Interviews

Britain’s euroscepticism hardens

With the European financial crisis rumbling on, anti-EU sentiment in Britain is deepening. Two polls — one by YouGov for PoliticsHome and the other by Angus Reid — show that 50 per cent of the public would vote for Britain to leave the EU if there was a referendum.   Of course, this is nothing new. Brits have long been the most eurosceptic of Europeans, as Fraser noted a couple of months ago. In fact, we’re the only country where more people think our membership of the EU is bad than think it’s good: The hardening of eurosceptic sentiment does seem to be due to current events: 34 per cent

Huhne pooh-poohs rising energy bills as ‘nonsense’

Chris Huhne was on the Andrew Marr show this morning. As you might expect on a day when the Sunday Telegraph broke the news that fuel bills will boom by 30 per cent as a result of green taxes, the Energy Secretary was asked to ruminate at length on all matters Murdoch. Eventually, though, Huhne had to answer searching questions pertaining to his brief. Confronted with the Sunday Telegraph’s story, Huhne described it as ‘nonsense’ because it did not take potential savings into account. Huhne also pledged to introduce more competition to shatter the grip that the ‘Big Six’ utility companies have on 90 per cent of the UK’s energy market. Greater

Cooper takes on the coalition from the right

What an intriguing interview Yvette Cooper gave to Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan show this morning — and not just because she was standing, ruffled and incongruous, in a field somewhere. I was live-tweeting proceedings here, and there was much to anticipate even before she appeared. On top of today’s stories about housing benefit, social care and immigration, the shadow home secretary would also have to deal with the comments made by Lord Goldsmith during the show’s newspaper review. “It’s not clear what Ed Miliband stands for,” said Goldsmith, to cheers from the Tory press team. “I don’t think the rifts in the party have been healed.” But, in the end, it

Digestif | 25 June 2011

Hard-working, mercurial and good at playing mean – reformed hell-raiser Dominic West eats asparagus into the small hours with Imogen Lycett Green After nearly two decades hitting headlines as a womanising bachelor of the most hell-raising kind, Dominic West married the mother of three of his four children last year. Has family life brought tranquillity with it? ‘You must be joking,’ he screams, throwing his head back. ‘I am swamped by kids. The theatre is where the order is, the calm, the structure. Things begin on time. Family life is chaos. I have never been happier in my life but when it’s time to go to the theatre, I run

Profit could hasten Gove’s school reforms

Michael Gove is giving a big speech tomorrow on free schools amid evidence that the policy is beginning to gather momentum. The papers report today that there have been 281 applications to set up free schools in the round that closed this month alone (sentence updated).   One of the best known of these planned free schools is the one being set up Tony Blair’s former strategist Peter Hyman. Ever since The Spectator revealed back in May that Hyman was planning to take advantage of the Tories’ reforms to start his own school, there’s been considerable interest in what Hyman is up to. In today’s Sunday Times he eloquently defends

Gove keeps on going

My gosh, Michael Gove is hyperactive at the moment. From his interview with James in the latest issue of the Spectator, to his recent announcements about failing primary schools and secondary school standards, this is a man who just cannot stop. So stop he doesn’t. The Secretary of State for education is delivering yet another speech on Monday. And he has another interview (£), with Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, in today’s Times. The Times interview, if you can vault across the paywall, is a worthwhile read. In it, Gove draws attention to the anti-reformist bent of local authoritarians; he warns that if we fail to adequately educate our population,

Glasman sings the blues

Maurice Glasman, a favoured thinker of Ed Miliband’s, has given an interview to someone called Filippo Sensi who writes for an Italian magazine called Europa. I sound a firm note of caution here because there is a distinct possibility that it’s a spoof. Take Glasman on the etymology of Blue Labour: “There is a sense of bravery and tragedy in our position and that is one meaning of the word blue, that links Miles Davis with Picasso and Aristotle. It is not mentally ill or depressed to feel triste and out of that understanding can flow a deeper understanding of the world and a more durable courage in resisting it than

Meeting Christine Lagarde

The FT has been speaking to Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister tipped to become managing director of the IMF. A few salient points emerge from it. First, she has more than a dash of hard-nosed Gallic defiance. Responding to the charge of a lack of a qualification in economics, she reiterated the comments she made to the Today programme earlier in the years: “From what I know of the job, I think I can do it. One of the qualities that people recognise in me is my ability to reach out, to try to build a consensus, to bring people to the common interest while still being a very firm

Cable’s punditry could come unstuck

“It’s not imminent. But you can see this happening.” So sayeth Vince Cable about the prospect of another global financial crisis, in interview with the New Statesman today. To be fair, you can see his point: there is a pervasive sense that the contradictions of the banking sector still haven’t been fixed, and — as I have written recently — our economy, and economies worldwide, are still afflicted by debt of all varieties. But that’s not going to calm those Tories who regard Cable as a combustive liability. In the weeks since the Lib Dems’  annihilation at the polls, the Business Secretary has increasingly reverted to his pre-coalition form: a

Alan Greenspan doesn’t exist

Five years have passed since Alan Greenspan stepped down from the most influential banking job in the world. (Now that’s how to leave at the right time.) Described in books, interviews and profiles too numerous to mention as ‘the most powerful regulator/person on earth’, he served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for 19 years. For reasons of sheer longevity, perhaps Greenspan deserves to be called the architect of the modern global economy more than any of his elected contemporaries. So it’s not insignificant that, by the accounts of his friends back in 1950s New York, Greenspan was something of a fruit-loop as you will discover tonight if you watch

