Politics

What sort of Budget will George Osborne unveil on 20 March? In this week’s Spectator, Fraser Nelson predicts that it will be an empty one, devoid of radicalism. The piece outlines one meeting in which the Chancellor explained why he is feeling so cautious: Before every Budget, George Osborne always seeks the advice of various MPs. He usually doesn’t heed it but it’s a good way, he thinks, to keep the troops happy. As the economic headwinds have strengthened, this advice has tended to be increasingly radical and in a recent meeting with the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs, the Chancellor made clear he was in no mood for

After today’s slightly confusing PMQs line from the Prime Minister about unidentified ‘people’ who ‘should be thinking of their positions’ after the Mid-Staffs scandal, ministers and loyal backbenchers have gone out to bat for the government. After PMQs, the Prime Minister’s sources refused to say who these ‘people’ were who needed to consider their positions. But now Jeremy Hunt has written a piece for ConHome saying ‘Labour can and will be held accountable for what happened at Mid-Staffs’. He then warns that the party appears to have learned no lessons at all from the Francis Report and that the public shouldn’t trust them again: ‘Labour’s reaction to Mid Staffs has

Whooo that was nasty. Today’s was the most vicious PMQs of the last twelve months. Easily. Ed Miliband started by quoting the case of a Londoner called ‘John’ who was concerned about living standards. ‘John’, however, wasn’t a disabled pensioner but a City fat cat concerned that next year’s bonus might be capped at two million pounds. ‘What’s the prime minister going to do to help him?’ Nifty tactics from Miliband’s team. Cameron might have floundered here but his reply matched the full force of Miliband’s attack. His government, he declared, had cut bonuses to a quarter of what they’d been under Labour. ‘And we aren’t going to listen to

Po-faced Labour MP Grahame Morris has been crying into his bitter this morning at young Tories up at York University who hold an annual ‘Hagueathon’ in honour of the fourteen pints the Foreign Secretary necked when he was a student. The game is very simple: right-wing students try to drink fourteen ales, with varying degrees of success. ‘I suspect William Hague’s capacity for 14 pints of Yorkshire bitter was a figment of his imagination,’ moans Morris to the Mirror. ‘In the current climate when the Government is supposed to be doing something about the alcohol crisis, this sets a bad example.’ Steerpike hears that Barrel Scrapper Morris has missed a

Panic, once let loose, is hard to corral. And there seems to be plenty of panic on the Tory benches at Westminster. The Eastleigh by-election result, the stagnant economy and the rising sense that the Prime Minister has somehow lost his way all contribute to this. Each fresh setback – or perceived setback – now has an impact disproportionate to the actual size or importance of the problem. These things are no longer measured on a linear scale. Read, for instance, Ben Brogan’s analysis in today’s Telegraph and you will perceive an under-current of deep panic presently afflicting the Tory tribe in London. Similarly, when Paul Goodman is writing –

Who are all these folk jumping on Nigel Farage’s bandwagon? Ukip — which received just 3 per cent of the vote in 2010 — is now averaging about 11 per cent in the polls. Its rise has fuelled all sorts of speculation about where its supporters are coming from and why they’re turning to the party. Today, YouGov have thrown a bit of data into that speculation. They’ve combined the results of all their February polls, which sampled 28,944 people including 2,788 who said they’d vote Ukip. The results are a mixture of the expected and the surprising. First, the expected: most of them voted Tory in 2010 — 60