James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
I don’t mean to sound like a kill-joy but doesn’t it suggest a rather warped set of priorities for a minister in the Ministry of Defence to quit his post to prepare for a car race at a time when British forces are engaged in two wars?
The reaction of three of the most influential commentators on the left to the Queen’s speech is instructive. Michael White in The Guardian suggests that it was less important than people think as Gordon Brown will probably go until 2010 before calling an election meaning that there will be time for one more full legislative programme before the government goes to the country. Jonathan Freedland is far from enthused by the speech but argues that there could be merit in aiming to do a few things on a certain theme and then getting them done. But as Freedland acknowledges if government is purely managerial it leaves itself uniquely exposed to events. The most bullish of the three isSteve Richards.
Michael White’s diary for Guardian Unlimited is always worth reading and today it has a fascinating little tit-bit that I hadn’t heard before. Apparently, it was Sarah Brown who persuaded Admiral Sir Alan West to become the security minister in Gordon Brown's so-called gvernment of all the talents by phoning up his wife.
Ben Brogan flags up a hilarious, and worrying, stat from the FT this morning. Only 71 people responded to the government’s online consultation on the Queen’s speech. The FT also reveals that a government paid for regional road-show event cost more than £50,000. If Gordon Brown really wanted to know what the public thought of his plans wouldn’t it be simpler just to hold an election?
It has long been a joke in Westminster that you don’t need to put your finger in the wind to see which way it is blowing, you just watch Jack Straw. So the fact that Jack Straw has revived the tradition of walking backwards once the Gracious Speech has been handed to the monarch should reassure the Queen. If Bray is looking for a vicar, they have the perfect candidate.
Perhaps the most depressing story in the papers today is the one about how Thabo Mbeki remains an “AIDS dissident.” The Guardian reports how Mark Gevisser, a biographer of Mbeki, found that Mbeki regretted having withdrawn from the debate over the link between HIV and AIDS. Here’s the key section: “Mr Gevisser recounts how Mr Mbeki phoned him late on a Saturday evening in June to discuss Aids. The president asked the respected Johannesburg author whether he had seen a 100-page paper secretly authored by Mr Mbeki and distributed anonymously among the ANC leadership six years ago.
A Populus poll for tomorrow’s Times has Labour on 37, the Tories on 36 and the Lib Dems on 16. The Lib Dems are the big gainers, up four, while the two main parties have both lost votes. The Lib Dems are clearly benefitting form the extra attention they are getting thanks to their leadership election. While the poll, as Anthony Wells points out, doesn’t actually mark a change in the lead when it comes to Populus polls it is still a nice psychological boost for Gordon Brown ahead of the Queen’s speech.
The speech by Jonathan Evans, the Director General of MI5, to the Society of Editor’s conference is well worth reading in full. Iraq and the dodgy dossiers mean that it has become impossible for government ministers to talk about the terrorist threat without been accused of scaremongering or trying to win public support for an extension of the period of detention without trial, ID cars or the like so speeches from Evans and his colleagues are the best information we have on how the security establishment see the situation. Sadly, the extent of the threat facing this country is not some piece of Blairite spin.
Following on from King Abdullah’s claim that the British were warned about 7/7, Prince Bandar—formerly the Saudi ambassador to the US who is extremely close to the Bush family—has said that if the Americans had cooperated with the Saudi properly, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. Here’s how ABC’s The Blotter reports the Prince’s remarks: "Saudi security was actively following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision," Bandar, the national security advisor to Saudi King told the Arabic satellite network, Al-Arabiya, Thursday. "If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," Bandar said.
The Guardian reports this morning that neither David Miliband nor Condi Rice can get General Musharraf to return their calls. This suggests that Musharraf might be preparing to renege on his pledge to go ahead with elections in January. It is crucial that Britain and America do not end up appearing to endorse any postponement of elections. At the moment, the chance of Musharraf surviving are less than 50-50 and it makes no sense for Britain and America to further alienate whoever succeeds him.
This essay on Barack Obama’s foreign policy is well worth reading for an insight into the candidate’s thinking and his growing frustration with Hillary Clinton. One quote stood out to me as revealing how different Obama is from Hillary: “Ask Nye why Hillary’s paint-by-the-numbers foreign policy makes her more qualified to handle a crisis when for most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn’t, not by failing to use force.” Personally, I think Obama’s analysis here is too simplistic but it is striking that he is prepared to say this given the emphasis that post-Carter Democratic presidential contenders give to projecting strength and toughness.
