Media

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Coulson under the spotlight again

The New York Times Magazine‘s article about phone hacking at the News of the World comes, it must be said, a little out of the blue. It’s over a year since the story last exercised printing presses in the UK – and a year, too, since David Cameron’s communications chief, Andy Coulson, was hauled in front of MPs to explain what happened under his editorship of the paper. Back then, he distanced himself from the dubious methods of some Screws reporters, saying that he was neither aware of, nor complicit in, any phone hacking. And, in the absence of any countervailing evidence, the process left Coulson with a few light

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Tony Blair, freelance statesman

Say what you like about Blair, but he is something of a political entrepreneur. He detects a gap in the market and fills it: he did with New Labour in the mid-1990s. And he detects a trend in the globalised world: a system where governments don’t matter so much and power is held by a global elite. This, CoffeeHousers, is what he’s up to with his memoirs. He is presenting himself in new incarnation, a statesman without a state, able to move without being tied down to an electorate. There’s a very revealing passage in his book where he talks about Condi Rice: “She is a classic example of the

Ed Howker

Blair: the sex scenes

Not just a Prime Minister, not just a global statesman, in A Journey Tony Blair also demonstrates he knows how to treat a girl: CHERIE: “I DEVOURED HER LOVE” “…that night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel that I was about to do was right … On that night of the 12th May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated,

David Blackburn

The Mirror backs ‘The Special One’

The ballot has opened and the Mirror has joined the mounting chorus in favour of David Miliband. They say of Miliband: ‘We believe he has the intellect, talent and experience to take on the Tories – and eventually become PM.’ Their timing is odd, given that Fleet Street and Westminster are currently captivated by Tony Blair’s memoir. But it is also a neat coincidence that Blair’s journey ends on the day that his apparent heir’s begins. As Tim Montgomerie notes in today’s Times (£), the Tories fear David Miliband because he is the only Labour leadership candidate who asks: ‘What would Tony do?’ It goes deeper than that. Tony Blair

Saturday

David Blackburn

Round x of Hunt versus Thompson

Jeremy Hunt has responded to Mark Thompson’s MacTaggert lecture, the contents of which have been reviewed by Paul Goodman at Con Home. You can watch Hunt here. He’s becoming as repetitive as the talking clock: the BBC must be live on the same planet as everyone else, the licence fee is not off limits and competition (both for programming and platforms) is a good thing and that the licence fee is not a muscle for the BBC to expand its activities ever further. As usual, he reserved ire for the BBC’s lack of transparency, which has led to excess in executive pay. But Hunt is an adept performer and realises

Friday

Orlando Bird

From the archives: The Chatterley trial

It’s 50 years since the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was declared sub judice, so commenting on the trial amounted to contempt of court. Here’s how the Spectator circumvented the order at the time: The Prosecutors, The Spectator, August 26, 1960 As Penguin Books Ltd. have been summoned under the Obscene Publications Act, the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is now sub judice; and this means… But what does it mean? The trouble with the law of contempt in this country is that because defendants are allowed neither trial by jury nor the right of appeal it tends to be more arbitrary, and more capriciously exercised, than any other law.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Cruddas backs David Miliband for middle Britain

The rumours were true: Jon Cruddas has backed David Miliband. It’s an unlikely union on the face of it – an ambitious centrist and an almost utopian socialist. Though Cruddas once forged a partnership with the equally centrist James Purnell, so it is no great surprise that he is a pluralist. Cruddas tells the New Statesman that in ‘terms of the nature of the leadership that’s needed, he’s beginning to touch on some of those more profound questions that need to be addressed head-on.’ Is Cruddas right? Miliband has delivered the speech that he thinks will define his campaign. To be brutally honest, it was not profound. There was little

David Blackburn

The Staggers backs Ed Miliband

The New Statesman has backed Ed Miliband in the battle of the brothers. Press endorsements don’t count for what they used to, but the country’s leading left-wing magazine remains significant in this context. Below is tomorrow’s New Statesman lead article; it rejects the charge that Ed Miliband is ‘comfort zone Labour’ and portrays him as a thoughtful dissenter from New Labour’s orthodoxy. (On the counter, there are rumours that Jon Cruddas is to back David Miliband. Support from such an independent and left-minded source would be worth its weight in gold for David Miliband.) ‘The Labour leadership contest began in earnest with the New Statesman debate at Church House in

Patrick Nolan

What do you need to know ahead of the Spending Review – Welfare

This is the fourth of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first three posts were on health, education, and the first hundred days. What is the budget? The welfare budget must be at the heart of the debate on how to restore the public finances. The Government spends more on welfare than anything else. In 2009 the bill for social protection was around £199 billion. This has almost doubled in real terms over the last 20 years from £104 billion in 1989. Social protection now represents 32.5 percent of all government expenditure or 14.2 per cent of GDP. Some welfare spending varies with economic conditions,

David Blackburn

A ‘regressive’ budget?

