Politics

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat. If you’d done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary,  has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling

Former Chief Whip Andrew ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell has been reflecting on his salad days. In an interview with Cambridge University’s alumni magazine, which one presumes was given some time before the row with a Downing Street police officer which ended his career, Mitchell recalls his arrival at Jesus College in 1975: ‘I came here straight out of the army – literally direct from Brize Norton. I drove up with my four boxes of worldly possessions, unpacked and then lay on the bed.’ That army career (an eight-month short service commission after leaving Rugby School), gets multiple mentions: ‘having arrived straight from the army’ he ‘had very short hair [and] stood up straight.’

This time tomorrow, the country will be flocking to the polls to select their first ever police commissioners. Or at least some of them will. Turnout has long predicted to be low, but the latest analysis by Sky’s psephologist Michael Trasher suggests it will come in between 15 and 20 per cent. Such a figure would be the lowest of any election in modern times (outside of London). As the Electoral Reform society notes, the current record stands from 1998 at 25 per cent. Much of the apathy towards these elections can be blamed on poor public understanding of PCCs. Although a marketing push has been underway in the last few

The Prime Minister chose his words carefully earlier today when asked if he would be sending his children to private school. Sky News’ eagle-eyed Sophy Ridge reports that Cameron was cross-examined by a pesky school kid at a ‘Cameron Direct’ meeting this morning at the John Cabot Academy in Bristol. Cameron told his inquisitor that he ‘would like’ his children ‘to go to state school’, which is nearly the same thing as saying that they will do. The Prime Minister pointed out that his two children of school age – Nancy, 8, and Arthur, 6, attend state primary schools, which implies that they will continue to do so at secondary level. Only

Theresa May gave a defiant statement to the house on the Special Immigration Appeals Committee’s (SIAC)  decision to uphold Abu Qatada’s appeal against deportation to Jordan on grounds that he would not receive a fair trial. She vowed to fight on by ‘appealing the decision’, which prompts the question: how will she do that? It’s necessary to understand what the SIAC considered (here is its judgment and here is a précis). First, it examined whether or not evidence given by Qatada’s former co-defendants in an earlier trial (from which Qatada was absent), Abu Hawsher and Al-Hamasher, is admissible in Qatada’s retrial. This question is not initially concerned with whether the

Why not tax the bejesus out of the City and tighten regulation? Yes, the bankers will moan — but it’s not as if they will go abroad. The tax rate may be low in Zug, but do our pinstriped friends want to actually live there? The City’s elite have their kids in British schools, the time zone is right for business and the global phenomenon of Planet London has attractions that outweigh marginal tax rates. So let bankers moan: they’ll stay. This is, more or less, the argument that you hear from MPs on all benches as they take a carving knife to the golden goose that is the City