James Forsyth

Two new polls out this morning suggest that no party can be confident about winning the next election outright. The Tories lead in both, but in the Com Res poll their margin is only one point and their six point lead with YouGov would not be enough for an overall majority on a uniform swing. The puzzle is why the Tory momentum that was developing straight after the PBR, the two polls that were conducted straight after that had the Tories 11 and 15 points ahead respectively, has stalled. Personally, I expected that the Damian Green affair would benefit the Tories in the polls. That does not seem to have happened and it might even have hurt them by distracting from their economic message that was finally beginning to come into focus.

Simon Hoggart is absolutely spot on in his Guardian column about the arrogance of Lord Saville: “Someone else who seems to want plenty of the public's money is Lord Saville, whose inquiry into Bloody Sunday has been going for more than a decade, and won't be complete until the end of next year. It has already cost £182m, and counting. Not surprisingly, the Commons Northern Ireland committee wants to know how this remarkable delay and astonishing expenditure has come about. They asked Saville to see them. He declined firmly, even brusquely. He had nothing more to say than he had already said publicly. He had interviewed 2,500 witnesses, and seen tens of thousands of documents.

Tony Blair used to drive those who disliked him almost insane. Judging from Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail today, David Cameron has the same effect on his opponents. Here’s how she starts: “David Cameron has the most annoying legs in British politics. In fact, the Tory leader has the most annoying legs in Britain, full stop. His ankles are as prettily turned as a showgirl's. His knees are too shapely. Above them, like great crags of sinew, lurks the beefy heft of the Cameron thighs. Ug, ug, ug. Yet worst of all are his calves. Oh God, how I hate those smug calves!

Jane Merrick has a post over at The Independent speculating that David Davis could be made shadow defence secretary in the 2009 reshuffle. Certainly, back when Cameron was putting his first shadow cabinet together it was thought that Davis would get either the Home or Defence briefs. But I don’t think Davis will get defence for one of the reasons Jane Merrick thinks he might get it: Afghanistan. (I’d also be surprised if Cameron moved Fox). Jane Merrick notes that Davis “has been asking a lot of questions in parliament recently about troops in Afghanistan”.

Malcolm Gladwell has a fantastic piece in this week’s New Yorker which contains a totally compelling argument for merit pay for teachers: "Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects.

Since the Mumbai atrocities there has been a lot written about the need for a settlement in Kashmir. Undoubtedly, a resolution to this conflict is to be wished for on it own terms and because it would make cooperation between India and Pakistan easier. But as Patrick French argues in a trenchant op-ed in today’s New York Times, the idea that the ending of the Kashmir dispute would see the terrorists put down their arms is naïve in the extreme. Here he describes the views of Hafiz Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba “who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi Money”: "Mr. Saeed’s hatreds are catholic — his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis.

Sam Coates breaks the news that Lord Jacobs, the Lib Dem’s biggest donor, is quitting the party. But reading about his policy dispute with the party, one wonders why he was a Lib Dem in the first place. Sam reports that: “His beef is that he wants Clegg to go further on tax, taking the lowest paid out of tax altogether but also reducing the rates for higher earners. The party is reluctant to raise employers national insurance by the required amount to pay for it, and relations have clearly broken down. Now Lord Jacobs wants to be free to hawk his tax plan around Labour and the Tories - and he isn't ruling out joining another party.

Gordon Brown has done something great for Britain: he was one of the people most responsible for keeping this country out of the European single currency. As Chancellor, he was a roadblock to Blair’s ambitions on this front. So when the idea of Britain joining the euro was floated last weekend, I thought it was just Peter Mandelson getting too far forward on his skis and being a bit, from his perspective, too hopeful. But Peter Oborne reports in the Mail today that it was actually part of a coordinated plan: “It was as a result of these talks [with Barroso] that Lord Mandelson floated the tragically misguided idea of sterling entering the euro during a recent speech.