More from The Week

Saturday

Peter Oborne

The Hunting Bill is insulting and appalling – but it could be worse

Few issues have highlighted the more shameful qualities of the Blair government quite as starkly as hunting: its moral turpitude, instinctive mendacity, fundamental gutlessness, endless dithering, ugly populism and blind conformity to suburban prejudice. Labour MPs who favour a ban feel understandable resentment that after six years no Bill has reached the statute book. Tony Blair lied at least twice while attempting to ingratiate himself with anti-hunting audiences by asserting that he had voted for a ban, when in fact he had done no such thing. Fear of the Countryside Alliance, which has in the last five years produced the two largest demonstrations ever seen on the streets of London, temporarily at least put the government off a ban on hunting.

The Spectator

Speak for England

Dr Rowan Williams, who was this week ceremonially confirmed as Archbishop of Canterbury, becomes leader of a Church which is among the most mis-reported institutions in Britain. To judge from the press, one would think that the Church of England is obsessed by the issue of homosexuality, with women priests another vexatious issue, and has nothing much else to report apart from the odd vicar who absconds with someone else's wife, these capers and controversies all taking place against a background of headlong and inevitable decline.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Poor, proud Prescott will soon be hauled off to the knacker’s yard

The origins of government mishandling of the firefighters' strike are to be found in the immediate aftermath of the general election in June last year, when Tony Blair failed to sack John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister had proved a strikingly incompetent transport secretary during the 1997-2001 Parliament. Commuters are suffering the consequences today. Prescott could easily have been farmed out to the backbenches: his infamous slugging match with a Welsh farm-worker during the election campaign gave an additional excuse. Some of the Prime Minister's advisers wanted Prescott out, but in the end Tony Blair lacked the courage to make a clean break. It may well be that Gordon Brown stood up for Prescott, with whom he has formed an alliance.

The Spectator

BROWN’S BLACK HOLE

Of the many personal mishaps to have afflicted ministers in the last Conservative government, few, ultimately, can have proved as damaging as the revelation that Norman Lamont had exceeded the credit limit on his Access card. No matter that most credit-card holders commit this oversight at some point, nor that the cheap cigarettes and fizz he was alleged to have bought in a seedy street in Paddington turned out to be a fantasy on the part of an off-licence manager. The point was that at the time the government was running a £51 billion overdraft. The link between the personal and the official was irresistible: how could a chancellor who was unable to look after the pennies in his own pocket be trusted with looking after the pounds in the Treasury?

Saturday

The Spectator

SET OXBRIDGE FREE

If the Institute of Economic Affairs has a branch in the heavens, the surrounding clouds must be disturbed by a loud wailing sound emanating from the soul of Sir Keith Joseph. If any man had a reason to cry out about the unfairness of life, it is he. Pilloried in the early 1980s for daring to suggest that students ought to pay their own way at university, his earthly reputation now has to suffer the indignity of witnessing a Labour government proposing the same; and of seeing the policy delivered by one of the National Union of Students' bearded tendency. Imagine the snorts of 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Out! Out! Out!

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

Mr Blair looks nice and talks Tory, but is presiding over a vast increase in state power

To watch Tony Blair at the Lord Mayor's Banquet on Monday night was to be reminded that nobody is better at delivering a certain kind of speech. The actual language is unremarkable, and so is the delivery, and so are the jokes. We do not feel ourselves to be in the presence of Demosthenes, or Oscar Wilde, or Lloyd George. When Mr Blair reaches some passage which he tries, by a catch in his voice, to invest with emotion, he sounds callow. But these defects, or limitations, help him avoid the far more dangerous error of sounding superior. The Prime Minister's charm, his natural good manners, save him from any hint of superiority or condescension.

The Spectator

LET TURKEY IN

Turkey has for centuries been a convenient European metaphor for all that is evil, but in truth there is very little that Turkey stands historically accused of which Europe has also not been guilty. Recently, however, M. Giscard d'Estaing - that great and principled defender of democracy, as the people of the Central African Republic and former empire will be the first to attest - saw fit to resort to the kind of language about Turkey that was straight out of the 17th century. M. Giscard d'Estaing is, in fact, the sick man of Europe. He resorted to the most flagrantly prejudiced rhetoric in his now notorious interview in Le Monde.

