Politics Archives

Sunday

18 Nov 2012

David Cameron under attack from voters, Ed Miliband, David Davis and Angela Merkel on Europe

The Sunday Papers and the broadcast shows are packed with accounts of Britain’s fractious relationship with the European Union, and what that means for David Cameron. The Observer gives space to a poll, the headline of which says that 56 per cent of Britons would ‘probably or definitely’ vote to leave the EU against 30 per cent who would probably or definitely vote to remain in the union. The Independent on Sunday carries a ComRes poll on the more immediate question of next week’s EU budget discussions. The findings will give Mr Cameron a headache: 66 per cent of voters want the budget ‘cut rather than frozen’. The voters will

Sebastian Payne

David Cameron brings in the Wizard of Oz

After months of will he/won’t he, Lynton Crosby has decided to join the Cameron clan. The Sunday Telegraph reports that the Australian strategist behind Boris’ two victories has signed up as a consultant to run David Cameron’s re-election campaign. The efforts to secure his return were described in the political column in this week’s Spectator: ‘Later this month, George Osborne and two of the Prime Minister’s most senior political aides — Stephen Gilbert and Andrew Cooper — will sit down with Lynton Crosby to see if a command structure for the election campaign can be worked out. Conservative high command is keen to bring Crosby, the man who oversaw Boris Johnson’s elections as

Saturday

17 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Imposing a minimum price for alcohol will leave Cameron with a political hangover

On Monday, the government is set to announce its alcohol strategy. It is expected that this will call for a minimum unit price of 40p. As Graham Wilson reports in The Sun, this idea is a personal favourite of the Prime Minister but opposed by several influential members of the Cabinet. These ministers worry that it’ll be seen as the rich man taking away the poor man’s pleasure. Given the media reaction to the pasty tax and the caravan tax, this is a legitimate concern. They also fear that a successful legal challenge to it, which is a distinct possibility, would do further damage to the government’s reputation for competence.

Charlotte Henry

The crime of the Justice and Security Bill

The Coalition Agreement states: ‘We will be strong in defence of freedom. The Government believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties.’ The Justice and Security Bill, which returns to the Lords on Monday, contains measures that contradict the noble objectives laid out above. This should shame the coalition and the Liberal Democrats in particular, for whom civil liberties are a defining issue. The government has made a last minute amendment (£) to the bill in order to scale back some of the ‘order-making’ powers of the Secretary of State, which

Sebastian Payne

Can the Wizard of Oz solve the Tories’ 2015 problem?

How is David Cameron planning to get re-elected? If he couldn’t win a majority against Gordon Brown in 2010 then why should he do so much better after five years of flat growth and shrinking living standards? The Police Commissioner elections have been another reminder that, for all their other merits, the Cameroons are not very good at fighting elections. So what to do? James Forsyth reveals their strategy in his political column this week: the 40+40 strategy. It involves love-bombing 20 LibDems out of their seats. But how to make this strategy work? At present, Lynton Crosby is the obvious solution to avoid history repeating itself. He’s the Australian mastermind behind Boris Johnson’s two

Friday

16 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Reasons for all three parties to worry

Of the three main parties, Labour will be happiest with today’s results. They’ve won Corby, the contest that was always going to get the most media attention. But, I think, there are things to worry all three parties in the results. Last week, Labour sources were talking about how the big two tests for them of the night were Corby and the Bristol mayoralty. In Bristol, they’ve been beaten by an independent candidate. Ben Bradshaw is already complaining on Twitter that this defeat can be put down, in part, to the party’s resource allocations for these elections; the fact that Corby was prioritised above everywhere else. The Police and Crime

James Forsyth

Comings and goings at Number 11 Downing Street

Few politicians have put as much thought in to the team around them as George Osborne. He is a collector of talented people. Unlike most Tories, he has gone outside of CCHQ and parliament for nearly every senior appointment he’s made. But I understand that after Christmas he’ll be losing one of the most important members of his operation, Poppy Mitchell-Rose. Mitchell-Rose has acted as Osborne’s fixer and gatekeeper since he first became shadow Chancellor. On the long—and sometimes bumpy—road from opposition to government, she has been a calm sherpa who has dealt with a host of problems before they have even arisen. But she is now moving to Washington,

