David Blackburn

Thursday

David Blackburn

Gray heralds the latest shake-up

From our UK edition

The coalition is taking it to the MoD, Whitehall’s most intransigent department.  The FT’s Alex Barker reports that Bernard Gray has been appointed Chief of Defence Materiel.  Gray is a revered and original defence specialist with a history of criticising the MoD in plain terms. Resentment persists over his savage report into procurement, which exposed the full extent of the wasteful ‘conspiracy of optimism’ that pervades the department’s operations and its relations with contractors. He argued: ‘Industry and the Armed Forces have a joint vested interest in sponsoring the largest programme at the lowest apparent cost in a ‘conspiracy of optimism’.

David Blackburn

Miliband’s Oldham dilemma

From our UK edition

Joy. It will be a campaigning Christmas, now that the Oldham by-election is likely to be held on 13th January. The Labour party is much exercised. The permanently outraged Chris Bryant says it is a ‘disgrace’ that politics will sully the ‘major Christian festival of the year’ – the lapsed cleric seems to have forgotten the election’s proximity to Easter. More importantly, fewer students will be in Oldham on 13th January to serve ‘judgement’ on the government, as Hilary Benn put it in the Commons this morning before adding that the government is ‘running scared’. By-elections are determined by local issues, as one would expect.

David Blackburn

Anita Brookner, Justin Cartwright and Blair Worden’s books of the year

From our UK edition

Our colleagues at the magazine have kindly allowed us to republish the books of the year columns. Here's the first installment. Anita Brooker Society is composed of two classes: the patrons and the patronised, and a change of status, the migration of the one to the other, is a subject well worth studying. Michel Houellebecq, misanthropist, Islamophobe, and rank outsider, performed this feat by winning the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. Houellebecq is famous for his preoccupations, which are largely rancorous, yet his novel La carte et le territoire is mild, strangely addictive, but not without its subversive elements: Houellebecq himself features in it, ultimately as a headless corpse. Much of this is beyond parody.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

PMQs Live-blog | 15 December 2010

From our UK edition

VERDICT: A quiet PMQs by recent standards. Miliband's delivery is improving, slowly, but the content still fails him. Cameron's commitment to the NHS is clearly very personal, but it pays a tactical dividend also in that the government is immune from the criticism Miliband made. Likewise, Labour's jibes on the economy fall flat: Miliband has no constructive policy agenda, whilst the government's achievement in having calmed the markets and overseen better than expected growth. It's simple for Cameron to claim that the opposition is talking down the economy. With these advantages at his disposal, Cameron doesn't need to play the Full Flashy. So, when he plays them, his rhetorical cards tend to win tricks. Cameron took home a comfortable win for Christmas today.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages | 15 December 2010

From our UK edition

Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world's literary pages: Whilst the chattering classes are reverberating to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Jon Michaud of the New Yorker isn’t: ‘I breathed a sigh of relief and held up my hands like a distance runner breaking the tape. Though “Freedom” is sizable enough at 562 pages, it read to me like a much longer book. As I made my way through the final chapters, I began to feel like Walter Berglund, trapped in an unending marriage to this moody, depressive, Patty-like novel, while alluring, Lalitha-like books—“Unbroken,” “Room,” “Tinkers,” etc.—pressed themselves on me.

David Blackburn

The anti-Clarke campaign is gaining momentum

From our UK edition

After months of whispered asides, Theresa May cut loose yesterday and expressed what may on the Tory right (not to mention Labour’s authoritarian elements) feel: Ken Clarke’s prison proposals are potentially disastrous. Prison works. Tension has built to its combustion point, but there is no apparent reason why May chose this moment. Perhaps she was inspired by the persistent rumours of Cameron’s displeasure with Clarke? Or maybe the cause was Michael Howard’s smirking syntax as he denounced Clarke’s ‘flawed ideology’ in yesterday’s Times? Either way, the campaign to move Clarke sideways in a Christmas reshuffle is gaining momentum.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Talking point: the West Lothian question

From our UK edition

Political Betting carries this table on the breakdown of the tuition fees vote. English Lib Dems were noticeably more loyal than their Celtic counter-parts (only 16 of 43 voted against the bill), which reflects the left-wing political focus in those regions and perhaps the divide in the Liberal Democrat party itself. But, clearly, the West Lothian question is at issue here. Personally, I’m swayed by the argument that the new fees arrangement will affect applications to Scottish universities and therefore it is the business of Scottish MPs. That higher education was devolved in the first place is another, more interesting debating point. The comments section is yours...

