Politics

Yet more exciting news from my favourite city, Brighton. Maybe I should do a weekly Brighton update. Or maybe we should just leave them alone and ignore them; it is not a bad thing to have a large proportion of Britain’s most irritating people corralled in one ghastly laager. I don’t mean the poftahs, by the way. I mean the rest of them. Anyway, the local council is planning to abolish the titles Mr and Mrs. This is because Brighton, apparently, has a large number of residents who for one reason or another are unable to choose which one of the two they are. They sit there, pen in hand,

Danny Alexander told Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics that even if he had known the economy would only grow by 0.6% rather than the five and a half percent plus that the Office of Budget Responsibility predicted in 2010, he would still have backed the austerity programme. ‘The judgment we made was the right one’, he declared. He cited how the deficit reduction programme had reassured the markets from which Britain still has to borrow and that the OBR’s view is that fiscal tightening has not been a major reason why its forecasts were so out. Alexander refused to concede that a mansion tax was dead, despite the Chancellor

It was not a huge surprise when Ken Clarke rowed back this afternoon on his comments to the Telegraph about tax breaks for married couples. The minister without portfolio was hardly going to get through the first interview he has given since the reshuffle without saying something he would later have to ‘clarify’. But he made another interesting observation to the newspaper about the Tories’ 2015 strategy. He said: ‘If we are back to strong growth by the next election, we probably won’t need to campaign. If at the next election, the economy is in strong normal growth, George Osborne will be given the Companion of Honour or something and

In The Spectator this week, Charles Moore argued that David Cameron — despite his oft-stated desire to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership — doesn’t actually have a European policy. Charles’ criticisms have clearly stung. For in his Telegraph column, he outlines what post-2015, the Conservatives would seek in any renegotiation: “In essence, the scheme is to turn the EU into two concentric rings. The inner ring shares the euro and undergoes political union. The outer ring avoids both these things and has a looser, trading membership grounded in national parliamentary sovereignty. You could say that this split already exists, in fact if not in theory, but the difference

A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when Andrew Neil pointed out that Labour was — contrary to Balls’s earlier denials — running a structural deficit in 2007, Balls got into a long-winded attempt to justify both that and his denial of this point last year.

To the gardens alongside Parliament, where MPs and their mutts lined up this morning in a bid to win the coveted title of Westminster Dog of the Year. Miniature Dachshunds appear to be the dog du jour among Tory MPs, with three of them competing to be crowned top dog. However, their short legs put them at a disadvantage in the Doggy Dash, while the rain left them shivering miserably in the corner. At times Essex bitch Joni (the only dog there to have marched at last weekend’s TUC rally, with owner Jon Cruddas) and Lindsay Hoyle’s Gordon looked as if they might be about to treat onlookers to a