All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The Iraq Inquiry had been conspicuously silent, but now John Chilcot’s team has called Tony Blair to give evidence again. It’s expected that our former PM will make the trip to the Queen Elizabeth II centre early next year. That would push the expected deadline for the inquiry’s work finishing – at the end of
The financial services industry in the UK is at a crucial juncture. Our new research report “Not with a Bang but a Whimper” – published tomorrow – highlights the decline in the UK’s competitiveness as a domicile for this sector, and the increasing likelihood that both companies and workers will take the leap and choose
The Big Society never really went away as a theme, but it certainly became a less insistent catchphrase after the general election. The Tories were no doubt stung by the ambiguous response their invitation to government, and felt that the early days of coalition government were not an opportune moment to reheat their central election
At last Wednesday’s PMQs Cameron kicked Ed Miliband into touch with a debonair swagger. Today anger replaced disdain. The PM’s eye-popping rage is so palpable that some commentators take it for vulnerability or even a hint of self-doubt. Milband has Cameron rattled? Nothing of the sort. Cameron just can’t control himself. Asked about the
After last week’s PMQs, Ed Miliband needed a clear win today—and he got one. Cameron, who had admittedly just flown back from Afghanistan, didn’t seem on top of the whole tuition fees debate and kept using lines that invited Labour to ridicule the Lib Dems. When Cameron tried to put Miliband down with the line,
VERDICT: Tuition fees, tuition fees, tuition fees. Ed Miliband used only one weapon from his armoury today – but it served him unexpectedly well. The Labour leader scraped a contest that, as usual, offered far more heat than light. His attacks were slightly more cutting, his one-liners that little bit more memorable, and it was
It may not be The Sun wot won or lost the last election, but its readers did swing heavily from Labour to the Tories and, even, to the Lib Dems. Which is why No.10 will not be untroubled by the paper’s cover today. “Get out of jail free,” it blasts, marking what Tim Montgomerie calls
Oh look, Alan Johnson has performed a hasty Reverse Cable. Only a few days ago, the Shadow Chancellor suggested that he didn’t believe a graduate tax – Ed Miliband’s chosen policy – could work. Yet, in a wilting Thunderer column (£) for the Times today, he now claims that “there is a very strong case
Whaddyaknow, Wikileaks have some Lockerbie-related cables? Unfortunately they’re only about the release of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and so less interesting – or perhaps simply less illuminating – than Lockerbie-related cables from the investigation and trial years might be. The Guardian’s headline is typically tendentious: Lockerbie bomber freed after Gaddafi’s ‘thuggish’ threats. This is true in
Comparing GCSE or A-Level results to previous years is a meaningless exercise. Leaving aside all the arguments about whether or not these exams are getting easier, it doesn’t much matter if children today are doing better academically than their peers a generation ago. What does matter is how they are doing in comparison to children
That’s the question asked by David Lammy and the Guardian today. According to the paper 21 Oxford and Cambridge colleges made no offers to black, British students last year. At Oxford just one student of self-described “Black Caribbean” background won a place. Only 35 applied. The headline figures are pretty terrible and enough to give
The wait is over. We have just been told that Nick Clegg will definitely vote for the coalition’s policy on tuition fees. Clegg announced this, according to his spokeswoman, at the meeting of the Lib Dem parliamentary party that is currently going on. He told the meeting that to govern is to choose, and that
I would be taking high-mindedness too far if I were to say that the press is missing the real point of the Mike Hancock story. I cannot blame editors for falling to their knees and thanking whatever gods there may be for giving them the tale of how a bearded old man hired a gorgeous
I thought that CoffeeHousers might appreciate a few graphs to steer them around the prisons debate. It’s by no means a complete overview of the issue, but just three of the trends that hover over Ken Clarke’s proposals: 1. Rising prison population, falling crime Well, that’s striking enough. Expect, as any fule know, correlation doesn’t
So, little blogging here. Partly because, even more so than usual, I’ve been living on Australian time these past few days. I’ve a quick piece up at Critical Reaction on the Adelaide Massacre: Never mind ‘Were you up for Portillo?’ Were you up for Adelaide? An entire generation of England supporters have waited all their lives
The Adam Smith Institute kindly asked me to speak at their Christmas reception last night, and yesterday I was mulling what to say. When at The Scotsman ten years ago, I would sometimes visit the great man’s grave in Edinburgh, and be surprised to see only Chinese tourists paying tribute. It was a pretty good
