More from The Week

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The scene is set for a long and bitter constitutional battle

Derry Irvine has not gone to pieces, as some former colleagues predicted that he would after being suddenly sacked as Lord Chancellor last June. Friends say that, if anything, he drinks less than he did in government and that his intellect is as sharp as ever. Convention debars former lord chancellors from practising law after leaving office. This leaves Irvine with time on his hands. He sits assiduously on the back-benches of the House of Lords, always voting with the government. He voted with the government again on Monday night, but could not prevent the Constitutional Reform Bill plunging to defeat. It is unlikely, however, that Irvine was greatly saddened.

The Spectator

Lock them up

A small milestone was reached this week. The Prison Service announced that for the first time the prison population has passed the 75,000 mark. To be precise, a total of 75,007 people now reside at Her Majesty’s pleasure, or the people’s pleasure as it will perhaps soon be known. It has become customary to greet statistics on prison population with shame, scorn, despair or a mixture of all three. Liberals will bemoan the failure of this or indeed any form of punishment, suggesting that Sid Noggs and his fellow safe-busters instead be sent on safaris in Africa in order to improve their interpersonal skills and boost their self-esteem. Pessimists will shake their heads and say it all just proves what a beastly place the world has become.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

A bad summer in Iraq will open the way to new regimes in Britain and the US

The most significant purely domestic event in what has turned into a terrible week on the international stage was a speech by Jack McConnell to Labour’s Scottish conference in an arctic Inverness. McConnell looked ahead to next year’s general election, as all politicians are beginning to do, and emerged with a subversive proposition: Labour should fight on the economy. There is a litany of statistics that will enable Labour to go into the general election with a winning hand on this front: inflation and unemployment at their lowest since the 1960s, seven years’ uninterrupted growth, spending on health and education powering ahead, etc.

The Spectator

Gordon’s great con

Aspiring actors are, by tradition, advised by their mentors never to work with children or animals. Budding politicians, on the other hand, should be advised at all costs to avoid pensioners. They make lousy photo opportunities and they have a tendency to fuss over irritatingly small amounts of money. On the other hand, it doesn’t look good when old folk get sent to jail as a result of government policy. This is exactly the embarrassment now facing Tony Blair’s administration. Up and down the land, leathery ladies in silly hats are vowing that they would sooner do time in Holloway than fork out for another hefty rise in council tax. The government has been lucky to get this far without provoking a popular revolt against council tax.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The rich can afford to be liberal about immigration; the poor can’t

The invasion of Iraq and everything that followed caused grave difficulties for the government. But at least it created a sense of purpose and perpetuated the illusion that Tony Blair is a strong Prime Minister. The primacy of domestic issues over the last few weeks has reminded us how vacant New Labour really is. Politics has suddenly lurched back three or four years to the era of government by gimmick, the cringe-making early Blair period when Downing Street was dominated by a frenzied desire to create newspaper headlines. Contemplate last week. The Prime Minister launched his plan for random drug-testing in schools on Sunday. By Monday his scheme was in trouble and by Tuesday it was halfway to collapse. Over at the Treasury Gordon Brown was not to be outdone.

The Spectator

Closed minds

If staff at the Lancet ever go on bonding weekends, they should avoid rock-climbing, canoeing or any other activity in which they would rely on the trust and loyalty of their colleagues. Last weekend the magazine spectacularly turned against the author of one of the most controversial papers it has ever published. Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 raised suspicions that the MMR vaccine was responsible for causing autism, was told by the magazine that his study should never have been printed. Editor Richard Horton said that Dr Wakefield’s research was ‘fatally flawed’ because its author had failed to declare a conflict of interest: that he was also conducting work on behalf of lawyers representing families of autistic children.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Letwin’s panoramic sweep and intellectual ambition

This has been by far the dullest week in British politics since well before the 2001 general election. Yet it would be wrong to say that nothing is going on; far from it. A meddling government has resolved, once again, to tear up the examination system. There is a Cabinet rift over the treatment of migrant workers from Eastern Europe. The emergence of a prospective President Kerry in the United States has left Tony Blair looking too close to President Bush for comfort. Unemployment sank to a 28-year low — though scarcely reported, it was the most significant political event of the week. Nevertheless, it remains the case that there have been no crises, wars or dramas of any kind.