The IFS has given the coalition’s opponents powder for their muskets, only it’s a little damp. The IFS’ analysis is drawn exclusively from straight tax and spend figures; it does not account for the future financial benefits brought by structural public service reform – so Gove’s and IDS’ reforms, both of which aim to alleviate poverty, have not been evaluated.  Matthew Sinclair explains why this means the IFS has exaggerated the severity of Osborne’s Budget: ‘Suppose you invented a policy, some kind of economic miracle, which doubled the incomes of the poorest ten per cent of families without the Government spending a pound.  That would reduce benefit spending.  It would

David Blackburn

Clegg needs to find some courage

Nick Clegg is eviscerated by this morning’s press. The Independent, The FT and The Guardian gleefully report that the influential IFS has decreed the Budget (supposedly a model of fairness according to Clegg) to be regressive, that there is discontent fomenting on the Lib Dem benches and that the latest polls place Lib Dem support at 12 percent. None of this is news. The IFS is reiterating what it argued on Budget day: Osborne’s measures will hit the poorest in 2014-15. That is still some way off and action can be taken to lessen their impact. Besides, the coalition should have delivered its promise to raise the income tax threshold

Monday

David Blackburn

David Miliband and the graduate tax

As James Kirkup notes, it looks as if David Miliband supports a graduate tax – only ‘looks’ mind, we can’t be sure. The university funding debate is now captive to ill-defined terms – is what is being proposed a tax, a fee or a contribution? David Miliband is hard enough to comprehend as it is, but is he talking about a graduate contribution or a graduate tax? How would either be assessed? Also, does David Willetts make any more sense?

James Forsyth

A very British diarist

The extracts from Chris Mullin’s diaries that ran in the Mail on Sunday this weekend suggest that the second volume will be as good as the first. It contains things that you just couldn’t make up. Tom Watson, for example, told Mullin that he was pushed into rebellion by the knowledge that Cherie Blair had had the Prime Minster’s section of the nuclear bunker redecorated.   But, perhaps, the most telling  story is what happened when Gordon Brown went to the Chinese embassy to sign the book of condolence for victims of the earthquake there: “While Gordon and his party were inside, word reached them that David Cameron was waiting

Peter Hoskin

How the coalition can develop its case for fairness

The coverage in today’s FT is a reminder that one question will pursue the coalition more doggedly than any other: are the cuts fair and “progressive”? This isn’t an issue that Osborne & Co should duck, and not just because they’ve set it as a measure of their own success. There is, to my mind, a moral and economic necessity for measures that benefit the least well-off – and, what’s more, this is terrain which the coalition should feel quite comfortable traversing. Benefit reform, schools reform, lifting low-income earners out of tax: these policies provide a solid foundation for an argument about fairness. If the coalition wants to develop that

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Clegg’s dilemma | 18 August 2010

Nick Clegg’s few days in charge have summed up his current political problem. If he says he agrees with what the government is doing, the media ask what’s the point of the Lib Dems? That’s what happened to him on the Today Programme this morning. But if he talks about where he disagrees with the coalition programme as he did on Monday when discussing Trident, he’s lambasted for exacerbating coalition tensions.   It is all far cry from the early days of the coalition when there was some concern in Conservative circles that Clegg was a thinner, better version of David Cameron. But if Clegg went back and like a

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff

Few writers can make a silly season story read like official history, so it’s worth drifting behind the Times’ paywall to read Rachel Sylvester on Boris and Dave’s mutual emnity. It is no secret that BoJo and DC are united in rivalry, but Sylvester adds a second dimension with insider quotations – a mix of arch witticisms and savage partisanship. Here are several of many from today’s column: ‘Most people at Westminster assume that Boris — compared by one of his editors to Marilyn Monroe, “another egomaniacal blonde” — still harbours ambitions to lead his party. As a boy he used to declare that when he grew up he wanted to be “world king”, so

Monday

David Blackburn

The university funding debate continued

University funding is beginning to dominate op-ed pages. Yesterday, Matthew d’Ancona put the case for a graduate tax from the conservative perspective; and to which Douglas Carswell has responded. Today, Professor Alison Wolf, a specialist in Public Sector Management at KCL, makes the point that any debate about higher education funding is prejudiced because Britain’s politicians and policy makers are predominantly Oxbridge educated, and the structure of Oxbridge undergraduate degrees is radically different from anywhere else. Writing in the Times (£), she asserts: ‘I’ve sat in many meetings, in Whitehall and Westminster, where people have talked up credit systems (a modular system of assessment) without the faintest idea that we

David Blackburn

Blair, magnanimous master of PR

It’s easy to be loose with a trifling £4.6m when you’re Tony Blair. Many will denounce his decision to give the advance and any royalties on his memoir to the British Legion as opportunistic – a cynical gesture characteristic of the man. As ever with Blair, there is more than a hint of a public relations exercise about this. But it is also extremely gracious, aiding people who prick his conscience. So I prefer to take his generosity at face value. As Con Coughlin puts it:   ‘Whatever you might think of Mr Blair, he always had the courage of his convictions when it came to defending our freedoms, whether

Friday

James Forsyth

Debating gay marriage

There’s an intellectually enriching debate going on at the moment between Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan over gay marriage. It was all started by an eloquent and heartfelt column by Ross arguing that the idea that “lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support” and that is incompatible with gay marriage. Andrew Sullivan, who along with Jonathan Rauch, deserves a huge amount of credit for moving the argument for gay marriage into the mainstream, wrote a powerful set of rebuttals. Personally, I subscribe to

Peter Hoskin

Was Labour’s spending irresponsible?

An eyecatching claim from Ed Miliband, interviewed by Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “I don’t think our spending was irresponsible.” And here’s a graph in response: I’ll let CoffeeHousers draw their own conclusions.