Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Steerpike

Hold the front page: Anne McIntosh is holding a constituency surgery!

Mr S takes embargos very seriously. He respects the convention. An embargo is sacred. Yet the news that Anne McIntosh MP is holding a constituency surgery is so momentous that it took every ounce of my integrity not to share it with you before the appointed time this morning. Most ordinary MPs don’t embargo news of their surgeries. These events happen every week, more or less; they ought not to be newsworthy. But McIntosh is extraordinary. Readers may recall that McIntosh, the Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, has not been re-selected by her association. The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer, a member of the association, wrote an account of the row.

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: PM vents fury at Gove for interview on Etonians

Unsurprisingly, Michael Gove’s FT interview in which he attacked the ‘preposterous’ number of Old Etonians around David Cameron – widely interpreted as a sally on behalf of George Osborne – has gone down like a lead balloon with the Prime Minister. I understand that Cameron had a stern word with the Education Secretary over the weekend, with one source telling me that ‘he was torn a new one and given a right royal bollocking’. Cameron has made it very clear to Gove that his words were ‘bang out of order’ and that his aim is to focus on the Cabinet job in hand, not go on freelance missions. Meanwhile, those

Isabel Hardman

How tax transparency can help the Tories

George Osborne is as adept as any gamekeeper at setting little traps in every Budget and Autumn Statement for Labour to fall down. He hinted at a few in his Marr interview yesterday and they were largely the sort we’ve come to expect from the Chancellor on welfare and deficit reduction, but there’s also speculation that he could set another trap on tax. Ben Gummer’s 10-minute rule bill calling for National Insurance to be renamed the ‘Earnings Tax’ received a disproportionate amount of attention for what is normally simply a parliamentary device by which a backbencher can garner a little bit of attention for their hobby horse. But the reason

James Forsyth

Time to switch energy companies say ministers

Both coalition parties remain scarred by the political potency of Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices. They are determined to do what they can to stop this issue gaining salience again. So, it is telling that Ed Davey and Michael Fallon have both personally signed up to The Big Deal, a new initiative designed to gets consumers cheaper energy bills through bulk buying. Their decision to sign up shows how it is politically imperative to be seen as on the side of the customer rather than the producer when it comes to energy. (It is also testament to how well connected the campaign is in Westminster.) No politician wants

Isabel Hardman

Why no Tory can lecture another on leadership challenges

The continued speculation about who in the Conservative party is putting the most effort into preparing their leadership hat to throw into the currently non-existent ring is quite amusing. But it also means that those involved will struggle to have such a moral high ground when they need to lecture backbench colleagues for getting overexcited about potty-sounding leadership challenges after the European elections. Boris and George Osborne may be engaged in a strange fight about who is gaining the most currency with backbenchers so that they’re in the best possible position post-Cameron, while backbench unrest will be focused on Cameron’s own position. But the problem with this hysteria, where the

Steerpike

Owen Jones: ‘the BBC is stacked full of right wingers’

Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight’s appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of ‘left wing bias’ at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from ‘myths and deception’ and that the ‘BBC is stacked full of right wingers’. Now, now, no laughing at the back please – we ought to take the Guardian’s star columnist seriously. Jones names 10 people who are connected to the right (some of them very tenuously so): Chris Patten, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb, Thea Rogers, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Andrew Neil, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys and Craig Oliver. He neglects

Alex Massie

Yes, of course the BBC is biased against you

And it doesn’t matter who you are. Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or UKIP it’s all the same. The BBC is hopelessly prejudiced against you. As it should be. Why only this morning we see Owen Jones complaining that, contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the BBC is instinctively biased against the left and Lesley Riddoch suggesting  the corporation is reflexively biased against the very idea, let alone the prospect, of Scottish independence. Well, up to a point. But asking whether the BBC is inclined to the left or right is the wrong question. It is a kind of category error. Adding up the number of

Melanie McDonagh

David Davis should be in Cabinet – or at least in government

Class never quite goes away as an issue for the Tories, for the simple and sufficient reason that it matters. Lately it was Michael Gove stating the obvious, that the Prime Minister mixes mostly with people with backgrounds like his own…a perfectly human impulse, but not a good look, the Old Etonian coterie. Now David Davis has observed (on the radio) over the weekend, as John Major did last year, that it’s much harder than it was when he was growing up for a working class boy to get ahead in the world. Mr Davis is a product of a Tooting grammar school, a route that’s now closed, but it wasn’t just

Rod Liddle

Do you believe what the Malaysian government is saying about flight MH370?

Is the world now being fed a bit of disinformation from the Malaysians over the fate of that missing jet, flight MH370? We are now told that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a ‘fanatical’ dissident, a supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has once again been jailed under Malaysia’s homophobic laws for allegedly having sex with a man. This makes Shah a democrat and a moderate, in my book – and I would have thought most people’s books. There is no suggestion that Shah had sympathies with PAS, Malaysia’s somewhat fundamentalist, although lately moderating, Islamist party (and which for reasons of political expediency has in the past

Nigel Farage and ‘new Ukip’ are running away from disaffected Tories. Why?

