Monday This Aitken business is all v confusing. Has led to heated debates about some extremely odd-sounding things that happened ten years ago. I thought Mr Blair invented ‘sleaze’! But it seems there were all sorts of shocking goings-on in the 1990s under poor Mr Major. Poppy knows all about them, of course, and thinks
Gordon Brown managed to keep a straight face last month when he claimed that he was abandoning plans for a snap election because he needed time to spell out his ‘vision for change’. The rest of the country, it must be said, was laughing at this nonsense, knowing full well that it was polling evidence
It took the Queen only eight minutes to read the speech Gordon Brown’s advisers had prepared for her and even she looked bored by the end of it. The Prime Minister may have waited ten years for this chance to set the parliamentary agenda, but one searches this Queen’s Speech in vain for any sense
Monday Whisked to Oxfordshire with Jed and Wonky Tom as part of Queen’s Speech preparation team! Spent whole day in outer inner sanctum!! Dave was in kitchen with his River Cottage apron on making slow-roast organic pork sandwiches when we arrived. If only people could see him like this, we would definitely win the next
When Nigel Lawson was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he liked to say that the problem with tax simplification was that you always end up complicating tax, too. The same is true of much constitutional reform: any attempt to remove an anomaly will often create another. New Labour’s devolution experiment responded to the desire of the
Monday Dear me! How are we supposed to have a grown up argument about immigration when silly Lithuanian ambassadors can’t see the funny side of a little joke about one-legged dance troupes? If you ask me, people with names that look like the last line of the optician’s testing chart shouldn’t be allowed to start
At last somewhere in Europe as filthy and littered as almost the whole of Britain! If we can’t make ourselves better — and of course we won’t, so long as the final purpose of our public service is to employ the people employed by the public service — we can at least rejoice in the
It is almost 40 years since Enoch Powell delivered his notorious speech on immigration to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre on 20 April 1968. ‘As I look ahead,’ said Powell, ‘I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much
Monday Great balls of justiciable fire! If one more person asks me to write a memo about ‘opt-outs’ I will explode. People are talking in fluent Alphabetti Spaghetti. It’s all ‘IGC mandates’ this, and ‘QMV’ that, as if anyone had the faintest clue what they were on about. And what are ‘justiciable rights’ anyway, when
Let us step aside for a moment from the political posturing and horse-trading at the Lisbon EU summit and go back to the beginning. On 20 April 2004, Tony Blair announced to the House of Commons that there would, after all, be a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty. It is important to restate the
The past week has seen history repeating itself, skipping the tragedy and moving straight to farce. Two weeks ago a Scottish MP, tipped from his first days in the Commons as a future leader of his party and hyped for years as his party’s one true statesman, stood exposed as a leader with a reputation
Sunday Bonjour, mes amis! Am in Paris for Compassionate Conservative hen weekend! All the girls from the office are here giving Abby from Dave’s team a Right-Of-Centre-Yet-Modern send-off. Staying in what Poppy describes as a dump, but is actually a boho chic boutique hotel (I checked the brochure). We were going to stay at a
People have only to talk for a short time for it to become obvious that the greatest of human rights is not freedom of opinion, but freedom from opinion. It is a mercy that there are so many languages that one does not understand. While in Venice recently I joined a queue for an exhibition
Rattled, hoarse and angry, Gordon Brown did not look a happy man at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Small wonder: it is only weeks since his clunking fist was pounding the Tories into submission. Now, he has allowed himself to be caricatured as a clucking chicken, as fearful of an election as he is of
Monday What can I say?! Happiness and General Wellbeing levels through roof! Dave is the greatest! We’re definitely going to win in 2009!! But more importantly, I have been seconded on to the Brown Attack Unit! Am at centre of fevered preparations ahead of PMQs involving cut-throat political strategy. So far have come up with
A-bomb or B-movie? Sir: I have no idea whether or not we really came close to WW3 last month, as your correspondents Douglas Davis and James Forsyth insist (‘We came so close’, 6 October), but one line in their exciting piece brings doubts to mind. After ‘secretly’ crossing into Syria (as opposed to coming in
Ten years after New Labour came to power, it is remarkable that the unions can still hold us all to ransom. This issue of The Spectator has gone to press a day earlier than usual, to minimise the risk of disruption to our readers from the threatened postal strike. It is depressing that such precautions
For a party still facing defeat at the next general election, the Conservatives left Blackpool feeling remarkably upbeat. ‘It’s the spirit of Gallipoli,’ said a veteran of William Hague’s election campaign. ‘They’re united against Brown,’ mused one shadow Cabinet member. Neither image is quite right. This was no deluded optimism, no awestruck reaction to David Cameron’s
Sunday Am shattered from lugging huge bag of policies around. Felt like asking Mr Gove what exactly he’d put in his blasted School Reforms, but just about controlled self. Plus, the poor girls working for Gids are having to cope with a Mulberry hold-all each of tax cuts so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Anyway,
When we were students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public