Politics Archives

Monday

13 May 2013

Childish childcare bickering continues

Last winter, the surest way to get a Lib Dem to ring you back was to mention the words ‘boundary changes’. Better still to write a piece criticising the party’s decision to scupper the reforms as a revenge for the collapse of Lords reform, and no matter whether it was late at night or early on a Saturday morning when all normal people are still hiding under their duvets or sitting self-consciously in independent coffee shops, the Lib Dems would ring very quickly indeed. The same thing is happening now over the plan to relax childcare ratios. This morning I wrote as a throwaway comment that the party was blocking

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron needs to become a man with a plan

‘I’m a man with a plan,’ David Cameron told the Conservative party conference in 2008. Now the Prime Minister is struggling to give the impression he does have a plan for dealing with the Europe problem in his party: and he needs one, because things are going to get a lot stickier. The furore around tomorrow’s Queen’s Speech amendment is in many ways rather amusing because however backbenchers, PPSs and ministers vote, it doesn’t change a thing outside the Commons chamber. It simply says the Tory party wishes there had been an EU referendum bill in the Queen’s Speech. For all the criticisms that he’s running behind his party on

Sunday

12 May 2013

Isabel Hardman

Philip Hammond becomes 2nd Cabinet minister to say he would vote to leave EU today

If the Tory leadership had hoped that a few weeks of reconciliation between David Cameron and his backbenchers would lead to a new, serene phase in party management, they couldn’t be more wrong. Things seem to be getting worse on Europe: today two Cabinet ministers have felt emboldened by the Queen’s Speech vote this week to say that on the current terms of Britain’s membership of the EU, they would leave. James covered Michael Gove’s comments this morning, and this evening Defence Secretary Philip Hammond joined in, telling John Pienaar that Britain needed a better settlement in order to stay in the EU. This is a transcript of the exchange

Shiraz Maher

Why engaging with the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t quite as simple as it seems

Conventional wisdom has long suggested that we should engage pernicious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in order to defang them. Just talk to them, it is said, and you’ll discover they’re not as bad as they seem. Proponents of this view also believe that to engage reactionaries is to control them. Tell that to members of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who tried to engage the Muslim Brotherhood earlier this week. They invited its Secretary-General, Helmy el-Gazzar, to Washington D.C. where it was hoped he would engage in a discussion about the future of Egyptian politics. They organised his visa, booked him business class flights, and arranged for

James Forsyth

Gove: I’d vote to leave the EU if referendum held today

In a firecracker of an interview on the Andrew Marr Show, Michael Gove confirmed that if an EU referendum was held today he would vote out. But he followed this by saying to James Landale that he backed the Prime Minister’s plans to renegotiate and hoped that a satisfactory form of membership could be agreed. Significantly, Gove indicated that David Cameron would set out the Conservative ‘negotiating platform’ before the next election. This has been a key demand of Euro-sceptic Conservatives but one that Cameron has resisted. He is reluctant to provide anything akin to a renegotiation scorecard. Gove’s intervention changes the terms of debate. It means that every Conservative

Friday

10 May 2013

Fraser Nelson

How Cameron’s only black adviser was ‘frozen out,’ by his ‘friend’…

The Daily Telegraph has an interesting splash tomorrow. Its headline reads: ‘Shaun Bailey, the Prime Minister’s only black aide, was ‘frozen out by David Cameron’s clique’. It quotes a ‘friend of’ Mr Bailey, a Hammersmith candidate once given the prime warm-up slot to Cameron in the Tory conference. This friend says rather a lot, and below is a summary: ‘They just didn’t get what Shaun was saying. He kept challenging them saying, ‘Why are we not saying this?’ … He went into Downing Street and the first thing he said was, ‘The only political conversation you need to have publicly is about the cost of living’. He also gave plenty of

