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It's not beyond our Ken to see Ed Miliband become electable

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Kenneth Clarke has done a supposedly 'unelectable' Labour leader no harm by pouring scorn on Osborne's recovery

Edward Heath, prime minister from 1970 to 1974, was widely considered unelectable until elected. Margaret Thatcher, PM from 1979 to 1990, was way behind her Labour opponent James Callaghan in the popularity polls of 1979, but was elected. John Major, PM from 1990 to 1997, took over from Thatcher in 1990, and was re-elected in 1992, although the bookmakers at Ascot were offering 6-1 against the Tories the day before the election.

The latest British candidate to be considered unelectable is Ed Miliband. We shall see. His luck may turn. In David Cameron he has an opponent who is manifestly losing his nerve. A prime minister who can sack his attorney general, Dominic Grieve, because the latter believes in the European court of human rights (which has nothing to do with Brussels), and who cannot accept the wise advice of such an elder statesman as Kenneth Clarke, is giving too many sops to the Eurosceptic Cerberus that is the Tory right wing.

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You can tell it's silly season: Boris and the Eurosceptics are out in force

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The mayor's 'coming out' as a candidate and a sceptic reinforces a dangerously cavalier attitude to Britain's position in the EU

Terrible things may be happening in the Middle East and parts of Africa, but August is usually regarded as the silly season for press and public in Britain, and this month is proving to be no exception.

One need look no further for an example of this than the inordinate degree of attention devoted last week to the admission by Alexander "Boris" Johnson that he is indeed planning to stand for parliament, in time, he hopes, for the May 2015 general election.

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With Old Labour, we might have had a better New Britain

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The BBC's revealing interview with Roy Hattersley shed a lot of light on what Labour gained and lost during the Blair years

Older readers may recall that I usually spend August in a delightful Provençal village near Vaison-la-Romaine. Often there have been guest columnists, but occasionally I would write from there and the words Vaison-la-Romaine would appear at the top of this column.

Not this year! With my barrister wife having been summoned to jury service in the middle of the month, we had the briefest of trips (yes, lawyers are now summoned for jury service). That was how I found myself, unusually, back in London in mid-August, and listening to the BBC instead of French radio.

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Monetary union for Scotland? Just look at the eurozone

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Alex Salmond is pinning his hopes on monetary union with the UK but political independence has landed the euro countries in a grim collective plight

Have I got this right? The world is facing, in Ukraine and the Middle East, the most disturbing concatenation of unpredictable events for decades, but the big issue in Scotland is whether it should leave the UK, and the main obsession of the Conservative party is the prospect of the UK's departure from the European Union or Brexit, as it is known.

Just to put the icing on the cake, my good friend Peter Sutherland, once a successful EU commissioner and now chairman of the London School of Economics, points out that Scotland is the most pro-European member of the UK, and a yes vote would increase the chances of Brexit.

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Spoils of bruising Scottish referendum battle could go to Gordon Brown

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Could the former Labour prime minister be poised to return to prominence after his stirring contribution to the no campaign?

"Are we," asked a senior Whitehall official, "witnessing the return of Gordon Brown to the big political stage?" And that was the day before the Thursday speech that had them rocking in the isles and the deepest recesses of the Conservative party were lost in a mixture of admiration and apprehension.

All right: there was speculation, after one heavily pored-over hint, that the Big Hitter might have challenged Alex Salmond for the post of first minister. But Scotland apart, could it possibly be that, on the eve of the last Labour party conference before next year's general election, there might be a cunning plan for my good friend Gordon to take an even more central role in politics?

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The Conservatives' real deficit problem is a lack of shame

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Far from being the cause of crisis, the budget deficit was part of the solution in 2010. Now it serves to provide political cover

Cabinet ministers evoke a wide variety of judgments, but I cannot recall anything quite so caustic as that of the celebrated journalist Bernard Levin, on the foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, in 1959. In a review in the Spectator of a book about the early 19th century statesman Lord Castlereagh, Levin wrote: "The real mystery, in fact, is not why Castlereagh cut his throat, but why Mr Selwyn Lloyd has not." Not long after that, Lloyd was elevated to the chancellorship by Harold Macmillan.

My dissatisfaction with the chancellorship of George Osborne has not diminished with time, but even I should find it a little extreme to suggest that he fall on his sword. Nor do I think any longer that that great fan of Macmillan, David Cameron, should sack him. No, I think Osborne should remain in place until he faces the verdict of the electorate: a verdict that ought to be damning.

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The economy could topple again unless we keep up the great rebalancing act

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Its not all the eurozones fault, whatever Osborne says. Growth means exports, which means manufacturing, which means a new attitude to the makers whose march has never really got going

Here we go again. Just as it looked like the recovery was on a firmer footing, and a little smugness had even crept in over Britain growing faster than other big economies, were hit with fresh warnings about a slowdown.

