Blog Posts by Ian Dunt

By Ian Dunt

Foreign diplomacy is a mucky business, but every so often you are presented with simple choices.

Imagine the following situation. An election is taking place in a neighbouring state which you rely on for your nuclear and defence plans. The incumbent has previously described you as an "obstinate kid" and refused to shake your hand in public. The challenger is riding high in the polls and looks set to win.

Do you a) throw your chips in with the new guy? b) Stay removed from the election and then welcome the winner, a practise which happens to correspond to diplomatic convention, or c) back the incumbent and rudely snub the challenger.

b) is the right answer, but if you're incapable of that, at least a) makes a rash kind of sense. c) is a quite insane way to proceed and that is precisely what David Cameron did.

The prime minister threw his lot in with Nicolas Sarkozy in two ways. First, he snubbed Francois Hollande on his trip to London, leaving him to meet up with Ed

No matter how many gains Labour secures, Ed Miliband does not look like a prime minister in waiting. He looks like a Lego man, unable to compete with David Cameron's easy charm.

Labour's gains tonight are significant but, at the time of writing, they are not of a scale which suggests an impending general election victory. Even if they did, one should always be wary of translating local council fights into a general election.

But Ed Miliband could be prime minister by 2015 because of a unique combination of factors: An incompetent government, a resurgent United Kingdom Independence party (Ukip), a divided Tory party, a hung parliament result, an unpopular austerity package and continued economic decline.

Much has been written about Miliband's weaknesses, but consider for a moment the accomplishments of the Conservatives. They have not won a general election since 1992. They failed to do so even against a deeply unpopular Labour party which had been in power for 13 years. Cameron has

By Ian Dunt

James Murdoch's extraordinary evidence session at the Leveson inquiry has left media secretary Jeremy Hunt on the brink. Can he survive?

What has Hunt done?

Jeremy Hunt, the culture, media and sport secretary, was handed responsibility for News Corp's BSkyB bid after Vince Cable was caught boasting about being "at war with Murdoch" to undercover journalists.

Before he was even handed the file he was already on good terms with News Corp officials. But even as he held a quasi-judicial role in the process, information was being regularly communicated by his staff to the media company.

The key figure is Frédéric Michel, News Corp's public affairs executive. The evidence from Leveson came from a stack of emails from Michel to James Murdoch. In them, he appears to be receiving highly confidential information from George Osborne's special adviser, Rupert Harrison, and Hunt's special adviser, Adam Smith.

What was in the emails?

Once Murdoch realised that Cable would not meet him to

They're meeting on Friday the 13th, which is never a good sign. Tomorrow, European officials get together and decide how best to stop you accessing information about their decision making process.

They will propose three quite insane things: to change the definition of what a document is, to create new exemptions from the public's right of access to EU materials and to keep the legal advice the EU receives secret. They will then present the ideas to the European parliament and turn them into law.

If you thought the EU was shady before, just you wait for what comes next.

Under the plans, a host of new exemptions would be added to public right-of-access regulations. This might take the form of block exemptions or they might be tailored specifically to three situations: competition cases, the context of court proceedings and infringement procedures.

Infringement procedures are the most important. When the European Commission initiates legal proceedings against a member state, the public

There are very few things which Andrew Lansley does well, so it should come as no surprise that reasoning and sincerity can be added to his list of failures

The health secretary, fresh from breaking several NHS eggs and failing to make an omelette, decided to distract the media with a meaty abortion story last month. Out of nowhere he demanded the supposedly-independent Care Quality Commission (CQC) drop what it was doing and carry out spot checks on abortion clinics.

Six hundred routine inspections of hospitals and care homes had to be cancelled. The interruption to its scheduled activities cost it £1 million and the equivalent of 1,100 working days.

Sinister motives lurked behind this PR campaign. Before the CQC could reveal its findings, the Department of Health was on the phone to the BBC and the Telegraph bragging about a major investigation into abortion.

A handful of private and NHS clinics had been found to have been breaking the law by allowing doctors to pre-sign consent

Few civil liberties people  seems to understand both technology and the law, but I had a chat with one yesterday and they had an interesting perspective on the Home Office surveillance proposals.

Of course, we don't know really know what the proposals are yet — we've just the odd leak to the press about 'real-time' access. Try calling up the Home Office and asking about it, if you fancy a laugh. What we do know is that authorities want access not just to telephone records and emails but to communication on newer technology, like Skype and Facebook.

Quite how they would access that information has not been mentioned, but experts tell me the only possible way to do so is through 'deep packet inspection', where a black box recorder is put on Internet Service Providers. The result of that change? Every single thing you do online is intercepted. Interception will be the norm, the only question is whether the authorities bother to look.

Why would they use this system? Well, the government's

1) Without the Falklands, Thatcherism would be forgotten

Before the invasion of the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher was on her way out. The Tories had been trailing the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the polls and unemployment was rocketing. No-one expected her to win a second term. But the simplicity of the war — a winnable conflict against a hostile foreign dictatorship — boosted public support for the government. In the euphoria which followed the victory, the Tories returned to the top of the opinion polls and won the next year's general election by a landslide. Of course, the creation of the Alliance split the anti-Thatcher vote and helped her to victory, but the war marked a turning point in the Iron Lady's fortunes. Without it, she would not have been able to remake the country.

2) The Falklands hastened the end of the Argentinean dictatorship

The lead-up to the war was typified by rebellion and political manoeuvres in Buenos Aires. There was widespread unrest against the military junta,

The next few hours will see many political journalists dedicate themselves to mocking George Galloway. Videos will be shared of him acting like a cat pretending to lick milk from an actress' hands during Celebrity Big Brother. They will say he is a Stalinist, that he supports Middle East dictators and rarely bothers to attend parliament. They will be right about all these things. Galloway makes it easy to mock.

But this is not an appropriate response to Galloway's Bradford West by-election victory. Startling results like this baffle the political analysts, who try to explain it away with references to Galloway's rhetorical skills and tactical political genius. There's a certain irony to that, given that the picture contrasts unconvincingly with the monkey-fool they depict elsewhere.

Those personal qualities have some role in explaining what happened last night. A charismatic and eloquent candidate is a necessary but insufficient condition of achieving victory. What's needed is a