Who votes Ukip? It’s a question psephologists have been trying to answer for years but Nigel Farage had a clear response on the Sunday Politics today: not just disaffected Conservatives. Based on research by Lord Ashcroft, Farage boasted that ’new Ukip’ — a party which is ‘a lot of more professional, a lot more smiley, a lot less angry’ — now has such a great influence on the Labour party, they will be forced into changing their stance on an EU referendum following May’s Euro elections: ‘There’s a long way to go between now and the next election. As we’ve seen with Conservative policy, it chops and changes…I think what

James Forsyth

George Osborne readies his tax dividing line

George Osborne was on Andrew Marr this morning announcing support for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent and the extension of Help to Buy on new build homes until 2020. The Tories hope that these policies will show both that they are planning for the long term and that they are supporting aspiration. But what struck me as most significant was Osborne’s response when told by Marr that he was sounding more like a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. He instantly replied, ‘Conservatives believe in lower taxes, Liberal Democrats want to put taxes up.’ We already know that Osborne believes that the rest of the deficit can be

George Osborne and Ed Balls play it like it’s 2010

George Osborne and Ed Balls have gone head-to-head in the media – the former in The Sun on Sunday and the latter in The Sunday Mirror. The two also appeared on the Andrew Marr Show. Neither man said anything new, at least not in terms of the grand narrative, which is scarcely surprising because the electoral cycle is at the stage where new ideas do not have time to gestate. This is especially true of the chancellor. Osborne has been under pressure to raise the threshold at which people pay the 40p rate. Osborne made it very clear to Andrew Marr that the government’s tax threshold reforms had benefited 25

Fraser Nelson

Would George Osborne really be brazen enough to expand ‘Help to Buy?’

Today’s Sunday Times has news which would be laughable, if it were not to plausible. That George Osborne intends to pour some more petrol on the property market fire next week by extending his discredited Help To Buy equity loan scheme – in effect, a flagrant example of politicians using taxpayers’ money in an attempt to buy votes. It’s a sign that Osborne intends to use help-to-buy as an election weapon, and as loaned money doesn’t show up on the deficit figures he’s quite relaxed. Here’s the start of the Sunday Times story:- The Help to Buy scheme, designed to help people get on to the housing ladder, is likely

I’m exposing Clegg’s gimmicks to stop him interfering with schools

Simon Jenkins has written a bizarre piece in the Evening Standard. As well as answering that, I’ll explain a few others things about it. Unfortunately, he has completely misunderstood the basics of the universal free school meals fiasco. He writes: ‘Gove decided, by a deal with Nick Clegg, that running every school meant insisting every child have a “proper meal”. The order went out over Christmas. Gove would be first to admit he has never run a whelk stall and was surprised to discover that schools were having trouble becoming Jamie Oliver academies overnight… Comrade Stalin himself would have warmed to the tears of gratitude.’ Where to start?! Simon Jenkins clearly thinks

Isabel Hardman

Viviane Reding’s next trick

Viviane Reding is a bit of a favourite among UK ministers. The European Commissioner for Justice has a knack of making such a good case for reform of Europe with her interviews and policies that Conservatives – and indeed Ukippers – are quite content for her to intervene as often as possible. This week, she’s got another cunning plan that eloquently makes the case for reform of Europe – and ministers will be standing up to her again. Reding is expected to publish the second annual EU Justice Scoreboard on Monday:  it’s a league table of all the EU member states’ justice systems. At first glance, this sounds like a

Polling worries for Miliband – and for Cameron

There’s been much hullaballoo this afternoon over a Populus poll that shows a Labour lead of one point. The usual caveats apply (it’s just one poll!); but, nevertheless, this sample adds to the sense that Ed Miliband is in difficulty. There is, incidentally, only 419 days to go until election day. If the Populus poll was disappointing, then this projection compiled by Stephen Fisher of Oxford University could have Miliband reaching for the scotch: ‘Forecast Election Day Seats: Con : 307 Lab : 285 LD  : 31 Con largest party, but short of a majority by 19’ A dismal prospect for Labour; but there are also worries for the Tories because they are

Did David Cameron just promise Scots devo max?

Scotland will get more powers – including control over taxes – if Scots vote No in September. That was the message David Cameron took to the Scottish Conservative Party at its annual conference in Edinburgh today. The Prime Minister has come under fire from the Scottish Nationalists who have claimed that the only way Scots can guarantee more powers is to vote Yes. In a clear attempt to undermine this argument, the Prime Minister went further than he has ever done before by promising to devolve more power from Westminster to Holyrood if Scots vote No. He said: ‘The Nationalists want people to believe that this is the end of the line

Lara Prendergast

Tony Benn – feminist

You may not have agreed with the late Tony Benn’s politics, but as Mary Wakefield points out in her interview with him, ‘his faith in humanity had deep roots’. And here’s an example of it. Back in 2001, Benn took it upon himself to erect a plaque in the broom cupboard where Emily Wilding Davison hid during the night of 2 April 1911, the night of the Census, so that she would be registered as a resident at the House of Commons. As a woman – with no right to elect who could stand in Parliament – it appealed to her sense of irony that she would be recorded as a

Rod Liddle

Despite his faults, Tony Benn was a real Big Beast

I suppose you could argue, if you were a conservative, that Tony Benn’s greatest contribution to public life was helping to render Labour unelectable for thirteen years. There’s quite a few within Labour who might wryly argue the same thing, frankly. And plenty more who had grave doubts about the man’s ‘principled’ devotion to Socialism, a principle which seemed to visit itself on him, suddenly, in the early 1970s, when he saw the base of the party was swinging wildly to the left. He had previously been a pretty moderate and competent minister under Harold Wilson. Later he was to become a sort of cartoon bogeyman for the red top