444 items found
Gary Gibbon
There is a growing feeling that the “Stop Bercow” campaign will win the day on Monday. The sense is that John Bercow might very well top the ballot on the first round of the Speakership contest but then not pile on many votes. Sir George Young and Margaret Beckett could be vying for second place.…
Gary Gibbon
“I didn’t realise how much you liked me so I’ve decided I’m staying.” The Speaker’s words at the end of a nearly two hours of tributes. But he was only joking.
Jon Snow
Gordon Brown will signal today whether the political classes “get it” when it comes to combating the expenses scandal in parliament. “Getting it” extends well beyond expenses to full-blown reform of our system of governance, as I have written here before.
Gary Gibbon
At the heart of the Prime Minister’s address to the PLP in 30 minutes’ time will be an analysis of last night’s results which tries to say “it is not all over for Labour.” The Prime Minister will say there are signs in the European Parliament election results that the Tories have not made a…
Jon Snow
Crumbs! An act of personal political courage – or of scheming personal political advancement? At this point almost impossible to judge. I don’t know James Purnell well. He was once a pivotal bag carrier, speech writer and muse inside Tony Blair’s Downing Street. Hence a Blairite, almost certainly well aware of, and wary of, Gordon…
Gary Gibbon
Rumours are flying around about more resignations this afternoon. It would be surprising, but then the word febrile doesn’t do justice to it. Ministers are on the Green where I am standing outside the Commons giving robust defences of the PM. But the ally of Gordon Brown who let it be known off the record…
Gary Gibbon
Friends of Jacqui Smith are insisting her departure is not part of a coordinated Blair Babe walk-out from government to precipitate the downfall of Gordon Brown (Patricia Hewitt and Beverley Hughes announced today that they were standing down as MPs at the next election ). This is much more about the first, longest suffering victim…
Jon Snow
Ever since she was discovered to be claiming a room in her sister’s house in Nunhead, south London as her primary residence, home secretary Jacqui Smith has been in trouble. Her husband renting a couple of porn movies on the taxpayer didn’t help. But in truth the first woman home secretary, the second youngest holder…
Gary Gibbon
A revolution or an upset? Does the expenses saga have the capacity to change our politics fundamentally? Will the terrors lurking in some financial institutions wrest our politics back to economics and away from MPs’ home economics? Will the prime minister survive the inevitable movements against him by some Labour MPs after the Euro and…
Jon Snow
Gordon Brown talks of radical constitutional change. So does David Cameron. So does Nick Clegg. But is it going to happen? It was the 19th century radical John Bright who conjured the phrase “Mother of Parliaments”. It’s a cosy, reassuring concept and has often been distorted to suggest Westminster is the “Mother of Parliaments”.
Jon Snow
If the expenses scandal is about anything, it is about the public’s right to know what politicians do in their name and with their money. Yet as the parties attempt to purge the transgressors, all the indications are that the same secrecy and attempted cover-up that led to the leaking of MPs’ expenses to the…
Jon Snow
How convenient, the Whitsun break. Have you ever wondered how many weeks the political classes absent themselves in a year? But the problem today is not absenteeism. In some cases it’s a lack of it.
Jon Snow
I first set eyes on Gordon Brown at Edinburgh University in 1970. We were both involved in student protests in our respective universities and I’d been invited from Liverpool University to give a talk to him and his fellow protesters on the campus in Edinburgh.
At the highest levels of the Treasury and the Bank of England, they are talking about the “Honda Effect”. As luck would have it, yesterday I went to visit the Honda factory in Swindon. The fact that it was in the final fortnight of a four-month production shutdown was as tangible an example of the…
Jon Snow
spent yesterday afternoon in the environs of the House of Commons. An extraordinary experience. Normally, ostentatiously crawling with MPs and peers anxious to be recognised, stopped and interviewed – yesterday the place was completely deserted.