Politics

It’s tempting to see Nick Clegg as a champion of lower taxes. He’s nudged the tax threshold up over this parliament and in a letter sent out to Liberal Democrat members  (while David Cameron is out of the country) he suggests the state should only start to confiscate earnings from people when they hit £10,500 a year, higher than his current target of £10,000, from April 2015. He has this to say: Think of it as a workers’ bonus. The British people have lived with austerity for three years. Your sacrifices are making it possible for us to fix the economy*. This is your recovery and you deserve to feel

Somehow I managed to miss Iain Martin’s praise for the manner in which David Cameron has “handled” the referendum on Scottish independence. Happily, John Rentoul has prompted me to take a keek at Iain’s article which, somewhat uncharacteristically, concludes that the Prime Minister has “played a blinder”. This, as Mr Rentoul cautions, is premature praise. We are asked to believe that Cameron has pursued a policy of masterly inactivity. It is also suggested that securing a single-question referendum was a masterstroke rather than, well, the obvious outcome of a negotiating process between Edinburgh and London that was much less dramatic, and much less important, than everyone agreed at the time to

John Bercow has done many good things as Speaker. But he’s in danger of being the second Speaker in a row to be turfed out. Why? Because he can’t let go of his dislike of the Tory hierarchy. The Speaker needs to be above the hurly burly of politics. But Bercow’s increasingly confrontational and personal chairing is threatening his position, as I say in this week’s magazine. As even one of his defenders concedes, ‘You can’t be so dismissive of so many people so much of the time.’ I hope that Bercow can rein himself in. In many respects, he’s been a good thing. That the House of Commons chamber

Remember Cameron’s hug a husky speech? Or his lecture on ‘the need recast politics for the digital age?’ Well, good job you do because the Tory party has been trying to purge their online history, according to Computer Weekly. As Mark Ballard explains, someone at CCHQ has used a robots.txt file to block Google (and other search engines) from indexing the files: ‘…the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010. ‘It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google,

The Sunday Sport, that esteemed paper of record, has replied to Ed Miliband in the matter of Ralph Miliband killing a kitten with a bicycle during WW2, which Miliband described while accepting one of our Parliamentarian of the Year awards last week. The paper says: ‘A WIDOW whose beloved pet kitten was KILLED by the Marxist Dad of Ed Miliband is demanding a face-to-face meeting with the Labour leader. Last month we revealed how the late academic Ralph Miliband ran over Eunice Clark’s  pet Winston while drunkenly riding his bicycle in 1944. Eunice, now 78, was only nine then – but time has failed to ease the upset of losing