Columns

Wednesday

Hugo Rifkind

A chance to look backwards, and forwards, and see where you are

To Edinburgh for Christmas this year, and I can’t wait. We’ll be leaving any day now, in our pathetic London squib of a car. You know the sort — it’s got a fuel tank the size of a milk carton and on the motorway it sounds like a bee. It never feels pathetic in London, because we use it once a fortnight and drive at 15mph. Up north, though, you can feel people looking at you askance. I mean, they never say anything, but you know what they’re thinking. ‘You’re professional, grown-up people,’ say their eyes, ‘and you have a family car with an engine smaller than that of my toddler’s dirt bike. How pretentious.’ My toddler doesn’t have a dirt bike, because our London garden isn’t big enough to have any dirt.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Osborne is the St Augustine Chancellor – he wants to balance the books, but not yet.

After months of squabbling and not-so-civil war, the coalition now appears to be functioning again. This is one immediate consequence of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. The Chancellor was allowed to present a package to the House that had not been leaked earlier by coalition partners in an act of preemptive spin. This matters not only for the orderly proceeding of affairs of state but also because the Autumn Statement was the first of a two-part coalition effort to seize the political initiative. The second will come in the new year with the publication of its mid-term review. Time is running out for further radical reform. The Autumn Statement was limited in its ambitions, and the mid-term review will be the last chance.

Steerpike

Tony Hall’s successor, organic government and the great Lib Dem shale plot

Rending of raiment and gnashing of teeth at the Guardian. I’m told that the paper’s veteran editor, Alan Rusbridger, is tipped to take over at the Royal Opera House once the BBC’s director-general designate, Tony Hall, relinquishes control. Quite a wrench for Rusbridger, who has stewarded the profit-averse newspaper since 1995. Last year alone he amassed losses of £44 million, so he’ll be relieved to know that the Opera House comes with an annual subsidy of £28 million from the Arts Council. Rusbridger was coy when Steerpike asked him about making a move this week, though he denied having spoken to anyone at the Royal Opera House.

Hugo Rifkind

Even my mimsy leftist friends don’t care that prisoners can’t vote

I mean, honestly. What kind of mimsy, soggy-spined, weak-kneed, faffing, lentil-eating, self-loathing, lefty north London ninny gives a damn that prisoners don’t have the vote? Pretty much my entire social circle could be described in such terms (as mimsy ninnies and suchlike, not as prisoners) and nobody gives a flying monkey’s. I had a conversation about it with Jeremy Hardy on the News Quiz, for God’s sake, and even he was a bit ‘meh’. So how has this become an issue? What madness has taken root? Of all the things you can do when you aren’t in prison that you can’t do when you are, you’d think voting would come pretty low down.

Rod Liddle

Is it grim up north? It’s too expensive to go and find out

My flight to Italy a couple of weeks back was held on the runway for a while because of some altercation back at the departure gate. After a while the pilot appeared at the front of the cabin and, full of self-righteous anger, explained that ‘two Italians’ had been rude to the gate staff. He would not be allowing them onto ‘his’ plane, he said, and then began to lecture the rest of us as to how he wouldn’t tolerate any form of rudeness on any of ‘his’ flights, certainly not to ‘his’ staff, it was something up with which he most certainly would not put, he barked, puffed up to the size of a small planet.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Now is the time to buy stock in George Osborne

Few politicians have a more volatile share price than George Osborne. His career to date has been a tale of highs (the inheritance tax announcement, the 2010 emergency budget) and lows (yacht-gate and the aftermath of the 2012 budget). Westminster’s stockbrokers were waiting for next week’s autumn statement to decide if his stock was on the up again. But the Chancellor has beaten them to it. His success in persuading Mark Carney, the governor of the Canadian Central Bank, to take on the role of Bank of England governor, is a market-moving intervention. To be sure, few voters will head to the polls in 2015 determined to return to government the man who put a Canadian in charge of the Bank of England.