As gloomy news this week on manufacturing, construction and trade all pointed to a weaker close to 2014, George Osborne got the excuses in early. This was a critical moment for the British economy, he said as he headed to an International Monetary Fund meeting. The eurozone risks slipping back into crisis. Britain cannot be immune from that. Indeed, it is already having an impact on our manufacturing and our exports.

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Note to George Osborne in upper class: beware the plebs who fly economy

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It is symbolic that the chancellor of a government that proclaims that we are all in this together is travelling upper class while inflicting dangerous cuts on public services

I am always amused when, after touchdown, passengers are thanked for having chosen to travel by X or Y airline. In my case, and I imagine it is the same with others, the main choices concern cost and time. However, after a weird experience with British Airways recently, I decided to give Virgin Atlantic a chance to boost its profits with my money.

It happened like this: when I reported at Romes Leonardo da Vinci airport on my way back from a conference, the woman on the British Airways desk told me that I could not board the flight on which I had been booked, because I should have been on an earlier one. When I showed her the evidence of my travel documents, she proceeded to say that I could not possibly have flown over the day before which I had because there was no record on the system. Then, to cap it all, she said that I should have to pay all over again. Now, your correspondent did not get where he is today putting up with this sort of nonsense, and I stood firm. My advice to anybody who finds themselves in similarly bizarre circumstances is not to fly off the handle but, well, to stand firm.

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Cameron will pay the EU its billions; Ukip will cost him much more

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Farage is crazy enough to urge withdrawal from Europe, as are too many Tories, and the prime minister is running scared

Its the 2.1 billion euro question: Is Cameron going to pay the £1.7bn? a London cab driver asked me last week. The answer, despite the prime ministers angry outburst on the subject, is almost certainly yes, though there will no doubt be some haggling over the timing and over minor details.

The operative phrase he used in his teenage outburst of rage at being the last person to be told about the back payment was: I am not going to pay that bill on 1 December. That leaves 23 payment days before Christmas.

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The spectre of communism? Europe should fear the spectre of austerity

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Germany was at the heart of the struggle between east and west. Now it is at the heart of one between growth and deflation

Marx and Engels proclaimed in 1848 that a spectre was haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

As it turned out, the spectre did eventually materialise, in the form of Soviet communism, which spread after the second world war to eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall was built 16 years later, in 1961, to put a stop to the way East Germans were voting about communism with their feet.

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George Osborne has snared his party in its own austerity trap

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The deficit has not been eliminated. Depressed living standards are barely rising. This is not ‘job done’, but a record of failure

After his stunning speech on the eve of the Scottish referendum, Gordon Brown, by announcing that he will not stand for parliament again, has chosen to go out on a high. His speech was so powerful that even the occupants of Downing Street were bowled over, with some wondering whether he planned a return to mainstream politics.

That, apparently, is not to be. But there is still an outside chance that he might return to a prominent role. It depends on two big “ifs”. If Labour were to have the balance of power in the next election and if, for some reason, Christine Lagarde were to resign prematurely from her job as managing director of the International Monetary Fund, then Brown would be an obvious candidate to succeed her. The last three holders of the IMF post have, for different reasons, not served a full term.

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The deficit isn’t the real problem. The crisis is in productivity

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However much the media has swallowed George Osborne’s line on the deficit, Britain is not broke. The malaise lies elsewhere

When British governments are in trouble, their first line of defence is to attack the BBC – an institution valued all over the world, but not always in Westminster. Having had what he plainly regarded as a successful day delivering his autumn statement the other week, George Osborne sounded as though he had woken up with a hangover when he lost his cool on the Today programme and complained bitterly about the BBC’s coverage.

I found it pretty strange at the time, and still do. The BBC and the media generally have cravenly swallowed the chancellor’s line that the most important issue facing the nation is The Deficit. I have lost count of the number of references to this residual economic statistic that for decades hardly rated a mention in the press.

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George Osborne is obsessed with the deficit – pity it’s the wrong deficit

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The chief secretary to the Treasury is the cabinet minister responsible for controlling public expenditure and number two to the reigning chancellor. Not everyone can be entrusted with this responsibility and chief secretaries occasionally fall out with chancellors and prime ministers. This was the case in the early 1980s, when John Biffen, once a champion of sado-monetarism, decided that enough was enough and expressed doubts about the wisdom of a further attack on public spending.

Once Biffen, a popular figure with journalists, had been described by Bernard Ingham – Margaret Thatcher’s Alastair Campbell – as “semi-detached”, his days were numbered.

