All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
David Lidington’s letter to Conservative Party members on ‘reform in Europe’ tells us not very much about almost nothing at all. It is measured, upbeat and polite, but that is the essential optimism and generous disposition of the man himself. The only interesting glimpse it offered into current thinking was confirmation of his ignorance of
Where were you when the world remembered Nelson Mandela? David Cameron, Barack Obama and Helle Thorning Schmidt will always be able to answer that question with their memorial service selfie, snapped in the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg today. Michelle Obama seemed oddly reluctant to join in.
Those tortured souls who study the Kremlinology of Westminster think-tanks had some rare excitement last night. Out went Matthew Sinclair as the Chief Executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance (TPA), the tax cutting campaigners, and up stepped Jonathan Isaby, once of the Telegraph and ConservativeHome, to replace him. Isaby was political director at the TPA. John O’Connell,
Universal Credit has replaced Labour’s NHS supercomputer as the ABC of how not to manage an IT project. Just six months after the hip Government Data Service outpost was brought in to take over enhance the project, they’ve been pushed aside. According to the Cabinet Office,’a team within DWP will now take the digital solution forward’—
The Prime Minister is interviewed by Fraser Nelson in the Christmas treble issue of The Spectator, out on Thursday. After dutifully answering questions on tax, China and welfare he cut to the chase: at a time when the nation is divided between those backing Charles Saatchi and those backing his ex-wife, what’s David Cameron’s position?
The enemies of school reform have something of a champion in Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg. In a recent comment piece for the Guardian, he discusses his self-invented bogeyman, the ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ with the evil-sounding acronym ‘GERM’. GERM has failed, he says. In his story, choice, competition, and accountability have spread like a virus around
There were two key lessons from Treasury Questions today. The first is about Labour’s post-autumn statement line of attack. We already knew from Ed Balls’ briefing last Thursday that he feels cost of living is still a valid debate for the next year, while ministers want to talk about credibility and the need for a
A sneak preview from The Spectator’s bumper Christmas issue, out this Thursday… It’s 9.30 a.m. on a Friday and David Cameron is about to head for his Oxfordshire constituency and work from home. This is precisely the habit that his Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is trying to beat out of the civil service, but
Reading the obituaries last Friday, one was left with impression that Nelson Mandela’s only flaws were fastidiousness and a tendency to flirt with every pretty girl he met. Otherwise, he was exemplary in every respect, and of course a human right activist in the exactly the sense that Western liberals find winsome and cuddly. ‘Flawless,’
If you’d judged the success of universal credit purely on Iain Duncan Smith’s tone at the Work and Pensions select committee this afternoon, you might conclude that things weren’t going very well at all. IDS was in a fabulously grumpy mood this morning on the Today programme, muttering about the presenters trying to find fault,
Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren’t any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn
Remember that shopping list of EU reforms that Conservative party members sent ministers in the summer? Well, they’ve finally got a reply. I’ve got hold of a letter to members from Europe Minister David Lidington, which answers some of their concerns and gives us an interesting glimpse into where Conservative party thinking currently stands on
These are troubled times for Princess Michael of Kent. Austerity has hit Kensington Palace. ‘We’ve cut back dramatically,’ she tells the Times. ‘I mean we never go out to dinner unless we go to somebody’s house. We never go to restaurants. That’s too extravagant.’ It sounds just ghastly. And, I regret to say, that the princess
After the Mail on Sunday’s awkward front page about Ukip Councillor Victoria Ayling’s apparently unsavoury views, Nigel Farage has sent an email around to party members complaining about the story and reassuring them that Ayling’s views have been distorted. Here is the text of the email: ‘I am sure many of you are aware of
All three party leaders paid eloquent tribute to Nelson Mandela in the Commons. But by far the most powerful speech came from Gordon Brown. His speech, which combined wit with a string of serious points, was a reminder of the qualities that made many in the Labour party prepared to overlook his flaws. Brown, the
When George Osborne paid tribute to the ‘march of the makers’ in his 2011 Budget, few thought the Chancellor was secretly plotting to join the march himself. But as part of his tour of #hardworkingpeople, Osborne hasn’t just been pointing at things, like normal politicians: he’s been making things too. Today he made a cake:
What’s happening? The rage continues today in advance of Ipsa’s expected recommendation that MPs should get a 11 per cent pay rise to take their pay to £74,000 in the next Parliament. This follows a consultation paper Ipsa released in July, with five key recommendations: Increasing MPs’ basic pay, and then linking their salaries to
