More from The Week

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The Tories should support Tony Blair’s magnificent defiance of his own party

The intelligent case for voting for Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001 was simple and very compelling. Only New Labour could bring about deep-seated reform of British public services. The argument went as follows: the Tories would never be trusted to tamper with the NHS or the social security system. Their motives were suspect. The voters were easily convinced that their real agenda was privatisation. Just as Richard Nixon, a Republican president, was the only political leader who could restore relations with communist China, so Labour's Tony Blair was the only man who could take on the public-sector workers.

The Spectator

Equality is unfair

On Monday the Employment Equality Regulations 2003 came into force, making it an offence, subject to an unlimited fine, for employers to discriminate against their staff on the basis of their religious belief or sexual orientation. On Tuesday the Norwich Union announced that it was cutting 2,300 call-centre jobs in Britain and moving them to India. If the link between the two events isn't immediately obvious, one is a cause, the other an effect of the increasingly high cost of employing people in Britain. For a discussion of the merits of these regulations, it is no use thumbing through back issues of Hansard. Parliament is no longer considered a proper place to discuss a measure which will have a huge impact on businesses in this country.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Jack Straw scents the impending demise of Tony Blair

Six years into the Thatcher government, and there was no question about who the Prime Minister was, what she stood for and where she was going. There was already a substantial body of achievement. Not so Tony Blair. Halfway through his second term he remains a rudderless and curiously negligible figure. If he vanished one morning in a puff of smoke, an outcome that can by no means be ruled out, he would leave very little behind. This week’s warning from Jack Straw that Britain is ready to veto the new European constitution admirably demonstrates the fleeting, insubstantial quality of so many of the Prime Minister’s political enthusiasms. The Foreign Secretary’s defiant briefing contradicts everything Tony Blair has said.

The Spectator

So why not give us a vote?

When former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing referred to the writing of the proposed EU constitution as Europe’s ‘Philadelphia moment’, he was presumably referring not to the composition of the United States’ constitution in 1787, but to the popular brand of processed cheese. What emerges from the first two months of the year-long negotiations is less a crisp declaration of the rights and responsibilities of free-born citizens, more a soggy mass of indefinite form. That is not to say that the European manner of writing treaties and constitutions is without method.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The man with the joyless task of relaunching Tony Blair

Normally the leaves are still on the trees, full of their autumn glory in russet and brown, when Parliament rises ahead of the Queen’s Speech. Not this year. For reasons no one can quite explain, this session has stretched on towards winter. It has been marred by squabbling and drift. Wednesday night’s venomous rebellion over foundation hospitals was in keeping with the mood of the rest of the year, easily Tony Blair’s worst as Labour leader. He has started to create the impression that he does not know who he is or what he is doing in Downing Street. Even quite loyal ministers readily admit that the government has lost its way. Tony Blair’s behaviour has taken on a strange, random turn.

The Spectator

Infantile resentment

By the time this magazine hits the streets it will be jostling for space with about a million marchers. It is important to be fair to those who have turned out to parade their hatred of the American President. Some of them may be inspired by principled objections to, say, the treatment of prisoners in Camp Delta, or US steel tariffs. These are indeed powerful points to be made against Mr Bush’s government. What has brought so many folk on to the streets, however, is a much broader case: that the President is a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who epitomises the arrogance of American foreign policy, and who by his violent and ill-thought-out actions in Afghanistan and Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place.

Saturday

The Spectator

Don’t burn Bush

The Queen’s state carriage has carried some pretty rum types over the years. Nicolae Ceauscescu took a break from murdering his countrymen to take a ride down the Mall in June 1978. In 1994 it was Robert Mugabe’s privilege and in 1979 Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi — at a time when Moi’s corrupt administration was bleeding his country of £600 million a year. Emperor Hirohito didn’t even need to apologise for the second world war in order to be granted a place in the Queen’s carriage in 1971. Questions over Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Chechnya did nothing to stop the Russian President taking a seat beside the Queen five months ago.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The growing mystery of a coup without a conspiracy

Last week’s display of virtuosity by Michael Howard was immaculate, ruthless, perfectly executed: high politics at its purest and most beautiful. His clarity of vision, contemptuous facing down of opposition, cunning, efficiency, resolve, above all the compression of eight weeks’ weary business into 90 minutes’ decisive action, combined to clear the battlefield with a single strike. Nothing as Napoleonic in audacity or scope has been seen at Westminster since Tony Blair’s seizure of the commanding heights of the Labour party ten years ago. This was one of those extremely rare occasions when the political correspondent really needs the skills of the art critic. The only proper initial emotion was awe and wonderment: just as Ruskin felt when he first saw Venice.

