Politics

The EU budget ‘victory’ cheers go on in the Commons, but the facts seem to have been lost in the Prime Minister’s ‘triumph’. What the cheering Tories can’t quite grasp is that all that came out of the European Council last week was an agreed position to make cuts in the EU’s long term budget. That’s all, an ‘agreed position’. It was not a deal. Under the Lisbon Treaty, there is no deal until the European Parliament agrees to one: and the Parliament is in no mood to agree any cuts in EU spending. And if the Council and the Parliament cannot reach an agreement? The Parliament would be delighted.

Does the Royal Charter, published by the Conservative party this afternoon, take politicians any further away from meddling with press regulation? The charter is the Tory answer to the statutory underpinning recommended by Lord Leveson, and the party is keen to stress that it ‘does not require statute and enables the principles of Leveson to be fulfilled without legislation’. But is this plan any better? Well, the charter, which you can read here, can only be unpicked or changed if the leaders of all three parties confirm they agree with this and if the change gets the support of at least two thirds of MPs. It also needs the support

David Cameron could barely contain himself when he addressed MPs on his victory in last week’s EU budget talks. ‘I didn’t quite get a thank you!’ he jeered at Ed Miliband once the Labour leader had finished his response. ‘But I will give him a thank you for the non-thank you.’ He also mocked Ed Balls for saying ‘hear, hear’ when the PM mentioned the need for spending constraint in the EU as so many of its member states struggled with austerity measures. Obligingly, Balls then cheered ‘hear, hear’ as often as he could, and continued to do so when his own leader started talking. For Ed Miliband, this was

It took a while for Nick Clegg to confirm that he would stay with his party to 2015, but today his colleague Ed Davey did him a favour (or perhaps not) and confirmed on his behalf that Clegg would stay not just through the next election, but would lead his party into the 2020 election. He told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics: ‘I’m really very supportive of what Nick has been doing, I think he’s the best leader we’ve ever had and I think he’s going to lead the party not just into the next election but into the one after that.’ Ed Davey is obviously trying to fend

When Jeremy Hunt became Health Secretary last September, the Google Alert I set up against his name would spew forth a regular stream of contemptuous comment on the new appointment. Invariably accompanied by an unflattering photo – quite often that one (above) where Hunt arrives in Downing Street looking less ready for a Cabinet meeting than as the stand-in children’s entertainer – the pieces conformed to an ordained boiler-plate. They would focus either on his Murdoch-stained record in office, or on the certainty that he was about to privatise the NHS out of existence or, failing that, on the general observation that here was another public school twit, capable of

In his victory address after the successful EU Budget deal this afternoon, David Cameron sought to paint himself once again as a Galileo-style EU heretic who spoke truth to power. This was all about what Cameron himself had achieved: his press conference statement was full of first person references to what he had ‘slashed’ and ‘achieved’. At one point he even said ‘at last someone has come along’ to sort the EU’s ‘credit card’, again clearly referring to himself. This echoes the Prime Minister’s Europe speech last month where he talked about Europe’s ‘experience of heretics who turned out to have a point’. Today he was Camileo, the heretic who