Politics

Nick Clegg’s spring conference speech seems to have been written entirely with Nigel Farage in mind. The Lib Dem leader has decided to go after the Ukip chief, and today’s address was the latest example of the old party of protest directly engaging with the new one. Where Farage had a slogan about loving Britain and voting Ukip (which would have been better if it hadn’t been borrowed from the BNP), Clegg had a whole Love Actually-esque speech about it, ranging from affectionate asides about cups of tea and queues to this country’s love of freedom and its generosity. It was pretty difficult to disagree with anything that the Deputy

Since I became the Deputy Prime Minister I have had the privilege of spending a bit of time representing Britain’s interests in other parts of the world. I have visited Latin America and Asia to boost exports. I have been to Africa, where we are building better education systems as well as helping fight corruption, poverty and disease. I have travelled to different parts of Europe and the United States to promote British trade. And while each trip varies from the last, there is a thread which runs through them all: you get to see Britain through other people’s eyes. Everywhere I have been – every nation around the planet

The Tory leadership is not best pleased with James Brokenshire, the Immigration Minister whose ill-judged speech turned a media spotlight onto the Cameron’s nanny. There are mutterings in Downing Street about the speech having being submitted for clearance very late. But Number 10 can’t escape its share of the blame for this fiasco. First, the speech should never have been cleared. The problems it would cause were obvious, which is why one Lib Dem tells me ‘we all fell out about laughing when we read it.’ Second, Brokenshire should never have been appointed to this job. When Mark Harper resigned as immigration minister because his clearner was working in the

As Patrick McLoughlin makes clear in his interview with The Spectator, Sir Howard Davies’s report on where in the south east new runways should be built will be published soon after the next election. The plan is that the new runways will then be approved and construction under way by 2020; meaning that there’ll be no chance for people to vote against them at a general election. Strikingly, the Heathrow Hub option — which would extend the northern runway and then turn it into two runways — is rapidly gaining support in Westminster. Part of its attraction of is that the scheme would also enable you to extend the southern

Haters of HS2 rejoice: the project has an even better chance of failing now. Following James’ revelation that the Transport Secretary doesn’t believe the Hybrid Bill will pass through Parliament before the next election, there are several scenarios on how the parties may change their stance on the project. If a cross-party consensus falls apart, HS2 will run into severe difficulties. Nearly all of the possibilities pose a threat to the line actually being built: 1. David Cameron remains Prime Minister James played out this scenario in his blog yesterday, explaining why it matters that HS2 will be a big issue at the next general election. HS2 has always been a difficult sell to Tory

Lib Dems are excitedly travelling to their Spring conference in York, which kicks off this evening with the traditional rally (hopefully a stand-up free one, though). Vince Cable and Tim Farron will be cheering the troops at tonight’s event, with Nick Clegg offering a Q&A tomorrow and his main speech on Sunday afternoon. Party figures expect the conference to be reasonably serene: there are no party rows this year, and the only real bickering is manufactured Coalition stuff, rather than a genuine crisis. As I explain in my Telegraph column today, one of the things the Lib Dems are increasingly keen to do is to argue that key policies and