More from The Week

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Blair helped Bush win, and he will be rewarded

Not long before midnight on Tuesday, a mood of dogmatic certitude overcame the throng of British MPs, ministers and journalists assembled at the traditional election-night party at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. We knew that John Kerry had won, and dismissed with knowing contempt the warnings of our hosts — whose election, after all, it was — that it was far too early to tell. A delicious report went round that shares in Halliburton, the construction company associated with Vice-President Dick Cheney, had crashed on Wall Street shortly after 4 p.m. local time, in reaction to the first unofficial exit polls. One lonely Foreign Office official, along with Bruce Anderson, the political columnist, challenged the prevailing mood.

The Spectator

Brown’s tax trick

While the world’s eyes have been on polling booths in the back streets of Ohio, the British political scene may appear to have been becalmed. But it isn’t so. In the past week a couple of notable salvoes have been fired in the direction of the government’s economic policy, which by rights ought to inflict a serious wound in the side of the Chancellor. They came from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) and Barclays Capital, which are both scathing of Gordon Brown’s chances of sticking to his so-called ‘Golden Rule’ and of his sophistry in attempting to convince us that the rule will be stuck to.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Blair’s duplicity may be deliberate, or he may just change his mind a lot

Very few political decisions achieve nothing but good: one of them was the abolition of exchange controls exactly 25 years ago. This week the Adam Smith Institute rightly marked the anniversary with a dinner at the St Ermin’s hotel. Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor who masterminded the stroke, reflected on how monumental the judgment — so obvious in retrospect — appeared at the time. Lord Howe revealed that it was the only occasion in his career that he lost sleep on account of a policy decision, while Margaret Thatcher was all but overcome by last-minute nerves. Nigel Lawson, financial secretary in 1979, used the event to muse on how political judgments are reached. ‘It was a leap in the dark,’ he remembered.

The Spectator

Half a cheer for Bush

Next Tuesday an unhappy choice confronts the American people. To suffer a gloating Mark Steyn. Or to endure the sight of a jubilant Michael Moore thumping the air in the belief that he has just personally saved the world from military and ecological disaster. Grim though these alternatives are, with heavy heart we are minded to favour the first, and urge Americans to vote for Bush. It is a cliché that this year’s presidential candidates are the least inspiring for years. American presidential candidates are always the least inspiring for years.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The US holds the key to paying off Blair’s debts

I was brought up near Warminster in Wiltshire, and love this quiet, unassuming country town. Its proximity to the Salisbury plain has ensured it the role of local garrison, a position viewed with at best mixed emotions by the locals. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Royal Irish Rangers, unable to serve back home, incessantly returned to Warminster. The Irish Rangers, since disbanded, were brave men and fine soldiers, but they instilled a reign of terror in the local pubs and nightspots that is remembered with a shudder to this day. Now Warminster plays host to one of the British army’s most famous regiments, the Black Watch, or to be precise their families, for most of the men have been serving in southern Iraq.

The Spectator

All bets are on

You can’t please some people. The Daily Mail has spent the Blair years complaining about the nanny state. But when the government finally comes up with a measure to add to the gaiety of the nation, the Gambling Bill, the Mail suddenly turns nanny itself. ‘Gambling with our futures,’ it whined last week. ‘Trashy glitter and the lure of easy money to exploit the vulnerable ...that Labour is encouraging super-casinos in every town would horrify the fathers of socialism.’ Actually, we suspect that to some extent the fathers of socialism may well have been in sympathy with the Gambling Bill, which seeks to correct the injustice of having one law on gambling for the rich and another for everyone else and to remove silly restrictions on casinos.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The Prime Minister has become the main international prop for George Bush

Two weeks ago, in the course of an interview with the Observer, Tony Blair claimed that he had already said sorry for issuing false information about Iraq. This is what he said: ‘We’ve apologised for the information that was given being wrong.’ I have since ransacked government statements, but found no trace of any apology. Downing Street, when asked, has also been unable to shed any light on the matter. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Prime Minister’s claim was another of those lies which regularly drop from his lips. Two days after the falsehood in the Observer, the Prime Minister made his annual speech to the Labour party conference.

