Politics

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

There’s a spectre haunting the Conservative party, the spectre of a voteless recovery. Under the gothic arches of the House of Commons, small groups of Tory MPs stand around nervously debating whether ‘it’s John Major all over again’. Their fear is that a Conservative government will preside over an economic recovery but receive scant thanks for it from the voters. This concern has been sparked by a dire set of weekend newspaper headlines for the party. What worried MPs, and even some ministers, most was that these awful front pages followed a week in which the government actually had quite a lot of good news to talk about. Unemployment, crime

As you read this, the Conservatives seem to be edging towards some promise, to be contested at the next general election, of a referendum in the next parliament over Britain’s membership of the EU. You can see how far opinion has moved by the fact that government ministers — Michael Gove only last week — can now say that we should contemplate getting out of Europe without the heavens falling in on them. If Mrs Thatcher had said anything like Mr Gove did, she would have been ejected from office at once. Now of course we should welcome all genuine attempts to give our own citizens a fuller say in