Coalition

It is easy to make a case for why all three main parties should do badly at the next election. After five years of austerity, who will vote for the Tories who didn’t in 2010? And how will they stop those dissatisfied with the compromises of coalition from sloping off to Ukip? As for Labour, why would the public want to put them back in charge just five years after booting them out? This question has special force given that the Labour leadership is so identified with that failed belief that boom and bust had been ended. Then, there’s the Liberal Democrats—they’ve alienated their left-leaning supporters and lost their status

By the time the G8 is next held in this country, the United Kingdom may well have left the European Union. In the next eight years, the question of whether Britain is in or out will be settled. We know that if David Cameron is Prime Minister after the next election, that decision will be made in 2017. But whoever is in No. 10, a referendum is coming. When it comes, the Tory party will have to decide whether it is for exit or staying in. Either way, it is hard to see the party staying together. On Monday, we had a preview of the coming argument. David Cameron gave

GCHQ’s use of the US monitoring system Prism is threatening to turn into a major political row. Douglas Alexander is demanding that William Hague come to the House of Commons to explain what GCHQ was doing and what the legal basis for it was. But this controversy is going to have an effect on coalition relations too. It is going to intensify Liberal Democrat opposition to the measures included in the Communications Data Bill. This comes at a time when David Cameron has decided, as he made clear in the Commons on Monday, that the measures in it are needed. In the United States, the Obama administration is pushing back

Andrew Adonis is in the loop. At least that’s the impression you might get from 5 Days in May; his account of the various coalition discussions after the 2010 election. His viperous comments about Nick Clegg suggest he was ‘inside’; but word from the corridors of power says otherwise. A little birdie tells me that Nick Clegg saw neither hide nor hair of his lordship on any of those five days in May.

Today must count as one of the most encouraging days for the centre right in British politics in recent times. Labour’s apparent abandonment of universal child benefit is a massive blow to the 1945 settlement. It is akin in significance to when Labour began to accept the privatisations of the Thatcher era. Now, there’s no intellectual difference between declaring that better off pensioners won’t receive winter fuel payments and that better off mothers won’t receive child benefit. But in symbolic terms, the difference is huge. The winter fuel payment is a recent addition to the welfare state, introduced by the last Labour government. It is not fundamental to it. By

Today is not a good day for politics or parliament. The latest, depressing sleaze revelations are only going to increase public cynicism about politics and parliament. It seems that a statutory register of lobbyists will now be coming in. Francis Maude, in a striking shift from the government’s post Queen’s speech position, told Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics ‘we are going to do this.’ But it is hard to see how a statutory register of lobbyists would stop MPs and peers from doing what Panorama, the Telegraph and The Sunday Times appear to have caught them doing. My instinct is that no set of regulations or regulators will be

I suspect that there’ll be a few MPs and peers nervously waiting for 9pm on Thursday night. For this is when the Panorama special on parliament and lobbying, which has already caused Patrick Mercer to resign the Tory whip, will be broadcast. Today’s Telegraph contains details of the accusations surrounding Mercer. The paper alleges that the MP has been paid £4,000 by a fake lobbying company set up by the Telegraph and the production company making Panorama. Mercer appears not to have declared this money. But he has asked a string of questions on Fiji; the paper claims that the company had told him that ending Fiji’s suspension from the

Hardly a day goes by these days without a story about Boris Johnson and the Tory leadership. Yesterday, it was Andy Coulson’s revelation that David Cameron believed Boris Johnson would be after his job once he’d been London Mayor. Today, it is The Economist talking about ‘Generation Boris’, the more libertarian inclined voters who the magazine suggests will sweep him to Downing Street in 2020. Now, for Cameron having as his main leadership rival someone who isn’t an MP is not actually that bad, however infuriating some in his circle might find the press and the party’s love affair with the London Mayor. What’s most striking about Boris, though, is

Ever the helpful friend in times of strife, Nick Clegg is giving a speech today in which he will soar above the troubles the Tories currently find themselves in to tell everyone that the two parties will remain manacled together until the 2015 general election. There has been plenty of speculation that this won’t be the case, with Benedict Brogan reporting yesterday that Downing Street has been mulling contingency plans for an early split prompted by Clegg being ousted in a Lib Dem coup. So the Deputy Prime Minister is attempting to put those rumours to bed, while positioning the Lib Dems as the mature party of government. He will

