Uk politics

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Personal loyalty brings down Fox

From our UK edition

When Liam Fox celebrated his 50th birthday, he invited friends - those who would be likely to turn up for his 60th no matter what political fate befell him. Political allies fall away, ran his argument, but not friends. No one would have imagined that he'd be able to test this theory within just three weeks. On Monday, it looked more likely than not he would survive: he gave what seemed like a full apology and made full disclosure. The Tory tribe had rallied behind him. It was embarrassing that his best man had turned up to share vodka martinis with him in various parts of the globe, but where was the wrongdoing? But, as we now know, that was not the whole story. There was a missing part, the saga of Adam Werritty and his unusual sources of finance.

Jonathan Jones

Fox resigns, Cameron responds

From our UK edition

Liam Fox has just resigned as Defence Secretary. Here is his resignation letter to the Prime Minister in full: Dear David, As you know, I have always placed a great deal of importance on accountability and responsibility. As I said in the House of Commons on Monday, I mistakenly allowed the distinction between my personal interest and my Government activities to become blurred. The consequences of this have become clearer in recent days. I am very sorry for this. I have also repeatedly said that the national interest must always come before personal interest. I now have to hold myself to my own standard.

James Forsyth

Few think Fox can survive

From our UK edition

I understand, from a Cabinet Office source, that Sue Grey, the civil servant who interviewed Adam Werritty on Tuesday, was completely baffled by Werritty's explanation of how his funding arrangements work. This is yet another sign that events are beginning to move rapidly against Liam Fox. The Times' front page story this morning has led to a significant fall away in support for Fox among Tory MPs. There is also considerable nervousness in Tory circles about what tomorrow's papers are expected to bring. All this makes it increasingly hard to find people who expect the Defence Secretary to survive. Indeed, several people who have been defending Fox in the media say that they feel that they can no longer do so.

Matthew Parris

The pathology of the politician | 14 October 2011

From our UK edition

With ministers behaving particularly oddly, we thought CoffeeHousers would enjoy Matthew Parris' Spectator column from May, in which he explains the weirdness that afflicts politicians. Politicians are not normal people. They are weird. It isn’t politics that has made them weird: it’s their weirdness that has impelled them into politics. Whenever another high-profile minister teeters or falls, the mistake everyone makes is to ask what it is about the nature of their job, the environment they work in and the hours they work, that has made them take such stupid risks. This is the wrong question. We should ask a different one: what is it about these men and women that has attracted them to politics?

David Blackburn

Ministers behaving oddly

From our UK edition

It’s a rum deal being a Global Networker. This morning’s Times reports (£) that Adam Werritty has received nearly £200,000 in donations from clients who appear to have employed Werritty to lobby Liam Fox on ideological issues such as Israel, the Special Relationship and Euroscepticism; although why anyone thought it necessary to lobby Fox, who is a resolute neo-Conservative and Atlanticist, on these matters is something of a mystery. Meanwhile, the Telegraph reveals that Fox and Werritty enjoyed a $500-a-head dinner with American military figures in Washington, which the Ministry of Defence has not disclosed (perhaps because no British official attended the dinner).

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Lansley’s historic debacle

From our UK edition

I've just come back from a Health Service Journal conference of medics, where all manner of subjects came up. One audience member asked what historical event stood comparison to Lansley's mishandling of the Health Bill. What else has caused so much controversy, to such little purpose? No one knew. Many of those present — senior doctors, NHS executives, etc — knew Lansley, and everyone seemed to agree that he is a policy wonk fatally miscast as Health Secretary. Politics is about making and winning arguments; whereas Lansley wanted to work on details so complex that, even now, almost no one in government can explain what is being done.

