John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning. Click here and 'like' to receive updates on Facebook
I did not know that the Mark of Cain was put on him by God to protect him from those who might want to do him harm because he had killed his brother. (Cain and Abel, by Titian, right.) So it is an analogy that does not quite work for Ed Miliband, then.
I have written [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 3 October 2010 at 5:16 pm
Interesting long interview by Simon Schama with David Cameron (right) in the Financial Times (registration) today.
The first thing I ask him is to imagine Florence, 16 years hence, about to do her history GCSE (in the restored version of the curriculum I push him to reinstate), asking her pa what he’d done to deserve the plaudits. An [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 2 October 2010 at 6:38 pm
A while ago, I promised some more nuggets from the revised paperback edition of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, to which the author with his trademark modesty has failed to draw the world’s attention.
He reports that, during the election campaign, Tony Blair misheard someone who told him about a car that crashed into [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 1 October 2010 at 10:08 pm
I seem, or rather Ed Miliband seems, to have (re)started something with the declaration that the invasion of Iraq was “wrong”, about which I wrote on Wednesday.
This generated a large number of comments, some of the authors of which seem to be coming to the issue for the first time, and some of them seem [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 1 October 2010 at 6:41 pm
Two quotations to deepen the gloom. A friend who left the Labour Party to join the SDP in the 1980s writes:
I was all ready to rejoin Labour before Ed got it. Even if I agreed with him on some things, his whole campaign was just so horribly cynical. Does anyone think that if he’d been [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 1 October 2010 at 5:49 pm
In a miserable failure of self-promotion by the seventh most popular media blog, I forgot to link to my review of Steve Richards’s excellent book, Whatever It Takes, on Sunday. The title of the book is taken from Brown’s speech at Labour conference in Manchester in September 2008, just after Lehman Brothers went bust: “When people [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 1 October 2010 at 11:40 am
Unused quotation of last week, from Nick Clegg’s diary for The Spectator:
If someone’s sick in the back of my cab, nobody blames the person who comes with a mop and bucket to clean it up, do they?
How “a Liverpool cabbie” explained the coalition’s political situation to the Liberal Democrat leader. “A little too graphic, I fear, for my conference speech.”
Photograph: The Taxi Project, Tate Liverpool [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 30 September 2010 at 4:45 pm
The mystery deepens of Ed Miliband’s sacking of Nick Brown as Labour chief whip – my scoop yesterday, previously discussed on this blog.
Guido Fawkes reports that Brown shared an adviser with Rosie Winterton (right), whom Ed Miliband chose as chief whip to replace him.
Which lends credence to a theory put to me by a supporter of [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 30 September 2010 at 2:11 pm
The Iraq war has been debated long enough, and to carry the debate on is backward-looking, but it was the Leader of the Opposition who raised it in his forward-looking, “optimistic” speech:
I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war and we need to be honest about that. Wrong because that war [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 29 September 2010 at 4:38 pm
Very occasionally, you get the news first if you follow me on Twitter. I had just reported hearing that Ed Miliband had spoken to Nick Brown, Labour’s chief whip (right), and said that he did not want him to continue in the post. Now Brown has announced that he will not be standing for election:
As [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 29 September 2010 at 3:11 pm
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