The Independent - John Rentoul RSS Feed

John Rentoul: Cameron is the new Blair

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

"What are Cameron's 10 Bills for his first Queen's Speech?" a Cabinet minister asked me recently in disbelieving frustration. "The Swedish Schools Bill, and what else?" This could be a consistent theme of Labour attacks on the Conservatives, if Labour attacks on the opposition were sustained and coherent enough to have a consistent theme. You could imagine that, if the Labour Party had more confidence, it could take the Tories apart for their inconsistencies and their lack of preparedness for government. You could. But you would be missing the point.

John Rentoul: It's Miliband's turn for hard choices

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

Having spoken to well-placed sources, I can reveal that David Miliband's preferences for his next job are in this order: 1. Prime minister before the election, 2. European foreign affairs high representative from January, 3. Leader of the opposition after the election.

John Rentoul: Why Cameron makes no sense

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:39:01 GMT

Philip Collins in The Times today expounds brilliantly on why David Cameron's "progressive conservatism" is a contradiction in terms

John Rentoul: Iraq, the false prospectus

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:13:57 GMT

Someone's got to do it, and not just to keep Hopi Sen happy. Not so much making the case for Tony Blair to be President of the European Council, but trying to ensure that, if the decision goes against him, it will not be because of untrue propaganda put about by the haters.

John Rentoul: Blair Revolution, a few years late

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:26:34 GMT

Wonderful news of a real breakthrough in public service reform, which is of course, therefore, hardly reported at all in today's newspapers.

John Rentoul: Labour's special delivery to Griffin

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It was a terrific pantomime. Rarely is a live audience provided with such an obvious villain to jeer. When Nick Griffin went back to the end of the Ice Age as the source of his ideology, it was genuinely funny. When he the course of a single sentence went in from telling Jack Straw that "skin colour is irrelevant" to demanding that Britain be restored to its aboriginal "white" people, the audience, alert to absurdity, hooted with that rarity of polite society, derision.

John Rentoul: The golden age of education is a myth

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

We don't half like moaning about how awful life is. Take schools, for instance. Dreadful. Children shouldn't go to them. Not until they are at least six, and possibly 16. Most of them leave school unable to read and write, anyway. And testing. That's a load of rubbish. Scrap the SATs. Then all those children who are not at school but presumably roaming the streets will pick up the three Rs by osmosis. Learning by doing.

Joan Rentoul: The golden age of education is a myth

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

John Rentoul: Daily Mail and innumeracy

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:15:52 GMT

I do blog about subjects other than the best Labour prime minister. Well one other subject anyway, namely how wrong the Daily Mail is. Today, in its ideological bias it makes a statistical howler. It reports:

John Rentoul: Dirty work

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:41:31 GMT

It is hard work defending Tony Blair and thankless. But there are some things that just have to be done.

John Rentoul: Cameron blew it. Labour can win

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Robert Conquest made two great contributions to human knowledge. As a historian he revealed the truth about Stalin's purges in the 1930s. As a writer, he formulated two laws. His First Law states: "Everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about." I don't think it is true. I would say that everyone is a gradualist reformer on subjects they understand. But Conquest's Second Law is a good guide to life, and especially politics. It says: "Every organisation appears to be headed by secret agents of its opponents."

John Rentoul: Cameron's secret weapon – say nothing

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:00:01 GMT

The least important thing that happened last week was The Sun coming out for the Conservatives. We knew that already. The Sun stopped supporting Labour the moment that He Who Is Suddenly Back Among Us left Downing Street. So the timing of the announcement was the only interesting thing about it. Interesting on News International's side for its sheer self-important vindictiveness; and on the Labour side for the failure of Gordon Brown's people to ask themselves in their planning, "What can go wrong this week?"

John Rentoul: Promises of more of the same won't do

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It is a good thing that party conferences don't actually matter. Because if they did, it really would be all over. You would say that Labour in Brighton was just going though the motions if they hadn't abolished that form of internal party democracy in favour of "policy workshops".

John Rentoul: Labour's Catch-22

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:42:55 GMT

More on opinion poll beauty contests. There was another one yesterday from YouGov, which asked how people would vote if various alternatives were Labour leader.