Steerpike

The Speccie at the heart of Ed Miliband’s operation

‘Red Ed’ invited the great and good of the media into his Westminster den for hummus and natter last night. No one knew what they were celebrating. Poor local election results? His rescue of a cyclist? Christmas? Who cares; no hack ever passed up a free drink. Ed glided through the room, flirting with friend and foe in an easy manner that does not translate to television. And, unlike Cameron and Clegg, Ed is not one for an early bed. He stayed right to the bitter end, even after the wine and beer had dried up, just as he did at last year’s Spectator summer bash. Incidentally, the Labour leader

Isabel Hardman

Please, stop trying to solve the Women’s Vote problem by banging on about childcare

Flicking through my diary this morning, I came across something I’d scrawled as ‘All the Tory ladies’ without further explanation. It turned out to be one of those drinks events for people in Parliament who happen to be women, presumably where we all stand around and talk about how great/terrible it is to be a woman, depending on the sort of day we’ve had. I was reminded of this again by James Kirkup’s excellent blog examining the great power of Mumsnet over the British political establishment. He also charts Number 10’s attempts to appeal to women, by inviting ‘women in the media’ for drinks, trying to get the PM into

Jonathan Jones

Is nice but dim such a bad thing for Labour?

Labour’s lead in the polls has been pretty steady at around 10 points for a little over a year now. So why does today’s Guardian carry an article with the headline ‘Outright election victory in 2015 looks a distant prospect, pollster tells Labour’? It’s based on two YouGov polls — commissioned by Progress and actually conducted two months ago, but released today. The first asked voters to put each of the parties into one of four categories: ‘nice and smart’, ‘nice but dim’, ‘mean but smart’ and ‘mean and dim’. Labour seems to come out best, in that it has the highest proportion choosing ‘nice and smart’ and the lowest

Isabel Hardman

Sarah Wollaston, the next ticking Tory timebomb

MPs are having a party next week to celebrate the return of Nadine Dorries to the Tory fold. But as they pop champagne corks for the Prodigal Daughter, they might be wondering whether a similar drama could unfold with another of their number. Dr Sarah Wollaston appears to be growing increasingly angry with her party’s leadership, and isn’t afraid to say it in the press. She may be a very different Conservative to Dorries, but there’s a risk that she moves into the same open stand-off territory that led to her colleague flying to the jungle. Many observers wrongly assume that the trouble began when Dorries told Giles Dilnot that

Thursday

9 May 2013

Peter Jones

Aristophanes’ advice for Nigel Farage

Ukip is on the march, and the F word on the lips of every ashen-faced MP in the House — or the NF word, to be exact. What should be NF’s next step? Let the Athenian comic poet Aristophanes insert a tiny thought under his seething trilby. Aristophanes’ Men of Acharnae (425 BC), reflecting the feelings among ordinary, farming people during Athens’ long war against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 BC), opens with the hero farmer Dikaiopolis waiting for the democratic Assembly (all citizen males over 18) to begin. The war has been going on for six years now, and like everyone else he is cooped up inside Athens’ impregnable

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 May 2013

On Tuesday night, at a Spectator readers’ evening, Andrew Neil interviewed me about my biography of Margaret Thatcher. He asked me if, after leaving office, Lady Thatcher had come to the view that Britain should leave the European Union. I said yes (I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992), although advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life. I had believed this was widely known, but according to Andrew, it is a story. My revelation, if such it was, came on the same day as Nigel Lawson’s piece

The Spectator

Lord Lawson’s exit

Lord Lawson’s announcement that he intends to vote for Britain to leave the European Union has been interpreted by some as reinforcing demands that David Cameron holds his referendum this year or next, rather than 2017. But it does no such thing. Follow Lawson’s arguments and the logical conclusion is that the best chance of securing a British exit from the EU is for a vote to be held as planned, in four years’ time. As the Prime Minister has said in a letter to MPs, he is powerless to bring in a vote while in coalition because the Liberal Democrats are so vehemently against it. Nick Clegg’s commitment to

