Today's prize for environmentally friendly journalism goes to The Guardian, which managed to lead its front page with the recycled story that Jack Straw would like us to think that he tried at the last moment to dissuade Tony Blair from joining the Iraq invasion.

Of course, it is of interest that Straw has been listed to give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, at which he will presumably be asked about his note of16 March 2003. But a front-page lead?  That might imply that the story of the note itself is new, an inference some people inevitably draw.

It is not. It was reported by John Kampfner in his book Blair's Wars, serialised in the Mail on Sunday on 14 September 2003.
 

A proper, thinking Oakeshottian who has been an intellectual and moral pioneer in an environment at times brutally hostile to him. That's Andrew Sullivan. I'm a big fan. He makes it his business to speak truth to power. Precisely because he doesn't allow tribal immaturity to obscure his thinking, and precisely because he is, as The Daily Dish boasts, "of no party or clique", Sullivan is the most important and most effective critic of the Republican Party alive today. I challenge any conservative who thinks themselves reasonable to find dispute with his excoriation of the increasingly disappointing Bill Kristol. His post is brave, and so correct that I'm going to copy and paste the whole fabulous thing.  

Neoconservatism In A Word: "Fight"

Bill Kristol, whose view of politics is pretty much as Trotskyite as the far left used to be, does not see healthcare reform as a means of addressing a serious political, economic and moral challenge. It is, of course, just one more battle in the eternal ideological and partisan warfare he believes in. His current advice to the GOP is the same as the advice he has given for a couple of decades now:

*** Keep fighting on health care. Fight for the next few days in the Senate. Fight the conference report in January in the Senate and the House. Start trying to repeal the worst parts of the bill the moment it passes, if it does... The criticism of the Obama administration needs to be broad-based, because you never know just what issue is going to take off, and because the opposition needs to knit together all those who object to the Europeanization of America... So: Fight on with respect to health care. Fight on other fronts. And recruit new fighters. In a word: Fight. ***

Note that the issues as such are largely opportunistic - "you never know just what issue is going to take off".

I saw Iain Dale had a taxi-driver moment when Ipsos-MORI reported a 17-point Conservative lead rather than the three-point gap that was rumoured:  

Now some of the comrades are excited about today's ComRes poll in The Independent, which shows a nine-point lead, as opposed to the 17 points in its previous poll for The Independent on Sunday.

Those of you who do not know about sampling variation, look it up on Google. Those of you who do, look at Anthony Wells's UK Polling Report Polling Average. The Conservative lead is at 12 points, as opposed to, er, 12 points a week ago, and 14 points two months ago.  

Update: Anthony Wells emails to say that he had not updated his average at the time I wrote this, so the Tory lead is not 13 points as I wrote a few hours ago but an earth-shattering 12 points. The trouble is that even if the Daily Mail put "No Change in Underlying Poll Trend!" in two-inch-high type on the front page, no one would think it much of a story.

Music has always mirrored politics, but over the last ten years it’s seemed that people just can’t be bothered. With this years number one I predict a change in the mood of the generation that politics forgot, the millions who marched against an illegal war, remember them? The ones that have been ignored and who don’t even bother to vote any more because they feel like their voice is not heard. The ones that are so desperate that they have voted BNP because they just don’t know where else to turn. ‘Horrific’ is the only appropriate word for that particular state of affairs. The reason this Christmas’s number one is so exciting is that it shows a depressed, suppressed and repressed nation flexing their combined muscle in a small but significant act of independence which we have been stripped of by New Labour. Yes, it’s a drop in the ocean against it all; the recession, global warming, the war, the unbearable and suffocating bureaucracy, the bland, PR’dness of it all, but you’ve got to start somewhere. 
 

The televised election debates, that is. Number 199 of my Questions to Which the Answer is No is asked by Peter Hoskin at Coffee House.  

 
Lord Lawson of Blaby: Access denied



I'm a little confused. Those who don't believe that climate change is being forced by human action object to being called "climate change deniers". It's a nasty attempt to associate them with "holocaust deniers" apparently.

How come the finest diplomatic and political minds in the West didn't see the Chinese veto coming? Copenhagen has been planned for two years and yet no one seems to have thought to find out if the leaders of the country producing the most greenhouse gas would sign up for what most other countries would accept. Or, if the Chinese said they would, whether they meant it.

I recommend Michael McCarthy's report and question-and-answer guide in The Independent on Sunday today. Also worth reading: the magnificent pessimistic rage of Polly Toynbee (in the course of which she proclaims social democracy as an optimistic creed), and Tim Collard at the Telegraph, stating what should have been obvious: don't blame the Chinese; they are part of the solution.

The relative failure of the Copenhagen summit has a more parochial implication: Gordon Brown won't get the credit he so richly deserves for a feat of negotiating energy and skill that helped to solve all the main issues apart from the big one, the great stonewall of China.

