James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
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Context is all in politics and, with the government widely considered to be in big trouble, every piece of bad news is making waves. So, the Labour peer Lord Desai’s observation that “Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was” is going to be headline news for the rest
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Sam Coates flags up this classic photograph.
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The blogs are alive with Alistair Darling’s observation from China about what the government needs to do: “But we have also got to make sure that in other areas we sharpen ourselves up, that we have a clear message of what we are about.’” Darling’s comments fit Michael Kinsley’s definition of a gaffe perfectly, ‘a gaffe
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Today’s Evening Standard leads with the headline, “Suicide bomb backer runs Ken campaign.” The Standard alleges that Azzam Tamimi, who is a leading figure in the Muslims for Ken campaign, is on record as both praising suicide bombing and suggesting that he himself would be prepared to be one. “If I can go to Palestine
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Gordon Brown’s visit to the USA shows that his team really has developed the reverse Midas touch. The Embassy has secured meetings with all three presidential candidates and on home turf to boot, an impressive demonstration of diplomatic clout that few countries—if any—could match. But by arriving at the same time as the Pope, the
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The total lack of interest surrounding Gordon Brown’s visit to the United States is a testament to how shamefully detached from the Iraq project Britain now is. Back in the hey-day of the Bush and Blair relationship, the arrival of the British Prime Minister the week after Congress had held hearings on Iraq and the
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Today’s AFP dispatch from Basra makes for fascinating reading. It suggests that the Iraqi government efforts to rein in the militias that had come to dominate the town, thanks in part to British policy, has been much more successful than initially thought: “Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic
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Tomorrow’s Times splashes on the news that Digby Jones will resign before the next election as he is not prepared to say that he supports Gordon Brown during an election campaign. The Times reports that the former CBI head made the remark at a private event at the end of January. Brown must wish that
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Every day now brings another set of bad headlines for Gordon Brown. Today, there’s that dire poll in the FT–which Pete mentioned, the news that a cabinet minster told Nick Robinson that “the danger we face is that we are just too damaged to recover”, and a whole slew of columns laying into the Prime
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If Tony Blair were still Prime Minister Labour would be five—not sixteen—points behind the Conservatives, according to the latest YouGov poll. With Blair back at the helm, the Conservative vote falls to below 40 percent, while the Labour vote rises by six points. More voters think that it is unlikely than likely that Brown will
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The full absurdity of the health and safety culture is brought home by this story in The Sunday Times. A chap was taking his date to the champagne bar at St Pancras for her birthday and so asked if he could bring a candle for them to put on a cake for her. This is
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The Sunday papers pick up where the Saturday ones left off. The Independent on Sunday reports that Charles Clarke is preparing a stalking horse challenger if Labour does badly on May 1st. The Mail on Sunday revives the story that Brown has promised to only fight one general election. A poll for The Sunday Times
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May 1st is becoming ever more important for Gordon Brown. Holding London and exceeding expectations in the rest of the country is the only thing that can put a stop to the increasingly frequent stories about how his government is doomed and he is the problem, see the Martin Kettle and Matthew Parris articles that
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One of the most important things to have emerged from recent events in Basra and the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker is that Iran has stepped up its efforts to destabilise Iraq. The crucial question is whether the Maliki government is now more prepared to confront this Iranian influence. The signs are promising.
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Another week, another PR Week story about what Stephen Carter’s new Downing Street team has planned. The frequency with which these stories are appearing is becoming really quite comic—it must be doing wonders for PR Week’s circulation in Westminster but it also seems to prove that the outsiders the Prime Minister has recruited are more interested in getting
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This episode of Charlie Rose with John Burns and Dexter Filkins of The New York Times (full video below) is by far the most informative thing I’ve seen on the Petraeus and Crocker testimony and the whole state of the war in Iraq. Both Burns and Filkins stress that things are precarious but equally they
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Ed Balls has had a rather bad week and it now appears that Jim Knight, the schools minister, has been sent to mend fences with the Board of Deputies over Balls’s attack on the admission procedures of Jewish faith schools. This whole row over admissions was concocted by Balls himself but has ended up back-firing
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Gordon Brown has only been Prime Minister for 289 days but already The Sun is devoting its main commentary slot to handicapping the race to succeed him. George Pascoe-Watson lists nine contenders—Ed Balls, David Miliband, James Purnell, Andy Burnham, Alan Johnson, Harriet Harman, Jacqui Smith, Jon Cruddas and Charles Clarke—giving Balls and Purnell particularly favourable
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The knives are out for Ed Balls at the moment. Partly this is because, as Michael White points out in The Guardian, he is a proxy for Gordon Brown. But it is also because he’s been empire building with little thought to the feelings of his fellow ministers. One friend of Coffee House points to
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Gordon Brown’s position on the Beijing Olympics is becoming more absurd by the day. He’s happy to have the Olympic flame surrounded by guards from a particularly unsavoury branch of the Chinese security services in Downing Street but not to touch it himself. Now, he’s planning to skip the opening ceremony but doesn’t want anyone
