More from The Week

Saturday

The Spectator

The bitterness of Brown sugar

Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. Gordon Brown’s rhetoric in his tenth and presumably final pre-Budget report on Wednesday was as robust as his morning appearances on radio and television were reassuringly amiable. This was a Chancellor setting out his stall for the top job, presenting himself as a peerless custodian of the economy who can now be entrusted as custodian of the whole country. But his smiling confidence was misleading.

Fraser Nelson

If Britain had its own Baker report on Iraq, this is what it would say

After so deftly avoiding any Iraq inquiry at home, Tony Blair will be cursing his luck to have walked straight into one in Washington. His talks with President Bush were planned months ago: it was a ‘happy coincidence’ (as his spokesman said through gritted teeth) that it should coincide with publication of the long-awaited Baker report on Iraq. But for once, the Prime Minister is ahead of the Americans. He did not need a ten-month report to get moving: the British withdrawal has quietly begun. The Americans were given no specific timetable for withdrawal in James Baker’s ‘which way now?’ report, but Britain’s was settled a fortnight ago. Of the four provinces under British control, the last one will be handed over to the Iraqi government in the spring.

Saturday

The Spectator

Grade expectations

A television channel has reached a sorry state when the structure of its ownership is more exciting than what it broadcasts. Yet this is precisely what has happened to ITV, whose appalling programming schedule has become a low-rent joke, making real the parodies of the BBC’s Little Britain. The problem is not that ITV strives for popularity and entertainment: so it should. But at present it is achieving neither. The best ITV offering in the pre-Christmas schedule is not one of its own creations, but the sensational battle for control of the network between the two tycoons, Sir Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch. Michael Grade’s return to commercial terrestrial broadcasting as chairman and chief executive is precisely what ITV needs.

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron must avoid the trap set by Gordon Brown’s pre-Budget report

When Ernest Bevin was appointed to run Britain’s wartime economy, he saw his chance to fix policy for decades. When Ernest Bevin was appointed to run Britain’s wartime economy, he saw his chance to fix policy for decades. ‘They say Gladstone was at the Treasury from 1860 to 1930’, he declared. ‘Well, I will be at the Ministry of Labour from 1940 to 1990.’ Bevin was out in five years, and dead in another six. But Gordon Brown is made of sterner stuff. The Chancellor firmly intends to be at the Treasury — spiritually, if not physically — from 1997 until 2017, and he started legislating with that goal in mind nine years ago.

Saturday

The Spectator

Parliamentarian of the Year | 25 November 2006

The 23rd annual Threadneedle/ Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch took place last Thursday at Claridge’s. The prizes were presented by the Rt Hon. David Cameron MP, Leader of the Opposition. Welcoming Mr Cameron, Matthew d’Ancona, the editor of The Spectator, observed that, in less than a year as Conservative leader, he had dislodged Beckham as the most popular Dave in the country, shown his fellow Tories that a glacier is not just a kind of mint, and taught the political world that green is more than the colour of envy. NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR Julia Goldsworthy MP The judges faced a difficult task selecting one MP from the intake of 2005 — which, in the words of Sinatra, was a very good year.

The Spectator

Worse than civil war

The assassination on Tuesday of Pierre Gemayel, Lebanon’s industry minister, was another brutal blow of the axe to the cedar tree that gave its name to the nation’s so-called ‘revolution’ last year. That uprising was triggered by another death — the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri in February 2005 — and forced the resignation of the pro-Syrian government of the time. The shooting of the 34-year-old Gemayel, a scion of the country’s leading Christian family and an outspoken opponent of Syrian influence, shows how desperately fragile Lebanon’s gains have been and, frankly, how illusory were its claims to independence after the 2005 uprising.

