David cameron

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Lord Saville eviscerates the British army

David Cameron has just told the House of Commons: ‘There is no doubt, there is no equivalence. The events of the 20th January were in no way justified…You do not honour the British army by excusing the unjustifiable.’ He apologised for the atrocity and the Wigery report. According to Lord Saville, there was no conspiracy or pre-meditation, but soldiers of Support Company 1 Para entered Bogside in Derry and opened fire without provocation from the victims or nationalist paramilitaries – though Martin McGuiness ‘was present, probably armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun’. Lord Saville concludes that the testimony of many soldiers was false. Cameron did not rule out independent criminal

David Blackburn

How Hughes will play the coalition

Simon Hughes is an experienced campaigner, whose reputation is deservedly blemished by a handful of duplicities – Peter Tatchell, denying a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and the like. Hughes has just appeared on the Daily Politics and, very subtly, split the Lib Dems from the Tories. It was very simple: the Tories are responsible for all that’s bad and the Liberal Democrats are benevolent. First, Hughes dissociated the Liberals from tax rises: “I hope that the chancellor’s hearing the voices that says VAT is not the right tax to change in the budget next week.” Those voices are, of course, his ‘colleagues in the Treasury’ – an enlightened check

Monday

David Blackburn

Seeing it through

David Cameron’s address to the House contained no surprises. NATO and its allies are 6 months into a strategy to stabilise Afghanistan. All sides of the House were agreed that Britain should fulfil its commitments, but remain in Afghanistan not a day longer than necessary. That date is unknown. Like Blair and Brown before him, Cameron aspires to ‘improve Afghan security’. ‘Stability’ surely means the expulsion of al Qaeda from Afghanistan. How likely is that without the complete co-operation of the Taliban? (At what cost would that be secured?) And, as Julian Lewis MP pointed out, is al Qaeda more dangerous in Afghanistan than it is The Yemen, Somalia or

David Blackburn

Naughty Nokes

Life has imitated art – or Jilly Cooper in this case. The former chief executive of the National Pony Club, Caroline Nokes MP, 37, has been having a three year affair with a Tory toy boy, Councillor James Dinsdale, 27. Theirs was an affair of hotel-room assignations and steamy conference meetings – Bournemouth has little else to commend it. They were outed by the Sunday Mirror. Mrs Nokes, a married mother of one, was photographed entering the Kensington Close Hotel last Monday night. Minutes later, Mr Dinsdale arrived, casually dressed in a blue hoodie. Taking a ‘Hug a Hoodie’ to extremes, Mrs Nokes checked out at 8:30 the following morning.

David Blackburn

Defence matters

Sir Jock Stirrup’s early departure was one of the worst kept secrets in Westminster. But the ‘resignation’ could have been better handled. The coalition has created a lame duck in Stirrup. And, rightly, Con Coughlin asks why Stirrup is overseeing the strategic defence review if he was sufficiently inept as CDS? It makes no sense, as removing Stirrup and Sir Bill Jeffrey (the MoD’s permanent secretary) is clearly about preparing the way for spending cuts and a new model of UK military intervention. Liam Fox gave a speech this morning promising a ‘clean break with the Cold War mindset’. He emphasised the importance of maintaining counter-insurgency spending and training; presumably,

Saturday

David Blackburn

Should Cameron mention McKinnon?

Lord Tebbit poses the question on his latest blog, pointing out that Nick Clegg campaigned against Gary McKinnon’s extradition, and urged the government ‘to do the right thing’.   Well, now he can and it would be a popular decision in the current circumstances. The US-UK extradition treaty should be unacceptable to any government that considers itself sovereign, but this is no time for bluster and confrontation. Barack Obama has leapt about with shrill adolescent abandon; it would be hypocritical for Cameron to return fire in kind. Despite what Obama protests, BP is not solely liable (Halliburton and TransOcean have a case to answer). And Obama’s naked political desperation and

