All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
The launch party for Call Me Dave proved to be an eventful affair as it was revealed that Lord Ashcroft was unable to attend after falling critically ill around the time of the book’s launch. As guests munched on cocktail sausages and sipped champagne, his co-author Isabel Oakeshott took to the stage to give a speech. To kick things off, Oakeshott
Lord Warner has resigned the Labour whip in protest at the direction in which Jeremy Corbyn is taking the party, Patrick Wintour has revealed tonight. Warner was a minister of state at the Department of Health under Tony Blair. Now, Corbyn supporters will be quick to point out that Lord Warner is hardly a household
Tory MPs had a briefing meeting today with George Osborne which a number of them used to press the Chancellor about the tax credit cuts. Peter Aldous raised concerns about the changes, which which lower the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises,
With Lord Ashcroft notably absent in the days and weeks following the release of Call Me Dave, guests at the book’s official launch at Millbank Tower waited with anticipation for Ashcroft to make his grand entrance. However, when it came time for the speeches, it fell on the book’s publisher Iain Dale to break the news to guests
John McDonnell has accused me of telling an untruth. Yes, I know, worse things have happened. But still. His accusation refers to the closure of the Redcar SSI steel plant. Mr McDonnell claimed that a visit to the area, where he met with tearful workers, prompted him to do a u-turn on supporting the Conservative
Few Conservative MPs are expected to rebel on tomorrow’s Opposition Day motion on tax credits, mainly because defying the whip to vote with Labour on a motion that is non-binding on the government is pretty pointless. But that doesn’t mean that the internal Tory revolt on the matter isn’t building. More and more big names
David Cameron has just delivered a statement to the House of Commons on last week’s European Council meeting. Cameron stressed that any visa liberalisation programme for Turkey would not apply to Britain as this country is not part of Schengen. He also reiterated his condemnation of President Assad and accused the Russians of predominantly striking
Will David Cameron allow senior ministers to take whatever side they wish in the EU referendum? There are reportedly six Cabinet Ministers pushing for a free vote on the matter, and today Liam Fox added his voice to the calls, telling the Daily Politics that even if the Prime Minister refused an official suspension of
The British government has published its counter-extremism strategy, unencumbered by the Liberal Democrats who held a similar strategy up for five years of coalition. There is much to be said about this strategy, a strategy which is to my mind the most advanced, careful and rigorous counter-extremism strategy anywhere in the Western world. While the
Although Russell Brand has stopped producing his YouTube series The Trews after tiring of being in the spotlight, fans of the comedian-turned-revolutionary can now get their fill in the new documentary Brand: A Second Coming. While the film, which is directed by Ondi Timoner, was originally supported by Brand, he later got cold feet on viewing
Are you a Phillist or a Teddist? A Phillist is not a Philistine in a hurry, but one who warms to the sensibility of Philip Larkin. A Teddist prefers that of Ted Hughes. Recent BBC documentaries on each poet have clarified the choice. Whose vision of life is more convincing and compelling – the glum
Sir Jeremy Heywood has been caught meddling in government matters again. The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg reveals that the Cabinet Secretary wrote to ministers before party conference season to warn them against speaking out on expanding Heathrow Airport while a decision is still being taken. Heywood helpfully said it was fine to reiterate statements made pre-July but they should keep
Well, it’s something, I suppose, that the Archbishops of Canterbury and York didn’t sign that ill-advised letter last month from 84 CofE bishops to the PM calling for the Government to take in 50,000 more Syrian migrants; Justin Welby and John Sentanu do have some redeeming sense of caution. Meanwhile the 84 are still waiting
At the SNP conference the First Minister and her deputy, John Swinney, both had precisely the same thing to say about university. Here’s Swinney: “Students from a poorer background have never had a better chance of a place at university than under the SNP”. And Nicola Sturgeon: “More students from poorer backgrounds are now going to
The recent invitation to write a poem that begins with the first line or two lines of a well-known poem but then takes off in a new and unexpected direction produced another mammoth postbag. Both Sid Field and W.J. Webster remembered Adlestrop as a rather unusual character from school, and George Simmers used the opening
Pope Francis yesterday gave an address to the profoundly divided Synod on the Family in which he confirmed his plans to decentralise the Catholic Church – giving local bishops’ conferences more freedom to work out their own solutions to the problems of divorce and homosexuality. This is the nightmare of conservative Catholic cardinals, including – unsurprisingly –
With the ardent zeal characteristic of the freshly converted, I found myself channelling waves of anger towards Stanley Kubrick. The closing bars of Also sprach Zarathustra had utterly turned my head, transforming what had been my passing interest in the music of Richard Strauss into an infectious bout of Strauss monomania. Kubrick’s exquisitely consummated marriage
