James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Nick Clegg’s speech in Luton today on extremism is a challenge to large parts of David Cameron’s remarks on the subject in Munich just last month. Indeed, even the venue of the speech can be seen as a rebuke to Cameron who was attacked for giving a speech on Islamic extremism on the same day
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The decision on News Corp’s take-over of BSkyB has thrust Jeremy Hunt into the spotlight. The culture secretary is many Tories’ bet to be the next leader of the party. Hunt is ambitious even by political standards: during the Brown bounce he canvassed opinion as to whether he should stand in the Tory leadership contest
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Danny Finkelstein’s paean of praise (£) to Andrew Cooper, the PM’s new director of political strategy, contains several interesting lines. Finkelstein says that his former flat mate’s biggest challenge is, ‘Devising a strategy for changes in the NHS so that a critical political battle isn’t lost disastrously’. This is yet another indication of how nervous
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Developments in Libya continue to dominate the news, and rightly so. The view from Whitehall is that this stands off will continue for some time. There is even talk that we might be heading to a situation where Gaddafi holds onto Tripoli for months while the rest of the country is liberated from his rule.
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There are two significant developments in the Middle East to reflect on tonight. The New York Times is reporting that two Libyan air force jets conducted bombing raids on Monday. These raids appear to have been relatively ineffective. But they do suggest that there are still pilots prepared to carry out the regime’s orders, something
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The government’s game of catch-up on Libya continues apace. David Cameron came to the Commons to update the House on the current situation. His main message was now that we have the vast majority of our citizens out, we can have a policy. Indeed, the government is today openly admitting that it was hamstrung last
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National Pay Bargaining is one of the major impediments to rebalancing the national economy and improving the quality of public services. But as Julian Astle, the head of the Liberal think tank Centre Forum, notes the coalition is doing little about it. It knows that the public sector unions will go to the wall for
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The greatest political, as opposed to strategic, threat to the coalition from the Libya evacuation crisis was that it would give the government a reputation for incompetence. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Labour are looking to pin the incompetence charge to the coalition at every possible opportunity. The Miliband team knows that
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Have the Tories rediscovered the Right instincts? If power without responsibility has been the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages, then the lot of a government minister can seem like responsibility without power. In private moments, ministers complain that they are overwhelmed by paperwork and have to drive change through a recalcitrant Civil Service.
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The headlines about Nick Clegg forgetting that he was running the country and the botched evacuation of British nationals from Libya have combined to make the coalition look rather incompetent, the most dangerous thing for a government to appear as. Certainly, the effort to get British people out of Libya has been a national embarrassment.
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Today’s letter in the FT from 69 business leaders in support of high-speed rail is a great example of how you advance an argument. We have so often heard politicians announcing that a particular scheme will create jobs and promote growth that we have become inured to it. But the public does listen when a
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The Al-Jazeera live blog has a fascinating report that the Gaddafi’s daughter Ayesha has unsuccessfully attempt to leave Libya for Malta, the Maltese refused her plane permission to land. There are also reports that a Libyan plane that wanted to land in Beirut contained one of Gaddafi’s daughters-in-law. The question raised by this is whether
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We now know that Libya is heading into a full on civil-war and that Gaddafi is prepared to do pretty much anything to stay in power. The former interior minister Abdel Fattah Younes al-Abid, admittedly a partial source, says that he defected after arguing with the Libyan leader over his plan to bomb the rebel
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Tonight, Libya appears to be on the verge of a full on civil-war. The interior minister has defected to the opposition and urged the army to do likewise. The interior minister has also warned that there are half a million mercenaries in Libya under Gaddafi’s orders. This seems further grim confirmation of just how far
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There’s a quite remarkable op-ed by Paddy Ashdown in The Times (£) today which goes public with a lot of the griping about Liam Fox that one heard behind the scenes at the time of the Strategic Defence Review. Ashdown remarks that the ‘problem with the SDSR was not speed, but lack of political direction.’
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David Cameron’s speech in Kuwait today did not take on his hosts in the way that Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech did. But it was a still fine, liberal speech. The key argument of the speech was that: ”As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the
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Over at Comment Central, Danny Finkelstein has written a post saying that it might not be in the best interests of the No campaign for Cameron to campaign heavily against AV. His argument is that the No campaign’s best hope is to run as a spiky, anti-establishment effort. I think this is true but that
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To date, this government has not had much of a foreign policy. Where there should have been grand strategy there has been trade promotion. But this appears to be changing. It is certainly striking that Cameron is the first western leader to visit post-Mubarak Egypt. Cameron himself is, normally, at the realist end of the
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David Cameron’s piece on opening up public services today is, as Ben Brogan notes, one of the most important moments of Cameron’s premiership so far. First, it is, as I discussed last week (subscribers here), part of a concerted attempt to get the Big Society back to its original meaning, that public services do not
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There’s an intriguing Sky News report this evening which suggests that the Libyan Army might be about to turn away from Gaddafi. The channel is reporting that soldiers in the second city of Benghazi have turned from the regime and have told locals that they have ‘liberated’ the city. If the bulk of the military
