deeply regrets the decision of the Dutch Parliament and Government to withdraw protection abroad from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author, film-maker and former politician, and urges both bodies to reverse this decision forthwith.” Personally, I don’t agree with

When Gordon Brown first announced the outsiders he had recruited to his ‘ministry of all the talents’ there was much chuckling in Westminster about whether Digby Jones or Mark Malloch Brown would be the first minister to be sacked. Early on, Malloch Brown moved into pole position with an insufferably pompous interview in the Telegraph that caused Brown all sorts of problems in Washington and led to a public slapping down of the over-mighty junior by his boss David Miliband. But now Comrade Digby must be the bookie’s favourite. Digby’s unhappiness over the changes to capital gains tax announced in the pre-Budget report has not exactly been a state secret.