Conservative party

They should have seen it coming. A government defeat on an issue of war may be unprecedented, but defeat on the Syria vote did not come out of the blue. You can certainly blame poor party management, failure to prepare the ground, underestimating the poisonous legacy of Iraq — but such failings are common enough. The biggest single factor is one that ministers, the media and MPs themselves have failed to understand: Parliament has changed. The consensus has long been that Parliament no longer matters. It is assumed to be the docile creature of the government, full of spineless or ambitious MPs who are the slaves of the party whips.

William Hague’s appearance at the 1922 Committee has underlined the fact that the Tory party is now split on foreign policy. I’m told that the questions that the Foreign Secretary received were pretty much evenly split between the passionate supporters of intervention in Syria and its passionate opponents. Those present calculate that the room was evenly split between the two factions. Hague, I understand, made a robust case for why Britain needs to remain an outward looking nation that is prepared to use its military forces. But he did say, when asked, that ‘lessons will be learned’ from how the Syria vote was handled. This answer will fuel Westminster speculation

There’ll be no second parliamentary vote on Syria, George Osborne stressed this morning. There had been speculation that following President Obama’s decision to go to Congress before using military force, meaning that strikes won’t happen before the week of the 9th of September, there could be a second parliamentary vote on UK military involvement. But Osborne scotched that idea on the Andrew Marr show this morning. listen to ‘Osborne – No second Syria vote’ on Audioboo Obama’s decision, though, has eased the political pressure on David Cameron. Judging by some of the coverage this morning, he’s not a bungling leader who couldn’t get his way with his own parliament, but

To be fair to David Cameron, he’s not the only leader who’s performed a volte-face in the past 24 hours. If you’d listened to Ed Miliband yesterday afternoon, you might have been forgiven for thinking that he was quite likely to support the government’s motion on Syria, so long as it was and ‘legal’ and had specific and limited aims. listen to ‘Ed Miliband: Labour would consider supporting limited action in Syria’ on Audioboo

The Cameron operation’s effort to move onto an election footing continues with a set of new appointments to the Number 10 political operation. Gabby Bertin, who has been with Cameron since he became Tory leader, will return from maternity leave to become director of external relations. Bertin, who was previously Cameron’s political spokeswoman, will be responsible for forging – and maintaining Downing Street’s – relations with business, pressure groups and charities. The appointment of one of his most trusted aides to this role is a sign of how imperative Cameron believes it is to prevent Labour from securing business support at the next election. Bertin’s return will be greeted with

I’m just back from three weeks away to find the summer momentum very strongly behind the Tories. A ComRes poll suggests that the majority of Labour supporters think Ed Miliband is doing badly, and things are going so strongly for the Tories (as George Trefgarne writes) that the odds on a Tory majority are shrinking rapidly. So why would Cameron be planning for another coalition, as my colleague James Kirkup writes in his Telegraph splash today? His piece has struck a nerve in No. 10, which is strongly denying that the Prime Minister is thinking of anything other than a Conservative majority in 2015. There are, I’m told, no plans

Unless you’re as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it’s pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made entirely the wrong assumption about what the Tories had planned for recess. Labour was clearly just lying in wait for more mistakes and bad news to come crawling out of the woodwork over the holidays. But they’d reckoned without the months of careful planning that the Conservatives had put into this slower season. I understand

So both the Lib Dems and the Tories have yielded to the inevitable, and passed on the Joan LB Edwards donation to the Treasury. Their responses were swifter than even critical friends might have expected. The Lib Dems were first out of the starting blocks in the race to the moral high ground by announcing they’d be writing a cheque to the Treasury. But before Nick Clegg even had time to start recording a new autotune version of ‘I’m Sorry’ about how ‘we took a donation that we couldn’t possibly keep (but frankly could have done with given the state of the party coffers)’, the Tories decided they had to

Last December, after one of the most brutal PMQs this Parliament has seen, David Cameron was walking through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster to address a 1922 Committee meeting. Ed Miliband had subjected the Prime Minister to a real savaging, and Labour backbenchers had loyally joined in, raising a constituent’s suicide and describing Cameron’s government as ‘grandeur for the few, the workhouse for the many’. It had been a bleak session. Heading for Committee Room 14, the Prime Minister bumped into a junior minister, who was keen to reassure him that everything would come out in the wash. He told Cameron that ‘they can go for the emotional

If only he’d read the job description a little bit more closely, we might have avoided all these rows. Unfortunately for John Bercow, the man who loves the sound of his own voice more than anything else, the role of Speaker really doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Traditionally, the Speaker has taken a definite back seat, bellowing the odd ‘order, order’ in the Commons but otherwise maintaining a rather reticent and impartial position. Judging by Bercow’s behaviour over the past few months, it would seem that he hasn’t got the memo. This summer alone, he’s travelled to Romania, Burma and New Zealand, observing wryly at his final destination

Ties between the Tories and the Republicans have rarely been weaker than they are today. The hiring of Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, is another sign that the Tories are more interested in the technical effectiveness of the Obama machine than they are in anything that the Republicans are producing. I suspect that the Republican most likely to revive Tory interest in the GOP, its idea and its electoral strategy, is Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. Christie is neither a southern Republican nor a Tea Party man. Rather, he’s a north eastern Republican with a more emollient attitude to government. Christie is up for re-election in New

Matt Hancock is both a competent economist (read his account of the Great Recession) and a keen political strategist. Where possible he has used his position as minister for skills to position the coalition on the compassionate side of the employment argument; for example, with his considered support for the minimum wage. Yesterday, in an article for ConservativeHome, he pre-empted Labour’s attempt to shift economic focus to the cost of living, now that hopes of a recovery are building. He made two basic points: 1). Labour’s record on the cost of living is abysmal – wages did not keep pace with growth during the boom. He says that gross disposable income

It’s a good time to be a Tory in Westminster at present. Labour is under pressure. The backbench dissenters have been quietened. Aides, hacks and spinners exude an air of confidence when you meet them in SW1’s watering holes. Even Boris Johnson reckons that David Cameron could yet pull it off in 2015. Speaking of which, the party has captured the services of Jim Messina, a strategist who has worked with Barack Obama. He will whip CCHQ’s mercurial digital assets into shape and help to sell the government’s economic record. Aside from enjoying the benefit of Messina’s gifts, this is a PR coup for the ‘nasty party’. Observe the reaction