The Spectator

Friday

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Ashley’s Ashes

Simon Barnes has a lovely tribute to the retiring England spinner Ashley Giles in this morning’s Times. Giles had a bit of a rough press as he was nearly always used in purely negative ways by his captain. While he irritated the purists as he wasn’t a great spinner of the ball. But, as Barnes, points out England wouldn’t have won the Ashes in 2005 without him. Few small innings have been as important as Giles’s at Trent Bridge in 2005. England were collapsing chasing a mere 129 to win. The Australians had opened up every old English wound and looked to set to snatch the unlikeliest of victories and keep hold of the Ashes. But Giles would not yield. By sheer willpower he kept Warne at bay before scampering the winning runs.

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A healthy crunch

It seems the silly season is extending to financial markets. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation about how the credit crunch is supposed to be such a disaster for the companies quoted in London and New York - yes, its bad news for American homeowners and a few of the more speculative private equity deals. But we need these credit squeezes to make sure we don’t repeat the mistake of Asia in 1998 and have asset prices pumped up to ridiculous levels by cheap debt. Isn’t this the kind of weeding we need in a healthy stock market? And as Lombard Street research powerfully argues here stock markets are now looking rather cheap by historical standards. Braver souls than me may consider this the time to buy.

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How long can Brown have it both ways on relations with the US?

Gerard Baker has a great column in The Times this morning about how Gordon Brown is trying to play it both ways on relations with America. Baker dubs it the bat’s piss strategy, in memory of the Monty Python sketch of that name. But as Baker notes there will come a time when Brown will have to choose between playing to the domestic gallery and the strategic relationship with Washington. Indeed, it is a mistake to think that whoever succeeds Bush will adopt a foreign policy that the likes of Mark Malloch Brown will approve of. Do read the whole of Baker’s piece and enjoy this wonderful quote that he has from a senior US official: “Brown does rather give the impression he was born in a suit and tie, doesn’t he?

Thursday

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What Bush almost said about Iraq

George W. Bush’s speech in May 2003 declaring major combat operations in Iraq over while a banner behind him proclaimed “mission accomplished” was, with the benefit of hindsight, unfortunate at best. (Even at the time it was clear that the fighter pilot-style entrance was a little excessive.) But Bush’s words could have been so much worse. Apparently, his chief speechwriter had drafted the following for him: “The sirens of Baghdad are quiet. The desert has returned to silence. The Battle of Iraq is over, and the United States and our allies have prevailed.” One dreads to think how these words would have been hung round Bush, and every other Iraq supporter’s, neck if the president had actually delivered them.

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Are diversity and solidarity compatible?

Robert Putnam’s new work on diversity is sure to set the cat amongst the pigeons. The Boston Globe summarises the findings of The Bowling Alone author thus: “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.” This research bolsters the argument that David Goodhart made a few years back about the tensions between ever-growing diversity and the welfare state. But I suspect that diversity is not actually at the root of these problems.

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Look who’s coming to dinner

The Bush clan will be gathering in their New England retreat this weekend and they will be joined, as Irwin Stelzer hinted they would be, by Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also holidaying in New England. Sarkozy is pulling off the opposite trick to Gordon Brown. While Brown has distanced himself stylistically from Bush but not substantively, Sarkozy is playing buddy buddy without changing anything other than the atmospherics of French policy towards America. Sarkozy has carried this off with even more élan than Brown. It is amazing to find the same people who used to think that France was a dirty word now praising its president and holding him up as a model to the Republican party.

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The Iranians in Iraq

Do watch the opening segment from yesterday’s edition of Newsnight on what the Iranians are up to in southern Iraq. It gives you a very good idea of what the Iranian game plan is and how they plan to benefit from a British withdrawal. Even if Newsnight did rather spoil it by then having John Bolton debate Denis Kucinich to give us the US point of view, which is a little bit like having Bill Cash and John McDonnell square off on British politics--entertaining but not particulalry enlightening.

Wednesday

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Obama hits Hillary over Iraq

The contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is entering a decisive phase. The first primary is now only five months away and Hillary retains a commanding national lead, even if things are closer in the early states. So Obama needs to start taking chunks out of Hillary’s numbers soon if he is not going to fade away. This exchange between the two front runners and Chris Dodd, another Senator running for president, at last night's debate shows how the battle lines are being drawn. Note how hard Obama hits Hillary over her Iraq vote and the reaction of the crowd, albeit one from Obama's home state of Illinois, when Hillary tries to scold him for his inexperience.

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The 2008 version of the Olympic Spirit

A small, but telling, example of the nature of the regime that will be hosting the 2008 Olympics comes in James Fallows’s latest missive from China. “CNN International began its report talking about what is obviously the main deal-breaking threat to the Olympics: the air. The correspondent had gotten far enough into the story to say, "Some foreign athletes fear..." and then the screen went blank for the next two minutes or so."Do also take a look at these fantastic photos that show just how bad the pollution in Beijing really is. It will be a wonder if they get through the games without the poor air quality disrupting proceedings.

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When discrimination is good

Thank God for the Act of Settlement (1701). It keeps us focused. In the past week newspapers have been focusing on poor Peter Phillips, tenth in line to the throne, who is engaged to Autumn Kelly, a Canadian Catholic. If she does not abandon her religion, he will have to renounce his right to succeed — or call the wedding off.  That’s the deal with the Act of Settlement -- the Supreme Governor of the Church of England may not be married to a Roman Catholic -- and RCs are said to be very cross. In the words of the Times’s excitable Ruth Gledhill, the Act ‘has for centuries been a cause of anguish to Catholics’.

