Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Politico Future

From our UK edition

At the New Republic, Gabe Sherman has a fun piece about the rise and rise of Politico, DC's in-house paper for political intrigue and gossip. There's plenty to consider: Politico is essentially a web-paper that carries ads in a small circulation print edition circulated on Capitol Hill and K Street. At the moment - though they say this is changing fast - it's the print edition that makes the profits. Nonetheless, as a niche, but obsessed, audience there's no doubting the impact Politico has made. The most entertaining bit of the piece is the sniffiness with which "old media" regard this whipper-snapper: Politico's pace and self-promotion has irritated some in the Washington press corps. "It's maddening. Everyone has to chase them," one Washington reporter complains.

Alex Massie

Carrying the Country First

From our UK edition

An excellent post from Blimpish, making the point that while Labour governments tend to be elected with great enthusiasm, voters are usually more cautious when choosing Conservative ministries. It was only in 1983 that Thatcher won her landslide (Reagan, of course, emulated her example in 1984). And as he says, you don't need to win your party (completely) to win the country: Thatcher’s latter-day hero-worshippers may believe the British people enthusiastically embraced the full-blooded Thatcherite agenda of sound money, free markets, union-busting, etc.

Alex Massie

Rugby League Pipedreams

From our UK edition

Here's today's nominee for Most Deluded Man in Britain (Non-Government Division): Wigan head coach Brian Noble believes Super League clubs should be buying up rugby union's big stars. The former GB coach is advocating the scheme in order to bring more British and Irish talent into the sport. "Every club should be given a remit to sign one union home nations player," Noble told The Super League Show. "Just imagine the national headlines our game would generate for bringing the likes of a Jonny Wilkinson or a Brian O'Driscoll across." Just imagine! Well that's all you can do, isn't it? I can't think of a single reason why any leading rugby union player would want to switch to league these days. Can you?

Tuesday

Alex Massie

When English is actually British

From our UK edition

George Monbiot raises a complaint one has seen several times lately: Had Heathrow's third runway been debated only by English MPs, the proposal would have been resoundingly defeated; it was approved by 19 votes, after 67 MPs from the other nations were induced to support the government. They can support such measures without any electoral risk, as their constituents are not directly affected. Except that, in this instance at least, a so-called English issue is actually a British issue. Heathrow's capacity - indeed the capacity of all the London airports - is a matter of interest north of the border. After all, Heathrow is Scotland's most important air connection to London and, by extention, to the rest of the world. Clearly Heathrow's future is a matter of national concern.

Alex Massie

Local Tories

From our UK edition

The Conservatives new approach to localism - or subsidiarity - deserves a couple of cheers. It is at least a step in the right direction. Just as well since, allied with Tory education policy and, one might argue, some burnished environmental credentials, this "New Localism" is supposed to be the "Big Idea" animating a renewed, reinvigorated Toryism. So, while today's announcement is welcome, it's also imcomplete. Apart from anything else, local accountability requires local financing. There's not enough in the Tory proposals (yet) to link local councils with local sources of revenue. As the Scottish Parliament has demonstrated, if there's no link between policy and revenue-raising then more money is presumed to be the solution to all problems.

Alex Massie

The Sporting White House

From our UK edition

I take my hat off to Katty Kay. Writing at the Daily Beast she comes up with a novel criticism of the Obama administration: it's too fond of  sports metaphors. Seriously. This, apparently, is "insidiously sexist" and consequently unfair to female political reporters trying to understand how the White House is approaching any given matter. I'd have thought that this injustice was scarcely limited to women, since presumably male reporters with no interest in baseball or basketball would be similarly disadvantaged. But perhaps not.

Alex Massie

In Praise of Stella Rimington

From our UK edition

A statement of the obvious perhaps, but a welcome one nonetheless given that it's hard to see how Stella Rimington, as a former head of MI5, can sensibly be caricatured as a weak-kneed, soft-on-terrorism simpleton: “Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper. “It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said. Quite so.

