Dominic cummings

Thursday

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg’s weird war with a former Gove adviser

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Miranda Green discuss Nick Clegg’s war with Dominic Cummings” startat=590] Listen [/audioplayer]We’ve come to expect strange things from coalition government, but the events of the last few days have been particularly odd. On Saturday, several newspapers contacted the Department of Education about a story claiming that its budget was in chaos. Officials set about drafting a clear rebuttal. But this was vetoed by David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools minister, preventing his department from denying a damaging story. This act of self-harm was just the latest twist in the spat between the Liberal Democrats and Michael Gove’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings. Following Cummings’s revelations about

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Revealed: how Nick Clegg cooked up his ‘free school meals’ pledge

For those who missed Dominic Cummings, recently departed Michael Gove adviser, on BBC Radio 4’s World At One, here’s the extraordinary transcript which confirms what Coffee Housers will have feared. He didn’t give an interview, but responded to the BBC’s questions (below) about Nick Clegg’s plan to give free school meals to all school pupils – even the offspring of millionaires. And to me, this sums up why coalitions are a bad idea. The junior partner gets desperate for a jazzy-sounding idea to call their own, so ambush their senior partner. An announcement is made, for reasons of spin and nothing else. No policy work is done. The expectations of

Wednesday

Ed West

Intelligence is just another privilege you inherited from mummy and daddy

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence and claiming that it was all part of some government plan to keep the poor in their place. Others have waded in, raising the spectre of eugenics, and I imagine someone is right now composing a comment piece