To put today’s coronation of Gordon Brown as Labour leader into historical perspective – with the exception of leaders who have stepped into the breach temporarily after deaths (George Brown after Hugh Gaitskell, and Margaret Beckett after John Smith), there has not been an uncontested succession since George Lansbury took the helm in October 1931.
Lie of the land Sir: In the past few weeks Hamas has shown itself to be a merciless, power-hungry organisation with little interest in the well-being of its own people, let alone that of its Jewish neighbours, so Dr Hamad must be laughing into his cup of Earl Grey tea at the ease with which
As Matt points out below, whether we have a referendum or not is a political not a legal question. In ruling one out, Gordon Brown is banking on David Cameron not wanting to risk looking Europe-obsessed by banging on about the need for one. (I can already hear Brown taunting Cameron at PMQs with lines
The great choreographer and negotiator got what he wanted: four red lines on a shirt. Tony Blair is claiming complete victory in his final summit, and the negotiators are particularly relieved that the complexities of voting rights have been kicked into touch till 2014 (what will Blair be doing then? And Gordon?). But, with the
By the time the next issue of The Spectator hits the news-stands, Tony Blair will have battled his way through his last EU summit; the Labour party will have elected a new leader and deputy leader; and Britain will have a new Prime Minister who will be busy forming his government. Harold Wilson’s over-quoted remark
Berlin Mentioning Poland’s suffering in World War II is usually a sure way to win sympathy and shut down argument. But this week Polish politicians may have pushed the “Christ of Nations” act a bit too far. Explaining his intransigence over EU vote distribution – which has led to a diplomatic train wreck at this
I hope that Tony Blair becomes a Catholic, but I don’t think that his being received into the Church will make him one. Nothing about Blair says ‘Catholic’. He has made much of his Christianity, but he has always seemed more Songs of Praise than Pontifical High Mass. His enthusiasm for the global democratic revolution
This morning’s must-read is Mary Anne Sieghart’s column in The Times about Brown’s maneuvering over the past few days. Here’s her key point: “That this was not properly thought through inclines me to believe that Mr Brown’s approach was never really serious. He knew that he would look good whether Sir Menzies and Lord Ashdown
I’ve been musing on Fraser’s post about the Ashdown affair and can’t help thinking that Brown must have know that Ashdown would say no: Northern Ireland Secretary is hardly something worth breaking with your party for. Indeed, if you think about it, is hard to see what the attraction of the job is even to
What was Gordon Brown up to in offering a job to Paddy Ashdown? He would have known that news would leak (you can always be sure of Ming “colander” Campbell) so what was his game? There are three theories in Westminster today. 1) He wanted to sew division amongst LibDems, furious at the idea that
This is lots of fun, from the strangemaps website: each US state renamed as a country with comparable GDP.
This week’s magazine has a great piece by Tessa Mayes who went undercover with the celebrity Scientologists. If you want to hear more about her experience, download this podcast.
Here’s another thought about the difference between Blair and Brown in their relations with the business world (see ‘The coming Blair nostalgia’ in this week’s online edition). On Wednesday night, for the eleventh year in a row, Gordon Brown ‘snubbed’ the City by refusing to conform to the evening dress code for the Mansion House
I have always had a theory that within the anarchic millennial Byron that is Pete Doherty, there lurks an incredibly well-behaved middle-class boy. Doubtless it was the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” pop poet that first appealed to Kate Moss. But it is surely the well-concealed Jekyll within that has persuaded judge after judge
Interesting row brewing over at Guido Fawkes. Should I and other hacks have shown our faces at the Lord Levy party last night (see my earlier post)? Yes, of course. That’s the point of access. You go along and then you pass on what you find to your readers. Which is why I went and
Republicans have had very little to cheer recently. The party’s approval rating in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll is at a record low of 28% and the implosion of the Bush presidency is threatening to drag it down even further. So the news that the billionaire mayor of New York Mike Bloomberg has decided to quit
Like father, like son: my old friend Malcolm McLaren’s son, Joe Corre, has rejected his MBE, accusing Tony Blair of being “morally bankrupt”. As manager of the Sex Pistols, Situationist art student and all-round subversive, Malcolm revelled in such acts – famously releasing the single God Save the Queen during the Silver Jubilee. I gave
Sometimes a book is so compelling you have to recommend it before you’ve finished it. I might have known that Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Penguin) would be good, but this time the master really has excelled himself. Iraq, Gray writes, “has ceased to be a contest in
Yesterday, I was happily thundering away against all the hand-wringing over the Rushdie knighthood when a friend brought me up short my making a rather good case against it. The argument goes that we defended, rightly, the Satanic Verses on free speech grounds and we are always telling these protestors, Voltaire-style, that while we might
And so the cavalcade of farewell parties proceeds towards the terminus of June 27 and Tony Blair’s last bow. Last night, it was the turn of Lord Levy to say goodbye as the PM’s Middle East envoy at a reception in the garden of Lancaster House. Mr Blair paid fulsome tribute to his old ally,