More from The Week

Saturday

The Spectator

The audit of war

Following the example of progressive local authorities, this magazine will not, on this page this year, be celebrating Christmas but an alternative festival of light in which Muslims can share too. It is called the elections for a permanent government in Iraq. As we go to press, the polling booths are being prepared to enable the people of Iraq, for the second time in a year and only the second time in their history, freely to elect their own leaders: this time for a four-year term. Like ‘winterval’, the secular, multicultural festival concocted by the City of Birmingham, nobody is quite sure what it all means. Does it mark the beginning of better times, or will civil war be inevitable anyway?

Saturday

Andy Mcsmith

Why do my Labour friends send their children to private school?

A good friend said something strange the other day. Her daughter, who is approaching her final school year, has asked if she can leave private school and go to the local sixth form college because she would like to make some new friends. Her mother was brimming with pride as she relayed this news — pride, and relief, that her progeny should be so open-minded as to volunteer for the adventure of breaking loose from her peer group and entering a place where she will meet teenagers who are working class. I should include a brief social profile, to put the anecdote in context. Our friend has a salaried public-sector job which brings her into contact with working-class clients every working day.

The Spectator

Fresh air

It has become a cliché in recent days to contrast the gloomy jowls of Gordon Brown, performing emergency surgery to his spending plans in the Commons, with the beaming countenance of David Cameron, radiating hope and happiness throughout the nation. To make too much of this contrast is, of course, to underestimate the task that faces the Conservatives in winning the next election; unlike Labour at Tony Blair’s election as leader in 1994, the Tories are still some way behind Labour in the polls. But like all good clichés, there is considerable truth in the assertion that there has been a change in the political mood of Britain.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

How Cameron plans to profit from the war between Blair and Brown

Almost exactly two years have passed since Michael Howard was drafted in as emergency leader of the Conservative party. He has done the job he was asked to do. He took over at a moment of traumatic collapse. He administered first aid and gradually brought the victim back to life. In due course colour returned to its cheeks, and it was able to sit up in bed. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of Dr Howard, the patient is now taking tentative, unaided first steps. The recovery is by no means assured. But Howard’s own role is over. His final act was bravest of all. When he suddenly announced that he was stepping down as leader last May, everyone thought that he had made a foolish and reprehensibly self-indulgent mistake.

The Spectator

No surrender | 3 December 2005

A fortnight ago this magazine praised the Prime Minister for a statesmanlike speech in which he made the case for abolishing agricultural subsidies and dismantling tariff barriers on food from the developing world. We repeat our assertion that if Mr Blair achieves this, it will be a legacy well worthy of honour. Unfortunately, however, he appears to be wimping out at the first hurdle. It is reported from within Whitehall that, in spite of having promised not to surrender the British rebate unless there is significant reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Prime Minister is preparing a fudge. The rebate will be split into two, part of which will be given up and part of which will be retained.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Now Cameron is positioning himself as the heir to George W. Bush

At the heart of David Cameron’s project for the Tory party is admiration for Tony Blair: his techniques, style, language and persona- lity cult. This reverence for the Prime Minister extends far beyond mere form to embrace substantial policy issues. It is well known that David Cameron agrees with Tony Blair’s insights into public-service reform, while insisting that he could apply them with greater courage and forcefulness. The resulting pledge to support next year’s Education Bill has been greeted with hostility from Cameron’s leadership rival David Davis: so much so that it is now hard to see how Davis could fit at all comfortably into the front-bench team Cameron will form after his inevitable victory on 6 December.

