The Spectator

Tuesday

The Spectator

Just as far as we can

From our UK edition

"We’ll have as much spine as we possibly can, under the circumstances." This response by Hillary Clinton to an activist calling on her to show some spine by endorsing federal funding for a needle exchange programmes is incredibly revealing of the Clinton campaign mindset. The Clintons's electoral success has been based on this approach of not going to the mat on issues that they perceive as vote losers and ultimately peripheral. Following their disastrous handling of the gays in the military issue right at the beginning of Bill’s first term in 1993, they basically passed on all this kind of cultural politics.

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Where Brown agrees and disagrees with the neo-cons

From our UK edition

Rachel Sylvester has a typically astute piece in today’s Telegraph on how Brown differs from both Blair and Bush. Here’s the key section: “Mr Brown is different - not just from Mr Bush but also from Mr Blair. While Mr Bush and Mr Blair see the world in black and white, Mr Brown observes more pragmatic shades of grey. For him, foreign policy is based on a "global hub". His moral compass is strictly for domestic use. When he cites neo-Conservative writers such as Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q Wilson with approval, it is their sense of national moral purpose that he admires, rather than their views on international affairs.

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Cameron hits back

From our UK edition

Criticism from Ali Miraj, a Tory activist who was an early supporter of David Cameron and sits on two of the party’s policy review groups, of the Tory party's lack of substance is getting some ink this morning. But in a combative interview on the Today Programme, David Cameron revealed that just yesterday Miraj asked the Tory leader to make him a peer and implied that Miraj’s criticisms are just sour grapes. I suspect that we haven’t heard the last of this.  Update: Conservative Home reports that Miraj is going on the World at One to respond to Cameron. The last thing that Cameron needs now is a personal squabble with someone who introduced him aty the launch of his leadership bid.

Monday

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The George and Gordon show

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown will be pleased by how his first press conference with George W. Bush went. There were no disasters even if Bush’s ragging of the press and boast that Brown is a ‘humorous Scot’ will rather grate on British ears. While on the plus side, Bush affirmed that Britain is America’s most important bilateral relationship. Brown’s tactics for this meeting have worked a treat. He has kept his distance from Bush by dressing formally, keeping everything workmanlike—he rattled through agenda items in his opening statement as he used to do economic statistics in his budget statements, and by avoiding the mutual banter that Bush and Blair were so fond of.

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Signs of progress in Iraq

From our UK edition

Ken Pollack and Mike O’Hanlon—neither of whom could be called a neo-conservative, a Bush supporter, or a Republican—have a must read op-ed in the New York Times this morning on Iraq. Their view is that: “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.” This is not to argue that everything is rosy in the Iraqi garden. As today’s Oxfam report illustrates there are still huge obstacles to be overcome.

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Ingmar Bergman RIP

From our UK edition

The death of Ingmar Bergman coincides with the re-release of his greatest film, The Seventh Seal (1957), a meditation upon death and the fear of godlessness set in the middle ages but inspired by the nuclear terrors of the Cold War. The bleakness of Bergman's oeuvre is undeniable, but his films were not cold: there are few more affecting explorations of the life of the elderly than Wild Strawberries, or poignant explorations of a relationship than Scenes from a Marriage or its recent sequel Saraband. Fanny and Alexander is, amongst many other things, one of the most visually sumptuous films of the twentieth century. So many directors wanted to be Bergman, not least Woody Allen whose various homages to the Swedish master occasionally strayed into parody.

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Brown hits all the right notes

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown’s op-ed in the Washington Post this morning shows how fluent he is in the language of the special relationship. (Although, Brown speaks it with a less emotional and more intellectual accent than Blair). His piece hits all the right notes and by approvingly quoting Ronald Reagan he shows Washington’s Republican elite that he is not the Cape Cod partisan that some fret that he is. The most notable line in the essay is Brown’s description of terrorism as “not a cause but a crime. A crime against humanity.” This is yet another example of Brown’s balancing skills.

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Gordon Brown’s American tour

From our UK edition

Gordon Brown’s first Prime Ministerial visit to the United States is working well so far. He has kept his personal distance by wearing a suit and not bringing along his wife but balanced this with a statement expressing admiration for the United States and invoking the usual Churchillian rhetoric. He is not playing to the gallery on Iraq but has come up with appealing policies on Darfur and trade and all this is winning him favourable press coverage right across the spectrum. Ben Brogan is blogging the visit in his usual inimitable style. He has some particularly interesting thoughts on the new special relationship between Miliband and Brown.

Sunday

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Time for Cameron to reflect

From our UK edition

Perhaps the best outcome of these torrid last few weeks is that the Cameron project has been brought down to earth. After winning the party leadership against all the odds, some of the Cameroons had the idea they could walk on water, and rewrite the normal laws of politics. They thought if they said the mantra “social responsibility” long enough, the phrase would mean something. That they could change society by exhortation, not legislation. That companies could be dragooned into implementing government priorities. All of this new-age nonsense has proved as useful as a chocolate fireguard in the heat of Brown’s first few days.

