George Conway: J.D. Vance is telling us something we should've already known
Conservative attorney George Conway joins Morning Joe to discuss the vice president's social media posts saying federal judges aren't allowed to control a president and why he says the White House won't obey court orders. Historian Jon Meacham also joins the discussion.
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7 minutes ago
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What Washington can learn from a legendary London meltdown
In a city where allegiance and proximity to power is everything, the leader's closest adviser portrayed himself as an outsider. He began the year by hiring a bunch of 'weirdos and misfits' and ordering them to rip up the entire 'rotten' system of government. The adviser loved to put noses out of joint and 'own the libs,' while building up his profile in the media as the real power behind the throne. Then, having realized that his easily-distracted and impulsive politician boss wasn't actually committed to building a tech-heavy, libertarian future, the disillusioned adviser quit — dedicating himself to publicly destroying his former employer. If you're British, watching the collapse of Donald Trump and Elon Musk's uncomfortable marriage has echoes of the end of the relationship between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings in 2020. How that psychodrama played out in the UK could have lessons for the US — not least because Cummings eventually succeeded in undermining Johnson's political career, ultimately defenestrating the prime minister through relentless briefings and leaks. When someone who was inside the room and was perceived to be central to a political project says it's all a sham, the damage can be significant. For those who don't know, Cummings was the chief strategist of the successful Brexit campaign in 2016 but then largely disappeared from view when it came to actually defining what Brexit should look like. Unlike Musk, Cummings was a lifelong political operative, albeit one who cultivated a reputation for actually reading books. Three years later, with his political standing inflated by a film in which he was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch as an insane genius, Cummings returned to maneuver Johnson into Downing Street. Once inside government, Cummings broke all the standard operating procedures of the British state to finally 'get Brexit done' and sever the UK's relationship with the EU in January 2020. When I look back at my occasional text exchanges with Cummings from that era, usually while trying to check stories about the funding of the Brexit campaign or his desire to defund the BBC, they mirror what he said in public. He held a seemingly sincere belief that most of the British media was fake news, that the British state was not fit for purpose, and that the political party he was nominally working for, the Conservatives, was little more than a helpful vehicle for an insurrection. One ally approvingly described the chief of staff of a Conservative government to the BBC as a 'Leninist.' Ultimately, both Musk and Cummings believed that you can run the government as a high-performance start-up and that the defining failure of past civil service reforms was that they hadn't smashed enough things quickly enough. Both also have the fatal flaws of being undisciplined, delighting in picking public fights and getting bored easily. Their independent means also meant they were not as beholden to their political masters as other advisers. Cummings might not have Musk levels of money but he was wealthy in British terms (his father-in-law Sir Humphry Tyrrell Wakefield, owner of a 13th century castle, would write letters in support of his proto-DOGE policies) and connected (his wife was deputy editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine). The overwhelming impression Cummings gave was that politicians were the useful idiots who should give him the runway to remake the state. Iconoclasm was the point. When Cummings quit he took to publishing lengthy Substack posts portraying Johnson as a broken supermarket 'trolley' who veered all over the place based on the last thing someone said to him. Even more effectively, Cummings helped to leak stories about Johnson's pandemic lockdown-busting in a scandal known as Partygate. In an echo of what's happened with Musk, left-wingers who previously thought Cummings was the devil incarnate began cheering him on as he stuck the knife into Johnson. The attacks rang true among Tory MPs and Johnson's ratings never recovered, ultimately leading to his early departure from politics. Many people leaked against Johnson and his circle, but when Cummings did, the pair's previous closeness gave it the ring of truth. Musk and Cummings got opportunities because they went in to bat for fundamentally untrustworthy but opportunistic politicians, in the hope that they would be given the freedom to enact policies with limited scrutiny. The two men have even exchanged notes and acknowledged the similarity of their programs. Ultimately, these were political shotgun marriages — the very thing that made the attachments so powerful at a particular moment in time was ultimately their undoing: In each case, the leader learned that there was no real love there. As Cummings and Musk found, if you hitch yourself to an anti-establishment hero who eschews patronage and loyalty then it's only a matter of time before you find yourself the target. There is a case that a less bellicose, less in-your-face flavour of DOGE could work better — and that such changes are easier when they're not associated with a controversial figure. In the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government, elected last year, is pinning its hopes on widespread use of AI technology to improve productivity, for person. And there are even people in Downing Street who quite envies the idea of taking a Musk-style wrecking ball to parts of the state; Health Secretary Wes Streeting recently abolished one of the main administrative levels of the National Health Service in an overnight raid. Attempts by the insurgent, right-wing populist Reform party — headed by Nigel Farage, who has courted Musk's funds — to launch a 'British DOGE' and find excess spending in local government have hit the rocks. Announced on Monday, the program's first leader had quit by Thursday. Cummings said in November that he was hopeful Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley. Cummings was long on diagnosis but short on prescription, the London-based Institute for Government think tank wrote in November 2021. It sought to fill the gap with ideas of its own for civil service reform.