David Blackburn

Reid: essentially, Miliband’s not fit for purpose

From our UK edition

John Reid made a bruising and quite extraordinary appearance on the Daily Politics earlier today. He demolished the Labour leader. Reid’s analysis was concise: there has been a vacuum at the heart of Labour since Tony Blair’s departure. Gordon Brown was divisive, at best, and clearly not up to the demands of leadership. And, Reid intimated, Brown's child shares his father’s foibles. Ed Miliband has not impressed so far, having failed to understand the cause of New Labour's success. Case in point, his support for the coalition’s very liberal policies on crime, and his inability to perceive that New Labour’s sustained dominance was due to constant policy renewal, not ideological trauma.

David Blackburn

What now?

From our UK edition

The BBC is reporting that the embattled Silvio Berlusconi has survived confidence votes in both of Italy’s Houses. The vote in the second House is understood to have been particularly close; apparently, there were just a couple of votes in it.   Theoretically, Berlusconi could soldier on. But his governing coalition is extremely fragile, and Berlusconi’s credibility is surely irretrievable. That said, the memory of Romano Prodi’s debacle of a government casts a long shadow and the opposition left remains totally disorganised by all accounts. Plus, Berlusconi was expected to lose both votes, particularly the second, so he now has a little momentum. Will it be a case of better the devil the Italian centre and right knows?

David Blackburn

The clot at the heart of the MoD

From our UK edition

Gibbon wrote that the Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own stupendous fabric. So too is the Ministry of Defence. An investigation by the Times (£) has revealed that bureaucratic intransigence has cost the taxpayer £6bn and several servicemen their lives. We have been here before with the Nimrod disaster and the subsequent Gray and Haddon-Cave reports. ‘A culture of optimism’ in procurement and maintenance leads to unsustainable costs, expensive delays, and, occasionally, the indefensible loss of life. At last, the Commons Public Accounts Committee is volubly shocked and has called for urgent reform.

Monday

David Blackburn

A comprehensive offer to Liberal Democrats

From our UK edition

It seems strange for Ed Miliband to veer from offensive to charm quite so quickly, but it's a decent ruse nonetheless. Miliband deliberately cites David Cameron’s famous 'comprehensive offer' and many disenchanted Lib Dems will be swayed by his three point-plan, especially after the recent Grayson intervention. Disingenuous? Yes. Opportunistic? Very. Coherent and well-defined opposition to trebling tuition fees? Certainly. Now for some policies, perchance...

David Blackburn

Please sir! No more poetry!

From our UK edition

Free from the cares of office, Andrew Motion has been busy. In fact, he has been a frenzy of activity. His output on Bob Dylan, Philip Larkin and the like has been well publicised; however, the Motion Report into poetry in schools is less well-known.   I still have dreams about my short-trousered self standing on a flip-lid desk straining to recite some featureless excerpt of Walter de la Mare. Motion agrees that poetry and school often do not mix; he writes in the report’s foreword: ‘Poetry is commonly described as a valuable part of our national life. But by common consent the existing general audience for it is much smaller than it could be, and the enthusiasm for it in schools is less than it should be.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Entering Galgut’s strange room

From our UK edition

'He has no house.' Volislav Jakic's epigraph opens In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut's acclaimed novel. Donne's 'No man is an island' would have served just as well. This is the story of one rootless man, Damon, and his fear of commitment. Ostensibly, travel is Galgut's subject. Hope and desire are thwarted by chance and choice on the road. But, as Galgut is fond of saying, memory is fiction. With the globe at his disposal, Galgut explores how memory is adopted or discarded to mitigate or exaggerate moments of euphoria, grief and regret; and hints at the influence of landscape on memory. Africa - its beauty and squalor, promise and threat - is the book's most visited landscape, inspiring some of the most evocative description of time and place I've ever read.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

There is always an alternative

From our UK edition

The late twentieth century was blessed with brilliant academic historians whose writing had a common touch; Tony Judt was one of them. Postwar was his crowning achievement. As Europe’s divided halves were conjoined politically and economically after the Cold War, Judt united their conflicted histories. For instance, 1968 was about more than students in Paris and Prague; it was a continental mass of common causes and misunderstandings – a thwarted dash for freedom of expression and thought, from which stronger collective identities must eventually emerge.   He was also an essayist, whose work merited the over-used label of ‘polemic’ – a form that seeks truth in confrontation, not ad hominem for its own sake.

