Politics

Tristram Hunt is on a crusade — to find Labour an education strategy. In today’s Daily Mirror, the new shadow education secretary takes a punt by offering up some fresh ideas, including a pledge to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16 to 19 year olds in further education. When it was canned in 2011, the EMA scheme had an annual budget of £560 million so how would Labour fund its return? By cutting back winter fuel allowance from rich pensioners: ‘Mr Hunt also wants to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance to help teenagers from the poorest backgrounds stay in education. This could be paid for by stripping

The Tories promised they would fix the roof while the sun was shining. It seems they are keeping their word for once. Although this crane, which came crashing down into the roof of the Cabinet Office in last night’s megastorm, means poor Nick Clegg can’t hold his much-anticipated monthly press conference. The press lobby are all bereft: what will they find to fill the downpage ‘meanwhile, Nick Clegg’ slot?

As Britain’s train lines suffer in the wake of St Jude, the political storm over high speed rail continues to rage. The government and Labour are playing footsie with each other. Labour’s somewhat left-field idea to re-open the Grand Central Railway — at an estimated cost of £6 billion, compared to £43 billion for HS2 — has been matched by a fear-mongering government statements about the implications of not building a high speed rail line. The coalition’s ‘updated business case’ claims that, if Britain did not pursue the high-speed solution, a ‘patch-and-mend job’ would be necessary, which would be almost as expensive and mean 14 years of weekend closures. It

David Cameron took a pasting at PMQs today. Ed Miliband, armed with a whole slew of lines from John Major’s speech yesterday, deftly mocked the Prime Minister. Cameron, faced by a Labour wall of noise, struggled to make his replies heard. At one point, he rose to his feet thinking Miliband had finished, only for the Labour leader to contemptuously signal at him to sit down. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron v s Miliband on energy prices’ on Audioboo But Cameron did announce some policies today that might offer him a way out of the energy hole he’s currently in. First, he made clear that he wants to scale back the

Ed Davey is currently answering an urgent question in the Commons on the Grangemouth petrochemical plant. He urged Ineos and Unite to return to talks, describing the failure of the negotiations as ‘regrettable’. As the questions from backbenchers to Davey continue, it’s worth noting that there wasn’t a single mention of the plant at Prime Minister’s Questions, even though the closure of that plant will lead to around 800 people losing their jobs. Ineos estimates that around 10,000 jobs rely indirectly on the factory. The SNP have already picked up on this silence, and can quite easily argue that it shows that Westminster doesn’t care about jobs in Scotland. Even

That London Mayor has some cheek. In today’s Daily Mail, Boris suggests that our occasional diarist Pippa Middleton has wimped out of the ping-pong match she challenged him to in the Spectator earlier this year. ‘We have offered dates’, he says, ‘she has chickened.’ Au contraire, Boris. Here’s what really happened. The Spectator hounded Boris’s office to arrange the contest at our offices in 22 Old Queen Street, but Team Boris insisted that the match should be held at a venue of their choosing. Fine, said Pippa, who is a good a sport. Eventually a date was agreed — 12 September — but BJ pulled out. Fair enough, he’s a busy