James Delingpole

Back in the Delingpole fold

Gosh, I can’t tell you how lucky you were not to have been brought up in the Delingpole family. There were nine of us in all — not counting the cats, iguanas, fleas, lice and one-eyed pugs — and the scene every day in the rambling Old Rectory where we lived was like the second half of Lord of the Flies only without the restraint, civility and gentle charm. It was a dog-eat-dog world where no quarter was given and none expected. It was like Florence in the era of the Medici (only without the culture and art part: unless you count the huge mural of Judge Death my brother Dick did in his bedroom) — an era of constantly shifting alliances, betrayal, backstabbing, torture, humiliation and perpetual war. It made me the hardened street-fighter I am today.... ....

Matthew Parris

Can anyone defeat the town-hall zombies?

Others have already swelled a chorus of rage against Rotherham -council for removing three foster children from the couple caring for them, on the grounds that the couple were members of Ukip; and the rage is justified. But few sane people will need persuading that the -council’s judgment was wrong, and I don’t intend to bang on about it. Within that statement — ‘few sane people’, etc — lies the puzzle I want to -examine. And a puzzle it is; because those who took the decision were not insane.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Westminster waits eagerly for the return of the Crosby show

Never before in British politics can the recruitment of a part-time consultant have been given so much coverage. The papers have treated Lynton Crosby’s coming arrival at Conservative Campaign Headquarters with the seriousness that used to be reserved for changes in the great offices of state. Ministers are no less excited; they are full of theories about the significance of the hiring of this hardscrabble Australian operative and what it says about the future direction of the party. So what’s the fuss about? Well, as with so much to do with the Cameroons, one can only really understand it in the light of the 2010 election.

Steerpike

Leveson’s tour of Australia, Lynton Crosby’s uneasy return and the anger of Ben Fogle

Brian Leveson’s epic inquiry into press malpractice is finally drawing to a close. In Britain, the courtroom saga has enjoyed a tiny daytime TV audience of tagged convicts, stoned job-seekers, bored print journalists and ex-employees of News International. But in Australia, millions have tuned in to watch his lordship’s estimable ruminations. Their enthusiasm is about to be rewarded by the great jurist himself, who is planning a short speaking tour down under, kicking off in Sydney as soon as his report is published. Even his press officer is happy to disclose these travel arrangements to anyone who picks up the phone. I find this innocent candour rather endearing.

Hugo Rifkind

Within ten years, you’ll be buying cannabis at your off-licence

The first time I came across skunk cannabis was in an underground out-of-hours bar in Nottingham in 1997. I think I’ll leave that as ‘came across’, if it’s all the same to you. I might want to be prime minister one day, and it’s important to have my tenuous denials lined up in advance. More expensive than your regular cannabis, I remember, uh, people saying, with a stronger smell and a far -stronger effect. Which I noticed, obviously, from the behaviour of other people. As I studied them with clear, unreddened eyes, like an anthropologist. Yes. From then on, until I stopped moving in such circles, skunk was all there was.

Thursday

James Forsyth

To win the next election, the Tories must crush the Liberal Democrats

On the wall in Conservative Campaign Headquarters is a clock counting down the days, hours and minutes to the next election. It is so large that anyone who enters for the next 901 days won’t miss it. The party is now on an election footing, as the clock is intended to demonstrate. Grant Shapps, the new chairman, had it installed as soon as he was appointed to inject a sense of urgency into CCHQ’s work. Talk to people there and in Downing Street and you would think the election is only months away. They regard David Cameron’s conference speech as having kicked off a long campaign. They speak of ‘election messages’, and ask who will manage target-seat strategies.

James Delingpole

Here’s a BBC scandal that should really make you disgusted

How many of you reading this were abused by Jimmy Savile? Few if any, I would hazard. And while I don’t wish to play down the misery wrought over four or more decades by that loathsome perve, the BBC scandal I’m about to describe has resulted in damage, pain and destruction far more widespread than anything Savile managed.