The Spectator

Oliver asks for less

Oliver Letwin has laid the foundation for a Conservative victory at the next general election. We do not mean the Conservatives will necessarily win that election: that will require the recovery of great tracts of the political landscape from the Labour party. But the Conservatives are now in a position to campaign on the basis of a robust and pragmatic financial programme which is in harmony with the instincts of the British people. When politicians are asked what they intend to do with our money, the question is generally posed in the following form: are you going to raise public spending or cut taxes? To this conundrum, the shadow Chancellor answers ‘both’.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Michael Howard sounds like a man who wants to dump traditional Conservatism

This year’s dominant theme has been the domestic legacy of the war against Iraq. It has hung over British politics like a cloud of mustard gas, foul-smelling and ubiquitous. This week the cloud at last lifted, and it became possible to survey with a new clarity the ravaged landscape. Lt Col Blair, the commanding officer, now walks with a pronounced limp, and shows signs of shock. But the important thing is that he is still in place, barking orders and to some extent in command. Major Hoon is at his post. The regimental adjutant, Captain Campbell, had to be taken away by the military police and silenced after becoming hysterical. The devastation is widespread. Dyke, Davies and Gilligan are missing. Major Howard on the opposition side has been injured.

The Spectator

Make them legal

There could be no clearer example of human exploitation and its tragic consequences than the recent events in Morecambe Bay. Nineteen Chinese workers, who had paid a small fortune to agents in order to come to Britain for a better life, were drowned while gathering cockles in dangerous tidal waters of which they lacked local knowledge. Nothing can absolve those who exploited them — in this ferocious and conscienceless manner — of their moral responsibility, but this should not prevent us from considering what part our current way of treating illegal immigrants played in the tragedy.

Saturday

The Spectator

Right war. Wrong reason

Every so often there is an event which confuses the usual prejudices of political folk. One such event was the rise of the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who combined gay liberation with a dislike of immigrants, thereby scattering in all directions those on the Left whose belief systems are dependent on the assumption that all minorities have common cause against white conservatives. The publication of the Hutton report and the appointment of Lord Butler to conduct a further inquiry into the intelligence which took Britain and America to war with Iraq is another such event.

Saturday

The Spectator

Bring back Gilligan

On Tuesday, 24 September 2002 Tony Blair stood up in the House of Commons and waved a dossier. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ he said. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ These words were vital, at the time, since many MPs believed this country had no business waging war in Mesopotamia. It was in Mr Blair’s interests to point up the threat from Iraq. ‘The document discloses that Saddam’s military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them,’ he wrote in the foreword. As Mr Blair’s officials had foreseen, these words had a big impact.

Saturday

The Spectator

Parents make the best parents

Two developments this week demonstrate the absurdity, not to mention the inhumanity, of the government’s policy towards child-rearing. Firstly, sperm donors were informed that children conceived with the aid of their donations will be given the right to trace them. Secondly, the minister for children Margaret Hodge announced that it would be impossible to reunite thousands of children with parents from whom they were removed as a result of child-abuse prosecutions, even in cases where those prosecutions are ruled to be unsafe. In the first case, the government is intent on thrusting some of the responsibilities of parenthood upon men who simply wished to help others and who believed the law protected their anonymity.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Blair downgraded the Labour whips – and now he is paying the price

Iin the immediate aftermath of the 2001 general election victory Tony Blair made a series of important organisational mistakes, for which he is still paying the price. Probably the most disastrous was the eviction of the government whips’ office from its historic base in 12 Downing Street. Alastair Campbell, director of communications, moved in with his media-handling entourage instead. Hilary Armstrong, the Chief Whip, spent the remainder of the summer scouring Whitehall for alternative accommodation. It was a humiliating state of affairs which immediately sent the message round Whitehall that the Chief Whip no longer counted. The whips’ office had already been downgraded in other ways. Previous governments used the office as a training ground for rising stars.