David Blackburn

Darling: it’s not as bad as all that

Alistair Darling is about to retire to the backbenches, though he stresses (and hopes) that it’s a brief stint in obscurity. ‘I get bored,’ he tells the Guardian in an interview today. Darling is remarkable. He emerged from 13 years in cabinet and a hellish tenure as Chancellor with his reputation enhanced. There were rumours of a leadership bid, but those were fanciful. Darling was not an architect of New Labour, but he certainly laid the odd brick. Darling could not break the legacy of Blair and Brown, and reveals as much in his Guardian interview. As Shadow Chancellor, he has to defend his record as Chancellor and argue that

Friday

David Blackburn

David Davis is the darling of the Tory right

ConservativeHome conducted a poll into prominent, right-wing Tory backbenchers. Unsurprisingly, David Davis topped the poll. 70 percent of respondents hold that David Davis represents their views and 54 percent believe he articulates those views effectively. John Redwood and Daniel Hannan were some way behind as DD’s closest rivals. Davis’s chief weapon is communication. Plain speaking and from a working class background, people easily identify with him; and he expresses an acute intelligence in simple terms, something that John Redwood has failed to do. And whilst Hannan has charisma, Davis has more – the fruit of a decade at the forefront of British politics. Above all, Davis espouses talismanic grass-roots causes:

Daniel Korski

The end of BP

BP is in trouble. Deep trouble. American lawmakers are threatening to take away its dividends and now President Obama is huffing and puffing in order to deflect attention from the role of his administration. BP is struggling to get a word in with the media, pundits, talking heads, politicians and environmental experts monopolising the airwaves.      Not a lot of people will be sympathetic to BP’s plight. The Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill is first and foremost a human and natural tragedy: 11 workers were killed, others were injured and now many Gulf Coast residents will end up losing their homes and livelihoods while their natural environment will

Thursday

James Forsyth

Keeping the backbenches occupied

In this new world of Coalition politics, there is a difference between Conservative party policy and government policy. There are things that the Conservatives would like to do but can’t do because they didn’t win a majority. As Tim wrote this morning, this provides an opportunity for the Conservative parliamentary party to fill this gap. When the backbench policy committees of the 1922 are set up, they should start working on developing, detailed policy ideas rather than just critiques of Coalition policy. The Prime Minister should encourage this for three reasons. First, it would provide him with a series of possible options for the next manifesto. Second, it would give

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Events that are shaking the special relationship

Barack Obama knows language and innuendo: he will know what he’s doing by deploying what Boris Johnson rightly calls “anti-British rhetoric” in the BP disaster. BP has not – for many years – stood for British Petroleum’ – you won’t find the two words anywhere in its annual report. But you hear them plenty tripping off the presidential tongue, as if to point the finger on the other side of the Atlantic. It makes you wonder how highly he values UK-US relations: Bush was genuinely grateful for the fact that Britain was America’s most dependable ally in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine Bush using the rhetoric that Obama

David Blackburn

Coulson on £140,000

The list of Special Advisors pay is out. The headline grabbing figures are that Andy Coulson is on £2,500 less than the PM, and that the overall bill is allegedly £1.9m less than Labour’s. Also, George Osborne appointed Rupert Harrison and Eleanor Shawcross to the Council of Economic Affairs, but they will claim no extra salary. And, for those interested, there are 5 SpAd vacancies in government. Still, £4.9m is a lot of money for unaccountable, party officials. Some time ago, I asked if Cameron would govern any differently. Transparency and cost-cutting are welcome, but wearing fewer garments doesn’t change the innards of a government.   

David Blackburn

What can Cameron do about Obama’s war against BP?

Very little is my immediate answer. The President’s approval ratings are biting the dust. Powerless to stem the tide of oil and unpopularity, Obama can only victimise a ‘foreign’ oil company. Obama may be embattled at home, but if any doubt the US President’s ability to influence global events, they need only look at BP’s share value and the pension funds derived thereof. BP is mired in an expensive oil disaster, but the President’s rhetoric about the ‘habitual environmental criminal’ and threatening BP with criminal proceedings demolishes market confidence. If the British government had condemned AIG, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in similar tones, the US administration would have retorted.