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How emotional should politicians get?

Drew Westen, the super smart American political scientist who wrote for The Spectator a few weeks back, has extracts of his new book on why leaders need to connect on an emotional as well as intellectual level in G2 today. Westen makes a good case; there’s no doubt that much of the Republicans’ electoral success since 1968 can be chalked up to their superior ability to connect with voters on a gut level. But Westen goes too far when he suggests that Gore would have stood a better chance of being elected president if he had hit back during the 2000 debates when Bush questioned his honesty and called Bush a coward, a drunk, a crook, and a disgrace to his family, his state and his country.

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A period of silence on Malloch Brown’s part

This morning’s Today Programme had an item on the Foreign Office Minister Mark Malloch Brown that’s well worth listening to. Malloch Brown has quickly become the most controversial of Gordon’s appointments. His desire for a “more impartial” foreign policy, for Bush and Brown not to be joined at the hip and his endorsement—albeit while still at the UN—of a unified EU seat on the Security Council has made him a ripe target for the press. Presumably, that’s why Malloch Brown turned down Today’s invitation to go on to talk about the new UN resolution on Darfur But if Malloch Brown is having to be shielded from the press just months after being appointed, what chance is there of him making it all the way through to the election?

Tuesday

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A Golden Opportunity for the GOP

A ballot initiative in California could have more impact on the 2008 presidential race than any of the back and forth that is going on between the candidates at present. Currently California gives all its presidential votes—and it has more of them than any other state, 55 of the 270 you needs to be elected president—to which ever candidate gets the most votes. This is good news for the Democrats as California is a solidly blue state. However, this ballot initiative would dish out California’s voters by Congressional district—giving the Republicans around 20 or so of its electoral votes, that’s equivalent to winning a state like Pennsylvania, Illinois or Ohio.

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You don’t want to say that

Here’s the Guardian’s website reporting William Hague’s defence of David Cameron today: “Speaking at a press conference in central London, Mr Hague also dismissed claims that Mr Cameron was failing to bolster Tory support in the north. He said the party had raised more money from northern donors in the first seven months of this year than it had over the whole of last year.” This strikes me as entirely the wrong metric for Hague to use as it means that when another Tory donor takes pot shots at the leadership in public, as they surely will, the media will have a justification for treating it as a major story.

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Why England industrialised first

Was the industrial revolution a product of downward social mobility? That’s the argument of a forthcoming book by the American historian Gregory Clark. His thesis is that as the rich had more children that survived than the poor, the population of England was by 1800 overwhelmingly made up of the descendants of the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages and that as the children of the rich spread throughout society so did the attitudes and values that make people wealthy. As he puts it, “Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving”.

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The state of Basra

The Washington Post this morning has a sobering account of the situation on the ground in Basra. The paper reveals that the US government has expressed concerns about the impact of the British pull back on the rest of Iraq at the highest levels to the British. While a senior US intelligence official tells the Post, "The British have basically been defeated in the south".  All of which makes the government’s desicion to refuse to facilitate asylum applications from 91 Iraqi interpreaters who have worked with British forces in Basra all the more shocking. The Times is surely right that these brave folk should be welcomed to this country with open arms.

Monday

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Things you shouldn’t reveal on Facebook

If you’re the daughter of a presidential candidate who already has political problems because of his complicated family life it doesn’t help if you reveals on your Facebook page that your supporting another candidate. The only silver lining for Rudy Giuliani is that his Harvard undergrad daughter Caroline (pictured with her mother and Rudy's second wife) is backing Barack Obama and not another Republican.

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What Labour MPs should read instead of The God Delusion

The most popular book among Labour MPs this summer is, according to a new survey, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have rather mixed views on Dawkins who is as dogmatic as those he so joyously bashes for their dogmatism. Rod Liddle brilliantly skewered this aspect of Dawkins in a Spectator interview with him back in December which is well worth reading if you want to save yourself the trouble of wading through The God Delusion.

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Another Rumsfeld blunder

Abu Ghraib was a shameful episode and Don Rumsfeld, true to obstinate form, never seemed to grasp quite how much damage it had done America. But what is equally revealing is the careless way that Rumsfeld disclosed the name of the whistle blower, Joe Darby. Dabry recounted the story in the Sunday Times: "Five weeks later I was sitting in the dining facility in Camp Anaconda in Iraq when a press conference came on that was the live feed from the congregational hearings about Abu Ghraib. There was an announcement that secretary Rumsfeld was thanking me for turning in the photos and allowing the investigation to go forward – thanking me by name. I was eating with four soldiers and I just stopped mid-bite.

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Is Ashcroft’s money a reason for Brown to go early?

John Kampfner has a piece in The Guardian today urging caution on Labour and its supporters about the party’s electoral prospects because of the amount of resources Lord Ashcroft is pumping into the Tory’s target seats. Kampfner’s argument is that that the Tory money advantage combined with the fickle nature of the press means that come September Cameron’s fortunes will start to revive which suggests that an early poll is not the risk free exercise that some seem to think that it is. Yet there is a case to be made that Ashcroft’s efforts are a reason for Labour to go early rather than spending the next 18 months trying to build up a war chest to match the Tories pound for pound.