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an hour ago
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Who owns the news? It must not be a group of foreign powers
Who owns the news? Much of the Left has been obsessed with the issue for over a century. They have long railed against press barons and their supposed bias. So it is perhaps surprising that this Labour Government is taking such a lackadaisical approach to foreign states having substantial holdings in British newspapers. The last Conservative government back in December 2023 intervened to put on hold and scrutinise the proposed sale of The Telegraph to a company backed by Sheikh Mansour, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. Columnists, including Charles Moore, The Telegraph's former editor, rightly argued that even if there was no actual interference in the newspaper's editorial line, there would be the perception that the paper would no longer be independent. This would fatally undermine the newspaper's standing by throwing away its reputation for fearless reporting, whatever the reality of the situation. The then government listened and last year, in the Digital, Media and Competitions Act, introduced a new regulatory regime to restrict foreign state ownership of newspapers and news magazines. But this Act only set out the broad principle, not the details of how it would be implemented. A total ban would come with its own problems. There would be little risk of editorial interference if, say, the sovereign wealth fund of Norway was a passive investor owning 3pc or 4pc in a UK-listed media company. During the consultations, it was proposed that a 5pc limit may be appropriate to allow for such holdings. Last month the new Government announced that the threshold would not be 5pc, but actually 15pc. I and many of my colleagues in the House of Lords have serious misgivings about this much higher limit, but it is one we can live with. However, there is another aspect of the draft regulations which is unacceptable. The 15pc threshold is not cumulative, it applies to each individual holding. This means that there would be nothing to stop multiple states each owning 15pc of a newspaper. It has been reported that after The Telegraph's proposed takeover by RedBird Capital, Sheikh Mansour intends to retain up to a 15pc stake in the newspaper. With the current proposals there would be nothing to stop, say, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain from each taking 15pc holdings. A cumulative 60pc of a British newspaper owned by foreign states is a very different proposition. The guarantees against foreign control would have evaporated. Has this potential scenario arisen as a result of an oversight by Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary? Alongside 50 of my fellow peers, I have written to Ms Nandy asking for clarification. Signatories include former chancellor Lord Lamont, former trade secretary Lord Lilley, long-time chairman of the 1922 committee Lord Brady, ex-director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald and the current chairman of Ipso, the independent press regulator, Lord Faulks. Our fears could be easily assuaged by simply amending the proposed regulations to ensure that 15pc is a cap on total foreign ownership. If the move is deliberate, it raises serious questions about this Government's commitment to a free press. The statutory instrument implementing the Government's regulations has now been laid and will shortly come before both Houses of Parliament. If the proposals reach the Lords in their current form, I and many of my colleagues will not be able to support the measure. The Telegraph's ownership has been left in limbo for two years so far. It is time for the new regulatory framework to be put in place that will allow its smooth transfer to new owners. But this must be done in a way that entrenches the traditional freedoms of our press. The issues are much wider than the future of just one newspaper. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
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an hour ago
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Labour faces embarrassing defeat over foreign state ownership of newspapers
The House of Lords is preparing to inflict an embarrassing defeat on Labour over its 'deeply problematic' plans to let foreign powers become part-owners of British newspapers. Peers including a former chancellor, a former director of public prosecutions and the current chairman of the press regulator are in open revolt over proposals by Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, to relax an outright ban on foreign state shareholdings to allow passive stakes of up to 15pc. The basic principle was expected to be reluctantly accepted by Parliament, in part to end the destabilising uncertainty at The Telegraph caused by a blocked takeover bid bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates. However, a loophole that it is feared could allow foreign powers to team up to gain sway over Britain's free press has stoked a rebellion capable of defeating the Government. As proposed, the legislation would enable foreign states to own up to 15pc if they are not cooperating with each other. Lord Young, the journalist and founder of the Free Speech Union campaign group, has spearheaded an open letter to Ms Nandy demanding she tighten the proposed laws. It has dozens of signatures from Conservative peers of all stripes, including former Cabinet ministers Lord Lamont, Lord Baker and Lord Lilley, as well as crossbenchers including Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions. The letter to Ms Nandy said her proposals to allow multiple foreign powers to own shares in a single newspaper were 'deeply problematic'. It added: 'It has to be assumed that if different state actors are intent on exerting influence through their shareholding, then some may be prepared to do so covertly and in collusion with other states. 