James Forsyth

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 rest are useless.” The way—and where—The Sun has reported this story suggests it is not totally confident in it. But it is far from the first time that something like this has been reported. Last December, Fraser revealed how: “David Cameron has meanwhile been going back to his constituency and preparing for government.

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 why the police were prepared to go to such extreme lengths. This theory was bolstered this morning by Jacqui Smith’s declaration on Andrew Marr: “There are four leaks that are in the public arena. The point is that this started as an investigation into a systematic series of leaks about which, of course, it was not clear what had been leaked and what may not have been leaked.

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 trading; the Asian currency crisis was blamed on some combination of hedge funds and IMF-induced policies; the Internet bubble was blamed on Wall Street analysts. The subprime-mortgage panic has yet to find its one big culprit, and I’m not sure it ever will.” The question of who emerges as the principle villain will determine what the political legacy of this crisis is.

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 that cast it in a better light. But, obviously, leaking isn’t an option for them in this case. As it is, we go into the weekend wondering why nine counter-terrorism officers were involved in this investigation when it appears that British citizens might, once more, have been the perpetrators of terrorist attacks abroad. This raises, to put it mildly, question about the police’s priorities.

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 will have to be radical cuts in spending. Brown hopes that delaying until after the election the planned combination of spending cuts and tax rises means that the public won’t cotton on to what is going to happen before they cast their ballots. But the signs are that this is not going to work; the 45p red herring failed because the media immediately grasped how, in revenue terms, insignificant it was. Once numbers move from million to billion to trillion it is hard to keep count.

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 the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share. Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys to Beijing — bringing the faltering talks between China and the exiles to a standstill.