The Spectator

The cowardice of Labour

It is too much to hope that by the time all our subscribers have received this week’s magazine there will have been a change of government. Nevertheless, world events may have moved on substantially. The Royal Mail has admitted that it will take three weeks to clear the backlog of post created by last week’s illegal strikes by postal workers. The cost to business has been immense. Bills, contracts and order forms still sit helplessly in the wire bins of the Royal Mail’s Dickensian sorting offices as postal workers return grudgingly to work. As we go to press, many subscribers are only just waking up to last week’s issue. It is beyond our power to do much about late-arriving magazines.

Saturday

The Spectator

The fall of IDS

Tory MPs have decided to get rid of their leader in what are, on the face of it, surprising circumstances. The party is ahead in the polls by as much as 5 per cent. The recent Blackpool conference generated a host of new policies on health, education and welfare, most of which attracted favourable notices even from the BBC. At the most recent test of national electoral opinion, the 1 May council elections, Iain Duncan Smith’s Tories romped to victory and picked up 3,000 seats. There must have been some powerful incentive that drove Tory MPs to unseat a man elected, never let it be forgotten, by 61 per cent of the party membership. That incentive was fear.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Will it all be over for Iain Duncan Smith by Christmas?

It has been a week of stagnation and drift in Westminster. MPs have almost nothing to do in the Commons. On Monday night party managers put Conservative MPs on a one-line whip; in other words told them that they might as well go home, a decision that was only partly inspired by the forlorn hope that it would stop them plotting. This state of affairs looks set to carry on right up to the Queen’s Speech, which is not due till late November. Only in the House of Lords, where peers on Tuesday night voted down the Hunting Bill in a sudden squall of energy, is there any purpose or vitality. It is hard to know whose plight is the more wretched: the Tories with their inability to oppose, or New Labour with its incapacity to govern. Both parties are gripped by a crisis of identity.

The Spectator

Rough trade from the US

Almost forgotten among the hubbub over the Iraqi war is the last bout of diplomatic fisticuffs between Europe and America. On 5 March 2002, George W. Bush issued Presidential Proclamation 7529, placing tariffs of 30 per cent on imported steel in an attempt to protect the fading American steel industry. At the time, this magazine warned that no good would come of the measure, and so it has proved. The US International Trade Commission, a federal agency which advises the US government on trade issues, has just published a report on the effects of the tariffs. Far from being boosted, the US steel industry’s share of worldwide steel production fell from 12.4 to 10.2 per cent, while its share of the US market increased by a measly 1.4 per cent, from 79.6 per cent to 81 per cent.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

If Mr Hoon resigns, as he must, how can Mr Blair not resign as well?

Three events counted at Westminster this week. The first, and by far the most important, was the dramatic testimony given on Monday to Lord Hutton by Kevin Tebbit, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence. Tebbit confirmed that Tony Blair chaired the crucial meeting at which the ‘naming strategy’, designed to bring the identity of Dr Kelly into the public domain, was agreed. The importance of Tebbit’s revelation could not be greater. If Tebbit’s evidence is to be accepted, then Tony Blair’s emphatic assertion that ‘I did not authorise the leaking of the name of Dr Kelly’ was false.

The Spectator

Thank heavens for Betsy

At Alfred Roberts’s grocery store in Grantham in the 1930s, husband, wife and daughters all took their turn behind the counter. For any Conservative, the decision to employ other family members in one’s business ought to come across as an act of pragmatism. Indeed, the efficiency of such an arrangement is appreciated not just by Conservatives, as Leo Beckett, beavering away in the office of his wife Margaret, will attest. Yet for Betsy Duncan Smith, a spell of employment in the office of her husband Iain has turned out to be the subject of suspicion and speculation that may yet fatally undermine the Conservative leadership.

