Whatever It Took

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 1 October 2010 at 11:40 am In a miserable failure of self-promotion by the seventh most popular media blog, I forgot to link to my review of Steve Richards’s excellent book, Whatever It Takes, on Sunday. The title of the book is taken from Brown’s speech at Labour conference in Manchester in September 2008, just …

“The most incredible feeling”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 1 October 2010 at 5:49 pm Two quotations to deepen the gloom. A friend who left the Labour Party to join the SDP in the 1980s writes: I was all ready to rejoin Labour before Ed got it. Even if I agreed with him on some things, his whole campaign …

More reasons why the Iraq war was not wrong

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 1 October 2010 at 6:41 pm I seem, or rather Ed Miliband seems, to have (re)started something with the declaration that the invasion of Iraq was “wrong”, about which I wrote on Wednesday. This generated a large number of comments, some of the authors of which seem to be coming to …

The Car Crash and “Scenario 4”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 1 October 2010 at 10:08 pm A while ago, I promised some more nuggets from the revised paperback edition of Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, to which the author with his trademark modesty has failed to draw the world’s attention. He reports that, during the election campaign, Tony Blair …

Cameron the History Man

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Saturday, 2 October 2010 at 6:38 pm Interesting long interview by Simon Schama with David Cameron (right) in the Financial Times (registration) today. The first thing I ask him is to imagine Florence, 16 years hence, about to do her history GCSE (in the restored version of the curriculum I push him to reinstate), asking …

Mark of Cain

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 3 October 2010 at 5:16 pm I did not know that the Mark of Cain was put on him by God to protect him from those who might want to do him harm because he had killed his brother. (Cain and Abel, by Titian, right.) So it is an analogy that does …

Another reason Labour members might vote No

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 3 October 2010 at 9:56 pm David Herdson at Political Betting asks, “How much has Ed’s win boosted the pro-AV camp?” Which mistakenly assumes that it has boosted it at all. As I said at a Progress fringe meeting in Manchester last week, I thought Ed Miliband’s victory under the Alternative …

Did Aristotle Onassis order Robert Kennedy shooting?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 4 October 2010 at 2:31 pm Number 393 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No is asked by Irish Central. The first paragraph of its report is number 393a, rephrasing the question in fuller and sillier form: Did Aristotle Onassis have Bobby Kennedy [right] killed by a member of …

Why Fox Might Have Leaked

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 4 October 2010 at 7:25 pm A rather unenlightening “Diary of a Civil Servant” in The Observer yesterday. Its anonymous author opines that “leakers have different motives”, and suggests that ministers and their advisers sometimes leak “for political advantage”. The most vulnerable time for any minister is when their policy proposal is …

Is the Channel Wider than the Atlantic?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 4 October 2010 at 8:08 pm I know the answer to this one! It’s number 394 in the series. Thanks to Robert for supplying this photograph. Sorry – I missed number 392. That was asked on Saturday by champion contributor Mike Smithson at Political Betting: Is Balls at Defence the coalition’s biggest …