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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the YouTube debate Barack Obama and Hillary got into a row about whether or not the US president should meet with some of the world’s least attractive leaders—Castro, Chavez, Ahmadinejad etc. Clinton went after Obama hard for promising to meet with all these guys during his first year in office. After the debate, she described his plan as "irresponsible and frankly naive." Hillary, perhaps, overplayed her hand, as her criticisms drew from Obama his toughest attack on her to date: "I think what is irresponsible and naive is to have authorized a war without asking how we were going to get out -- and you know I think Senator Clinton hasn’t fully answered that issue.
What do neo-con action hero John Rambo and not-neo-con newspaper The Independent have in common? A bottle of champagne to the first Coffee Houser to get the right answer.
The new issue of the always excellent Prospect has a great debate between Andrew Marr and Joan Smith about whether the mass emotionalism that followed Diana’s death, and is now a regular part of our national life, is a good thing or not. Andrew Marr argues that thanks to it: "We are a more relaxed and more emotionally healthy people than we used to be, and the “Diana moment,” for all its weirdness and excess, marked this change. It was a telling national catharsis, and the moment too when “holding it all in” was no longer seen as a virtue. I like what we have become.
Fraser's piece is already making waves. The reason for this is that it poses the question that all Tories are thinking about but dare not voice - not least because they do not know the answer to the question: "If not Dave, then who?" To lose a fourth successive general election, as the polls suggest the Conservatives are on course to do, would be a savage blow to any party. The years 1992-94 (post-Kinnock, pre-Blair) have been airbrushed out of Labour Party history, but they should act as a terrible warning to those Tories who think that a bit of creative disunity now is what the party needs.
If you’re thinking about the sacred bullock that is about to be slaughtered on the orders of the Welsh Assembly, do read the incomparable Jeremy Clarke’s piece on Shambo.
Fraser has a cracking piece in tomorrow’s magazine on who'd take over if something happened to Dave. As Fraser reports, there’s no clear alternative—something that Cameron has reason to be thankful for considering the feeding frenzy currently going on in the Westminster village. I called William Hills earlier and asked them for the odds on who would be the next Tory leader and they make for interesting reading. William Hague 9/4 fav. David Davis 5/1 George Osborne and Andrew Lansley 10/1 Liam Fox and Alan Duncan 12/1 Nick Herbert 14/1 Theresa Villiers 16/1 Some other interesting odds: Ed Vaizey 20/1, Malcolm Rifkind, Ken Clarke and Julie Kirkbride 25/1, Michael Gove 33/1 and Boris Johnson 50/1.
Gordon Brown’s announcement that there will now be a unified border police force removes one of the Conservatives’ favourite talking points on security. It also puts them in a tricky position as it was an essential balance to their opposition to other anti-terror measures such as 90 day detention: we’re not soft, they could say, just practical. The Tories now find their security see-saw distinctly unbalanced: another round to Brown.
I have been interested in Ward Churchill for years. So interested, in fact, that his writings inspired me to write a novel about what might happen if the “global justice movement” developed a taste for revolutionary violence. Churchill, who claims Native American ancestry, has finally been sacked by the University of Colorado for calling the dead of 9/11 “little Eichmanns” – his appalling claim being that the financiers in the World Trade Center were no better than the Nazis. In fact, Churchill has been saying this, and much else for six years. His reaction to the September 11 atrocities was: “it’s about time.
There’s been a lot of hype – justifiably – around P J O’Rourke’s book on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations Indeed, we posted on it weeks ago. But Coffee Housers should not miss out on Eamonn Butler’s splendid new guide, Adam Smith - A Primer (IEA, £7.50), which is a thorough and well-written introduction to the thoughts of the great economist and philosopher. Given our new Prime Minister’s fascination with Smith, it is a book to keep at one’s side in the months ahead.
If like me you’re a complete sucker for all things Banksy, do check out the graffiti artist’s new website.
Oh, Vino. How could you be so stupid? You fought all the way up from the bottom, making it from Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan to Paris, France on the strength of your legs and an indomitably aggressive spirit. When your team collapsed days before last year's Tour de France when German Jan Ullrich was barred on doping charges, you convinced the Kazakh government to put together a team just for you. When you fell on one of the first days of this year's Tour, you won the hearts of fans by racing on with more than 30 stitches in your leg and arm. Just finishing this year would have been enough to guarantee a comfortable retirement as the Kazakh Minister of Sport or some such sinecure.
Today’s papers carry a rather exasperated quote from the publicist of Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor who plays Harry Potter. Responding to questions about whether Radcliffe had, shock horror, been drinking at his 18th birthday party: “The question as to whether Daniel was or wasn’t drinking alcohol at his birthday party last night, I am not willing to discuss. Daniel is now 18 and the question of whether he chooses to consume alcohol at a private function or not is completely up to him.” But the publicist rather spoils her point by going to great lengths to deny that Radcliffe had been “drinking Fosters or any other lager” while watching the cricket at Lords during the day.
Today's Guardian ICM poll continues the run of bad figures for Dave. Now, all of this can be (and is being) dismissed by Tory optimists as part and parcel of the predictable "Brown bounce": Gordon has not yet been PM for a month, after all. And I agree that Cameron would be daft to mould his strategy around the voting intention statistics drawn up by pollsters in the first few weeks of a premiership. The finding that should worry Dave is that a majority of Labour and Tory voters think that Brown has brought a change to government. This suggests that the public has bought Gordon's mantra that he has "listened and learned" and is the "change" candidate.
Anyone who doubts George W Bush's commitment to Iraq should read this speech delivered by the President at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina. Quoting verbatim from intelligence reports, Bush argues that al Qaeda is firmly established in Iraq, but that its operations there predated the invasion of 2003. He takes Bin Laden at his word, in concluding that this is a test case for the war on terror, not a distraction from it: Our action to remove Saddam Hussein did not start the terrorist violence — and America withdrawal from Iraq would not end it. The al Qaida terrorists now blowing themselves up in Iraq are dedicated extremists who have made killing the innocent the calling of their lives.