A family is for life, not just elections
The Liberal Democrat politician Chris Huhne came in for some vitriol over his affair with a bisexual PR woman, Carina Trimingham, during an election campaign in which the married MP portrayed himself as a staunch defender of family values. The Daily Mail seemed particularly unsettled by events. Its columnist Sandra Parsons said the “hypocrisy” of Huhne, married for 26 years to the economist Vicky Pryce and a father of three, was “quite revolting”.
Jan Moir, also writing in the Daily Mail, argued that while increasingly people don’t care about discrepancies between public and private lives, in Huhne’s case the private was public. She pointed out that he won his seat by a slim majority and pondered whether he would have squeaked in if his constituents had known about his private life. “He even cancelled meetings with some of them to be with his mistress,” she wrote. “That must rankle in the heartlands.”
In The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie pondered: “How can you be a retired lesbian?” Trimingham, meanwhile, told The Daily Telegraph that she had no plans to live with Huhne ... and that she had never worn Dr Martens shoes.
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Put the pipe and slippers on hold
Work until you drop, screamed the headlines after it was revealed that the age of retirement was to rise and new laws are expected to be introduced in this parliament linking pensions to life expectancy.
For campaigners for the right to work beyond 65 it was good news, and in The Times, Patrick Hosking said the proposal to raise the pension age was long overdue: “Politicians ignored the timebomb ticking away.” But writing to The Daily Telegraph, Chris Barmby claimed that “there is no fiscal advantage ... Until a worker retires, a vacancy does not become available” and the money saved in paying the state pension is “dwarfed” by benefits for unsuccessful jobseekers.
Budget masterstroke or hara-kiri?
The budget debate centred on whether the public spending cuts proposed by the chancellor, George Osborne, really had to be so harsh and quick to save the country from economic collapse. Did his measures, instead, create a real risk of a double-dip recession?
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Writing in The Times, David Aaronovitch disputed Osborne’s claim that the budget was “unavoidable”, fretted that job losses were inevitable in the face of such huge public spending cuts, and worried about tax increases and spending cuts “choking off the recovery”. BBC2’s Newsnight also concentrated on the possibility of a double-dip recession in an interview with Richard Koo, the chief economist of Japan’s Nomura Research Institute, who warned that Osborne’s budget could lead the UK into the kind of long-term economic decline that Japan faced in the 1990s.
However, Edmund Conway, writing in The Daily Telegraph, judged the budget “one of the most courageous in living memory”. He forecast that by the end of the parliament the chasm in the public finances would have closed. “His [Osborne’s] plans are not merely brave, but inspiring: the maths is immaculate,” he wrote.