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Thursday 3 June 2010
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Aid being distributed to Haitian earthquake survivors earlier this year. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Andrew Mitchell uses first major speech as development secretary to announce the creation of an independent watchdog and promise greater transparency on aid spending
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Cumbria police stand outside the home of Derrick Bird, who killed 12 people in a shooting rampage. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/AP
Was I imagining it, or did today's parliamentary exchanges over the shootings in Cumbria suggest a revived reticence about horrors of this kind – not so much a Diana moment, when raw emotions are displayed, as a post-Diana moment when participants accept that such things happen and communities do recover?
Amid the welter of "Cumbria changed forever" cliches on 24/7 TV channels, the politicians seemed more grounded and genuinely sorrowful. Only 12 felt the need to share their thoughts with the new home secretary, Teresa May, and most were sensible. There was no cheap point-scoring and very little by way of our old friend, the knee-jerk reaction.
Like Jacqui Smith, whose Commons debut as the home secretary saw her having to report on failed bomb plots in London and Glasgow, May faced the grim task yesterday of addressing the mass killings by the taxi driver Derrick Bird. Soberly dressed, she performed the duty calmly and well. Continue reading...
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Wednesday 2 June 2010
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Vince Cable, the business secretary, is still the king of Westminster. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Business secretary is Britain's most popular politician, comfortably ahead of David Cameron and Nick Clegg
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Simon Hughes will play crucial role in managing anxious grassroots if he becomes Lib Dem deputy leader. Photograph: Jason Bye/Rex Features
A crucial moment in the life of the Lib-Con coalition comes tonight when the Liberal Democrats start the process of electing a new deputy leader after the resignation of Vince Cable. The business secretary announced his resignation last week to concentrate on his ministerial duties.
Simon Hughes, the veteran MP and activist who is supported by a host of Lib Dem grandees, is favourite to win the post. If he wins, Hughes will provide a crucial link between the Lib Dem grassroots, who are uneasy about the coalition, and the leadership, which knows it has to manage the party with care. Andy Beckett has examined these tensions in a piece for G2 today.
Nick Clegg used an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning to reassure Lib Dems that they are gaining from the coalition. In his first broadcast interview since the weekend resignation of David Laws, the deputy prime minister said he was confident that a referendum would be held on electoral reform in time for the next general election to be held on the alternative vote system if there is a yes vote.
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David Cameron speaks in the Commons for the first time as prime minister on 18 May. Sitting next to him are William Hague and Nick Clegg. Photograph: PA
Join Hélène Mulholland for the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition's maiden prime minister's questions
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Israeli forces approach one of six ships bound for Gaza. Photograph: Pool/Reuters
The worldwide chorus of criticism over Israel's seizure of the Gaza Freedom flotilla has become so deafening that there must be something to be said in Israel's defence. Let's try.
Mind you, launching special forces onto the decks of crowded vessels in darkness – and in international waters, too – those Israelis don't make it easy, do they?
As the Israeli commentator Yossi Melman srote in Ha'aretz yesterday, don't they remember anything from their own brilliant Zionist propaganda coups of the 1940s – sending crowded boats full of European Jewish refugees to break the Royal Navy's blockade of British-mandated Palestine? The other side obviously remembered.
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Tuesday 1 June 2010
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George Osborne, with David Cameron on the night he became prime minister, can expect a tough grilling from the next chair of the Treasury select committee. Photograph: Andrew Parsons
A rare wind of democracy is gushing through the Palace of Westminster. The 23 House of Commons select committees, which have monitored the work of government departments over three decades, will be composed of elected members for the first time.
The change marks a significant step towards a more Congressional style of doing business at Westminster in which the legislature can flex its muscles over the executive.
Until now the executive has controlled the committees. The three main parties would divvy up the chairmanship of each committee between them. These would then be appointed by the party whips. The number of MPs on each committee would be decided on the basis of the parties' strength in the Commons. Members would then be appointed by whips.
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NHS chief executive David Nicholson earns between £255,000 and £259,999. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian
David Cameron used his first podcast to hail a new era of Government transparency, promising to "rip off the cloak of secrecy" surrounding Government information. His first step in fulfilling this pledge is to release this data about the salaries of senior Whitehall officials
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Whitehall in central London. Photograph: Paul Owen
Are senior civil servants paid too much? Some of them, almost certainly. Are others paid too little for what they do every day and might just as easily do for far greater reward in the private sector? Ditto.
So the coalition's overnight publication of senior Whitehall salaries sheds light on things the taxpayer did not know before – but not much light, and not necessarily very useful.
Why has the coalition done it? According to Polly Curtis's Guardian report it is to "pull back the curtains to let light into the corridors of power". So says the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, who had some uncomfortable light shed on his own expenses last year.
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Sunday 30 May 2010
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Former Treasury chief secretary David Laws. Photograph: Alastair Grant/PA
Watching David Laws handling his ministerial debut with such calm, even chilling authority, over the coalition's cuts agenda in the Commons on Wednesday, I murmured, possibly out loud: "Someone will get him for this."
Someone? Perhaps the Labour opposition, angered by perceived arrogance and an apparent volte face over the Lib Dems' more cautious attitude towards financial retrenchment during the campaign. Possibly disgruntled MPs on his own side.
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Friday 28 May 2010
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Chris Patten believes David Cameron will return to the mainstream centre right in the European parliament. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
From the Olympian heights of the chancellorship of Oxford university, Lord (Chris) Patten makes public pronouncements with care these days.
So the coalition government will note with interest an intervention this weekend by the former Tory chairman on his favourite subject – Europe.
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British airmen conduct a dawn airborne counter insurgency patrol in Basra, Iraq, last year. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Should the military be wasting its time squabbling over whether or not to circulate, let alone publish, an internal ministry of defence review of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as Richard Norton-Taylor reports in today's Guardian? Probably not.
It is not as if the world does not know that everything except the brief ground war that toppled Saddam Hussein was pretty shambolic. The Chilcot inquiry, one of a near-perpetual series, is currently recrossing the scarred and muddy terrain like soldiers on the Western Front.
So Lieutenant General Chris Brown's reportedly scathing analysis of the failure both adequately to prepare for the invasion and to manage the occupation will doubtless embarrass military and civilian planners, but is unlikely to change the way the war is generally seen: as a costly military and diplomatic failure.
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Diane Abbott launching her Labour leadership campaign at B6 college in London today. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Andrew Sparrow with all today's political news, including David Cameron's speech on the economy, and Diane Abbott and Ed Miliband's campaigns for the Labour leadership
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Thursday 27 May 2010
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Tony Benn takes a photograph of Denis Healey, the ultimate Big Beast, during Labour's wars in the early 1980s. Photograph: Don McPhee/Guardian
The Labour leadership contest is shaping up to be a much more civilised affair than the bloody battles that came close to destroying the party in the early 1980s.
All the candidates are going out of their way to be polite to eachother and there are some strange bedfellows. John McDonnell, the veteran left winger, has won the support of Frank Field and Kate Hoey who have flirted in the past with the Tories.
But the Labour party is missing out on one of the few positive elements that shone out during the dark years of the early 1980s. Veteran Big Beasts, who helped ensure that the party did not completely lose touch with Planet Earth, hung round after the Labour defeat in 1979. This time they're fleeing.
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