Patrick Hennessey

No politician visits the frontline

A few years ago, when I was serving with the Grenadier Guards in Iraq, I was part of a team tasked with looking after the visiting Secretary of State. There were five Defence Secretaries during my short spell in the army – a sign, perhaps, of the lack of attention the last government paid to the armed forces. Some were impressive, some less so. One was famous for falling asleep during briefings, but the one I was accompanying in Basra was wide awake. He wished to carry out of the most important missions facing Cabinet members in a warzone: conduct an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio Four.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Cameron repulses Harman’s misdirected assault

The PMQs attack No 10 was expecting from Labour on the Coalition’s planned spending cuts did not materialise and today’s was another relatively quiet affair. It started with a minute’s silence in memory of those who died in the shootings in Cumbria. Harman asked one question on gun laws before moving on to the electoral roll and whether it is fair to redraw the boundaries on a roll that does not include three and a half million people. Harman would be on quite strong ground here except for the fact that the boundaries were redrawn under the last government using this electoral register, a point Cameron made. When Harman moved

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Will the coalition rue ring-fencing health?

George Osborne has unveiled his plans for a comprehensive spending review. In addition to the pledge to broaden the base of consultation, the most significant announcement was that health spending “will increase in real terms in every year of this parliament”. The oft repeated objection to this pledge is that of the IFS. Spending in other departments will have to be cut by a savage 25 percent to pay for it. In view of Britain’s current commitments, could the defence budget sustain such a cut? David Cameron defines his politics with three letters: NHS. But think of the political damage caused by mass resignations over, say, the relationship between swingeing

Monday

David Blackburn

The previous government’s economic failure laid bare

As Ben Brogan notes, there was a clean symmetry to David Cameron’s speech this morning: the crisis was Labour’s fault; therefore, Labour is to blame for the painful measures needed to restore stability. As Cameron put it: ‘I think people understand by now that the debt crisis is the legacy of the last government. But exactly the same applies to the action we will take to deal with it.’ Cameron made constant reference to the actions of the ‘previous government’. As a foretaste of what the Independent Office for Budget Responsibility will expose, Cameron alleged that Alistair Darling withheld estimates that Britain will be repaying £70bn per annum in debt

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron lays the ground for cuts

David Cameron’s speech today was about preparing people for the cuts to come, persuading them that Labour’s mismanagement of the public finances had made this ‘unavoidable’ and reassuring them that he had no ideological desire to make cuts and so would do them in the most sensitive way possible. Cameron managed to pull this off fairly effectively. He is managing the rhetorical transition from leader of the opposition to Prime Minister fairly well. In a way, what Cameron is doing now is the easy bit: the intellectual case for dealing with the deficit is unarguable. It is when the Coalition has to outline not broad principles but the specifics that

David Blackburn

D-Day (plus one)

Cuts are here. The most important news of the weekend was the G20’s official backing for spending cuts. It was a significant volte face, and doubtless the sight of violent uprisings in Greece concentrated minds. Finally, George Osborne has been vindicated; but having convinced finance ministers, he must now carry the coalition and the country with him. The first thing to do is ignore Nick Clegg and his claim that cuts will not be savage. Cuts will re-configure government in Britain, the current invasive Leviathan will be dismantled; but the process will be painful in the short-term, it must be. Osborne has been influenced by the Canadian model, which turned

Saturday

David Blackburn

The war on poverty opens a second front

I detest the use of the word ‘Czar’. Everything has a Czar – potato regulation, multi-story car parks and Twitter being my favourite three. But the war on poverty needs to be fought by free-thinking absolutists. The appointment of Frank Field to conduct an independent review into poverty and life chances confirms David Cameron’s, and the coalition’s, non-partisan commitment to social mobility and betterment.   Field presents his analysis in a succinct piece in the Telegraph.  He writes: ‘Over recent decades, the Left and centre-Left’s answer to poverty and inequality has been to spend more money, to redistribute from richer to poorer. Yet this central social democratic ideal is being