James Forsyth

Labour’s Andy Sawford wins Corby from Conservatives in by-election

Labour have won Corby from the Conservatives, and with a larger swing than most pundits were predicting. Its majority of more than 7,000 means that Labour now holds the seat with a larger majority than it did after the 2001 election. The Tories are already pointing to several factors to explain the scale of their defeat. It’s mid-term and the fact that Louise Mensch had quit the seat having won it last time to move to New York definitely hurt them. But it is still a poor, if not spectacularly so, result for them. I suspect it will lead to increased jitters on the Tory benches as MPs work out

Alex Massie

Rand Paul: Leader of the US Senate’s Tiny Awkward Squad – Spectator Blogs

Speaking of politicians worthy of your support, here’s Senator Rand Paul doing his thing: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is holding up a vote on the Defense Authorization Act until he gets a vote on his amendment affirming the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution and the indefinite detention of Americans. […] Paul’s amendment would give American citizens being held by the military rights to a fair trial with a jury of peers and the right to confront the witnesses against him or her. “A citizen of the United States who is captured or arrested in the United States and detained by the Armed Forces of the United States pursuant to the

David Blackburn

John Prescott battling, and the Tories get thrashed in northern cities

John Prescott’s trials continue. There will be a run-off between Prescott and the Tory challenger, Matthew Grove. This has been quite a turn around, with Grove staging a late charge in the race for first preference votes when the rural East Riding area was called in his favour. He displaced the independent candidate, retired copper Paul Davison, who finished third by a mere 300 votes. The race has been very close so far; now it comes down to second preferences. Sky News’s Jon Craig reports that the Tories are confident of an upset. There have already been a couple of shocks in the PCC results. In North Wales, Labour’s Tal Michael

Alex Massie

Michael Gove: an adult in a parliament of toddlers – Spectator Blogs

Michael Gove, the most important and successful Aberdonian politician since, well, since I don’t know actually, is also that rarest of things: a grown-up cabinet minister. He knows the importance of praise. Consider this passage – highlighted by John Rentoul – from a speech he gave on Child Protection this morning: Just as the Labour Government early in its life felt that teachers needed to be told how to operate – down to the tiniest detail of what should happen in every literacy or numeracy hour – so the Labour Government towards the end of its life felt it had to produce thousands of pages of central Government prescription on

Fraser Nelson

Will Osborne have the luck of the Irish with his 4G auction?

Could George Osborne be in line for a genuine windfall? The Chancellor is getting quite good at conjuring fake ones (Post Office pensions, raiding £35 billion from the Bank of England) but he has yet to sell the 4G licenses. This could be more significant than next month’s mini-Budget. The stunning success of Ireland’s 4G auction (here) suggests that the UK auction may yield a lot more than is currently expected. A decade ago, governments world over pocketed massive windfalls auctioning the 3G licenses to mobile operators. This time Ofcom has put a reserve of £1.3 billion. But the Irish government expected to get just €170 million from its licenses.

David Blackburn

Too many elections and not enough votes?

More people are interested in low turnout than turned out to vote at yesterday’s PCC elections; that is the story of the day so far. The figures quoted are baleful, ranging between 12 and 24 per cent (Harry Phibbs has a good guide). This makes elections to the European Parliament look popular. Indeed, one polling station in Newport took no votes whatsoever, which tells its own story. In terms of the politics of this, low turnout is thought to suit the Tories rather than Labour because more of their voters make it to the stations in elections like these. Indeed, there are fears for Big Bad John’s effort in Humberside because Tory areas might

