Conservative party

In recent weeks, Downing Street has been repeatedly told by Tory MPs that if proposals for an elected element in the House of Lords were brought back to the Commons, the next rebellion would be even bigger than the 91 who voted against second reading. Downing Street, as the Telegraph reported this morning, has now accepted that Lords reform will have to be dropped and there is talk of a formal announcement to this effect as early as Monday. But, intriguingly, I understand that David Cameron does not intend to abandon efforts to get the boundary reforms through. This, as Isabel noted this morning, has the potential to cause a

It’s a strange old world when a Prime Minister backing his own Chancellor is worth reporting. But this afternoon the Prime Minister was asked by Sky News whether he was going to reshuffle George Osborne. Naturally, he answered: ‘George Osborne is doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances and he has my full support in going on and doing that job. He’s not going anywhere.’ Kay Burley then pressed Cameron on whether this meant Osborne would still be Chancellor at the next election. He replied: ‘Yes.’ Now, this was quite obvious anyway. Osborne’s stock is certainly down amongst Tory MPs, many of whom are still smarting after watching the

After Boris’s re-election as London mayor, his departing aide Guto Harri complained that the dry but effective campaign had rather taken the ‘bubbles out of the champagne’. Well, the Olympics is certainly putting them back in. Boris keeps taking opportunities that no other politician would dare to—the zip wire ride today being the latest, and most dramatic, example. The question is where does all this end, is it all just Olympics hi-jinks that will be forgotten when the flame leaves Stratford or is it just the next stage of the Boris for PM campaign? In my column in the magazine tomorrow, I say that it does seem to be more

Boris Johnson has had a fantastic few days. On Thursday he drove a crowd in Hyde Park wild with his Mitt Romney banter. On Saturday he charmed the public with his thoughts on the Olympic opening ceremony (‘People say it was all leftie stuff. That is nonsense. I’m a Conservative and I had hot tears of patriotic pride from the beginning. I was blubbing like Andy Murray.’) Today, in between talking about glistening otters (which in itself is a feat: a politician getting away with talking about how wonderful it is to see semi-naked women in central London and not sounding like a dirty old man), he has emerged as

Boris Johnson is one of the few politicians in the world able to clamber up on a concert stage in Hyde Park, take the mic, and whip a crowd up into a frenzy as he did last night. If you haven’t seen the Mayor of London sending Londoners wild with excitement while mocking Mitt Romney, it’s well worth watching below: It’s impossible to imagine any of the members of the Cabinet managing to carry any of this speech off with any dignity at all, let alone the panache that Boris possesses. A Ken Livingstone Olympic rally might have struck a rather different tone had London voted in a Labour mayor

The Lords Commissioner for Standards has cleared Baroness Warsi of allegations that she wrongly claimed expenses for staying rent-free with a friend. Now that this has been cleared up, and Sir Alex Allan has already exonerated her from any allegations of impropriety for allowing a business partner to accompany her, Warsi has a clean slate to present when it comes to September’s reshuffle. The Prime Minister said that the Conservative Party co-chair would lead a ‘big summer of campaigning for the Conservative Party’ in the run-up to the police commissioner elections, but that still leaves the door open to a new task in the autumn. Paul Waugh reported yesterday on

David Gauke was only elected in 2005, but it’s impossible that he can’t remember the Back to Basics campaign, and how well that moral campaign worked out for the Conservative Party. Its 1993 launch precipitated revelations of all kinds of non-traditional behaviour in the party, from affairs to cash for questions. Had the Exchequer Secretary who bears the outstanding achievement of being named Tax Personality of the Year thought about the damningly long list of revelations that the Major government had to endure, he might have thought twice before declaring that it was ‘morally wrong’ to pay your plumber or cleaner cash-in-hand. The problem with Gauke’s moralising was so obvious

Tim Montgomerie has some excellent intelligence on ConHome this morning that Francis Maude is about to gain a new PPS. The Cabinet Office Minister’s former aide was Angie Bray, who was sacked after voting against the government at the second reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill. But Maude’s replacement PPS, Stuart Andrew, is also a rebel. He was one of the 81 who defied the three-line whip in the autumn to vote for a backbench motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. As Tim points out on his blog, this is a sign that rebels might still have a hope of a job in the

David Cameron’s decision to convene an inner Cabinet of seven Tories to advise him is a sensible move. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, calling this group together shows that Cameron knows he needs help handling his party. I understand that it meets regularly with a particular emphasis on the Conservative party side of coalition management. One Cabinet minister told me recently that the Prime Minister spends more time on coalition management than any other subject. To date, this has too often been at the expense of party management. Inevitably, if you spend most of the time thinking about what the Liberal Democrats will accept you begin to

David Cameron’s interview with the Telegraph today reveals that the Prime Minister would not campaign for an ‘out’ vote in a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. This will confuse some Conservatives, who had hoped that the ‘fresh deal and a fresh settlement’ that the Prime Minister described in the chamber earlier this month would either lead to a successful renegotiation followed by a referendum in which the government pushed for a ‘yes’ vote, or a failed attempt at renegotiation followed by a referendum in which the government pushed for a ‘no’ vote. But Cameron told Robert Winnett that he would never campaign for an ‘out’ vote. He adds: ‘It comes back

One of the great goals of the pioneering Victorian explorers of Africa was to find the source of the Nile. The origins of the grievous miscalculation by Harold Macmillan of what became known as The Night of The Long Knives on Friday 13 July 1962, when he summarily sacked seven members of his Cabinet, may appear equally obscure, but can in fact be traced back to the Wallace Murder Case in Liverpool in 1931. At that time Selwyn Lloyd was a young lawyer on the Northern Circuit. Legal news in Liverpool in 1931 was dominated by the trial of William Wallace, who was convicted of the murder of his wife

Tory MPs clamouring for a new relationship between Britain and Europe were given an amuse-bouche today when William Hague announced a review into the impact of the EU on everyday life. The Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons earlier that the review, which will report towards the end of 2014, ‘will present the evidence and analysis’, adding that it would be ‘for political parties to decide on their own policy recommendations’. The Foreign Office is briefing that the audit was not about identifying powers to grasp back from the EU, but many in the Conservative party certainly hope it’s the start of that process if nothing else. A study