James Forsyth

James Forsyth

James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Labour’s next rebellion

Mark Mardell has a fascinating post up about a forthcoming EU directive that would allow people to travel to another member state for medical treatment. Left-wing Labour MPs like Frank Dobson are, in typical levelling down fashion, worried about what this will do to the NHS as patients flee our MRSA-ridden hospitals. Already 33 MPs are objecting to it, worried that people might—heaven forefend—receive treatment from a non-state provider abroad and then claim the money back from their local health authority. Will this be the issue that revives Euro-scepticism on the soft-left?

James Forsyth

Is Fabio the man to bring an end to forty years of hurt?

The most encouraging thing about the news that Fabio Capello is set to become England manager is his refusal to accept egos in his team. One of the problems that has so blighted England in recent years is our obsession with star players at the expense of the team itself; exhibit a is how long the Lampard--Gerrard partnership was kept going despite the fact it was evident the two of them could not play together. Equally, the England team is blighted by mediocre players whose huge wage packets persuade them that they’ve made it. Just look at how many of them swan around in white or red boots—which really should be the preserve of the odd exceptionally skilled Brazilian.

James Forsyth

Labour’s thin blue line on pay

At first glance, Labour’s decision to pick a politically damaging fight over police pay when avoiding it would cost £40 million at most is bizarre. But as Michael White explains in The Guardian this morning, police pay is just the first public sector pay battle that Labour will have to fight. With the public finances in a battered shape and inflation rearing its ugly head, the government has to keep a lid on public sector pay.  So, expect a series of rows like this one over the coming year. The problem for Gordon Brown is that these fights are going to alienate Labour from a key part of its voting bloc just at the time when it needs every vote that it can get.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Going negative

The Republican primary race has entered a decisive phase with Mitt Romney’s decision to go negative on the surging Mike Huckabee. Romney’s unleashed the first attack ad of the campaign hitting Huckabee for his position on immigration and he’s knocking him in tough language on television, telling last night’s evening news that: “I’m convinced as people take a good hard look at Mike Huckabee’s record, they’ll see this is a guy who is soft on criminals, soft on illegal aliens, but hard on taxpayers. And that’s not what’s going to lead the Republican party to take the White House.” On top of this, Romney’s favourite outlet for opposition research, The Drudge Report, is playing up stories that are damaging to Huckabee.

James Forsyth

Is there anything less festive…

Than miserable looking employees in Santa hats. Getting my coffee this morning, I was struck by just how dejected all the baristas in Santa hats looked. If some Union wants to launch a campaign against folk being forced to wear them, I’m with them.

James Forsyth

Putin will still be calling the shots in Russia

Dmitri Medvedev, who Vladimir Putin anointed as his successor yesterday, today pledged to make Putin Prime Minister of Russia when he takes office. Medvedev even admitted that Putin would be more powerful than him: “In order to stay on this path, it is not enough to elect a new president who shares this ideology,” Mr. Medvedev said. “It is not less important to maintain the efficiency of the team formed by the incumbent president. That is why I find it extremely important for our country to keep Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin at the most important position in the executive power, at the post of the chairman of the government.”So while the letter of the Russian constitution is being observed with Putin stepping down, the spirit of it is being trampled on.

James Forsyth

Why there’s so much talk about the Labour succession

Both Rachel Sylvester and Steve Richards cast their expert eyes over the Labour succession in their columns today. The current emphasis on who will succeed him must be absolutely infuriating for Gordon Brown, nothing makes a leader look like a lame duck more than everyone speculating about who will be next. The explanation for this emphasis on the coming leadership battle in the Westminster village is, as both Richards and Sylvester note, the belief that Gordon will only fight one election as PM. As Fraser first revealed back in August, the PM is sceptical about the chance of the public giving someone over 60 a mandate that would carry them beyond retirement age. (Fraser also made the point that, “Rule number one of being PM is: never talk about retirement.

James Forsyth

Everything left to play for

Today’s poll in The Times shows how much in flux British politics still is. A Tory optimist looking at it might rejoice that the party has breached 40 percent for the first time in a Populus poll. On the other hand, a pessimist might wonder why the party isn’t at 45 percent, the level at which support becomes almost self-sustaining, considering the number of rounds the government has discharged into its foot in recent weeks. Equally, a Labour backer inclined to see the glass as half full will be heartened to see that even after a disastrous few weeks, Labour remains above 30 percent and in sight of the Tories. While, someone looking at the glass as half empty would worry that Labour is down where it was at the fag-end of the Blair-era and with no recipe for recovery.

Monday

James Forsyth

What is Putin up to?

At first blush, Vladimir Putin’s decision to anoint the relatively liberal Dmitry Medvedev as his successor rather than the hawkish, former KGB agent Sergey Ivanov appears to be a signal that Russia is not set on out and out confrontation with the West. But this New York Times story suggests that Putin might just be playing for time, realising that the West will be keen to accommodate Medvedev as the least worst option and so likely to accede to more of Russia’s demands. The great unanswered question, is what will Putin do once his term expires. The chairmanship of Gazprom is now open with Medvedev’s move.

James Forsyth

Patten Nonsense

Chris Patten is trying to assure us all that there is nothing to worry about in terms of foreign policy in the EU Treaty previously known as the Constitution. Playing a weak hand, Patten tries to change the subject, telling Mark Mardell:  "The biggest issue to effect our sovereignty in the last few years has been our commitment in Iraq; without having any real say over what was happening there; which British servicemen and women were being shot at and being killed there.  "That is a huge sovereignty issue. Nothing, nothing, that happens in the European Union is going to be anything like that in its dimensions." This argument simply doesn’t reflect the facts.

