James Forsyth

The evidence all seems to strongly suggest that George Osborne did nothing illegal in Corfu. But that does not mean he should escape without criticism. What he did was clearly foolhardy in the extreme. If Osborne has just googled Deripaska he would have seen enough material to make him hesitate about even being in his vicinity, let alone meeting with him on his yacht. These unforced Tory errors need to stop. What the party need is someone in Central Office powerful enough to demand to be told of anything even potentially controversial that a shadow cabinet member is planning to do and if necessary order them not to do it. Some will deride this as treating the shadow cabinet like children.

Gideon Rachman floats, on his blog, the rumour that Obama might make Oprah Winfrey Ambassador to London, and no it is not April Fool’s Day. I doubt very much this will happen, there are other ambassadorships I’d expect she’d prefer, but it does illustrate a long-standing weakness in the way the United States appoints its ambassadors. The plum jobs nearly always go to big campaign donors. This is a practise the United States cannot afford now that it is involved in a struggle for international support for its actions in a 24.7 media environment. It needs the best people for the job that it has regardless of whether they gave to the campaigns or not.

There is a great tick-tock in The Times this morning about how the bank recapitalisation plan came into being. The take-away point is that the Chancellor was much more the driving force behind it than the Prime Minister. Here are the key extracts: The Times can reveal today that the Chancellor believed that recapitalisation was the “only show in town” some time before Gordon Brown and that the Prime Minister signed up only after the intervention of his ministerial fixer and enforcer, Baroness Vadera. ... Mr Darling had first started plotting his move in mid-September, hiring the legal firm Slaughter and May to carry out contingency planning. He quickly became convinced that it was the only viable option to ease lending.

PMQs is frequently derided as something that is only of interest to the Westminster Village. That may be true but it helps frame the way that political reporters and commentators see the battle between the parties and plays a crucial role in determining the mood of the parliamentary parties.  This week’s clash will be one of the most important in a while. The consensus in Westminster is that Cameron’s speech today was too small for the moment—though, it is worth noting that the Standard’s write up is positive and the odd conversation about it that I’ve overheard on the train to the north that I’m on has been fairly warm about it—and if Brown is perceived to school Cameron at PMQs then the Brown comeback narrative will gain further momentum.

Bagehot in The Economist makes the sensible—but overlooked—point that Brown’s strengths are his weaknesses and vice-versa: “In his response to the crisis, Mr Brown has demonstrated many of the traits that contributed to his ruination before. One is a fondness for plagiarism. He is a natural copycat, as he demonstrated to his cost last year when he imitated a sketchy Tory idea to ease inheritance tax by squeezing “non-doms”. But well-judged plagiarism can be a desirable, even an admirable, skill in a leader, as it is proving now. Mr Brown borrowed elements of Sweden’s bank-rescue package of 1992, plus ideas advanced by the Tories and others, and worked them into a proposal that he victoriously presented as his own.