Conservative party

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The First 2012 Debate

Will be held next spring at the Reagan Library. So soon! What joy! Andrew Sullivan notices that Hugh Hewitt thinks it’s terrible that the questions will be asked by “mainstream journalists”. Hewitt wants “different kinds of journalist” to set the agenda. By different he means the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity Mark Levin and Michael Medved. Andrew complains, hyperbolically to be sure, that this is “like Stalin being grilled by the Politburo”. But actually, I would be interested in watching a Presidential debate moderated by the likes of Limbaugh and Levin and co. Lord knows, there will be plenty of opportunities for Wolf Blitzer and Brian Williams and the

Peter Hoskin

The Harman bounce

I kid, I kid – but it’s still striking that Labour are pushing ahead in the polls as soon as Ed Miliband takes his paternity leave. According to today’s YouGov poll, they are now 5 points ahead of the Tories: their biggest lead since 2007, and an escalation of the 2-point advantage they recorded in a couple of polls earlier this week. The question, of course, is whether this is a momentary blip, or representative of wider discontent over tuition fee rises and the like. In any case, here’s the graph: 

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 17 November 2010

VERDICT: Harriet Harman’s questions must have looked quite clever on paper: a heavy emphasis on police cuts, followed by a quick dose of indigation over the vanity photographers. But, in reality, they were breezily repelled by Cameron. All he had to do was cite the words of Alan Johnson and refer to a list of Labour’s own dodgy hires. By the time Harman attacked the cost of elected police commissioners, leaving Cameron to stand up for greater local democracy and accountability, it was clear who had won this bout: the Prime Minister, by some distance. Although, as Andrew Neil and Tim Montgomerie have noted, the absence of any talk about

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

The divide over the Guantanamo settlements

After being pre-empted by the morning newspapers, Ken Clarke’s statement this afternoon contained nothing that was unexpected. “We’ve paid the money so we can move on,” he said. And he went on to emphasise that the Guantanamo payouts are not an admission of culpability, but rather all about sparing the public’s money and the spooks’ time. More striking were some of the responses from Clarke’s coalition stablemates. Take Tom Brake, the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton and Wallington, who suggested that the government wouldn’t have made the payments if the UK didn’t have a case to answer. Or Andrew Tyrie, who claimed that this underlines “a period of what appears

Peter Hoskin

A royal wedding bounce?

Slap all kinds of health warnings on this, but – in view of speculation that the Wills and Kate nuptials might work in the coalition’s favour – I thought CoffeeHousers might like to see what happened to the the Tory government’s poll rating in 1981, around when Prince Charles married Diana. So here’s a graph I’ve put together from Ipsos MORI’s figures. The dotted line represents the date of the wedding: PoliticsHome suggests that the “royal wedding worked wonders for Thatcher” – but, on the basis of the above, I’m not so sure. It’s worth nothing, though, that the Tories surged ahead of Labour as soon as the Falklands War

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Bonfire of the vanity photographers

Today is a very good day to bury bad news. Prince William and Kate Midddleton’s engagement is going to dominate the news and the front pages for at least the next 24 hours. Almost any other story can be slipped out unnoticed in the current circumstances. So it was a convenient time for Downing Street to announce that the photographer and the videographer would be moved off the public payroll and back onto the Tory one. This means that their work will not be able to appear on any government websites. Downing Street’s correction is welcome. But in reality, the damage has already been done by this story. It will

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Cameron: it’s all about the economy

A minor landmark for David Cameron tonight, as he delivers his first Mansion House speech as Prime Minister. Like occupants of No.10 before him, he will use the occasion to talk about foreign affairs – although the result may be rather more like the Chancellor’s annual speech at the same venue. Judging by the extracts that have been released so far, Cameron’s overall emphasis will be on the economy, and on Britain’s fiscal standing. As he will say, “we need to sort out the economy if we are to carry weight in the world.” Cameron develops this point by claiming that, “whenever I meet foreign leaders, they do not see

Peter Hoskin

General Well-Being is back

Spectators might smile wryly at the news that the government is to devise a method for tracking the well-being of the nation. This idea of General Well-Being (GWB) was common currency in the early days of the Cameron project, when the Tory leader was going all out to “detoxify the brand”. But it soon hit a downturn-sized snag. Any talk of happiness might have sounded a little complacent and New Age-y in the face of job losses and bank bailouts. And so the Tories backed away from GWB, and it was relegated to little more than branding for the coffee stalls at Tory conference. It was quite a surprise to

Peter Hoskin

ConservativeHome goes global

A post about the blogosphere, I know – but I thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a link to the new ConservativeHome USA site that launched in the past hour. It is, of course, a sister site to the UK’s very own ConservativeHome which, under the thoughtful editorship of Tim Montgomerie, has done so much to clarify the often hazy ground between the internet, politics and grassroots activism. Tim will, of course, be involved with the American project, but it’s also got its own editorial team in the form of Ryan Streeter and Natalie Gonnella. The posts on Day One gives us a good sense of what we can expect in future:

Sunday

James Forsyth

Laws and the coalition

David Laws’ eagerly awaited account of the coalition negotiations contains some great lines. Peter Mandelson’s declaration on being told of the Lib Dem’s desire for a mansions that ‘surely the rich have suffered enough already’ is classic. While William Hague’s description of the Conservative party as an ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide’ is a candidate for the dictionary of quotations. But politically the thing that struck me about it most was what it tells us about Ed Balls. Balls had worked with Gordon Brown for years and had been one of the most ardent Brownite. Yet it was Balls who effectively pulled the plug on the idea of a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

