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So there we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth, and to round off a sentence of tired clichés all that needs to be said is that Clare Short was “conned”. Everyone was in fact: “We were in a bit of a lunatic asylum… I noticed Tony Blair in his evidence to you kept saying,
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According to Laura Kuenssberg, Lord Stern is not an official advisor but confirms that he is consulting with the Tories on their climate change policy. As Iain Martin notes, what bizarre timing. The UEA and IPCC scandals simmer and Ed Miliband recently declared war on reason – which has almost certainly reduced James Delingpole to
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I doubt His Holiness and I would hit it off, but he is right that Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill would impose strictures upon religious communities that run contrary to their beliefs. The coalescence of British and EU anti-discrimination law is but an immodest garment for trenchant ideology. Harman’s bill strives to subjugate individual freedoms, such
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Voltaire praised the English for their boldness: “how I like the people who say what they think”. The slow and steady contraction of the polls continues, and Rachel Sylvester is convinced that the Tories must embrace risk and revoke ‘health-and-safety politics’. She writes: ‘Increasingly, his pronouncements seem designed to grab a headline rather than challenge
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Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I never refused a request for money to pay for arms and equipment during my time as Prime Minister.” The panel did not take the bait, but they will have to following Lord Walker’s evidence today: “There was indeed a list of stuff that we were
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Smarting from the savaging he received in Mo, Peter Mandelson characterised David Cameron’s “no swingeing cuts” comment as a u-turn, and compared Cameron and Osborne to Laurel and Hardy. This is a bit rich considering the government’s obvious confusion over the timing and extent of cuts, and that the immortal line “That’s another fine mess
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Politicians have to shout to be heard over the lurid tale of John Terry’s bordello, but Ed Miliband’s fervour for climate change is sufficiently shrill. He has declared “war” on “sceptics”, who have been rather jaunty of late. As Fraser noted yesterday, the press’ climate change narrative is shifting – scepticism, in its proper sense, is
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I’ve been flicking through the British Social Attitudes survey this afternoon, and what a conflicted bunch of socially liberal and economically conservative people we are. The British decry the state’s interference in each facet of life and at the same time we are displeased that more has not been done to limit cannabis’ availability. There
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Oooh, there’s just been a wonderful exchange at the Chilcot Inquiry. Baroness Prashar was asking some kindergarten questions about military planning. She barely mentioned Geoff Hoon’s evidence that the MoD was chronically under-funded and short of equipment before, during and after the conflict, and merely concentrated on ‘visible military planning’, or the lack of it
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Michael Crick reports that Owen Paterson is seeking an urgent conference with Sir Reg Empey (the UUP leader) after revelations that the UUP held secret talks about a possible electoral pact with the DUP. If the story stands up, the UUP/Tory pro-Union and anti-sectarian alliance is dead. Crick writes: ‘Some in Belfast think that the
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Not so good for John Rentoul: it’s WMD time and Blair’s body language spoke volumes. His movements were almost involuntary. The glasses were on and off, the brow furrowed, the head wagged and jagged in the manner of an amphetamine junky going cold turkey, and the hands were more intrusive than Andrew Marr’s. In round
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So far so good for John Rentoul: Blair’s walking it, but there have been intriguing moments. The suggestion that Blair’s foreign policy was motivated solely by vanity is false. The former Prime Minister’s thinking is extremely coherent. That is not to say that he is right nor to deny his obvious vanity, or to overlook
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This week has seen confirmation that social mobility has stagnated, that the economic recovery is dangerously anaemic and that peace in Northern Ireland is threatened. Yet a conflict that was declared won nearly 7 years ago has been ever present on the frontpages. Bagehot is not at all surprised that the Iraq war remains definitive:
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Gordon Brown is a master of connivance. I never understood that he is contriving the EU’s destruction until hearing of Baroness Ashton’s glorious exploits. Agnes Poirier reveals all in the Times. CND’s sole attraction was that its protesters went home every evening and never worked weekends. Alas, the EU is for twenty four hour party
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The Tories should gain little from what is a Labour dominated affair, but the Chilcot Inquiry is doing the Tories a vicarious favour by succeeding against the odds. The government’s refusal to disclose the full range of relevant documents frustrates Chilcot, but it also compounds the impression that Downing Street has contrived to restrict the
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The Lancaster House conference commences this morning and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has penned a stupefyingly worthy article in the Times, playing the same old tunes about the intention to ‘improve governance, fight corruption and bring Taleban fighters back into society if they are ready to lay down their arms.’ The Afghanistan mission has
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Yesterday, I wrote that Jack Straw’s savagery in response to Goldsmith’s original advice bespoke of personal animosity. That may well be so, but Goldsmith’s testimony reveals that he was long convinced of his initial advice’s validity. Blair was exasperated with his friend’s stubbornness: “your advice is your advice,” he said pointedly. Yet eventually Goldsmith changed
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12:00: Stay tuned for live coverage. As Gordon Brown is still in Northern Ireland, Harriet Harman will face William Hague today. 12:03: Tory John Whittingdale opens up with Army compensation, a hot topic over the summer. Harman replies that these issues are being addressed by Ainsworth and the MoD. 12:04: Will the government do more
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Boris Johnson has resigned as Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, apparently because he could not devote enough time to the job. The deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, replaces him. This is a marginally embarrassing turn of events for Boris and the Tories. It’s a puerile point but Boris still has the time to
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Another pallid dawn brings more statistics proving that Britain is riven by inequality – ‘from the cradle to the grave’, concludes the Hills report. Unless the offspring of professionals pursue a peculiar urge to be writers or enter Holy Orders, they will bequeath ever greater advantages to their children. For those in converse circumstances, Larkin’s
