Coalition

Come back, you insufferable relatives, all is forgiven: the political class has devoted an afternoon to trading insults about who said what about VAT and when. However, there have been some intriguing exchanges amid the New Politics’ latest outing. First, Labour seems to be fighting the two coalition partners as a single entity in Oldham East. Cameron, Clegg and Simon Hughes have received equal measures of opprobrium this afternoon and all have been lumped together. This was always a danger, but, as Fraser noted, Clegg and Cameron invited the manoeuvre by uniting their parties’ central operations in the cause of government. If Cameron and Clegg don’t differentiate in the general,

To accompany Fraser’s suggestion that Cameron and Clegg are planning a merger, it is notable that the ubiquitous Nick Boles has renewed his calls for a formal pact. Previously, Boles averred that Liberal Democrat ministers should be protected in three-way or Conservative-Liberal marginals. This time round, his argument is more philosophical. He told Radio 4’s PM: ‘The Coalition has enabled the Conservative party to be more radical than it would have been able to had it formed a government on its own with a small majority… Jacob Rees Mogg who’s a fellow MP who’s certainly not a sort of liberal Tory like I am in the sort of modernizing sense. In five

When a Conservative leader wishes the LibDems well in a three-way marginal by-election, then what is going on? Andrew Gilligan’s piece today shows that the Conservative campaign there is muted, and my colleague Melissa Kite reported earlier that Cameron personally called off  the hunt supporters, Vote OK, who were planning to boost the Tory campaign. Little wonder that Conservative MPs are beginning to smell a rat. They are being told this is the cohabitation of rival parties; in the Daily Telegraph tomorrow, I ask if this is actually a merger.   From the start of this coalition, I’ve been struck by the differences between the coalition in Westminster, and that

Ne’er mistake correlation with cause, I know. But, during the Brown premiership, the correlation between petrol prices and poll ratings was still pretty striking. Mike Smithson graphed it early last year, but the basic story was this: the Tories enjoyed their biggest poll lead over Labour when petrol prices were at their highest, and Labour closed the gap to only 1 percent when petrol prices were at their lowest. At the very least, it gives us a hypothesis to work from: prices up, the government suffers; prices down, the government recovers. And it looks as though we’ll be able to test that hypothesis soon enough. Today’s Express reports that –

If you want to know why party managers don’t like open primaries look at page 26 of today’s Guardian. There Sarah Wollaston, the GP who won the Tory open primary in Totnes, warns that Andrew Lansley needs to watch out if his NHS reforms are not to turn into privatisation by the back door. The piece is, to put it mildly, unhelpful from a Tory perspective. For a Tory MP, and one who was a GP, to suggest that Tory health policy could lead to a privatisation of the NHS is a gift to Labour. It is also the last thing that Andrew Lansley needs given the u-turn he has

The Lib Dem manifesto committed the party to a fully elected House of Lords. The Tory manifesto talked about a ‘mainly-elected’ second chamber and in 2007 David Cameron voted for ‘the other place’ to be 80 percent elected (interestingly, George Osborne voted for a fully elected Lords). The coalition agreement committed the government to a ‘wholly or mainly elected upper chamber’. So it is hard to see how a Lords that retained a twenty percent appointed element could be portrayed as a major Lib Dem triumph as, according to today’s Guardian, the coalition wants. There has been talk in Westminster that Clegg’s consolation prize if the AV referendum is defeated

Downing Street may  have dismissed as “complete nonsense” a newspaper report that the coalition was considering inviting David Miliband to become British ambassador to Washington. But the former foreign secretary is one of a few younger British politicians with international standing and while it would be odd to appoint him to a government job – and stranger still for him to accept — the coalition should consider putting him forward for a number of international assignments. Potential jobs include the international community’s “high representative” in Bosnia; as a UN envoy to Yemen; or as the representative of the Friends of Democratic Pakistan. In future, these three posts need to be