James Forsyth

The Fox story rumbles on

From our UK edition

It has been a relatively quiet day on the Liam Fox front today. It now seems that the report into this whole affair will not be ready until next week; Adam Werritty has not yet had a second interview with Cabinet Office. For his part, Fox has looked more confident today and by all accounts was impressively calm as he sat on the front bench today. Interestingly, one ministerial ally of Doctor Fox feels that last night’s report by Nick Robinson was more damaging for the defence secretary than most people have realised. His fear is that having people pay Werritty to push a specific agenda, even if it was ideological not commercial, is deeply problematic and makes it more likely that Sir Gus O'Donnell’s report into the whole matter will not be sympathetic to Fox.

James Forsyth

How Lansley won over the Lords

From our UK edition

As Ben Brogan wrote this week, the House of Lords is threatening to become one of the biggest obstacles to the coalition’s reform agenda. But the way in which the Health and Social Care Bill was steered through its second reading in the upper house does provide a model for how even the trickiest votes can be won. Andrew Lansley’s much derided operation got this one right. It realised months ago that the crucial thing was to stop the crossbenchers voting against the bill en masse. So, the health minister in the Lords, Earl Howe, and Lansley’s long-serving aide Jenny Jackson have been on a cup of tea offensive for the last few months, seeking to explain the bill to any crossbencher who would listen.

Peter Hoskin

Happy Birthday, Mrs T

From our UK edition

It is, you may have heard, Margaret Thatcher's 86th Birthday today. By way of a congratulatory toast to the Iron Lady, here's a thought-filled article that T.E. Utley wrote about her politics, for The Spectator, some 25 years ago: Don't call it Thatcherism, T.E. Utley, The Spectator, 19 August 1986 There is no such thing as Thatcherism. The illusion that there is is in part a deliberate creation of Mrs Thatcher's enemies. They have proceeded on the age-old maxim that there is nothing (certainly not private scandal) more likely to injure the reputation of a British politician than the suggest that he has an inflexible devotion to principle. This maxim is only partly true, but is an unshakeably established belief, a fact which helps to make it truer than it otherwise would be.

Daniel Korski

Ministers need their Werrittys

From our UK edition

I've never met Adam Werritty and hadn't even heard of him before a few weeks ago. I'm also of the belief that financial wrongdoing should not be the only test used to judge Liam Fox's suitability for ministerial office. And I don't think the fact that a previous government changed ministers too often is a reason to overlook inappropriate ministerial behaviour. Whether the Defence Secretary, in fact, behaved inappropriately remains to be seen. But the signs are not, at this stage, good – even if the airwaves are now dominated by "Foxies": the Defence Secretary's friend and allies. That said, I think the self-styled advisor is getting an unfair wrap, at least based on the information available to the public.

Ian Birrell

The ongoing NHS scandal

From our UK edition

Shock! Horror! Another report reveals the shameful care given to the elderly in British hospitals. People in the twilight of their life reduced to begging for food and rattling the bars of their beds in a desperate attempt to get the attention of medical staff paid to care for them. The findings came in reports of random inspections by the Care Quality Commission watchdog that found concerns in 55 of the 100 hospitals visited, with 20 of them — one in five — breaking the law in its levels of neglect. They found patients starved of food, denied water, spoken to rudely or simply ignored. It is sickening stuff.

Jonathan Jones

The centre ground’s there for the taking

From our UK edition

YouGov recently repeated its occassional exercise of asking people where they'd place themselves, the parties and the leaders on the left-right spectrum. Anthony Wells reported some of the findings on Saturday: Cameron is seen as slightly less right-wing than his party, while both the Tories and Labour appear to have moved away from the centre-ground since the election. One thing these YouGov numbers allow us to do is see where on the spectrum the parties get their support from. First, how people voted in 2010 and then how they say they'd vote now: This looks broadly as you'd expect, with Labour dominating among left-wing voters and the Tories doing likewise on the right.

