Tag: “Gordon Brown”

I suppose political strategists are likely to be more interested in interviews with political strategists than most people, but anyone with an interest in politics, campaigns and the next election should read the interview below. It is with political strategist David Axelrod, a key member of the team for both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns; conducted [...]

The reason we ended up with a coalition government is that the public did not want Labour back for a fourth term but they did not want the old Tory Party back either. So they chucked in the Lib Dems and said ‘you lot sort it out.’ Analysed coldly, David Cameron should have won the [...]

TweedleGeorge and TweedleDanny were out the other day, dressed in G4S style security jackets, announcing a bit of infrastructure spending. TweedleDanny appeared to have lost the power of speech, but he had retained the power of head movement and was nodding earnestly as TweedleGeorge explained how the difficult decisions taken by the coalition had made [...]

I can hardly complain at The Guardian’s ‘brilliant but bonkers’ headline on the second part of the extracts they are running from my new book, Burden of Power. Tony Blair said the words, and he said them about Gordon Brown, so even though it is not news that there were sometimes difficulties between them, and [...]

A few months ago, George Osborne, in the eyes of many of his MPs and much of the media, could do no wrong. He was not just the Chancellor presiding over a bold plan to cure all known economic ills in a single term. He was also the party strategist whose economic and political mastery [...]

Not much doubt which will be the most read newspaper in Whitehall today… the Daily Telegraph, which leads on a story headlined ‘worst civil servants to be sacked,’ and includes the remarkable line from a ‘minister’ that he is in favour of sacking 90 per cent of them, and paying the remaining 10 per cent [...]

I hope someone at Tory Central Office is minting a medal for Michael Fallon, the MP who so gamely trots from studio to studio defending whatever Cameron-Osborne shambles happens to be trending at the time. But last night, as he sat with others waiting for election results to come in, there came a little sign [...]

I don’t suppose the two arrogant unapologetic posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (copyright Nadine Dorries) would ever listen to Alistair Darling. But they could do worse. Writing in the FT today, Labour’s last Chancellor sets out his ideas for how his successor George Osborne might get the economy going, including investment [...]

A Tory strategist (now there’s a rare bird) is quoted in the FT today as saying ‘I don’t think there will be a permanent impact [from recent troubles] if we can show we are a competent government.’ That may be true, though I doubt it; may be wishful thinking, indeed clearly it is; but the [...]

I got in last night to catch sight of Nick Clegg talking about child benefit on the news. Now I didn’t see the start of the report, but if I read the words and body language right, I thought that rather than agitating as the Lib Dem leader in advance of the Budget, he was [...]