James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
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Tucked away in the Whip column of The Sun is this item: “Now senior Tories are aghast at rumours that David Cameron was rubbishing them during a private dinner recently. He is said to have told a pal: “I’ve got six or seven people in the Shadow Cabinet capable of working in the government. The
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The latest rumour doing the rounds about the Damian Green affair is that the Home Office is worried about a much bigger, more embarrassing leak that might soon emerge. It is this, so word has it, which explains both why Sir David Normington, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, called in the police and
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The Sunday Mirror has an amusing account of Nick Clegg discussing rather too loudly the strengths and weaknesses of his frontbench team on a plane flight to Scotland. He is apparently flirting with idea of demoting his old leadership rival Chris Huhne. He’s also no fan of Steve Webb, he apparently said of the Lib
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The heavy-handed arrest of Damian Green has highlighted one set of threats to freedom of speech, thought and inquiry in Britain. But there are others, notably our draconian libel laws. As Nick Cohen writes in The Observer today: “Listen as hard you like, but you will never hear a Law Lord tell Eady that he
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This time last week there were anxious conversations in Tory world about how the parliamentary party would react if Labour moved level or ahead in the polls after the PBR. But the PBR has not had the political effect Labour hoped it would. The main story coming out of it has been how bad the
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Few people write more engagingly about finance than Michael Lewis; Liar’s Poker is one of the best books about Wall Street ever written. In an essay over at The Daily Beast introducing a collection of essays on the financial crisis that he has edited, Lewis writes: “The 1987 stock market crash was blamed on program
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Suketu Mehta’s book about Bombay, Maximum City, has been much quoted in recent days. It is, as Matt says, the best book about this astonishingly complex city.Today, Mehta has an important piece about how best to defeat the fanatics who attacked it in today’s New York Times. “The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will
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The ICM poll in today’s Guardian has the Tories ahead by 15 points, their largest lead in it since August. This combined with the Populus poll showing that Brown’s lead on the question of who is best leader to deal with the recession has shrunk dramatically seems to confirm what most commentators thought: the PBR
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John Reid famously called the Home Office ‘not fit for purpose’ and it is still regarded, with some justification, as one of the most dysfunctional government departments. So, it is rather ironic to hear the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office defend calling in the police on the grounds that the leaks “risked undermining the
From our UK edition
If it wasn’t for how stupid their actions were, you could almost feel sorry for the police over the furore that has followed the arrest of Damian Green. If you asked any spin doctor what the police should do in these circumstances, they’d tell you that the plod should leak some details of the investigation
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It is rare for people in the Westminster Village to actually be outraged, as opposed to be claiming to be. But everyone I’ve spoken to this morning about the Damian Green affair is genuinely angry. As Iain Martin — who has been waging a noble struggle to make Parliament take itself more seriously — writes
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As Fraser says, one hopes that there is more to this Damian Green case than we currently know about. If not, it is a disgrace. It does make one wonder what kind of country we now live in. Maybe I’ve been watching too much The Devil’s Whore, but Green’s arrest—and the search of his Commons
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The chatter in Westminster is that a big story is going to break tonight. Stay tuned.
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Following the horrific attacks in Mumbai, there are calls for the whole of the England cricket tour to India—not just the two remaining one day internationals—to be called off. But this would be a huge mistake. It would be giving these terrorists what they want: they are, among other things, trying to send a message
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The revelation that a rise in the VAT rate was being considered by the government up until the very last minute, and apparently in the PBR figures themselves, is part of a greater truth that the level of borrowing that the country has embarked on means that taxes will have to rise considerably or there
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Robert Barnett, the Tibet expert, has a commentary in The New York Times that claims that Britain has changed its position on Tibet in exchange for China giving more money to the IMF. Here’s the key part of Barnett’s argument: “Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to
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The free sheets in London are leading on Boris’s attack on Gordon Brown in his Telegraph column this morning. The column is full of good knock-about stuff but what has attracted the papers’ attention is this passage—the banner headline on one of them ‘Like a drunk’: “He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has
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With The Sun, The Times and The Daily Mail declaring the death of New Labour, it is worth thinking about what a New Labour government PBR would have looked like. For an idea you can look at a PQ that Stephen Byers, someone who has kept and advanced the New Labour faith, asked back in
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Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian today contains these jaw-dropping couple of sentences: “Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs. Most people will suffer not at all in this recession: on the contrary they will do well as prices fall and the real value of their earnings rises.” Can
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Today was meant to be the start of a fiercely contested general election campaign. Last night, the mood in centre-right circles was grim—the feeling was that Brown was about to pull off another Houdini act. But instead today has ended with Labour routed. Tories are striding around Westminster tonight with renewed confidence while Labour MPs