A fitting tribute to John Prescott
The Labour deputy leadership results are a total shambles. The BBC is reporting that Harman’s won but they don’t seem really sure. If she has won, then it is a remarkable triumph for mediocrity.
The Spectator
Sunday
No contest
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. “On going to the first Party meeting after the election,” recalled Clement Attlee in his memoirs, “I had a message from Arthur Henderson that George Lansbury would be proposed as Leader and myself as Deputy. These nominations went through without opposition.” New Labour, old stitch-up.
Saturday
Letters to the Editor | 23 June 2007
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 he has manipulated Clemency Burton-Hill (‘Tea with Hamas’, 16 June). Her naivety is breathtaking, as is her willingness to pass on his fanciful assertions to the rest of us without challenge. It would not take much research to show Hamas for what it is: a fundamentalist Muslim organisation which gets its money and its orders from Iran. In Dr Hamad’s Promised Land, women like Clemency Burton-Hill have no place outside the kitchen and the breeding chamber.
Referendum politics
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 like, “he wants to talk about the arcane details of European treaties, we want to talk about schools, hospitals and the other issues that make a difference to the lives of the British people.) Whether Cameron decides to go all out in calling for one depends on if he’ll be charging the Brownite guns alone. If on Monday, The Sun and The Daily Mail demand a vote Cameron will likely come out of what, as Tim notes, is his self-imposed purdah.
Over to you, Gordon
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 battle of Brussels over, the battle in Westminster has only just begun. The new Prime Minister must now try to dodge and weave his way out of offering a referendum. As one close Blair ally said to me with a vengeful smile: "It ain't easy at the top".
A long time in politics
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 that a week is a long time in politics is, in this case, entirely apposite (Joseph Chamberlain’s version was that ‘there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight’). Such intelligence as has seeped out of the Treasury suggests that Gordon Brown’s reshuffle will be wide and deep: but it should be stressed that planning such a reorganisation is very different from its execution.
Friday
Don’t mention the war!
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 week’s EU summit -- President Lech Kaczynski told Polish radio the past justified the present. "We are merely demanding what was taken from us," he said. "If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would be today looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million," nearly double the current population of 38 million. The reaction in Europe was, well, disappointed, with clucking from foreign ministers and editorial writers alike.
A pretty straight sort of Catholic?
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 -- for liberal interventionism -- is certainly not shared by the Pope Benedict XVI or by any orthodox Catholic. His position on abortion is not morally serious. Having voted for it in the past, he now says he is against it 'personally'. But why? Does he believe there is something objectively wrong with it? If he does, how can he at the same time regard it as a matter of conscience, something that should be decided on a free vote?
What Gordon was up to
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 said yes or no. Like Nicolas Sarkozy, he would be reaching magnanimously across the political divide. He would confound his critics by appearing open-minded and outward-looking. To those middle England voters who are unaware that the Lib Dems have moved to the left, he would look as if he were joining forces with a moderate, centrist party.
Thursday
Was Brown really serious about this offer?
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 someone like Ashdown who has personal links to the province. The ‘heroic’ period of peace-making, which wasn’t heroic at all to my mind but that’s an issue for another day, is over and the prizes for solving the Irish Question have already been awarded. If Brown had really wanted to bring Ashdown inside the tent he could have tempted him with something involving Iraq or Afghanistan.
What did Gordon mean by that
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 the leadership would be bribed by job offers from Brown.2) He wanted to show willing, so when his Cabinet is announced – and is packed full of Brownite stooges – he can say: well, you can’t say I didn’t try.3) He wanted to infuriate Ming Campbell, by showing that Ashdown is the only LibDem he’d want in his government. Remember, Campbell and Ashdown are old rivals.
America as the world
This is lots of fun, from the strangemaps website: each US state renamed as a country with comparable GDP.
Listening to the Scientologists
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.
Dressing down Brown
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 dinner. To wear a black bow tie instead of long, dull, striped one, his spokesmen annually point out, would be to break his socialist principles and pander to elitism. But really his psychoanalyst might add it's an expression of the self-righteous egotism and tortured self-consciousness that make him such an uncomfortable public figure whatever he's wearing. Blair has never made a fuss about that sort of thing, and has even been seen in white tie and tails.
A nice middle class boy
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 to let Doherty off with a mild telling off ("you young scallywag"). Now, there comes proof in the Times's serialisation of the former Libertine's journals. Here, for instance, are Pete's "Things to Do" for February 10, 1999:He only forgot to mention buying a new orange folder for his Physics revision notes. This is the authentic voice of a pop prince who may be forced by his image to trash hotel rooms, but would secretly prefer to tidy them up.
Wednesday
Why I went to the Levy party
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 reported back to Coffee House as I did. Which is also why (I happen to know) the bloggers are petitioning for lobby credentials that will give them the same rights as print journalists at Westminster: quite right, too. Guido suggests that my going to the party might compromise my coverage of any trial involving Levy. Er, I don't think so.
The billion dollar president?
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 the party sounds like another tale of Republican woe. But it is actually the best news the party has had in ages. The logical explanation for Bloomberg bolting from the Republican fold is that he plans to run as an independent in the 2008 presidential election.
Rebellion is in the genes
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 him a tip or two over lunch when he was running for Mayor of London, a glorious venture that fizzled out at just the right moment (he didn’t take my advice to run as a Tory). His son knows how to pull a stunt, too: he accepted the honour and then had a change of heart, thus maximising publicity for his lingerie brand, the appropriately named Agent Provocateur. It’s what his old man called Cash from Chaos.
One for the reading list
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 which secular ideologies are at stake and has become instead a many-sided war of religion entwined with an ongoing resource war”. Another magnificent work from the greatest philosopher writing today.
The case against the Rushdie knighthood
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 not agree with what is said—or in the case of the Danish cartoons, drawn—we defend their right to say it. But HMG giving Rushdie an honour blurs this line and suggests that the State has a position not only on Rushdie’s right to speak freely but also on the worth of his statements.