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,
Today’s Guardian reports that Brown is considering bringing a Lib Dem or two into the government. My gut reaction is that the Lib Dems would be fools to accept the offer, it would be far better for them to sit tight and negotiate from a position of strength in the hung parliament we’re likely to
Fred Thompson, the man many are hailing as the saviour of the Republican party and who you probably know best from his roles in Hunt for Red October, In the Line of Fire, Die Hard 2 and the TV show Law & Order, is in London right now and I went to hear him speak
I can’t really comment on Salman Rushdie as a literary figure, since I tried and failed three times to get beyond the opening 50 pages of Midnight’s Children. I can comment on him as a public figure, however, having followed his career attentively since the fatwa of 1989. I supported Mrs Thatcher’s response of cutting
The departure of Nick Ross from “Crimewatch” is a sad victory for the worst kind of criteria now being applied in television. Nobody disputes the importance of appearance on screen – it would be odd if it were otherwise – but Ross is scarcely senescent and looks a pretty sprightly 59 year old. Having dined
Two days to go and already the European Union summit is promising to be a cliffhanger. Will Blair sign? Will the Poles and the Czechs save him, and veto? No10 appears to be furious that Gordon Brown is holding out the prospect of a referendum and says there will be none “because we will not
This front page story in The Guardian about the Blair Brown relationship is essential reading for anyone who thinks that the whole Blair Brown feud is something got up and exaggerated by the ‘feral’ media. It has yet more examples of just how dysfunctional the relationship at the very top of the government was and
The death of Bernard Manning marks the end of an era in comedy and will force liberals once again to wrestle with the question: why was a man who ought to have been offensive so bloody funny? Answer: Because he was bloody funny. That’s it. That’s all there was to it. Those who think he
