James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
Jim Murphy is that rare breed, a genuinely working-class, modern British politician. We meet on the eve of Labour conference in a café in an upmarket shopping centre in his native Glasgow and he begins by talking about his childhood. Labour’s 44-year-old shadow defence secretary was born on a Glasgow housing estate and spent his
The Daily Telegraph is tonight alleging that Neil Wallis was paid by the News of the World to provide crime exclusives while working as a consultant for the Metropolitan police. The paper claims that the News of the World paid Wallis £25,000 for information including the details of Scotland Yard operations during this period. According
One thing British politics has yet to rise up to is how possible it is that Barack Obama might lose next year. All the pollsters have his approval rating in negative territory, Gallup has him down by ten, and the American economy looks likely to deteriorate between now and November 2012. But the big thing
US-Pakistani relations will deteriorate even further following today’s claims by Admiral Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Pakistani ISI aided and abetted the attack on the US embassy in Kabul. Mullen told a Senate panel that, “With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted a truck bomb attack,
Ed Miliband’s pre-conference interviews in Progress and the New Statesman serve as a reminder of the Labour leader’s desire to move the political centre ground. To the New Statesman he talks repeatedly of changing the current ‘settlement’ both economic and political. I presume by that he means the orthodoxies of the Thatcher-Blair era. Indeed, he tells
As the Liberal Democrat leadership leaves Birmingham, it is a contented bunch. Their conference has gone as well as could be expected. There were no embarrassing defeats for the leadership and no gaffes by any of their ministers. But conference was yet another reminder of how much of a gap there is between where those
Listening to Nick Clegg’s speech today, there was little doubt which party he’d rather be in coalition with. There were some coded slights at the Tories’ expense—the emphasis on how the Lib Dems had been ‘fighting to keep the NHS safe’ and his commitment that the Human Rights Act was here to stay—but they were
I’ve been away from Birmingham today but, even from a distance, it’s clear that Tim Farron has had a rather difficult day. It started with a story in The Times this morning about upset among his fellow MPs about his rhetoric on Sunday implying that the coalition partners would get divorced before 2015 and continued
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,
One of the most striking things about Lib Dem conference has been how up for a scrap over Europe the party’s ministers are. Every single Lib Dem Cabinet minister has, over the past few days, ruled out any attempt to repatriate powers from Brussels. Given that the Conservative party wouldn’t forgive David Cameron not attempting
“We’ve got to stop beating ourselves up,” Clegg just told Lib Dem members in a Q&A session. As is traditional at these events, Clegg spent a lot of time trying to explain to his party why the coalition is doing what it is doing. The tone of the event was, perhaps, best summed up by
Even by his own standards Vince Cable’s speech today was noticeably pessimistic. The Business Secretary warned that the post-war cycle of ever-rising living standards has been broken by the crash. There was little in what he said to suggest that he has any optimism about the prospects for growth over the next few years. If
Lib Dem conference delegates have just provided the press with a nice easy story, they’ve voted to set up a panel to look at the legalisation of cannabis and the decriminalisation of all drugs. But away from the main hall, Danny Alexander has just given an interview to Andrew Neil in which he has distanced
For Lib Dem modernisers there are few more depressing sights than how conference reacts to a Tim Farron speech: he serves up social democratic red meat and they absolutely lap it up. Farron, the party president, delivered one anti-Tory jibe after another. He declared that the government would be an ‘absolute nightmare without’ the Liberal
Nick Clegg’s interview on Andrew Marr this morning subtly shifted the Lib Dem position on the 50p tax rate. When Marr asked him what he would do if the George Osborne commissioned HMRC study showed that it raised no money, Clegg replied ‘then I of course think we should look at other ways in which
If you can judge a party’s mood by the number of bad jokes it tells, then the Liberal Democrats are in better form than last year. Their rally to open conference was characterised by a string of appalling gags. George Osborne was a particular target with both Don Foster and Sarah Teather trying to raise
When David Cameron spoke to the Carlton Club political dinner on Thursday night, he stressed that the Conservatives must not subcontract out compassion to their coalition partners. The Prime Minister’s desire to hold this ground can be seen at the speed with which Downing Street has briefed out that it was Cameron’s personal commitment that was
Lib Dem conference this year brings with it the serialisation of Jasper Gerard’s biography of Nick Clegg. The focus will be on the claims that deputy Prime Minister has promised his wife he’ll only serve one term and that senior Lib Dems are interested in a soft electoral pact with the Tories. But, to my
It is too early to call him the comeback kid of British politics, but Nick Clegg enters the party conference season in better shape than anyone expected him to be four months ago. Back then, his party did not dare put his face on its campaign leaflets. Even Liberal Democrat ministers didn’t expect Clegg to
The former Lib Dem leader on learning to love the Tories – and the fate of the euro ‘Have you ever been in the world’s smallest lift?’ Paddy Ashdown asks when we meet at the entrance to the House of Lords. ‘It was designed by William Gladstone!’ We travel up in the lift, admiring the