James Forsyth

The Tories are, understandably, crowing about the result in Norwich North. Getting another half a percent of the vote to break through the psychologically important 40 percent mark would have been the icing on the cake for them. I thought one possible fly in the ointment for them could be the size of the UKIP vote. But I’m told that a sizable chunk of that vote came in the urban wards that are traditionally Labour strongholds. But the real story, to my mind, is not how well the Tories did but just how badly Labour did. As the Tories are gleefully pointing out, Labour’s 18 percent vote share was the lowest ‘of an incumbent MP’s party in any UK by-election for at least 40 years’.

Ben Brogan’s column, which Pete flagged up earlier, contains this intriguing insight into how Brown sees himself: “Mr Brown is currently obsessed with Winston Churchill, and how to avoid his fate. Those around the Prime Minister describe how he is preoccupied by the idea of a war-time leader who guided the nation to safety through dark times, only to be thanked with a thumping defeat. For the Second World War, read the financial crisis; for D-Day, read the bank rescues and the fiscal stimulus package. By his reckoning, Mr Brown has led us through the Normandy bocage, but the Ardennes and the Rhine lie ahead. The trick, Downing Street believes, is to fight the next election as if it was November 1944, when the war was going well but far from won.

The New York Times has been briefed by the ISI on the Pakistani perspective on the situation in Afghanistan. The paper’s distillation of what it was told, is depressing reading: “Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

There hasn’t been much good news for the Republican party in recent years. But David Brooks, who is hardly a partisan, argues in his column today that the Democrats are throwing away their chance of a permanent majority in much the same way that the Republicans did: ‘We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

The well-connected Jim Hoagland has a preview of how the Obama administration hopes the next year or so of its foreign policy will pan out. On Iran, still the biggest foreign policy challenge facing this administration, Hogland writes: ‘The next diplomatic trampoline for Obama is the G-20 summit [on September 24th], which he will host and hope to use to forge new multilateral approaches on Iran and Middle East peace, as well as on global economic recovery. The president came back from Europe this month with what one senior U.S. official described to me as "Russian and G-8 buy-in" to that concept. "If the Iranians have not responded by then, the world should make clear to them they cannot stall indefinitely," says an official who knows Obama's thinking.

One of the things that will show us what kind of Prime Minister David Cameron will be, is what he does with the defence budget. It raises two fundamental questions. First, is Cameron committed to Britain remaining a frontline nation? We believe, for reasons we set out in our editorial this week, that it is imperative that we do remain so. But it is hard, if not impossible, to see how this can be done without increasing the defence budget: as the last few years have shown, you shouldn’t fight wars on peacetime budgets. Second, it will show whether Cameron is prepared to look at public spending from first principles. Any assessment of public spending that started from the question of what should government do rather than what does government do, would lead to more money for defence.