Saturday

Andrew Gimson

Portillo approaches the Tory party as a joyrider approaches someone else’s car

The manner in which Iain Duncan Smith turned and faced his tormentors on Tuesday was reminiscent of the bravery shown by Prang, a bull terrier kept by his father while serving in India with the RAF after the second world war. The Conservative leader recently related how his father saw Prang deal with the danger of being torn limb from limb. Early one morning, he was taking Prang for a walk, and the dog was running on ahead. Then my father heard the sound of hunting horns, and a pack of hounds came streaming over the hill ahead of the hunt. They were big animals, because they hunt jackals in those parts. The hounds caught the scent of the bull terrier and came charging towards him. Father ran to try to intervene, but couldn't make it.

The Spectator

GOODBYE, SHAYLER

Besides secret agents themselves, who face assassination should their identities become known, no man can have been more grateful for the existence of the Official Secrets Act than Ian Fleming. Had it been known back in the 1950s that MI5 and MI6 were inhabited not by suave womanisers but by dull paper-shufflers who go home on the Tube, his books would not have prospered. Thanks to David Shayler, the former MI5 officer jailed earlier this week for breaching the Official Secrets Act, the image of the secret services now projected on to the public mind is that of any other government department: a bungling bureaucracy staffed by a mixture of the ambitious, the bored and the devious, fighting little turf wars and gradually being consumed by paperwork.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

IDS has a plausible strategy. A leadership contest now would be an unseemly farce

To turn this week to the Conservative party, rather than deal with matters of consequence. On Wednesday morning George Jones, political editor of the Daily Telegraph, reported a 'sharp slump in morale' in the Tory party at Westminster. He stated that plotters are taking soundings to discover whether they can secure the necessary 25 signatures from Tory MPs to launch a vote of no confidence in Iain Duncan Smith. He judged that backbiting among Tory MPs 'is the most serious since Lady Thatcher was forced to stand down as prime minister 12 years ago'. George Jones is a sober and fastidious journalist. Though he does not name the conspirators, there is no reason to doubt his word. The Telegraph political editor accurately conjures up the mood in the Commons.

The Spectator

Russia is wrong

Of the many New Labour slogans which the government has tried quietly to drop over the past five years, none can have landed with quite such a thump as 'ethical foreign policy'. The party elected in 1997, it may hazily be remembered, promised to put an end to the practice of making shady deals with dictators to further British strategic interests and of turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of faraway countries in order to promote British trade. The government's moral compass, it was asserted, would read as true in an armchair in some distant presidential palace as it does in Whitehall.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

This firemen’s strike is a climacteric moment for Tony Blair’s government

Tony Blair has been a lucky Prime Minister. Never in his first six years in office has he had to confront the co-ordinated industrial unrest which bedevilled Harold Wilson and destroyed Jim Callaghan. When he entered No. 10 in 1997, Blair found the unions in a state of cowed irrelevance: one of the many legacies of Margaret Thatcher for which the Prime Minister has never expressed gratitude. Since 1997 the Prime Minister has set about restoring the morale of trade unionists. Many of the Thatcherite reforms have been reversed, while union leaders are now welcome in Downing Street. For the last two years the Prime Minister has enjoyed boasting, though only while in select company, that public-sector pay is now rising faster than private wages. The strike rate has rapidly increased.

The Spectator

GO TO BLAZES

Any public-sector union contemplating a strike is best advised to start by targeting children's bookshops. It is remarkable how groups of workers who first impinge on the consciousness through the pages of nursery books manage to command greater public affection and higher wage settlements than those who do not. Nurses and train-drivers have done particularly well out of recent pay disputes. Municipal grave-diggers, by contrast, not only remain lowly paid operatives; they also continue to be held as chief bogeymen for the Winter of Discontent, when the 'dead went unburied'. Fireman Sam, as represented by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), is well aware of the power of public opinion.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Blair is now fighting the Tories on their own turf. Can they fight back?