David Blackburn

Lord Ashdown: Get out of Afghanistan quickly

The headline on Lord Ashdown’s piece on Afghanistan in today’s Times (£) will please Lib Dem strategists. ‘This awful mistake mustn’t claim more lives.’ It allows the Lib Dems to play the anti-war card: we are the party that will bring Our Boys (and Girls) home. The strategists could take plenty of other lines from Ashdown’s quotable article. ‘All that we can achieve has been achieved. All that we might have achieved if we had done things differently, has been lost… Our failure in Afghanistan has not been military. It has been political.’ Ashdown’s analysis echoes that of prestigious think tanks such as the Centre to Strategic and International Studies

James Forsyth

Labour hold in two by-elections but turnout low

So far, the election results are as expected. Labour has comfortably held Manchester Central and Cardiff South and the Tory candidate has been elected as the Police and Crime Commissioner for Wiltshire. But turnout has not been good. In Manchester Central it was under 20 percent, the lowest by-election turnout since the war according to the BBC. While in Wiltshire, only 16 percent of people bothered to vote in the Commissioner contest. so far, it looks like yesterday was not Super Thursday but Stay-at-Home Thursday.

Thursday

15 Nov 2012

James Forsyth

Election night: It’s all over bar the counting

Tonight is election night but there’s not much counting going on. The Corby by-election count doesn’t start until tomorrow morning and Wiltshire is the only place where the Police and Crime Commissioner votes are being tallied up over night. But we should get results in the next few hours in Manchester Central and Cardiff South, two safe Labour seats where the MP is standing down to run as a Police and Crime Commissioner. Most of the media attention will focus on Corby. It is, indeed, a bellwether seat. But it is worth remembering that this is mid-term and a Tory defeat here would not tell us that much, especially given

James Forsyth

Another sign that CCHQ is moving on to an election footing

Today brings yet another sign that CCHQ is gearing up for the long election campaign. After yesterday’s news that the party has chosen the forty seats it intends to target at the next election, I now hear that talent is being moved out of Whitehall and back to Millbank to beef up the team there. Giles Kenningham, one of the most effective Tory spin doctors, is taking leave from the Department of Communities and Local Government, to head up CCHQ’s media operation following Susie Squire’s secondment to Downing Street. Kenningham joined the Tories from ITV in 2007. In the 2010 election, he was one of the two Tories who took

Alex Massie

Will supporting gay marriage help the Tories? It’s all a matter of location, location, location. – Spectator Blogs

Do pollsters and pundits actually understand how British elections work? I sometimes wonder. Take, for instance, the debate concerning whether or not supporting gay marriage might win the Conservative party more votes than it loses. The Prime Minister says there are polls that suggest it would. Not so fast, retorts ComRes’s Andrew Hawkins. He argues: Your letter of 19 October 2012 to The Rt Hon Cheryl Gillan MP states that “a recent poll by ComRes found that 10 percent of current Conservative voters say that the policy [to legalise same-sex marriage] would make them ‘less likely to vote Conservative’ compared with 7 percent saying it would make them ‘more likely

Rod Liddle

Margaret Moran: an MP too depressed for prison

Are you happy that the former Labour MP Margaret Moran, who swindled more than £50,000 from the taxpayer in rogue expenses, will escape a custodial sentence because she is ‘depressed’? It is a sort of reverse catch-22 for miscreants who have held some sort of high public office (which an MP still is, I suppose). Their fall from grace and humiliation can be assessed to have had such a startling impact upon their mental state that they are considered ‘too ill’ to be banged up. Imagine that you are a skagheaded member of the untermensch up before the courts on a charge of aggravated burglary amounting to, let’s say, £50. Do you

David Blackburn

Lord McAlpine speaks out

Lord McAlpine has just given an incredibly moving interview to BBC Radio 4’s World at One. He talks about how the false accusations affected him. He said, ‘It gets into your bones, it gets into your soul. There’s nothing bad as this you can do to people.’ The damage, he said, could not be repaired because of the British proverb ‘that there is no smoke without fire’. As Andrew Neil tweeted moments ago, ‘Many should be hanging their heads in shame – and not just at BBC!!’ You can listen to the whole interview here: listen to ‘Exclusive interview with Lord McAlpine – The World at One’ on Audioboo