Defence

Keen-eyed spectators might have noticed Danny Alexander and Michael Gove wearing a slightly different type of poppy over the last few days: the Scottish Poppy. At the beginning of the poppy-wearing season they are for sale at the Scottish Office in Whitehall and are worn by certain Scots down here – any money that Andrew Marr will be wearing one on Sunday, for example.   What’s the difference? Scots poppies have four petals, and no green leaf.  The English version costs a little more to produce, and – one might argue – looks more sophisticated. But the Scots version can claim to be anatomically correct, because poppies don’t have green

Is David Cameron just too nice? There are worse accusations to levy at a politician, but it’s one I have heard suggested quite a lot recently – and I have written about it in my News of the World column today. He seems to have adopted the politics of wishful thinking. There is a “zip-a-dee-do-dah strategy” and precious little contingency if things go wrong. He makes defence cuts, because he doesn’t intend to go on a massive deployment (neither did Woodrow Wilson). He will make prison cuts, because he thinks – bless him – that it won’t increase crime. He signs a deal with French for military co-operation, thinking they

The Entente Cordial Redux has generated a lot of commentary, most of it ill-informed, some of it ridiculous. Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, in particular, has singled himself out to be a perpetuator of stereotypes with his reference to the duplicitous nature of the French. But many historians, like the otherwise brilliant Orlando Figes, have not fared much better, talking about the Crimea War as if it had any relevance at all for modern warfare. It’s good fun to tease the French. That is what boozy lunches ought to be about. But it should not pass for serious commentary by MPs. Since the 1990s the French have worked very closely with

Today is one of those days when you can’t walk around the Palace of Westminster without bumping into a Tory with a grumble about the coalition’s polices. First of all, there’s massive irritation that the government has been forced into agreeing that prisoners should have the right to vote. It has revived Tory concerns about the ECHR and annoyance that the presence of the Lib Dems in the government means that nothing will be done about it. Then, there’s this Anglo-French defence agreement. Tories are, understandably, deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of giving the French a veto over the deployment of British forces. For many Tory MPs, the answer

Split-stories have their own momentum. As soon as you know that a certain secretary of state is in the dog house with Downing Street, you start seeing things through that prism. So when I saw that the press release on the government’s new national security strategy contained quotes from the PM, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Development Secretary, but not the Defence Secretary, I immediately regarded it – and perhaps wrongly – as part of the Westminster Fox hunt.   Liam Fox’s appearance on the Politics Show on Sunday was ill-advised. By celebrating his defiance of the Treasury’s demands and trumpeting the PM’s support for him, he