Politics

One of the vulnerabilities of the Coalition is that when Labour moves position one of its flanks can be exposed. When the Coalition agreement was drawn up, it seemed sufficient that the Lib Dems would maintain the right to carry on opposing tuition fees as both Labour and the Conservatives were in a favour of them. The Lib Dems would still be able to tell students, a key constituency for them, that they were the only party committed to abolishing fees. But as soon as the Labour leadership contenders started moving rapidly towards a graduate tax, the Lib Dems had a problem. The Tory leadership rapidly accepted the need to

There’s a story in the Mail on Sunday today about MPs who have been either warned about their conduct towards House of Commons expenses staff, or issued with “yellow cards” which they do not know about. Among the MPs, er, named and shamed, are Theresa May, Bob Ainsworth and Denis MacShane. A lot of the problems have come about as a consequence of the new computerised system which almost nobody can understand. But it seems to me that most of it is a consequence of the civil service staff being sanctimonious, unhelpful and whining. None of the stuff reported in the paper strikes me as being bad behaviour, per se;

David Cameron’s neatly-constructed article in the Sunday Times (£) perfectly typifies the balancing act he is performing ahead of this autumn’s Spending Review. The Prime Minister has to sound tough on the deficit because, thanks to the fiscal brinksmanship of one G. Brown, that’s the job he has been appointed to do. But he doesn’t want to come across as sadistic or gloomy, lest it alienate voters and coalition partners alike. The edges of the cuts need to be rounded off, made more presentable. To that end, Cameron suggests first that the cuts aren’t ideological. There are, he says, items of spending that he’d like to keep – but wider

For the foreseeable, Vince Cable is going to be a political barometer figure: journalists and other innocent bystanders will sift through everything he says to check the temperature of the LibCon coalition. In which case, they’ll find little to excite or worry them in his cool interview with the Newcastle Journal today. The Business Secretary says all the right things about staying his role for the full five years (“that’s my intention, yes”) and about the internal dealings of the coalition (“it works in a very business like way”), even if he does quash the idea of a full merger between the two parties. It’s all unsurprising, uncontroversial stuff. Indeed,

MPs have never really got along with the new expenses body, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. But now their mood towards it seems to have become even frostier. I imagine that IPSA’s three-month anniversary, and the rather complacent-sounding celebrations that accompanied it, are something to do with that. Tom Harris’s wonderfully acerbic Birthday message, from a couple of days ago, captures how many MPs feel about the whole affair. In letters to the Telegraph today, Michael Fabricant and Denis MacShane ratchet up the attacks on IPSA. And while many will not see them as the ideal poster boys for a rebellion against an expenses watchdog, it’s worth remembering that they

I daresay you’ve seen the ranking for British Prime Ministers since the second world war which, rightly, shows our Clem at the top and that jackanapes Eden at the bottom. Although I suppose if Eden had won in Suez then we might have been spared the misery of the first and second Gulf War, and Eden’s reputation unblemished if still unremarkable. However, more to the point, who have been the most serious bloody irritating politicians since the second world war? I will ask for your nominations and then we’ll have a vote on it. Try, if you can, to extend your memory back beyond the trauma of New Labour. Here