The Spectator

Produce the memo

A front-page exclusive in the Daily Mirror is normally something to be treated with great scepticism. Until, that is, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, offers his full stamp of approval by invoking the Official Secrets Act. Fantasies and hoaxes — unless they are fantasies and hoaxes propagated by HM government — by definition lie outside the scope of the Official Secrets Act. All of which convinces us that there must be some truth in the Mirror’s claim that in April last year President Bush, in the company of Tony Blair, discussed bombing the headquarters of the Arab television station al-Jazeera, in Doha, Qatar, and that the Prime Minister talked him out of such an attack.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Time for David Cameron to reach beyond the media class

We have entered an equivocal and shiftless passage in British politics. Tony Blair is in the situation of a relegated football club towards the end of the season. He is going down, and there is a zero statistical chance that he can survive. He lingers at top table, but has reached the stage where even victories cannot save him. David Cameron finds himself in exactly the opposite position. Formally, he is still a mere contender. But the issue is in practice decided. This means that Cameron no longer needs to use the two-and-a-half remaining weeks of campaigning to secure votes. The imperative need is rather to work out strategies for the moment he officially becomes Opposition leader on the afternoon of 6 December.

The Spectator

Full marks to Blair

Over the past fortnight it has been necessary for this magazine to side with those who would like to bury Tony Blair. This week it is our solemn duty to praise him. No amount of disquiet over his illiberal — and happily failed — scheme to subject terror suspects to 90 days’ detention without charge will stop us from recognising that the Prime Minister’s foreign- policy speech at Guildhall on Monday was an impressive piece of statesmanship. In a month’s time members of the World Trade Organisation will gather in Hong Kong to continue the so-called ‘Doha round’ of negotiations over the liberalisation of world trade.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

How does Tony survive? Eloquence, unction and the abuse of power

No prime minister, with the debatable exception of Anthony Eden, has been held in such low private esteem by senior civil servants as Tony Blair. Cabinet secretaries Robin Butler and Richard Wilson have delivered withering public verdicts on the slipshod way government now conducts its business. So have senior officials like Michael Quinlan and former ambassadors like Rodric Braithwaite. Meanwhile Downing Street has fostered a novel species of accommodating officials. The DTI permanent secretary Robin Young, rather too happy to engage in Blairite political intrigue, is one. Jeremy Heywood, the Downing Street private secretary who adapted so readily to Tony Blair’s sofa government, is another.

The Spectator

The politics of terror

When history comes to make a final judgment on the Blair government — and we can be forgiven for hoping that moment is not too much longer delayed — there is one key statistic by which to assess the Prime Minister’s performance. Since 1997 the Labour government has created no fewer than 700 new criminal offences. This is supposed to be an age of increasing peace and prosperity. Yet the Labour party has been in such a continuous panic about the behaviour and potential behaviour of the British people that it has found 700 new ways in which to proscribe courses of conduct. In case you are wondering how that compares with any previous administration, Labour is creating criminal offences at a rate ten times greater than that of any other government.

Saturday

Richard Littlejohn

How greed and hubris led to Blunkett’s downfall

At least this time we were spared the self-pitying squealing about only doing what he had for the ‘little lad’. But even though David Blunkett walked the plank he still refuses to accept that he’s done anything wrong. Maybe the Viagra has gone to his head. It was obvious as early as Tuesday morning that he couldn’t survive. In the end, Tony Blair sacked him for a second time, just as he had been forced to jettison twice-disgraced Peter Mandelson. Blunkett had become an embarrassment, so he had to go. All the usual New Labour guff about this being just an unfortunate lapse in judgment, time to move on, draw a line, blah blah, wouldn’t wash.

The Spectator

Labour sleaze

Edward Gibbon would recognise it: the air of decadence, the smell of death which hangs over the New Labour empire this week. The impotence of Emperor Blair is a pitiful sight. His protestations of the innocence of Senator Blunkett — which once would have swung the public behind him and turned the condemnation upon Blunkett’s accusers — now inspire contempt. Another who would recognise the position of the government this week is John Major. Several times in the dying months of his government he found himself similarly overwhelmed by charges of sleaze; he would defend his minister to the death, then the minister would be forced to resign anyway. The inevitable question then was: and how long before you, too, fall on your sword?

