James Forsyth

James Forsyth

James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The fierce urgency of education reform

Michael Gove is giving a speech tonight reaffirming the Tory plans for radical education reform. In it Gove deploys a battery of statistics to show just how comprehensively the current system has failed. The one that stood out most dramatically to me was this one: “Out of 75,000 children eligible for free school meals only 5,000 were even entered for A level. Of that 189, only 75 were boys.  Yet in the same year Eton had 175 boys who got 3As at A level.  One school with almost two and a half times as many boys getting 3As as the entire population of our poorest boys on benefit.” If this doesn’t persuade you of the urgent need for education reform, then I don’t know what will.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

There is peace tonight but if Cameron’s Europe plan doesn’t succeed, the Tory Europe wars will return

David Cameron kicked the can down the road on Europe today. What he announced will be enough to keep the vast majority of Tories united behind the leadership until the election; the party is close enough to power that most people are not inclined to rock the boat. But judging from those I’ve spoken with evening, there could be trouble ahead. Tonight’s reaction suggests that the Eurosceptic mainstream of the parliamentary party accepts Cameron’s position. But it wants the mechanisms that Cameron announced to prevent any further erosion of sovereignty to work. The renegotiation will also have to succeed in bringing back what Cameron said it would.

James Forsyth

Cameron promises Sovereignty Act<br />

The word coming out of Committee Room 14 is that David Cameron has just told his MPs that his party’s manifesto will not contain a commitment to a referendum on whatever repatriation package that the Tories manage to negotiate once in government. The most that he said was that if a Tory government was unsatisfied with what it managed to get back, then there might be a commitment to a referendum in the 2014 / 2015 manifesto. Set against this was a promise to put everything that comes from Europe from now on through a new sovereignty act that would require a referendum on any further ceding of powers to Europe. Cameron apparently received loud applause when he told his MPs that never again would a treaty pass into law without a vote.

James Forsyth

Unconditional surrender

The front benches on both sides felt that they had to say that they accepted Kelly in full and so Harriet Harman and Sir George Young did just that. One member of the shadow Cabinet told me earlier this week the only option for the political class is unconditional surrender. But it does seem like there might be some areas where Kelly is watered down. The bit of Sir George Young’s statement that stood out to me was on commuting rules, where the shadow Leader of the House said: “As Sir Christopher says, IPSA will need to look closely at the proposals in this report. There are legitimate concerns with aspects of it, particularly the rules surrounding who was expected to get back to their constituencies at night.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

What Cameron should now say about Europe

The accusations of betrayal being hurled at David Cameron are, for the reasons I outlined earlier, deeply unfair. It is Labour that has broken its promise, not the Tories - a point that the Tories should be shouting from the rooftops. Also, Euro-sceptics should remember that Cameron did keep the pledge he made during the leadership to take the party out of the EPP despite the many siren voices urging him to renege on this commitment.  The whole referendum question, though, is turning into one of trust. Part of the reason for this is that the Tory leadership always seems slightly embarrassed by the issue of Europe.

James Forsyth

One in five children live in jobless households

The Guardian reports this morning that, “One in five – two million – British children now live in households where neither parent has a job.” This is an incredibly worrying statistic. The evidence suggests that worklessness is corrosive and soul-destroying. A child growing up in a workless household will, for obvious reasons, tend to have limited ambitions and opportunity. Obviously, as the economy recovers this number should go down — the recent rise indicates that many of these parents have been laid off in recent months. But even before the credit crunch really kicked in, there were more than 1.8 million children living in workless households.

James Forsyth

Cameron hasn’t broken a pledge on Europe

With the Czech constitutional court’s decision removing one of the final barriers to ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, attention is turning to what the Tories will do next. What we know they won’t do is hold a post-ratification referendum. This is prompting cries of betrayal from some. But this charge is unfair. Cameron’s “cast-iron pledge” has been overtaken by events — the treaty will already have been ratified by the time Cameron comes to power and so a referendum would only be demonstrative. This is one of those instances where an analogy can be instructive.

