Archive for peter mandelson
5 Days in May: The Coalition and Beyond by Andrew Adonis
Andrew Adonis’s book about the May 2010 coalition negotiations following the general election is very much one of two halves: a near-contemporary account written in the heat of the moment and then reflections on what happened, written three years on. It’s also a book of two halves in that one part reveals little new whilst [...]
Learning the lessons from last week #2: Lib Dem voters don’t want out of the coalition
Even after last Thursday, I’ve come across very few Liberal Democrats saying, “we should have made a deal with Labour last May”. That’s not a surprise, given the Parliamentary arithmetic and also all that has come out since about just how split Labour’s negotiating team was, not to mention the almost farcical lack of preparation [...]
How the world is slowing down and Labour would have doubled tuition fees: posts of the week
Welcome to my weekly round-up of two blogging highlights from the past week: the post that I found most interesting or enjoyable to write and the post from someone else that I found most interesting or entertaining. A post from me… Is the world speeding up? No, it’s slowing down Faster, faster, faster: that is [...]
22 Days in May by David Laws – book review
Many insider accounts have already appeared of the events retold in David Laws’s book 22 Days in May: The Birth of the Lib Dem-Conservative Coalition. It is therefore one of the book’s strengths that not only is it written in a lively style which gives some freshness to the now familiar sequence of events but [...]
Book review: Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man – Life at the heart of New Labour
At the book’s title suggests, Peter Mandelson’s memoirs The Third Man do not hold back from placing himself not only at the heart of New Labour but also at its top, variously using the phrases the three musketeers or the triumvirate to describe himself and the two Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Mandelson [...]
Alistair Darling wanted to raise VAT
Throws a bit of a spanner in the works of the Labour rhetoric about how awful anyone who contemplates raising VAT is: Amid reported wrangling between No 10 and the Treasury, Lord Mandelson suggested in his memoir that Mr Brown rejected a proposal from the chancellor to raise VAT while Mr Darling quashed calls for [...]
If you ram through a law about illegal copying online…
… the last you thing you want is to be caught red-handed indulging in a bit of, er…, illegal copying online.
Step forward and take a bow: the Labour Party (front bench voted for the Digital Economy Bill)
Followed by a bow please from the Conservative Party (front bench voted for the Digital Economy Bill)
For as The [...]
Brown cracks a good joke whilst Cameron flounders on gay rights
Yikes. Not quite sure what’s the most surprising from the interview I’ve just watched. The good joke from Gordon Brown about Peter Mandelson or the collapse of David Cameron, who asks for the interview to stop, turns to his minder off camera and asks for a different style of questioning.
Watch the interview here.
And no sniggering [...]
Daily View 2×2: 14 March – featuring exciting bollards and Mandelson saying “Vote Lib Dem”
It’s Sunday. It’s 9am. It’s time for photographs of bollards, but first the news.
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
The Mood at Lib Dem Conference: Nick Thornsby takes the pulse
The Saturday List: Lib Dem Constituency Songs: Will [...]