The Spectator

No need for an inquiry

At 6.20 a.m. on Tuesday, the serial killer Harold Shipman hanged himself in Wakefield prison. He tied a noose in a bedsheet, placed it round his neck, tied the other end to the bars of his windows and jumped off a radiator pipe. It is difficult to see what else there is to say about the matter, but no doubt Stephen Shaw, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, will already have some ideas. He has just been appointed to carry out an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the former GP’s death. Mr Shaw will do his job with professionalism. He will establish what Harold Shipman had for supper the night before his demise, what exactly was said in Shipman’s last telephone conversation with his wife, Primrose.

Saturday

The Spectator

The uses of adversity

On Sunday, Tony Blair told the troops in Basra that they were ‘new pioneers of 21st-century soldiering’. The praise was fully deserved and sincerely delivered. Over his years in office, the Prime Minister has become a great admirer of the armed forces. Even so, there was a slight problem about the way he chose to phrase his compliment. The emphasis on new century, new army could obscure a crucial point: that the British Army is so good because so many of its traditions and so much of its ethos do not change with the calendar. Tried and tested, they endure. This also applies to training methods, which have come under attack in recent years because of fears about bullying.

Saturday

The Spectator

No guns on planes

When, at the insistence of the US Department of Homeland Security, the first armed ‘sky marshals’ take to British transatlantic flights, it is to be hoped that the in-flight movie won’t be Goldfinger. For anyone who has managed to avoid seeing any of the 40 years’ worth of repeat screenings, the Bond film concludes with the sight of Goldfinger’s portly frame being sucked through a plane window shattered in a gunfight with 007. It doesn’t take any great knowledge of aircraft pressurisation systems to realise that guns and planes do not mix. The pilots’ union, Balpa, has come to the same conclusion. Even former BOAC pilot Norman Tebbit, who supports the case for sky marshals elsewhere in these pages, does so with grave reservations.

Saturday

The Spectator

Don’t hang Saddam

As we go to press, two prisoners are awaiting their fates in very different circumstances. Ian Huntley, found guilty of the double murder of the Soham schoolgirls, seems destined for 50 years' worth of DVDs and games of ping-pong in one of Her Majesty's jails. Saddam Hussein, on the other other hand, faces a public hanging preceded by a brief formality of a trial, the verdict of which the American President has already announced. It is easy to envy the Iraqis what will be a moment of national jubilation in a country unused to that emotion.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

What Tony Blair really needs is a stiff drink

By the time Parliament rises for the Christmas recess, the Prime Minister will have endured 18 consecutive days without a day off. This stretch embraces two uncomfortable working weekends, the first of them to the fly-blown Nigerian capital of Abuja for the Commonwealth conference, an event made more fractious than usual by the Zimbabwe squabble. The Prime Minister left Abuja before the conference finished in order to return to a family funeral in Scotland. The hazards of this complicated journey included a 3.15-am arrival at Glasgow airport. Then it was back to London and the Downing Street reception for the all-conquering England rugby XV.

The Spectator

One world

It is traditional at this time of year to feel a kind of self-disgust. After the wrapping-paper has been burned in the fire, and the last mince pie has been forced down the gullet, you sit back, crapulous and afraid, and try to find some spiritual meaning in the festival of Christ’s nativity. What’s it all about, eh? you say to yourself as you watch your children fool apathetically with toys more costly and complicated than anything you could have expected as a child. Is this it, then? you wonder, and, as the mercury sinks in the mouth of the dying day, you may be inspired by this guilty thing called the spirit of Christmas.