Monday

James Forsyth

When public service reform works

There’s a heartening story in the Evening Standard today of the difference that public service reform can make. The paper reports that Harris City Academy is the first school in the country to receive a perfect Ofsted score under the new inspection system. This is a transformation since 1991 when at Sylvan High School , the school that the Harris Academy took over, 90 percent of pupils failed to get five good GCSES A* to C.

James Forsyth

Is the US now pushing for a power sharing agreement in Afghanistan?

Abdullah Abdullah dropping out of the Afghan election run off and Hamid Karzai being elected by default has left the Nato-led coalition in a very difficult situation. After the level of fraud in the first round it is hard to claim that Karzai is a legitimate leader. But equally, leaving Afghanistan remains as unplatable an option as ever. So it is intriguing that at today's White House press briefing, Obama's spokesman played for time when asked if Obama was now pushing for a power-sharing deal between Karzai and Abdullah. He told the journalists present, "Let me get some guidance from our guys in Kabul". Certainly a power sharing deal would make it easier for Western politicians to make a case to their electorates for the continued deployment of troops to Afghanistan.

James Forsyth

A Grieve error

The Conservative leadership claims that a British Bill of Rights would serve to guide judges in interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights and so give Britain some discretion in how the rights which exist in the Charter — many of which are vague — are applied in this country. But in the new issue of Standpoint the eminent legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg reports that Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary and a firm supporter of the ECHR, thinks that a British Bill of Rights would only be introduced towards the end of a Cameron first term and might well not be on the statue book by the end of it. Grieve tells Rozenberg, "I would like to think we could do it in the course of a parliament".

Sunday

James Forsyth

The Tories’ new line on Europe

Tim Montgomerie has the scoop that the Tories will not hold a referendum on Lisbon if it has been ratified by the next general election. A vote on Lisbon once it had been ratified would only have had moral force so the Tory policy shift is not a betrayal of Euro-scepticism. However, the party will seek a ‘manifesto mandate’ to begin negotiations to repatriate powers. The challenge for the Tories is to persuade the other member states to allow Britain to take back powers.  As Tim says, the Tories will need a savvy negotiator with strong Euro-sceptic instincts to take charge of this process. To my mind, Theresa Villiers, a former MEP who knows her way around the European system and is a strong Euro-sceptic, would be ideal for this task.

James Forsyth

Labour’s unintentional comedy

The prize for this weekend’s most comic briefing must go to the ‘leading Brown ally’ who told Simon Walters that the PM would go if everyone else in the Labour party wasn’t even more hopeless than he was. Here are the choice paragraphs: Mr Brown’s supporters said he views Foreign Secretary David Miliband as ‘lightweight’, Home Secretary Alan Johnson as ‘lacklustre’, Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman as ‘a disaster’ and his protege, Schools Secretary Ed Balls, as ‘too aggressive’. A leading Brown ally said: ‘Gordon knows things haven’t gone as he hoped and how tough things are going to be between now and the Election.

James Forsyth

Until Ashcroft is clear about his tax status, the press will make a mountain out of everything he does

I have long thought that the secrecy surrounding Lord Ashcroft’s tax affairs is a strategic liability for the Conservative party. The Conservatives should be able to say if their party vice-chairmen is domiciled in this country for tax purposes. Indeed, openness about this point should be a condition of him holding the position. The Observer today has a front page story about Ashcroft’s involvement in William Hague’s trip to the US. But even given my concerns about Ashcroft, I fail to see the evidence produced as particularly worrying. We know that Ashcroft has flown members of the shadow Cabinet around before—David Cameron even took a flight back from the 2007 Rugby World Cup final in Paris on an Ashcroft plane.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Heseltine rules out serving in a Cameron government

There has been speculation in the press recently that Michael Heseltine might be offered a Cabinet post after the next election. But in an interview for the BBC’s Straight Talk with Andrew Neil, Hesletine is fairly Shermanesque in his denials: “I would be 77, and frankly David Cameron does not need 77 year olds in his Government.  We do not have the physical stamina to sit up all night reading those interminable papers, arriving for breakfast meetings or whatever it may be, 6 days a week, or 5 and a half days a week, so it’s better to, you know - any advice we can give is free and available and welcome to it but you mustn’t think in terms of recruiting people like me.” The construction of his first Cabinet will be a tricky task for Cameron.

