James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
The Metropolitan police are confirming that a 46 year old MP has been arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. The member concerned is a Tory. UPDATE: The BBC is now naming Andrew Bridgen as the MP involved. There's been no statement as yet from CCHQ on the matter. In the last parliament, Andrew Pelling was suspended from the Consevrative party a week after being arrested on suspicion of assault. No charges were brought against Pelling.
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One of the odd things about David Cameron is that he wants to be a consensual radical. Unlike Margaret Thatcher he doesn’t want to have ‘a people’, a section of the electorate that is loyal to him personally. Rather he wants to be seen as a unifying national figure. He is, to borrow a phrase from The Economist, a ‘one nation radical’ But Cameron’s persona doesn’t mean that the left aren’t going to fight him with everything they’ve got. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s assault on the coalition today in the New Statesman is a classic example of the kind of opposition he is going to face. (If you read the whole piece, it is clear that Rowan Williams identifies himself as being on the left).
From our UK edition
One of the many problems with the equalities act is that it requires a level of consultation and a number of equalities impact assessments that are not compatible with speedy decision making. Word is seeping out tonight that the coalition is now having to ‘reconsider’ its decision on Academy funding because the Treasury, the Department of Education and the Department for Communities and Local Government did not tick all the right boxes before announcing the new settlement. The reverse is the result of a legal challenge by various local authorities. But this is a pyrrhic victory as the likely result of it is that local authorities actually receive less money than they would have done because a whole set of decisions on Academy funding are now being rethought.
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David Cameron hasn’t wasted much time since his return from holiday in dealing with the government’s two biggest political vulnerabilities: its policies on the NHS and criminals. The u-turns have got Cameron into a better place politically but they come at a cost. On the NHS, Cameron has had to water down the Lansley reforms and accept the temporary creation of a two-tier NHS and a highly bureaucratic structure. While on sentencing, Cameron has removed one of the ways that Ken Clarke was trying to save money. But, perhaps, the biggest problem with these u-turns is that they add to the impression that he’s not prepared to stand and fight, that when the going gets tough he gets going.
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Having u-turned on two more policies in the last two days, one would have expected David Cameron to have a hard time today at PMQs. But he didn’t. Ed Miliband never got going, turning in one of his worst PMQs’ performances. Cameron pithily summed up Miliband’s performance when he joked that ‘the best thing that can be said about his performance is he wasn’t thinking about politics on his honeymoon.’ Miliband’s performance today will add to the low-level grumbling about him among some Labour MPs and members of the shadow Cabinet. Miliband has a big speech coming up on Monday and he needs it to deliver a rationale for his leadership, to give it a purpose.
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Ed Balls walked into two traps on Newsnight yesterday evening. First, he seemed stumped when Jeremy Paxman asked him if he was praying that George Osborne was right. Paxman’s ‘gotcha point’ was that if Osborne isn’t right the country is in deep trouble and Balls wouldn’t want that. But Balls’ more serious slip was to say, “My view, though, is that the central outcome isn’t that we see a resumption of growth.” This, as coalition sources have been pointing out today, allows them to present any growth as a vindication of their strategy. For all the talk about the NHS today, the economy still remains the central battleground in politics. So far, the economic data has not been decisive one way or the other.
From our UK edition
If the counter-terrorism strategy the government is announcing today is to succeed, it will have to overcome bureaucratic opposition and institutional inertia. As Dean Godson writes in The Times today (£), senior civil servants in the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism are highly reluctant to accept the government’s new, more muscular approach to this issue and will go back to the old, failed way of doing things if given the chance. If the Prime Minister’s writ is going to run across government on this issue, he is going to need someone working from the centre with Cameron’s explicit backing whose sole role is to supervise the implementation of the policy — the Home Secretary has too much on her plate to expect her to do this task alone.
From our UK edition
While Dominque Strauss-Kahn was in a New York court room, pleading not guilty to charges of sexual assault, his former IMF colleagues were delivering their verdict on the UK economy at the Treasury. The IMF are very polite guests and their report has provided some timely support for the coalition’s fiscal approach by declaring that there is currently no need for a Plan B. The Osborne operation has been quick to point out that even in various alternative scenarios the IMF set out in their report, they don’t call for more spending or smaller cuts. But there are things which the IMF says that won’t be music to Osborne’s ears.
From our UK edition
The coalition’s counter-terrorism strategy will be published tomorrow. This rather delayed review has been the subject of some semi-public wrangling, Cameron and Clegg have given speeches setting out very different visions for it. But one thing to remember is that the test of the review's robustness isn’t just whether it stops government money going to extremists groups. It also has to lead to government, at all levels, stopping dealings with these groups, denying them the oxygen of recognition. Today’s Telegraph notes that 20 groups will lose their funding because the views they espouse are antithetical to British values. This is to be welcomed.
From our UK edition
Tomorrow sees the publication of the report David Cameron commissioned on how to address the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Thanks to a leak we already know most of what’s in the report. It proposes, among other things, that sexualized advertisement shouldn’t be displayed in places near where children go, that the watershed should be more strictly enforced, that lads mags shouldn’t be displayed at eye level and that it should be easier for parents to block access from home computers to certain internet sites. There’ll be those that dismiss these proposals as gimmicks or as too small to make a difference. But making the public square more family friendly is a noble purpose and something that it is appropriate for government to get involved in.
