If one hype video was weird, the other shown to delegates in Manchester this afternoon (but designed to be seen on blogs and Facebook and so on) was good politics in the service of a good cause. Or, if you really must, vice versa. As Matt d’Ancona tweeted, the Cameroons aren’t just Maggie’s children, they’re Live Aid kids as well…
Jim Murphy’s tweeted verdict on David Cameron’s speech to the Tory conference seems accurate: Bits I saw seemed written by 4 different people in 4 different rooms and merged just in time to be fed into the autocue. Such is the fate of conference addresses and today’s was no different. This is a tired format in dire need of refreshing. A speech that was half as long but four times as concentrated would work better. Instead, there are the usual dreadful “jokes”, the usual attempt to cover far too much ground, the usual blather about British spirit or promise or greatness and the familiar flabby mess of a speech. But
I’m not sure I’m sure what this video, shown to the party conference waiting for David Cameron’s speech this afternoon, is actually about but it’s not the kind of thing you’d have seen in the Lady’s day. That is the point of it and it’s supposed, I suppose, to be posted on blogs and social media and so on to remind people that the Cameroons aren’t your daddy’s Tories. It’s probably a post-riots thing too. Or something. There was an appeal for aid to famine-struk East Africa too. Again, the point of this is to allow the Tories to move right in other areas.
The unexpectedly interesting struggle to lead the Scottish Tories (no-one is interested in the plight of the Scottish Liberal Democrats) rumbles on. In Manchester this week, Murdo Fraser’s supporters have done their best to look chipper but the fact is that his brave decision to suggest scrapping the party and starting again is beginning to look like a blunder. It is not that Fraser’s analysis is wrong, far from it, merely that asking the Tories to endorse a withering critique of their past and probable future failures is asking more of them than it is reasonable to expect. If Murdo had run an orthodox campaign, his supporters say, he’d have
As a general rule any time you read an article asking that foreign policy be recalibrated to take greater account of the “national interest” you can be sure that you’re dealing with blather and hokum and platitudes and a deliberate misrepresentation of whatever the other mob got up to when they were in power. Sadly Dominic Raab’s contribution to a new book, presumptiously titled After the Coalition, proves all this all too well. I say sadly because Raab, a freshman Tory MP, is sound on a good number of issues I care about, civil liberties most especially. Nevertheless, his piece, reprinted by the Telegraph, is rotten. Let’s count the ways.
Like most sensible folk I have a grand opinion of Alan Cochrane and, this being the case, alert readers will know that this is by way of a throat-clearing before we move on to the business of suggesting that his latest Daily Telegraph column is a little less persuasive than the Sage of Angus would like it to be. As Alan concludes: It is hard not to sympathise with what Mr Fraser is trying to do. Something dramatic does need to happen to galvanise centre-right supporters in Scotland and the idea of a completely separate party but which is part of an electoral pact with the UK Conservatives in the
There are three things to be said about Murdo Fraser’s willingness to put his own party out of its misery: this is not a new idea, it is not enough, on its own, to spark a centre-right revival in Scottish politics and it is a brave way to begin a leadership campaign. Tactically it is a risky ploy; strategically it makes sense. Put all this together and there’s every chance, yet again, that nothing will come of it. For that matter, it may be a mistake to make this the crucial issue in the leadership campaign. The Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party may be feeble but it is also stubborn
What does Independence in Europe mean in 2011? That’s one of the questions Alex Salmond and the SNP have preferred not to ask, far less find an answer to. Way back in the dog days of the Thatcher-era Jim Sillars coined the slogan as a way to demonstrate that Scotland, small and on the periphery of the continent, would not be cut adrift and helpless were her people persuaded to back the Scottish National Party’s vision for independence. It was a canny move: reassuring and progressive and other nice and cosy things. That was then and this is now. The ongoing crisis in Euroland necessarily means things have changed. The
Tonight, the main news is—obviously—the situation in Libya. But Robert Peston’s claim that Andy Coulson carried on receiving payments from News International, as part of his severance package, while working for the Tories is worthy of note. If true, this piece of news is a further embarrassment for the Tories and David Cameron. Even if the money was simply part of a severance deal, it does not look seemly for a political party to have a communications director who is in the pay of a media group (Though, it should be noted that these payments stopped at the end of 2007 once Coulson had been paid the amount he was
Anyone looking for a good blast of common sense on a Saturday morning should read Eric Pickles’ interview in the Telegraph. In it, he responds to much of the kite-flying by the Liberal Democrat left in recent weeks. In an exchange that will have many of his Cabinet colleagues nodding along in agreement, Pickles criticises judicial activism and the chilling effect it is having on ministers: “You are constantly looking over your shoulder for judicial review … the electorate is being frustrated,” he says. “I could kind of expect to be reviewed on procedural matters, but to be reviewed on policy?” But, should judges not have some oversight of policy? “No,” he
The best parts of David Cameron’s speech this morning were those passages spent defending the government’s plans for police reform and secondary education in England. This should not be a surprise: whether you agree with them or not, these are relatively coherent policies that have enjoyed the benefit of long gestation. The rest of the speech, alas, was a humdrum tour of long-familiar bromides (families are good!), items pulled from discount bins (‘elf and safety!) and impossible promises just vague enough to escape obvious ridicule (“a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country”).