The lazy assumptions that I shared - that Brown hates international meetings, that he is shy, awkward and rude, and therefore a poor negotiator - turn out to be wrong. I am told by his spin doctors that he used his relationship with Barack Obama to help save the summit as it approached meltdown on Wednesday and Thursday. They tell me that he chaired difficult meetings brilliantly, and that he chaired so many of them, with such energy and stamina, that he seemed to be directing the whole show.

What is really extraordinary is that they are right. Just because they are the Prime Minister's spin doctors does not mean that they should always be disbelieved. Because I have also spoken to other people who have no interest in talking Brown up but who have seen him in action. They say that he is really good at the multi-dimensional chess of international summitry; that, as chairman of many of the key meetings, he has proved himself an effective judge of summit psychology, allowing people to feel that they have had their say but keeping the business moving along. Obviously, the UK, as a part of the European Union delegation, had limited leverage on the geopolitical power play between the US and China, but that limited hand was played, I am told, as well as it could have been.  

What a productive error that was. I expressed myself clumsily in The Independent on Sunday last weekend. Don Paskini responded on his blog and at Liberal Conspiracy. I tried to express myself more clearly here:  

Then everyone else joined in. Anthony Wells chipped in at UK Polling Report. Sunder Katwala had a go at Next Left. Tom Harris was typically forceful in his "Class war is for losers". I also had an intelligent commenter called mjtmjt (his real name), who came in on Paskini's side of the argument.

Daniel Finkelstein had the last word yesterday, giving me the sort of name-check that I would put up in lights at the top of this blog if I knew how, and endorsing Wells. As he says, Wells summed up the whole spat brilliantly thus:  

Polls on whether the public agree with a policy or not do not always tell the whole story. When looking at a policy there is the direct effect of whether people agree with it or not, and the indirect effect of what associating themselves with that policy will do to a party’s image.

The example I normally use is not taxing the wealthy, but immigration. Polls consistently show that immigration is an issue people care about, and that they want harsher restrictions upon it.

Surely immigration would be a winning issue for the Conservatives? Not necessarily, since they have also spent the last four years trying to change their image to look less reactionary and “nasty”. If they made anti-immigration a key message, it might itself be popular, but would risk making them look bigoted and unpleasant.

It’s the same with taxing the rich. If tax hikes are necessary, polls always show that people much prefer them to hit the rich. Equally, penalising bankers is a route to easy popularity.

A super pedant takes issue with my earlier post attempting to out-pedant Paul Waugh on the spelling of Solicitor General. He said hyphen; I said not. It turns out that Hansard says Solicitor-General. But then it not only also hyphenates Advocate-General but Attorney-General too.
Has she got one? Patricia Scotland (left) and Vera Baird.

I think we put that down to one of the charming eccentricities of ancient British tradition.  

Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, gives us dividing-line politics at its most crude in his column for Tribune today. It is not the Tribune site yet, but is here. This is the key passage:  

I like the "Gordon and I" - in 2001 Balls was only Brown's chief economic adviser. But the attempt to paint the Conservatives as "the party of VAT" is (a) unsubtle and (b) an implied confirmation of reports that "Gordon and I" forced the Chancellor to reject a VAT rise in favour of another hike in National Insurance in last week's pre-Budget report.

Balls has a fair point that NI is more progressive - better related to ability to pay - than VAT, but against that it is also true that it is a "tax on jobs". (Nor is it wise to remind us of Labour's defeat of VAT on domestic fuel in 1993, one of the most ungreen and retrograde policiesof the past two decades.) Whoever forms the next government, all taxes will have to rise, including VAT.

All taxes have drawbacks. This is one dividing line that politics does not need.  

Top pedantry from Paul Waugh. Reporting on the Solicitor-General's dog, he asks of Vera Baird's title: "Anyone know why it's hyphenated, but Attorney General isn't?"

I can answer that one. It is not hyphenated. Neither the Solicitor General nor the Attorney General take a hyphen, according to the Law Officers' website, and the house style of most newspapers, including The Independent titles. Nor does the Advocate General of Scotland, or that of Northern Ireland, when it is created.

Who said the internet dumbs us down?   

Another Questions to Which the Answer is No special: this is number 197, the title of a discussion forum hosted by the BBC. It appears that a law is being debated in the Ugandan parliament on Friday that proposes:

I wouldn't want to spend too much time in the Comments, but note that 182 of 395 comments have been rejected by the BBC moderator so far.

Tom Harris is cross. He waited eight and a half years for House Magazine to write a profile of him (pdf), and in its first paragraph it accuses him of having voted for the Social Nemocratic Party.

That'll teach you, you traitorous right-wing splitter. If you vote for a party that is one letter different from the Satanic Nasty Party, you have only yourself to blame if 26 years later some teenager who's never heard of Bill Rodgers makes a typing error.

Photograph: Yes, that was considered media friendly in 1983