Politics

The Trident Alternatives Review hasn’t even been published and already the Conservatives are attacking any proposals the Liberal Democrats might have cooked up to water down the nuclear deterrent. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman told the morning lobby briefing that the Prime Minister has ‘seen no evidence that there is a way of providing an alternative to a like-for-like replacement’ of Trident, while in his Daily Mail article today, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond says ‘there is no alternative to Trident that provides the same level of protection and ability to deter an aggressor’. So the challenge for the Liberal Democrats is to present this review, which has been lead by Danny

The Conservative party is a bit like HMV, the bankrupt music business. For years, just like HMV, we were market leaders. We won 44 per cent of the vote in 1979, 42 per cent in 1983 and 44 per cent again in 1987. But like the old music retailer, we have been losing touch with our customer base.  HMV sold music the wrong way, via a costly chain of shop outlets. We, too, have been retailing politics the wrong way. We last won a Parliamentary majority over 20 years ago. When we gained office after the 2010 election, we did so having got 36 percent of the vote. A pinnacle of

The government’s £26,000 benefit cap is one of the most popular policies pollsters have ever come across. No wonder, then, that CCHQ is putting this infographic about to underline the political power of this emblematic policy as it is rolled out nationwide today. Of course, it’s not entirely true that Labour supports limitless benefits, as the party is considering some kind of regional benefit cap, with more money paid to recipients in London to reflect the higher cost of living. But Liam Byrne and Ed Miliband’s decision to lead the party into voting against the cap in the end makes it very easy for the Conservatives to slap Labour with

Four years ago I was in a windowless room within the parliamentary estate. I was working in David Cameron’s opposition office at the time and a number of Tory political advisers had been corralled into said room to go line-by-line, page-by-page through the expenses forms for all Tory MPs. This was in the middle of the corrosive drip-dripping of expenses stories, and British politics had hit its nadir. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time living and working in SE Asia, which has enabled me to peer at the Westminster ant farm with a bit more perspective. On my last visit back to SW1, just over a month ago, I

Andrew Marr was back on the Marr show this morning, doing a great public service by reminding Britain why we’re not missing David Miliband. The ex-Blair adviser formerly nicknamed ‘Brains’ is off to join International Rescue next week – and even Marr couldn’t resist a Thunderbirds reference. Miliband wasn’t amused. He’d come to give a message: I’m not ruling out a comeback. But after watching his performance, I rather doubt that Labour members will be begging him to attempt one. listen to ‘David Miliband on the Andrew Marr show, 14 July 2013’ on Audioboo

Everybody knows that the price of motoring fuel is too expensive. Often, this is blamed on the taxman: at nearly 60 per cent of the cost of fuel, it is a toxic tax that affects the price of everything. Of course, we should recognise that fuel duty is 13p cheaper in tax terms thanks to actions by the Chancellor, but fuel duty needs to be a top priority for tax cuts as soon as financial conditions allow. But the desire to see lower fuel taxation often means that the wider debate on the price of fuel is overshadowed. This changed in May this year when it was announced that the

As if the poor Egyptians didn’t have enough on their plate, into the arena marches the man to sort it all out, the world’s ‘Middle East Envoy’, Tony Blair. Lucky world. Give the man his due, the Middle East is a monumentally fractious, fissiparous, disputatious neck of the woods and they all seem to hate each other. But mention the name ‘Blair’ and suddenly Maronite and Shia, Ashkenazi and Hamas, Druze and Sunni, men with long sideburns and men with long beards are united in an hysterical cackling. It is not often this column seeks an elucidatory comment from the Hamas spokesman Mohammed Shtayyeh, but his succinct verdict on Blair

Ed Miliband’s relationship with Len McCluskey was defined in a brief camera shot at the Labour party conference in 2010. After praising trade unions, Miliband added that he would have no patience with ‘waves of irresponsible strikes’. Several rows back, McCluskey, who three days earlier had helped Ed defeat his brother David in the leadership election, was filmed shaking his head and shouting ‘Rubbish!’ Given that McCluskey’s Unite union pays most of Labour’s bills, his word was seen as a veto. This was the new deal. McCluskey and his colleagues bestowed their patronage upon Ed not because they thought he would be a strong leader, but for rather the opposite

When my parents came to choose a secondary school, they were naturally keen to send little Sebastian to the best possible place — regardless of whether it was state or independent. Their first choice was Emmanuel College in Gateshead, where we lived — one of Kenneth Baker’s original city technology colleges and inspiration for Labour’s academy programme. The next was the fee-paying King’s School in Tynemouth. Emmanuel declined to offer me a place and King’s turned out to be too expensive. I ended up at a respectable, above-average comprehensive — so I was luckier than most. King’s would have been superb; it’s one of best schools in the north-east. But