James Forsyth

The Tories’ push to scupper President Blair is the highest form of flattery

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When William Hague put on his masterful performance at the Dispatch Box last year, imagining how Gordon Brown would feel as President Blair’s motorcade pulled into Downing Street, it seemed the funniest thing in the world to the Tories. But the last laugh may yet be on them. The idea of President Blair is now featuring in their own nightmares — especially given how unpopular David Cameron expects to be after the first year of his cuts agenda. One Tory elder is warning friends: within 18 months, Blair may yet again be the most popular politician in Britain. A Blair EU presidency is not (yet) regarded as probable, but the prospect already has Westminster in a fluster.

Friday

James Forsyth

Free the universities to participate in and mould policy debate

Politics in this country lacks a proper ideas infrastructure. One of the major reasons for this is that the universities play so little part in policy making and the broader policy debate. Vernon Bogdanor has an important piece on the reasons for this in this week’s New Statesman. His argument is that the bureaucratisation of the education system and the emphasis that the research assessment exercise puts on the rapid production of research has led to an emphasis on an intellectually uninteresting scholasticism in the social sciences. Bogdanor believes that the way to get the universities contributing usefully to policy debates is to free them up from government control, to let them become more independent and therefore intellectually creative.

James Forsyth

Don’t be fooled by Kelly’s 60 minute rule

Next week is going to be dominated by Sir Christopher Kelly’s scheme for reforming MPs’ expenses and allowances. The party leaders are trying to force these reforms through, believing that it would be disastrous for the reputation of politics if MPs don’t accept these reforms in full. But the leaks about what Kelly will propose suggest that some of his ideas are ill thought-out and should not be accepted in full. Take the proposal that all MPs whose constituency station is within 60 minutes of a London train station will not be allowed to claim support for a second home. But this ignores the time it takes an MP both to get to his constituency station and to get from a London station to the Commons.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Blair’s campaign falters

A contact just back from Brussels tells me that the putative Blair candidacy, which I wrote about this week, is in trouble. Apparently the supporters of Jean Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg PM, are frank that the purpose of his candidacy is to polarise the field with him—Federalist, anti-Iraq—on one side and Blair on the other. In typical EU fashion, the compromise candidate will then be looked for.   Blair’s problem is that he is the high-profile front-runner. He is the man everyone is either for or against and in a selection that is decided by consensus that person rarely gets the job. In the meantime, the Dutch PM Jean Peter Balkenende, who I am told Merkel favours, is neatly tucked up on the rails ready to break through when there is a gap in the field.

James Forsyth

Is the army funded to its target level?

During the TA debate yesterday, Bob Ainsworth tried to explain why the government had ended up making the cut in the first place. One of the reasons Ainsworth advanced was that recruitment for the regular army had been stronger than expected. But the army remains below its target strength. The exchange between Fox and Ainsworth suggests that the army isn’t actually funded to what is meant to be its full strength: “Dr. Fox: For the sake of clarity, we know that more recruits have come forward than expected, but the Army is still below the target level set by the Government. Is the Secretary of State telling us that the Army is not funded for its establishment figure? Mr.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Raging against the dying of the light

George Osborne’s speech on Monday calling for huge cash bonuses not to be paid this year drew an angry response from those hoping to receive huge cash bonuses – and various City and business pressure groups. A few years ago I would have felt deeply uncomfortable with what Obsorne proposed, but because nearly every bank has drawn heavily on state support over the last year, I think politicians do have a right – even a responsibility – to offer firm guidance to the banks. The FT led the charge against Osborne with both a critical news story, gleefully dissected by Iain Martin, and a harsh leader. Today, the paper follows up with a page two story on a letter Alastair Campbell has sent the paper criticising the shadow Chancellor.