After all the parliamentary back and forth yesterday, gay marriage passed third reading by the comfortable margin of 366 to 161. Tory sources are briefing that fewer of their MPs voted against at third reading than second reading, though we’ll have to wait for the division lists to confirm that. We probably now have only a couple more Commons votes left on this; there’ll be on any amendments made to the bill by the House of Lords. The atmosphere in the House as the result was read out did not seem particularly historic. There was some clapping from the Labour front bench, but the Treasury bench didn’t join in and

David Cameron’s approach to the gay marriage debate inside his own party has been to take a low profile. The passion and eloquence he displayed on the subject in his first conference speech as leader, has been replaced by a strategy of keeping his contributions on the matter to a minimum. This is, I think, a pity. There is no better Conservative advocate of the case for it than the Prime Minister. The crucial point about Cameron’s position, and why he might have been able to carry some more socially conservative minded people with him, is that he starts from the position that marriage is one of the most important,

If four years ago, a Liberal Democrat politician had attempted to portray the Lib Dems as the natural party of government we all would have laughed. But that is just what Danny Alexander tried to do on The Sunday Politics. Being interviewed by Andrew Neil, he implicitly contrasted Lib Dem steadiness with Tory in-fighting. He said: “You know some people at the time in 2010 said that it would be difficult to keep a coalition going because one party might not be able to remain united and disciplined. Let me reassure you and your viewers that Liberal Democrats will make sure that this government continues to be strong and stable

Insulting your own side is a dangerous thing to do in politics and in the current circumstances for any prominent Tory to do it is positively incendiary. But one ‘senior figure, who has strong social connections to the Prime Minister and close links to the party machine’ is quoted on the front of The Telegraph and The Times describing Tory activists as ‘mad swivel-eyed loons.’ Given the row the Tories have had over Europe and are about to have over gay marriage, the timing could hardly be worse. James Kirkup, Sam Coates and James Lyons — the three journalists who broke the story — have started a major row which, if

The National Audit Office has slammed High Speed 2 today, citing a £3.3 billion ‘black hole’ in the funding plans while suggesting the construction timetable is ‘over-ambitious.’ Not exactly an overwhelming vote of confidence, but does this mean the project is dead in the water? Far from it — it’s more likely to happen than even an EU referendum. The hybrid HS2 bill (to ensure the project is speedily moved along) was prominent in the Queen’s Speech for this parliamentary session. When I was travelling along the proposed route, even the most ardent fighters have conceded the line will be built. As one remarked to me: ‘all we can do now

The last few days have seen the Tory party losing its collective head. Number 10 hopes that the publication of a draft referendum bill will begin to restore order. If this bill had been published by the leadership a week ago, it would have looked like a bold move. Today, it appeared panicky. But it is now out there, and any Tory backbencher who comes high up in the private members bill ballot on Thursday has a chance of guiding it through. I suspect if a vote could be won on second reading, the parliamentary dynamics of this debate would change yet again. What’ll be intriguing is to see how

Last winter, the surest way to get a Lib Dem to ring you back was to mention the words ‘boundary changes’. Better still to write a piece criticising the party’s decision to scupper the reforms as a revenge for the collapse of Lords reform, and no matter whether it was late at night or early on a Saturday morning when all normal people are still hiding under their duvets or sitting self-consciously in independent coffee shops, the Lib Dems would ring very quickly indeed. The same thing is happening now over the plan to relax childcare ratios. This morning I wrote as a throwaway comment that the party was blocking

In a firecracker of an interview on the Andrew Marr Show, Michael Gove confirmed that if an EU referendum was held today he would vote out. But he followed this by saying to James Landale that he backed the Prime Minister’s plans to renegotiate and hoped that a satisfactory form of membership could be agreed. Significantly, Gove indicated that David Cameron would set out the Conservative ‘negotiating platform’ before the next election. This has been a key demand of Euro-sceptic Conservatives but one that Cameron has resisted. He is reluctant to provide anything akin to a renegotiation scorecard. Gove’s intervention changes the terms of debate. It means that every Conservative