Well, Blears and Smith were good, but Geoff Hoon walking the plank? Klasse. Apparently there is talk of making him a European commissioner again; God knows why. Alan Sugar is some sort of minister and a peer of the realm. Peter Mandelson is turning into Michael Heseltine before our boggling eyes. Better get some cardio…
Read More Bob’s yer uncle, and Tess is your aunt..What is all this whining about MPs doing constituency work? It seems to be conventional wisdom across the more fogeyish commentators (Simon Jenkins, Vernon Bogdanor etc) that members of the Commons are spending too much time representing the interests of their constituents; no article on the upshot of the great expenses row is complete without…
Read More For constituency workProponents of UAVs like to talk about the “enduring stare”; their ability to remain on station, to keep pointing at the target, rather than taking discrete reels of photos. Blogging ought to be a bit like that; keep after the story, don’t accept the official news (or bullshit) cycle. Hence, this McClatchy story, which has…
Read More can’t we, you know, move on?A lot of other countries who are small economies compared to the USA or China, industrialised, and heavily dependent on foreign trade have a government policy of keeping a substantial local ownership stake in important businesses or important technologies. This may or may not be held by the State. Examples of such so-called “core investor…
Read More the Harrowell optionTim Ireland of Bloggerheads has a hell of a story. Now, I’ve not always been totally convinced by Tim; he spends an inordinate amount of time pursuing minor politicos for breaches of netiquette I think I’d just forget. But two of the crucial principles of journalism can be summed up as the clam ethic –…
Read More tearing up the astroturf“Londonstani” has a superb post at Abu Muqawama about Ed Husain’s The Islamist. Read the whole thing. Then look at the comments and cry. Meanwhile, shouldn’t this story be getting much more press? Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers…
Read More spiesOK, the last post wasn’t totally serious. But is it too much to say that John Redwood is back? He’s been given a committee to chair, which sounds like a kick to touch, but we live in committee times. The Government is handling the economic crisis through a combination of outside committee-ists and a civil…
Read More the time has come to shoot you downIt is come to this. Here is our Secretary of State for Culture: The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material. He plans to approach US…
Read More Burn, Hollywood, Burnham!An interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the…
Read More Is this the CIA? Is this the IRA? Is this the UDA? No, it’s the Grauniad…Quite a score for our reader “Ajay”, who I think is the first to spot that the Mumbai terrorist attack bears a very close resemblance to the coup plot in Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, which makes it the third and possibly fourth case of someone actually using Forsyth’s book as a practical handbook.…
Read More the world’s deadliest novel strikes again