James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
When I arrive to interview Stella Creasy in one of the cafés in parliament, she’s sitting in a meeting with two earnest, wonkish types, the coffee mugs having been cleared from the table. As time ticks by, her body language becomes urgent, but she’s too polite to wrap it up. I begin to see why
That Italy is now paying around 7.8 per cent for two-year borrowing, compared to the 4.5 per cent it was paying just last month, is a reminder that the imposition of a technocratic government was far from a solution to the country’s problems. With €8 billion more debt to be sold on Tuesday, there’s little
Political debate is going to be dominated by the economy between now and the autumn statement. Ed Miliband is trying to use this moment to persuade the public that the Coalition’s economic policies have failed. By contrast, the Tories want to highlight how much deeper trouble the country would be in if it did not
Today’s PMQs was a preview of the debate we’ll be having after next week’s autumn statement. Miliband, struggling with a bit of a cold, tried to pin the economy’s problems on Cameron. The Prime Minister’s retort was ‘who would want to put the people responsible for the current mess back in charge’. It was a
Another lobbying scandal has hit the coalition. The Times is reporting that Carina Trimingham, Chris Huhne’s partner, boasted of having ‘excellent contacts… from Cabinet members to more junior ministers’ to a lobbying firm she was seeking work with. She also allegedly urged this firm to ‘make use of my skills and contacts.’ Trimingham has told
The recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s review into party funding are not going to happen. Both the Labour and Tory members of the review have issued notes of dissent to it. Nick Clegg has, on behalf of the government, issued a statement gently rolling the report into the long grass. Interestingly,
The government’s announcement on housing today is an attempt to square the circle. On the one hand, a return to excessive lending and sub-prime mortgages is clearly not a good thing. Critics say, with justification, look where government backed mortgages got America. But on the other, there are clearly problems when people who aren’t fortunate
There is a growing acceptance in government that the South East needs more airport capacity. But, as today’s Times outlines, there’s nowhere near agreement on how best to achieve this. The big problem with a new airport on the Kent coast or ‘Boris Island’ is that the Dutch would not be prepared to open up
The expected triumph of the centre-right Popular Party in today’s Spanish elections promises to have some interesting consequences for British politics. The PP have been in close touch with the Tories here and plan to introduce an emergency budget based on the Osborne model: a clear deficit reduction plan combined with an increase in the
The riots are fast in danger of becoming the forgotten issue in our politics. The social and cultural problems that they laid bare have been knocked out of the news by the continuing financial and political drama in the Eurozone But if we, as a society, don’t work out how to address these problems then
There’s a pattern emerging to George Osborne’s autumn. He gives a big domestic set piece speech on growth and then immediately leaves the country for a meeting of European finance ministers. It is what he did straight after his conference speech last month and what he will do after the growth review on 29 November.
David Cameron and Angela Merkel were clearly keen to show that, whatever the tensions over the role of the European Central Bank, they still get on. I lost count of the number of times in their press conference that they used the word ‘good’ to characterise their relationship and their discussions. But there did not
Jill Sherman, the Whitehall editor of The Times, reports tomorrow that the government will not raise benefits in line with September’s inflation figures as normally happens. However, there’ll be no freeze in benefits. Instead, they’ll rise in line with a six month inflation average which stands at 4.5 percent rather than September’s 5.2 percent figure.
I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But
Today’s unemployment figures do not make for cheery reading. Youth unemployment is up to over a million and unemployment overall has reached 2.62 million, meaning that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been for 15 years. Laura Kuenssberg tweets one particularly striking statistic: ‘Number of UK Nationals in work fell 280k compared to
David Cameron summoned all Tory special advisers to Downing Street for a meeting this afternoon. He wanted, I understand, to warn them that too much of the coalition’s internal workings were being briefed out to journalists. He made it clear that he wants an end to process stories appearing in the papers. Downing Street
David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet last night was a significant moment — the clearest articulation yet of his European Policy. In the crucial paragraph, he declared: ‘we sceptics have a vital point. We should look sceptically at grand plans and utopian visions. We’ve a right to ask what the European Union should
Today’s New York Times has a fun piece about Google X, the secret lab where Google is working on its special projects. The ideas are, suitability, far out. They are, apparently, looking at connecting household appliances to the internet and creating a robot that could go to the office so you don’t have to. It
No columnist is closer to David Cameron than Bruce Anderson. The Spectator’s former political editor spotted Cameron’s potential back in 1992 during the general election campaign and ever since he has been an advocate of the Cameron cause. In 2003, he wrote a piece for The Spectator in which he tipped Cameron for the premiership.
José Manuel Barroso’s article in The Observer today is a plea for relevance. When you cut through the usual EU jargon, what you find is the Commission President—predictably—declaring his opposition to German talk of an inter-governmental treaty among the 17 Eurozone members. He’s also warning the smaller Eurozone states that without the Commission’s protection their
