Politics

If you think the battle in the Tory party over policies can get bloody, spare a thought for the Lib Dems, who have to listen to their members as well as the differing views of their MPs. I write about how Nick Clegg and his colleagues at the top of the party are trying to encourage grown-up decision-making in my Telegraph column today. The problem for the Lib Dems – which they regard as a strength – is that their party structure gives members a great deal of final say over the manifesto content. A manifesto working group, led by David Laws, reports to the Federal Policy Committee, which decides

The House of Lords’ committee rooms are not ordinarily the setting for a ruckus; but there was rumpus in the Moses Room on Tuesday night, when the greybeards were musing over the Energy Bill. A witness tells me that Baroness Worthington of Cambridge, also known as the environmental campaigner Bryony Worthington, who was elevated from relative obscurity to a Labour peerage in 2011, ‘exhibited appalling behaviour.’ Worthington was ‘screaming, gesticulating wildly, referring to the minister (Baroness Verma) as ‘you, you, you’, whilst pointing in her face,’ says my man in ermine. At the end of the outburst, it is claimed that Worthington’s ‘Labour colleagues were hanging their heads in shame

Remember all the fuss about ‘tiger-mothering’ sparked by Amy Chua’s book: Battle-Hymn of the Tiger Mother?  Mothers around the world began agonising about whether they were pushing their children hard enough. Well here’s a thought, sparked by our interview with the brilliant Professor Robert Plomin in the magazine this week. Maybe Amy’s children, the tiger cubs, would have got all those A+ results anyway, even without her cracking the whip so hard. Professor Plomin has studied over ten thousand pairs of twins and found that IQ is strikingly heritable – and that it becomes more heritable as kids grow up. Part of the reason for this, he suggests, is that

You might have thought that being the scene of a tabloid sensation — and one concerning a national treasure — could have spelled a tricky period for Scott’s of Mayfair. Not a bit of it. My man with a corkscrew says that the place has been packed with Tories all week. They had Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in for lunch on Monday, before Boris and Gove dined (after a fashion) that evening. No one was at anyone else’s throat on either occasion. Joe Public does, though, have a wicked sense of humour. The terrace tables, the very spot where Nigella and Charles Saatchi’s marriage ended, are particularly sought-after at present. However, reports

Michael Gove leads a lively life. In the past week he’s landed himself in the doghouse with his wife after a night on the town with Boris Johnson, and has been exposed as a gentleman rapper. Today, after giving an impassioned speech on teachers’ pay, the Education Secretary found himself being grilled by members of the lobby about both activities (rather than his desire to improve classroom standards). Did he leave Boris drunk in charge of a bicycle, wondered one member of the press pack. ‘As far as I could tell on Monday night, Boris was on sparkling form, and that was due more to his natural joie de vivre than

Today’s broadcast from Len McCluskey Land was always going to be fun. For those of us who only lived through the tail end of the 1980s, the Unite General Secretary’s speech was a useful glimpse of that decade and the one before. It was also peppered with some great characters: a chap who Len called Paul Dackery who, when not editing a national newspaper that made a rather embarrassing editorial judgement 80 years ago, apparently likes to go around licking people’s boots. McCluskey addressed Dacre and his colleagues at the Mail, saying ‘we know you like to kick the poor while licking the boots of the rich’. Apart from anything