Alastair's Blog

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 [...]

For various reasons I have seen no news coverage and read no newspaper reports of the Tory conference since Sunday morning. This has not been a deliberate snub to one of the two ruling parties, just the result of other things getting in the way. So today I spent a little time wandering around the [...]

I have never felt I have that much in common with David Cameron, but today we share a modest traducement by The Sunday Times. The Prime Minister’s comes in the form of a headline saying ‘Cameron says sorry to women’. What? All of them? What on earth has he done? It turned out to be [...]

With thanks to Labour’s media monitoring department, and to the Financial Times, here is the first’s account of the second’s report today on school standards. ‘Poorer pupils seen to be catching up in exams’ (FT p4) – Poorer children closed the educational achievement gap on children from wealthier backgrounds during Labour’s last term of office, [...]

While the press revels in the judgement that allows them to carry on with kiss and tell stories about footballers (provided they are England captain it would seem) I would like to focus not on Rio Ferdinand but on Robert Enke. He was the German goalkeeper who killed himself after a long battle with depression, [...]

An interesting little passage in Polly Toynbee’s column in The Guardian this morning, as she described the post-Ed speech process in the press room at Liverpool. “‘Lurching to the left’ and ‘Red Ed’ were the inevitable responses of the mostly rightwing press convening in an instant huddle after the speech. If you want to see [...]

Ed Miliband said he was going to be his own man, and follow his own instincts and his own values, which is surely the right approach for a leader. He was at his best today when he was passionate about where those instincts and values lay. He had a core argument – that the political, [...]

At least the economy is centre stage as Labour’s conference begins. It has to be. And finally, after a year of the main parties arguing over the size and scale of the deficit, and the speed with which it should be reduced, the argument appears to be moving to the much bigger issues that now [...]