James Forsyth

James Forsyth

James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Not aiding the cause

One of the most frequent complaints that you hear from those who have served in Afghanistan is that DFID is simply not fit for purpose. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Stuart Tootal, the commander of 3 Para who recently quit the army, gives a depressing example of how the DFID bureaucracy puts obstacles in the way of necessary projects:  “The hospital sheets were filthy and the doctor said they couldn’t wash them,” he explained. “But we said, ‘You have an industrial washing machine sitting there in cellophane.’” The US aid agency that had donated it withdrew when the British arrived so it had never been installed.

James Forsyth

Our delayed trains

There’s a depressing piece in The Observer today detailing the horrendous delays that anyone trying to go on holiday in August using various train lines is going to be subjected to. (Full disclosure: I’m planning to go up to the Lake District in August so am going to get caught up in all this). What makes these delays all the more galling is how expensive train travel is. According to The Observer £10 in Britain buys you 27 miles of train travel while in Ireland it gets you 38 and in France 50. The Observer also reports that: On many lines into London from the South East there is no prospect of adding carriages until the platforms at Waterloo and other stations are lengthened.

James Forsyth

Blair’s most unpopular decision is more popular than Labour under Brown

Looking at the numbers from that Independent poll, one thing stands out to me: today, more people agree with Blair’s decision on Iraq than support Labour under Gordon Brown. Labour has support from 24 percent of the electorate while 26 percent disagree with the assertion that "Britain should never have become involved in Iraq". It says something about how low Labour’s standing currently is that Blair’s supposedly most unpopular decision commands more support than the party does.

James Forsyth

Brown to take a pounding during the summer 

There is a lot of debate in Westminster about whether the summer break will be good for Gordon Brown’s standing or not. Labour optimists argue that over the summer, people will drift back to the party. But Iain Martin in The Sunday Telegraph points out one of the flaws in this theory:  Here's a prediction. By the end of August, millions of Britons will be grumbling about the level of the pound, and it will be a live issue as the nation returns from its holidays. It will not top the list of complaints but will feed concern over inflation, the state of the economy and Gordon Brown's mangling of the public finances. The fall in the value of the pound is one of the unreported stories of the moment.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Labour’s latest record low

John Rentoul breaks the news of the latest ComRes poll for The Independent over at Open House, the Tories are on 45 and Labour on 24—the lowest the pollster has ever had Labour, and the Lib Dems 16. 68 percent of voters agreed with the statement that Labour will lose next time round regardless of who is the leader. However, among Labour supporters that number dropped to 38 percent. It would be interesting to see whether those who voter Labour in 2005 think the party would have a better chance of winning with someone other than Brown in charge. Rentoul is impressed by the fact that a plurality of voters think the Tories would do a better job on fighting knife crime than Labour.

James Forsyth

Not all right Jack

Peter Oborne in his Mail column conducts a telling thought experiment: “Yesterday morning witnessed a summit in Whitehall between Cabinet ministers and the country's biggest union barons. Top of the agenda was a series of arrogant demands from the unions for control over government policy in return for funding a bankrupt Labour Party through the next General Election. Some of these demands are breathtakingly audacious: abandonment of the public sector pay policy, reintroduction of secondary strike action and the end of private sector involvement in public services. Yesterday's meeting signalled a blatant return to the kind of old-fashioned stitch-up between union bosses and Labour politicians that dominated British politics in the Sixties and Seventies.

James Forsyth

It’s bad out there, Darling 

Alistair Darling’s interview with The Times this morning marks the start of a new chapter in British politics. Darling makes no attempt to sugar-coat the economic situation. He is frank that “the economic news is going to be difficult for quite some time.” He also does not try and pretend that the economy will have recovered by the next election. Instead, he argues that the election will be a choice about who can best get Britain out of the current mess. (Realistically, it is hard to see how Labour can win unless the economy improves.) Darling tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson that he has informed his Cabinet colleagues that they can’t have any more money to spend.

Friday

James Forsyth

Why an Israeli strike on Iran could turn nuclear

Benny Morris’s op-ed in The New York Times is essential reading. He sets out how any Israeli, as opposed to American, strike on Iran could easily escalate into a nuclear war. I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but here are the key paragraphs: "But should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear level will most likely follow. Every intelligence agency in the world believes the Iranian program is geared toward making weapons, not to the peaceful applications of nuclear power.

James Forsyth

Livingstone to run again

Ken Livingstone has confirmed to The Guardian that he will run for Mayor of London in 2012. It is hard to see how anyone could stop Livingstone from winning the Labour nomination so we will likely have a reprise of this year’s Ken v. Boris race. Livingstone is presumably betting that it will be harder for Boris to win with a Tory government in power than it was with a Labour one. The thought that he would, provided the Tories win the next election, be the most powerful Labour figure in the country must also be tempting him as well as the thought of being Mayor during the Olympics. The recently released audit of London under Livingstone revealed general mismanagement but contained no killer fact which would bar Ken from running again.

James Forsyth

The Unions have their strategy right

The Unions have 130 demands that they intend to lay before Labour’s National Policy Forum, Patrick Wintour reports this morning. These range from extending the minimum wage to those under 21 to making union subscriptions tax deductible. This strikes me as exactly the right approach for the Unions to take. Labour is in no financial shape to reject all these demands. Equally, it cannot be seen to cave in on everything. So, Brown will make a big show of resisting a few of the Union’s big ticket demands while conceding on everything else.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Coffee House Exclusive: Richard Reeves to be the new director of Demos

I said earlier on Coffee House that who Demos appointed as their new director would give us a sense of where the intellectual energy is on the left and the news that they have appointed Richard Reeves shows that the liberal-left is not yet ready to cede the intellectual battlefield. It also illustrates that even on the left the intellectual conversation has moved passed Gordon Brown. Reeves co-wrote with Phil Collins the recent Prospect essay Liberalise or Die that caused such a stir; Brownite loyalists demanded that James Purnell stop using Phil Collins as a speechwriter after it appeared.

