Eric pickles

Sir Eric Pickles looks every bit the diamond Tory geezer. As we sit down in a room overlooking Big Ben for his first interview since leaving the Cabinet, the 63-year-old MP for Brentwood and Ongar has dressed for the occasion: purple braces, monogramed shirt cuffs, pocket square and a golden Rolex. Yet his demeanour does not match the bling. Pickles’ laid back Yorkshire conversational style and dry wit are not what you would expect from a politician responsible for slashing millions from the budgets of local councils. But there is nothing relaxed about Sir Eric’s attitude towards his new assignment: tackling corruption, both in finance and politics. As the government’s new

The Lord Sewel scandal makes me feel proud to be British. For here, thanks to some glorious John Wilkes-style dirt-digging by the Sun — in your face, Leveson! — we have a proper political scandal. This ain’t no yawn-fest about MPs claiming the cost of a Kit-Kat or accidentally favouriting a gay-porn tweet: sad little pseudo-scandals which in recent years have tainted the good name of ignominy. No, the fall of Sewel is a full-on, drugged-up, peer-and-prostitutes scandal, of the kind Britain used to be pretty good at before the square Blairites and cautious Cameroons took over. The disgracing of Sewel is a reminder of British politics at its saucy

When the Conservatives won a surprise majority in the election, many businesses breathed a collective sigh of relief that the two Eds would not have a chance to implement their ‘anti-business’ policies. Retail expert Mary Portas appeared to express her own personal relief when she appeared at Hay this week to discuss her memoir. Portas, who was appointed by David Cameron to head a review into Britain’s high streets, recalled an awkward encounter she had with Ed Balls on a train: ‘I saw Ed Balls on the train once and he was so pleased that he’d negotiated a mammogram centre in an Asda in his constituency. I thought ‘quelle horreur’. Can you imagine getting your boobs out after

With every policy launch during an election campaign, it is worth asking why a party has chosen that policy and why it is launching it on that particular day. This is generally because answering those questions helps you work out what message a party is trying to send and whether they are on the defensive or offensive. But today it is worth asking this question simply because it would be nice to get an answer: why have the Tories launched two completely unconnected policies which don’t sound very Toryish on the same day? One of these policies is the freezing of rail fares, which begs the question, why did the Tories expend so

They have been burning churches and murdering Christians again in Niger. You’d think that they’d have more immediately pressing concerns than worrying about a cartoon, Niger regularly winning the award for being the worst country anywhere on God’s earth, and the poorest. But nope, it’s kill-a-kuffar time once more. Some 45 churches set alight and at least five people killed and 50 injured. Adherents of the Religion of Peace (© all UK politicians) included in their pyromania a Christian orphanage, which was thoughtful of them. There have also been massed rallies and protests and the usual effigy-burning business in the vast and dusty Islamic desert rat-holes next door, Mali and

Eric Pickles’s letter to Mosques is pretty anodyne. It is hard to see how it could be objected to. But the Muslim Council of Britain is busy complaining about it. Its deputy secretary general Harun Khan is quoted in The Guardian saying, “Is Mr Pickles seriously suggesting, as do members of the far right, that Muslims and Islam are inherently apart from British society?” Now, if you read the letter it is very hard to argue that this is any way what Pickles is saying. He writes, ‘British values are Muslim values. Like all faiths, Islam and its message of peace and unity makes our country a better and stronger place, and

Since 2010, every government department has tried to highlight the profligate spending of their predecessors in the most imaginative ways possible. In return, Labour have been on the look out for the slightest whiff of waste upon which to jump in order to claim they have changed their ways. Parliamentary Questions are placed, diaries tipped off and John Prescott is still denying that the civil service credit card billing at his local Chinese was anything to do with him. This latest letter that I have been passed, however, takes the metaphorical biscuit. After a story appeared in the Sun on Sunday about glamorous Russian fans demanding photos of Eric Pickles, it seems

It is worrying that Eric Pickles is in charge of religion for this government. I first came across his footprints in Bradford, where in the Eighties he was as much responsible as any other politician for the introduction of ‘multicultural’ policies into English cities. He understood that there were Pakistani Muslim votes at stake, and introduced policies to gratify their sensibilities, something conveniently forgotten once he moved down to Essex. The central flaw in this policy was not that it encouraged Islam but that it locked Pakistani machine politics into the indigenous machine politics of local government. Labour turned out to be the main beneficiary of the process, though you

Fresh from celebrating the Tories’ victory in Newark, George Osborne is continuing a very joyful day by celebrating the International Monetary Fund admitting that it got it wrong on austerity. Christine Lagarde today conceded that ‘we underestimated the growth of the UK economy in our growth forecast a year ago’. The report the IMF published today contains its usual mix of things that all parties can celebrate: plenty of compliments for the Government such as ‘the economy has rebounded strongly and growth is becoming more balanced’, along with criticisms that Labour finds useful for its press releases. Osborne has very little to worry about immediately from the main criticism, which