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Thursday 20 May 2010
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Cameron is off to Paris tonight for dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy before flying to Berlin tomorrow to see Angela Merkel. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
On the airwaves a few minutes ago Alistair Darling used the untypically flashy phrase "displacement activity" to describe Germany's obsession with regulating the hedge funds at a time when the euro teeters on the brink of what Angela Merkel – also untypically flashy – calls its existential crisis.
Our ex-chancellor is right about the hedge funds, which were not responsible for the 2007-09 phase of the ongoing financial crisis. Merkel is right about the threat. So the displacement activity jibe could extend to us all, fiddling while the Treaty of Rome burns.
Here, the BBC is gearing up excitedly for the Clegg-Cameron launch of the final version of the coalition agreement. Vince Cable is threatening to privatise the Royal Mail (who would want to buy it?) while the new prime minister takes time to all-but-abolish the backbench Tory 1922 committee.
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Tuesday 18 May 2010
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George Osborne is sending friendly noises to fellow EU finance ministers. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images
George Osborne, the new chancellor, has decided to abandon a tradition established by Gordon Brown when he held the job.
On the eve of meetings of EU finance ministers, Brown's team would brief a friendly journalist about how the chancellor would lecture the Europeans on their mistaken economic ways. Brown would then turn up briefly in Brussels, mostly ignore the other ministers round the table and read out a script that bore no relation to the hostile press briefing.
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Thursday 29 April 2010
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Eastern European migration is going down. Click image for full graphic
Gordon Brown's 'bigot' gaffe has highlighted immigration from Eastern Europe yet again in the general election campaign. Here's the data you need to understand the debate
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Thursday 22 April 2010
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Nick Herbert. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
It is fascinating to read in today's Guardian that David Cameron is to dispatch the Tories' most senior gay frontbencher Nick Herbert to Poland to encourage the Conservatives' new rightwing allies in the EU to moderate their homophobia.
Fascinating, first of all, because the announcement comes hours before tonight's TV debate on international affairs, in which the Tories' new alliance will be a major point of discussion.
But fascinating also because last autumn, when journalists first began to point out that the likes of the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS) were homophobic (anti-gay views are central to its Catholic fundamentalist view of life) they were attacked by the Tory media machine for being part of a Labour-led smear operation. The stories were nonsense, they said, and Labour-inspired lies.
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Tuesday 16 March 2010
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Liam Byrne. Photograph: Martin Godwin
The day the Conservatives' European parliamentary colleagues march through the streets of Riga commemorating dubious deeds in wartime may seem a strange day for the Tory frontbench to praise the European commission. But today the Conservatives were praising the commission to the skies.
The commission had declared, as it does regularly, that the British government's deficit reduction plan does not go far enough. Alistair Darling and his henchman Liam Byrne want to reduce the deficit to just 4.4% by 2014-15. The commission says it should come to down further to 3% by then, meaning an extra £26bn of cuts.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning Kenneth Clarke, the shadow business secretary, fell into a small hole. He started endearingly by wandering down memory lane saying "in my day", forgetting he is supposed to be still very much in his day. He then endorsed the commission's call for a faster reduction of the deficit, at which point Byrne pounced, claiming Clarke had just committed his party to further cuts.
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Friday 12 March 2010
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Steve Hilton, the man in charge of detoxifying the Tory brand, is to share an office with the party's media chief, Andy Coulson. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA
Love, it would appear, is breaking out at Conservative Campaign HQ. Andy Coulson, the party's communications chief, and Steve Hilton, its director of strategy, are now sharing the same office at the party's HQ on Millbank.
The Coulson-Hilton love-in is designed, no doubt, to scotch rumours of a clash between the two figures at the top of the party. The news that the "yin and yang" of the Tory campaign are sharing an office is disclosed today by Tim Montgomerie, the founder and editor of ConservativeHome. Montgomerie writes:
Steve Hilton, director of strategy, and Andy Coulson, director of communications, are now sharing an office at the heart of operations. The two men have taken over the third floor's last available meeting room and now sit opposite each other. This uniting of the party's yin and yang is the beginning of a big effort to ensure better communication of the party's strategy.
Coulson, the Essex boy who became editor of the News of the World, and Hilton, who has been the brains behind the detoxification of the Tory brand, are said to have differed over election strategy. The two men have always been on friendly personal terms. But Coulson was said to favour a harder edge while Hilton wanted to focus on a sunnier, optimistic message of the future in the mould of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" theme.
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Thursday 25 February 2010
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I was ploughing through George Osborne's Mais lecture with an icepack on my temple a few minutes ago when raucous noises from the kitchen radio distracted me.
It was the sound of Nigel Farage, the Ukip MEP, accusing Europe's latest new president, of having "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk".
Oh dear, the Mais lecture will have to wait while we dispatch investigators to the European parliament in Brussels, where the incident took place.
Why, oh why, are the Brits rude so often in public nowadays when once they were a byword on the continent for good manners and understatement, inhibited reticence even? Is there an election looming?Continue reading...
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Tuesday 9 February 2010
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Hey there, Eurosceptic. Yes, I'm talking to you, the one with the loud voice and the scowl. Spare five minutes in the course of your busy day to read Ian Traynor's lengthy zeitgeist (sorry about the German) report in today's Guardian on the demoralised state of the European Union.
Smart chap and highly-experienced correspondent that he is, Traynor is right on the money. If anything, it's worse than he says. You can't pack everything into one article and Ian has concentrated on the EU's diplomatic disarray on the world stage. Continue reading...
