The Spectator

Monday

The Spectator

Malloch Brown wanted a joint EU seat on the UNSC

From our UK edition

The Tories have dug up a rather good story. When Mark Malloch Brown was still at the UN he was a strong advocate of the EU having one collective seat on the Security Council, saying that it should happen “as quickly as possible. I’m a huge fan of it.” Now admittedly, Malloch Brown wasn’t in the government at the time. But it does seem rather odd that Gordon Brown has put a man who aspires to this as the minister in charge of UN reform. It also puts the proposal for the EU High Representative to automatically speak for the EU as a whole, whenever the Union is agreed, at the Security Council into a rather more sinister light.

Sunday

The Spectator

America looks for a first spouse

From our UK edition

One of the most notable features of the 2008 presidential race is the amount of attention being lavished on the spouses of the candidates. Just today we have a New York Times interview in which Judith Giuliani responds to a scathing Vanity Fair profile of her and pieces in the Washington Post and Newsweek looking at the role of Fred Thompson’s wife Jeri (pictured) in his campaign. You can come up with lots of reasons for all this interest in the other halves of the candidates. Obviously, there’s the Bill factor with the fascination with him and the Clinton marriage spilling over onto the other candidates and their wives. There’s the fact that the spouses this time out are a pretty interesting bunch who are taking on high-profile campaign roles.

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What are Britain’s best blogs?

From our UK edition

Iain Dale is compiling a list of the best political blogs in the UK and wants to know what  y'all think. If you want to take part just send iain AT iaindale DOT com an email, type Top 20 in the subejct line and then list your top twenty, or at least top ten, political blogs. The results should make for interesting reading.

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Gordon’s retirement plan

From our UK edition

With Brown celebrating what Matt rightly calls a triumph of a first month, it is a strange time to consider his retirment as I do in my column in today's News of the World (not online). My information is that Brown believes he has only one election in him: he'll fight it, then hand over. This makes sense: Brown may be all for working past retirement age but I doubt the electorate would let him lead by example. He has already started succession planning, by putting a new generation of ministers in key posts but being careful not to over promote (and therefore risk ruining) them. But as Blair showed, openly planning for retirement is a dangeous game in No 10. After you win the election, the fighting begins.

The Spectator

Miraj row rumbles on

From our UK edition

The Ali Miraj saga takes another twist with a piece by him in The Sunday Times alleging that a current member of the shadow cabinet offered him a peerage soon after 7/7. Miraj writes that: “What is not commonly known is that I was, in fact, asked whether I would consider accepting a seat in the Lords in 2005 following the 7/7 London bombings tragedy, when the party was seeking to appoint a “Muslim” parliamentarian to that House. The approach was made by a present member of the shadow cabinet and I declined it. I am choosing not to disclose names at this time, but should the party elect to have selective amnesia on this issue, naming the individual concerned will be the only logical response.

Saturday

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Letters to the Editor | 4 August 2007

From our UK edition

Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. English lessons Sir: Graham Lord (‘Is it a tough ask to speak proper English?’, 28 July) gives a clue to the increase in use of bad English when he points out that recent immigrants from eastern Europe speak our language much better than many of our own young people do. The reason is that the incomers have been taught by people who think it important to use correct English. That does not apply to some teaching in our state school system today.

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Screening the PM

From our UK edition

The Times has a cracking story this morning about how everyone in Whitehall is coping—or not—with Gordon Brown’s ferocious appetite for work. Apparently, “His weapon of choice is the mobile phone, which will ring from 6.30am, with the bright-eyed, perky Prime Minister demanding papers, discussing strategy and even asking for feedback.” The Times reports that it has got so bad that people are now not picking up when Brown calls. There’s lots of other great details in the piece; including how he kept Ruth Kelly, Ed Miliband, Hilary Benn at No. 10 until one in the morning while he waited to be satisfied that a moment of danger during the floods had passed. Do read the whole thing.

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Brown’s Darfur triumph is also his test

From our UK edition

Those who have exchanged fierce views on the invasion of Iraq have a fresh challenge this week: how to react to the UN resolution, tabled by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy with support from George W. Bush, to send 19,000 peacekeeping troops to the Darfur region of western Sudan. This is one deployment of foreign troops, we trust, of which all but the most ardent pacifist or isolationist will approve. Over the past four years 200,000 Sudanese have keen killed in rebel fighting and a further two million turned into refugees. If this is not a humanitarian disaster on a scale which justifies international intervention, it would be difficult to conceive of one which did.

Friday

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What Cameron can learn from Canada

From our UK edition

The Conservative Home team are currently touring the Anglosphere and reporting back on the state of conservatism in these countries. This week’s report is on Canada under Stephen Harper (pictured) and makes for interesting reading considering the Tories current predicament. After all the Canadian Conservatives came back from a defeat far more crushing than 1997. To my mind, the key lesson the Tories can draw on from the Harper-led Conservative revival is his success in building internal coalitions on issues. This is something that the Cameron project has been bad at. For instance, lots of Tory members are inherently suspicious of all the talk of global warming.

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Summer reading for Gordon

From our UK edition

Matt notes in his report on Brown’s US trip this that Gordon Brown has, thankfully, abandoned the intellectual lazy assumption that poverty causes terrorism. But Brown should still get hold of a copy of What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism by the Princeton professor Alan B. Krueger before he heads off to Dorset on holiday. Krueger through a careful analysis of the statistics debunks the notion that poverty and terrorism go hand in hand. Indeed, it is amazing how this idea—which has no evidentiary support—has become the received wisdom.   The link that Krueger finds is not between terrorism and poverty but terrorism and an absence of political freedom.

