Politics

This is unfortunate, not least because the Prime Minister is a greater realist than many of his erstwhile supporters. They, too often, seem to be another bunch of Bourbons. They helped destroy the last Conservative Prime Minister and they seem determined to help vanquish this one too. The country is not nearly so obsessed with Europe as the Conservative party thinks it is and, whatever the people’s frustrations with Brussels and the European Union, I still think it unlikely the electorate is liable to be impressed with or by a party that spends quite so much time and energy on the European question. Not that the Prime Minister is helping.

David Cameron told journalists before Christmas that he had a ‘tantric’ approach to his European policy speech: that it would be all the better when it eventually came. So today he decided to continue tantalising his party and the media by popping up on the Today programme a whole week before he’s due to give the speech, and refusing to give details of what that speech will contain. It’s an interesting strategy, as speaking so far before the speech won’t help the Conservative party remain calm. The next week was always going to be a little frenzied in the run-up to the speech. But here’s what we did learn from

The Europe debate is raging in the Sunday papers ahead of Cameron’s speech on the matter. There’s mounting concern among Tory Cabinet Ministers that the speech will not go far enough and will simply inflame the situation. One told me, ‘It would be better to make no speech than to disappoint.’ But I suspect that Tory spin doctors will be concerned about a second Europe story this Sunday, Eric Pickles’ confirmation under questioning from Andrew Neil that the government has a number for how many Romanians and Bulgarians are expected to move here from December 2013 when EU transition controls come to an end: listen to ‘Eric Pickles on housing

Refusing to publish your 2015 manifesto at the start of 2013 is, obviously, a sensible one. However uncomfortable Labour frontbenchers have felt over the past two and a half years about not being able to respond to the jeers of ‘well, what would you do then?’ from ministers at departmental questions, writing another one of the longest suicide notes in history would have left them in still greater discomfort at the polls. But how do voters know whether to trust you or not when they’ve only recently booted you out of government? Ed Miliband was trying to explain this tension to James Landale on Marr this morning. Miliband: But, James,

If you didn’t like New Labour much, then you have something in common with Ed Miliband — who appears to have loathed it. He’s just given his first speech of the year to the Fabian Society, the torch-bearers of an older type of socialism, and his audience was left in no doubt that if elected, he would offer a very different type of left-wing politics to that he helped served up when working for the Blair/Brown governments. Miliband has hammered nails into the coffin of New Labour before, notably in a speech in September 2010 just days after he was elected Labour leader. Today, he wanted to make sure the

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Fabians is being rather over-shadowed today by Lord Heseltine’s attack on David Cameron’s EU policy; the political media like nothing more than a ‘Tories split on Europe’ story. I suspect, though, that Labour won’t mind this too much. Heseltine’s criticisms make the Tories look divided and allow Labour to claim that even Cameron’s own growth adviser thinks his Europe policy is wrong. Of course, there is nothing surprising about Heseltine’s criticisms: he is an ideological pro-European. He wanted Britain to join the euro, something that would have been a total disaster for this country, and even now believes that we will join the euro one-day.