David Blackburn

Lansley’s real fight

From our UK edition

Yesterday was a rare good day for Andrew Lansley: the Health Bill survived its trial in the House of Lords. But there are no fanfares in this morning's press for the near-moribund health secretary. The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Mail all lead with the story that 50 per cent of English hospitals fail elderly patients according to the Quality Care Commission. Lansley may have thought that his struggle was with nit-picking peers, who are determined that he, as the secretary state, remains ultimately accountable for the NHS in the letter of the law. But, maintaining the standard of NHS care is his real battle. The irony of the recent squabble between the government and the Owenites is that today’s headlines suggest it was needless.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Werritty’s no Walter Mitty

From our UK edition

Those "friends" of Liam Fox who are trashing Adam Werritty to journalists (see here, here and here) are doing the Defence Secretary no favours. The idea that Werritty somehow imposed himself on Fox is simply risible. Fox was under no obligation to invite Werritty to dinner with an American general or to go on skiing holidays with him. Crucially, Fox didn't move to cut Werritty off even after he found out about the infamous business cards that described Werritty as an adviser to him. On Monday, Fox told the House that he dealt with this issue in June. But this doesn't seem to have led to any change in Fox's attitude towards his friend.

Daniel Korski

What is Labour’s foreign policy these days?

From our UK edition

As William Hague found before last year’s election, getting your voice heard on foreign policy is difficult for an Opposition. You are, at best, reduced to providing commentary to on-going events, vying not with the government for access to the media but with an array of better-informed foreign policy experts. Having a distinctive take on the changes in the world and practical ideas for how to affect change is harder still. You don’t have a 1,500-person strong Foreign Office.   For Labour, there is a different set of problems. Does the party opt for Blairite interventionism, tempered by the fiscal and political realities? If so, what’s the difference to what David Cameron is doing?

Fraser Nelson

Time to scrap the minimum wage?

From our UK edition

Today’s youth unemployment figures are simply appalling. It’s now 21 per cent amongst the under-25s, above the peak of 18 per cent seen under the 1990s recession. For the first time since then, Britain’s youth joblessness is worse than the European average. This is a tragedy, and not one we should accept as being a grimly inevitable aspect of the recession. Ed Miliband said in PMQs that a million young people are on the dole: a statistic everyone should get angry about. And we can think of what has gone wrong. The above graph shows how Britain has nothing left to boast about in unemployment. Blair used to love heading to Brussels and saying the real 'social model' was lower regulation which meant higher employment. What’s changed over the last 20 years?

James Forsyth

Miliband attacks Cameron on jobs

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband chose to ask all six questions on the economy today, making only the quickest of references to the Liam Fox story that the Westminster village is currently obsessing over. Armed with ammunition from the latest unemployment numbers, Miliband did a solid job of pushing Cameron onto the back foot. But there was one moment which will worry Miliband's supporters: the spontaneous way the government benches fell about when Miliband claimed that Scottish and Southern Energy's decision to start selling its electricity on the wholesale market was the result of his conference speech. Three Labour backbenchers did ask questions about Liam Fox. Cameron said he would look at publishing a list of Adam Werritty's professional and social contact with ministers and advisers.

Tuesday

Julia Unwin

Right to reply: The truth behind the poverty figures

From our UK edition

This morning, Fraser published a piece criticising the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ definition of poverty. Here is a counterpunch from Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which is the organisation that funds the IFS. This article is the latest post in our Right to Reply series.  Do we really need another debate about the usefulness of a poverty measure? Of course, no definition is perfect. One of the hardy perennials of the poverty debate is the question of measurement. I wonder what it says about us as a country: why do we spend so much effort thinking about definitions of poverty, and so little responding to the reality? All measures of poverty have their uses — and, yes, their flaws.

Fraser Nelson

Werritty’s donors

From our UK edition

So, who paid for Adam Werritty's air miles? This is the question going around Westminster this afternoon. James blogged yesterday that No10 has set two tests: was Werritty being paid by defence companies, and did Fox know about it?   From what I understand, the answers to both are "no". Werritty was not paid by any defence company — or, indeed, any company at all. His funds were provided by individual donors, who do not have even a tangential interest in the defence industry. His job was to network and provide updates about politics in general. His donors are interested in affairs in the Gulf and the Middle East, about energy security and other such issues — so this involved going to a lot of conferences, and a lot of travel.