Politics Archives

Tuesday

18 Mar 2014

Number 10 plays down Warsi Eton Mess stunt

Downing Street is trying to play down Sayeeda Warsi’s Eton Mess stunt on The Agenda last night. Asked what his response to her decision to hold up a front page saying ‘Number 10 takes Eton Mess off the menu’, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: ‘Look, I think that was in the light-hearted section of the programme. I’m not sure whether he actually caught the programme, as it happens.’ He then added that the Prime Minister had ‘spoken about the importance’ of greater social mobility, and that the Chancellor had made similar comments to that effect yesterday. Both Warsi and Michael Gove were at Cabinet today, but the spokesman said there

Sebastian Payne

How much do voters care about Old Etonians and the political class?

Are voters really concerned about how many Old Etonians David Cameron surrounds himself with? Judging by the cutting remarks from Michael Gove and Sayeeda Warsi it matters a lot, but opinion polling tells a slightly different, more troubling tale about how people feel about the ‘political class’. On the Eton question, YouGov recently carried out a poll asking which characteristics they found most unsuitable for a ‘leading politician’. When asked to choose three or four negative qualities, 38 per cent stated that an MP who went to Eton and doesn’t ‘understand how normal people live’ is unsuitable: According to the polling, having been schooled at Eton is judged as a

Steerpike

Eddie Izzard’s kiss of death to Scotland

Game over: Eddie Izzard has cursed the union. The comedian who once championed equal clothing rights has waded into the debate over Scottish independence, to the horror of supporters of the union. You might imagine that we unionists would welcome a celebrity endorsement – even from a c-lister like Izzard. But he has a dreadful track record when it comes to these things. He was a devout Europhile who campaigned for us to join the single currency. He supported Gordon Brown and Labour at the last election. He backed Ken Livingstone last time round in London. And who can forget Izzard’s deathless contribution to the Yes2AV campaign? A source at the

Fraser Nelson

The anatomy of a political lie: ‘tax-free childcare’

Today’s announcement of childcare subsidy, up to the value of £2,000 per kid under the age of 12, is welcome news. As The Spectator argued last week, this is perhaps the smartest single move the Chancellor can make – too many highly-skilled women want to work, but cant afford to as they’d face Europe’s highest childcare fees. And then the Treasury has to spoil it all by lying about the policy. The government website has this to say: The first thing parents need to know is that the scheme is not ‘tax-free childcare’ at all. So how on earth does the Treasury justify claiming otherwise? Its explanation is below:- ‘For every

Ed West

What I want from the Budget: some conservatism

Budget day tomorrow, and I’m sure many of you will relish the reminder that you are, in George Osborne’s reported view, ‘successful’ because you pay 40p tax band. It’s better than that, in fact. I know of men who ask their partners to make obscene references about their tax contribution during intimate moments, about how they are part of the 15 per cent of taxpayers who are reducing the deficit and making Britain the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Stranger still, Osborne is reported to have said, although he denies everything, that the 40p tax made people more likely to vote Conservative. This is the polar opposite of the truth;

Isabel Hardman

Tory leadership rivals may be jumping too early

The Coalition is trying to make today about childcare after announcing plenty of housing initiatives over the weekend. Announcing different policies in a drip-drip in the run-up to the Budget means they get their own limelight – and that’s fine if you’ve got enough left in the larder once the statement itself arrives. George Osborne has learned from the 2012 Budget the art of spinning things out while leaving enough to hand out on the day – particularly giveaways that Sun readers like. But today is also about the frankly weird shenanigans at the top of the Conservative party which continued this morning with Boris Johnson’s father pressing his case

Steerpike

Hold the front page: Anne McIntosh is holding a constituency surgery!

Mr S takes embargos very seriously. He respects the convention. An embargo is sacred. Yet the news that Anne McIntosh MP is holding a constituency surgery is so momentous that it took every ounce of my integrity not to share it with you before the appointed time this morning. Most ordinary MPs don’t embargo news of their surgeries. These events happen every week, more or less; they ought not to be newsworthy. But McIntosh is extraordinary. Readers may recall that McIntosh, the Tory MP for Thirsk and Malton, has not been re-selected by her association. The Spectator’s Martin Vander Weyer, a member of the association, wrote an account of the row.

