Ed miliband

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business: How François Hollande let France miss the global recovery train

I’ve always respected stationmasters, but that sentiment is not universally shared. A distinguished friend of mine across the Channel described François Hollande the other day as ‘un chef de gare, sans aucune dignité’ — and it’s not difficult to picture the little president, peaked cap awry, trousers unbuttoned, haplessly waving his whistle as the last train à grande vitesse departs for the Eurotunnel laden with talented compatriots who see no future in France. As modern socialist leaders go, Hollande is beginning to make Gordon Brown look statesmanlike. Nicknamed ‘Flanby’ after a cheap custard pudding, he has left decision-making to his ragbag of ministers and done nothing to steer France towards

Ferdinand Mount

Ferdinand Mount’s diary: Supermac was guilty!

You have to hand it to Supermac. Fifty years after the event, he is still running rings round them. The esteemed Vernon Bogdanor (The Spectator, 18 January) tells us that Iain Macleod was wrong in claiming that Sir Alec had been foisted on the Conservative party by a magic circle of Old Etonians. On the contrary, the soundings had ‘revealed a strong consensus for Home. So Macmillan was not slipping in a personal recommendation when he advised the Queen to send for him — he was doing precisely what he was supposed to do.’ This is a deliciously selective account. When Macmillan decided to resign in October 1963, not because

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The top level of government isn’t riddled with personal hatred – thanks to Osborne

Now that the economic statistics are looking better, people are beginning to rediscover the once-fashionable thought that George Osborne is a great strategist. Things are coming together before the 2015 election in a way which makes life uncomfortable for Labour. I am not sure that ‘strategist’ is the right word, but I do think Mr Osborne deserves praise for something else. If you compare this government with the last, you will see that it is not dysfunctional in its internal relations. The coalition has constant frictions, but these are, as it were, built into the system. After nearly four years, there is no serious split or even known personal hatred

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Miliband begins to run out of arguments

Syria overshadowed PMQs today. The chamber was quiet and sombre. And both leaders were clearly about to do their world-statesman bit. Ed Miliband rose to his feet with an air of ineffable goodness. He looked like St Peter on his way to donate the dead Judas’s sandals to a charity shop. He asked about Britain’s readiness to accept Syrian refugees in accordance with a UN directive. Britain, said Cameron, is already the second largest donor to Syria. And the crisis can’t be solved by few hundred refugee placements. Miliband used two more questions to press the case for ‘orphans who had lost both parents.’ Cameron said he was prepared to

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Despite Miliband’s best efforts, Cameron still has the upper hand at PMQs

Ed Miliband is still trying to keep his reasonable tone going at PMQs. He led on Syria, pushing David Cameron on the government’s refusal to join in a UN resettlement scheme. Cameron argued that given how many refugees the Syrian conflict had created, a resettlement scheme could only ever deal with a tiny part of the problem. Labour, though, were not happy with Cameron’s answers and will hold a Commons vote on the matter next Wednesday to try and force the government into changing its position. But when Miliband moved onto the economy, he found it far more difficult to keep his tone civil. Tories cheered him saying unemployment had

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Ed ‘Teddy’ Miliband: Labour is the party of competition

Ed Miliband tends to enjoy success when he’s either stealing someone else’s clothes or offering a possibly unworkable policy that sounds catchy. This morning on the Andrew Marr Show he tried both tactics. Having nicked One Nation from the Tories and repeated the phrase so often that they probably don’t want it back, Miliband is now trying to ape a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt. His close colleague Lord Wood sets out why Labour thinks this is a space it can jump into in a piece for Coffee House. listen to ‘Ed Miliband on the Andrew Marr Show’ on Audioboo The catchy line from this Roosevelt-style crusade is that Labour is

Stewart Wood

Ed Miliband is better placed than the Tories to follow Roosevelt

On Friday, Ed Miliband pledged to introduce greater competition in our banking market. Last September, he pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months while our broken energy market is reset to expand competition and consumer choice. Reforming broken markets to increase competition and address the long-term sources of our cost-of-living crisis might seem an unusual theme for Labour to champion. In fact it is an approach that has learnt from a progressive conservative tradition, one that understands the importance of reform to ensure that markets remain open and competitive. Noone understood this idea better than the American President Theodore Roosevelt – a passionate believer in free enterprise, and a

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Coming soon – the Bank of Miliband. Be very afraid.

