Westminster

“I certainly think it’s a serious problem and I described it when we last discussed this as a canker on the body politic and I would stay with that,” said Jesse Norman on the World at One earlier today. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s sting, splashed by this morning’s Independent, of executives from lobbying/PR firm Bell Pottinger boasting of their influence over the prime minister has renewed the debate about regulating the lobbying industry, with calls for a public register to be established. Downing Street has outright denied the allegations, which do sound rather far-fetched. Bravado is, of course, the currency of thin-air merchants. The objection is not to the

George Eustice’s comments just now that if the government doesn’t support his amendment  to the EU referendum motion, then he’s “minded” to vote for the original motion is a sign of how Downing Street is losing the parliamentary party on this issue at an alarming rate. Eustice having been press secretary to David Cameron is not an instinctive rebel nor can he be being accused of motivated by personal animus.   Equally telling is Eustice’s saying that he’s being pushed towards supporting the motion because “the government’s not going to deal with the party in a responsible way on this”. This is a sign of just how fed up normally

Tonight, George Eustice, David Cameron’s former press secretary, and several other eurosceptic members of the 2010 intake have put down an amendment to the EU referendum motion that will be put on Monday. The amendment reads: “This House calls upon the government to publish a White Paper during the next session of Parliament setting out the powers and competences that the government would seek to repatriate from the EU, to commence the renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU, and to put the outcome of those negotiations to a national referendum.” As I said before, this renegotiate-referendum strategy is Cameron’s best chance of heading off a full-scale rebellion on Monday,

“In Britain, a free press is non-negotiable,” Ivan Lewis has just said – before suggesting ways that Government might, ahem, oversee this freedom. The shadow culture secretary has an idea: a register system to license journalists. “As in other professions, the industry should consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off,” he said. He wants “a new system of independent regulation including proper like-for-like redress, which means mistakes and falsehoods on the front page receive apologies and retraction on the front page”. It’s an odd type of independence: one that would be prescribed by the political elite. And what type of journalists might it target? I’ve heard

The row about which email account special advisers use for which emails is, I suspect, of very little interest to anyone outside SW1. But today’s FT story certainly has set the cat amongst the Whitehall pigeons. At the risk of trying the patience of everyone who doesn’t work within a mile of the Palace of Westminster, I think there is something here worth noting about our political culture. Christopher Cook’s story in the FT this morning is about an email that Dominic Cummings, one of Michael Gove’s special advisers, sent urging various political people not to use his Department of Education email. In this case, the email was perfectly proper. Ministers

What’s the most important geo-political event of this century? Most people would say 9/11. The Foreign Secretary believes that it is the Arab Spring. But in The Times today (£), Emma Duncan makes a persuasive case for it being the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Duncan argues that Lehman Brothers’ fall has three claims to be an epoch-making event. The first is its contribution to the financial crisis and subsequent economic stagnation. The second is the way that it has catalysed China’s economic rise vis-à-vis the US, with China now predicted to become the world’s largest economy within this decade. The third, the fact that that the economic troubles of the