Nicola Sturgeon is to close the SNP annual conference today, and her aides have leaked what she proposes to say about UK military intervention in Syria. I hope there’s time for her to change the text because, as it stands, it’s muddled and rather embarrassing – it suggests that she does not understand the situation at
Futurology is a cursed science, but just occasionally I feel I can already write a news story years into the future. Watch out about the year 2040 for a headline: ‘Building HS2 wasn’t worth it, ministers admit.’ It gave a us a gleaming new Euston station, it will go on to say, and regenerated the
Nicola Sturgeon spoke at the open and close of the SNP conference, and her speech today transposed the key themes of the short address she gave on Thursday morning. She attacked Jeremy Corbyn for disappointing her ‘high hopes’, saying ‘so far, Jeremy Corbyn isn’t changing Labour – he’s allowing Labour to change him’. And she
The problem with Nicola Sturgeon is that she is, by the standards of contemporary politics, unusually straightforward. There is little artifice and even less deceit about Scotland’s First Minister. What you see is what you get; what she says is what she mostly means. That is, even when she’s sidling past the truth it’s clear
Nicola Sturgeon and the Daily Mail hosted a drinks reception for journalists last night. The unholy alliance included speeches from the First Minister and Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden. Roden recounted a fashion show he had covered at the Scottish parliament which had involved Sturgeon as one of the models, and two Mail
The SNP conference has had to get bigger as the party has grown. Those who’ve been coming for years are a tad unsettled by quite how big and slick this event is. The exhibition hall is much bigger and is packed with lobbyists and big corporate stands, including a McDonald’s stall. The hall is bigger,
This year’s SNP conference has proved to be a somewhat tame affair with Nicola Sturgeon playing down talk of a second independence referendum. While hacks hoping to meet the party’s army of cybernats have so far been left disappointed, Mr S has compiled a selection of photos showcasing the slightly stranger elements of this year’s conference:
The SNP didn’t win the independence referendum, but is still talking about the lessons it can learn from what happened a year later. That’s because it wants to win the next one – and everyone at this conference believes that the next referendum only has question marks about when, not if, it will happen. SNP
Amber Rudd will be keeping a low profile this weekend. The sight of a working mother on Question Time, tearfully confronting the Energy Secretary over cuts to working tax credits, won’t have made easy viewing for the Tory press machine. Earlier this month, at Conservative Party Conference, George Osborne reiterated again and again that core
Last night, George Osborne interviewed Charles Moore to mark the publication of the second volume of Charles’s magisterial biography of Margaret Thatcher. You can watch the whole thing on the Policy Exchange website but one of the most striking things about the event, apart from Charles’s subtle needling of the Chancellor, was the questions that
The Labour leadership has abandoned plans to effectively neuter the party’s whips office after realising it is quite useful, Coffee House has learned. I understand that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn had considered making the whips’ office more of an administrative entity which didn’t try to herd MPs into the right lobby. There had also
Nicola Sturgeon has a plan about how to achieve another independence referendum, even if there won’t be a pledge for one in the SNP’s next manifesto. On the Today programme, Sturgeon pointed the finger at the Tories in Westminster — the bogeymen she believes will help the nationalists make the case for independence: ‘I think we do what we have
Pity Stewart Hosie, the SNP’s deputy leader. He appeared on the Daily Politics today to defend the party’s North Sea oil revenue projections and its record in government on health spending. He seemed rather unprepared. When questioned by Andrew Neil on the SNP’s comically inaccurate projections for oil revenue (it expected over £8 billion by now; only
The things people say in anger are generally the most revealing things of all. So it was on last night’s Question Time when a clearly very angry Simon Schama confronted Rod Liddle of this parish on the question of migrants. I’m sure Rod himself will have something to say about this, but I thought it
Is the purpose of education to educate or socially engineer? It was announced yesterday that England is to have its first new grammar school in decades, and the strange thing is that not a single person in the media (that I could see) asked whether this would improve education standards. Instead the entire debate was
Power to the smartphones! The High Court has ruled in favour of Uber this morning after Transport for London and the taxi lobby asked it to clarify whether smartphones in private hire vehicles counted as taximeters. In the ruling, Mr Justice Ouseley said that the drivers’ app may be essential for calculating the fare but that did not make it the
Later this year, or more probably in the spring of 2016, the following scene may play out on the steps of the High Court in London. An editor will appear before the cameras and say: ‘I am instructing my reporters stop investigative journalism until the law is changed.’ The naïve who have failed to educate themselves
