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Tuesday News Review

14/09/2010, 07:00:51 AM

'Visibly tense'

The Final Countdown

The leadership candidates now have one last televised hustings on Question Time this Thursday to put their case to become Labour leader to members. I hope they all take this final opportunity to proudly defend our record and put forward a more positive agenda that builds on our achievements not trashes them. – Prescott blog, The Guardian.

David Miliband was visibly tense, his brother Ed seemed a bit subdued, Ed Balls was witty and relaxed (yes, really!), Andy Burnham rather tetchy and Diane Abbott… Well, she was just Diane. – Sky Blog, Sky News.

“For many Labour people this hasn’t been an easy election to call. All of the candidates are of the centre left, they are all Labour. That isn’t the issue here. The big question is who are the Tories afraid of? Who is the best candidate to stand up against Cameron at the despatch box? Who has the best chance to beat Cameron in an election? For me the best choice is David Miliband and that is why I will be supporting him as next Labour leader.” – Lancaster Guardian.

Diane on women

“One way of illustrating this is to examine the Budget’s impact on women and families. The figures are frightening. The bulk of the impact will be felt by women. Some 72 per cent of the cuts will be met from women’s income, as opposed to 28 per cent from men.” – Diane Abbott, Morning Star.

Burnham on Blair

“Tony Blair was right to position Labour as pro-business, pro-job creation and pro-wealth creation,” [Burnham] says. But he says the party attached itself too much to big companies and sold its soul. “In wanting to appear pro-business we lost our sense of ourselves,” he says. – FT.

Labour’s visionary leader

Labour’s challenge is to find a visionary leader who adapts the party in the light of profound socioeconomic change, to ensure social justice while maintaining Britain’s competitive advantage. In the case of all five candidates, their previous experience of government or lack of it will count for little. – Anthony Seldon, The Guardian.

From the outside…

Plenty of Lib Dems are watching the current Labour leadership race, hoping that someone congenial like David Miliband carries the day, so that they can forge a nice, progressive Lib-Lab coalition at the next election. – The Economist.

Cuba

Cuba has announced radical plans to lay off huge numbers of state employees, to help revive the communist country’s struggling economy. The Cuban labour federation said more than a million workers would lose their jobs – half of them by March next year. – BBC News.

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Monday News Review

13/09/2010, 07:52:09 AM

Neck and neck

Asked about the poll, David Miliband, the shadow foreign secretary, said on the BBC’s Politics Show: “It’s good that there is a wake-up call for this election. Because too many people have thought that they can get a leader who can unite the party from Dennis Skinner to Alistair Darling, get a leader who the Tories fear, get a leader who sets out a forward agenda but not have to vote for him. The truth is, if you want that leader, which I will be, then the people who are watching this programme need to go into their kitchens, pick up their ballot papers and vote.” – The Guardian

Last night Ed Miliband said he was increasingly confident. “My sense is it’s moving towards me in every section.” But he added: “I don’t think you can ever say this is locked up due to the nature of our voting system.” Voting by postal ballot is now going on with the winner announced later this month. The YouGov poll for the Sunday Times showed bookies’ favourite David Miliband enjoying a narrow lead on first preferences. – The Mirror

LABOUR MPS’ second preference votes are expected to decide the party’s leadership race, following an opinion poll which indicated that Ed Miliband has greater support than his brother David among trades union and party members. More than three million people – including the party’s 270 MPs and MEPs, 160,000 party members and more than two million people affiliated to Labour through membership of trade unions – are entitled to vote in the race, which will be decided at the end of the month. – Irish Times

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Sunday News Review

12/09/2010, 08:35:16 AM

YouGov puts Miliband Jnr ahead

David Miliband’s smooth journey towards the Labour party leadership was dealt a blow last night as one poll suggested his brother was on course to snatch victory by a narrow margin. A survey of Labour members and trade unionists by YouGov suggested Ed Miliband had a small lead over his older sibling, who has been considered the favourite throughout the four-month leadership campaign. But the pollsters calculated that once lower-ranking candidates were eliminated and their second choice votes distributed, the younger brother would prevail. Although the YouGov poll gave David a 36 per cent to 32 per cent lead on first preferences, YouGov suggested that could be converted to a 51 per cent to 49 per cent win for his brother by the final round. – The Independent