James Forsyth

The next key stage in the SATS debacle

The current SATS marks scandal is going to have huge knock-on effects. Schools are getting back results with pupils marked as absent who were present, other scripts are being returned unmarked and there is growing evidence that the grading has been—to put it mildly—inconsistent. This means that this year’s school league tables are going to be hugely flawed. In these circumstances, the government appears to have three options. It can just not publish league tables this year which would be embarrassing and illustrate just how big a cock-up this has been.

James Forsyth

Milburn for Chancellor?

On Tuesday, Coffee Housers mused about the possibility of Alan Milburn replacing Alistair Darling. Today, Andrew Porter reports on the Westminster Village chatter about this: “So could he make an improbable comeback as part of a major reshuffle? The answer, I'm told, is yes, he could. And in a seemingly far-fetched scenario that would shake Westminster he could return as Chancellor if the PM decides to jettison Alistair Darling. Surely not? One Cabinet source said: "It is a possibility. Alan is bright and has the sort of ideas that may be able to make a difference. He still has enthusiasm." Given Brown’s track record, it seems highly unlikely that Brown would be so bold as to make an Milburn an offer he couldn’t refuse.

James Forsyth

Director of Demos quits

Stephen has already flagged this, but Catherine Fieschi has resigned as Director of Demos. She sets out her reasons for leaving in The New Statesman as well as defending Demos’s decision to attending Islam Expo. (There is no reason to think that her departure has anything to do with Demos’s participation in Expo). Demos played a key role in the early years of the New Labour project. Who is appointed to this job will offer a fascinating insight into where the intellectual energy now is on the left.

James Forsyth

The Islamism agenda

Seamus Milne’s column in The Guardian today is most revealing. Milne is completely frank that he believes that the government should engage with Islamism. As Milne writes: “The issue is the government's growing hostility to dealing with anyone connected with the highly diverse movement that is Islamism. This is a political trend that has violent and non-violent, theocratic and democratic, reactionary and progressive strands, stretching from Turkey's pro-western ruling Justice and Development party through to the wildest shores of takfiri jihadism.

James Forsyth

The Blairite plates are shifting

There have been few harsher—or more prescient—critics of Gordon Brown than John Rentoul. Today, Rentoul again predicts that Brown will be forced out by the Cabinet before the next election but what is new is who Rentoul thinks is coming up fast, James Purnell. Rentoul writes: "That the opinion polls are so tilted against the Government on the basis of Cameron's offer of fresh faces and an easy manner rather than policy substance ought to give courage to Brown's enemies – those are the ones on the bench next to him. I suspect that Brown will be forced out by a self-interested Cabinet rebellion by this time next year. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, would probably beat Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, in a leadership election.

James Forsyth

The Daily Mail lauds Cameron as a real leader

At the beginning of his premiership, The Daily Mail used to heap praise on Gordon Brown at David Cameron’s expense. But today, The Mail devotes its leader column to congratulating Cameron on his recent performance. Here’s how it starts and finishes:  “From the very beginning, this paper has supported David Cameron. We are the first to concede, however, that we've had more than the occasional doubt about his substance and conviction. That is why we feel an obligation to record what a remarkably good few weeks he has had. With a steady 20-point lead in the opinion polls, the Tory leader might have been tempted to sit back and allow a beleaguered Government to carry on with the business of destroying itself.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Seven Tory MPs make an expensive mistake

The vast majority of Tory MPs have, at David Cameron's request, published further details of their expenses. The right to know forms they have had to produce are not hugely revelatory but do bring more information into the public domain which is to be welcomed. On my very quick flick through the most interesting things I noticed were that David Davis employs his wife as his executive secretary—the only top Tory to do so—and that David Cameron’s mobile bill is less than a 100 pounds a month. Not every Tory MP, though, was prepared to open themselves up to even this fairly modest level of scrutiny. Miranda Richardson points out that seven Tory MPs have withheld their details from Cameron’s register.

James Forsyth

A state funeral for Thatcher wouldn’t be as divisive as the left think 

It feels rather unseemly to be discussing Margaret Thatcher’s funeral arrangements while she is still very much alive but I doubt that giving her a state funeral will divide the country in the way that Kevin Maguire and Sunny Hundal are predicting. Take the example of Ronald Reagan, who in many ways was as controversial a figure as Thatcher. I was working in Washington when he died and no one was quite sure how this very liberal city would react to his funeral. But everyone actually behaved respectfully and with affection for him, the streets were lined as his funeral cortege passed.  Talking to people at the time, it wasn’t so much Reagan that Washingtonians were coming out to pay their respects to but the passing of a particular historical moment.

James Forsyth

If you fight fire with fire, you’ll get burned

Nick Cohen has a fantastic post at Harry’s Place, questioning why Demos was happy to participate in an event at Islam Expo organised by the British Muslim Initiatives. Here’s the key section of his argument: “Demos says it is slyly using one brand of Islamism to fight another. Will Demos employ the same cunning plan against the white far right? Given that the BNP, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, does not specifically advocate communal violence, but merely, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, is at the beginning of a continuum whose terminus is psychopathic hatred, surely Demos should attend BNP rallies and host BNP debates. After all, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat, the BNP has a constituency in Britain.