IDS shows how arguments are won

For years, I have complained that the Conservatives have timidly stayed within Labour’s intellectual parameters, arguing that they need “permission” to make certain arguments and need to stay within the limits of what the public find acceptable. Such intellectual timidity confined them to opposition: they can never win, playing by Labour rules. Iain Duncan Smith is breaking free of this. It may be rash to predict it now, but I believe he is on the brink of a breakthrough in the way that welfare is regarded in Britain. This victory in a battle of ideas could be the greatest single blow against poverty in a generation. The extent of this

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The Gove reforms grow even more radical

Local authorities are already doing their utmost to block the coalition’s schools reforms, so just how will they respond to this story on the front of today’s FT? It reveals how Michael Gove is planning to sideline local authorities from the funding of all state schools – not just free schools and academies. The idea is that state schools will get cash directly from the state, without any need for the council middlemen that currently control the system. Here’s an FT graphic that captures the change: The money would be allocated to schools in proportion to the number of pupils they have, and headmasters would have much more freedom in

Friday

James Forsyth

The pledge divide

Over at the FT’s Westminster blog, Alex Barker asks why it is that David Cameron’s expensive personal pledge on pensioner benefits has survived the spending review while Nick Clegg’s personal pledge to scrap tuition fees, which would have cost roughly the same amount, has been spectacularly ditched. As Alex argues, one reason is that Clegg himself was not particularly attached to his pledge on fees. Indeed, he had tried to change the policy several times in opposition. The other is that George Osborne, who is the Tories’ chief election strategist as well as the Chancellor, is determined to protect the Cameron brand. When one right-winger made the case to him

Peter Hoskin

Ten things you need to know about the welfare White Paper

I’ve sifted through yesterday’s welfare White Paper, and thought CoffeeHousers might appreciate a ten-point guide to its contents. This is by no means the entire picture – and some of it will be familiar from past Coffee House posts – but hopefully it should capture the broad sweep of IDS’s reforms: 1) The problem. Fundamentally, the issue is that there are a lot of people stuck on out-of-work benefits: around 5 million at the last count. This means different things for different groups. For the Treasury and taxpayers it contributes towards an unwieldy working-age welfare budget that has increased by 45 percent, in real terms, over the past decade –

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The Lib Dems are spared by idiotic students

The violence at today’s student protest is, politically, a boon to the coalition. The story now is not the Lib Dems breaking their word but the storming of Millbank. The violence will also have cost the no-fees cause much public sympathy, we don’t like attempts at aggressive direct action in this country. There are questions that need to be answered after today, why were the cops so unprepared for the protest turning violent? I crossed through the protest at lunchtime and then it was quite clear that there was potential for trouble. I’m also bemused as to why it is taking so long to put a stop to the violence

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Big Society conundrum

The children’s minister Tim Loughton is in danger of having ‘gaffe-prone’ become his suffix. After rather putting his foot in it at conference by suggesting that the policy George Osborne had just announced on child benefit could be revisited, he has now suggested that not even ministers know what Cameron’s big idea, the ‘Big Society’ actually is. He told a dinner last night: “The trouble is that most people don’t know what the Big Society really means, least of all the unfortunate ministers who have to articulate it.” A friend of Loughton tells me that this was meant as a joke. But the problem is that it cuts far too

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 10 November 2010

VERDICT: Earlier today, I wrote that the coalition “has few better defenders of its cause than Nick Clegg”. You wouldn’t have guessed it from this PMQs performance. Harman had him on the back foot over tuition fees from the off, and he struggled to give concise, clear answers in return. A pity, because Clegg is right when he says that the coalition has a better policy than Labour’s messy graduate tax – yet there was too much waffle, and too little directness, from him today. The deputy Prime Minister was better when he blazed with anger over Labour’s hypocrisy. But, on the whole, this was a bout to cheer the

Tuesday

James Forsyth

What about Whig history?

Simon Schama, who is advising the government on drawing up a new history section of the national curriculum, has an essay in The Guardian today setting out why and what children should learn about our ‘island story’. Schama highlights Thomas Becket’s clash with Henry II, the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt, Charles the First’s execution, the establishment of the British Raj in India, the opium wars and the Irish question, as things that every school kid should be taught about. But at the risk of being too crudely Whiggish, the most important thing is surely that pupils learn how Britain became a democracy. It will help people understand the

Peter Hoskin

The new welfare consensus

The New Statesman’s George Eaton has already homed in on the key passage from James Purnell’s article in the Times (£) today, but it’s worth repeating here. According to the former welfare minister, he pitched something like Iain Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit to Gordon Brown, and the reception it received catalysed his departure from government: “Before I resigned from the Cabinet, I proposed a similar plan to Mr Brown. But he was scared that there would be losers, and his refusal to give me any answer made me think that there was no point in staying inside the Government to try to influence him.” This is of more than simple

Monday

James Forsyth

Delay in Oldham is good news for the coalition

The longer we go before a date is set for the Oldham East and Saddleworth general election rerun, the better it is for the coalition. This delay allows the Tories to give the Lib Dems a head start; Nick Clegg’s party can pour resources into the seat while the Tories do very little until a date is set. There will be a Tory candidate in this election, but I doubt that a Tory victory would be a cause for celebration at CCHQ or in Number 10. The Tory leadership knows that a bad result for the Lib Dems would make their coalition partners jumpy and make it harder for the