Politics

Lucky old George Osborne. The British economy is not in “meltdown,” but churning out tax revenue like a fruit machine. Figures out from the ONS today show that the tax haul for January alone was £58.4 billion – pushing the public finances into a surplus £3.7 billion for that month (an almighty £3.6 billion more than expected). If this rate continues (no reason why not, seeing as we’re all getting drunk on Mervyn King’s underpriced debt again), then Citi estimates he will have £8 billion more to play with than expected in the current financial year. So what will he do? Osborne’s decision will tell us plenty about what type

Over at Comment Central, Danny Finkelstein has written a post saying that it might not be in the best interests of the No campaign for Cameron to campaign heavily against AV. His argument is that the No campaign’s best hope is to run as a spiky, anti-establishment effort. I think this is true but that the No camp has rather forfeited this chance by appointing Margaret Beckett as its president and having a former Labour MP front its launch. If the No campaign is going to be use so many politicians as spokesmen for it, it might as well have one of the most able ones involved. Second, and most

Given that David Cameron will have a tougher fight than perhaps any postwar Prime Minister other than Thatcher, it’s a bit unfortunate that his team doesn’t like political combat. Losing to Rachel Johnson over forests last week exposed major weaknesses, and sent a message to the government’s enemies: that these guys have pretty poor political combat skills. Now word is out, the cuts protests in Liverpool today will be the first in a series of challenges. Cameron, too, is stung by the avoidable mistakes of the last few weeks – and is reshaping No.10 to account for them. Some changes are great, some less so, others downright worrying. Here’s my

Another Saturday, another interview with Ken Clarke. This time, the bruised bruiser has been talking to the FT and the remarkable thing is that he has managed to say nothing. Not a sausage. Colleagues were not insulted, Middle England escaped unscathed and the European Court of Human Rights wasn’t even mentioned.  But Clarke conveys his determination to fight. He defends his prison reforms and community sentences, to which the right has now applied the grave term ‘misconceived’. Clarke retorts: ‘We are trying to take 23 per cent out of the budget. I don’t recall any government that’s ever tried to make any spending reductions on law and order – let alone 23

The spending figures from the Oldham East and Saddleworth campaign have been released tonight and they show just how much the Tories soft-pedaled their campaign there. The numbers, which Michael Crick has blogged on, reveal that the Tories spent less than half what their coalition partners spent in the content, £39,432 to £94,540. Labour, who held the seat, expended the most, £97,085. Indeed, even the UKIP campaign was more expensive than the Tory one. These figures show just how absurd it was for the Tories to claim that they were fighting a normal, style by-election campaign. There was clearly a deliberate decision to go easy in the seat to give

A very dangerous precedent has been established today over the forest fiasco. Caroline Spelman earlier gave the most extraordinary interview on Radio 4’s PM. “We got it wrong,” she said in the Commons. “How so?” asked Eddie Mair. She wouldn’t say. As he kept asking her, it became increasing clear that she didn’t think they got it wrong. They conducted the U-Turn because they were losing the media war.   Really? Is that all it takes to defeat Cameron’s government? A decent two-week campaign with a couple of celebs? The forest policy was a good one: why do we need state-run timber farms? Not that this argument was ever aired.