Politics

The debate over the Beecroft report is now the politics of the viscera. For Tory MPs it has become symbolic of how the Liberal Democrats — and Vince Cable, in particular — are holding them back from doing what they need to get the country out of this economic emergency. On the Liberal Democrat side it has become emblematic of everything about Steve Hilton — ‘Thatcher in a t-shirt’ as they dubbed him — that annoyed them. Adrian Beecroft’s intervention today in the Telegraph and the Mail is bound to increase Tory tensions on the matter. He tells the Mail that Cameron and Osborne have ‘given up’ on unfair dismissal.

Hollande fever strikes again in Nick Clegg’s interview with the FT this morning. ‘I personally massively welcome the arrival of Hollande on to the scene,’ he says, but it goes deeper than that. You see, the Deputy Prime Minister also places an emphasis on ‘growth’, as opposed to ‘austerity’, suggesting that the government might do more to get infrastructure projects up and running. When asked why they didn’t do this before, Clegg responds, ‘It’s for the obvious reason — because the economy is flatter than we anticipated two years ago.’ In some respects, this is unsurprising. Not only did Clegg deploy similar language in an interview with Der Speigel the

It’s no surprise that the Lib Dems aren’t keen on Adrian Beecroft’s proposals for hiring and firing. This intra-coalition disagreement has been rumbling on for months now, after all. But when Vince Cable spoke out against them yesterday, it wasn’t entirely clear whether this was his party’s line or just Vince being Vince. Other Lib Dems might have taken a more conciliatory approach. Today, however, it’s clear that they’re not going to. Nick Clegg himself has charged in behind Cable, saying that ‘I don’t support [Beecroft’s plan for “no-fault dimissals”] and I never have, for the simple reason that I have not seen any evidence yet that creating industrial scale

Will Parliament soon decide to clamp down on payday loans? The controversial firms, offering ultra-high interest short-term loans, have proliferated on high streets and across the Web, utilising crafty advertising to make them appear far less dangerous than the 4,000 per cent APR would imply. Our Campaigner of the Year, Stella Creasy MP, has been fighting for legislation to regulate the firms, after witnessing the consequences of the 17 payday loan businesses in her consistency. Ahead of a crucial Commons vote on her proposals to regulate the firms, polling by ComRes has given her a boost, with strong support inside and out of Parliament for action on the matter. MPs and public are for once

The Eurozone is a kind of lunacy if you look at it as an economic project. But this isn’t about economics, or rationality — it’s about emotion, as the leader in today’s Telegraph says. The Brits and Americans often fail to understand this fully because we judge a currency union in terms of its economic merits. But many European nations see it as part of another, wider, agenda. For the Spanish and Portuguese it’s about not going back to dictatorship. For Greece it’s about being Western rather than Eastern (and not being run by the military). As John O’Sullivan wrote for The Spectator recently, Eastern European states still — even

I suspect that ‘Weekend secrets of the “chillaxing” Prime Minister’ (£) is one of the last headlines that Number 10 wanted to see this Saturday. It is acutely sensitive about the idea that Cameron doesn’t work hard enough, a charge that it thinks is as unfair as it is damaging. But perhaps more interesting than the details of the Prime Minister’s Sunday routine — a ‘crap film’ and a few glasses of wine at lunch — is what Francis Elliott and James Hanning reveal about the Cameron-Hilton relationship. As Cameron’s biographers, Elliott and Hanning know the Cameron circle extremely well and they provide an intriguing perspective on what has happened

There was a small but important piece in the Independent this week by my former boss John Kampfner. He’s not my boss any more, so I don’t have to be nice to him. But it really was rather good. John simply pointed out that political journalism goes in cycles of hype and condemnation. Thus, just after his election as Labour leader, Gordon Brown could do no wrong — until he failed to call a snap election, after which everything he did turned to dust. So where once sat Teflon-coated David Cameron, we now find a man presiding over an omnishambles, and it is very difficult to find anyone saying ‘I