It’s a bit pointless asking whether the Prime Minister has confidence in Iain Duncan Smith, so this morning his spokesman was asked a slightly different question: why does the Prime Minister have confidence in Iain Duncan Smith? The spokesman replied: ‘Because the Secretary of State is leading this very important programme of welfare reform, which
Good luck to Trenton Oldfield, his wife Deepa Naik and their newborn baby today: it’s Oldfield’s day of judgement. He will find out if he is to be kicked out of the country, as Theresa May apparently wants. The tribunal hearing is at 1400. Oldfield, if you remember, disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a couple
This week’s Mail on Sunday carried two stories on the same page about immigration. Perhaps unwittingly the two stories — and one man in particular — demonstrate the craziness of this country’s immigration debate. One story was about a Conservative party candidate at the 2010 election who has defected to UKIP. Her ex-husband has released a
Iain Duncan Smith is up before the Work and Pensions Committee this afternoon to talk about his department’s annual report. Doubtless the latest bad news on universal credit will crop up, which is a line in the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook which says there will only be a handful of claimants on universal credit
Generally when someone says they ‘couldn’t give a toss’ about something, you can safely bet more than 50p and a cake that it’s the most important thing ever to them. So when Ed Balls told Sky’s Murnaghan programme today that he ‘couldn’t give a toss’ about speculation that Ed Miliband might move him, it meant
At the beginning of the autumn, strategists from all three parties assumed that the theme of the season would be Labour’s poll lead narrowing as the economic recovery picked up pace. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, Labour’s lead has remained and its own poll numbers have actually ticked up. This is, largely, thanks to Ed
In Whitehall, there is a phrase for the entity which would be left if Scotland were to vote Yes to independence next year. The acronym is rUK, which stands for ‘the rest of the United Kingdom’. This device of referring to a country’s altered state in its name has a precedent. After Macedonia broke away
Vince Cable is surely right in his comments yesterday that the most likely scenario for Britain leaving the EU is if Ed Miliband is Prime Minister after the next election. The theory, that you hear a lot in Westminster, goes like this: Miliband is forced by public opinion into promising a referendum on EU membership,
Spectator literary competition No. 2829 Peter Porter called Hull ‘the most poetic city in England’ but would Philip Larkin have agreed? What would he have made of his adopted home city being named 2017’s City of Culture? Answers, please, in verse of up to 16 lines, to be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1
Ed Balls didn’t have a good day yesterday with his poor Autumn Statement performance, but he’s had a slightly better day today, with an analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that confirms families will be ‘substantially’ worse off in 2015/16 than they were in 2009/10. Balls wants to keep talking about the cost of
Mr Steerpike was among the throng that gathered at the East India Club on Thursday night to hear about the development of the Margaret Thatcher Centre, the project to perpetuate the legacy of Britain’s greatest post-war leader. Donal Blaney, the Thatcher Centre’s CEO, and Conor Burns MP invited the Lady’s ‘most fervent supporters’ to pledge
Yesterday’s autumn statement included the results of the Treasury’s study of the dynamic impacts of the cuts to Corporation Tax, which George Osborne is down from 28 per cent to 20 per cent. This study used the new HMRC Computable General Equilibrium model – as Fraser reported on Wednesday – and the results are impressive.
Boris Johnson’s Margaret Thatcher Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies attracted attention for its remarks about IQ, but the media ignored its central thesis. The speech is against equality, eloquently so. I date the mental collapse of the Conservatives from the moment in 1995 when Labour’s newish leader, Tony Blair, jumped up in Parliament
What with Britain’s dreadful performance in the PISA educational rankings, there has been comparatively little attention given to another international league table– Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. The good news is that Bulgaria and Romania, with whom we will become much more intimate next month, are already in the EU’s top 5 for corruption, placed
Chris Leslie popped up on the Daily Politics today to complain about the way Ed Balls was received in the Chamber when he responded to the Autumn Statement. Asked why Balls made such a horlicks of yesterday’s performance, Leslie said: ‘Well, there are plenty of Conservatives who would like to say that, in fact there
Sometimes when a significant public figure dies, even, perhaps especially, when that death comes as no surprise and may, indeed, be considered some form of release there is a natural tendency to wonder if the blanket media coverage that invariably follows is altogether appropriate or even seemly. Is it not all too much? A man
Look; I’m sorry Nelson Mandela is dead. It happens quite often to people in their 90s who have been very ill, even famous people, but I’m sure that doesn’t lessen the sadness for many of us. I never met the man but, on balance, I came to the conclusion that he was a force for
