Eagle Eye
The Lib Dem Disillusion
A ComRes poll for The Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror tomorrow finds that 52% of people who voted Lib Dem say Clegg has “sold out”, and 40% say they would have voted differently if they had known about the coalition with the Conservatives.
The poll defines the scale of the problem faced by Nick Clegg (right) as he [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 September 2010 at 7:30 pm
Clegg and the Centre Ground
People have made the mistake of misjudging Nick Clegg before.
One nugget in Steve Richards’s Whatever It Takes is that Miriam “had her doubts” about the “sudden transformation” in her husband’s public status as a result of his good showing in the televised debates. She was “intelligently sceptical about the theatrical dimension in British politics”, he [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 September 2010 at 5:31 pm
End of the World Was Nigh
Terrific anecdote from Steve Richards’s Whatever It Takes, which I am reviewing for The Independent on Sunday next week. As queues formed outside branches of Northern Rock during Lib Dem conference in 2007, a “senior cabinet minister” told Richards he had just received a call from Will Hutton, the economist and former editor of The [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 September 2010 at 11:22 am
Is Carole Caplin set to blow the lid on Tony and Cherie Blair’s sex secrets?
I think we’ll put this from today’s Daily Innuendo down as number 387 in the long-running series.
It also belongs in a separate series, known as “How Journalism Works” (earlier entries here), not just for the use of seven further questions in the body of the article but for the ingenious use of “set to” in [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 September 2010 at 10:05 am
Labour’s denialism
I have just opened my Labour Leadership ballot paper. As a Trade Union member I am one of the few non-Labour MPs to be offered a vote in the Labour Leadership election
With the unions committing themselves to opposing any cuts or job losses it is interesting to read the manifestos of the Labour Leadership [...]
By John Hemming MP | Eagle Eye | Friday, 17 September 2010 at 3:00 pm
Simon Jenkins’ two-party thinking
“We are back to the 1930s and 1950s, to a Tory ascendancy, briefly helped by the remnants of a once-popular Liberalism” according to Jenkins. This is historicism masquerading as wisdom.
By Ben Chu | Eagle Eye | Friday, 17 September 2010 at 2:00 pm
The Politics of the Morgue
Quotation of the day, from Paul Sinclair, who worked in No 10 under Gordon Brown, and who had this to say of his colleagues’ approach to politics to Steve Richards for his Radio 4 programme next week:
There was a line in The Untouchables that Sean Connery’s character [second from left] uses – ‘If they pull [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 17 September 2010 at 1:13 pm
The Stupid Shadow Cabinet Election
Lesley Smith, who says she “worked for the Parliamentary Labour Party in the last century and the private sector since”, has an excellent article on Labour Uncut entitled, “Shadow cabinet elections are stupid enough without voting stupidly too.”
True on both points. One of the unfortunate consequences of not holding an early leadership election is that [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 17 September 2010 at 1:05 pm
He said what?
This blog has so far been a Pope-free zone. Then I received an email press release from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in America headed, “Atheists must apologize for Hitler.” I was going to press delete, which is what I do with crank emails, when I noticed that it attributed a quotation [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 16 September 2010 at 10:26 pm
“A Man of Conscience”
Who writes this of whom?
[He] ranked spiritual truth above all other values. He was willing to alienate anyone, old friends and future ones, in its pursuit … He would do what he thought right however uncomfortable or unpopular it would be.
You have to admire this intellectual courage … “A man of conscience is one who [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 16 September 2010 at 2:27 pm
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