Category: “Politics”

Perth in Western Australia is a lovely place, but I suspect David Cameron wishes the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting could have been held in the equally lovely Scottish namesake. No matter how wonderful Australia may be, it is a long long way away, and the PM was unsurprisingly looking a bit tired I thought. [...]

The mood music out of the eurozone crisis summit was pretty good, the reactions not bad, and so the sense is of disaster averted. The problem is that further difficult steps now have to be taken, and what happens when they are is far from certain. Europe’s leaders have laid down what should happen, but [...]

You’d have thought President Sarkozy would still have been in post-Libya mutual backslap mode with Dave, added to which a new baby usually puts a man in a good mood for a few days. So our PM must really have been getting Sarko’s goat to provoke the tirade that came his way at the European [...]

I promise I am not going soft, but I am beginning to feel a little bit sorry for David Cameron and George Osborne. As a regular attendee of European summits when Labour was in power, I always feel a bit sorry for anyone who has to eat into the weekend to go to some soulless [...]

The post has just arrived and in it a very nice surprise, the discovery that Jacques Seguela, one-time adviser to President Mitterrand, now close confidant of President and Madame Sarkozy (indeed he intoduced them), and something of a legend in French political communications, has dedicated his latest book to little old moi. With apologies for [...]

It will not have escaped most people’s notice that despite Labour being out of power, its senior figures continue to be held accountable whether via public inquiries, a media that sometimes seems to think we are still there, and a government that never misses an opportunity to paint a negative picture of a very successful [...]

Having been through a few ministerial media frenzies, and knowing as I do how the press can twist and distort every little detail to feed the frenzy, even with Tories I like to let the benefit of the doubt linger for as long as I can. It partly explains why you will have to look [...]

As Liam Fox and Chris Huhne were embarrassing themselves and the government last night, I won’t have been the only one to have liked the younger, more feminine look of the new shadow cabinet. But I am sure Ed Miliband and his team understand – getting the new team together is the easy bit. Now [...]

I fear I may have been overly kind to the Prime Minister when I described his speech as ‘very average’ on twitter yesterday. This was certainly on the kinder end of the comment spectrum. It would seem even commentators on the right were largely underwhelmed, and instead resorted to saying how Prime Ministerial he looked. [...]

Greetings from Vienna airport where I am waiting for a plane, worrying about the unseasonal heat, getting irritated by a couple who are kissing their dog like it is a baby, and trying to find a single reference to the Tory Party conference in the Financial Times. It is the Europe edition, so unsurprisingly leads [...]