Uk politics

The Liberal Democrats are mad as hell at their coalition partners—and don’t seem to care who knows it. Their fury has been caused by what they see as the roughhouse tactics of the No campaign and the Tories’ complicity in them. Chris Huhne’s letter to George Osborne has been written to make clear just how betrayed the Liberal Democrats’ feel by the actions of their coalition partners. Huhne writes, “I explicitly warned you that the manner of the AV campaign would be as important as the result, in terms of the effect on the coalition.

Judging from the front page of tomorrow’s Independent on Sunday, the coalition’s relationship troubles are escalating. The paper’s front page blares, “Clegg rages against Cameron ‘lies’”. Even accounting for the license headline writers takes, this shows just how fraught things are inside the coalition at the moment. The Liberal Democrats feel that the Tories have let the No campaign go too far in its’ attack on Clegg and so feel they are no longer bound to be respectful about their coalition partners. Vince Cable’s message in today’s Guardian sums up the sense of many Lib Dems that they’d rather be in coalition with Labour than the Tories.

I'm sorry to do this to you, CoffeeHousers, at the start of a bank holiday weekend — but I thought you might have a morbid sort of interest in Gordon Brown's latest role. Turns out that, as expected, our former PM is to join the World Economic Forum in an advisory capacity. He won't be paid for his work, although the Forum will cover his staffing costs. One of his spokespeople has told ITV's Alex Forrest that his task is to "stop the next financial crisis." Which is to say, he'll be saving the world. Again. If nothing else, it's yet another demonstration of Brown's peculiar resilience. Our former PM may be electoral anathema in these parts, but he clearly still holds some allure for the technocrats of Davos, Geneva and Bretton Woods.

As you've no doubt deduced from the cover image on the left-hand side of this page, the latest Spectator is out today — and it's a soaraway double issue for Easter. By way of peddling it to CoffeeHousers (buy it here, etc.), I thought I'd mention one article among many. It's a celebratory list of some of the country's "most inspiring and influential over-80s," and it includes tributes to them from some rather notable under-80-year-olds. So we have Matt Ridley on David Attenborough, Alex Salmond on Sean Connery, Ian Rankin on P.D James, and plenty more besides. Anyway, there are two entries that CoffeeHousers might care to see in particular, so I've pasted them below: David Cameron on Margaret Thatcher, and Nick Clegg on Shirley Williams.

Barack Obama's budget plan has become a political debating point on this side of the Atlantic. Ed Balls set the ball a-rolling in an article for the Guardian this morning, which effectively claimed that the President isn't planning to cut the deficit as quickly as George Osborne is. "The truth is that it is Osborne himself who is isolated," is how he pugnaciously put it. But the Tories' Matthew Hancock has since responded — on Coffee House, as it happens — arguing that, actually, the Obama Plan is simpatico with what Osborne is doing. By way of hovering above the red-on-blue scrap, we thought we'd put together a comparison of Osborne's and Obama's budgets for the benefit of CoffeeHousers.