Shadow Energy Secretary Ed expects to mop up an avalanche of support when outsiders Ed Balls and Diane Abbott drop out. He told the News of the World last night: “I’m increasingly confident that I have the momentum behind me and I am going to win. People are coming to my campaign because they believe we have to change to restore people’s trust.” But self-styled “unity candidate” David, Shadow Foreign Secretary, warned: “I’m trying to persuade the Labour Party not to lose three or four elections before it bounces back.” The Milibands insist they are still close, but relations between their camps have become strained, with David’s key allies branding rival Ed “Forrest Gump” after the less-than-bright character played by Tom Hanks in the hit film. The new Labour leader will be announced on September 25. – News of the World

The Labour leadership contest remains too close to call with one poll suggesting Ed Miliband could snatch victory by a narrow margin. A survey of Labour members and trade unionists by YouGov for the Sunday Times showed bookies’ favourite David Miliband enjoying a narrow lead on first preferences. But the pollster calculated that once lower-ranking candidates were eliminated and their second choices redistributed the younger of the two brothers would prevail. Voting is under way in the race to succeed Gordon Brown with the winner to be announced on the eve of this month’s party conference in Manchester. – Press Association

Balls growing fan base

Last month, he gave a major speech at Bloomberg, setting out his economic case, based on a Keynesian vision of investing in public works to boost growth. He has advocated using a £6bn underspend from government borrowing to build 100,000 houses, creating three quarters of a million jobs. “The public wants us to cut waste but they don’t want us to cancel their new schools. They want us to get the deficit down but not if it risks hundreds of thousands of jobs in the private construction sector.” This is the central argument to his economic pitch. He is particularly pleased to claim the support of both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson for his argument against the coalition’s draconian cuts programme. “It is an unlikely alliance. The lesson of history for Labour is that if we don’t have the confidence and the credibility to stake out a view and instead run along with the consensus, then we end up not having any distinction.” – The Independent

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Saturday News Review

11/09/2010, 07:00:56 AM

Leadership

Mr Miliband’s brother Ed, seen as his closest challenger, is more likely to move the party away from New Labour and has been nicknamed “Red Ed” by opponents. He said: “I’m trying to persuade the Labour Party not to lose three or four elections before it bounces back.” – Telegraph.

First and fundamentally any renewal of Labour as a party of real power must be predicated on the alignment of socialism and democracy. Socialism, which all five leadership candidates have confessed an adherence to, can only be the collective capacity to change our world. For that we need a set of moral and practical rules; this is what democracy is and should be applied not just to Westminster but the state, our communities and workplaces. – Neal Lawson, Guardian

On 25 September, the next leader of the Labour Party will be announced. This is the person Labour believes should hold the keys to Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Yet, despite one of the longest leadership campaigns in memory, there has been no detailed debate about the role and scale of Trident, Britain’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. – New Statesman

On the campaign trail

“What the coalition doesn’t seem to understand is that when they make cuts to things like building schools for the future, it isn’t just bad for our children’s education, it’s bad for private sector jobs. It’s the cavalier way they are going about these cuts which is going to be damaging to the region. What we need to be doing is showing that there’s an alternative.” – Ed Miliband, This is Exeter.

Hacking claims

“A very senior News International journalist told me at the Labour party conference in 2006, in the early hours of the morning, that his editor would never forgive me for resigning as a minister in Tony Blair’s government and that she would pursue me for the rest of my political career until I was destroyed.” – Tom Watson, The Guardian.

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Friday News Review

10/09/2010, 08:31:58 AM

More questions, few answers

The parliamentary sleaze watchdog is to investigate claims of phone hacking surrounding David Cameron’s chief spin doctor. MPs agreed yesterday that the powerful Commons Standards and Privileges Committee should hold an inquiry into the allegations. It comes amid growing pressure on Andy Coulson, No 10’s head of communications, over accusations he knew of illegal phone-tapping while he was editor of the News of the World editor. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who claims his phone was targeted, told MPs he was concerned that recent allegations were just the “tip of the iceberg”. – The Herald

Labour former minister Tom Watson told the Commons: “Something very dark lurks in the evidence files of the Mulcaire case, and dark and mysterious forces are keeping it that way.” He claimed too many powerful politicians were “afraid” of the power of newspapers. He said: “Here we sit in Parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy, between us some of the most powerful people of the land, and we are scared. We are afraid, and if we oppose this resolution it is our shame. That is the tawdry secret that dare not speak its name. – The Express

David Cameron’s spin doctor suffered another blow yesterday when MPs ordered the Westminster sleaze watchdog to probe phone-hacking claims. Ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson has insisted he didn’t know the eavesdropping technique was used at the paper. But former employees claim Mr Coulson – now No10 director of communications – must have been aware of the practice. – The Mirror

