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Wednesday 14 July 2010
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Lord Adonis. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Former transport secretary to become executive director of fast-rising Whitehall thinktank the Institute for Government
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Tuesday 13 July 2010
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Tony Blair predicted in private that Gordon Brown would face a leadership challenge if he failed to improve. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The extensive coverage of Peter Mandelson's memoirs today has largely overlooked an intriguing element in the book. This is Tony Blair's role behind the scenes as Gordon Brown's position became weaker and weaker.
The extracts today raise an interesting question: did the former prime minister break his word to the Labour party? Blair gave two key informal undertakings over the years. These were that he would:
• Not hang around in office as long as Margaret Thatcher. He stayed longer than expected. But his ten years at No 10 meant he observed this undertaking, if not in spirit, because Thatcher remained as prime minister for eleven and a half years.
• Not repeat Thatcher's mistake of behaving like a backseat driver. Blair issued a strong signal on this front when he stood down as an MP on the day he resigned as prime minister in 2007 to concentrate on his new role as Middle East envoy for the "quartet".
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Friday 9 July 2010
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Patrick Wintour: The fairly posionous relations between Labour and Lib Dems are for the moment going to get a little worse
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Sunday 27 June 2010
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David Cameron is at his first international summit, working the room, turning on the charm, establishing the personal rapport that is vital in high-level politics. Sitting in a room alone with seven other top leaders over lunch and dinner – albeit with officials listening in from outside the room – must be the moment you realise with total certainty that you are prime minister.
He has also piled up four bilaterals, including a big one yesterday with Barack Obama, a man of real professorial intelligence, but he is also thinking domestic politics. He is strangely thrilled at the way in which Labour is attacking the Liberal Democrats for the big betrayal of joining the coalition, especially Nick Clegg's role in the axe-wielding, VAT-raising budget.
Why is the prime minister so happy? Well, he thinks the tone of the Labour attacks is driving the Liberal Democrats deeper into the arms of the Conservatives, and that from Labour's point of view this is hardly intelligent politics. It is creating a realignment in which Labour ends up on the wrong side.
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Wednesday 16 June 2010
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Labour leadership candidates Andy Burnham, Ed Balls, David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Diane Abbott. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty, David Levene, Toby Melville/Reuters, John Stillwell/PA, Martin Godwin
The MPs have largely cast their nominations, and the Famous Five are now touring the country speaking/pandering to various audiences in the constituency section of the Labour party, but soon the unions are going to come into play, and the focus will be on gaining the recommendations of the union executives. Unison and Unite, the biggish two of the unions, gather in Leeds on two consecutive days – 2 and 3 July – to meet the candidates and make a recommendation.
The unions represent a third of the vote in the electoral college, and, in a very tight contest, their votes will matter. One of the three leading contestants told me yesterday that they had no idea how the ballot would end save that it would be a very close result, and go right to the final round.
In 1994 the union executive recommendations counted for nothing in the Labour leadership contest. Faced by a choice of Tony Blair, John Prescott, and Margaret Beckett, every major union recommended their memberships vote for either Beckett or Prescott, and every single union membership voted for Blair. The media, and Blair's performance, trumped the guidance of the union leaderships.
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Tuesday 8 June 2010
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Harriet Harman and Diane Abbott. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
The Labour interim leader Harriet Harman is taking the controversial step of nominating Diane Abbott for the Labour leadership. Although strictly neutral in the campaign, Harman regards it as necessary to try to ensure a woman is on the ballot paper when nominations close.
Harman is expected to say she is doing this for the good of the party, and it may lead to a group of other people nominating Abbott before nominations close tomorrow.
Abbott is currently way off the 33 nominations from her fellow MPs needed to stand in the contest. She had nine at lunchtime, including her own.
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Tuesday 11 May 2010
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John Reid is not the only Labour figure who is critical of a deal with the Lib Dems. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA
Twenty four hour news wants instant resolutions, but senior Liberal Democrats are now saying the deal may not be secured today, and any final deal will have to go to a party conference at the weekend. The Queen may be kept on hold.
But the balance is now tilting back to the Liberal Democrats striking a deal with the Conservatives, partly because there is a sense that some Labour negotiators are less keen on a deal than the Conservatives.
Senior Liberal Democrats are also picking up signals that Labour is too divided to strike a deal. John Reid and David Blunkett, the two former home secretaries, speak for more than themselves when they criticise the idea of a deal altogether.
