By conventional wisdom, Tony Abbott should not become Prime Minister of Australia this weekend. He ought to be too conservative, a throwback to a bygone age. He is sceptical about global warming, and proposed to abolish a carbon tax on the grounds of its expense and uselessness. He is a churchgoer who is against abortion
There is something deeply disturbing about switching on the television and finding Jack Straw talking about the need to take military action against a Ba’athist dictator who is using weapons of mass destruction against his own people. Tony Blair has also popped up to urge moral purpose. And all this before the UN weapons inspectors
Upon taking office, David Cameron promised himself that he would resist the temptation to sack ministers in response to every scandal. He would have a major reshuffle halfway through his government and another one before the election. That would be all. He is now understood to be weeks away from deciding who should go where,
It is good to see the Guardian suddenly rediscover its interest in the sanctity of a free press. Just five months ago, the paper seemed to have given up on the idea, when it backed the statutory regulation of newspapers. It did not show any particular alarm when Rupert Murdoch’s journalists were hauled out of
We would not want to return to the days when the transport secretary was actively engaged in the running of the railways, down to what the last wheel-tapper was paid. Nevertheless, Patrick McLoughlin’s answer when invited to condemn the £5 million bonuses which could be on offer to Network Rail directors over the next three
When spending money is declared to be a good in itself, it is certain that much of it will be wasted. If that was not obvious already, it was proven by experiment when Gordon Brown announced 13 years ago that he wished to increase healthcare spending in Britain to the European average without much of
David Howell never really succeeded as energy and then transport secretary in Mrs Thatcher’s governments. After she sacked him in 1983, Thatcher wrote that ‘he lacked the mixture of creative political imagination and practical drive to be a first-class cabinet minister’. If she were still alive and writing now, she might have added that he
It is not quite clear what Google did to David Cameron, but the Prime Minister seems to be exacting some sort of revenge. First, he wanted them to keep records of their customers’ emails just in case his officials wanted to snoop later. Now he wants the British government to be the first in the
According to popular wisdom on the left — and even among some in the Conservative party — this ought to have been a tough week for the government. On Monday, the new £26,000 cap on benefits came into effect and with it a new principle: that no one on welfare should receive more than the average working
Ed Miliband’s relationship with Len McCluskey was defined in a brief camera shot at the Labour party conference in 2010. After praising trade unions, Miliband added that he would have no patience with ‘waves of irresponsible strikes’. Several rows back, McCluskey, who three days earlier had helped Ed defeat his brother David in the leadership
Democracy and holding elections are not the same thing. There could be no better demonstration of this than the experience of Egypt. Protesters who two years ago gathered in Cairo to force a dictator out of office, and to win the right to replace him with an elected governmentS, are back — this time to
The Labour party used to joke that the Tories would act as their cleaners: win, take the political pain, abolish the deficit by 2015 and then hand over a balanced budget when they lost the election. George Osborne has, at the very least, put paid to that. His Spending Review this week made it clear
It’s not just soldiers who risk their lives in Afghanistan. Anyone who enters the country’s judicial service becomes an assassination target. Only last week, six Afghan judges were killed by a suicide bomb outside Kabul’s Supreme Court. A Taleban spokesman said they had been ‘sentenced to death’ for playing an ‘important role’ in ‘legalising the
This week’s exposé of the US National Security Agency has been heralded as the greatest intelligence leak since the Pentagon Papers. It is nothing of the sort. Far from revealing some institutional outrage, the whistleblower Edward Snowden merely appears to have found what any low-level intelligence source might find. Intelligence agencies try to find things
There can be little doubt that Britain is edging towards intervening in Syria. President Bashar Assad’s bloody ruthlessness seems to be paying off: his forces are retaking former rebel strongholds (the strategic town of Qusair was reclaimed this week) and the more he believes he can win, the less likely he is to negotiate. From
As ministers trooped one by one into George Osborne’s office last week for negotiations over the Spending Review, most looked pretty grim, steeling themselves against news of cuts to come. But three more cheerful figures stood out: the Secretaries of State for Health, Education and International Development. Their budgets, which between them account for more
Anyone who googled ‘tax avoidance’ this week will have been confronted (between adverts for accountancy firms) with endless stories about Google’s own tax avoidance schemes. If the company’s reputational management team was striving to stem the flood of bad publicity, it was not succeeding. Salvation for -Google arrived only when Apple’s tax avoidance became the
David Cameron, it has been argued this week, has become detached from the views of Conservative voters on Europe. Amid the noise on the EU referendum, however, comes more evidence that it is Ed Miliband who has the greater problem of detachment from the views of his party’s supporters. While the Labour leader continues to
Lord Lawson’s announcement that he intends to vote for Britain to leave the European Union has been interpreted by some as reinforcing demands that David Cameron holds his referendum this year or next, rather than 2017. But it does no such thing. Follow Lawson’s arguments and the logical conclusion is that the best chance of
The press, declared Lord Leveson, must not be allowed to mark its own homework. There is one profession, however, which the government seems quite happy to allow to judge its own success. Every few months we are presented with the latest set of crime statistics and invited to believe that crime is falling, clear-up rates