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Fighting words from Cameron, but he’s picking the wrong fight

From our UK edition

  Some strikingly martial language from Cameron who is now promising to "give the government a bare knuckle fight over the NHS". What a shame that his strategy is to do this on behalf of the unions, rather than the patients. There is still time to rewrite his dismal NHS policy. Brown is dumping the Blair reform agenda: power to the patients, not the producers (or the "professionals" as the Tories now lovingly call them), should be Cameron's mantra. But this fighting talk is a welcome change of tone.

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Have you seen this man?

From our UK edition

Iain Dale has his monthly table of shadow cabinet media mentions up and as always it makes for interesting reading. Amazingly, Peter Ainsworth, the Tory environment spokesman, got a mere 57 mentions in July despite the 24/7 media coverage of the floods. Indeed, his Liberal Democrat opposite number Chris Huhne got more attention than Ainsworth as did 18 of his shadow cabinet colleagues. The numbers also show the need for the shadow cabinet as a whole to up its game. Currently, David Cameron gets more press than the 31 members others of it combined. While if Nick Clegg was a Tory he’d be eighth in the table. All of which raises the question of whether the shadow cabinet can continue to carry so many part-timers.

The Spectator

Guardian: Brown planning Spring ’08 poll

From our UK edition

The Guardian has a story in today's edition suggesting that Gordon Brown has pencilled in spring 2008 as the time for an election. Apparently, campaign professionals are being sounded out about working for the campaign with polling day planned for sometime before May 1st. This date would have the advantage of short-circuiting the Cameron project without Brown risking a backlash from the country for calling an election just because he’s ahead in the polls that he might face if he went this autumn. What are your predictions for what the result of a spring ‘08 poll would be?

Thursday

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Very possibly the worst idea from a presidential candidate ever

From our UK edition

  Some dumb things are said during every presidential campaign but few statements in campaign history can be as reckless, irresponsible and downright idiotic as Republican Presidential contender Tom Tancredo’s proposal that the United States announce that in response to a nuclear terrorist attack it would nuke Mecca and Medina. Tancredo thinks that this would be an effective deterrent. But  it would actually play straight into the terrorist hands: not only would they have pulled off a spectacular on American soil, but the American response world then thrust the world into a full blown clash of civilisations. I know you can say that Tancredo is about as likely to win the Republican nomination as Gordon Brown is to wear that bomber jacket George W.

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The challenge for Boris

From our UK edition

There is both a must-read and a must-hear on the Boris for London front this morning. First the must-read, Matthew Parris's column in this week's magazine on what Boris needs to do to win. His thoughts on how Boris could prove that he’ll put city above party are particularly smart. While the must-hear is Ken talking about his likely challenger on The Today Programme. He conceded that Boris is the most formidable opponent that he’ll face in his political career but he also previewed his line of attack on him, declaring that Boris was to the right of Norman Tebbit. Red Ken is half-way through Boris’s entire oeuvre at the moment so expect his assault  to consist mainly of lines taken from Boris’s columns.

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The revolution enters a new phase

From our UK edition

Philip Gould's memo laying out what Gordon Brown needs to do to win an early election makes for fascinating reading. Especially notable is Gould’s belief that elections can’t be won on ‘schools n’ hospitals’ or ‘investment versus Tory cuts’ any more. He writes that: “There is no doubt that the political landscape is changing: Crime, terror, immigration and so on are now the dominant issues. Underpinning these concerns is a growing sense of the power of events beyond our control - globalised economies, international terror, community disintegration and so on....However, public services and the economy are still important, about equal and just below security.

Wednesday

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Obama out-hawks Bush and Clinton on Pakistan

From our UK edition

Barak Obama just delivered the most important speech of the 2008 campaign so far. Having stepped to Hillary’s left on the issue of meeting with Castro, Ahamdinejad, Chavez et al, he is now going to her right by pledging himself to military strikes on al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan if Musharraf won’t deal with the problem himself. If, through positions such as this, Obama can establish himself as credible on national security he will have removed one of the major obstacles to him being elected president. Here's the key passage of his speech: “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005.

The Spectator

Everything you ever wanted to know about Harry Potter and some

From our UK edition

If you have read all seven of the JK Rowling books and still haven’t sated your appetite for knowledge of Potter and friends, then read this QandA between the author and some of her most dedicated readers. (Don’t click on the link if you haven’t yet finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and want the ending to be a surprise) Hat tip: New York magazine.

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A cheeky idea

From our UK edition

The BBC are reporting that Ed Davey, Ming’s chief of staff, is floating the idea of his officemate Lembit Opik running for mayor of London. This strikes me as a rather desperate attempt by the Lib Dems to get someone with Boris or Ken level name recognition on the ballot. But there’s no denying that Opik’s presence would further liven up the contest.

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List your pet hates

From our UK edition

Over at Comment Central, Daniel Finkelstein is asking folks what impolite behaviour really gets under their skin in an attempt to draw up a definitive list. He starts us off with David Aaronvitch’s ten suggestions in The Times this morning and adds in a few of his own: people who bellow on their mobiles, make speeches when called on to ask a question, put you on email lists without asking and joke about other people’s weight. I’ll definitely second Daniel on the motion of people who fail to obey the chair’s injunction to ask a question--not speechify--at meetings and add in my current bug bears: people who try and get into a Tube carriage while others are still trying to leave and London cab drivers who ask you where you are going before picking you up.