James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
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First it was Margaret Beckett tipped for a return to the front line, now it is John Prescott. Here’s Martin Bright in the New Statesman. “There is also talk of the need for a Chris Patten figure to act as cheerleader for the party, as the Tory chairman did in the run-up to the 1992
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Daniel Finkelstein has a cracking column in The Times today arguing that ever since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928 the public has always elected the right party. Do Coffee Housers agree?
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President Bush’s decision to have the US military head up a humanitarian mission to Georgia is about more than bringing much-needed aid and relief to the Georgian people. The thinking appears to be that using US planes and ships to deliver aid will serve as a way of pressuring Russia not to close down Georgian airspace
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The New York Times’s latest report from Gori, a Georgian town outside of South Ossetia, is well worth reading. This quote from a Russian tank commander is rather chilling: The Russian tank commander bragged that his troops were ready for another head-on confrontation. “It all depends on what Saakashvili is going to say. If he
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You either love these snappily titled American social science books—The Tipping Point, Blink, Freaknomics, Th!Nk and the one that the Cameroons are all reading: Nudge—or you hate them. Having just read Anne McElvoy’s review of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge in Standpoint, I can guess which camp Anne falls in. But even as a
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New York Magazine has done a special issue this week on race and the US election. There’s lot of good stuff in the package but this line from John Heilemann’s cover story stood out to me: “In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it” This
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The Cameroons love their non-electoral milestones and I think they passed a very important one this weekend. The News of the World ran a story on the Camerons’ swimwear which, in gushing terms, told its readers how they too could dress like the Camerons on the beach. The Camerons were being held up as the
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With hindsight it is clear that Hillary Clinton should have either hugged Barack Obama so close from the outset that he couldn’t wiggle free or set out to destroy him as soon as he announced his candidacy. Hillary, though, tried an odd mix of the two, giving Obama just the opening he needed. Gordon Brown
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The 12 days since David Miliband’s Guardian op-ed has seen Miliband both achieve a tactical success and a tactical failure. Indeed, the real gainers from this initial phase have been the other possible challengers. Miliband’s achievement is that he is the boy who lived. He is the first Labour MP since Blair in 1994 to
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UK Polling Report points us to the details of the YouGov poll for the News of the World which put the Tories 46-26 ahead of Labour. What should worry Brown more than the headline figures is that voters of all parties would be more likely to vote Labour if Brown was not leader. Among the
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This report from the Moscow Times gives a flavour for how Russian television is covering the crisis: “Russian television is flush with footage of misery left by the Georgian assault in the separatist district of South Ossetia, but few, if any, reports mention Russia’s bombing of Georgia. William Dunbar, a correspondent in Georgia for English-language
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Russian ground forces are now moving on Gori, a Georgian city outside of South Osseti. This marks a major escalation in this conflict. Russia’s behaviour in the past few days—most notably, the bombing of Georgian energy pipelines far away from either South Ossetia or Abkhazia and its lack of interest in a proposed ceasefire—have demonstrated
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Today’s most important news story appears in the Washington Post, here’s the lede: “U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence service provided logistical support to militants who staged last month’s deadly car bombing at the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan’s capital, U.S. officials familiar with the evidence said yesterday. The finding, based
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The Miliband camp can easily spin today’s YouGov poll, which Pete blogged earlier, showing that the Tory lead holds steady with Miliband as leader. They can say with some justification that the public has seen Brown doing the job and decided that he’s not up to it while they might warm to Miliband once they
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The Daily Mail reported yesterday that Downing Street suspected that Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander knew in advance of David Miliband’s Guardian op-ed. Today, in The Times Alice Miles, who is close to Ed Miliband, insists that Ed was unaware of it: Ed did not know about the article David wrote for The Guardian this
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Politics right now is unbelievably macho. Every conversation I’ve had today about the Labour leadership has involved phrases like ‘kill or be killed’, ‘kneecap him’, ‘destroy him’ etc. As this seeps into the coverage, it is going to be distinctly unappealing to voters. Now, consider that Gordon Brown is only going to be removed from
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Damian McBride will be happy that this is the lead headline on the BBC’s politics site: MPs urge Brown to sack Miliband This, though, is mild compared to what everyone thinks is coming.
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David Miliband is not backing down. Listening to him on the Jeremy Vine Show just now, it was noticeable how pleased he sounded when callers rung in to say how awful Brown was and how what Labour needed was a nice young man like him in charge. Indeed, when the final caller launched an assault
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Camilla Cavendish’s column in The Times is essential reading about the Miliband leadership bid. She makes the point that for all the talk about Miliband being a big thinker with a firm grasp of policy, the Miliband manifesto is very vague: “His pitch is that a refreshed Labour Party must combine “government action and personal
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In media short-hand Miliband is a Blairite. But after talking to a bunch of folk over the last few weeks, I suspect that he might actually be a more left-wing PM than Brown. The theory goes that Miliband is not an uber-Blairitie, some of them express a certain disappointment in him—they brought him up and