The official line is that the cabinet backed the deal unanimously, but I am not sure that this represents a true account of opinion In a bid to shore up the Labour coalition, Alan Johnson, the current home secretary and Neil Kinnock, the former Labour leader, came out in favour of the deal.
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Friday 7 May 2010
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Gordon Brown arrives back at 10 Downing Street as the country looked set for a hung parliament. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Can Labour cobble together enough support to form a government?
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Wednesday 5 May 2010
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The "dreary steeples" of Fermanagh and Tyrone, mocked by Winston Churchill (above), could take centre stage in a hung parliament. Photograph: Rex Features
Are the "dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone" about to take centre stage in British politics?
Winston Churchill famously dreamt up this disparaging remark to say that little had changed in Northern Ireland after Europe had been shaken to its core by the first world war.
But the rest of the United Kingdom may be looking to those steeples in the coming days if voters elect the first hung parliament since February 1974. Continue reading...
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Monday 3 May 2010
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The battle of the party election broadcasts continues. Ross Kemp, who played Grant Mitchell in EastEnders, stars in Labour's final broadcast, which will be aired tonight.
Entitled Sixty Seconds, the video features Kemp pleading with people to spend 60 seconds to protect their jobs and the economy by voting Labour:
This election isn't a beauty contest. This is about what's best for you, your family and your country – and who you really trust to look after them for the next five years. You probably have lots of important things to do on Thursday – a full day's work, picking up the kids, paying the bills.
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Who said Labour has lost its sense of humour? The party has produced this witty personalised video lampooning David Cameron's "big society" in which people will be invited to join the government of Britain.
Labour believes the big society is a PR makeover of an old Tory idea to shrink the state. It says that Burke's "little platoons" were all very well in the 18th century when high-minded charitable groups helped relieve poverty. But Labour says they are wholly inappropriate in the 21st century when only state action can tackle inequalities.
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Whoops! Amusing to watch the TV types, and the Conservatives, executing a delicate U-turn this morning as they discover their narrative – the undecideds break decisively for the Tories – is failing to come good. The Guardian/ICM poll and the YouGov/Sun tracker both showed yesterday evening that David Cameron did not have the big momentum his acolytes had claimed only 24 hours earlier.
Cameron's weekend interviews setting out the order of legislation now look what we call previous.
Both Sunday night polls, if the swing is reproduced nationally, show Labour coming out as the largest party in terms of seats, thus releasing Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg from his commitment to give the Tories the first chance to form a government.
It may be an utterly daft electoral system, but it is the one the Tories enthusiastically voted for in the Commons only a month and a half ago. The Tories, let it be remembered, did not just vote to keep the current system, they did not even want to give the voters a chance in a referendum to decide if they wanted a change. Continue reading...
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Wednesday 14 April 2010
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Hat tip to the great Paul Waugh who has spotted that the Labour party has been screening different election broadcasts in England, Scotland and Wales.
Those of us who live in England were treated to a rugged looking Sean Pertwee starring in The Road Ahead. Stick on the correct road with Labour, rather than risk a dangerous looking country lane under the Tories, went the message. A few crumpled newspaper headlines in a dustbin, spotted by Pertwee, illustrated Labour's central argument: that the Tories made the wrong calls in the recession.
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Monday 12 April 2010
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Gordon Brown at the launch of Labour's manifesto today. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
It was slick, Gordon Brown was relaxed and, for once, the jokes weren't forced. The launch of the Labour manifesto this morning showed that the party still has fire in its belly even if David Cameron won the prize for a pacier first week of campaigning.
The venue, the smart new acute wing of the Queen Elizabeth hospital in the marginal Labour seat of Birmingham Edgbaston, sent a powerful message. The Tories, Labour was saying, might gripe about Britain's record £167bn fiscal deficit. But just look what we've built with the money. (Of course that's not technically correct because future generations will be paying off the costs of new hospitals through the PFI scheme.)
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Wednesday 31 March 2010
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Philip Gould provided the polling advice leading to Labour's 1997 landslide win which saw Tony Blair walk up Downing Street cheered by by flag waving supporters. Photograph: Tim Rooke/Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features
Lord Philip Gould has reached guru status in Labour circles, deservedly so since he is a great reader of the public mood. So his thoughts on the eve of the election are worth reading.
Gould has recently been ill which means he is not quite as front line as in the past, but he is doing quite a few focus groups for Labour. His analysis will be influencing all the big Labour players. His thinking permeated much of Tony Blair's speech yesterday.
On Politics
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