Eagle Eye
Men of Secrets II
The video and transcript of the full interview with Robin Butler, Cabinet Secretary 1988-98, in the 10 Downing Street history series is now on the Mile End Group cabinet secretaries website.
Interviewed by Anthony Seldon, Lord Butler reflects on the difference between the Margaret Thatcher he had known as her principal private secretary in the middle phase [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 24 May 2013 at 10:51 am
Men of Secrets
All living cabinet secretaries, including the present one, Sir Jeremy Heywood, have been interviewed for the History section of the 10 Downing Street website, a joint project of No 10 and the Mile End Group.
Highlights videos of two interviews, with Robert Armstrong and Robin Butler, have gone up on the Downing Street website, and the [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 24 May 2013 at 7:06 am
The Dawn of Time
My esteemed colleague Jack Riley, head of digital at the Independent and Evening Standard, is leaving to join AOL/Huffington Post. I wish him well, and want to pay tribute to him for the success of The Independent on the web, but also, more selfishly, for helping me into the digital world.
I started blogging in 2007, [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 6:58 pm
The Fiction of Gatsby
“In Britain and America, inequality is now back to Gatsby-esque levels.” So wrote Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian economics leader-writer, yesterday. It is just not true. I don’t know as much about America, but it certainly isn’t true about Britain.
It is a popular myth of anti-Labour propaganda: that the gap between rich and poor expanded greatly under Tony [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 22 May 2013 at 3:48 pm
Why “build more houses” is not The Answer
Fine post by Hopi Sen yesterday that deserves a wider audience. Almost every hard political problem today can be solved, too many people seem to think, by “build more houses”.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 21 May 2013 at 10:18 pm
Cameron on Gay Marriage Should Make Us Proud
Apologies to Benedict Brogan, deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, whose excellent morning briefing describes the fuss over gay marriage as “avoidable”. Avoidable how?
Then we had Tim Montgomerie and Mary Ann Sieghart on the Today programme saying that David Cameron should have come out fighting for gay marriage. “That’s what Tony Blair would have done,” [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 20 May 2013 at 9:16 am
What Focus Groups Say About Ed Miliband
If people vote in the general election on 7 May 2015 the way our ComRes opinion poll today suggests, Labour would win a majority of 74 seats. But they probably won’t. So how will public opinion change over the next two years?
Here are two schools of thought: Dan Hodges, my fellow zombie Blairite, has devised [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 8:29 pm
Cameron’s possibly winning position
My article in The Independent on Sunday today is part of a continuing series explaining why popular attitudes towards Europe might not be such a problem for David Cameron as might be assumed.
Since May 2010, when the general election coincided with the start of the euro crisis, most opinion polls, including our ComRes today, have [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 2:57 pm
“Clearing the Battlefield”
Matthew d’Ancona says David Cameron’s talk is of “clearing the battlefield”. Which is a nice way of saying, “everything looks like a shambles now, but just imagine what it will be like the week after next when all this bad stuff is out of the way”.
D’Ancona reports what I had heard, which is that No [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 May 2013 at 9:54 pm
UKIP Surges to Record High
The UK Independence Party is on 19 per cent, the highest share recorded by any pollster, in a ComRes poll for tomorrow’s The Independent on Sunday, shared with the Sunday Mirror.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 18 May 2013 at 7:27 pm
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