'To guard against this risk, the draft regulations should ensure that the cap in the percentage of shares that can be owned in a British newspaper enterprise is a total cap.' The letter was also signed by Lord Faulks, the chairman of the press regulator Ipso; Baroness Fleet, the former editor of The Evening Standard; and Lord Goodman, the former editor of the Conservative Home website. Other prominent backers included Lord Brady, the former chairman of the 1922 committee of Conservative backbenchers; Baroness Deech, the chairman of the House of Lords appointments commission; Lord Swire, the former Foreign Office minister; and Baroness Spielman, the former head of Ofsted. Lord Roberts, the Churchill biographer, has also signed and has written in The Telegraph that the legislation 'must be done in a way that entrenches the traditional freedoms of our press'. The letter marks a significant escalation of opposition to the legislation in the Lords. Baroness Stowell, who last year played a critical role in forcing the Government to block the UAE bid for The Telegraph, was among the first to raise concerns over multiple state shareholdings in a letter to Ms Nandy last week. She did not sign Lord Young's letter, but warned the Government it faced defeat if it pressed ahead, even though the Conservative leadership in the Commons had signalled it did not oppose the proposed laws. The Liberal Democrats have tabled a rare 'fatal motion' to veto the statutory instrument which may become the focus of the Lords rebellion. Lady Stowell said: 'I really hope the Government reconsiders these proposals quickly. 'It would not be acceptable for multiple foreign states to own stakes of up to 15pc in the same newspaper, yet for reasons unclear, that is a scenario Lisa Nandy wants to allow. 'Unless she closes this obvious loophole, I can see peers swinging behind a fatal motion to block this legislation. It would be a rare step to take, but I know colleagues feel very strongly about this crucial matter of press independence.' The Conservatives are the biggest group in the Lords. Alongside the Liberal Democrats and some crossbenchers they could readily defeat the Government and spark a battle with the Commons. Lady Stowell is among the parliamentarians to have said she would accept a limit of 15pc with reservations, were it not for the risk of cumulative shareholdings. The figure is three times the limit proposed last year by Rishi Sunak's government. Ms Nandy decided to lift it following lobbying on behalf of Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail. Both media moguls have sought sovereign wealth investment in the past. Lord Rothermere previously considered a takeover bid for The Telegraph with financial backing from the Gulf. Mr Murdoch relied on the support of a Saudi royal shareholder to fight off the investor rebellion sparked by the phone-hacking scandal. Lobbyists for Lord Rothermere and Mr Murdoch argued that a 5pc cap on foreign state investment would cut news publishers off from a significant source of potential investment in digital growth at a time of upheaval as print newspapers decline. The row over cumulative shareholdings threatens to further delay a conclusion to the two-year saga over ownership of The Telegraph. RedBird Capital, the US private equity firm that was the minority investor in the blocked UAE takeover, has agreed in principle to become controlling shareholder in a £500m deal. IMI, the media investment vehicle owned by UAE royal Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is expected to retain up to 15pc. However, the deal has not been finalised and is likely to require a settled legal position before it can face regulatory scrutiny. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport declined to comment. Lord Biggar Baroness Meyer Lord Moylan Lord Jackson of Peterborough Baroness Eaton Lord Brady Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell Baroness Finn Baroness Fleet Baroness Noakes Baroness Bray of Coln Lord Strathcarron Baroness Lea of Lymm The Earl of Leicester Lord Borwick Lord Roberts of Belgravia Baroness Deech Lord Sherbourne Lord Mackinlay Lord Ashcombe Baroness Coffey Baroness Foster of Oxton Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Lord Evans of Rainow Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Baroness Buscombe Lord Sharpe of Epsom Lord Mancroft Lord Robathan Baroness Nicholson Lord Wrottesley Baroness Cash Lord Goodman Lord Shinkwin Baroness Altmann CBE Edward Faulks KC Lord Swire Baroness Fox of Buckley Baroness Spielman Lord Lamont Lord MacDonald of River Glaven Lord McInnes of Kilwinning Lord Hamilton of Epsom Lord Reay Lord Pearson of Rannoch Lord Lilley Lord Baker of Dorking Lord McLoughlin Baroness Morrissey Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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