Alex Massie

Marie Antoinette is traduced again

From our UK edition

Like King Canute, Marie Antoinette is a much-misunderstood and, generally speaking, a much and unfairly maligned figure. Disappointingly, this time the guilty party is my old boss Iain Martin. For shame. Iain hazards that Peter Mandelson's suggestion that everyone try and keep their heads in these turbulent times since there is "no value in creating frenzy" is but the latest "Marie Antoinettish" comment from the noble lord. In the first place, Marie Antoinette probably never said "Let them eat cake". Secondly, if she had she would scarcely have been the first to suggest that the populace switch to brioche in times of shortage.

Alex Massie

Obama’s Momentum

From our UK edition

James fears that Barack Obama's healthcare reforms may be in trouble if he can't win enough Republican support to convince centrist voters. In other words, he'll be too much beholden to the left-wing of the Democratic party. Well, perhaps. But centrist voters in 2009 are rather to the left of where they were in 1993, the last time major health care reform was tried. Also: Obama is a better salesman than early-90s Hillary Clinton. Remember too, Obama won with more than half the vote; Clinton was elected merely by a plurality of punters. Now it may be that the GOP's near-universal refusal to meet the new President half-way on the stimuls (though many more Republicans in Washington would, had it been a free and secret ballot have voted for the stimuls) will pay-off in the long run.

Monday

Alex Massie

Three Terms are Enough

From our UK edition

Brother Bright gives some of his reasons for hoping that Labour will prevail at the next election here. As a good man of the left, one would expect no less from him. And he's right, I think, to suppose that we'd be facing many of the same problems had David Cameron and Georgie Osbourne been running the country these past five years. In that sense, you can undertsand the frustration some of the Prime Minister's supporters must feel. Not all of this is the PM's fault, but he's the only fellow the public can kick. But for those of us who aren't automatically attached to any party the calculation is pretty simple: no-one, except in th direst circumstances, shoul ever be entrusted with four consecutive terms. Thirteen years is enough.

Alex Massie

Republicans and Churchill

From our UK edition

As if determined to prove my point about the absurd excesses of the GOP's love for Winston Churchill, consider this entertaining snippet culled from the pages of the Washington Post: But  Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party. He calls the stimulus bill "a stinker." Well! It's a shame the Post doesn't seem to know any more British history than does Mr Cantor; then again it's a shame Mr Cantor should want to make such an ass of himself. Presumably he hasn't actually spent very much time studying 1930s British politics.

Alex Massie

Watching the Watchers

From our UK edition

LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 16: Photojournalists stage an act of mass photography outside New Scotland Yard police station on February 16, 2009 in London. The event aims to highlight the threat of an amendment to the Counter Terrorism Act that could be used to prevent press photographers taking pictures of the police. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images) Of course, it's not just press photographers who are vulnerable to this sweeping, draconian legislation. More here.

Alex Massie

Obama and Churchill

From our UK edition

So Obama has said he doesn't feel the need for his presidency to be reinforced by the presence of a British-government-owned bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office. As my friend Tim Shipman reports, the bust, loaned to George W Bush after 9/11, is now in the care of the British Embassy in Washington. This is a good thing in as much as anything which damages the Cult of Churchill in the United States is to be welcomed. One can desire this without in any way compromising one's respect and appreciation for Churchill's wartime heroics. But the Churchill Cult in the US  - especially amongst conservatives - distorts American views of Britain and, for that matter, history: every foreign policy crisis is seen as a test one may pass (like Churchill) or fail (like Chamberlain).

Alex Massie

Stanford’s Demise

From our UK edition

It's an ill-wind that fails to blow in any silver-lined clouds and the current financial difficulties are no exception. It seems that Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan financier determined to "crack" the American "market" with Twenty20 cricket may be in a spot of bother himself. I'm going to guess that having people suggest you could be a kind of Caribbean Bernie Madoff is, even if completely untrue, not Good News. It wasn't the money involved in the Stanford Twenty20 challenge match between his all-stars and England that was objectionable. After all, there's a long history of big-money challenge matches and cricket's known worse rogues than Stanford in the past. True, the event was pretty vulgar stuff but that's not really the issue either.