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Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, is one of the columnists most sympathetic to and best informed about what David Cameron is trying to do. So when Charles warns that the current set-up of Downing Street isn’t working for the Prime Minister, Number 10 should take notice. Charles’ worry is that the new Downing Street set up is insufficiently political, that policy and politics are being kept too far apart. I think Charles is right about this. The Number 10 policy unit is now made up mostly of civil servants or former management consultants who, by their very nature, aren’t intellectually or ideologically committed to the Cameron public service reform agenda.
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One of the lessons of the new Labour years is that constitutional reform is best avoided. One of the lessons of the new Labour years is that constitutional reform is best avoided. New Labour swept into office with total confidence that the British constitution could be easily ‘modernised’. Its 1997 manifesto mocked the Conservatives as follows: ‘The party which once opposed universal suffrage and votes for women now says our constitution is so perfect that it cannot be improved.’ Thirteen years later, it was clear that Labour had fallen horribly foul of the law of unintended consequences.
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Jean-Claude Trichet’s speech yesterday proposing a ministry of finance for the eurozone (£) can be taken as setting out how the European Central Bank wants to resolve the eurozone’s problems. It is yet another example of how the European elite use crises to advance integration. But just as important from a British point of view is Trichet’s admission that the overall package of changes he is talking about “naturally demand a change of the [EU] treaty". This, as Fraser has written previously, presents David Cameron with a glorious opportunity to take advantage of this moment to redefine Britain’s relationship with the European Union.
From our UK edition
If the Tories are to win an overall majority at the next election, they are almost certainly going to have to take some seats off the Liberal Democrats. Given that the Tories have problems in Scotland and the urban north, the party needs to win seats like Somerton and Frome. This fact is why Tory MPs are paying such attention to a piece by Rob Hayward on Conservative Home. Hayward, a former Tory MP who has advised the party on the coming boundary review, points out that where the Lib Dems had an MP, their vote in the local elections pretty much held up. This implies that removing Lib Dem MPs at the next election will be harder work than many Tories think.
From our UK edition
Martin Wolf’s column on the eurozone today does a superb job of summing up its troubles. As Wolf says, "The Eurozone, as designed, has failed." Keeping its current arrangements is simply not an option for the eurozone. Wolf concludes that: "The eurozone confronts a choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution or open-ended official support. The existence of this choice proves that an enduring union will at the very least need deeper financial integration and greater fiscal support than was originally envisaged." The question now is essentially whether Germany and other prosperous eurozone countries are prepared to embark on further integration and a programme of fiscal transfers to save the project.
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One of the Conservative leadership’s worries at the moment is that the party is losing its reputation for being tough on crime. So it won’t welcome today’s Daily Mail splash about how a prisoner was granted permission by Ken Clarke to father a child by artificial insemination. Now, we don’t know the precise details of the case, meaning that it is hard to come to a firm judgement. But I understand that when he was justice secretary Jack Straw rejected these kind of applications. He was, one familiar with the issue tells me, of the view that prisoners should not be allowed to benefit from non-medically necessary NHS services. One intriguing thing to watch is how Ken Clarke responds to this story.
From our UK edition
The news that the votes which ended up with Russia and Qatar winning the rights to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups might not have been model, clean elections is about as surprising as the news that the faeces discovered in the woods are believed to be of ursine origin. In the Independent today, Dominic Lawson cuts through the seemingly continuous media coverage of the matter to the question of whether it actually matters: “More to the point, given that there are no objective economic benefits to the nations holding such competitions (whatever the kudos to local political dignitaries such as Boris Johnson) shouldn't we as taxpayers feel grateful if other countries managed to offer more successful bribes? They, and not us, are the ones who've been Blattered.
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The Harvard economist Martin Feldstein proposes an intriguing solution to Greece’s problems in his latest column: “A temporary leave of absence from the eurozone would allow Greece to achieve a price-level decline relative to other eurozone countries, and would make it easier to adjust the relative price level if Greek wages cannot be limited. The Maastricht treaty explicitly prohibits a eurozone country from leaving the euro, but says nothing about a temporary leave of absence (and therefore doesn’t prohibit one). It is time for Greece, other eurozone members, and the European Commission to start thinking seriously about that option.
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With David Cameron in Ibiza and Ed Miliband on honeymoon, British politics is relatively quiet. But something fascinating is happening in America: Sarah Palin, contrary to media expectations, appears to be preparing to run for the Republican nomination. With the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee deciding against getting into the race, Palin has a far better chance of lining up populists and social conservatives behind her candidacy—two formidable voting blocs in the Republican primaries.
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Sometimes I wonder if the judiciary and the human rights culture are just trying to make Richard Littlejohn’s columns look understated. Today’s story in the Daily Mail about how a convicted criminal has been freed from prison because of the effect that his incarceration was having on his children is in real ‘you couldn’t make it up’ territory. Wayne Bishop, a father of five, had been sentenced to eight months behinds bars after pleading guilty to burglary and dangerous driving. But he has now been freed after judges worried about the effect of his imprisonment on his childcare arrangements given that he and his partner have split up and Bishop has now married another woman.
