Politics

Downing Street’s mini-shuffle announced this morning to coincide with a joint Cameron Fallon visit to a green car plant is intriguing. Having made some inquiries, it seems that the aim was to move John Hayes out of DECC, where he was still clashing spectacularly with the Secretary of State Ed Davey and alarming some in the industry, and Michael Fallon in. Everything else followed from that. Fallon’s additional responsibilities are yet another sign of the high regard Number 10 holds him in. Fallon might be culturally, and politically, quite different from most of those in Number 10 but they have come to see him as their safest pair of hands.

The mini reshuffle earlier this morning is significant. David Cameron has moved Tory ‘greybeards’ to address problem areas. Cameron’s twitter feed has announced: ‘Delighted John Hayes joining me as a Senior Parliamentary adviser – and Michael Fallon adding a key energy role to his brief.’ Benedict Brogan and Tim Montgomerie have good analyses of what this means. In summary it appears that Hayes, a self-confessed ‘blue collar’ Tory and popular MP, is going briefless to the Cabinet Office to help the PM communicate government policy to the backbenches and the working classes. Hayes speaks in plain language. He has been pushing the energy bill through parliament, and has clashed openly

Today’s newspapers disclose that Cabinet members have received letters telling them to expect 10 per cent cuts to their budget in the next spending round. This will have been a letter designed to be leaked, and to establish a negotiating position. The Times says that the real figure is closer to 8 per cent, as I disclosed in my Daily Telegraph column three weeks ago. It was the 8 per cent figure which set off the chain of events which led to Theresa May’s leadership-style speech. To recap, here’s what happened first time around. The problem came when Osborne asked ministers to make further cuts of 8 per cent in

On 27 March 1963, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ was published. Better known as the Beeching Report, the paper was a seminal moment for Britain in the twentieth century. Dr Beeching’s report (and subsequent axe) recommended the closure of 5,000 miles of tracks and 2,363 stations, with 67,000 jobs lost. Most of Beeching’s initial suggestions were eventually implemented and our railways were changed forever. Beeching is still a controversial figure. The trade unions, then and now, paint him as a mad axeman who destroyed a noble institution and the livelihoods of thousands of railway men. No wonder one ‘Dr B. Ching’ is still lampooned in Private Eye every week. But

From tomorrow’s Spectator. Downing Street aides nervously run through the symptoms: a flat economy, poor press, leadership mutterings. Then they say, ‘It’s just mid-term blues, isn’t it?’ A second later, they add nervously, ‘It’s nothing more serious than that, is it?’ The truth is, nobody can be certain. There’s no reliable way of distinguishing mid-term blues from something politically fatal. Part of the problem is that few Tories have anything to compare their current mood with. After 13 years in opposition, only a handful of them have been in government before, let alone in the mid-term doldrums. When I put this argument to one veteran of the Thatcher years, he

There have been angry mutterings from the backbenches today about the passage of the Justice and Security Bill last night, with allegations of cunning play by the whips. It appears that the start of yesterday evening’s discussions was mysteriously delayed until 6.15pm and Closed Material Proceedings (secret courts) were debated at around 7pm. The first vote took place at 9.20, several hours after it was originally expected and very late in the day. The whips were enormously active in the face of last minute amendments to derail ‘secret couts’: several peers were bussed in to bolster the government and at least one ermine-clad creature was plucked from abroad to answer the division