Saturday

Michael Heseltine

I do not see how the Attorney-General can stay in the government

When the House of Commons returns next week, Iain Duncan Smith will face a personal and political decision that must rank as among the most challenging of his career. He has to decide how the Conservative party handles Iraq. Iain has a special responsibility, both to the nation and to the party. Some time before British troops went into battle to seek and destroy weapons that were said to threaten this country, the Leader of the Opposition was invited to No. 10 for a briefing on Privy Council terms. By accepting a discussion on those terms he would have felt a deep commitment not to seek to abuse the privilege, or to play politics with it. That is what one would expect. Whether he was wise to accept so binding a commitment in such questionable circumstances is another matter.

The Spectator

Israel’s right to retaliate

No country can be expected to sit idly by while its citizens are slaughtered by suicidal fanatics, as those of Israel are. Moreover, virtually by definition, the fanatics themselves cannot be deterred, since they court death rather than fear it. It follows that only the sponsors of the fanatics can be deterred, for they are usually rather more attached to their own lives than the people they send into so-called battle. Martyrdom is for others, not for them. The European condemnation of Israel for its air raid on Syria in response to the latest suicide-bomb attack in Haifa is therefore unreasonable, unrealistic and offensive in its tone of moral superiority, which is so easy to assume from a safe distance.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

‘More battered without but stronger within’? Pass the sick bag

There are times when there is no alternative but to throw up one’s hands in despair and just confess that one is not up to the job. A plumber, sent to investigate a problem with the drains, is doing his client a favour if he admits that he cannot identify the cause of the problem. Likewise a doctor who confesses that he cannot discover the ailment that troubles his patient. So too there are times when it is best for a political journalist to come clean and admit to his readers that he is completely out of his depth. So it is with this Labour conference. It just doesn’t add up. There is something rum going on, though it is hard to say what. The conundrum is easy enough to state. Tony Blair arrived in Bournemouth after the most calamitous summer of his political career.

The Spectator

Debt bomb

Sir Ian McKellen’s visits to Downing Street were supposedly to discuss gay rights. To study the Prime Minister’s conference speech at Bournemouth, though, suggests another possibility: that our foremost Shakespearian actor has been giving Tony Blair some voice training. The trembling, impassioned delivery, the pregnant pauses: while most retired prime ministers these days are assured of a lucrative second career addressing annual corporate beanfeasts in glitzy convention halls across America, Tony Blair’s talents will earn him a place, too, on the provincial theatre circuit. Puffy, red-blooded socialists who only a few moments earlier were plotting over pints of Tetleys were caught sobbing, on camera.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Scapegoating Hoon was a bit like solving a crime by arresting the village idiot

For a long period in the late 1990s I worked for the Daily Express, a paper which vigorously supported the New Labour government. Once every six months or so Alastair Campbell, sometimes accompanied by Tony Blair, would turn up to give us our marching orders. At the end of one of these meetings I asked Campbell whether the rumours that he kept a diary were true. He moved his head away, did not look me in the eye. 'No,' he said. This is the trouble with Campbell. Though not without charm, or animal cunning or plausibility, he is untrustworthy. The extracts from his journal suddenly produced for the inspection of the Hutton inquiry last week must be treated with suspicion. Lord Hutton would be advised to check that no material was removed, inserted, changed or embellished.

The Spectator

Happy birthday to us

Readers may feel they have had almost enough of The Spectator's 175th anniversary. Enormous and flattering articles have appeared in newspapers, including the Guardian. Spectator staff have been deployed on the airwaves, plugging merrily away. If the thought were not so appalling, one might even wonder whether there were some public-relations campaign, to 'plant' favourable items at strategic points in the media landscape. As the festivities come to their peak, routs and revels have been organised, sponsored by diamond companies and attended by Spectator-related celebrities such as Charles Moore and Nigella Lawson. Now, however, by way of a climax, a beautifully produced one-off anniversary edition is on the stands, an anthology of the best journalism of the last 175 years.