Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Alex Massie is Scotland Editor of The Spectator.

Pray for Huckabee? God Help Us All.

Yes, this is a site soliciting commitments (and email addresses) from those prepared to pray for Mike Huckabee to assist him make the anguished decision to run for the Presidency of the United States. Or not. It’s not, his spokesman tells Ben Smith, an official Huckabee site, though it is linked to from his own

Labour’s Holyrood Campaign HQ? The Beach.

YesterdayTom Harris MP wrote a savage-but-accurate appraisal of Labour’s Scottish election failure for Labour Uncut. Pretty much every part of his analysis is persuasive, most notably his appreciation that Scottish Labour has grown fat, arrogant and complacent. Just as importantly, many voters think this too. There was a widespread perception that there had to be

Alex Massie

Attacking Harry Flashman is a Fool’s Game

So Ed Miliband brought up the Flashman thing at Prime Minister’s Questions today. How rum. Now I think it would be sensible for the Prime Minister to be polite to his opponents. There’s no need to belittle Mr Miliband when he does such a good job of doing so himself. If Labour think attacking Cameron’s

Alex Massie

Wouter Weylandt’s Cortege

There was no racing in the Giro d’Italia yesterday. Instead the peloton rode at a funereal pace to honour Wouter Weylandt, the Belgian sprinter killed in a crash on Monday. Then Weylandt’s Leopard-Trek team-mates came to the front to lead the field into Leghorn. With them was Garmin-Cervelo’s Tyler Farrar, Weylandt’s best friend in the

Alex Massie

Just Say Yes, Dave

When David Cameron was a backbench MP he condemned the “abject failure” of the War on Drugs. And when he campaigned for the Troy leadership he said it was time for “fresh thinking and a new approach” to drug policy. He correctly noted that “Politicians attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator by posturing

Newt 2012

Having flirted with the idea on several previous occasions, Newt Gingrich has decided this is the moment America has been waiting for. So he’s running for the Presidency. Alex Knapp supplies the only slogan – coming to a t-shirt near you soon, I hope – and commentary his opponents need: GINGRICH 2012: HE WILL ALWAYS

Alex Massie

Aunt Annabel Departs But the Tories Can Live Again

So farewell then, Annabel Goldie. As Hamish Macdonnell says, your position was weakened by the inquest into last year’s disappointing (let’s be kind, here) Westminster results. But Miss (never Ms) Goldie can step down knowing that her party is better-off than either Labour or the Liberal Democrats. A cynic might suggest it’s easy for a

Alex Massie

The Size of Things to Come & Unionism Needs a New Story

Recalling the collapse of RBS, Tyler Cowen suggests that Scottish independence might not be such a nifty notion: The conceptual point is simple.  If you think that the world is now more prone to financial crises (and I do), the optimal size for a nation-state has gone up.  Risk-sharing really matters. That’s a pretty widely-held

Alex Massie

Labour’s New Strategy: Fight the Tories

You might think this should have been their strategy all along. But just as Labour in Scotland misidentified their primary enemy, concentrating on the Conservatives when they should have been opposing the SNP so Labour in London has spent the past year looking for monsters in all the wrong places. Peeved by being thrown from

Wouter Weylandt, 1984-2011

I was all set to write a post complaining that, as usual, the Anglophone press never pays enough attention* to the Giro d’Italia but for the saddest of all possible reasons, that won’t be the case tomorrow. Wouter Weylandt, pictured above winning the third stage of last year’s Giro, died this afternoon after crashing on

Team A Thumps Team B

What a year! First Fianna Fail in Ireland, now Labour in Scotland. If only all elections were this entertaining and satisfying. At long last the anti-Labour vote was organised properly. Indeed, the SNP have won a lop-sided victory of the type Labour have been accustomed to winning in Scotland, taking more than 70% of the

Alex Massie

An Astonishing Night in Scotland

Scottish elecctions tend to be boring. Little happens. Small earthquake in Scotland, not many dead. Just for once, however, that has not been the case tonight. Labour’s dismal, depressing, you-cannae-do-anything-right campaign met its deserved end. Even so, who predicted the SNP could win FPTP seats in Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire. Who thought they could win a

Osama bin Laden Was Not America’s Useful Enemy

The Guardian is a great newspaper but, lord, does it ever print some claptrap. Via Messrs Geras and Worstall comes this dreadful piece by Adam Curtis. The headline, for which Mr Curtis is not responsible, is a warning of the nonsense to come: For 10 years, Osama bin Laden filled a gap left by the

Alex Massie

First, Hang the Administrators

So England will have different captains for each form of cricket this summer. Fine. Nothing much to see there. Much more important, really, is the news from South Africa: Australia’s forthcoming tour has been cut to just two tests. As usual, the over-crowded calendar is blamed. As usual this is a reasonable diagnosis. As usual

Alex Massie

HMQ’s AV Victory

The success of Prince William’s wedding was one thing but if you want another indication that, whatever people think they think of Prince Charles right now, the monarchy is in no imminent danger consider the fate of the referendum on introducing the alternative vote for Westminster elections. I suggest that republicans are among today’s losers.

Our Drug-Stuffed Prisons

It’s not that I disagree with this post by Blair Gibbs, nor that I don’t think he makes a number of reasonable points. There’s clearly a problem with drugs in prison even if it it’s not, one supposes, on anything like the same level as the Cousins’ difficulties in that area. Nevertheless, surely the most

Alex Massie

The Scotsman Sees Sense

The Scotsman’s endorsement of the SNP and the Scottish Conservatives is so thoroughly, even startlingly, sensible it could almost have been written by me*. [T]here is no other credible candidate for First Minister beyond Mr Salmond. Despite his party’s apparently staunch commitment to statism, we also know the SNP leader is passionate about the role

Alex Massie

Stray Thoughts on the Execution of Osama bin Laden

Just as it’s difficult for death penalty opponents to be too upset by the verdicts of the Nuremberg tribunal, so it is hard to be upset by the assassination (let us not be coy) of Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, it seems increasingly probable that al-Qaeda’s titular leader was executed “after” a firefight not, rather tellingly,