I wonder whether our Prime Minister is historically minded enough to have compared himself lately with Stanley Baldwin? When Mr Blair was told that the Prince of Wales intended to marry Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles, would his first thought have been of what starchy old Stan went through in 1936, when a King of England
The war on terror will be concluded, George W. Bush has suggested, when citizens of the free world no longer live in fear. Everyone, that is, except Britons accused of crimes in America. Last week, three former investment bankers with the NatWest, David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Darby, took the extraordinary step, via a
Watching Labour’s 2005 election campaign unfold, I’m afraid words fail me. The great Democrat governor of New York Mario Cuomo once remarked that ‘we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose’. And even though I struggle to find the language to do justice to Labour’s campaign, one poet does capture their approach perfectly: Rudyard
The Prince of Wales, it is said, employs a manservant for the task of squeezing toothpaste on to the royal toothbrush. The servant cannot have the most demanding of careers, but he is almost certainly providing greater public utility than are many of the state’s bean-counters. Saving money, or rather the attempt to do so,
For a negative interpretation of events in which the rest of the world can see nothing but good, the Guardian’s editorial pages are much to be recommended. Sure enough, on Monday, while millions of Iraqis were waking up with stained fingers to the first day of democratic Iraq and enjoying generous tributes to their courage
Last week the Conservative party unveiled an extremely good policy: to cut government waste to the tune of £35 billion and to pass £4 billion worth of it to the public in tax cuts. This week it unveiled two much less good ones: to set an arbitrary limit on the number of immigrants allowed to
Robert Jackson, the MP for Wantage, has come in for a good deal of abuse, though if anything not enough. Put yourself in the position of those who have worked for a quarter of a century to install Mr Jackson in parliament, so that he can speak in the Conservative interest, and then imagine your
One of the less worthy reasons cited for going to war in Iraq is that it would increase Britain’s influence in the White House. If this was on the Prime Minister’s mind when he ordered British troops into combat, he has proved pathetic at exercising his advantage. Earlier this week the Foreign Secretary announced that
Since 1997, in a cynical effort to prove that it values power for more than its own sake, the Blair government has sought to tear up the constitutional map and impose its own, ‘modernised’, ways of doing things. This has not been uniformly successful. Devolution, for example, has led to financial profligacy in Scotland and
It may seem trivial, when so many thousands lie dead on the shores of the Indian Ocean, but we are now perhaps 14 weeks from a general election, and it is time to consider the apparent — the appalling — success of the Labour government. In circumstances that would be almost fatal to a Tory
Easter comes unusually early this year, on 27 March, which is not quite without political significance. The Prime Minister will probably wait for a few days beyond the festival before announcing the date of the general election, most likely to be held on 5 May. To put it another way, just 16 weeks remain before
It is 12 years since the Queen stood up at dinner and coined the expression annus horribilis to describe the miseries of 1992. She probably didn’t even have in mind the fact that her Chancellor of the Exchequer had just frittered away £5 billion of taxpayers’ money and caused thousands of homeowners to lose their
If anyone needed convincing of the BBC’s pathological self-importance, proof has been provided by the corporation’s news coverage of its own reorganisation. On Tuesday, a day on which back-bench Labour MPs threatened a revolt against David Blunkett’s proposed law against incitement to religious hatred, and Hamid Karzai was inaugurated as Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president,
The universal predicament which confronts the western world at the start of the 21st century concerns the breakdown of boundaries. Philosophers blur the distinction between good and evil; society no longer protects family life; sociologists applaud the collapse of class barriers; globalisation challenges national borders; postmodernism asserts that truth and falsehood are the same. The
There is no prize for predicting the two least exciting political events of 2005: the publication of Sir Alan Budd’s inquiry into David Blunkett’s alleged ‘fast-tracking’ of a visa application for his former lover’s nanny, and the conclusion of Sir Philip Mawer’s investigation into the Home Secretary’s misuse of a first-class Parliamentary rail warrant to
Jack Straw, though by no means a distinguished foreign secretary, nevertheless possesses animal cunning. He is an acknowledged master of dissimulation, contrivance, machination, manoeuvre, evasion, guile, trickery, craft, diversion, disguise, distortion, persiflage, falsehood, deception, sophistry, stealth, artifice, sharp practice, underhand dealing, sleight of hand, subterfuge, prevarication and every other stratagem of concealment and deceit. Occasionally,
Since it is probably as well that those of us who earn a living by political punditry should occasionally have a spasm of humility, let me share one of my own with you. I know in my heart that Labour is likely to win the next election, but I cannot for the life of me
The last few days have seen some hysterical over-reporting of a minor adjustment in the personnel of the Tory shadow arts team, and a woeful under-reporting of an excellent new policy proposal. John Whittingdale, the Shadow DCMS secretary, has announced a plan that could help rescue the finances of museums, libraries and galleries, and encourage
Events are now moving very fast. By this time next week, the Bill to ban hunting will have received royal assent. The fight to halt this oppressive piece of legislation is moving away from Parliament, into the courts and, probably, on to the streets. The government is preparing with great care for the looming battle.
The defeat of John Kerry has been widely portrayed as a poke in the eye for liberal values and for prevarication in the face of global terrorism. Rather less has been made of the defeat of a third strand of Kerry philosophy: protectionism. One of the central policies of the Democrat challenger was to put