Gordon brown

One of the media’s vices is to assume that the public are as interested in stories about journalism as journalists are. This always makes me slightly reluctant to write about the Leveson inquiry – more fascinating for my trade than to anybody else. But the Leveson inquiry is about to enter its political phase which, I think, makes it more relevant. Politicians will start appearing before it from towards the end of next month and, as I say in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron is scheduled to face the inquiry which he created in mid-June. Six other Cabinet ministers are expected to be summoned before the inquiry. For Cameron,

Transparency marches on, and what a joy it is. According to the newspapers today, George Osborne will tomorrow turn Ben Gummer MP’s call for tax transparency into government policy. And so we will all get statements detailing just what our tax pounds are spent on. To use the example being bandied around this morning, a £50,000 earner will learn that they contribute £4,727 towards welfare payments. As James put it at the weekend, George Osborne tends to have both economic and political motives behind his actions — and the two are present, if almost indivisible, here. No doubt the Chancellor hopes that taxpayers, on seeing where their hard-earned ends up,

Will George Osborne scrap the 50p tax in next week’s Budget? Whispers to this effect have been getting louder, and now the Guardian is saying that it will come back down to 40p, and it makes a lot of sense. As I argued in my Telegraph column a fortnight ago, this is the perfect time to do it. Axing the tax paid by 1 per cent of the population will be unpopular with the remaining 99 per cent, so if Osborne is going to take a political hit he should do so now. Anecdotal evidence of its harmfullness has been getting stronger: multinational companies saying they can’t persuade people to

A week devoted to Mervyn King and his eight-year reign at the Bank of England sounds like pretty turgid stuff. But, already, the series that has started in the Times (£) this morning — building up to an interview with the man himself — is anything but. Here, for instance, is a snippet from one of its articles, by David Wighton, on how Mr King reacted to the crumbling of Northern Rock: ‘As the plight of Northern Rock and other banks worsened, Sir John Gieve and Paul Tucker were urging Sir Mervyn to act, but he would not budge. “He mocked them as ‘crisis junkies’ and more or less accused

At the end of last year, Ed Balls suggested that Labour would be ‘taking a tougher approach to conditionality [for benefit claimants]. If people can work, they should work.’ Now the party are starting to outline what that means. As the Independent puts it today, summarising a speech that Liam Byrne has given in Birmingham, ‘The unemployed would be guaranteed the offer of a job but could lose their benefits for six months if they turned it down, under a tough new policy on welfare planned by Labour.’ The paper characterises this as an attempt to ‘outflank the Tories on welfare,’ which is surely true. But the whole thing also

A sombre and muted PMQs this week. Dame Joan Ruddock raised the issue of benefits and asked David Cameron if he was proud of his new reforms. Tory backbenchers cheered on the PM’s behalf. ‘Then would he look me in the eye,’ Dame Joan went on, ‘and tell me he’s proud to have removed all disability payments from a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy.’ This tactic — the Super-Vulnerable Voter ploy — is highly manipulative and highly reliable. But Dame Joan had forgotten something which Mr Cameron is unlikely to forget. Explaining his reform of the Disability Living Allowance he glared angrily at her. ‘As someone who has had a child

It would be so much easier for Ed Miliband to attract headlines if he could shout in Andrew Lansley’s face. As it is, the Labour leader has had to make do with giving a speech today attacking the NHS reforms. Within the parameters of what he might say, it’s an okay effort. The predictable lines about ‘creeping privatisation’ are leavened by the admission that ‘the question is not reform or no reform. It is what type of reform.’ And he adds, by way of a cross-party sweetener, that he would ‘get round the table’ with David Cameron to discuss ‘the future of the NHS’. But the substance of the speech,

Douglas Alexander may sometimes hide the meaning of what he says under a layer of jargon but he remains one of the more interesting political strategists on the Labour side. Alexander, a Brown long-marcher turned Blairite, saw before many of his colleagues the need for Labour to level with the public on cuts. He privately thought that Gordon Brown’s attempt to fight the last election on a reprise of the investment versus cuts strategy of ’01 and ’05 was a mistake. So, it is no surprise that Alexander, now shadow Foreign Secretary, is trying to use the opportunity created by Ed Balls’ acceptance of the need for a public sector

There was a fun game we used to play during Gordon Brown’s premiership: counting the number of ‘buck up, or we kick you out’ ultimatums that Labour MPs delivered to their leader. There were, suffice to say, a lot of them. And tallying them up illustrated two things: the constant, sapping pressure that the Brown leadership was under, and Labour’s persistent inability to actually finish him off. I mention it now because of this story in today’s Mail on Sunday. It collects the increasingly public criticism of Ed Miliband by his own MPs, including Graham Stringer’s warning that ‘Ed has got to get a grip and turn it around before

Yesterday night’s news that a senior FCO official lobbied Oxford University on behalf of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi adds more ordure to the already fetid story of Britain’s role in Colonel Gaddafi’s rehabilitation. The Woolf Inquiry into Saif’s dealings with British universities and businesses found that, ‘It was made clear [to Oxford] … that the FCO would appreciate help in this case since Libya was opening up to the West again.’  Oxford resisted; but this episode has hardly covered Britain’s elites in glory: the civil service, BAE and august universities are all criticised in Woolf’s report. Murmurs of disquiet about the Labour Party’s relationship with the Gaddafi clan continue to sound in certain quarters

Growth plans are a high growth industry — with every day bringing yet another set of ideas, from one quarter or another, for how the government can fix the economy. And one suggestion pops up quite frequently in all these plans: bring forward spending on infrastructure. This is often presented as a simple thing to do, with few (if any) downsides. But how realistic is this? We know that infrastructure is important for growth. Economic texts generally suggest that the ‘multiplier effect’ (when government spending leads to more private spending later on) from is higher for infrastructure spending than for spending in other areas, such as health and welfare. We

YouGov recently repeated its occassional exercise of asking people where they’d place themselves, the parties and the leaders on the left-right spectrum. Anthony Wells reported some of the findings on Saturday: Cameron is seen as slightly less right-wing than his party, while both the Tories and Labour appear to have moved away from the centre-ground since the election. One thing these YouGov numbers allow us to do is see where on the spectrum the parties get their support from. First, how people voted in 2010 and then how they say they’d vote now: This looks broadly as you’d expect, with Labour dominating among left-wing voters and the Tories doing likewise