Politics

For some time now, a growing number of Tory MPs have been quietly informing the whips that they will not be voting to support gay marriage. They’ve been getting letters from their constituents, and even those in favour of the idea know that they can’t afford to support it. When a cabinet member spoke to the whips office recently, he was given a startling reply: don’t worry, it will never come to a vote. The consultation is ongoing, but the agenda is being dropped. The effect it’s having on the morale of the Tory grassroots is calamitous. I look at this fiasco in my Daily Telegraph column today, and here

The Education Secretary gave a very pugnacious speech this morning on the need to improve the country’s state schools. ‘It is remarkable,’ Michael Gove said at independent school Brighton College, ‘how many of the positions of wealth, influence, celebrity and power in our society are held by individuals who were privately educated’. He cited the various professions — politics, law, medicine — where private schools are ‘handsomely represented’. That’s certainly not a new observation. Gove could have, if he’d wanted to, cited the Sutton Trust’s statistics (below) showing the proportion of judges, Lords and CEOs who come from independent schools. Instead, he chose a more novel — and effective — way

Today’s Cameron-Clegg event was meant to be very different from the one in the Downing Street garden two years ago: grittier, more real. Watching it, one was struck by the fact that the two leaders still seem comfortable in each other’s company. The dynamics between them are better than those between Blair and Brown two years in. But, thanks to the compromises of coalition, they lack a compelling growth message for the here and now — as opposed to the long term — at the moment. One of their other problems is that coalition makes everyone focus that much more on the political process. The ears of every journalist pricked

For the Cameroons, the political weather at the moment is about as appealing as the prospect of a Bank Holiday trip to the beach. The Tory party is having a very public debate about its future strategy. The Alternative Queen’s Speech being promoted by David Davis, John Redwood and Tim Montgomerie is a reminder of how vocal the leadership’s internal critics are prepared to be. The worry for Cameron has to be that there is this much sounding off just two years into the coalition. One wonders what it will like be a year from now. If this was not enough, Thursday and Friday promise to bring excruciating details of

It’s only ten days or so since Ed Balls was last quizzed by Andrew Neil, but there he was rehashing many of the same lines on the Sunday Politics today. Among the things that stood out was this: the shadow chancellor’s argument on the public finances is ever more cleaving into two halves. First, he accuses George Osborne of borrowing £150 billion more over this Parliament than originally planned. (Although there’s a detail that often, conveniently, gets obscured: namely, that borrowing is still going down year-on-year under Osborne’s plan). Second, that Balls’s plan would decrease borrowing in the medium-term even though it would increase spending and reduce tax revenues in

As the dust settles on these elections, it is becoming clearer how the parties did. Labour exceeded expectations, the Tories had a bad but not disastrous set of results and the Liberal Democrats took another kicking. Indeed, they actually lost a higher proportion of the seats that they were defending this year than they did last year: 44 per cent compared to 41 per cent in 2011. Given these results is it is quite remarkable how solidly behind Nick Clegg the Lib Dem parliamentary party remains. Not a single MP has called for him to go or for the party to quit coalition. I’m sure this is partly because the