Saturday

David Blackburn

Larkin Hour

From our UK edition

I doubt that Philip Larkin has ever been out of fashion, but after the 25th anniversary of his death and the publication of his letters to Monica Jones – beautifully reviewed for the Spectator by Philip Hensher – his star is well and truly back in the ascendant. T.S. Eliot, who was hardly renowned for generosity of spirit, wrote that Larkin made ‘words do what he wanted’ - a singular talent that gave Larkin broad appeal, which, for me, is his greatest strength. From the savage irreverence of This Be The Verse to the delicacy of High Windows, Larkin cuts it with both the intelligentsia and the chatterati. To prove the point, Radio 4 broadcast David Walliams and Andrew Motion waxing on all things Larkin. What’s not to like?

Thursday

David Blackburn

Laws on the formation of the coalition: Labour were simply too divided

From our UK edition

David Laws has responded to Andrew Adonis’ partisan review (no link apparently) of 22 Days in May. Laws’ account of the formation of the coalition and its infancy in government. Laws denies Adonis’ charge that the Lib Dems had a ‘right-wing agenda’ and, to prove the point, drops a wonderful quotation from Peter Mandelson during a discussion on tax, saying: ‘Haven’t the rich suffered enough already.’ Rather, Laws’ argues that the coalition formed as it did because Labour were simply too divided to be credible. He writes: ‘Labour was too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions on tax, education spending, pensions or the deficit.

David Blackburn

What the statist left thinks of the liberal right

From our UK edition

The Tories have the evil gene – that was the subtext to Ed Miliband’s jibes about the complacency of the children of Thatcher. Labour’s former General Secretary, Peter Watt, disagrees. In an important post for Labour Uncut, Watt observes: ‘But there is an arrogance at the heart of our politics that is going to make it difficult to really understand why we lost. It is an arrogance that says that we alone own morality and that we alone want the best for people. It says that our instincts and our motives alone are pure.  It’s an arrogance that belittles others’ fears and concerns as “isms” whilst raising ours as righteous.

Wednesday

David Blackburn

December Book the Month

From our UK edition

Alas, Gordon Brown’s Beyond the Crash was just too late to qualify for this month’s Spectator Book Club book of the month. What a sadness. Instead, I’ve picked a book to inspire goodwill in all men: Lucky Jim. The Spectator originally described Kingsley Amis’ campus classic as ‘that rarest of rare good things, a very funny book’. The general anger that Amis expressed has dissipated into apathy – nowadays it’s the students who feel exercised. But Amis’ craft - the wicked set-pieces, savage wit and his deft prose – remains vivid and modern. Orlando Bird’s piece on Amis’ legacy reminded me of what I’d forgotten of arguably the finest novel ever written by an Amis - let’s have that argument.

David Blackburn

Across the literary pages

From our UK edition

Here is a brief selection of the best offerings from the world's literary pages: Writing in the City Journal, Christopher Hitchens asks why Capitol Hill has been stolen by the pot-boilers: 'The days of the Georgetown hostess are gone; the hostesses themselves are gone, too. Their reign began to close years ago, when senators started canceling dinners to appear on shows like Nightline. (There's a prefiguration of this in Larry McMurtry's neglected 1982 Washington novel Cadillac Jack, in which a character pontificates on world-shaking matters of which he knows little.) The Washington pundit is also a thing of the past: it's been a good while since any insider columnist had the kind of access or influence that Ben Bradlee enjoyed with John F. Kennedy.

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Lansley gives us a nudge

From our UK edition

Andrew Lansley’s rhetoric is strident: ‘It’s time for politicians to stop telling people to make healthy choices. Rather than lecturing people about their habits we will give them the support they need... we will support leadership from within communities.’ One could be forgiven for thinking that the Health White Paper will inaugurate a completely new dawn. It doesn’t. Many of Lansley’s initiatives are resuscitated Labour policies: taxes on alcohol and tobacco and incentivising healthy living through choice are tried and tested formulas that have had limited past success in every field bar raising revenue. Lansley’s White Paper is not a testament of radicalism, but it is quietly revolutionary nonetheless.