The new season kicked off with an unwelcome pill for political reporters. As Parliament reassembled after its three months' recess, lobby correspondents hiked across St James's Park to the Foreign Press Association at 11 Carlton House Terrace. This fine Nash establishment, hard by the Turf Club, has been the disconcertingly grand London base for a collection of mainly down-at-heel foreign journalists. Now it has been rudely commandeered - in the face of ineffectual Foreign Office objections - as the headquarters for the daily Downing Street briefing operation. The location emerged only recently. But the general arrangement, with television cameras present and non-lobby reporters admitted, was announced last summer.

The Spectator

LIE, LIE AND LIE AGAIN

There has been much sniggering in the Western media over Tuesday's referendum in Iraq on re-electing Saddam Hussein, since it is obvious that the only permissible answer was Yes. But how different are referendums in the European Union? On Saturday the Irish will be voting for the second time on the Nice Treaty, because when they voted on it in June 2001 they got the answer 'wrong' and voted No. If the vote is now Yes, the televised jubilation across the Continent will be as synthetic as it was in Baghdad. Doctors in the Netherlands say that committing euthanasia becomes easier after you have done it once. The same is evidently true of overruling democracy.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Jack Straw must come clean about his role in the Jeremy Thorpe scandal

The memoirs of Joe Haines, now being serialised by the Mail on Sunday, are certain to rank among the most revelatory and important of the 20th century. Joe Haines was Harold Wilson's press secretary, but in truth - as with Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair - he was far more than that. Wilson told Haines that he gave him the job 'to conceal what you really do'. Haines has already revealed the existence of a plot to kill Marcia Falkender, Wilson's political secretary. He has provided testimony that Wilson and Falkender had a brief affair in the 1950s.

The Spectator

END THE CHARADE

A coalition with Sinn Fein was never likely to be straightforward for more normal, democratic parties. Only someone culpably naive could have expected it to play by a set of rules that is not of its own making. Sinn Fein is a minority group dedicated to dissimulation, conspiracy and infiltration according to the true and trusted principles first laid down by Lenin, with a definite and non-negotiable goal: the unification of Ireland, whether Ireland wants it or not. Power-sharing for Sinn Fein was always but a stepping-stone towards an irreversible change in sovereignty and towards total power. Its possession of a list of serving prison officers in Northern Ireland is a chilling indication of its probable intentions. This is how ethnic cleansing starts.

Saturday

The Spectator

BLAIR’S PFI RIP-OFF

We are at our best, asserts the Prime Minister, when we are at our boldest. His dictum, however, does not extend to Labour conference delegates, whom he prefers when at their most supine. On Monday, a motion calling for a review of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was carried by 67 per cent to 32 per cent. Far from being impressed by this rare act of boldness from his party, Mr Blair treated it with contempt, announcing on Tuesday that PFI would not be reviewed but accelerated. One does not have to share the concerns or the ideology of Unison, the union which tabled the successful motion, to recognise that delegates have a point. Many of the PFI projects already completed have turned out to be embarrassing failures.

Saturday

Peter Oborne

Almost as striking as the Tory silence – the total incoherence of the Labour Left

One of the most important political developments of the last ten years has been the abject failure of the Labour Left. Though never remarked upon, the absence of a strong and coherent left-wing voice has been of great moment. Ever since its birth, the Labour movement has been defined as much by a romantic tradition of eloquent rebels as by its leaders; think of Aneurin Bevan and Attlee, or Michael Foot and Harold Wilson. Foot and Bevan were incomparable: masters of oratory, capable of inspiring mass emotion or destroying an enemy with a phrase. Both political tragedies were on display when the Commons was recalled to debate Iraq on Tuesday. A ragged 53 Labour rebels voted against the government motion, and there was a handful of powerful speeches, by Galloway, Tam Dalyell and others.

The Spectator

STICK WITH THE UN

'I am in no doubt,' said the Prime Minister in last Tuesday's debate in the House of Commons, 'that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is serious and it is imminent.' After reading the dossier on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction released in advance of that debate, most people will share his sentiment. The dossier provides evidence that Saddam could build chemical or biological weapons in less than one hour, and that he has been trying to acquire from Africa the plutonium he needs to make a nuclear bomb. Sooner or later, if not prevented from doing so, Saddam will acquire nuclear bombs. That prospect is truly terrifying.