Fraser Nelson

At last, a political battle about the family. And not a moment too soon

Since Labour came to power, there has been a hugely important social trend that almost no one mentions. The institution of the two-parent family — whether married or unmarried — has been disintegrating at a speed seen nowhere else in Europe. The proportion of children living with lone parents was 19 per cent when Tony Blair first entered Downing Street. Today it stands at 24 per cent. Between these two statistics lies a social revolution, in an area that no party has dared to talk about. Until now. Mention the family, and trouble soon follows. It is a political minefield, strewn with the body parts of John Major’s government and a handful of reformist Labour ministers.

Saturday

The Spectator

To govern is not to legislate

When Her Majesty The Queen delivered her first speech to mark the opening of Parliament after the election of Tony Blair, she said, ‘My government intends to govern for the benefit of the whole nation.’ New Labour apparatchiks hugged themselves with glee, considering it a great victory that the monarch should read out such an archetypal Blairite soundbite. But who’s laughing now? The Queen’s Speech on Wednesday was the last of the Blair era, but certainly not Her Majesty’s final State Opening. Mr Blair is the tenth Prime Minister to have served the Queen, and for all the mischievous pleasure of his acolytes nine years ago, it is his time that has passed, not hers. To grasp how much the world has changed since 1997, one need only consult that first speech.

Saturday

The Spectator

Let justice be done

The US mid-term election results have many lessons, but one of them, as Christopher Caldwell argues on page 14, is that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is over, and that it has been lost. This reflects a broader, bone-deep fatigue in the West with the war on terror generally: a perception that the price we have paid has been too high, that our governments have systematically misled us, and that the whole enterprise stinks of arbitrariness and illegitimacy. This is why the sentencing this week of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the jailing of the British al-Qa’eda terrorist, Dhiren Barot, were so significant. True, the two trials could scarcely have been conducted in more radically different circumstances.

Fraser Nelson

Reid ‘wants some Etonian blood on his hands’. But so does Brown

The most famous political quotations come not from politicians but the wickedness of headline writers. Although Jim Callaghan never said ‘Crisis? What crisis?’, the phrase stuck because it seemed to sum up perfectly his psychological denial during the Winter of Discontent. It was a newspaper, not Thomas Jefferson (or even Thomas Paine), which declared ‘that government is best which governs least’. So it scarcely matters that David Cameron never actually said ‘hug a hoodie’ — the words seemed a credible summation of his approach to crime. It is enough, anyway, for Labour to declare war.

Saturday

The Spectator

Brown’s green dilemma

The publication of the Stern report on the economics of climate change was a deeply significant political punctuation mark. On Monday Tony Blair declared that the document was ‘the most important report on the future which I have received since becoming Prime Minister’. Yet it will not be Mr Blair who faces the formidable task of selling the report to the British public, legislating accordingly and urging other countries to follow suit. That task will fall to the man who is all but certain to succeed him: Gordon Brown. Sir Nicholas Stern’s findings are the work of a seasoned economist rather than of a green campaigner. Not everybody accepts his conclusions.

Fraser Nelson

The Queen’s Speech will be just a holding statement, as Whitehall waits for Gordon

There is something comically surreal about the ten-year plans Tony Blair has commissioned across his Cabinet. A Prime Minister who will not last another ten months is asking his Cabinet to agree a strategy in four areas of policy. No one engaged in the process is in any doubt about its futility. Soon Gordon Brown will be prime minister and his own, deeply personal strategy will be the only one that matters. All activity until then is hopelessly cosmetic. It is in this spirit that ministers are preparing for the Queen’s Speech on 15 November.

Saturday

The Spectator

Stern warning

On Monday the debate over climate change enters a new phase. Sir Nicholas Stern, who heads the Government Economic Service, will publish his review of the economics of climate change, which was commissioned by the Chancellor in July 2005. At last the debate on the environment will shift definitively towards the real choices facing the country and facing the world, and — we hope — away from the token gestures and feel-good rhetoric which have held sway thus far. Until now, economics has been conspic-uously absent from the climate change debate. We have heard a lot of science, much of it badly explained to the public.