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Why Dave needs David

From our UK edition

David Davis's warning to his party to show discipline and stick to the centre ground in today's Sunday Telegraph is the best news for the other David in a while. Davis is scarcely a woolly liberal, a Soho brand manager or a tree hugger. His voice reaches parts of the party Cameron cannot reach. Well-read and supremely intelligent, Davis is in a different league to John Prescott: Davis would make a fine party leader, which is something that could never have been said of Prescott. But Cameron should be using Davis much, much more as a public guarantor of his party reforms, just as John Smith and Tony Blair used Prescott. It is often said that the Cameroons are obsessed with aping New Labour. It is just as arguable that they are not obsessed enough.

Saturday

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Letters to the Editor | 28 July 2007

From our UK edition

Sir: I’m very encouraged to see you doing such wonderful work supporting Boris Johnson in his bid to be Mayor of London... Why we need Boris Sir: I’m very encouraged to see you doing such wonderful work supporting Boris Johnson in his bid to be Mayor of London (Leading article, 21 July). Yes, it’ll be a great laugh and yes, Boris is a great personality and a good match for Ken, but that’s not why I think it’s so important. It is crucial for Boris to become Mayor because if, as now seems likely, David Cameron and his team of young lightweights are blown away by Gordon Brown at the next election, Boris will be the only high profile Conservative in the country.

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The world after Bush

From our UK edition

This review essay by Samantha Power, a Harvard professor who is close to Obama, on where the Bush presidency is leaving the war on terror is well worth reading. Her main concern is that the American public, with little faith in the credibility of the government’s claims, may deny even cleareyed leaders the resources they need to meet the complex demands of neutralizing modern threats.

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Common sense submerged

From our UK edition

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street... The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses through the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street’.

Friday

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Tony Blair meets the Simpsons

From our UK edition

With Gordon jetting off to Camp David and the Simpsons movie coming out this weekend, here's Tony Blair--he used to be Prime Minister, you know--doing a cameo on the show. Somehow, I think, that this is one invite Gordon will never get.

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Another Colgate Moment?

From our UK edition

George W. Bush and Tony Blair famously bonded over their mutual use of Colgate toothpaste at their first meeting at Camp David. With Gordon Brown heading there this weekend, one can't help but wonder which product he and Bush have in common? Anyone have any ideas? One thing we can be confident of, though, is that Brown won’t turn up in—what Christopher Meyer so memorably described as—“ball-crushingly tight dark-blue courdroys.

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How Brown is reversing Blair’s reforms

From our UK edition

Doesn’t anyone spot what Gordon Brown is really up to? The great Peter Riddell isn’t convinced that he has altered the Blair reform agenda, and thinks that “changes are at the margins”. Well, you could say that. If you snap the brake cable of a car, change is at the margins – but the consequences will be rather profound. Brown has ingeniously sabotaged the City Academy programme, keeping the name but ensuring new ones will be indistinguishable from existing schools. Meanwhile the NHS establishment is freezing out (or, as happened yesterday, just sacking) independent healthcare providers. They will now never get the critical mass they need. The CBI says it is “alarmed by this shift into neutral”.

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Having a blast before blast off

From our UK edition

There are few things that can be more boring that floating around in a tin can looking down at the earth. So I’m glad to hear that the astronauts have found a way, albeit a rather unoriginal one, to make the time fly by. (Insert your own joke about one small sip for man, one giant drinking session for mankind) Following on from the infamous Nasa love triangle, it does seem that these astronauts are rather more interesting than their notoriously anodyne press conferences suggest.

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More poll woe for the Tories

From our UK edition

Today’s Telegraph poll is disastrous for Cameron. That the Tories are 9 points behind Labour is not even the worst news in it for him; what should worry him most is how his personal ratings have plummeted. In February, 43% of the electorate thought he was proving a good leader and 27% that he wasn’t with 30% undecided. Those numbers have now been reversed. Today, 44% think he is not a good leader compared to the 27% who view his leadership positively (29% remain undecided). How to pull out of this nosedive is now priority number one for the Tories.

Thursday

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Is their money good here?

From our UK edition

If you’re wondering what to make of the Chinese decision to invest in Barclays and the Qatari effort to buy Sainsburys do read this column that Martin Vander Weyer has done for us explaining why there is nothing sinister about such developments.

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The case Obama should make against Hillary

From our UK edition

It's the electability, stupid should be one of the major themes of the Obama campaign if they want to play harball with Hillary. The Democrats are desperate to take back the White House and the polls suggest that he is far better placed to do that than her.