James Forsyth

If Cameron is going to win in 2015, he is going to need a lot of help from Boris

One consequence of the local elections is that no Tory now denies that they need to win over UKIP voters to win the next election. How to do that, though, remains a subject of intense debate — last night’s 1922 Committee meeting with Grant Shapps discussed this point and ran massively over as a result. A large part of Nigel Farage’s appeal is stylistic. He is a technicolour character compared to the monochrome politicians of Westminster. He paints in primary colours rather than shades of grey. Now, Cameron can’t, and shouldn’t, ape this. He is not that kind of politician and would look inauthentic if he tried to be. But

Steerpike

Michael Gove: wind-up artist

Michael Gove likes to make mischief. Every so often he stokes London’s liberal elite into fits of righteous indignation. If he does this out of pure joy, then his latest caper will not have disappointed. This afternoon the education secretary gave a speech to private school headmasters in which he made an important point about the quality of children’s education: ‘I suspect that all of us who are parents would be delighted if our children were learning to love George Eliot, write their own computer programmes, daring to take themselves out of their comfort zone and aspiring to be faster, higher or stronger.’ But Gove couldn’t resist teasing his pious critics:

Isabel Hardman

EU referendum amendment is just first step in long battle

As expected, the backbench Tory campaign for an EU referendum bill started as soon as the Queen’s Speech proved not to contain one. The first battle is over an amendment expressing regret which John Baron, who is leading the charge on this, has tabled. The amendment, to the motion welcoming the Queen’s Speech, simply reads: ‘Respectfully regrets that an EU referendum bill was not included in the gracious speech.’ This means that all Tory MPs who want a referendum, but in a different form, such as the mandate referendum that Bernard Jenkin and others have pushed for, can still sign the amendment. Baron tells me that he hasn’t decided whether

Isabel Hardman

The Tories failed to make the case for relaxing childcare ratios: no wonder the policy bombed

Two ministers appeared in the Commons today to explain two different reforms. One is at the very start of its legislative life, appearing in yesterday’s Queen’s Speech, while the other one appears to be doddering about on its last legs after months of fanfare. Liz Truss found herself summoned to the despatch box to explain her plans to relax childcare ratios in order to drive costs down after it emerged Nick Clegg wanted to block them. This isn’t a great surprise: the reform has excited strong opposition from the sector and parents. But what is strange is that the government never really made a great deal of effort to be

Alan Trench

Will an EU referendum kill the Scottish independence referendum?

The UK faces two referendums about its future, not one. As well as David Cameron’s promised ‘proper’ referendum on the UK’s relationship with the European Union, there is also the one on Scottish independence due on 18 September 2014. By and large, despite similarities in the arguments involved, each of those debates has paid little regard to the other. That makes sense if the EU referendum takes place in the next UK Parliament, around 2017 or so, once the dust has settled on the Scottish vote. Suggestions of an earlier referendum may throw that into doubt. The dynamics of the debate about Scottish independence would look very different if the

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — Britain’s shale gas dilemma, the ruling elite and the Queen’s Speech

Will Britain’s lack of enthusiasm for shale gas result in a collapse of the government’s whole energy policy? In this week’s Spectator cover feature, Peter Lilley writes we will soon cross this shale rubicon. The former shadow chancellor and advisor to David Cameron vigorously argues that fracking can no longer be ignored in order to make the country’s energy ends meet. On the latest View from 22 podcast, Fraser Nelson discusses Lilley’s theory with Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the likelihood of another Downing Street u-turn. Will Cameron radically shift the government’s energy policy in an attempt to reduce consumer prices? And can the green lobby be successfully

Peter Lilley

Britain can’t afford to surrender to the greens on shale gas

The scandal of official reluctance to develop Britain’s shale gas potential is at last beginning to surface. It may prove to be the dress rehearsal for the ultimate drama — the inexorable collapse of our whole energy strategy. Most of us have by now heard about the US shale gas revolution. In little more than six years, shale gas has reduced America’s gas prices to a third of what they are in Europe, increased huge tax revenues, rebalanced the economy, created tens of thousands of jobs, brought industry and manufacturing back to the country’s heartlands, and given rise to a real prospect of American energy self-sufficiency by 2030. Britain may