Coalition

From his roost high on the backbenches, David Davis commands a luminescent eminence that he would not have had if he were a frontbencher. And as the current guardian of traditional right-wing Toryism, his words are clear against the often muddy context of coalition. Talking to the Mail’s Andrew Pierce and Amanda Platell, he offers George Osborne and David Cameron some sagacious advice. He joins the chorus, now stalked by Ed Miliband, which urges the government to articulate its growth and recovery rhetoric. ‘We cannot be defined by a purely cuts agenda. If the only message the public takes away from the events of the next few months is one

Ed Miliband did what he needed to do. In his speech he needed to show that he was not some demented left-winger, that he was not a tool of the unions and that he appreciates the need for cuts. He did the first bit with his tone. It is very hard to depict someone as dangerously left-wing when they appear thoroughly reasonable. The union test he got through with the line that no one in the Labour party should have any ‘truck with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes.’ As one Tory said to me last week, attacking him over being in hock to the unions was never going

Time is against Ed Miliband: there is a void where there should be a new shadow chancellor. The party leadership cannot refine its arguments ahead of next month’s spending review, upon which the immediate success of Miliband’s regime depends. A further problem is that all of Labour’s arguments are made in the past tense. The previous government’s economic record is defended with evangelical fervour; but each speaker is struck dumb when asked about specific future savings and plans. Alistair Darling closed his front-bench career this afternoon by saying, ‘The deficit is the result of the banking crisis – and the economic crisis that followed it. We had to take that

The scrubbing job starts in earnest this morning, as Ed Miliband tries to erase that “Red” epithet from before his name. Exhibit A was his appearance on the Andrew Marr show, in which he took every opportunity to cast the manner of his victory in a favourable light. “If you look at this as one vote-one member, then I got more votes than anyone else,” he assured us, before going on to say that he won the union vote because, “I spoke about things that matter to working people in this country.” When asked whether he would sway under pressure from the union leadership, he averred, “I’m nobody’s man, I’m

David Cameron’s interview in the Telegraph this morning is striking for three reasons. First, despite the interview appearing on the day of the Labour leadership declaration, there’s no attempt to bring the hammer down on the new Labour leader. All we get is some framing on the deficit. Next, as Paul Goodman notes, it is an attempt to reassure the Tory faithful after the Lib Dem conference Vince Cable is gently put back in his box with the line ‘Vince is Vince’. Cameron also stresses that he ‘will always safeguard our nuclear deterrent’; a line that is very different from the nakedly political discussions of Trident in Liverpool, where what

Politics Home has published an important poll, showing the staggering level of support for Vince Cable’s conference speech. The government will be pleased that its political attack on the financial services industry’s continued excess at time of austerity is cutting through; on the other hand, this could be seen as support for Cable’s emotive rhetoric. Worse still, the poll suggests that traditional Tory voters are the only group for whom Nick Clegg is more impressive than Cable. The business secretary has to be kept in government – the coalition can’t afford to have a charismatic wreaking havoc from the backbenches. Support for Vince Cable conference speech Who are the impressive

What are we to make of the fact that No.10 gave the thumbs-up to Vince Cable’s bizarre anti-capitalist rhetoric today? “Capitalism takes no prisoners and it kills competition where it can,” he fumed – and you can argue that, technically, he is paraphrasing Adam Smith. But he has been in politics long enough to know what signal his speech sent out (and the reaction it would trigger). Mood music counts for a lot in politics, and in business. And the mood music from this government sounds like a bunch of politicians happy to tax the bejesus out of the high-paid – regarding them as ATM machines to be raided, rather