Peter Hoskin

Paul Waugh's got it spot on.  The Muslim Association of Britain's statement on Sudan and Darfur today is utterly disgraceful.  Rather than supporting the ICC's decision to charge the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan Ahamd al-Bashir - who has encouraged the rape and murder of thousands of civilians, many of them Muslim - with war crimes, they describe it as "reprehensible".  Their thinking?  That similar prosecutions haven't been launched against war crimes in "Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya", as if that somehow mitigates the atrocities that al-Bashir has instigated. It's reminiscent of the Muslim Council of Britain's disgusting decision to boycott Holocaust earlier this year.

There's another epsiode in the Alistair Darling story today, with a hint in the FT that he may be resisting pressure from Brown to introduce a big package of (debt-fuelled) spending increases and tax cuts in the Budget:   "Mr Darling, speaking to foreign journalists in London, called for the world’s 20 leading industrial and developing nations to pursue a package of measures to boost the economy including monetary loosening and measures to rebuild banks. However, on the fiscal side the chancellor put the stress on implementing tax cuts and spending increases that were already in the pipeline... ...Some ministers believe Mr Darling is coming under pressure from Mr Brown to give the economy another fiscal jolt, a claim denied by both the Treasury and Downing Street.

Earlier today, Ben Brogan reported a telling comment from the Cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, that, when it comes to discussing the G20 summit with Washington, "There is nobody there ... You cannot believe how difficult it is."  The remarks have since been withdrawn, and expunged from civil service websites.  But, in spite of the revisionism, the sentiment has cropped up elsewhere.  A couple of weeks back, the Times quoted an anonymous "British official" saying the following: "The new US regime is like an echo chamber. We are struggling to get people even to return our calls. They are totally focused on domestic issues and have not lifted their heads to look at the international perspective.

Reporting this Compass / YouGov poll, the Sunday Telegraph concentrates on the news that Labour members think Peter Mandelson is doing a better job than Harriet Harman.  Yet, to my eyes, there's a more a striking finding in there.  74 percent of respondents think that David Miliband is doing a good job.  And that after Miliband's abortive leadership coup; the infamous banana and Heseltine moments; the disastrous trip to India; and his ill-advised 'War on Terror' article for the Guardian.  It's enough to make a Foreign Secretary think he could be party leader after all.

Recommending what sounds like a prescient report by Edward Chancellor, Crunch Time for Credit? (2005), Charles Moore writes the following in his column today: "Although some of Chancellor's work is technical, it benefits from a historian's understanding of what people have done in reality rather than a narrower economist's obsession with 'modelling'. It has strong elements of common sense. By that same common sense, though obviously with much less information, the man in the street also predicted the credit crunch." It's a crucial point - and one stressed by Nigel Lawson in his evidence to the Spectator Inquiry, which will be up on Coffee House soon - that while common sense may balk at 125 percent mortgages and the like, numerous economic and financial models failed to.