James Forsyth

A quick check on the health of a party is whether there is more talent on the back benches than the front bench. Labour are close to that tipping point with Charles Clarke, Jon Cruddas, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Denis MacShane, David Blunkett and Frank Field all out of the front line. Any of these would have added heft to the cabinet and all are more impressive figures than Caroline Flint and Yvette Cooper. If Brown had appointed Milburn to the Department of Work and Pensions he would have shown that he has moved on from the Blairite Brownite fights of the past and would have put someone in place who could have given the Tories a fight over welfare reform.

David Cameron is understandably eager not to allow Gordon Brown to present the Tories as slash n’ burn merchants intent on starving schools and hospitals of funding. However, unfair it was the £35bn of Tory cuts jibe at the last election hit home—as the IFS points out, by Brown’s own logic he will have cut spending by £9bn by the next election—and the current Tory pledge to match Labour spending commitments until 2011 is probably a necessary act of reassurance. But the danger is that Labour box the Tories in by projecting their spending plans further and further into the future.

Jacqui Smith’s comment about why she doesn’t walk around at night sums up what is wrong with the establishment attitude to crime. Here’s the exchange between the Home Secretary and Isabel Oakeshott: IO: Would you feel safe, walking round, say, Hackney, at midnight on your own?  JS: Well, no, but I don’t think I’d ever have done. You know, I would never have done that, at any point during my life. IO: Why not?  JS: Well, I just don’t think that’s a thing that people do, is it, really? Implicit in Smith’s answer is the belief that crime is inevitable and that if you don’t want to be mugged you don’t go out late at night. As the reduction in crime in New York shows, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Peter Hain has been cleared of breaching the Ministerial Code and many in Westminster think the furore over his failure to declare all the donations to his deputy leadership campaign will now die down. But Rosa Prince points out over at the Three Line Whip yesterday’s decision actually raises huge questions about Hain’s version of events and whether he can carry on as a minister. Hain has been cleared because he told his permanent secretary of the donations to his campaign including one from the GMB union of £10,000—which was not declared until last week—who he was negotiating with in his ministerial capacity at the time.

The news that Paddy Ashdown is going to be a reconstruction supremo in Afghanistan, coordinating the military and development work, seems to be announced every few weeks. But it has never been officially confirmed that he will go and do the job. Now, Michael White reports that there is a danger that the appointment might get dragged into the row between Britain and Russia over the Litvinenko assassination. Michael White reports on his blog that, “The foreign secretary is anxious that the row doesn't spill over to Iran or Kosovo, policy areas where we need Russian cooperation. One casualty could be Paddy Ashdown's Afghan appointment by the UN on Monday. He was furious that the deal leaked out of the UN this week when it has yet to be ratified.

Mitt Romney’s win in the Michigan Republican primary makes this Saturday’s Republican vote in South Carolina all the more important. If John McCain wins there, he should—barring disasters—end up as the Republican nominee. If he doesn’t, the race becomes wide open and Rudy Giuliani’s much criticised late state strategy could end up paying off. Politics is a dirty business in South Carolina and in 2000 John McCain was defeated in one of the nastiest campaigns ever conducted. No blow was too low. It was claimed that been turned while a prisoner of war in Vietnam and was really a Communist sleeper agent and that his adopted Bangladeshi baby was really an illegitimate child from an affair with a black woman.