James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
There are certain positions in government in which you can be hidden away, protected by your colleagues. Home Secretary isn’t one of them. Jacqui Smith has to work out how she is going to handle her return to public life. I’m sure there will be those advising her to carry on as if nothing had
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I doubt that even the Major government at its lowest ebb had a worse day of Sunday headlines than this government has had today. On a substantive level, Brown’s plans for the G20 appear in tatters. The Germans have leaked the draft communiqué and the New York Times has detailed Brown’s tendency to say one
From our UK edition
The News of the World reports that Stuart Wheeler, the major Tory donor, has written a £100,000 cheque to UKIP and will vote for the party in the European elections. But this is not a straight forward defection. Wheeler says he will vote Tory in the local elections and at the general election. So, the
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The National Union of Teachers is the spiritual successor to the National Union of Mineworkers; a union representing an honest, decent profession but with a leadership that is committed to an extreme version of leftism. The Union’s latest pay demands are a case in point. The Daily Mail reports that: “Teachers want their days in
From our UK edition
Today is a bad day for Labour in the spin wars. The papers have settled for a generally mocking tone about the G20 and Gordon Brown’s effort to save the world. Note how The Times in its pre-summit write up points out how ‘the ExCeL’s next big event is the British Pest Control Association conference.’
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It has always been Barack Obama’s foreign policy instincts that have worried me most. I worried that he both did not grasp the security challenges facing the United States and that he was unwilling to expend the necessary political capital on foreign policy. Given these reservations, I was definitely encouraged by Obama’s announcement of Afghan
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James Purnell’s speech to the ‘Progressive Governance’ conference in Chile is an interesting bit of political positioning. On the one hand, there’s a very Blairite argument that with the recession there is even more need for public sector reform, an acknowledgement that money is not the sole determinant of the quality of a service: “the
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This FT graphic showing the world’s biggest financial institutions by market cap from 1999 to 2009 is fascinating. In 1999, there were no Chinese banks in the top 20. Now, the top three positions are held by Chinese institutions and there are five of them in the top 20. In 1999, 11 of the 20 biggest institutions were American. Now,
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There is an important policy announcement from George Osborne in his interview with The Sun today: “He also declared war on public servant fat cats. None will earn more than the PM’s £190,000-a-year.” This is both good politics and good policy. It will strike a chord with a public that is increasingly angry and frustrated
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Daniel Hannan’s evisceration of Gordon Brown has now passed the one million mark on YouTube and the mainstream media is now covering it. Mission accomplished for the right side of the blogosphere.
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Martin Kettle and Steve Richards devote their columns today to the question of why Gordon Brown has so hyped the G20 Summit that it cannot possibly live up to expectations. Kettle sums it up nicely, when he writes that: “He has set expectations too high. His rhetoric left reality standing. From the moment the summit
From our UK edition
Bob Kagan, one of the smartest foreign policy thinkers around, points out why Obama’s attempts to reach out to Iran are, from a hawkish perspective, sensible: “So one of two things is going to happen: Either the friendly diplomatic approach works, and the Iranians actually cave and accept American and European demands, which would be
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Soundings, the left-wing journal, has just released a book entitled The Crash: A view from the left (you can download it for free here). Edited by Jon Cruddas and Jon Rutherford, it is—as the title suggests—an explicitly left-wing take on recent events. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the book’s economics. Its contributors don’t see that
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A few weeks ago, Allegra Stratton put the cat among the Labour pigeons when she blogged that Jon Cruddas and James Purnell might team up to run for the leadership. At the time, some dismissed the idea out of hand. The nay-sayers argued that the ideological differences between Cruddas and Purnell are simply too large;
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Last night Charles Farr, a civil servant who coordinates the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, delivered the Colin Cramphorn memorial lecture. Farr was expounding on and defending the recently released edition of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy. Listening to Farr, one was struck by how the government still can’t properly grasp that terrorism is merely a symptom of
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The FT’s Westminster blog flags up this quite astonishing statistic: ‘The FT’s resident economics guru Chris Giles has a flabbergasting explanation of the scale of the debt the government is raising in the next two years: £350bn. “That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of
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The state of the public finances means that it is going to be very hard—if not impossible—for the Tories, if elected, to cut taxes during their first term. But it is important that the electorate, and the base of the party, still know that the Tories believe in the benefits of low-taxation. One easy and
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Dan Hannan’s speech yesterday was magnificent, in three and a half minutes he absolutely eviscerated Gordon Brown. Unsurprisingly, the speech received little attention on the broadcast news—Tory MEP attacks Labour Prime Minister is a dog bites man story. But the speech has already has more than twenty-five thousand views on YouTube, Downing Street’s video of
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Gordon Brown is now hemmed in. Both the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England have now indicated that they would rather walk than go along with a full scorched earth policy. The Prime Minister must know that the resignation of either man would destroy him so we can be confident that Brown
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The Guardian’s editorial on the government’s decision to break off relations with the Muslim Council of Britain over the views of Daud Abdullah, its deputy secretary-general, contains this quite remarkable passage: “the government’s chief quarrel is with the hypothetical suggestion that resistance would be appropriate if UK forces were ever used to intercept arms destined