The Spectator

Bigley’s fate

The soccer international between England and Wales last Saturday managed to display in an instant two of the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern Britain. A request by the authorities for a minute’s silence in memory of Mr Ken Bigley, the news of whose murder by terrorists in Iraq had broken the previous day, was largely and ostentatiously ignored. Yet the fact that such a tribute was demanded in the first place emphasised the mawkish sentimentality of a society that has become hooked on grief and likes to wallow in a sense of vicarious victimhood. There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool, according him the same respect offered annually to the million-and-a-half British servicemen who have died for their country since 1914.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

The Tories are no longer taking the core vote for granted

For some time it was not polite to utter the phrase ‘core vote’ at a Conservative party gathering, or within earshot of those loyal to the leadership. It referred, after all, to people who believed taxation was theft, who despised the European Union and all it stood for, who venerated the monocultural society and saw no difficulty with mediaeval punishments for criminals. To suggest the Tory party’s core vote was something to be cherished, respected and, indeed, catered for was akin to dropping an especially pungent fart at the proverbial vicarage tea party. Throughout the Hague years, and the Duncan Smith years, and (until now) the Howard months, this remained unchanged.

The Spectator

War and peace

The newsreader Martyn Lewis once complained that there is not enough good news on the telly. To judge by his forays into literature, he would quite happily have presided over a Nine O’Clock made up entirely of dog and cat stories, but he had a point. When there is a spot of bother anywhere in the world there is a queue of foreign correspondents waiting to get in. Come the aftermath, the gradual return to peace and normality, and they are all off again, enticed by the promise of trouble elsewhere. Take Afghanistan. It is three years since our television screens were bombarded nightly with pictures of al-Qa’eda training camps vanishing in a puff of smoke and of flattened villages where American bombers had missed their targets.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Tony Blair has kept his grip on everything but reality

Two salient facts define the national political predicament this autumn. The first is a growing sense of disquiet about Tony Blair. Experts often speak of the lack of ‘trust’ which shows up in opinion polls. But there is more to it than that. People are beginning to sense that there is something rum about this Prime Minister, and that he is no longer quite 16 annas to the rupee. In the normal course of events this sense of unease might translate into a general election defeat. But this brings me to the second singularity. While distaste for Tony Blair is palpably growing both within the Labour party and elsewhere, there is no agreement at all about an alternative. The internal opposition to Tony Blair, after a summer of perfervid preparation, elected not to strike.

The Spectator

More apologies, please

The most revealing part of Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour party conference was when he said, ‘modern life is being perpetually stressed out. You can do more, travel more, consume more, live longer but nothing stops still. It’s always changing.’ Possibly some psychoanalyst could tell us that it is the cry of a leader wanting to be put out of his misery. At any rate, it is a symptom of a prime minister whose desire for a third term is tempered by exhaustion of mind and body. To his credit, however, Tony Blair’s hour at the lectern was not entirely wasted, as it has been in previous years, with vague platitudes. His Sovietesque ‘ten-point plan’ openly forms the basis of the party’s next manifesto.

Saturday

The Spectator

Rewarding the truth

If Lord Woolf is discovered ’orribly murdered in his cellar, the editor of the Daily Mail may well find himself helping police with their inquiries. There will certainly be a motive: the Lord Chief Justice is not a popular figure with the self-professed keeper of Middle England values. In response to his lordship’s proposal to reduce the effective sentence for murder to ten years in some instances where the accused admits guilt, the Mail ventured: ‘Rarely has a Lord Chief Justice seemed so smug, self-satisfied and remote while the law he is supposed to uphold sinks deeper into disrepute.’ Comparisons spring to mind with Nero, twanging away on his lyre as Rome burned around him.