Nigel Hastilow, the Tory candidate who said Enoch was right, has resigned rather than an issue an apology for his remarks. The speed with which he has gone has minimised the damage that has been done but Hastilow’s comments illustrate just how dangerous the immigration issue can be for the Conservatives; Peter Hain got in a shot at the ‘racist underbelly of the Tory party’ on Sunday AM this morning. The real problem for David Cameron will come if someone who is an MP, and therefore can’t be got rid of quickly, expresses similar sentiments.
Pakistan’s constitutional crisis is the biggest problem the world has faced since 9/11. It is not alarmist to suggest that there is a possibility that a nuclear power could either end up being run by radical Islamists or as a failed state. This Washington Post story shows how volatile the situation is. Xenia Dormandy, who was the Bush administration’s National Security Council director for South Asia until August 2005, tells the paper that she “would be very surprised if [Musharraf] lasts even six months." Stephen Cohen, perhaps the pre-eminent Pakistan expert in Washington, is blunt that he doesn’t “know what’s going to happen” and warns "I don't think any Pakistan expert knows what will happen even tomorrow.
The news that General Musharraf has imposed emergency rule, effectively martial law, in Pakistan is extremely worrying. Musharraf has done this despite a full court press from the West and the consequences are potentially disastrous. If the protests that will inevitably follow are put down with violence or if Benazir Bhutto, who is reportedly sitting in a plane at Karachi airport having flown back into the country, is arrested the situation could quickly escalate bringing Pakistan to the verge of being a failed state.
Today’s editorial in The Times on the improvements in Iraq is well worth reading in full. The key point is that the political debate about Iraq on both sides of the Atlantic no longer reflects the reality of the situation. Things have improved to an extent that it is no longer absurd to start thinking about what might be achieved in Iraq rather than just in terms of preventing all out defeat.
Cameron enters the immigration debate The government’s failure to count up the number of foreign workers in this country rightly reinforces the public’s fear that control of the borders has been lost, that an unstoppable tide of migrants is flowing into the country. It is in these circumstances that unsavoury politics flourish. To Gordon Brown’s immense discredit, he has expended more energy trying to capitalise on public disquiet over immigration than on trying to fix the problem. So Mr Brown talks of ‘British jobs for British workers’ and promises to deport migrants who peddle drugs to ‘our children’. Short of promising to deport those who rape our daughters, he could not have made a baser — or more emotive — appeal.
Hillary Clinton has used her gender brilliantly in the Democratic primaries to date and her campaign has been quick to depict Tuesday night’s debate, which was Hillary’s worst moment of the campaign so far and has sett off lots of chatter about whether she can be stopped after all, as a bunch of dudes beating up on women. (See this very clever web video that they produced). But now Obama has hit back. "I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else," the Illinois senator said in an interview with NBC's 'Today Show.' "When we had a debate back in Iowa awhile back, we spent I think the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues.
In The Guardian today, Alexander Chancellor reflects on how though more and more pheasants are being bred and shot the public won’t eat them, meaning that most of the birds go to waste. But Chancellor thinks he might have found a solution: “We should at least take advantage of the bloodlust of the new rich by eating their feathered victims, but for reasons I have never understood it is very difficult to find a pheasant in a supermarket. Maybe British shoppers don't like its gamey taste or just won't buy anything with lead pellets in it. If so, someone like Jamie Oliver should be asked to mount a television campaign to promote pheasant and tell people how to cook it.
The press this morning are almost unanimous in calling for Sir Ian Blair to resign. While we should not forget that the Met was operating under incredible pressure that day in almost panic conditions, the verdict does reveal a devastating set of failures. It is hard to see how Sir Ian Blair can restore the public’s confidence in the police. Yet judging from Ken Livingstone’s combative defence of him on The Today Programme this morning, Blair won’t be forced out. The Livingstone interview is well worth listening to in full. It is quite incredible to hear Red Ken defending the police chief over the killing of an innocent foreigner, one can only imagine how Livingstone the opposition politician would have reacted to a set of events like this.
Today, as the Tories are eager to remind us, would have been election day if Gordon hadn’t lost his nerve. What would have happened will be a great parlour game for years to come but Anthony Wells’s analysis is well worth noting: “More importantly looking at the current polls I suspect Labour would have been ahead in an election today. The polls straight after the Conservative party conference when Gordon Brown decided not to have an election were showing a temporary Conservative boost from a successful party conference. In this alternate universe they would probably have subsided.
