Decided to be undecided

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Monday, 5 August 2013 at 11:08 pm Ed Miliband is in the south of France while the Prime Minister is back at work and the Conservatives are building up their campaign team, recruiting Jim Messina who used to work for Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Labour does not even have an election campaign …

What Nigel Farage Doesn’t Say

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Monday, 12 August 2013 at 1:23 am Guest post by Tom Doran This Nigel Farage piece in the Telegraph is a quite remarkable thing. Its purpose is to take Cameron’s government to task for abandoning “traditional families” – so far, so UKIP – but there are two notable things in how he goes about it: …

The Catch-Up Service

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Monday, 12 August 2013 at 11:14 am Yes, very nice, thank you. I managed to stay upright on a wind surf board for about 100 seconds. I did post a week ago about Ed Miliband’s holiday indecision over a replacement for Tom Watson as election co-ordinator. One other reason for thinking …

Top 10 Laws for Life

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 2:47 pm My Top 10 in The Independent on Sunday’s New Review yesterday was Laws, including Godwin’s, Conquest’s Third, Murphy’s, Muphry’s and Parkinson’s. I cheated to get an 11th into the introduction, Twyman’s Law (“If a statistic looks interesting or unusual it is probably wrong”). But I …

George Galloway seeks help

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 3:28 pm While I was away, the mainstream press in the form of The Sunday Times (pictured; non-pay-wall version here) caught up with George Galloway’s hallucination of hate-fulfilment. The Sunday Times’s headline started well, before repeating the innuendo of Galloway’s film title. Fortunately, there is more chance of …

Holiday Reading

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Tuesday, 13 August 2013 at 4:26 pm A selection things I read or watched on my holidays, in case you missed them. “Mass immigration or the welfare state? Because we may not be able to have both,” by James Bloodworth. A bit deeper than Chris Bryant. Although I do pause over …

Are atheists mentally ill?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Wednesday, 14 August 2013 at 12:36 pm World-class Question To Which The Answer Is No asked by Sean Thomas at the Telegraph, even if the Committee staff have recorded the suspicion that he may have been trying too hard. It’s number 986 in the long-running series. First spotted by James Farrar. While I was away, we …

Merkel: “we can also consider whether we can give something back”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Friday, 16 August 2013 at 1:02 pm Angela Merkel’s comment on Tuesday should be noted well. In full: I believe that in Europe at the moment we have to take care to coordinate our competitiveness more closely, and for that we don’t have to do everything in Brussels. “More Europe” …

Poll alert

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 10:50 am We have a ComRes opinion poll in The Independent on Sunday tomorrow, shared with the Sunday Mirror. In addition to our usual voting intention question, we asked our tracking questions about David Cameron and Ed Miliband’s leadership. After the speech by Chris Bryant, Labour’s immigration spokesman, …

Voters oppose free movement of EU workers

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Last updated: Saturday, 17 August 2013 at 7:27 pm Voters have turned against the principle of free movement of workers in the European Union over the past four years, according to a ComRes poll for tomorrow’s The Independent on Sunday and Sunday Mirror. All citizens of other European Union countries should have the right …