So there was Martin Kettle, talking about “bright Tory shadow cabinet minister Greg Clark” (he’s the one who is now the central government’s Minister for Decentralisation). Now here’s Kettle claiming that David Cameron “wins this season’s golden boot” because, well, he’s really nice. In fact, Kettle actually seems to have been handed this nanosecond’s version of the talking point about Bill Clinton’s aides stealing all the “W”s from the keyboards/Ken Livingstone’s secret wine cellar/whatever. So I’m declaring victory on the statement that Martin Kettle is a worthless old hack.
(By the way, some examples of the delight of Brown’s staff at his departure – or otherwise – and his total lack of emotion towards ’em – or otherwise – can be sampled here. That would have required Kettle to read his own newspaper.)
Here’s Henry Porter, who thinks that:
From health to foreign relations, from defence to civil liberties, the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing.
Apart from ordering its own budget office to secretly change its forecasts in order to justify cutting the income of the poorest people in the country by 20%, I guess. Apart from deciding to pretend that across-the-board cuts in departmental spending of 25-40% will happen, but the public sector won’t have any effect on unemployment. Frankly, anyone who calls themselves a Liberal should be especially outraged by this, just for the insult to us as intelligent citizens, layered on top of the blatant cruelty. The OBR story has been the most sustained, most fully realised exercise in official lying since Iraq.