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Those who can remember the past are eager to rewrite it. Just ask the Tories

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Economic history underwent a major revision when Cameron and Osborne took power. Expect four months more of the same

It is all George Osborne’s fault. Lord Adonis pointed out in his book on the coalition negotiations in 2010 that, at the 11th hour, Osborne advocated legislating for a five-year, fixed-term parliament. That is why we are stuck with a government that has run out of steam – but not of hot air – yet must carry on for another four months.

After the tedium of the opening salvos last week, we can now look forward to daily slanging matches right up to the May election. And it is already manifest that these will involve the rewriting of recent history and the reopening of old wounds.

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Who needs a ‘long-term economic plan’ when the oil price is falling like this?

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The Tories must know their strategy has failed. But, unlike the governments of the 1970s, the energy market has saved them

I have taken part in many a pub discussion about the perennial question of whether governments lose elections or oppositions win them, or a mixture of both. If ever a postwar British government deserved to lose an election it is this one. That is why the Labour party has got to get its act together, and soon.

The gravamen of the charge against this government is that, for all the triumphalism about a long-delayed period of economic growth, it woefully mishandled the economy when it came in – and plans an assault on our already deteriorating public services, if it is re-elected, that would quite seriously threaten the social fabric of the nation.

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Italy and reform: in the Eternal City, the euro remains the eternal problem

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The credit crunch and the single currency has made the economy sick: but are the Italians ready to take the cure?

The runup to this election promises to be a mixture of daily boredom and entertaining gaffes.

When I returned to London after a seminar in Venice last weekend, the gaffe of the day appeared to be the responsibility of Stefano Pessina, acting chief executive of Walgreens Boots Alliance (plain old Boots to you and me), who told us that a Labour win would be “a catastrophe” for Britain.

For decades the economy trundled along quite nicely, with a strong industrial sector and the ability to devalue the lira

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This close to the general election, it’s better to be lucky than right

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An unbelievably convenient boost to demand in Britain has come in the nick of electoral time for the Conservatives

When it comes to the economy, the prime minister and chancellor are enjoying the luck of the devil. After the financial crisis struck in 2007-09, they opposed the Keynesian measures necessary to avert a 1930s-style great depression; and when they assumed the reins of office in 2010 they made misleading comparisons between the state of the British economy and that of Greece and introduced wholly unnecessary “austerity” measures.

These latter not only stopped the burgeoning economic recovery in its tracks: they sapped the animal spirits of entrepreneurs and wrecked any hope of the boost to confidence they were supposed to encourage. There followed several years of “flatlining” and missed investment opportunities in the public and private sectors.

Instead of counteracting the weakness in demand, the coalition took measures to aggravate it. I am not making this up

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A hundred-year loan? Now that’s a long-term economic plan

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Lloyd George’s war loan is due to be paid off on Monday. If only those currently in charge of the national finances could think so far ahead

Policymakers in Britain and the eurozone should take note of an interesting event due to take place on Monday. The British government will finally redeem the war loan taken out in 1917 under the premiership of Lloyd George. That is to say, the last traces of that first world war debt will be repaid almost 100 years later.

With debt, and deficits, one has to take the long-term view. This applied to the situation facing the coalition in 2010, and to the policymakers of the eurozone, who were also faced with the financial consequences of the 2007-09 banking crisis. The impact of the crisis was the peacetime equivalent of the devastation wreaked on public sector finances by war itself. Unfortunately, both in this country and the eurozone, an absurdly short-term view was taken of the situation, not least with regard to Greece and other peripheral eurozone economies.

Unfortunately, both in this country and the eurozone, an absurdly short-term view was taken of the situation

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George Osborne goes straight from the flatline to the rollercoaster

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The chancellor’s boastfulness and trickery have not saved him from the criticism of the independent economic watchdogs that he himself set up

I keep wondering who George Osborne reminds me of, and it finally came to me, during what I hope – in common, I imagine, with tens of millions of British citizens – will prove to have been his last budget speech.

During the austerity years of 1945-51, there was no shortage of demand, but a severe shortage of supply. Also, the country was broke, and there was, to coin a phrase, no alternative to austerity, of which the most obvious manifestation was rationing.

Osborne cannot get away from the fact that he has presided over the slowest and feeblest recovery in living memory

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Lord Healey: a chancellor who really knows about coalitions and crisis

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The last time there was multiparty government, Denis Healey was chancellor. Now, at 97, he still retains the lustre of a grand generation of politicians

What with speculation about hung parliaments and possible party “pacts” after the election, publishers Faber & Faber have chosen a good moment to reprint The Pact by Alistair Michie and my much-missed late colleague, Simon Hoggart.

First published in 1978 as The Inside Story of the Lib-Lab Government, 1977-78, The Pact is a reminder of how tiresome such arrangements can be for the chancellor of the day.

Like so many who had served in the war, he was shocked by the trigger-happy approach of Tony Blair over Iraq

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