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Monday 30 November 2009
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One of only four minarets in Switzerland, on a Muslim centre in Wangen bei Olten. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP
Reading about the Swiss electorate's unexpected vote to ban the building of minarets, I thought not just of Nick Griffin and how pleased he must be this morning ("Switzerland shows the way, comrades"), but of Emma Thompson, equally daft in her own way.
You remember Thompson's contribution to inter-communal harmony? In Exeter, where her adopted Rwandan son, Tindyebwa Agaba, suffered some harassment as a student, she complained that Comrade Nick would love the place.
"What can we do to change the whiteness of Devon and Cornwall? How can we expand our university?" the lovable London luvvie asked.
Speaking as a Cornish expatriate, I can tell you that won't have gone down well among us west country Whites, who are fed up with self-important Lun'nuners trousering all the best houses and talking too loudly in the pub.
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Friday 20 November 2009
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It's not true that last night's appointments at the EU's Brussels conclave are without historic precedence.
When the Italian politician Signor Caligula was the president of the European commission during one of the continent's more dynamic phases, he appointed his horse to negotiate the early stages of the Doha trade round.
You know something has gone horribly wrong when the Guardian and the Mail come up with the same front page headline, as they did today with: "The great EU stitch-up."
With its admirable desire to maintain the dignity of the great and good – bankers, senior civil servants, judges, federalists – as their trousers fall, the Financial Times rises to the occasion with "Top jobs for Belgium and the UK". Yeah, right.
Such gravitas does not reflect the deep embarrassment that permeates the senior ranks of Gordon Brown's ministerial team today Continue reading...
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Thursday 19 November 2009
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"We can all picture the scene at a European Council sometime next year. Picture the face of our poor prime minister as the name 'Blair' is nominated by one president and prime minister after another: the look of utter gloom on his face at the nauseating, glutinous praise oozing from every head of government, the rapid revelation of a majority view, agreed behind closed doors when he, as usual, was excluded. Never would he more regret no longer being in possession of a veto: the famous dropped jaw almost hitting the table, as he realises there is no option but to join in.
"Then the awful moment when the motorcade of the President of Europe sweeps into Downing Street. The gritted teeth and bitten nails: the prime minister emerges from his door with a smile of intolerable anguish; the choking sensation as the words, 'Mr President', are forced from his mouth. And then, once in the cabinet room, the melodrama of, 'When will you hand over to me?' all over again."
William Hague, 21 January 2008
Alas, another of William Hague's prophecies bit the dust during closed-doors haggling at the European summit in Brussels this evening. Hague was always better at jokes than at politics, as his own policies towards Europe will demonstrate soon enough. Tony Blair's embarrassment at being so publicly rebuffed by the EU 27 will not last long and he will bounce back as usual. Foreign secretary Hague's difficulties will endure. Continue reading...
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David Cameron was rightly put on the spot by John Humphrys this morning over Europe. There is no subject on which the Conservative leader sounds less convincing, so it is worth listening carefully when he is pushed into a corner.
What was most intriguing was the way Cameron said he could not now hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty because it is now law, or would be by the time a Tory government came to power.
He said that while Lisbon had been a "treaty" (by which he seemed to mean a non-ratified treaty) a referendum could have been called.
But now it was law (ratified by all 27 member states) that was impossible.
He seemed to say Lisbon is now not a treaty because everyone has agreed it. Not only is that a highly questionable argument (to put it mildly), but Cameron then went on to argue that he as prime minister would still be able to repatriate lots of powers over social, employment and justice and home affairs policy once in power.
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Friday 6 November 2009
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Pierre Lellouche. Photograph: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images
The French Europe minister, Pierre Lellouche, has clearly been experiencing an uncomfortable 24 hours after he let rip at the Tories' approach to Europe in an interview with me.
Amid Tory fury – William Hague condemned his remarks as an "emotional outburst" – Lellouche has embarked on a damage limitation exercise.
Hague is his friend, he now says after accusing the shadow foreign secretary of a "bizarre autism" in their discussions.
Lellouche would also live with whatever approach to Europe the Tories decide on, despite accusing them, in our interview, of "castrating" Britain's position in the EU.
A "contrite" Lellouche telephoned Sir Peter Westmacott, the British ambassador to Paris, to explain his comments, as the FT reports today.
That is all a standard rowback by a politician embarrassed when their true thoughts appear in print.
But Lellouche, whose masters are clearly nervous about alienating the next British government, has gone a stage further, and his spokesman (assuming his remarks have been correctly reported) has come out with some statements that are simply untrue. Continue reading...
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Thursday 5 November 2009
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Every cloud has its proverbial silver lining. A skillfully handled retreat from the barricades – in this case of Lisbon – is one of the hardest manoeuvres in politics, as it is in war. It requires discipline and loyalty in the ranks of Eurosceptic colleagues who don't like what he's saying.
Broadly speaking, David Cameron got it yesterday. Lurking in Portcullis House, the parliamentary office block, hoping to talk to MPs about their expenses, I found Tory members far more interested in the speech on Europe they'd just heard the Conservative leader deliver in private.
One pro-European ex-cabinet member told me: "A Tory leader has carried the party over Europe for the first time in 20 years. What a leader must do is twofold: to deal with the world as it is and also to deliver his party – as John Major was never able to do. David did."
More warily, a sceptic wondered: "It was skillfully done, but is David a Eurosceptic? He pressed all the Eurosceptic buttons, but can he deliver? If he doesn't, he will split the Tory party from top to bottom." Continue reading...
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