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My initial reaction is that it was good but not a home run. The ending was very strong but there was a bit towards the end when it ran out of steam a little bit. If I was Gordon, I’d be feeling a lot less confident of increasing Tony Blair’s majority in an election this year. The question is, has Brown put his neck out too far to pull back now?
2:15pm Cameron comes out to a rapturous reception. He tells the audience this might be a messy as he’s got no autocue, Cameron unspun. Fraser emails in: I notice all the shadow cabinet on stage. This is part of their strategy to show the Tories are a team, where Labour is a one man Brown band. Cameron announces to us that he has no notes “so it might be a bit messy but it will be me”. Subtext ‘unlike that control freak brown, imagine him doing this eh?’ And I love the reference to Thatcher’s long march to freedom, a reference to the Nelson Mandela biography of the same name.
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Word is that Cameron will attempt the speech of his life without notes or autocue. Critics said his 2005 noteless speech was no better than many stage actors could do – but that was a short one. This will be an hour long. Dare he? We’ll see soon enough…. PS: His aides say he will be carrying cards, to jog his memory if needed. But otherwise, flying solo. An incredibly, almost recklessly bold move.
You wait ages for a Tory tax pledge then a whole slew come along at once. Following his speech on Monday which pledged to raise the threshold for inheritance tax and cut stamp tax for first time buyers, George Osborne has given an interview to The Times announcing that there are both personal and corporate tax cuts to come, all of which will be funded by green tax rises. Now, the Evening Standard is going big on the story that spouses will be able to transfer over any unused portion of their personal allowances—potentially saving families £1,000 a year. There does, though, seem to be some confusion about whether this
Waiting for David Cameron’s speech, which is going to be a great end to a great conference. General buzz here amongst those who were at Labour’s Conference last week is that contrast has been striking: their Conference was all very hollow, lots of election speculation covering up the lack of no real substance; while ours has been full of new, exciting ideas. The Party has been really united and determined. We are up for the fight! On my brief there’s a story that is quite interesting – which the Mail and Guardian covered this morning. It concerns Labour’s misleading use of Treasury figures to attack our tax proposals. Yesterday lunchtime I
Samantha Cameron has risen even further in my estimation by declining to spend the week in Blackpool. She showed up on Sunday, to provide the main photo-shoot, then worked Monday and Tuesday in London arriving late last night and turning up at Les Hinton’s packed reception. Her husband, as far as I can work out, hasn’t attended one reception. There was a late rewrite of a major section of his speech last night, and an exhausted Danny Kruger (main speechwriter) turned up for breakfast as I was leaving at 10am looking like he hadn’t been to bed. Mind you, I look that way too and I slept a whole five
Today’s speech really is as important as the hype says it is. If David Cameron delivers a barnstormer and Gordon Brown pulls out of calling an election it will be a major coup for Cameron, giving him a level of personal authority as leader that he hasn’t had to date. Equally if Brown does go for it, this speech will frame whether the election is seen as a foregone conclusion or a genuine contest. There is, though, another way in which the speech is important. If there is an election before the end of the year, Labour would almost certainly win it. The question then is, as Adam Boulton points
Peter Ridell makes an excellent point in The Times today. Three months ago, in a Green Paper Gordon proposed a new convention that the PM should be ‘required to seek the approval of the House of Commons before asking the monarch for a dissolution.’ So: if he goes for an election announcement next week, will he honour the principle behind his own proposal and ask MPs first?
Credit where credit’s due, Labour’s attitude towards gambling has been vastly more sensible than one had any right to expect. The Economist reports: New laws which came into force in Britain at the beginning of September allow the creation of licensed internet casinos where people can gamble on games such as poker and blackjack. Until now, gamblers could try their luck at them only on servers located offshore. The change is aimed squarely at encouraging the development of an internationally competitive internet gambling industry in Britain. The government reckons that online casino operators will be willing to come under the watchful eye of its regulators (and tax collectors) in exchange
David Cameron gives his crucial speech to the Tory party conference tomorrow – a speech that will go some way towards deciding whether he has a real shot at becoming the next British Prime Minister. Despite the rotten polls and the talk of a snap election next month I’m unconvinced (albeit from a distance) that the Tories are toast yet. Still, it’s good to see that Gordon Brown’s commitment to a “new politics” remains rock-solid. Matt d’Ancona explains: So Gordon Brown, having brought forward his trip to Iraq, says that more than 1,000 troops will be home by Christmas. Is this the same Gordon Brown who said at Camp David
Guido has been having fun at the conference here, and has caught wind of what’s in Cameron’s speech tomorrow. It squares with the gossip here.