THE POSITION of British prime minister David Cameron’s top media adviser is under increasing pressure following a decision yesterday by the government not to block an investigation into allegations of widespread telephone tapping by British newspapers. The adviser, Andy Coulson, who resigned in 2007 as editor of theNews of the World after one of his reporters was jailed for telephone tapping, has faced fresh allegations in the last week that he approved of the widespread use of such tactics during his time in charge of the powerful tabloid. The Standards and Privileges Committee at the House of Commons is to meet early next week to decide whether it will launch a full public inquiry into the affair, but there is little doubt that it will do so given the strength of feeling expressed by MPs from all parties present at a debate on the matter yesterday, who voted unanimously for an investigation to take place. – The Irish Times

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Thursday News Review

09/09/2010, 07:30:13 AM

What did he know?

Ex-News Of The World editor Andy Coulson’s ‘position is becoming very difficult indeed’, Mr Burnham said after the issue was raised at PMQs. ‘The question I had in my mind during prime minister’s questions, when I saw Nick Clegg answering on the issue, was that Andy Coulson could have had a hand in preparing the lines that government ministers are using,’ he said ‘If he isn’t voluntarily suspended I think the prime minister should ask him to step back from his role.’ Shadow health secretary Mr Burnham also said the NHS was facing ‘its biggest threat in its 62 years’ from a government White Paper proposing to axe health trusts. – Metro

The police are to reopen their investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking next week and plan to interview former journalists from the newspaper for the first time to discover who else was involved in hacking the voicemails of public figures. The pressure on David Cameron’s spin doctor Andy Coulson will be intensified by the fact that Scotland Yard detectives are preparing to speak with Greg Miskiw – the former head of news and so far the only senior executive at the newspaper to be conclusively linked to Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed for tapping phones on behalf of the Sunday tabloid. – The Independent

A senior former News of the World journalist goes public to corroborate claims that phone hacking and other illegal reporting techniques were rife at the tabloid while the prime minister’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, was deputy editor and then editor of the paper. Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper’s investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that the use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware that this was going on. “How can Coulson possibly say he didn’t know what was going on with the private investigators?” he said. – The Guardian

Here come the cuts

Mr Cameron can ill afford to have the man in charge of organising the Government’s message appearing on the ten o’clock news night after night, with cameramen on his doorstep. At some point, resisting such attention is no longer worthwhile. Yet all this turbulence is nothing compared with what will hit the Coalition next month when George Osborne unveils his Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) – at that point, all hell will break loose. “We are in a canoe paddling down the Zambezi, and Victoria Falls lie dead ahead. Once we’ve gone over the edge, none of this will matter,” one leading Cameroon told me. The edge, for those at Westminster who worry about it, is the moment we discover just how bad the cuts are going to be. To judge by what Cabinet ministers and officials are saying, many worry that the Coalition has not done nearly enough to warn the public of the abyss into which the country is about to plunge. “If we have had a collective failure,” one Cabinet minister says, “it is that we have underplayed the scale of the problem.” – The Telegraph

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Wednesday News Review

08/09/2010, 07:01:11 AM

"Mmm, pass that guacamole stuff"

David Milibut

Miliband is only just recovering from the media derision that greeted his advice to Labour activists on how to organise a house meeting to support his campaign. He urged supporters to vacuum the house, buy some nibbles and turn on the oven. But it turns out that when it comes to his own culinary tastes, he’d rather save himself the bother. Questioned by the Evening Standard newspaper, he not only extolled the virtues of a “fantastic takeaway from Masala Zone in Camden”, but also listed “The Laughing Halibut fish and chip shop on Strutton Ground just off Victoria St” as one of his “favourite London discoveries”. – Channel 4.

Phone taps

Labour stepped up the pressure on the police when Harriet Harman, the party’s acting leader, wrote to the Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, asking him to inform any serving or former Labour MPs whose PIN numbers had been obtained. – The Guardian.