Alex Massie

Gordon Brown Should Just Abandon Hope

From our UK edition

From Andrew Rawnsley's (must-read) column yesterday: A member of the no contrition tendency in the cabinet says: "Gordon apologise? Bugger that. No way. People don't want to see him wringing his hands. They don't want him to get into this psycho-babble. They want him to get the job done." Is this actually true? I mean, do people actually want Gordon to "get the job done"? I'm not convinced they do. Isn't it possible that the electorate is enjoying this? The sourness and vindictiveness of the public mood at present seems unlikely to be much impressed by anything the Prime Minister could propose, let alone achieve.

Friday

Alex Massie

Geert Wilders is Not a Hero

From our UK edition

Several readers take me to task for not substantiating the suggestion that Geert Wilders is, as I put it, a "boor and a bigot". This, apparently, is a "shoddy tactic" and absent any substantiating evidence I should "withdraw the comment" and, asks Francis, is Wilders "really worse than your average Socialist"? Wilhelm, meanwhile, wonders if I'm taking my cues from what I saw on "the lefty BBC and Channel 4 news?" This last notion would, I think, surprise long-time readers. The answer is that Wilders is not a poster-boy for free speech, largely because he would seek to deny that right - not privilege, right - to those whom he disapproves of himself.

Alex Massie

Antiguan Debacle

From our UK edition

Just in case you had any doubts that cricket is the worst-run sport in the world, further proof comes from today's farce in Antigua. Even by cricket's lofty standards this is a disgraceful shambles. England were embarrassed in Jamaica; the entire sport is embarrassed by this nonsense. Ian Botham has just recommended moving the game to the Recreation Ground, arguing, quite correctly, that "you can't ignore the paying public". Except of course, ignoring the paying public is the game's administrators' standard operating procedure.  UPDATE: As ToryLion says, if the pitch is unsafe it's unsafe. Fair enough. But they have had weeks, if not months to sort this out. And it's not as though there aren't alternative arrangements that could have been made well in advance of today's debacle.

Alex Massie

Big Brother is Listening to You

From our UK edition

The sad thing is that you can no longer consider this sort of thing surprising: Security cameras have long been a fact of Scottish life, viewed with relief by many communities and with suspicion by civil libertarians. But what if they were listening to you as well? It has already happened in Glasgow. A Dutch company called Sound Intelligence carried out a two week long trial in a busy city centre street. They stress that their system, called Sigard, does not record conversations. It listens not to what is being said but how it is being said. At the company's headquarters in the Dutch city of Amersfoort, Bram Kuipers explained that Sigard was listening for the changes that affect the human voice in an aggressive situation...

Alex Massie

The Wilders Tale

From our UK edition

Peter is quite right. Both in his own analysis of the Geert Wilders fiasco and in recommending Philip Johnston's excellent piece in the Telegraph. It's worth remembering, reiterating even, that Wilders was, we are told, in Britain just two or three months ago. That visit went un-noticed and passed off without controversy as would this one had the lumpen idiocy of the Home Office not decided to intervene. What changed in the intervening period? I doubt he's more "dangerous" in February than he was in November. Wilders is a boor and a bigot and no kind of poster-boy for liberty given his own views, so it takes a particularly stupid, incompetent government to elevate him to his current celebrity and status. Bravo.

Alex Massie

Cameroons vs Cameronians

From our UK edition

In his Prospect piece on "Red Toryism" (of which more later) Philip Blond refers to "Cameroonian conservatism" and he's hardly alone in talking about "Cameroonianism" and the so-called "Cameroons" who follow Dave. Who chose these labels? And why? I mean, the perfectly sensible - and real! - word "Cameronian" already existed. Is it because no-one wanted to suggest that Dave's acolytes were like these fellows or because it was thought that "Cameroons" sounded amusing and riffed on these traditional Scottish sweets? Or, of course, upon a former French colony in West Africa? Anyway, I suppose we're stuck with "Cameroons" now. Perhaps Spectator readers can explain why - and by whom - this nonsensical term was coined in the first place?