If a riot has a hundred causes then it’s caused by everything and anything and any all-purpose, universal explanation for it is bound to be implausible. When a 31 year old teacher is among the first people charged in the aftermath of the worst of the violence you can put away your handy explanations about youthful alienation and all the rest of it. Of course that’s doubtless a factor but it doesn’t explain why the majority of those who might be thought most likely to take to the streets did not in fact do so. Indeed, as I suggest in passing in a piece for the Daily Beast, if these
First things first: defence policy is difficult. Even more than is generally the case in other departments every decision made at the MoD is a question of trade-offs. This is true of all aspects of the brief: policy, personnel, procurement and so on. If you do this you can’t do that and so on. Add the timescales involved and the realities of inter-service rivalry plus some unhelpful sniping from the Treasury and you can see why the MoD can become pretty dysfunctional pretty damn quickly. Nevertheless… Is anyone impressed by Tory defence policy? No, I didn’t think so. Neither the Prime Minister nor his Chancellor appear to have much interest
Tim Montgomerie is a bonnie fighter but his essay in this week’s magazine (Subscribe from as little as £1 a week!) is a splendid example of the pundit’s fallacy: if matters were arranged as I think they should be everything would be for the best and David Cameron would have a thumping majority. Well, maybe even if past experience suggests the kind of “Mainstream” Conservatism (has that label been ditched, yet?) Tim favours had a limited electoral appeal. That was then, however, and this is now. (It’s also fair to note that Tim accepts a good deal of the Cameron Project). Tim complains that “The Cameroons’ mistake was to combine
But first, another grubby little piece of u-turning from this government. You might think that a commitment to remove from the DNA database the details of more than a million innocent people was both simple and easily honoured. Such a suspicion fails to appreciate the so-called complexity of the matter and, one must presume, the deviousness of civil servants. Consequently the promise is not being honoured. Or not to the letter anyway: However, Home Office minister James Brokenshire admitted to MPs on a committee which is considering the legislation that police forces will retain innocent profiles. Mr Brokenshire said he had won agreement from the information watchdog that the DNA
The public may not be much interested in the Murdoch Affair but the importance of an issue is not measured by the level of public interest in it. If it were and if the news channels only covered the things the public loves we’d be treated to exhaustive coverage of kittens in trees, car chases and executions. Bully for the great British public. Equally, those tempted to dismiss the implications of the Prime Minister’s involvement in this stramash might consider whether they’d be quite so generous if the scandal had erupted – like some giant suppurating boil – while Labour were in government. As a general rule if you think
Tim Montgomerie suggests that we all at least try and keep the News of the World scandal in some degree of perspective. This is a worthy thought but not one that’s likely to fly very far given the febrile mood at Westminster. Moreover, Tim’s reasons for calling for calm are not, perhaps, quite as persuasive as they might be. For instance, pointing out that all these abuses occurred while Labour was in power is, while true, not terribly relevant. Ed Miliband may have been a member of that government but he wasn’t involved in courting News International. Besides, it’s the Tories who are in power now and, reasonably enough, their
Sorry Pete, but I don’t think there’s anything hugely ambiguous about the result from the Inverclyde by-election. This was a pretty solid victory for Labour and another reminder – if these things are needed – that Westminster and Holyrood elections are played by different rules. Labour and the SNP ran neck-and-neck in the gibberish spin stakes last night as some Labour hackettes, preposterously, tried to claim that the seat “was the SNP’s to lose”; for their part the nationalists tried to suggest they’d never been very interested in winning Inverclyde at all. More weapons-grade piffle. Then again, without this stuff how would anyone fill the weary hours of television before
Yes, really. Like his American contemporary George HW Bush, John Major has suffered from being sandwiched between two far more glamorous premiers and like Bush Sr this probably means he’s under-rated these days. At the time his government often looked hopelessly weak and of course it often was, riven with feuding and driven to distraction by Europe and the Thatcherite legacy. Then there was Black Wednesday and the destruction of the party’s economic credentials. Nevertheless, all these years later it seems remarkable that Major was able to hold it all together for as long as he did. As his successors’ fate demonstrated leading the Tory party, not always a cakewalk
Back to Ben Brogan’s latest piece, headlined David Cameron has lost his zeal for the radical in favour of retreat. This seems unduly harsh. According to the Telegraph’s Deputy Editor, however: Yet, as has become increasingly apparent, retreat is fast becoming the order of the day. Indeed, the gap I mentioned a few weeks ago between those who want to be radical at all costs and those who want to trim in order to win the next election is widening faster than I initially thought. The success of the Tory local election and AV campaigns, masterminded by George Osborne, has emboldened those, led by the Chancellor, who say that an