The Spectator

Monday

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The FCO fritters away money like a WAG

If you want an example of how government comes up with ways to waste our money, just consider the story in The Sun today of ‘The WAG’s Guide to Travel’ penned for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Jermain Defoe’s girlfriend Charlotte Meares. A quick call to the FCO confirms that Ms. Meares was paid for putting her name to the guide. The FCO won’t reveal how much but merely say that the money came out of the £1.8 million budget for the ‘Know Before You Go campaign.’  Now, consider that not only was Ms. Meares paid for her work but that a bunch of people were paid for coming up with the idea and you begin to see how the costs begin to spiral.

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Time to prune back the quangos

Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun today contains one of those facts that makes you stop and re-read the sentence to make sure you’ve understood it correctly. Kavanagh calculates that, "Getting rid of half [the 200 new quangos New Labour has created] would let us abolish income tax for everyone earning under £20,000--and still leave plenty to spare.” The budget for quangos is, shockingly, five times larger than that of the Ministry of Defence. The time is surely, ripe, for the Tories to come up with a list of quangos they would either abolish or, as Dan Lewis suggested in the Sunday Telegraph, privatise.

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Cameron comes out fighting

David Cameron sounded the right note in his back-to-school interview on the Today programme this morning. As Fraser has so consistently called upon him to do, the Tory leader put the “broken society” at the heart of his autumn campaign, while refusing the invitation of Jim Naughtie to endorse knee-jerk crackdowns on the drinking age. The only way to stop “Anarchy in the UK” is to “strengthen families and communities in the UK”: that’s spot on. Gordon Brown doesn’t buy the “broken society” analysis, so Mr Cameron has this terrain pretty much to himself.

Sunday

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Lib Dems not inclined to support a referendum

One of the key things to watch in the European referendum debate is the position of the Liberal Democrats; their support for a vote last time round was crucial to the government conceding one. Ming Campbell, however, seems unlikely to repeat the call. Speaking on the Westminster Hour this evening, he said that having compared the guidelines that the IGC has been given with the original constitution he’d concluded that it was “much less likely” that a referendum would be needed this time out. He did, however, hedge this with the line that he couldn’t confirm anything until he’d seen the final text. He also implied that if there was line by line scrutiny in Parliament that would make a referendum unnecessary.

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2012 will leave the wrong kind of sporting legacy

We’re always being told that bringing the Olympics to London will turn us into a nation of athletes, getting us all off the couch and onto the running track. But there’s no evidence for this claim; no other Olympic host city has seen a sustained rise in sporting participation after the games. To make things worse, grassroots sports are having to pick up the bill for overspend at the Olympics. Today’s Sunday Times reports that, “Local sports bodies will have to contribute £70m towards the Olympics, the equivalent of one multi-purpose floodlit games area or one 100m grass pitch in each parliamentary constituency." This is the opposite of the ‘sporting legacy’ that we were promised when London won the Olympics.

Saturday

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Letters to the Editor | 18 August 2007

EU vs US Sir: Irwin Stelzer can’t have it both ways (‘Now we know: Brown is a European, not an Atlanticist’, 11 August). If Gordon Brown is going to have to give up his independent foreign policy when the EU reform treaty comes into force, so too will Nicolas Sarkozy. So neither a British nor a French special relationship with the US will count for much. The truth of course is that neither proud nation will give up its independent foreign policy. What the reform treaty does ensure, however, is that there will in future be a more coherent EU foreign policy, which will remove some of the exasperation that some of the EU’s partners feel about present arrangements.

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Will Prezza spill the beans?

John Prescott is getting £300,000 for his memoirs which will be called Prezza: Pulling No Punches and ghosted by Hunter Davies. Davies, having worked on the Wayne Rooney and Paul Gascoigne autobiographies, will probably find Prescott a refreshingly intelligent subject. Interestingly, Davies says that Prescott “realises that he's got to tell the truth. He knows what really happened between Blair and Brown; he was the marriage broker." Admittedly, this could just be pre-publication boosterism but there’s no doubt that Prescott has been franker than many of his colleagues in his reflections on the Blair era. Also, seeing as Prescott’s role was as the marriage counselor the more he tells about how bad things got, the more history will appreciate his role.

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W. F. Deedes, 1 June 1913 – 17 August 2007. RIP.

Dear Bill. It is impossible to think of any other journalist -- let alone a former editor of the Daily Telegraph -- whose death would have made the lead on BBC news bulletins. Most journalists are not much liked. Bill -- W. F. Deedes, Lord Deedes -- was loved. The public trusted him. He wrote with compassion, common sense and a keen sense of the absurd, and was equipped with a vast knowledge of the world and its affairs. He knew or had met just about everyone who mattered in the 20th century. He drew on his own experiences but he did not bang on about himself.

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Brown’s magic is a trick

As he contemplates the surf on his Breton holiday beach this weekend, David Cameron has an opportunity to reflect on how swiftly the tides of politics can change. Just three months ago the Conservative leader enjoyed record gains in the local elections, winning more than 800 seats in a nationwide test of public opinion and recording general-election-winning levels of support. That result was the culmination of an 18-month period during which Mr Cameron had changed his party, modernised its policies and maintained a solid opinion-poll lead over Labour, an achievement which had eluded the Tories for more than 13 years. Since then, however, voters have cooled towards Mr Cameron, and warmed towards Gordon Brown. As a new Labour leader, Mr Brown has made an impressive start.