Matthew Parris

Listening out for the silent minorities

A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself. My Times column last Saturday is a case in point. I wrote after David Cameron had warned Phillip Schofield (on a TV programme called This Morning) against giving a stir to the unfounded belief that there’s a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. I suggested this was one of three great subterranean public prejudices that campaigners for homosexual equality have had to combat over the past half-century.

Rod Liddle

Welby’s impossible task is to lead the opposition to gay marriage

The new Archbishop of Canterbury has the cleanest-shaven chin I think I have ever seen on an adult male human. It is as if, in an attempt to rid himself of even the vestigial suspicion of facial growth, he has shaved twice with a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo™ razor, and then applied those molten wax strips that women use these days on their front bottoms — for reasons of hygiene and personal comfort, we are assured. I am not saying that Justin Welby actually does this, or has it done to him by some attendant vicar, merely that it looks that way.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Obama’s victory is a great solace to No. 10, and they will exploit it to the full

Four years ago, in opposition, the Cameron offices were a swing state in the US election. Most were for Obama but there was still a sizable number who held a torch for John McCain. But this time round it is hard to think of anyone in Downing Street who wanted a Romney win. I asked several people in No. 10 who would have voted for Romney, but only one name ever came up. The idea of a Tory Downing Street urging on a Democratic President would come as a shock to those who served in the Thatcher and Major governments. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had common foes at home and abroad. But it would be a mistake to think that the relationship between Tories and the Republican party went into decline when they both left office. Instead, it got even closer.

Hugo Rifkind

We want our politicians to be human – when they are, we condemn them for it

  Thus finishing his grand survey, Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits! That’s Jonathan Swift, as you’ll know, charting the disappointment of Strephon, the disillusioned peeping Tom. It came to me, though, reading the Mail on Sunday last week. For, therein, I learned that David Cameron had been text-ing Rebekah Brooks. Mainly about horses. In an informal tone. It’s a bloody outrage. Is it? Isn’t it? I think it must be, otherwise I don’t see why I’d have to know about it. But which is the outrageous part? Cameron sent Brooks a text about riding a horse which read ‘fast, unpredictable and hard to control but fun’.

Steerpike

The real master of No.10, leaks at the Wolseley and Archbishop Justin

Hats off to Sir Jeremy Heywood. The Cabinet Secretary’s bid to delete himself from everyone’s Christmas card list is proving a great success. Ministers were not amused by Sue Cameron’s Telegraph column hailing Sir Jeremy as ‘the only person trying to impose some order on the chaos’. She described him as the PM’s de facto political enforcer and she gushed lovingly about his capacity to ‘excite the frisson of fear’ in Downing Street. In response, the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn tweeted that Sir Jeremy had become the ‘unelected epicentre of power’. One disgruntled Downing Street staffer whispered to me, ‘What next? An eight-page spread in Hello!

Rod Liddle

How refreshing! A clean, old-fashioned expenses scandal

It was good to see parliamentary expenses back at the top of the news agenda over last weekend. I think we were all getting a little nonced out, so to speak. To judge from the number of lawsuits now filed against the BBC, and also the supposed list of people due to be picked up by the police, it would seem that almost everybody who works in television was guilty, at some time or another, of sexually abusing some innocent civilian. It is surely only a matter of time before we see the headline: ‘Police to interview Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and, of course, Grubb.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The end of the recession, but just the beginning of the PM’s problems

Since the end of the recession was confirmed a few days ago, confidence has returned to at least one part of -Britain. Ministers are beginning to strut again as they wander round Whitehall and their conversations include the occasional reference to a second term. Political recovery will, they think, follow economic recovery. As evidence for this, they point to polling which shows that the coalition’s reputation for economic management has already returned to pre-Budget levels. David Cameron, though, is more cautious. Over the past difficult few months, he did his best to keep his own and others’ spirits up. Colleagues were regularly told, ‘Well, it was never going to be easy.’ But now he is airing some of his suppressed irritation.