Politics

Labour under a more left-wing leader, the Tories bearing right. These are circumstances in which you would expect the Liberal Democrats to flourish. But they are in government and haven’t benefitted from this moment. Instead, they are struggling in the polls, coming fourth too often for comfort. Part of the problem is that the public simply aren’t listening to Nick Clegg at the moment. As one Conservative Cabinet Minister sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats’ political strategy observes, ‘Clegg can say anything, he’s just not being heard.’ Those close to Clegg believe that this will turn round in time. Their hope is that his apology over tuition fees has drawn some

Both the former Labour MP Tony McNulty and the present Culture Secretary Maria Miller claimed parliamentary second home expenses for houses in which their respective parents lived. This is in contravention of accepted procedure.  McNulty apologised, paid the money back, resigned his cabinet position and his seat. Maria Miller is somehow still the Culture Secretary and has the Prime Minister’s “full support”, as well as a still agreeably full bank account: she has paid back nowt. The only difference I can see between the two cases is that McNulty claimed £13,000 whereas Miller pocketed £90,000.  David Laws, meanwhile, is back in a quasi-cabinet role despite having diddled the taxpayer out

There’s nothing wrong with Nick Clegg putting some distance between his party and the Conservatives. Today the Liberal Democrat leader is going to open up about the gory details of government, explaining where his party has held the Tories back, and heralding a new era where he and colleagues are honest about what they actually think of policies. On Friday, I argued that this sort of honesty about the workings of coalition government was a good thing. But there is one caveat to this. Conservative MPs are pretty unhappy at present, and it’s not just that they are overtired before the Christmas break. Their unhappiness stems partly from the splits

By this stage in the Coalition, everyone would have expected at least one major bust-up between George Osborne and Vince Cable. But his evidence to today’s Treasury Select Committee suggested that the Chancellor isn’t so much involved in a stand-off with the Business Secretary as he is taking on his point of view. It was significant how many times Osborne had to explain a softening in what were previously hard-and-fast economic rules, and hard-and-fast policies. His refusal to rule out replacing the Bank of England’s inflation target with a growth target is the most significant sign of a coalescing between the two men. Osborne told the committee that the current

Planning Minister Nick Boles admitted yesterday that he did not believe his controversial suggestion for Britain to build homes on two million acres of countryside should be put into practice. The new minister caused a storm last month when he supported a 3 per cent increase in UK-wide development to alleviate the housing shortages caused by high immigration. The plan was to build homes on green-field land, increasing development from 9 per cent to 12 per cent nationwide. But yesterday, Boles denied the claims, arguing that they were meant to illustrate a wider point about under-development rather than create a particular policy or target. His admission came after the Prime

Liam Byrne is a modernising, Blairite Labour MP, and in case you were in any doubt about that, he conducts his interview with Coffee House sitting next to a framed photograph of him with Tony Blair. The party’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary is well known for his modernising zeal, which has sometimes led him onto a collision course with his party grassroots and other MPs on the left. This week, though, he’s on a collision course with the Conservatives, who hope they’ve managed to corner Labour into admitting it hasn’t quite modernised its welfare policy enough to win voters back. The Welfare Uprating Bill, launched in last week’s Autumn