Friday

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McCain: “Life is not 24”

This John McCain interview with John Stewart demonstrates why it would be foolish to dismiss his presidential chances just yet. Watch from about two thirds of the way in and note how clearly—and effectively—McCain separates himself from others in his party on torture.

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Cutting to the chase

A few things that bug me about this whole tax-cutting debate… 1)      Even Lord Forsyth’s suggestion of £21 billion worth of cuts is a tiny sum when you remember Brown will this year spend £553bn of our money – rising to £682 billion in 2011/12. Any Tory cut must be put in this context, or the sums just don’t mean anything. 2)      And let’s not forget that from now until April 2012, Brown intends to raise tax by an average £32 billion a year, according to Treasury figures. Would it be so bad if the Tories put a stop to that? Or slowed it down a little?

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At last, some good news for Bush

The news that Jenna Bush, the president’s daughter, is engaged and likely to get married long before the family leaves the White House raises some delicious questions of both protocol and politics. The guest-list is sure to be pored over for its meaning and given the Bush family’s tendency to mix the political and the personal—at the last Bush family wedding the Bush twins toasted their cousin George P. Bush and his bride as the 47th president and his first lady—we can be sure that it will make for interesting reading. Look out for which world leaders make the cut, whether Tony gets an invite or not, which members of the Bush cabinet are invited, whether the Clintons attend and if any of the current crop of Republican candidates gets an invite.

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Why there’s little difference between Hillary and Rudy

It’s not possible to be neutral about Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and now a Republican presidential candidate. You either love him or hate him. The novelist Kevin Baker does not love him. In the August issue of Harper’s Baker gives Giuliani a pretty thorough hiding, in a cover piece (subscription required) headed A FATE WORSE THAN BUSH. The opening sentence sets the tone: “Rudolph Giuliani has, by far, the most dubious known personal history of any major presidential candidate in US history, what with his three marriages, and his open affairs and his almost total estrangement from his grown children, not to mention the startling frequency with which he finds excuses to dress in women’s clothing.

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Are the Tories really lurching to the right?

Ever since John Redwood’s proposals first began to be floated, the Tories have been accused of lurching to the right. On the Today Programme this morning, Alistair Darling predictably accused the Tories of planning 21 billion pounds worth of spending cuts. While in The Independent today, Colin Brown writes that:  “The more Shadow Chancellor George Osborne protested yesterday that the Redwood working party's conclusions did not represent a "lurch to the right", the more it sounded like that is just what is about to happen. Mr Cameron's appointment of Mr Redwood to chair the commission on economic competitiveness was revealing. He must have known Mr Redwood, a committed Thatcherite, would propose a radical tax cutting package.

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Name that book

Today’s papers report that Tony Blair is hoping to pocket £8 million for writing his memoirs. Sadly for the Tories, the book is years away from publication and so won’t see the light of day before the next election. Indeed, if it going to be a genuine account of what happened I doubt that it will come out while Gordon Brown is still in office. (There is, though, the fun possibility of a race to publish between Blair and Alastair Campbell as soon as Brown walks out of Downing Street.) But anyway, what should Blair call his memoirs? If you have any suggestions for a snappy title leave them in the comments.

Thursday

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Use your vote because they’ll use theirs

Predictably, people are trying to derail the Tory nominating process for London Mayor. It’s an open primary, so the process is open to abuse—with the £1.50 charge unlikely to deter the committed. These attempts at sabotage make it essential that those who actually want the best candidate selected do vote. London deserves a proper contest and it would be a disaster if this vote was hijacked; any candidate selected under such circumstances would be a laughing stock from day one and would have no hope against Ken Livingstone. Of course, we’d urge you to back The Spectator’s official candidate.

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Tories hit Brown on his record

George Osborne, who unfairly has been taking much of the flak for the Conservatives’ current woes, has an interview in The Guardian today in which he attacks Brown for failing to spread prosperity out across the country from London. Osborne is, rightly, trying to tie Brown to the failures of the Blair years such as the fact there are 600,000 more people stuck in poverty now than there were when Labour came to power. The problem with this line of attack, though, is that it is inherently backward-looking and so makes it difficult for the Tories to appear as if they are, to borrow a phrase, the future not the past. PS This Fraser Nelson piece on the north-south divide is well worth a read.

Wednesday

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Are Beckham and Bush related?

David Beckham’s attempt to crack America continues apace. Last week, The New York Daily News reports, Beckham was given a private tour of the White House. His presence sparked confusion amongst those staff members not familiar with Brand Beckham, with the president’s private secretary asking him if he was a relative of Bush’s or a staffer; he’d certainly be an interesting replacement for Karl Rove. Meanwhile back on the West Coast, Posh Spice is continuing with her attempt to single-handedly restore US consumer spending. The gossip magazines are claiming that she has been offered a $5 million credit line at Neiman Marcus while apparently on a trip to the LA branch of Barneys she spent over $14,000.