Monday

17 Mar 2014

Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: PM vents fury at Gove for interview on Etonians

Unsurprisingly, Michael Gove’s FT interview in which he attacked the ‘preposterous’ number of Old Etonians around David Cameron – widely interpreted as a sally on behalf of George Osborne – has gone down like a lead balloon with the Prime Minister. I understand that Cameron had a stern word with the Education Secretary over the weekend, with one source telling me that ‘he was torn a new one and given a right royal bollocking’. Cameron has made it very clear to Gove that his words were ‘bang out of order’ and that his aim is to focus on the Cabinet job in hand, not go on freelance missions. Meanwhile, those

Isabel Hardman

How tax transparency can help the Tories

George Osborne is as adept as any gamekeeper at setting little traps in every Budget and Autumn Statement for Labour to fall down. He hinted at a few in his Marr interview yesterday and they were largely the sort we’ve come to expect from the Chancellor on welfare and deficit reduction, but there’s also speculation that he could set another trap on tax. Ben Gummer’s 10-minute rule bill calling for National Insurance to be renamed the ‘Earnings Tax’ received a disproportionate amount of attention for what is normally simply a parliamentary device by which a backbencher can garner a little bit of attention for their hobby horse. But the reason

James Forsyth

Time to switch energy companies say ministers

Both coalition parties remain scarred by the political potency of Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices. They are determined to do what they can to stop this issue gaining salience again. So, it is telling that Ed Davey and Michael Fallon have both personally signed up to The Big Deal, a new initiative designed to gets consumers cheaper energy bills through bulk buying. Their decision to sign up shows how it is politically imperative to be seen as on the side of the customer rather than the producer when it comes to energy. (It is also testament to how well connected the campaign is in Westminster.) No politician wants

Isabel Hardman

Why no Tory can lecture another on leadership challenges

The continued speculation about who in the Conservative party is putting the most effort into preparing their leadership hat to throw into the currently non-existent ring is quite amusing. But it also means that those involved will struggle to have such a moral high ground when they need to lecture backbench colleagues for getting overexcited about potty-sounding leadership challenges after the European elections. Boris and George Osborne may be engaged in a strange fight about who is gaining the most currency with backbenchers so that they’re in the best possible position post-Cameron, while backbench unrest will be focused on Cameron’s own position. But the problem with this hysteria, where the

Alex Massie

Ruth Davidson gives the Scottish Tories grounds for hope. At last.

Because I spent the weekend moving house and being depressed by events in Cardiff I did not attend the Scottish Conservative’s spring conference in Edinburgh. A dereliction of journalistic duty, perhaps, but also, well, life takes over sometimes. In truth, I didn’t worry about missing the conference. Attending these things can be dangerous. Like journalism, politics attracts a grim number of copper-bottomed, ocean-going shits but also, like journalism again, a greater number of decent, public-spirited, optimistic folk than you might imagine. Most politicians, most of the time, are in the game for most of the right reasons. Speaking to these people has its uses but, also, its dangers. Before you

Steerpike

Owen Jones: ‘the BBC is stacked full of right wingers’

Owen Jones has denied that Newsnight’s appointment of former Labour adviser and TUC official Duncan Weldon as economics correspondent is more evidence of ‘left wing bias’ at the BBC. On the contrary, Jones says that complaints about Weldon arise from ‘myths and deception’ and that the ‘BBC is stacked full of right wingers’. Now, now, no laughing at the back please – we ought to take the Guardian’s star columnist seriously. Jones names 10 people who are connected to the right (some of them very tenuously so): Chris Patten, Nick Robinson, Robbie Gibb, Thea Rogers, Guto Harri, Will Walden, Andrew Neil, Kamal Ahmed, John Humphrys and Craig Oliver. He neglects