John Rentoul: The real story is Ireland, not Brighton

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Party conferences are all very well, but they are not always closely related to life on this planet. That doesn't usually matter, because life in the political bubble is interesting enough. It has characters, mad, bad, dangerous and lovable; it has fights, feuds and reconciliations; and endless speculation about who is up or down. In Labour's case, though, we will be treated to a particularly otherworldly experience this week, in that the one bubble-world question is hardly going to be discussed – namely whether Gordon Brown will still be Prime Minister at the election. Journalists will still use the conference as an excuse to interview each other about it. That will only add another layer of unreality to the proceedings. Not since the Conservative conference of 2003, in which Iain Duncan Smith's speech was interrupted by 17 standing ovations, will a party put on such a strenuous show of unity in defiance of the bubble's own obsessions.

John Rentoul: Tories fail the 'under a bus' test

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

It's not very tasteful, but I didn't start it. Derek Simpson, the co-curmudgeon of the super-union Unite, started it. In his interview in last weekend's Independent on Sunday, he talked of what would happen "if Gordon fell under a bus".

John Rentoul: Summer's over. Let the plotting begin

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

I'll shut up about the Labour leadership in a moment, but the trouble is that everything comes back to it. It would be worth writing about education policy, but Ed Balls was the cause of the problem last week. And Gordon Brown is the cause of Ed Balls. On Monday ministers opened new and refurbished schools, including 67 new academies, in a start-of-term blitz that could have painted Labour as the party of excellence and choice. Instead Balls used it as a platform to attack "Tory cuts". It would be worth writing about the economy, tax and spend, health, defence, benefit dependency and climate change, but in each case the Prime Minister makes it harder for Labour to match the half-formed policies of the Conservatives.

John Rentoul: Stealing bread

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:37:00 GMT

My esteemed colleague and fellow Indepedent Minds blogger Amol Rajan tells what happened when he phoned Dennis Skinner, Labour MP for Bolsover, to ask if he wanted to take part in The Independent's You Ask the Questions feature:

John Rentoul: Put it to the vote

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:51:07 GMT

Not every story in the Daily Mail is rubbish. And I hope I am not saying this just because it furthers the cause of the AJ4PM campaign, but Tim Shipman's report this morning is significant

John Rentoul: Blair and Brown not the Lennon and McCartney of politics

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:43:00 GMT

I'm not a Beatles fan. So I appreciated this list of 10 awful things about the band by Michael Deacon of the Telegraph. In particular number six

John Rentoul: Ed Balls's contribution to philosophy

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:15:56 GMT

The Education Secretary* has caused a fuss by saying on the Today programme this morning, speaking for "the Government": "None of us wanted to see the release of al-Megrahi."

John Rentoul: The police against democracy

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:02:29 GMT

Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, advances some of the most pathetic arguments against democratic accountability for the police in an interview in The Independent today.

John Rentoul: Faraway bombs leave Brown's hopes in tatters

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Prime ministers tend to be defined as much by their foreign policy as by what they achieve at home. Eden – Suez; Wilson – Vietnam; Heath – Europe; Thatcher – Falklands; Blair – Iraq. Hence the importance to Gordon Brown of getting Afghanistan right. Just like Barack Obama, he took over from a leader identified with Iraq, and found himself embroiled in another war, which had started before and which will go on afterwards. In both Britain and the US, a foreign war has become caught up in a domestic political drama.

John Rentoul: If Britain is 'broken', who broke it?

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Beware cultural blah. Chris Grayling's comparison of crime on British streets to that on the American cult series The Wire did not simply make the shadow Home Secretary look foolish – it didn't work. It was not a comparison that told us anything useful, either about Labour's failings as a government or about Conservative policies to remedy them.

John Rentoul: Brown is too late for everything

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:00:01 GMT

Whatever Gordon Brown does, it is always too late. He was too late to express half a view on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. If he had said that he was "repulsed" by the scenes of celebration in Tripoli that greeted the man convicted of the worst terrorist murder in Britain on the day, when the sentiment was still fresh, it might have seemed genuine.