Iain Dale has news of a remarkable exchange between the Speaker and the Chief Whip last night (see from 22:16:30 in the video above). The coalition were attempting to pass a motion limiting the debate on tuition fees to three hours. Labour was trying to prevent this. The Labour front bench shouted ‘object’ at
Where are we with the tuition fee rebellion? Nick Clegg has an article in the FT claiming that the coalition’s policy is fairness codified, but he is running out of time to persuade his own MPs either way. Barring various unlikelihoods, the crunch vote will be held on Thursday. Before then, a handful of PPSs
Have to say, I’m getting a little weary of watching Ken Clarke smirking at various bunches of skaghead offenders and telling them he wants them out of prison, pronto, so that they can stab your wife and crap on your living room carpet. The latest of Ken’s media events inside a nick involved him hearing
While Nick Clegg battles on the tuition fee front, another internal conflict breaks out for the coalition today: prisons. And rather than yellow-on-yellow, this one is strictly blue-on-blue. On one side, you’ve got Ken Clarke, who is controversially proposing a raft of measures for reducing the prison population. On the other, Tory figures like Michael
You can’t trust traitors, any of them. And some of us have long memories. Mike Hancock was once a Labour MP but defected, along with a bunch of other opportunistic monkeys, to the SDP. He is now a Liberal Democrat. It is Mike who hired a young, leggy, blonde Russian babe as a parliamentary researcher,
Now, there’s a Tory rebel too. David Davis has told the BBC that he’ll be voting against the coalition at the end of Thursday’s fees debate. Those Lib Dems who do vote for tuition fees can now expect to be mocked as being to the right of David Davis. So far, there’s no sign of
Now the Wikileaks are beginning to become dangerous. Before, the leaks contained high-level tittle-tattle, confirmation of existing analyses and embarrassingly accurate portraits of world leaders. I still thought it wrong to regurgitate this data, as it will lead to more secrecy, bilateral problems and potentially even conflicts – the things that Julian Assange claims he
You really couldn’t make this up: it wasn’t Michael Moore’s PPS who was on the World at One resigning but someone impersonating him. The actual PPS, Michael Crockart, is still trying to make up his mind. I suggest that he doesn’t try and call in to a radio show to announce his decision. (Who would
Welcome to the latest CoffeeHousers’ Wall. For those who haven’t come across the Wall before, it’s a post we put up each Monday, on which – providing your writing isn’t libellous, crammed with swearing, or offensive to common decency – you’ll be able to say whatever you like in the comments section. There is no
Here in Westminster we are all brushing up on the names of Lib Dem PPSs, as we try and work out who might quit the payroll vote over fees. The latest is that Michael Crockart, PPS to Michael Moore – who is himself the most anonymous Lib Dem Cabinet minister – looks set to walk.
Isolationist sentiment seems to be on the rise in the United States. At an annual foreign policy event in Halifax in Canada, US Senator Lindsay Graham warned about the risk of an “unholy alliance” developing between the far left and far right that calls for greater US retrenchment from the world – and, potentially, a
…here are some posts made on Spectator.co.uk over the weekend: Fraser Nelson charts the Passion of Nick Clegg. James Forsyth wonders what the Lib Dems will say at the next election, and watches Alan Johnson making Ed Miliband’s life more difficult. Peter Hoskin check on the OBR’s growth forecasts, and tracks the latest confusions in
James Naughtie with some very improper language on the Today Programme this morning. NSFW, and all that. You have been warned:
The rapidly increasing likelihood that the Lib Dem payroll vote will vote to increase the amount that universities can charge in fees to £9,000 is a reminder of how different the next election is going to be. The Lib Dems will not be able to stuff their manifesto with eye-catching but unrealistic commitments designed to
Imagine that the British National Party controls a church and community centre in the East End of London. Imagine that it receives respectful visits from politicians, and grants from local and national government. Imagine that Prince Charles extends his already unhinged beliefs in pseudo-science and homeopathic quackery to include neo-fascist race theory, and signals his
You almost feel sorry for Nick Clegg this week, with the tuition fees vote in prospect. Being hated is difficult for LibDems because they didn’t expect it. Not so with the Tories. As a conservative, you usually realise early on that you’re going to be a small fish swimming against the current of fashionable received
There are only so many Labour interviews a blog can take, so I’ll skip over Yvette Cooper in the Guardian (sample: “I did think about standing, and Ed said he thought I should stand and if I wanted to stand he would not stand”). Instead, another catch-up on how the Office for Budget Responsibility’s growth
Today’s Guardian calls it his first interview since leaving office, although I think the Independent beat them to that one back in July. But, in any case, Gordon Brown’s chat with Larry Elliot is another staging post on his slow path back to public life. Here’s my quick summary: 1) Sniping from the moral high