James Forsyth

The mission for the Tories in the New Year is to communicate to the electorate just how bad a state the public finances are in. The Tories need to hammer this message home until the proverbial man on the street knows the numbers. Only when people realise that we were first in and last out of recession of the major economies and that, as Rosemary Righter points out in The Times today, the deficit is roughly twice as large in real terms than it was when Healey was forced to go to the IMF will Brown’s standing collapse as much as it should by rights. Brown’s defenders will say that he has been dealing with exceptional circumstances. But his pre-crash handling of the public finances was reckless in the extreme.

It is a depressing fact that the Detroit bomber appears to have been radicalised in London. Today, the New York Times takes an extensive look at the bomber’s radicalisation in London. As the paper, which is not prone to hyperbole, says: “Investigators are now, in fact, turning a sharper and retrospective eye to the passage in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life that began immediately after his summer in Sana, Yemen, in 2005, when he enrolled as a $25,000-a-year mechanical engineering student at University College London. In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim groups in Britain, were decisive in turning him toward Islamic extremism.

Two of the leaders of the organisation that is claiming responsibility for the attempt to blow up a jet over Detroit were released from Guantanamo in 2007, ABC News is reporting. They were sent from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they were entered into an ‘art therapy’ programme designed to rehabilitate terrorists. They seemed to have given this rehabilitation programme the slip and joined up with Al Qaeda in Yemen. This example highlights just how difficult the problem of repatriating Guantanamo inmates is. Guantanamo is, obviously, not an ideal solution nor even the least worst.

New York’s ever falling murder rate is one of the wonders of modern urban policy. It is proof that decisive political leadership can arrest and then reverse decline that many had considered inevitable. This year, as The New York Times reports, New York is scheduled to record the lowest number of murders since records began in 1962. In 1990 there were 2,245 murders in 2009, to date, there have been 461. Now, it has often been rightly said that Britain should learn from the success of broken windows policing. But reading the piece in the Times today, I was struck by the fact that the murder rate is still falling despite the NYPD having to reduce its number of officers by 6,000 since 2001. Much of this success is due to the NYPD using technology to help best deploy its resources.

Now is not a good time--politically--to be an incumbent. The economic realities mean that tough choices have to be made: services cut, taxes raised or both. So it is a clever move by Jon Cruddas and Chuka Umunna to set up a website, Tory stories, scrutinising the work of Tory councils. It also plays to the message that many in the Labour party, but notably not Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, want to push: Cameron and a few top Tories might have changed the rest of the party hasn’t.  The  Tories are keen to show that they will not balance the budget on the backs of the low paid, note how the million lowest paid public sector workers are exempt from their proposed public sector pay freeze.

Ken Livingstone has added fuel to the fire that Fraser started with his News of the World column revealing that Peter Mandelson was being talked about as a possible Labour candidate for Mayor of London by saying that he had been warned to expect a challenge from Mandelson. But it strikes me that Livingstone might be engaged in a typically cunning spin operation.   Mandelson is the ideal opponent for Livingstone. He is an establishment figure and so allows Ken to run as an outsider. At the same time, Mandelson doesn’t have the support or connections in the London Labour party that Ken has. In any primary contest against Mandelson, Livingstone could expect to win comfortably.   What Livingstone wants to avoid is a race against either David Lammy or Oona King.

Gordon Brown is in an odd position when it comes to PR. As a Labour tribalist he hates it. But he knows that it could be very useful to him as he attempts to save his job. There was huge pressure from within the Labour party on Brown announce a referendum on PR for polling day. The tactical aim was to put Cameron on the ‘wrong’ side of reform at a time when faith in politics is at rock-bottom. The strategic goal was to ensure the Tories would find it very hard to win an overall majority again under the new system. But Brown bottled out of that decision; instead saying in his conference speech there would be a manifesto commitment to a vote on electoral reform.

The last Friday before Christmas is pretty much the perfect take out the trash day and the Conservatives have today published the Legg repayment details of the shadow Cabinet. The person who has had to repay the most is Liam Fox. But as Paul Waugh reports, Fox seems to have had a pretty decent defence. But a decision has been taken, as so often before in the expenses crisis, that the reputational risk to the party is so great that a member of the shadow Cabinet should return expenses money even if they have reasonable grounds not to. You can say that this is a sensible strategic decision, it has certainly helped limit the damage to the party from the whole scandal.