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Tuesday News Review

07/09/2010, 07:00:32 AM

Welcome back: Theresa May faces tough questions over phone hacking

If Theresa May had been a luckier politician she might have faced an easier challenge on her first day back at Westminster: solving world hunger perhaps, persuading the Taliban to take up knitting or smuggling Tony Blair into Waterstone’s. Instead the home secretary got a big, black binliner full of stinking political rubbish dumped into her lap, the kind of raw material that News of the World reporters tiptoe away with from the dustbins of their victims. Except that in this case the investigators were outraged opposition MPs and the targets under surveillance were Scotland Yard, the News of the Screws itself and Andy Coulson, the boss’s pet rottweiler, all mixed up in the phone-hacking affair. A Lib Dem cabinet minister even called for Coulson to be sacked. – The Guardian

Backbencher Tom Watson said Mrs May must not join a ”conspiracy” to undermine the ”integrity of our democracy”. He called on her to confirm that Tony Blair had asked Scotland Yard whether his phone was hacked – a suggestion the former prime minister’s office has yet to shed light on. But the home secretary batted away demands for details, saying: ”There have recently been allegations connected to this investigation in the New York Times newspaper. ”Any police investigation is an operational matter in which ministers have no role.” – The Telegraph

Step forward, Tom Watson, the man they call “Tommy Two Dinners”. In fact, the man is becoming a star performer in the House of Commons. Before the recess, he savaged Michael Gove over the school rebuilding fiasco, dubbing him “a miserable pipsqueak of a man”. Now he launched into Theresa May with a machine gun-like summary of the latest allegations: succinct, easy-to-understand and extremely effective. Put that man in the Shadow Cabinet! He’s becoming one of Labour’s top attack dogs. Nick Clegg will be grateful that he didn’t have to face Tommy. – Sky

During the Commons debate, Labour MP Tom Watson asked May to clarify how many were on Mulcaire’s “target list” of people to bug. He also asked how the Metropolitan Police decided on the small sample of names which made up its 2006 investigation into the affair. He added: “Can she confirm that former Prime Minister Tony Blair has formally asked Scotland Yard whether his phone was hacked? “The integrity of our democracy is under scrutiny around the world. The home secretary must not join the conspiracy to make it a laughing stock.” – Press Gazette

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Monday News Review

06/09/2010, 08:29:58 AM

Coulson & Cameron

Senior opposition politicians are calling on the government to respond to renewed accusations that Downing Street’s chief communications officer, Andy Coulson, encouraged reporters to illegally intercept messages from the cellphones of public figures when he was editor of The News of the World. At the same time, a number of people whose phone messages may have been intercepted by The News of the World during Mr. Coulson’s tenure are accusing the Metropolitan Police of failing to fully examine all the evidence in its criminal investigation in 2006 and 2007.- The New York Times

A senior Metropolitan Police officer said the force had asked the New York Times to provide any new material it had relating to the matter, including an interview it published with former reporter Sean Hoare. Mr Hoare has claimed David Cameron’s close aide was well aware News of the World staff were eavesdropping on private messages when he was editor of the paper. All five candidates in the Labour leadership contest also called for a fresh inquiry into unconfirmed claims reporters listened in to the voicemail messages of a long list of prominent figures, including politicians and celebrities. – Sky

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Sunday News Review

05/09/2010, 10:27:57 AM

Cameron & Coulson

Labour leadership contenders Ed Balls and Ed Miliband said David Cameron’s judgment was being called into question after claims the former newspaper’s editor, Andy Coulson, now No 10’s head of communications, had personally asked at least one member of staff to tap into someone’s phone. Balls called on Home Secretary Theresa May to make a statement to the House of Commons, while Ed Miliband said Downing Street should issue a “specific response” to the allegations, and warned: “Until that happens, a cloud will hang over both Andy Coulson and indeed the government, because this is the man in charge of the Downing Street media machine.” – The Herald

Today, the New York Times magazine publishes new evidence from journalists on the paper during Coulson’s editorship insisting that mobile phone-tapping was extensive, as initial Scotland Yard inquiries suggested, but which NI has consistently denied. NI argues that it was confined to former royal reporter Clive Goodman, who spent some months in prison for the offence which triggered Coulson’s own resignation. Last week, another reporter on the paper was suspended, again, we believe, for suspected telephone-tapping. Coulson has consistently said he knew nothing of more tapping beyond Goodman’s and refuses to comment further. – The Guardian

Dappy: I hate David Cameron

He and I end up loitering in an antechamber together; I grab the opportunity to ask him if he’s backing either of the Miliband brothers in the Labour leadership election battle. Who’s that then, darling?” he asks. David and Ed Miliband? “Never heard of them, darling.” Oh, but I think you all went to the same school. Not at that same time, but still… “Who again?” I google them on my iPhone and show Dappy the image results. He shakes his head. “Sorry, darling. I don’t know them.” But you’re a Labour supporter? “Very much so, darling! I liked Gordon. I could have done with more Gordon.” Not a fan of Cameron’s, then? “I hate David Cameron,” Dappy says, and tells me why in terms so libellous that they can’t be printed. – The Guardian

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