Welcome to the Sunday outing for The Voice’s near-daily Daily View series. As it’s a Sunday, today it comes with a special bonus military film.

2 Big Stories

Spotlight turns to MPs’ outside earnings

The Telegraph, in a surprise departure, runs a big story on MPs and money:

A survey has uncovered the outside interests of dozens of MPs who hold down paid positions, ranging from legal and media work to crofting, and even grave digging. One earns £750 an hour for helping to organise an awards ceremony for the drinks industry, while another is paid more than £1,300 a day to provide business

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The Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow has been a busy boy – he’s been trying to keep pace with the Government’s U-turns since Gordon Brown made his statement announcing the Iraq inquiry last week. He reckons there have been a possible nine, and a definite five:

Indeed, it’s interesting to compare this list with Nick Clegg’s consistent pressure on the Government over the past few days, and the clarification he’s sought from inquiry chair Sir John Chilcot.

Economist columnist-blogger Bagehot has today analysed this litany of reverses in an attempt to explain Mr Brown’s reverse Midas touch:

I prefer to see the whole, shambolic episode as a parable of the dialectical weakness that has undone Mr Brown’s premiership.

The prime minister made his announcement without proper consultation, either of other political leaders or other interested parties, such as current and former generals. His proposal came in for criticisms—on the openness question, the composition of the panel, the time-frame and so on—that ought to have been glaringly predictable, and would certainly have been made plain by any meaningful canvassing of views. As a result, an initiative that was doubtless expected to be a vote-winner threatened to become a political disaster. The government has responded with an ongoing frenzy of back-tracking and buck-passing, leaving it to Sir John to resolve many of the controversial issues himself. (There is a useful catalogue of the various U-turns here.) What ought to have been a cross-party endeavour instead became, in the votes in the Commons yesterday evening, a futile test of the government’s strength.

There you have it: an encapsulation of the whole Brown tragicomedy. The motive may (or may not) have been noble. But the execution was a catalogue of shoddy judgments and mistakes, combining lack of consultation with a political tin ear, failings that perfectly illustrate why Mr Brown’s overall position is so vulnerable. That vulnerability in turn explains why he was obliged so swiftly to climb down. He is in large measure the author of his own predicament; and the predicament is in turn emasculating him.

And Labour’s U-turns aren’t restricted solely to Iraq. Just today, Harriet Harman scrapped the Government’s plans to limit the scope of the committee set up to oversee the reform of Parliament. Ministers had been planning to prevent the Wright Committee from examining any Government business. However, Ms Harman today contacted Lib Dem shadow Leader of the House, David Heath, to inform him that she would be accepting his amendment allowing the committee to look at Government business.

David Heath commented:

2 big stories

As any fule kno, the chair of the Iraq enquiry Sir John Chilcot has ruled that as a default all evidence should be given to the enquiry in public. He has also indicated that he will be calling Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to give evidence. From the Guardian:

The move to open up his hearings, which came on the eve of a Commons debate tomorrow on the inquiry, shows that a wholesale change of the terms has been carried out since the inquiry was established by the prime minister last week. The decision to summon Brown and Blair for public hearings was disclosed by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, who met Chilcot today on privy council terms. Chilcott held a separate meeting with David Cameron on the same terms.

2 Big Stories

Whips accused of fixing Speaker vote
The Times reports:

The race to become the most powerful Commons Speaker in modern history is being undermined by party whips who are trying to install Margaret Beckett as their anti-reform candidate.

Senior Labour figures have been accused of colluding with Conservatives to ensure that Mrs Beckett is elected today. She was the only candidate not to endorse plans to remove the powers of patronage from the Whips’ Offices — so that MPs, rather than party whips, would choose the chairmen of select committees.

Her candidacy was pushed by Nick Brown, the Chief

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Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced there will be a private inquiry into the Labour Government’s decision to go to war with Iraq. Beginning in July and reporting some time in 2010, the inquiry will cover the period July 2001 to July 2009 and be chaired by Sir John Chilcot.

Here’s Nick Clegg’s response to the Prime Minister’s statement:

I would like to thank the Prime Minister for his statement, and join him in paying tribute to our brave service men and women who have served our country in Iraq over the last six years.
And in particular to the 179

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Iraqi-LGBT reports that the administration in Iraq is about to begin executing gay Iraqis.

Urgent action is needed to halt the execution of 128 prisoners on death row in Iraq. Many of those awaiting execution were convicted for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality, according to IRAQI-LGBT, a UK based organisation of Iraqis supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Iraq.

