The Spectator

Wednesday

The Spectator

The author’s Faulks, Sebastian Faulks

The news that Sebastian Faulks has written a Bond novel says a lot about the status 007 has achieved in the culture. On the big screen and through a ruthless process of reinvention, Bond remains a player at the multiplex. Poor Pierce Brosnan thought he was doing just fine, being tortured in Korea to the strains of Madonna in Die Another Day….and then along came Daniel Craig to make Pierce look about as modern as a Robin Reliant. In the new Spectator which hits the newsstand tomorrow, Tim Walker has a terrific interview with Rupert Everett who speculates that a gay actor could never play Bond. But who knows? The film version of the character has to be almost infinitely adaptable to survive in the movie marketplace.

Tuesday

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Why Cameron is right on families

For all my misgivings about the Cameron project, he is in exactly the right place on the family. His speech today was authentic, strong, thought-provoking and laid out clear blue water between him and Gordon Brown. As the rather pitiful performance of Ed Miliband on Today this morning showed us, Brown is uninterested in the family agenda. He looks as this only in terms of children, whips his calculator out and declares them “lifted out of poverty” having crossed some weird threshold. Cameron talks about broken homes – language everyone understands. The Broken Society topic is the most urgent issue in Britain today, and Cameron is firmly on the right side of the debate.

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Can John McCain recover?

The former Republican frontrunner has just let his three most senior campaign aides go. These three departures signify the deep trouble that McCain’s campaign is in; he is now third or fourth in the polls and trails the fringe libertarian candidate Ron Paul in the money stakes. But he could still recover. He’s the candidate on the Republican side who is most qualified to be president from day one, not an unimportant qualification considering the state that George W. Bush will leave the country in. He ‘gets’ the nature of the fight we’re in better than any candidate on either side and is also the only Republican candidate to have been given the full presidential vetting by the national press corps. McCain is down but not out.

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I haven’t thrown in the towel

I would like to reach across cyberspace to reassure the great Anne Applebaum. She says in Slate that "the Spectator magazine—the Conservatives' once-faithful house organ—was ready to throw in the towel" with my cover story a fortnight ago 'All bets are off.’ Yes, we did indeed declare that Brown is surprising the Conservatives (and us) but our principles haven’t changed one iota. We remain a cheerleader for conservatism and common sense in general, which is why I feel under no compulsion to cheer Cameron as he moves so far to the left that he actually overtakes Brown. On several issues: flag waving, private equity, the environment, house building and tax Brown can reasonably claim to be to the right of the New Tories. It’s truly bizarre, but there we are.

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Why social breakdown is so difficult for government to deal with

"All of the work that we have done has reinforced the importance of the first three years on a child’s cognitive and emotional development. The emotional brain is largely created in the first 18 months of life and its auditory map is formed even earlier, by 12 months. Furthermore, it has also been shown, alarmingly, that a child’s education developmental score at 22 months can accurately predict educational outcomes at the age of 26." This stat in Iain Duncan Smith’s report illustrates the difficulty for public policy in dealing with the whole problem of social breakdown. You can have the best schools in the world but if social advantage is entrenched by the age of three, then they won’t make much difference--at least for this generation.

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Bush will change Britain’s politics more than America’s

While the Republicans in America are quietly burying George W. Bush's legacy in domestic policy, the Tories are embracing it. Iain Duncan Smith’s report on social policy, a labour of love if ever there was one, is animated by the same spirit of compassionate conservatism that underpinned George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. IDS’s description of the philosophical underpinnings of the report couldn’t have been put better by Bush, or Karen Hughes: “Our approach is based on the belief that people must take responsibility for their own choices but that government has a responsibility to help people make the right choices. Government must therefore value and support positive life choices.

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We spend far too much on science

A brilliant topic on the Today programme – the scandal of the government science budget. A staggering £3.4bn of our money is spent on science – thus socialising what should be a completely liberalised form of human endeavour. This partly explains why so many scientists are on call to add to the chorus of global warming alarmism: this is where the research funds lie. All this diverts scientific attention from cutting-edge science which runs against the grain of government priorities. We have a world class Foreign Office, yet are closing down embassies because its £1.8bn budget is deemed excessive. Scandalously, a school teaching Farsi and Arabic to GCHQ staff was recently closed because of cuts.

Monday

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If you’re looking for…

The Spectator’s thoughts on Boris running for Mayor see Mary Wakefield’s ten point plan and the magazine’s official endorsement. We also have comprehensive coverage of the Alastair Campbell diaries. Anthony Browne, head of the think tank Policy Exchange and the former chief political correspondent of The Times, flags up and explains the key passages below; Reading the Campbell Diaries Parts  I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X and XI. Our political editor Fraser Nelson previews the coming three-part BBC documentary on the diaries here and Toby Young explains why Campbell is, in reality, more like Adrian Mole than Nicolas Machiavelli. Everything else, continues below.

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What matters in the Campbell diaries

If you can’t be bothered ploughing through the Campbell memoirs, BBC2 has done a superb job filleting it. I’ve just had a preview of the three-part documentary starting on Wednesday – complete with his bleeped-out expletives and thoughts on everything from homicide to suicide. Fittingly, it’s from the same production company that did Grumpy Old Men. He reads from his diary, while a narrator and news clips take up the rest of the story. There are lots of shots of Campbell jogging, writing on his desk and staring out the window as if mulling world domination. It’s certainly his side of the story, and doesn’t pretend to be a balanced history. Yet for those who consider Campbell a villain, there’s plenty ammo to make you say ‘Ha!

