Gordon gets his headline but the devil is in the detail

Holding up the front pages on Newsnight last night, Jeremy Paxman observed that Brown couldn’t have got better coverage for his mortgage package if he’d paid for it. But as always with one of Gordon’s initiatives, a look at the small print reveals it to be not quite such a good deal after all. Both Tim Worstall and Dizzy point out huge flaws in it.

It does seem that this was done on the fly to catch out the Tories. Last night, one representative of the ‘third sector’ was commenting...

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Did a minister have advance knowledge of the Green arrest?

This from Iain Martin over at Three Line Whip:

"...the strong rumour is that one minister with good police contacts did know [about the Green arrest in advance] and has remained well under the radar since the row erupted last week, for understandable reasons. One thought: if that person was aware of what was going on, when it backfired would they actually 'fess up to the cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell, the PM or the media or just stay uncharacteristically quiet until the row blows over?"

If it does emerge that a minister had advance knowledge of...

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Turning Japanese? I really think so

After the rate cut, one question presents itself: is the British economy turning Japanese? Now rates are at 2%, it makes you wonder how low they can go and whether we are approaching a zero-rate like Japan after its economy blew up in 1990, leading to the “lost decade”? To answer it, let’s get a doctor to take a picture so we can look at the UK economy from the inside as well (*)

The market expects rates to bottom at 0.75% next spring and then rise slowly. So those lucky...

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Reid tells Smith how he'd have done things differently

No real bombshells in Jacqui Smith's statement on the Damian Green affair earlier (video here).  She pushed the same lines that we've heard from her throughout the past week: that it was right to involve the police; that she didn't know anything about the arrest; that the leaks coming from the Home Office are a "serious matter" etc. etc.

As Andrew Sparrow points out, the most eye-catching moment was an intervention by John Reid.  The former Home Secretary's been relatively quiet over the past few months - but he popped up with a...

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Washington or Whitehall whispers?

As Matt reflected just after Obama’s election win, both David Cameron and Gordon Brown desperately want to be and be seen to be Barack Obama’s best friend. There’s a bit of a blow to the Cameron campaign today with a New Statesman story about how Obama branded Cameron a ‘lightweight’.

But a close read of it suggests that the sources for this claim might be in Whitehall not Washington:

“Instead, I have been told, Obama exclaimed of Cameron after their meeting: "What a lightweight!" He apparently also asked officials

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