Conservative party

We’ve only had a few results through in the local elections, but already the parties are giving their verdict on the way last night worked for them. One thing to watch today is the development of a Tory line on UKIP. There hasn’t been one in the run-up to polling day, but will there be a concerted effort from the Conservative leadership to produce a clear message about what Nigel Farage’s success means for the Tories? Grant Shapps certainly managed to stick to the Tinkerbell strategy of trying not to say ‘UKIP’ or ‘Nigel Farage’ in his Today programme interview. But he also stuck to the sympathetic portrayal of those

The result is now in from South Shields. As expected, Labour have held the seat. Ukip have come second, with the Tories third and the Liberal Democrats a spectacularly bad seventh. Ukip’s second is more impressive when you consider that they didn’t even stand in the constituency in 2010. It is a sign that they are fast becoming the default protest party across England. Only a handful of county councils are counting overnight, and they are all Tory controlled. But John Curtice, the elections expert, has already told the BBC that Ukip looks like doing as well as the polls suggested. At 12.15am, Ukip is averaging 26% in the BBC’s

David Cameron’s refusal to say ‘UKIP’ on the radio today was rather entertaining, but it does highlight a strange problem that the Conservative party has brought upon itself for these local elections. Here’s his exchange with Martha Kearney, which you can listen to below, from 8m 49s in: Cameron: ‘My role is to get around the country and I’ve enjoyed doing it in the last couple of weeks, to get around the country and to talk about the government’s policies, local policies, what the Conservatives are doing. I think there is a real appetite for…’ Kearney: Is it a strategy, not to say UKIP? Cameron: No, not at all, it’s

Not wanting to heap worries onto the Prime Minister when he’s just about found harmony with his party, but as well as the underused backbenchers I mentioned this morning, he might want to think about his party’s PPSs as well. Some of them feel they were offered their jobs with the promise that the role would become ‘turbo-charged’, but haven’t found the reality quite so glamorous. I hear that the last meeting Downing Street held for ministerial aides didn’t cheer many of them up. It wasn’t just that they were given a presentation on oral questions that most of them felt they’d heard about a year ago, or that the

Downing Street has pulled off a coup with the recruitment of Chris Lockwood, the US editor of The Economist, to the new Downing Street policy unit. Lockwood is one of the brightest and most insightful people in journalism and one imagines that he wouldn’t have left a prime perch at The Economist if he did not think that the new Policy Unit will have real heft. Lockwood is close to Cameron: he was one of the six journalists that the Prime Minister listed as a personal friend in his evidence to Leveson. In 1993, as reported in the Elliott and Hanning biography of Cameron, Lockwood was part of a group

In a detailed interview on the Sunday Politics, Nick Clegg claimed that neither the Home Secretary nor Downing Street have ever proposed to him that Britain should temporarily leave the European Court of Human Rights so that it can deport Abu Qatada. Clegg was adamant that ‘no one has put a proposal to me.’ Under questioning from Andrew Neil, Clegg defended his decision to block any communications data legislation in the Queen’s Speech. He maintained that the proposals were ‘neither workable nor proportionate.’ Clegg conceded that the UKIP offer was ‘very seductive’ to voters. But he then attacked them for their flat tax proposal. Highlighting this policy is, according to

The married couple’s tax allowance is back on the agenda. After Conservative Home’s exclusive yesterday, David Cameron has confirmed that he will introduce one before the end of this parliament. This would allow couples to share a proportion of their personal allowance, lowering the tax bill for those household where one person stays home to look after the children. Cynics will suggest that this is a good time to float a policy particularly popular with the party base given that there are county council elections on Thursday. But Cameron is a bigger enthusiast for recognising marriage in the tax system than most of his Cabinet colleagues. In opposition, George Osborne

There was a startling late entry for the first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher. On the day after she died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he had not got round to it. Now he revealed that his father had come home from the Finchley selection meeting and explained that Mrs Thatcher had not really won the vote. Her rival, Thomas Langton, had just pipped her. Blatch senior, however, was very keen on Mrs Thatcher, and thought that Langton, who ‘was born