If you think bankers do a bad job of banking, just wait until government tries its hand. This seems to be what Ed Miliband is proposing today: a Labour government would set up two new banks, to challenge the existing five big ones. And so his 1970s revival continues. There’s no evidence that new banks would help much, as the Bank of England Governor has already indicated. But as I say in my Telegraph column today, Ed Miliband isn’t too worried about lack of evidence. He’s proposing to be a different kind of political leader. His list of ‘predators’ – ie, nasty businesses to whom he promises to give six

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s tricky second album

Ed Miliband has spent the past few months celebrating the success of his conference pledge to freeze energy prices. He was so pleased with the disruption that this caused that he referenced it in his speech on banking reform today. He is right to be pleased with that pledge. It was a hit. It’s just that today’s speech, built up by the Miliband camp as the sequel to the price freeze, was the political equivalent of a difficult second album. You could see what he was trying to do. Sections of the speech were straight from the Obama playbook, just as his conference speech was, with appeals such as ‘Britain

The Spectator

Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Economy’ speech: full text and audio

listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Economy’ banking reform speech’ on Audioboo Today I want to tell you what the next election is about for Labour. It is about those families who work all the hours that God sends and don’t feel they get anything back. It is about the people who go to bed anxious about how they’re going to pay their bills. It is about the parents who turn to each other each night and ask what life their sons and daughters are going to have in the future. It is about those just starting out who can’t imagine they will ever afford a home of their own.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Miliband’s big speech challenge isn’t Mark Carney

Even though Labour is quite clearly rather peeved by George Osborne’s minimum wage announcement, it is, in one way, a compliment to Ed Miliband that the Chancellor felt it strategically important to try to sabotage the Labour leader’s speech on banking, which he will deliver shortly. The Conservatives are aware that even if Miliband has a knack of coming up with policies that sound potty, he also has a knack of framing them in a way that disrupts the political debate. Thus a pledge by a party leader in the autumn to control prices in a market where he has no control of worldwide wholesale markets still managed to cause

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Ed Miliband looks like an ex-leader-in-waiting

Truce ditched. Peace deal scrapped. The parties agreed to revive Punch and Judy at PMQs today. Ed Miliband opened with bankers’ pay. RBS is seeking to give top traders bonuses of 100 per cent. This requires government approval. listen to ‘PMQs: ‘A bonus of £1 million should be enough’’ on Audioboo

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Ed Miliband’s problems are mounting

Today’s PMQs has left Ed Miliband with a strategic headache. Miliband’s new less-Punch and Judy approach to PMQs isn’t working. In large part, this is because Cameron — who thinks he wins more of these sessions than he loses and that the facts on the ground now favour him — isn’t interested in cooperating. So Miliband is faced with the choice of continuing with this approach and being beaten up every Wednesday or abandoning it after just two sessions. If Miliband does continue with it, expect to see the Tories continue to try to goad Ed Balls, one of the Commons’ most enthusiastic hecklers, into responding to them in kind

Steerpike Steerpike

Does Ed Miliband feel betrayed by Francois Hollande?

