Politics

Po-faced Labour MP Grahame Morris has been crying into his bitter this morning at young Tories up at York University who hold an annual ‘Hagueathon’ in honour of the fourteen pints the Foreign Secretary necked when he was a student. The game is very simple: right-wing students try to drink fourteen ales, with varying degrees of success. ‘I suspect William Hague’s capacity for 14 pints of Yorkshire bitter was a figment of his imagination,’ moans Morris to the Mirror. ‘In the current climate when the Government is supposed to be doing something about the alcohol crisis, this sets a bad example.’ Steerpike hears that Barrel Scrapper Morris has missed a

Panic, once let loose, is hard to corral. And there seems to be plenty of panic on the Tory benches at Westminster. The Eastleigh by-election result, the stagnant economy and the rising sense that the Prime Minister has somehow lost his way all contribute to this. Each fresh setback – or perceived setback – now has an impact disproportionate to the actual size or importance of the problem. These things are no longer measured on a linear scale. Read, for instance, Ben Brogan’s analysis in today’s Telegraph and you will perceive an under-current of deep panic presently afflicting the Tory tribe in London. Similarly, when Paul Goodman is writing –

Who are all these folk jumping on Nigel Farage’s bandwagon? Ukip — which received just 3 per cent of the vote in 2010 — is now averaging about 11 per cent in the polls. Its rise has fuelled all sorts of speculation about where its supporters are coming from and why they’re turning to the party. Today, YouGov have thrown a bit of data into that speculation. They’ve combined the results of all their February polls, which sampled 28,944 people including 2,788 who said they’d vote Ukip. The results are a mixture of the expected and the surprising. First, the expected: most of them voted Tory in 2010 — 60

This weekend David Cameron argued that the Tories are the ‘only party simultaneously committed to proper investment in the NHS and bringing down immigration’. This makes it all the odder that the Tories didn’t seize on Vince Cable’s comments on the Sunday Politics yesterday. The Business Secretary declared: ‘I’ve always been very critical of ring fencing but the policy under this government I accepted as part of the coalition arrangements.’ In other words, if Cable—the senior Liberal Democrat economic spokesman—had his way, the health budget would not be ring-fenced. But this comment seems to have gone unnoticed by the Tories; there was no press release from a Tory MP highlighting it.

No matter how bad the economic news, government ministers can always take heart that an attack from Labour will always be blunted by the simple line that ‘Labour would borrow more’. It’s why David Cameron managed to sail through Prime Minister’s Questions last week relatively unscathed even though Ed Miliband chose to make his attack on the loss of the credit rating. It’s a problem for the Labour leadership that Edward Carlsson Browne raises today on LabourList, but his argument is that Labour should be honest that it would borrow more as a government. He writes: We are different from the Tories. We would run the economy better. But if

With no man left behind the times, the Work and Pensions Select Committee are moving to ‘paperless working’. The pen-pushers are instructing members to get in touch with Parliament’s IT department for a free iPad — on the taxpayer, naturally. In theory, money will be saved on printing costs, though conscious of those members of the committee not quite prepared for modernity ‘alternative arrangements can be made if you do not wish to move to paperless working’, an email tells Committee members. The alternative presumably being printing stuff out, as per usual, thus rendering the whole operation nothing more than a nice spin job. Mr Steerpike’s eyes and ears say