James Forsyth

The emotive list of alleged victims of phone hacking has grown again tonight. To Milly Dowler, the parents of the Soham victims, and survivors of 7/7 can now be added the families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It should be stressed that nothing has yet been proved in any of these cases. But this story is just getting bigger and bigger and more and more problematic for News International. Among tomorrow’s front pages, the FT’s will — I expect — cause particular concern at the top of the company. It declares ‘Murdoch investors take fright’. This along with the growing international interest in the story, threaten to open new fronts on Murdoch. There are two new political notes to the scandal tonight.

One of the things about the press that politicians frequently complain about is that papers concentrate more on personalities than policies. But reading the latest extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries you see just how much personality matters. Indeed, according to Campbell, Tony Blair excluded Gordon Brown from a discussion about what to do after 9/11 not because of any difference about how to respond but because he had become fed up with how difficult Brown was to deal with on a personal level. Now, there are nowhere near the personal tensions at the top of this government that there were in the last one. But because politicians are humans and not purely rational actors, the individual relationships in the government matter.

Before writing my column for The Spectator this week I asked one of the most clued-up Eurosceptics on the centre right what opt-outs Britain should push for in any negotiation over an EU treaty change. His answer, to my surprise, was "forget that, we should just leave". This answer took me aback because this person had been the embodiment of the view that the European Union could be reformed from within. But people are dropping this view at a rapid rate for reasons that Matthew Parris explained with his typical eloquence in The Times (£) yesterday. I wrote in The Spectator this week that two Cabinet ministers now favour leaving the EU only to learn soon afterwards that the real number is three. Iain Martin writes that half of all Tory MPs now favour leaving.

The news, via a leaked letter, that Boris Johnson now opposes high-speed rail will come as little surprise to the government. Boris has been moving to this position for quite some time and the Department for Transport resigned itself to the mayor coming out against the scheme earlier this week. Recently, one of Boris’ senior aides visited the Department for Transport and said that the mayor would only support the scheme if there was an additional tube line from Euston as part of it. But when the Department for Transport pushed for details of where this line would go to, and how it would be engineered it became apparent that this was more of a rhetorical point than a negotiating position. Oddly, the politics of Boris’ position could work out for both sides.

There has been much talk about what George Osborne told Alistair Darling about the EU bailout mechanism during those days in May between the election and the coalition being formed. But notes of a conversation between Osborne and Darling released today show that Osborne did urge Darling not to commit to anything that would have a lasting effect on the public finances. Osborne also suggested that the UK government might abstain due to the fact that the country was between governments. To which Darling’s reply was that the Cabinet Secretary’s advice was that the government was the government until a new one actually took office. It remains to be seen what Douglas Carswell, the Tory MP who has been pushing for the release of these documents, makes of the issue.

The Foreign Secretary finds himself in the rather unique position today of trying to deal with the consequences of a crisis that he largely predicted. In May 1998, William Hague gave a speech warning that the single currency would lead to social unrest as governments tried to cope with one size fits all interest rates. It is a reminder of how much Hague was swimming against the tide of bien-pensant opinion that Michael Heseltine claimed this prediction was so extreme as to drive the Tories off the centre ground. But what is, perhaps, more interesting than Hague’s vindicated view that the euro, in a crisis, would be the ‘economic equivalent of a burning building with no exits’ is his view on how European governments would resolve the problem.

Roy Greenslade’s report in the Evening Standard that The Sunday Times will hand over to Essex Police the tape of Chris Huhne talking to his estranged wife Vicky Pryce that got the speeding points story motoring in the first place has revived speculation in Westminster about the future of the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. The Sunday Times’ report says that the tape contains Pryce telling Huhne that, ‘It’s one of the things that worried me when I took them; when you made me take the points in the first instance.’ Huhne, of course, has always denied that anyone ever took points on his behalf. It should be stressed that nothing has been proved any which way.