Nick Cohen

The Leveson Inquiry has all the makings of an establishment disaster. In saying that, I am not defending the behaviour of the tabloids. I find it contemptible that no story in the 'hackgate' scandal can be justified on public interest grounds. Not once did James and Rupert Murdoch hirelings break the law to expose an abuse of power, or the corruption of an official, or corporate wrongdoing. It is a measure of their degradation that they did not think they needed to act in their own self-interest by covering their backs with a few reputable investigations. Although there is no jurisdiction in the world that allows journalists to hack phones, the jury system of the Anglo-Saxon democracies would have protected reporters who had been pursuing worthwhile stories.

A few months ago a German magazine phoned me to talk about Scotland leaving the UK. The reporter had bought the SNP line that Scottish independence was a practical proposition, and that Scotland could survive and indeed flourish as an independent state in the Eurozone. But, I told her, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland, which were meant to be leading Scotland's charge to become a Celtic tiger economy, have collapsed. 'Does the EU really want another country with a failed financial system? Try selling that to the readers of Bild.' On the BBC on Sunday, Alex Salmond became increasingly tetchy when John Sopel questioned him about a Scottish future in the Eurozone.

For the past week, the papers have been full of the woes of David Cameron as Tory backbenchers sense the possibility of a new European settlement and try to put pressure on him to loosen Britain's links or leave completely. In more elevated moments commentators have discussed whether a new Euro bloc, bound in a fiscal union, would act against Britain's interests. What hardly anyone discusses is whether the EU can create a new settlement or Euro bloc, or whether the task is beyond it. Eurosceptics have been showing off quite shamelessly. They point out, correctly, that they have exposed the establishment thinkers who supported the Euro as dupes or idiots. But on one point Eurosceptics have been horribly wrong. The EU is not the "EUSSR" or a bureaucratic dictatorship.

Being an occasional series in which the writer confesses that supporters of the British Conservative party leave him in a state of perpetual perplexity. Part one here and part two here.   In my political neighbourhood, the image of the Cameron is now set. He is the smiling assassin whose affable public image hides his ‘Thatcherite,’ ‘heartless,’ ‘Bullingdon Club,’ — fill in any other disobliging epithet you can think of — agenda. He is an extremist dressed up as a moderate; a phoney centrist, who is quietly destroying the welfare state. Whatever they wish to say about the rest of the coalition programme, on economic policy, my leftish colleagues have got one aspect of this government hopelessly wrong.

Chris Patten has held almost every great and good job the great and the good can offer: Governor of Hong Kong, Companion of Honour, European Commissioner, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Chairman of the BBC Trust. Only his parents’ decision to send him to a Catholic church will prevent him becoming Archbishop of Canterbury and winning the game of establishment bingo with a full house. Patten features in Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver’s strange polemic against British supporters of the Euro. (Strange because Gordon Brown and the Labour Party stopped Britain joining the Euro so the authors have no crime to accuse the “guilty men” of – other than being wrong.

Listen to John Prescott on the Today programme this morning and you may begin to understand the complexity of the task Labour faces. Prescott was putting the best gloss he could on Labour and the vastly incompetent civil service wasting hundreds of millions on regional fire stations. Listening to his bluster, even the most loyal Labour supporter might have been glad that the party was no longer in office. Prescott showed no remorse; no appreciation that the burden of taxation falls on working and middle class people, who need to hold on to every penny they can. As with so many left-of-centre politicians, he did not regard the waste of other people’s money as a sin.

It is a sign of how serious economic thought disappeared in the bubble – "who needs it when we’re all making money?" –  that public opinion is not pummelling Labour for its failure to regulate the banks. Even the most conservative of Spectator readers might have once have said, "Well I expect Labour governments to increase spending and throw my money around. I expect them to waste it on schemes that won't help me, but at least I can count on them to treat the bankers like potential enemies of the state." I'm sure readers will correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot find one example of a centre-left government presiding over one of financial capitalism's manic booms and crashes.

All politicians require a thick skin, but Gordon Brown must have an elephant’s hide. If an ordinary man had presided over the greatest crash since 1929, shame would compel silence. Not so with Brown, who is unable to see himself as other see him, and has written an account of the European crisis for the New York Times, which is – astonishingly – well worth reading. ‘The exigencies of domestic politics have locked the euro zone into an impossible set of economic constraints — no defaults, no deficits, no stimulus and, of course, no devaluations — which mean that there can also be no banking stability, no lasting growth, no sustained job creation and no boost to competitiveness from their currency.

Andrew Neather of the Evening Standard was — and, for all I know, still is — a decent man. Although he worked as a speech writer for Jack Straw around the turn of the millennium, by the time I knew him he in the late 2000s, he had sensibly decided that bicycling was more interesting than politics. I could never have imagined him at the centre of a political controversy until 2009, when Neather wrote an article that sparked a conspiracy theory. As Joe Murphy, the Standard’s political editor, reported a week later: "Pressure was growing today for an independent inquiry into claims that immigration was encouraged by Labour for political gain.