Saturday

The Spectator

School bullies

Tony Blair has always had the remarkable ability to give the appearance of engaging in an heroic struggle with the intransigent Left of his party — while on closer inspection his proposals present at best a minor departure from old Labour dogma. He promised to ‘think the unthinkable’ on social security: the unthinkable result being that we now have record numbers of citizens — including almost all parents earning less than £60,000 a year — claiming state benefits. He promised to bring market reforms to the NHS, yet it has ended up even more of an unwieldy monolith than before; the main ‘market reform’ being that its doctors now sting taxpayers for Harley Street rates of pay.

Saturday

Stephen Glover

The Cameronians are wrong if they think they have humbled the Daily Mail

North Oxford is not one of the most deprived areas of Great Britain. When its generally quite large houses come on to the market — which is not often — they tend to be snapped up by computer millionaires or bankers from London rather than by dons. The ‘Tory turncoat’ Shaun Woodward has just paid squillions for a not particularly beautiful neo-gothic semi-detached just around the corner from me. You might expect that this would be solid Tory territory, but it is not. In fact, being a Tory in North Oxford has not been entirely plain sailing these past few years. At election time Lib Dem and Green and a few Labour boards stretch as far as the eye can see, but you have to go north of Summertown, and root around among the more modest inter-war villas, to find a Tory one.

The Spectator

Surrender to the unions

When Edward Heath was held to ransom by the unions in 1974, he called an election with the stirring question, ‘Who governs Britain?’, to which the answer was ‘not you, chum’. It is incredible that after more than 30 years, when so much is meant to have changed, the unions have just rolled over a New Labour government, with disastrous consequences for the public finances. Over the past year the Trade and Industry Secretary Alan Johnson has made a series of bold interviews and speeches on the need to reform public sector pensions, whose over-generous provisions promise to bankrupt future governments. Mr Johnson’s determination and common sense made him a worthy ‘Minister to Watch’ at last year’s Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Only literary theory can explain the life-changing success of David Cameron

MPs returned to Westminster this week during a spell of hot, sultry weather more characteristic of late July than mid-October. They sweated up in the corridors, mopped their brows in the chamber, sat in shirtsleeves on the Commons terrace (apart from the Liberal Democrats, who at first did not return at all; the recall of Parliament at the end of a 10-week break was a therapeutic ‘away day’ for party spokesmen. To be fair to Charles Kennedy, his absence was barely discernible). Tony Blair added to this troubling sense of unreality. President Talebani of Iraq has been in town.

The Spectator

Paternity madness

There were three news stories this week which might at first appear to be unrelated. The government announced that its forthcoming Work and Families Bill will give new fathers the right to take six months’ unpaid paternity leave. The BBC demanded that its licence fee rise at 2.3 per cent above inflation over the next eight years, perhaps taking it to £200. And Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned that the economy is heading for a bout of the 1970s disease: low growth and higher inflation. But of course there is a link between these three things.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

David Davis has suddenly acquired the air of the runner-up

Despite well-meaning efforts by Francis Maude, Theresa May and Alan Duncan to cast a pall over the occasion, Blackpool 2005 turned out to be the most life-enhancing Tory party conference in recent years. With 6,000 members present, it provided a pleasing reminder that vigour and enthusiasm survive among the grass-roots. Meanwhile, a series of outstanding speeches from the platform demonstrates the remarkable depth of talent within the parliamentary party. The first revelation was awesome: David Cameron. Every so often in British politics a star is born, and this happened last week. There has always been much to like about Cameron.

The Spectator

Cameron’s task

Many Conservatives will have left the party’s Blackpool conference with their feelings about the leadership contest transformed. As the horses enter the final stretch, the pulses of the punters are unquestionably quickening, and the smart money must surely be moving on to David Cameron. It is no disrespect to the other contenders to say that his star has risen the furthest over the last week. It may be that readers do not uniformly share the ecstatic sensations of Bruce Anderson, whose nunc dimittis may be found on page 16, but it is now the Cameron campaign that has momentum, a development that is obviously congenial to this magazine, since The Spectator decided months ago that he was the man for the times and for the job.