James Forsyth

Can conservative blogs survive a Cameron government?

One of the puzzles of the blogosphere in Britain is why there is so much more energy on the right than the left. In Media Guardian today, Matt suggests that the reason for this is that blogging is an essentially oppositional medium. He points out that in the States the left is far more vibrant online than the right. All of which leads to the question of whether right-wing blogs will be as lively under a Cameron government. My hunch, and Matt’s, is that they will be. I don’t think anyone could accuse any of the big right-of-centre blogs in this country of being simple cheerleaders for the Conservative party and I doubt that a Conservative government will make them suspend their critical faculties.

James Forsyth

US primary contests now too close to call

If you want a feel for how dramatically both the Republican and Democratic primary races have tightened in the US, consider this: “The only candidate in either party with a lead outside of the margin of error in the big 3 states (Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina) is Republican Mike Huckabee who sports a double-digit lead over his nearest competitor. No Democrat has a lead outside the margin of error in those three states and the Republican races in both New Hampshire and South Carolina are also margin-of-error close.” The importance of these early states in the process can not be over-stated and the worry for Hillary has to be that Obama has removed her firewall in New Hampshire.

James Forsyth

Searching for a solution in Kosovo

With the UN deadline for a final status agreement on Kosovo passing without success, we are now into a dangerous and unpredictable phase. The Kosovans will declare independence at some point in the near future, although the word is that they will wait months not week before doing so. A Kosovan declaration of independence will be regarded as unacceptable by the Serbians—egged on by the Russians. The challenge, as David Miliband acknowledged on Today this morning, is to find something to offer the Serbs to persuade them to accept Kosovan independence. Previously, Belgrade hinted heavily that membership of the European Union would make them take a softer line on Kosovo yet EU enlargement is now regarded as politically impossible.

Sunday

James Forsyth

Labour plotters talking Balls

John Rentoul’s column in the Independent on Sunday illustrates how the Blair – Brown feud is still poisoning Labour politics. Rentoul points out that most of the September plotters against Blair have been rewarded with jobs under Brown, often in the departments run by the Prime Minister’s closest allies. Rentoul then goes onto reveal that, incredibly, some of these plotters think that Labour needs Ed Balls to take over as leader before the next election. This really does make you question their sanity. It is highly dubious whether Balls will ever have what it takes to be PM—he gets monstered nearly every time he goes on TV—but he certainly isn’t ready now.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Republican presidential contender wanted to quarantine AIDS victims

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has come from nowhere to lead the Republican field in the lead-off state of Iowa. A large part of Huckabee’s appeal has been that he’s the relaxed, affable face of Christian conservatism. But the answers that he gave to a 1992 survey have put a considerable dent in that image. Huckabee proposed quarantining those who had AIDS and suggested that “multimillionaire celebrities, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna and others who are pushing for more AIDS funding” should pay for it rather than the Federal government. The problem for Huckabee is that having come from nowhere, he’s not received anywhere near the same level of scrutiny as the other candidates.

James Forsyth

How Gordon plans to reconcile with the Blairites

The big political story of the New Year will be how Gordon Brown tries to get his groove back. Peter Oborne reports in the Mail this morning that Brown’s plans include a regional tour,  a possible cabinet reshuffle and a rapprochement with the Blairites. To that end, Oborne reveals: “There is now lively talk inside Downing Street that Alastair Campbell might be brought back in a senior strategic role in the New Year and, apparently, there are indications that Blair's controversial former Press Secretary would welcome such a role.  More striking still, I am assured that Cherie Blair is now certain to receive a peerage.

James Forsyth

‘The Arab world with its own European union’

The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ war, the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world war and the Cold War. Explaining why is the task that Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has set himself in his new book God and Gold. Mead is a chronicler of American power and one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers of the post-9/11 era.

Friday

James Forsyth

Celebrity politics

I’m normally fairly sceptical about the value of celebrity endorsements. I can’t imagine that if, say, Frank Lampard urged people to vote Tory at the next election it would make much of a difference. But the exception to this rule is Oprah Winfrey, the American chat show host who is going out to stump for Barack Obama this weekend. She’s already filled an 80,000 seat football stadium in South Carolina for the campaign and she’s enabling Obama to reach voters he otherwise wouldn’t.

James Forsyth

Did Abrahams say this?

Just when you thought that the David Abrahams’s story could not become any more bizzare, along comes this. The Jewish Chronicle has an explosive interview with Abrahams this morning in which he warns that if “the government starts hammering” him, then the whole affair “might take one or two dirty turns.” He also claims that the “real reason I wanted to remain anonymous was that I didn’t want Jewish money and the Labour Party being put together because this is what I feared would happen. People would say there’s a Jewish conspiracy.” But Abrahams is denying that he ever gave the Jewish Chronicle an interview.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The Ukraine’s Iron Lady

With today’s news that Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the key figures in the Orange Revolution, is set to return as Prime Minister of the Ukraine, it is well worth re-reading the interview that Allister Heath did with her in May last year. What’s particularly interesting--apart from her saying that Margaret Thatcher is her role model--is the tough line that she takes on the question of Russia and her country’s energy independence.