Politics

You might have thought that being the scene of a tabloid sensation — and one concerning a national treasure — could have spelled a tricky period for Scott’s of Mayfair. Not a bit of it. My man with a corkscrew says that the place has been packed with Tories all week. They had Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in for lunch on Monday, before Boris and Gove dined (after a fashion) that evening. No one was at anyone else’s throat on either occasion. Joe Public does, though, have a wicked sense of humour. The terrace tables, the very spot where Nigella and Charles Saatchi’s marriage ended, are particularly sought-after at present. However, reports

Michael Gove leads a lively life. In the past week he’s landed himself in the doghouse with his wife after a night on the town with Boris Johnson, and has been exposed as a gentleman rapper. Today, after giving an impassioned speech on teachers’ pay, the Education Secretary found himself being grilled by members of the lobby about both activities (rather than his desire to improve classroom standards). Did he leave Boris drunk in charge of a bicycle, wondered one member of the press pack. ‘As far as I could tell on Monday night, Boris was on sparkling form, and that was due more to his natural joie de vivre than

Today’s broadcast from Len McCluskey Land was always going to be fun. For those of us who only lived through the tail end of the 1980s, the Unite General Secretary’s speech was a useful glimpse of that decade and the one before. It was also peppered with some great characters: a chap who Len called Paul Dackery who, when not editing a national newspaper that made a rather embarrassing editorial judgement 80 years ago, apparently likes to go around licking people’s boots. McCluskey addressed Dacre and his colleagues at the Mail, saying ‘we know you like to kick the poor while licking the boots of the rich’. Apart from anything

The much-ballyhooed Balance of Competences Review has just published its first set of reports and the lines have already been drawn between the In-at-all-costs camp and the Out-no-matter-whats. The former, jubilant at conclusions drawn by civil servants that EU competences across a number areas are just right, see fit to run around shouting ‘I told you so’ from the rafters. More hardened sceptics wearily remind them of their conviction from the outset that this was always going to be a technocratic sham of an exercise. The reports are of course crowd-sourced, a collation of evidence. The conclusions, less so. One such conclusion counters the submissions criticising European red tape by

After weeks of the Prime Minister and his team dancing on a semantic pinhead over whether they discussed plain cigarette packaging with, or were lobbied by, Lynton Crosby, the man himself has made a rare public intervention. The Press Association reports him denying that he had ‘any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister’ on plain packaging. Crosby added: ‘What the Prime Minister said should be enough for any ordinary person.’ But it wasn’t really, because David Cameron did rather lose his cool on the Marr Show at the weekend, telling Andrew Marr that his insistence that Crosby had ‘not intervened’ was ‘the only answer you’re getting’. While

Alan Johnson’s interview with Total Politics highlights one of Ed Miliband’s two big problems for 2015. One is the influence of trade unions over policy, or at least the perceived influence. The second, which Johnson expounds on, is whether it is too much to ask voters to trust Labour again when its top team contains so many familiar faces from the last government. Johnson tells Sam Macrory: ‘Everything is focused on what the chancellor is doing, not what the shadow chancellor is doing, and it’s a tough call. He’s also got to turn round this defeat, where for a long time the myth was created that it was because we

It’s always wise when looking at the European Union to imagine that you’re an alien (it’s the sort of thing MEPs probably do on away days, anyway) coming to the administration for the first time. If a friendly alien had pitched up on earth this afternoon and read the Foreign Office’s first tranche of Balance of Competences Review reports (clearly the sort of thing any sensible alien would do, after a period of revelling in the labyrinthine beauty and inefficiency of the gov.uk website), what would they think? The first of reports – there are three more to come – were published this afternoon, delayed, it was claimed, to stop

Andrew Neil’s interview on Sunday Politics the other week triggered much reaction – and protest from those who do not believe that there is a debate to be had. Andrew has replied at length today, and we thought you might be interested in what he has to say. First, the offending interview: The viewers included one Dana Nuccitelli, who works for a private Californian environment company and blogs at the Guardian. He objected to the Sunday Politics graph showing the absence of warming and said it should be ‘should be totally disregarded and thrown out’. His conclusion: ‘Throughout the show Neil focused only on the bits of evidence that seemed to

Further evidence of Number 10 finding a hard-headed campaigning zeal reaches this blog, in the form of a campaigning website called Protecting Our Children. It includes a petition ‘to support David Cameron’s call for ISPs to introduce Family Friendly Filters as soon as possible’, and facts about internet safety and what it is that the ‘the Prime Minister and ISPs have worked together to ensure’. If you can hear a faint sound of bells ringing as you browse this site, that’s because it is a carbon copy of the LetBritainDecide website. Tory MPs, including those who don’t always put their hand up to support the Prime Minister, are tweeting away