According to Ali Hili of IRAQI-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week.

IRAQI-LGBT urgently requests that the UK Government, Human Rights Groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission intervene with due speed

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I only ask because, you see, when the Freedom of Information legislation was going through Parliament, David Davis was one of the MPs who opposed the idea that a Government minister could veto the release of information:

A cross-party alliance of senior MPs was formed yesterday to attack the Home Office for giving ministers wide-ranging powers of veto in the Freedom of Information Bill … Others who joined the call for fellow MPs to back cross-party amendments to the Bill included David Davis (C, Haltemprice and Howden) (The Independent, 31 March 2000)

So now that Jack Straw has used the …

Iain Dale: So the Tories are backing the government’s plans for the Post Office and Jack Straw’s decision to block publication of the Iraq war cabinet minutes. It’s probably just as well I have been too busy today to do much blogging.

Dizzy Thinks: I thought I would just pass a quick comment on Jack Straw’s decision to veto the Information Commissioner on the issue of Cabinet minutes on the decision to go to war in Iraq. Firstly, the Tories are bloody idiots to support the Government on this…

So there he was, sat in the House of Commons listening to Jack Straw announce his decision to veto the Information Tribunal’s decision that the Cabinet minutes of the decision to go to war in Iraq should be released.

Up he then got, and this is what Dominic Grieve said:

The Secretary of State’s decision to use his powers of veto in this case classically illustrates what has been wrong with the Government’s approach to freedom of information.

and

The public have had their expectations about openness raised by Labour’s spin and propaganda, only to be brought down to earth.

and

Does

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The big Parliamentary news yesterday was the announcement by Jack Straw that he was over-ruling an Information Tribunal ruling and taking the unprecedented step of withholding information they had ordered should be released – the minutes of the Cabinet meetings which decided to go to war with Iraq.

The move was opposed by the Liberal Democrats, with David Howarth leading the charge:

The decision to go to war in Iraq was momentous, controversial and disastrous, especially for this country’s reputation as an upholder of international law.

There never has been a full and comprehensive public inquiry into the decision to go

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Anyone from any political persuasion can list things this Government has done that annoy them.

Personally, I was annoyed enough to join millions of others on the march against the war in Iraq – now it’s time to hold them to account.

I’m not so sure how I will react if and when I get the orders from the Government to present myself at the interrogation centre in nearby Derby and hand over more personal information than is currently demanded from sex offenders.  I’m not certain I’m ready to join Simon Hughes in jail for refusing an ID card.

I’ve never …

A late but perhaps decisive entry for most astonishing favourable media coverage of the week comes courtesy of – make sure you’re sitting down – Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail, commenting on yesterday’s fiery Iraq debate in which both opposition leaders renewed the call for a public enquiry:

But the Opposition leader who seized the attention yesterday was Nick Clegg of the LibDems.

It was a good way for him to mark his first anniversary in charge of his party. The year has not always been easy but yesterday he soared.

Mr Clegg came in for a lot of argy-bargy from Labour and Conservative hecklers. They only made him ballsier.

He accused Mr Brown of producing ‘an extraordinarily rosy account’ of the Iraq business.

Indeed, at one point Mr Brown had spoken of the ‘continuing gratitude’ the Iraqi people felt towards Britain for ‘freeing Iraq from tyranny’.

Such gush may be okay for propaganda broadcasts on the wireless but it is not really acceptable in an adult debating chamber.

On clattered Cleggster, citing the opinion of one Barack Obama that Iraq was ‘a dumb war’.

Labour didn’t like that. Mr Clegg accused Labour of conducting the conflict ‘in secret, unaccountable, behind closed doors’ and concluded: ‘They let Britain down.’

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And then Speaker Martin called, ‘Charles Kennedy’, and it was like being dragged back eight years.

Ex-LibDem leader Kennedy, plumper, pinker, pointed out that it was ‘fundamentally remiss’ of Mr Brown not to have referred in his statement to the Iraqi dead ‘who most shamefully the Americans and ourselves have not even bothered to count’.

He spoke with the voice of an ancient mariner. ‘No bodycount, no names,’ said Mr Kennedy.

He did not need to shout or gesture. A staining reproach before Christmas, it was formidably well put.

“Cleggster”? Has my meme worked? You can find Clegg and Kennedy’s full contributions to the debate in Hansard, and Clegg’s I think I’ll give you in full:

At the end of last month The Washington Post ran a piece from a former US military interrogator who worked in Iraq. It addresses head-on the question of whether torture is needed to fight terrorism:

I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I

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