Saturday

Simon Heffer

If Blair overrules the Lords on hunting, he should abolish them altogether

We have been told from time to time that one reason why the Prime Minister has been so slow in ‘reforming’ the House of Lords is that he feels it is important to have it, but he cannot decide what form it should take. It is important, it is said, for all those reasons why bicameral legislatures are superior to unicameral ones. It avoids elective dictatorship. The executive and its plans are held better to account. There is expertise in the upper house that can be brought to bear on Bills and can revise common sense into them. Above all, a House not run by the whips in the Commons can, by asserting its independence, prevent constitutional abuses.

The Spectator

Open the gates of Vienna

The chief recruiting sergeant for al-Qa’eda is not George W. Bush but Frits Bolkestein, the Dutch EU internal market commissioner. Speaking last week on the possibility of Turkey joining the EU — and thus Muslims one day coming to outnumber Christians within it — Mr Bolkestein commented that were this to come to pass ‘the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain’. For those unsure of the reference, Vienna was besieged in July 1683 by a force of 200,000 Ottoman Turks. The siege was crushed on 12 September of that year by the joint Polish and Austrian armies, thereby saving Christendom from further incursion by Islam.

Saturday

The Spectator

Help the aged

Andrew Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, resigned this week, so he says, in order to spend more time with his family. Or maybe he was peeved at some of the comments made about him by his colleagues. What is certain is that he didn’t resign for the reason he ought to have done: that the government’s policy on pensions has been a failure. In 1997 our pension pots were brimming. Alone in Europe we looked forward to a well-heeled old age without impoverishing future taxpayers. Just seven years later, however, many seem doomed to a retirement on baked beans — bought with means-tested benefits. The change in fortunes for pensioners, to be fair, can partly be blamed on the collapse of the stock market bubble. But this is far from the whole story.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

A Labour landslide will be terrible for the trusting Mr Brown

It was beyond a shadow of doubt an outstanding silly season, the best by far in recent years, with an excellent crop of stories. Leaving aside the daily tragedies in Iraq and Sudan, too heartbreaking to ponder for long without giving way to despair, August delivered some fine material: the emergence of the Notting Hill Tories, the amorous exploits of the Home Secretary and the arrest of Mark Thatcher. Mark Thatcher, now urgently in need of a biographer, produced the best of these three diversions. Thatcher’s defining characteristic is a preposterously inflated estimation of his own intelligence and abilities.

The Spectator

Jobs for life

To the parents of Victoria Climbié, the eight-year-old girl who died in 2000 after being battered by her great-aunt and great-aunt’s boyfriend in a seedy Haringey council flat, the disciplinary procedures employed by British local government must seem to take place in a parallel universe. On Wednesday morning, listeners to Radio Four’s Today programme were treated to the pained tones of Lisa Arthurworrey, the social worker who had been responsible for Victoria’s welfare and who is now to appeal against her sacking by Haringey borough council for gross misconduct. Ms Arthurworrey complains that although she made mistakes she was misled by doctors and let down by her managers, and that therefore she deserves to have her job back.

Saturday

The Spectator

The abuse of power

The impeachment of Tony Blair would form a fitting end to a prime ministership which opened with the promise to be ‘purer than pure’, but ended in the arrogant deception of the British people. This ancient form of trial, which has lain disused but not defunct in the armoury with which we defend our liberties, is the means by which Parliament can humble a chief minister who has arrogated grotesque quantities of power and has treated with contempt the constitutional forms which ought to have restrained him. Eminent among those forms or conventions or traditions is the dictum that ministers must not lie to or mislead the House of Commons.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

How Labour ministers lie about the world and their opponents

One of the key reasons why New Labour has been successful for so long is its ability to destroy or marginalise opponents. The techniques used are ruthless. Those who challenge government orthodoxy are smeared, discredited and rubbished as liars. Their motives are questioned and their characters assassinated. Normally, in the quotidian frenzy of political debate, there is no time to examine how ministers construct their arguments. Life moves on, the smears and falsehoods remain hanging in the air. But this month, while Westminster is quiet and the main characters absent, there is an ideal opportunity for a leisurely examination of New Labour at work. The last week has provided two interesting case studies.