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Wednesday 10 March 2010

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‘Everyone’s staring at me. Can you believe how rude people can be?

Wednesday, 10th March 2010

Hague and Cameron are vindicated for leaving the EPP

David Blackburn 5:35pm

Daniel Hannan breaks the, sadly, not very surprising news that MEPs have voted overwhelmingly in favour of an EU Tobin tax. The margin: 536 to 80. Only the European Conservatives and Reformist group and a handful of radicals opposed the motion. The EPP, which describes itself as ‘centrist’, voted uniformly in favour. Cameron was right to withdraw from a grouping whose interests are at odds not only with British Conservatives but with Britain itself: a tax on all financial transactions would castrate the City.

What does this division mean for Britain? On the...

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Clegg: Heir to Thatcher?

Fraser Nelson 3:20pm

Nick Clegg has a blue rose in his mouth in tomorrow's Spectator, serenading readers - and showing his hidden Tory side. I have to say, he puts his heart into it.

Not only does the Lib Dem leader say he'll end the structural deficit with 100 percent spending cuts (not the 20 percent tax rises, 80 percent cuts combo that the Tories advocate), but he even heaps praise in Lady Thatcher. More, he describes her as something of an inspiration: just as she took on vested interests in the 1980s, so he will...

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Tornado in the chamber

Lloyd Evans 3:04pm

It was like a volcano going off. At PMQs today Cameron was calmly dissecting the prime minister’s underfunding of the Afghan war when he quoted two former defence chiefs who’d called Brown ‘disingenuous’ and ‘a dissembler’. Then someone shouted, ‘they’re Tories!’ Cameron lost control. Instantly, completely. His temper just went. White in the face, he leaned his flexed torso across the dispatch box, hammering at it so hard that it nearly disintegrated. ‘Is that it?’ he yelled. ‘Is that what this tribalist and divisive government thinks of those who serve this country!?’

Rippling...

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The Tories will have waves of dirt thrown at them

James Forsyth 1:01pm

If you want a flavour of what is going to be thrown at the Tories between now and May 6th, read Jonathan Freedland’s column today. Freedland has a fair point about how Michael Ashcroft should pay tax in this country, in my view no one should be eligible for an honour let alone a seat in the legislature if they are not fully domiciled in this country for tax purpose, but it is all dressed up in the language of the class war.

I’ve never met Richard Drax, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to give...

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PMQs live blog

David Blackburn 11:48am

Stay tuned for live coverage from 12:00

Memory for Michael Foot and the four servicemen who have been killed in the last week.

12:03: And we're off. Tory backbencher Richard Benyon wants assurances that soldiers serving overseas receive a postal vote. Brown gives him such.

12:05: Here's Cameron. He starts with the examination into the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan which suggests that inadquately strong motorised equipment was responsible for their deaths. Prepare for Brown's Chilcot evidence, contradicted by Lord Guthrie among others, to come under sustained attack. Brown is at his most vulnerable on defence. That said, Brown apologises...

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The Tories’ problems have more to do with branding

David Blackburn 10:43am

Two weeks ago, David Cameron delivered a brilliant speech. It keyed into exactly what Michael Wolff means by the phrase, 'Cameron is a politician who quells, smooths, conflates, reassures.' It offered hope and optimism, a future free of the current morass. In that case, why are the Tories still faltering?

Cameron rode on the wake of Brown’s incompetence for eighteen months. It was never an exclusively positive endorsement, something of which Cameron was aware. Mandelson, Campbell et al have brought Labour back into the race with a series of well aimed jibes that the...

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The Budget will be on 24 March

Peter Hoskin 9:04am

So now we know. Gordon Brown has just announced that the Budget will be on 24 March – which strongly implies an election date of 6 May. Brown could dissolve Parliament on 6 April, the manifestos would be published on 12 April, and then we'd be into the campaign proper. Which means even more speeches, polls and dread speculation than we're getting now.

As for the Budget's general flavour, we'll probably get an idea of that today, too. Brown's currently giving a speech in which he's brushing over recent tremors in the...

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Tuesday, 9th March 2010

Tory lead down to four points in latest YouGov tracker poll

James Forsyth 10:03pm

Tonight’s YouGov poll has the Tory lead down to four points. The Tories have fallen three to 36, Labour is also down—dropping two to 32 while the Lib Dems are up four to twenty. Now, this is only one poll and we might find tomorrow night that it is a statistical blip and that the Tory lead is back to six points and the party is back in the high thirties. But at the very least, the poll is going to give the Tory wobble story-line another outing.

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Tough on dangerous dogs, blind to the causes of dangerous dogs

Fraser Nelson 6:03pm

It's 'dangerous dogs' season again - but is there more to the story? The Today programme gave this its main 8.10am slot. The BBC sought to interview some chavs to sneer at - the listener being invited to conclude that the law must be brought to bear on them. But Brendan O'Neill was quite right in this week's magazine, where he describes how government seeks to use this scare for yet another power grab over the citizens. The aim, he says "is not only to bring dog-owners into that very big tent of People...