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Thursday

The Spectator

Obama takes a shot at Hillary

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.

The Spectator

Has the Dianaisation of Britain changed the country for the better?

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.

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The Tories have no plan b

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.

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RIP Shambo

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.

Wednesday

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What if Cameron fell under a bus?

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.

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Brown nabs another Tory idea

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.

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The warped world of Ward Churchill

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.

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Essential reading

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.

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What a dope

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.

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The boy who drank

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.

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More bad news for Dave

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.

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Bush is not for turning

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.

Tuesday

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Reading between Gordon’s lines

Gordon Brown's new book, Britain's Everyday Heroes (Mainstream, £10.99), is yet another important clue to the Prime Minister's political trajectory. In inspiration, it is part Cobbett's Rural Rides, part Eliot's homage to "unhistoric acts". In his portraits of 33 individuals engaged in various forms of service and community work, Gordon identifies those he regards as the "true celebrities" of our times, and hails "an age of engagement: with our culture and communities energised and improved by the choices and actions of individuals - people power." In such enterprise, he says, we can see - you guessed it - the "greatness of Britain" as well as the "timeless values of the good society". Political bromides? Not at all.

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Here’s some beef

Amidst all the hullabaloo about David Cameron heading to Rwanda while parts of his constituency remain flooded, it is worth noting that the report he is unveiling over there has some pretty sound ideas in it. Writing in the Telegraph this morning, Peter Lilley, the group’s chair, argues that trade is essential and that rich countries must do five things: “open their markets unilaterally to the products of all low-income countries; liberalise the "rules of origin" that result in 40 per cent of imports that should enter Europe tariff-free paying duties; give incentives to reduce the high tariff barriers between developing countries; abolish export subsidies that damage Third World agriculture; and give more Aid for Trade to help poor countries develop their exports.

Monday

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Cameron’s gamble

Behold an extraordinary role reversal: the Tories used to define themselves by crunchy competence, and Labour by compassion and an emotional appeal to collective and international solidarity. Tonight, Gordon Brown is styling himself as the right man to steer the nation through its watery crisis: après la deluge, moi. David Cameron, meanwhile, has taken a colossal gamble, and gone ahead with his trip to Rwanda to mark the launch of the Conservatives' international poverty report. Tomorrow's papers will make for rough reading, I predict. As British voters worry about the cost of flood damage and the promise of further inundation, the Tories fly out of the country.

The Spectator

The real Iraq question

Both sides in the Iraq debate tend to ignore, or downplay, the downside to their preferred course of action. On Meet the Press, New York Times columnist David Brooks put the dilemma that both sides need to address: So are we willing to prevent 10,000 Iraqi deaths a month at the cost of 125 Americans? That's a tough moral issue, but it's also a tough national interest issue because we don't know what the consequences of getting out are. And the frustration of watching the debate in Washington, very few people are willing to, to grapple with those two facts, that there's--that the surge will not work in the short-term, but getting out will be cataclysmic. And you see politicians on both sides evading one of those two facts. But you've got to grapple with them both.

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Kavanagh: Labour set to win big and then win again

In The Sun this morning Trevor Kavanagh dismisses the Tories chances of winning the next election, writing: “Gordon Brown is going to win—and win big. In the process he will likely set Labour up for a fifth term and 20 unbroken years of socialism.Why? Not because he has necessarily delivered a better Britain over the past ten years – though he has been fiendishly clever. But because the Tories are still soft, arrogant and – some say – idle.”   Kavanagh goes on to contrast Brown’s workaholic determination with the Tories more relaxed approach.