Labour party

So there we have it.  There will be televised election debates between the three main party leaders during the next election campaign, after all.  The first will be on ITV, then there'll be one each on Sky and the BBC.  Talk about good TV for political anoraks. Like Tim Montgomerie and Mike Smithson, I suspect that Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg will be happiest with the news.  Both of them, particularly Brown, need potential game-changing events like this to make some progress in the polls.   As for Cameron, he'd probably be better off not giving his opponents a chance to make inroads into the Tories' poll lead.  But he could hardly have resisted live debates in the current political climate.

The government has sued for peace. The Observer reports that in the face of lobbying from the drinks industry, the government has dropped its mandatory code on the sale of alcohol, which Gordon Brown first brewed-up during the local election campaign. Labour excuses the u-turn on the grounds that vulnerable pubs and drinks retail industry must remain viable during this fragile economic situation. On the face of it, that is sensible; delve deeper and that excuse does not hold. Of course, there’s no sense in endangering businesses by punishing all drinks deals and ‘happy hour’ promotions. However, aspects of the code would have outlawed promotions such as ‘all you can drink for a tenner’ or ‘have a quart of vodka poured directly down your throat’.

Ok, so identifying the heroes of the New Labour era may not sit well with CoffeeHousers - but I'd still recommend you read through the latest Bagehot column in the Economist, which does just that.  It identifies five figures from the past 12 years who have "done the state and country some serious and lasting service," and whose "virtues [are] not be clouded or cancelled by grave mistakes or misdemeanours".  They are: Lord Adonis, Donald Dewar, Lord Mandelson, Sir William Macpherson and Robin Cook.  James Purnell, Alistair Darling and, strikingly, Bill Clinton finish in the runners-up list. You can debate the merits and demerits of those names all day long, but I'd rather suggest another person for the list: John Hutton.

If PMQs today showed anything, it's just how eager the Tories' opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a "non dom", and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague's direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are UK taxpayers.

Our Christmas double edition is out today, and is choc full of writers to keep y’all entertained over the festive season. Someone who certainly entertained me is Lord Mandelson. I interviewed him just after Charles Moore’s disclosures about the shooting party: he didn’t shoot, he says, but was at a large dinner chez Rothschild where Saif al-Gaddafi was present. What’s Gaddafi like, I asked? Is he all right kind of chap? PM: “I don’t regard him as an alright chap or a bad chap, I mean how can you judge?” FN: “I thought you knew him a little bit.

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we're not really facing a debt crisis at all.  "Yes, the national debt levels are bad," they say, "but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we're racking up." Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had "low levels" of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we've accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland: The picture would probably look even worse if you accounted for all the off-balance sheet fiddles, like the toxic bank assets and PFI.