I am on a Today Programme panel this week playing a prediction game modelled on the famous Doomsday Clock. The idea is for Michael Portillo, Jackie Ashley, John Curtice, Peter Kilfoyle and myself to guess how close we are to midnight—if 11:45 is the furthest away we can be, and midnight is the calling of an election. This morning, I thought the positive headlines for the Tories would nudge Gordon in the direction of caution, and opted for 11:53. Michael went boldly for 11:57, only three minutes away from blast-off, on the grounds that the PM has made his mind up but is just waiting for Cameron’s speech as a
Gordon Brown’s trip to Baghdad is the biggest political misjudgement of his leadership so far. It would have looked very different if the Tories were tearing themselves apart in Blackpool—Gordon could have posed as a statesman above such petty squabbles—but with conference going better than expected it looks like a cheap stunt; especially as Brown had pledged to announce any change in Iraq policy to the House of Commons first. The Tories now have a huge opening to ram home to the public what everyone in Westminster knows: Brown is just as keen on spin as Blair. The line of attacks should be, if Brown will play politics with the
So Gordon Brown, having brought forward his trip to Iraq, says that more than 1,000 troops will be home by Christmas. Is this the same Gordon Brown who said at Camp David that no announcement on troop drawdown would be made until he delivered his Commons statement, set for next week? What encouraged the PM to break this promise and make the declaration now? Surely not the Tories’ strong showing in Blackpool?
By the way I know that last post was very self-centred of me so I want to reassure Coffee House that lots of people up here are putting me in my place including fellow blogger G. Osborne. At the hammam-temperature Telegraph party last night (bacon butties, warm white wine) I kissed the shadow chancellor and asked him where Frances (his lady wife and a friend of mine) was. The sweat was dripping from his brow and his face glowed like a Halloween ghoul mask through the throng of dark suits. “Back in London,” he snapped, “Where you should be.”
Politicians like to talk about ‘non-electoral milestones’—the big symbols, endorsements and Clause 4 moments that pave the way for a party’s return to power. But what about the much smaller signs—let’s call them ‘micro-runes’ –that might or might not reflect political recovery? Here are three: 1. The Sun is depicting David Cameron this week as a Tom Cruise-style agent on a Mission Impossible – thus making glamorous his apparently insuperable task. Remember: this is the newspaper that pictured Neil Kinnock with his head inside a lightbulb, inviting the last person to leave Britain to turn the lights out, and William Hague as a dead parrot. 2. Labour ministers long ago
The mood at the conference has switched from despair to optimism. I traced it to Osborne’s speech but Emily Maitlis reckons it turned about midday. Anyway it was still buzzing at 2am this morning when yours truly retired. The upbeat mood is set to continue. If conference liked Hague socking it to Brown, then Fox will do the same today—and Brown’s trip to Iraq may serve only to give him a better backdrop. I hear the good doctor (and a former Major in the Army medical corps when he was seconded there) has been around the Tory constituency AGMs practising a line: the Brown’s conference speech had one words on
For a party facing certain defeat at the next election, these Tories are strikingly upbeat. Osborne’s speech has put lead in their pencil, they sense—to use a phrase—that the über modernisers have been slain and the focus now is about lower taxes, Conservative values and none of this “nasty party” stick they have taken from the platform for years. Osborne has teed up conference perfectly for Cameron, on whom everything now rests.
The psychology of this conference is like no other I’ve experienced. Having mastered walking, the Cameron Conservative Party believed it had a couple of years in which to get on top of this running business. No such luck. Gordon Brown’s very public toying with a snap election has compelled the party to unveil a larger tranche of hard policies than it had hoped to do at this stage of the electoral cycle. So Michael Gove and George Osborne had to look this morning as if they were capable of being Schools Secretary and Chancellor respectively in a matter of days. It is to their immense credit that each (in my