Fraser Nelson

Britain will ‘see the job through’ in Iraq. But ‘the job’ has changed completely

The perfect political U-turn is formed by an arc that curves so gradually that it is difficult to perceive any change of direction. Even now it is hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the British government gave up on Iraq. But in Westminster the mood change is discernible and the new direction clear. An inflection point has been reached where hope of a democratic, stable country — the original vision at the time of invasion — has been abandoned. The mission is now defined as handing over Iraq to the Iraqis, whether stable or not. The pace is being set in Washington, as it was in the months before the invasion.

Saturday

The Spectator

Is the horse weak or strong?

It is now all but orthodox to say that Britain must get out of Iraq sooner rather than later. Irrespective of its constitutional propriety, the declaration by General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, that we should withdraw ‘some time soon’ has been widely welcomed as a much-needed blast of honesty. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group, chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is expected to recommend a dramatic change in strategy, amounting, at the very least, to a phased withdrawal.

Fraser Nelson

New Labour’s greatest U-turn of all is its sudden attack on multiculturalism

The idea of cultural wars is as alien to the British nation as the word Kulturkampf is to the English language. In America, of course, such conflict is routine, as parties clash over issues like gay marriage, abortion and affirmative action. But Britain has never had much time for such confrontation. From time to time, specific loyalties divide the country — Charles or Diana, Thatcher or Kinnock, Mods or Rockers, Roundhead or Cavalier — but never before a clash of civilisations. Yet many in Westminster believe that culture wars are about to become an integral part of our politics. Jack Straw, the minister who started the present row about the Muslim veil, flatly denies accusations of bravery.

Saturday

The Spectator

Make North Korea blink

The Korean nuclear crisis marks the bankruptcy of one style of post-Cold War diplomacy and should be the midwife of wholly new methods. It is not only essential that Pyongyang itself be punished for its flagrant act of provocation. The crisis must be resolved in such a way that no other rogue state is tempted to pursue the same reckless path. The eyes of Iran’s rulers are fixed on the Korean peninsula to see how much Kim Jong-Il is allowed to get away with. But other regimes with nuclear ambitions — Syria, Venezuela — are watching too. This is a test of the West’s resolve, and of the principles it intends to apply in the new geopolitical landscape. Those who blame the Bush administration for this nuclear test satisfy only their parochial prejudices.

Fraser Nelson

Labour is losing on most fronts to Cameron, hence its new cultural war over Islam

The House of Commons has scarcely been back a week and already opportunities are falling from the sky for David Cameron. Government failures are spectacular and ubiquitous. Prisons are overflowing, hospital wards are closing and unemployment is rising. Casualty rates are high in Afghanistan and Britain has effectively lost Basra to warring militias. On every front Labour looks embattled, exhausted — and there for the taking. This is happening at a rather inconvenient time for the Conservatives. It has not yet finished its image makeover, the policy review is a year away and Mr Cameron is adamant that he will not bring forward the timetable. But, at Tory headquarters, there is an acceptance that firm proposals are needed to take on an imploding government.

Saturday

The Spectator

The substance of optimism

Those Tories coming to David Cameron’s first conference as party leader in search of detailed policies were always going to be disappointed. It is only ten months since Mr Cameron took the helm. Tony Blair’s first ten months as Labour leader were dominated by an internal party struggle over Clause 4. And one would have been hard pushed to gain a clear impression of what Britain would be like under Margaret Thatcher in her first ten months as Leader of the Opposition between February and November 1975 — a period during which she campaigned vigorously for a Yes vote in the EEC referendum.

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron has helped his party rediscover its most lethal weapon: loyalty

For the first time in perhaps a decade, not a drop of blood has been shed on the floor of a Conservative party conference. What was for so many years a vicious gladiatorial arena this week turned into a serene botanical garden. According to precedent, this should have been the conference when David Cameron faced protest from a party which he has dragged through all manner of ideological contortions. But instead, he received the polite applause of an optimistic audience. It is not at all natural. Nor was it particularly helpful. The script which Conservative managers had written for the week was one where Mr Cameron and his lieutenants would demonstrate his steely resolve by facing down the wicked ‘Tory Right’.