Alex Massie

Yes, of course the BBC is biased against you

And it doesn’t matter who you are. Conservative, Labour, Liberal, Nationalist, Green or UKIP it’s all the same. The BBC is hopelessly prejudiced against you. As it should be. Why only this morning we see Owen Jones complaining that, contrary to what the Daily Mail would have you believe, the BBC is instinctively biased against the left and Lesley Riddoch suggesting the corporation is reflexively biased against the very idea, let alone the prospect, of Scottish independence. Well, up to a point. But asking whether the BBC is inclined to the left or right is the wrong question. It is a kind of category error. Adding up the number of

Melanie McDonagh

David Davis should be in Cabinet – or at least in government

Class never quite goes away as an issue for the Tories, for the simple and sufficient reason that it matters. Lately it was Michael Gove stating the obvious, that the Prime Minister mixes mostly with people with backgrounds like his own…a perfectly human impulse, but not a good look, the Old Etonian coterie. Now David Davis has observed (on the radio) over the weekend, as John Major did last year, that it’s much harder than it was when he was growing up for a working class boy to get ahead in the world. Mr Davis is a product of a Tooting grammar school, a route that’s now closed, but it wasn’t just

Rod Liddle

Do you believe what the Malaysian government is saying about flight MH370?

Is the world now being fed a bit of disinformation from the Malaysians over the fate of that missing jet, flight MH370? We are now told that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a ‘fanatical’ dissident, a supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has once again been jailed under Malaysia’s homophobic laws for allegedly having sex with a man. This makes Shah a democrat and a moderate, in my book – and I would have thought most people’s books. There is no suggestion that Shah had sympathies with PAS, Malaysia’s somewhat fundamentalist, although lately moderating, Islamist party (and which for reasons of political expediency has in the past

Sunday

16 Mar 2014

Sebastian Payne

Nigel Farage and ‘new Ukip’ are running away from disaffected Tories. Why?

Who votes Ukip? It’s a question psephologists have been trying to answer for years but Nigel Farage had a clear response on the Sunday Politics today: not just disaffected Conservatives. Based on research by Lord Ashcroft, Farage boasted that ’new Ukip’ — a party which is ‘a lot of more professional, a lot more smiley, a lot less angry’ — now has such a great influence on the Labour party, they will be forced into changing their stance on an EU referendum following May’s Euro elections: ‘There’s a long way to go between now and the next election. As we’ve seen with Conservative policy, it chops and changes…I think what

James Forsyth

George Osborne readies his tax dividing line

George Osborne was on Andrew Marr this morning announcing support for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent and the extension of Help to Buy on new build homes until 2020. The Tories hope that these policies will show both that they are planning for the long term and that they are supporting aspiration. But what struck me as most significant was Osborne’s response when told by Marr that he was sounding more like a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. He instantly replied, ‘Conservatives believe in lower taxes, Liberal Democrats want to put taxes up.’ We already know that Osborne believes that the rest of the deficit can be

David Blackburn

George Osborne and Ed Balls play it like it’s 2010

George Osborne and Ed Balls have gone head-to-head in the media – the former in The Sun on Sunday and the latter in The Sunday Mirror. The two also appeared on the Andrew Marr Show. Neither man said anything new, at least not in terms of the grand narrative, which is scarcely surprising because the electoral cycle is at the stage where new ideas do not have time to gestate. This is especially true of the chancellor. Osborne has been under pressure to raise the threshold at which people pay the 40p rate. Osborne made it very clear to Andrew Marr that the government’s tax threshold reforms had benefited 25

Fraser Nelson

Would George Osborne really be brazen enough to expand ‘Help to Buy?’

Today’s Sunday Times has news which would be laughable, if it were not to plausible. That George Osborne intends to pour some more petrol on the property market fire next week by extending his discredited Help To Buy equity loan scheme – in effect, a flagrant example of politicians using taxpayers’ money in an attempt to buy votes. It’s a sign that Osborne intends to use help-to-buy as an election weapon, and as loaned money doesn’t show up on the deficit figures he’s quite relaxed. Here’s the start of the Sunday Times story:- The Help to Buy scheme, designed to help people get on to the housing ladder, is likely