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Boris for Mayor: A ten-step program

1) Do you remember in Peter Pan when poor Tinkerbell fades away because no-one believes in fairies, and how miraculously she perks up when the children begin to clap? Well, it’s the same with Boris.  I’m not saying that he responds to applause like fairy, just that the first step is faith. Exorcise your doubts right now: Believe in Boris! 2) Prepare a retort for the naysayers. Insecure and ambitious men will cry ‘buffoon!’ But Boris has done a good job as higher education minister, written serious books and made ancient history accessible. If he’s an idiot, what does that make the rest of us? 3) Then get online. There are hundreds of bloggers out there all tap-tapping away about Boris’s prospects. Log on. Join in. As we say round here.

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Mo Mowlam, not as useful as she was popular

August 17th, 1998 on how useless Mo Mowlam was in drafting a statement after the Omagh bomb: “We then had the ludicrous situation of TB having to ask Mo for her fax number, and her shouting out ‘Anyone out there who knows the fax number?’ and then saying the officials had disappeared. It was the Mo manner that was fine when things didn’t matter, but deeply irritating when they did. She sounded more and more exasperated. ‘I’ll say whatever you want, Tony,’ she said, at which point he exploded at her… she then lost the plot completely… Mo was getting near hysterical. TB said to her if you went out and read that statement as you read it to us earlier, you will be dead. I mean dead, totally out of the water.

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The Dodgy Dossier

Sunday 21st June 2003, on demands that he should resign over the “dodgy dossier” on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “I hadn’t slept well. I was avoiding answering the phone other than to the office because by now all the broadcasters and half the Sundays were trying to ask me if I was going. Now was probably not the right time. It would be seen as bad for TB and bad for me if I went under a cloud.” Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House.

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No WMD

June 2nd 2003, on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: “TB was still in ‘it’s ridiculous’ mode and getting more and more irritated by what was essentially a media-driven thing. The main problem of course was that there were no WMD discoveries beyond the two labs, and no matter how much we said that there were other priorities now, the public were being told as a matter of fact that we had done wrong. We had Clare Short, Robin Cook and a lot of backbenchers on the rampage now. So it was difficult.” Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House.

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Mandelson’s first resignation

December 19th 1998, on the news breaking that Peter Mandelson had borrowed money from Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house: “I had a long chat with Peter M, who claimed not to see what the problem was re the loan. He said what was wrong with a friend lending money to someone? I said it had the potential to be a big story…. He was adamant it would not be much of a story. I said it had the potential to be the worst thing to hit us yet.” December 23rd, 1998: “The papers were absolutely ghastly for Peter, massive coverage and relentlessly negative.” December 23rd 1998, on Mandelson after TB forced him to resign: “I felt desperately sad for Peter, who came back in looking wretched.

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‘Two families with the same woman’

July 11th, 2002 on TB telling him that Cherie was pregnant: “He then walked over to the wall, leaned against it, laughed and said ‘There’s another complication I need to tell you about.’ He said: ‘I think Cherie is pregnant.’ He said they were both absolutely gobsmacked about the whole thing. But it did mean it was forcing him to think about the future. ‘I’ve effectively got two families with the same woman.’” Anthony Browne, director of the think-tank Policy Exchange and prior to that the chief political correspondent of The Times, is plucking out the most interesting passages from the just published Alastair Campbell diaries for Coffee House.

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Downing Street wives

July 25th, 2003 On Cherie Blair firing Alastair Campbell’s wife Fiona Millar as her adviser, accusing her of briefing against her. ”I told TB about CB’s call and said that it was unforgivable that she spoke to Fiona like that after all she’d done for her. He said people were too fraught at the moment and Cherie was feeling under pressure. I said she needed to apologise, otherwise there would be badness between them that helped nobody. He said that the problem at the moment is that the public will begin to wonder whether we are governing the country. All they hear is all this stuff about personalities, process and the rest and they start to wonder if it’s all we do.

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The Mandelson-Brown relationship

May 9th 1996, on Peter Mandelson’s row with Gordon Brown over political strategy: “They started talking very loudly at each other, just a few decibels short of shouting. TB, who for once was sitting in the chair by the TV…said for heaven’s sake keep this under control. Peter then stood up, said no, I won’t, I’m not taking this any of this crap any longer, and stormed out. TB just shook his head, while GB stared at his papers then started scribbling.” Comment: in case there were any doubters left in Britain, the diaries make crystal clear the appalling relationship between two of the godfathers of New Labour - Brown and Mandelson.

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Campbell considered suicide

August 10th, 2003 on being told while on holiday in France that the Hutton Inquiry wanted to read his diaries: “I had received the request for my diary on Thursday and now, finally, this year’s was being flown out by Peter Howes [duty clerk]. As I left the house, and said goodbye to Fiona, I did actually wonder momentarily whether it would be the last time I saw her, whether what I discovered on reading my own diary would be so awful that I would want to top myself. It was only a passing thought, but it was there, and it came back several times as I drove down to Marseille. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but in this climate, things had gone beyond reason, it was like a drama or a novel, and nobody had control of events.

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Reading the Campbell diaries, Part III

August 11th, 1994: on Blair telling him about his plans to ditch Clause 4, while trying to persuade Campbell to work as his press secretary: “By now, he had also let me know, and sworn me to secrecy, that he was minded to have a review of the constitution and scrap Clause 4. I have never felt any great ideological attachment to Clause 4 one way or the other. If it made people happy, fine, but it didn’t actually set out what the party was about today. It wasn’t the politics or the ideology that appealed. It was the boldness. People had talked about it for years. Here was a new leader telling me that he was thinking about doing it in his first conference speech as leader. Bold. I said I hope you do, because it’s bold. I will, he said.