President Hollande’s private life continues to fascinate the whole world (other than the French press pack, obviously); but it is worth noting that the embattled president signalled a major shift in economic policy yesterday. France is a couple of years late to the austerity party; but it will experience €50 billion worth of cuts in 2015 – 2017, on top of the €15bn scheduled for this year. When Hollande won the Élysée, he promised ‘another way’. But he’s been mugged by reality. Austerity est arrivé. All of which is a little embarrassing for Ed Miliband, who told ITV in May 2012: ‘I congratulate Francois Hollande. I know from our conversations in London

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Labour’s poll woes as economy grows

Is the improving economy harming Labour’s standing? According to a new Guardian/ICM survey out today, Labour is still ahead of the Conservatives by three points — but the gap is slowly shrinking. Since the last ICM poll in December, Labour’s lead has dropped to just three points, down from an eight point lead in November: Today’s poll also looks at how assured people are feeling about their own financial position and their ‘ability to keep up with the cost of living’. 52 per cent now feel confident about the state of their personal finances — the highest level since October 2010. Confidence in financial situations plummeted in 2010 and a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Miliband returns to the ‘promise of Britain’ with pitch to middle class

Ed Miliband’s cost of living crisis campaign has, so far, tended to focus more on those who are seriously struggling and turning to food banks or turning off their heating in cold weather. But today the Labour leader turns to the middle classes in a Telegraph op ed. His assessment is downbeat as you would expect: Miliband needs pessimism in order to succeed in 2015, while the Tories need an upbeat vision (but not, as most senior party figures accept, so upbeat an economy that voters think it safe to back Labour). It is interesting that Miliband sees the middle class as a group worth bidding for: he clearly feels

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why should Nigel Farage have to fight the ghost of Enoch Powell?

One of the genuine seasonal pleasures to be enjoyed as 2013 slipped around the U-bend was Enoch Powell making his familiar comeback as the Evil Ghost of Christmases Past. Enoch was disinterred by the producers of the hitherto un-noticed Murnaghan Show — presumably in order to frighten the viewers and put a spanner in the wheel of the programme’s principal guest interviewee, the Ukip leader Nigel Farage. Dermot Murnaghan tripped up Mr Farage by the devilishly clever tactic of reading him some anodyne quotes from Powell’s exciting and controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and asking Farage if he agreed with them. But only later did he reveal that they were the

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the fantasy Pope Francis, Labour’s immigration nightmares and the Profumo affair

Is our perception of Pope Francis simply an invention of the liberal media? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, The Catholic Herald’s Luke Coppen and Freddy Gray discuss how the world has fallen in love with this ‘Fantasy Francis’, what might happen if the real Francis (whoever he may be’) is discovered and why he’s replaced Obama as a leftie pinup. Demos’ David Goodhart, The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman and Tim Finch from the IPPR also discuss Labour’s immigration nightmares. Is the party in a more difficult position than the Conservatives? And has Ed Miliband apologised enough for the mistakes they made? Plus, author Richard Davenport-Hines discusses William Astor’s article on the Profumo

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: a subdued week, but the bear-pit will be back

It’s a whole new kind of politics. The subdued atmosphere at PMQs had two possible causes. First, the tragic death of Paul Goggins had stunned the House into near silence. Ed Miliband seemed close to tears as he paid his tribute. ‘Labour has lost one of its own, and one of its best.’ Moving to more substantial issues, Miliband chose the neutral topics of monsoons and roulette machines. He saluted the work of the flood-wardens and the efforts of courageous citizens who had leapt to each others’ aid during the storms. Cameron replied by vowing that river defences would be reinforced with huge sandbags stuffed with cash. Then Miliband moved

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sombre PMQs sees David Cameron test his new line on welfare

PMQs was a rightly sombre affair, coming as it did only a few hours after the death of Labour MP Paul Goggins was announced. It has been striking to hear many MPs of all political persuasions pay tribute to Goggins as a ‘decent’ and ‘kind’ man, and those tributes were echoed in the Chamber. These two qualities are rarely trumpeted in politics and yet when someone does possess them, they have a profound impact on those around them. Ed Miliband split his questions between flooding and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). His first tranche, on flooding, was still rather sombre and the Labour leader and the Prime Minister both sought consensus.