Conservative party

At the start of this week, everyone was wondering how George Osborne was going to get out of trouble on tax credits, avoid a deeply damaging row over police cuts, all while still keeping to his surplus target. But thanks to the Office for Budget Responsibility upgrading its forecasts, Osborne was able to scrap the tax credit changes, protect the police budget and maintain his plan for a £10 billion surplus by the end of the parliament. But now, an even bigger challenge awaits Osborne: the EU renegotiation. I argue in my Sun column today that it is now the biggest threat to his chances of becoming Prime Minister. Boris

In the peroration of his statement today, George Osborne declared that the Tories were ‘the mainstream representatives of the working people of Britain.’ This is how he wants to position the Tories and it is why the tax credit changes had to go: they were getting in the way of the Tory attempt to rebrand themselves as the workers’ party. By ditching the tax credit changes, the Tories can now return to this theme—and can try and gain maximum political benefit from the national living wage. Osborne believes that with Jeremy Corbyn / John McDonnell leading the Labour party, the Tories have a real opportunity to pick up support from

David Cameron will set out his case for air strikes against IS in Syria to the Commons late next week. Cameron is, as I say in my Sun column today, immensely frustrated by the current British position of only bombing Islamic State in Iraq and not Syria. But he knows that it would be politically back breaking for him to lose another Commons vote on a matter of war and peace, so is proceeding cautiously.   But last night’s UN resolution has strengthened Cameron’s hand. Even before that, 30 Labour MPs were certain to back Cameron on this issue and another 30 were highly likely to. With a UN resolution

The House of Lords has tonight voted to give 16 and 17 year olds the vote in the EU referendum. This question will now go to the Commons, which can try and overturn it and send the bill back to the Lords—so-called ‘ping pong’. The government has already made clear tonight that it will try and overturn this amendment. But, intriguingly, some Tory MPs have told me that they think the Commons will actually back votes at 16 for the referendum when this comes back down to the Commons. If this does happen, this could delay the referendum as the Electoral Commission argue that extra time will be needed to

Usually when the Prime Minister offers a backbencher their first ministerial post, they trip over their shoelaces in the rush to accept. Not so Tracey Crouch. Even though she had been waiting for five years to be promoted – having previously been considered too rebellious – and even though she had always wanted to be Sports Minister, she hesitated when the call finally came after the General Election to offer her just that. Instead of accepting at once, she told the Prime Minister she wasn’t sure. The reason she gave David Cameron was one many women shy away from when discussing their careers. ‘I said I wasn’t sure because I

The kindest way to treat your enemies is to hate them. Hate them and you don’t understand them or their appeal. Hate them and you cannot see their own doubts and divisions. The opponents of Conservatives see them as greed-driven monsters, concerned only with helping the rich and middle-class. They are so tawdry, so lacking in idealism, they make you hate your own country. ‘There has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse,’ sighed Alan Bennett recently, before going on to accuse the Tories of creating a one-party state (a charge which astonished everyone who 1)

A running sore in the Tory party is the way in which school funding is allocated. Under the current arrangements, a school in a rural area receives less money per pupil than one in a town or city, and this causes a great deal of resentment. It means that schools in the best-funded areas get £6,297 per head, but those at the bottom of the list receive just £4,208 per pupil. Conservative MPs have held repeated meetings with ministers about this arrangement, but got nowhere before the election because the areas they were worried about were more likely to be safer territory for the Tories. They had a particularly grumpy meeting with

The Housing and Planning Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons this afternoon, and though Labour has been making angry noises about it, it won’t encounter as many problems as it might have done. This might ultimately be a bad thing for the Tories, though. The rebellion that won’t happen would have been on the right-to-buy for housing associations, which the Tories put in their manifesto, but which a number of their own MPs were deeply worried about. Housing associations were so worried about the impact of the government legislating to force them to sell off their homes that they made a voluntary offer to ministers to

Sir Gerald Kaufman is Jewish, which he seems to use as an excuse to make claims that would, ordinarily, be denounced as anti-Semitic. He has made this a trademark of his career but on Tuesday night, Sir Gerald – now Father of the House of Commons – outdid himself. In an extraordinary speech he allegedly discussed the influence of ‘Jewish money’ over the Conservative party. He also claimed that, according to an email he had received, ‘half’ of the Palestinian knife attacks in Israel over recent weeks have been ‘fabricated’ as an excuse to execute Palestinians, and that the small-circulation weekly newspaper The Jewish Chronicle has biased the Conservatives. Speaking at an event organised by

George Osborne and John McDonnell went head-to-head at Treasury Questions today and one topic predictably dominated: tax credits. There was a charged atmosphere in the Commons as the shadow chancellor explained ‘the Chancellor has a choice before him’ and outlined his proposal for reversing the planned cuts to tax credits. The plan differs somewhat from Osborne’s: ‘He can push on with the tax giveaways to multinational corporations. He can press on with tax cuts to the wealthiest few in inheritance tax that he announced in his summer budgets. Or he can reverse those tax breaks for the few and instead go for a less excessive surplus target in 2019-20 and be in

There has been an interesting response in the Tory party to Heidi Allen’s speech in which she criticised the tax credit changes. Many MPs are themselves worried about the changes, and didn’t disagree with what she had to say. But what has really riled them is the way in which she appeared to dismiss the Chamber as largely pointless – and that she spoke against the cuts having supported them once and then went onto vote with the government again on the motion before the House last night (though to be fair, she explained that she wouldn’t vote for the Opposition Day motion because she disagreed with its wording). One

‘I’ve been trying flipping hard to avoid doing it,’ said Heidi Allen today as she started her maiden speech. She hadn’t seen the point of speeches in the Chamber, she explained, because most people in the Commons were already wedded to their side, and there wasn’t much point in her adding to those speeches as they changed no minds. But the reason she had decided to give it during the Opposition Day debate on tax credits ‘because today I can sit on my hands no longer’. She wanted to criticise the tax credit cuts. She wanted to intervene before it was ‘too late’ to stop the changes to tax credits,

Tory MPs had a briefing meeting today with George Osborne which a number of them used to press the Chancellor about the tax credit cuts. Peter Aldous raised concerns about the changes, which which lower the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises, and was supported by colleagues. But though it was quite clear to the Chancellor that a large number of MPs from across the party – not just troublemakers – were seriously worried about the changes, he didn’t give anything away about any changes he could make. Instead, the case he made to MPs was that