An outbreak of common sense?

("Hi, I'm back. Can we all be friends again? Hello? Angela? Nicky? Hello?")

A very interesting article from The Sun. As many of you know, The Sun isn't my natural paper of choice, but if the report is true that David Cameron is seriously looking at what they hilariously describe as a "EU-turn" (oh what witty banter they come up with in Wapping!), then thank goodness for that. 

It won't immediately overcome the impact of the non-veto at the Council, and as The Sun correctly notes, 

"If the PM did sign a new treaty it would spark fury from Tory Eurosceptic MPs". 

Indeed, because as I argued at the time, unless Cameron wants to put the UK irreparably on the exit ramp from the EU,  this confrontation needs to happen. It also lays bare the fact that that this row is now (and probably always was) largely about internal Tory party party management, not about the substance of the new institutional arrangements - which is doubly damaging for Cameron who persistently claimed (in the face of the evidence) that he was "doing what was right for Britain".

So, let's hope that the PM can find a face saving route to climb down over Christmas and face down the Eurosceptics / Europhobes in his own backbenches. The sad truth is that if he doesn't do it now, then he'll either be in hock to them for the rest of his time in charge (shades of John Major and the "Maastricht Rebels") or he'll have to face them down later at much higher political cost. Unless, of course, he wants to leave the EU (which I'm sure he doesn't). 

Attaboy, Dave! Up and at them, and all of that.

More SDSR fallout...

 

("Minister, I'd like to drop this bomb on Libya this afternoon if we can afford it..."
"Dunno, let me get back to you.")

Briefly, those disreputable lefties at the Guardian have come up with a scoop, with an authentic-looking paper on cutting senior officers and civil servants in the UK Ministry of Defence. Naturally, the MoD are refusing to comment on leaks (which is sensible, and not just because there have recently been times when arguably they wouldn't have done anything else), but the numbers are remarkable.

Not, I hasten to add, because we didn't already know that there were lots more senior officers than the UK's force size would suggest, nor because we weren't all too clear that the MoD had a largely unreformed management structure, in which classic pyramids abound (if I'm a 1-star officer, then I must have one or more Captain / Colonel / Group Captains working for me, who in turn need the full array of Lieutenant Commanders / Majors / Squadron Leaders working for them who in turn etc etc).

No, on a first pass, the most notable factoid (assuming, as seems likely, this leak is real) is that the numbers of senior officers really grew after the end of the Cold War in 1990. Not sure yet whether this is absolute numbers or merely as a proportion of the forces - I'll get back to this later in the week.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with the ever-prescient words of Bremner, Bird and Fortune:

(Well, yes...)

Edit: updates here and here.