At a coffee stall inside Lord’s cricket ground on Monday, two customers bumped into each other with a start. Alastair Campbell and Boris Johnson have not met since No. 10 Downing Street took this magazine to the Press Complaints Commission for exposing Tony Blair’s attempts to interfere with the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state, but that subject
The language of priorities is the religion of socialism, said Nye Bevan. In fact, the setting of priorities is the basis of all practical politics. This is one of many reasons that David Cameron’s speech on social justice and crime this week was his worst error to date. It suggested — to an alarming extent
One day at the Commons recently, just before Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron found himself in the gents next to Gordon Brown. The two said a brief hello and then silence fell. As Mr Brown left, he said to the Conservative leader over his shoulder: ‘Good luck’. What struck me — beyond the mischievous interpretation
Any relationship, ‘special’ or otherwise, depends upon clarity, fairness and reciprocity. The US–UK extradition treaty signed in March 2003, ratified in this country the following year, boasts none of those features. As a consequence, three British businessmen — David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew, and Giles Darby — face imminent extradition from this country to Texas over
David Cameron had hoped to travel to Prague in secret last week. News that he had entered the final stages of negotiations with his Czech counterparts over the Tories’ future in the European Parliament would only increase expectation of the deal which has eluded him for the last seven months, and heighten the derision if
When Tony Blair campaigned for the rewriting of Clause 4, his mantra was that Labour ‘must mean what we say, and say what we mean’. The symbol of this supposed new transparency was the ‘pledge card’: my word is my bond, Mr Blair declared to anyone who would listen. It is worth remembering such claims
After seven weeks of plotting, Charles Clarke could at least have delivered his punchline correctly. He declared to the BBC that as home secretary he had been ‘tough but populist, I beg your pardon, tough but not populist’. He attacked Tony Blair for losing ‘purpose and direction’ but said the Prime Minister should nonetheless stay
John Reid declared last week that his ‘starting point’ on convicted paedophiles was ‘that information [related to their whereabouts] should no longer remain the exclusive preserve of officialdom’. For daring to make this perfectly reasonable comment — and sending one of his ministers to America to investigate the procedures used there — the Home Secretary
David Cameron has so far baited Gordon Brown with the confidence of a schoolboy teasing a roped guard dog. The Chancellor has wanted to unleash himself on his opponent from the outset, but was restrained by No. 10 Downing Street on the basis that such attacks would be a waste of energy during the new
After the initial horror — 9/11, Madrid, 7 July The purpose of terrorism is not only to cause bloodshed, but also to spray psychological shrapnel across the societies it attacks and seeks to subvert. After the initial horror — 9/11, Madrid, 7 July — the strategic objective is to force democracies, in their rage and panic, to
Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle in the dying days of Tony Blair’s time in No. 10 Downing Street has been the way in which he has joined protests and campaigns as if, somehow, he were not running the country. Last month, he signed a petition effectively demanding that the Prime Minister — that Mr Blair
The emergency water-rationing measures now affecting 13 million people across the south-east have rekindled memories of the last serious drought to afflict the country, in 1976. Britain in many ways is an unrecognisable country from the Britain of 30 years ago, when scraggy figures in flared trousers queued up at the standpipes. But one thing
After more than a decade of intellectual struggle, the Conservatives have finally made a political breakthrough over the National Health Service. Last month, when a thousand people were asked which party was ‘putting forward the best health policy’, the Tories finally claimed a lead. Men favoured the plan more than women, and even 8 per
John Prescott has always claimed to be one of the unacknowledged founders of New Labour. It is certainly true that he took an early lead in modernising the party’s structure, championing the Private Finance Initiative and the coining of slogans: ‘traditional values in a modern setting’ came from the Prescott camp, not the restaurants of
Alan Johnson is the Labour leader that Cameron’s Conservatives fear I got the shock of my life the other day. Recording a programme called What Is Right? for Radio Four, Norman Tebbit, that pitiless scourge of touchy-feely tree-hugging modernisers, went out of his way to agree with what I had said. Three times. It was
It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen as ‘cruel but competent’ It was once enough for the Conservative party to be seen, in Maurice Saatchi’s phrase, as ‘cruel but competent’. Lord Saatchi was among the first to warn, however, that this formula has had its day. Black Wednesday robbed the Tories
The Hinduja scandal is the closest the Labour party has to radioactive waste. Though officially buried five years ago, it remains lethal: the Indian billionaires had involved so many powerful people in their quest for British passports that the scandal threatened to engulf the whole government. In the event Peter Mandelson was — conveniently for
Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. After nine years in office, this was a terrible admission —
When the last Conservative government sacrificed its reputation for competence, it was at least for a worthy cause. On Black Wednesday, British monetary policy was rescued from what was to become the eurozone after John Major’s government lost a shambolic battle with currency speculators. It was a day of ignominious political defeat. But on that
The Prime Minister launched an initiative this week to promote longevity with the aid of a few well-chosen lifestyle adjustments. Mr Blair will, apparently, consume more water with his one real vice — drinking too much tea and coffee — and walk up stairs instead of taking the lift. If only his political staying power,