Cable’s latest warnings and provocations

My favourite part of the Guardian’s interview with Vince Cable today? When the business secretary says that his sermonic prescriptions from during the crash are of “enduring relevance” now. But there’s more to the article than self-aggrandisement, not least Cable’s gloomy overview of the British economy. It’s not quite the same as Alastair Darling’s Guardian interview in August 2008, but there is a touch of that here. “I think it is not understood that the British economy has declined by 6 or 7 per cent — it is now 10 per cent below trend,” says Cable, “Britain is no longer one of the world’s price setters. It is painful. It

Lansley stands up for his reforms

If there’s anything that stands out from Andrew Lansley’s interview with the Sunday Times (£) it is his air of quiet defiance. Of course, the Health Secretary sounds some of the conciliatory notes that have crept in to the government’s rhetoric since they decided to pause, listen and engage on NHS reform. But he also stands up for the original reforms as he conceived them. “From my point of view,” he says, “the White Paper was setting out what sensible, intelligent people inside the NHS were saying.” For him, the concerns that remain are not with the general thrust of his reforms, but with “implementation, the nuts and bolts of

Clegg’s implicit attack on the Tories

Up until a few months ago, David Cameron and Nick Clegg tried to avoid doing big set piece broadcast interviews on the same day. This was driven by a desire to both maximise the coalition’s dominance of the media agenda and to avoid having to give a running commentary on what the other had said. But this rule has gone out of the window as the AV referendum has got rougher and rougher. So, following on from their both doing separate interviews on Andrew Marr on Sunday, they both were on the Today Programme this morning. Clegg even told Justin Webb to ask Cameron about the split between the two

Fraser Nelson

John Humphrys makes the case for voting No to AV

Is AV too complex? Ask John Humphrys, who unwittingly made the case against switching system today, in conversation with David Cameron on the Today programme. It became clear that Humphrys believed that everyone’s second preference vote would be counted under AV — and Cameron pounced. Here’s the transcript: DC: If you go to an AV system you start counting some people’s votes more than once. And you end up, in the words of Churchill… JH: No you don’t. It simply isn’t true that you count votes more than once. DC: Yes, you count all the votes. You start eliminating candidates, and you count people’s second preferences. JH: And I have

Miliband’s pre-election surgery

Miliband-o-rama on this Good Friday, with the Labour leader spread all across the papers. The Mirror reports that he is to have an operation to have his adenoids removed this summer, in a rather extreme bid to “improve his voice”. The Guardian says that he’s to deliver a speech next week — presumably with adenoids still intact — that will engage with the “Blue Labour” thinking of Maurice Glasman. And, if that’s not enough, there’s a curious interview with Miliband in the Sun. I say “curious,” because there aren’t too many interviews where a party leader goes through the (less than flattering) nicknames that have been bestowed upon him —

Ed Miliband by numbers, April edition

It’s just a single poll, sure — but Ipsos MORI’s latest is still fairly eye-catching stuff. And this is why: it has the Tories level with Labour for the first time since October. Anthony Wells serves up a pinch of salt over at UK Polling Report, saying that this “unusual” result is most likely down to the weightings that are used. But, technicalities aside, any poll that puts the Tories close to Labour, at this stage in the political cycle, is going to be greeted cheerily by Cameron & Co. – and less so by Team Miliband. It’s not all bad news for Ed Miliband, though. His personal ratings have

Cameron quells the storm

David Cameron turned in an emollient performance on the Today Programme this morning. He declined to stoke the coalition row over immigration, heaped praise on Vince Cable and stressed that the Liberal Democrats have been good coalition partners. Even when pressed on the question of whether Britain would block Gordon Brown from becoming director of the International Monetary Fund, Cameron spoke softly. The only line of questioning in the interview that discomforted the Prime Minister was when Evan Davis pressed him on why a localist government was placing restrictions on what local government could charge residents for recycling or rubbish collection. Cameron seemed to think that Davis was asking him

Cameron: we’re looking at doing more for the Libyan rebels

As James Kirkup says, David Cameron’s appearance on Sky News this morning was intriguing. In addition to trying to reassure the massing media doubters that the coalition “remains strong” despite its differences, the PM was keen to discuss the military mission in Libya. The letter that he authored with Sarkozy and Obama on Friday asserted that regime change was a necessity for peace. Since then, both Whitehall and the Elysee have insisted that Gaddafi cannot remain. How then might he go? Plainly, Gaddafi will not abdicate of his own volition. On the other hand, Cameron is adamant that there can be no ‘invasion or occupation’, and he reiterated the point

The consequences of political abuse

Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on.   Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, wrote earlier this year about how she worried about the psychological effect on her children of people verbally assaulting her husband in front of them. During the Labour leadership contest, Ed Balls, for all his faults, spoke movingly about his concern over how he would protect his kids from what was

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg was claiming that the NHS reforms were the Lib Dems’ idea just three months ago

Ahead of this morning’s Cameron, Clegg, Lansley event on the NHS, it is worth reminding ourselves of what Nick Clegg was saying about these reforms back at the start of the year. On January 23rd, he went on the Andrew Marr show and had this exchange: ‘ANDREW MARR: Huge change to the NHS just coming down the line. Was that in the Liberal Democrat manifesto? NICK CLEGG: Actually funnily enough it was. Indeed it was. We were one of the primary critics in opposition of what we felt was a top … ANDREW MARR: (over) I don’t remember you saying you were going to get rid of Primary Care Trusts