Politics

It is a good thing that government ministers come to Scotland sometimes. It is a bad thing that they insist on opening their mouths when they do. Earlier this year we endured the spectacle of Philip Hammond making an arse of himself; today it has been Theresa May’s turn to make one wish cabinet ministers would, just occasionally, contemplate the virtue of silence. The Home Secretary was in Edinburgh to warn that an independent Scotland would be a dangerous place. It would, in fact, be left out in the cold. It would not, you see, be part of the English-speaking-world’s Five Eyes intelligence-poolling network. The UK, United States, Canada, Australia

The government’s approach to the HS2 debate has changed. Up until recently, government sources would wave away the suggestion that Labour might withdraw its support for the project. They’d point to Andrew Adonis and his influence on Ed Miliband to explain why Ed Balls’s doubts about it didn’t matter that much. But this has now changed. They’ve now decided, in the words of one Number 10 figure, that they need to ‘smoke Labour out on the issue’. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see the Tories trying to put more and more pressure on Labour to say whether or not they’ll back it. Number 10 is acutely aware that, at

The good news for the Cameroons on energy is that it looks like they’ll get an agreement by the Autumn Statement to take at least some of the green levies off energy bill. The bad news is that this means that the debate sparked by Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices for 20 months if elected is going to continue until, at least, December 4th. An agreement between Cameron and Clegg on energy bills does now appear to be close. The Lib Dem anger at Cameron using PMQs to try and bounce them into a set of concessions has been replaced by a fast-moving negotiation. As one senior Number

It is a shame that we will be losing Jack Straw at the next election. He has just announced his attention to stand down from a seat he has occupied for more than 30 years. I always rather liked him. He seemed – you know – sort of human, and his instincts were usually right, certainly over Iraq, even if he did cave in. So, we might add, did the majority of the country cave, at the time, under that welter of disinformation. He was misled as everybody was. He once came into the Today prog when I was still editor and, in the Green Room, I mentioned to him

In the days before Ed Miliband went all Marxist/brave on energy (delete as tribally appropriate), the debate around energy was more about fracking than it was about freezes. Shale gas has taken a back seat while ministers wonder what on earth they can do about bills to take the wind out of the Labour leader’s sails. But the political problems haven’t gone away. The debate is still about whether the incentives on offer are enough for local communities to accept fracking pads in their area. MPs whose constituencies sit atop the Bowland Shale don’t think the government is offering enough, and have continued to tell the Prime Minister that. He