David cameron

Senior Tories are saying that there won’t be many attacks on Ed Miliband from the party’s big hitters at conference. They are concerned that aggressive assaults on him could win him public sympathy. But both Cameron and Osborne respond to one of the central arguments of Miliband’s speech in their pre-conference turns. Cameron writes in the Mail that ‘the role for government is not to single out good and bad industries, it’s to make it easy as possible for all industries, all businesses, to grow, invest and take people on.’ While as the Telegraph reports, Osborne ‘scorns Mr Miliband’s suggestion this week that the Government should distinguish between “producers” and

The great pastime of Tory MPs is leadership speculation. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s in? Who’s out? Who succeeds Cameron? Simple, says Toby Young in our cover piece this week, it has to be Boris. Toby’s confidence in Boris is such that he once bet Nigella Lawson £15,000 that blond bombshell would lead the party one day. Subscribers can read about that story here, and non-subscribers can subscribe to the Spectator for just a £1 an issue. In the meantime, here’s a cover piece from the archives on this same theme: Boris is hot on Dave’s heels. Boris must wait his turn, Fraser Nelson, The Spectator, 10 May 2008 The

A showdown with the EU may come sooner than we expect. The European Commission has today threatened to sue David Cameron’s government unless it starts letting EU citizens come here to claim benefits. Until now, any EU citizen could live here, but if they couldn’t find work, they were not entitled to claim benefits. This was widely accepted. Today, the EU has issued a statement saying: ‘Under UK law, certain social security benefits – namely Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, State Pension Credit, Income-based Allowance for Jobseekers, Income-based Employment and Support Allowance – are only granted to persons with a “right to reside” in the UK. Other EU nationals have to

Ed Miliband has just finished an hour and twenty minute long question and answer session. The audience was meant to be a mix of the general public and Labour members, but there seemed to be far more Labour members than anybody else. It would be easy to take the Michael out of the whole event. The questioner who walked out as the Labour leader was trying to answer his question, Miliband’s tendency to stare into the bleachers with his hand above his eyes and the technical glitches. One could also, rightly, say that the vast majority of questions were classic lefty fare. But there was the glimmer of something important

The exodus from Liverpool has begun, following Ed Miliband’s speech. This means that there will be scant coverage of the events that occur hereafter. Shadow Health Secretary John Healey recognised this and gave an interview to this morning’s Guardian in order to highlight the speech he will make tomorrow. Healey is clear, as Ed Miliband was earlier this afternoon, that the government’s NHS reforms are a costly disaster and betrayal of the British people. Healey adds that they also threaten David Cameron, who has made “promises he is now breaking”. It’s good political posturing on a ‘Home’ issue for Labour. There is no indication that Healey will say anything new

Douglas Alexander has just told Andrew Neil that he will campaign for Scotland to stay in the union with ‘anybody else who wants to join me’. This opens up a difference with Alexander’s normally close political ally, Jim Murphy. Murphy, Scottish Secretary in the last Labour government and currently shadow defence secretary, recently declared that he wouldn’t share a platform with David Cameron during any referendum campaign. When asked about this earlier in the day, Alexander said that he was more interested in making the argument about the value of the union rather than arranging the chairs. But Alexander does seem to hold a different position than Murphy on the

David Cameron’s speech to the United Nations yesterday was, among other things, a defence of liberal intervention. It reminded numerous observers of Tony Blair’s famous speech in Chicago in, the setting for the so-called Chicago Doctrine that guided his foreign policy thereafter. The Spectator said surprisingly little about Blair’s speech, perhaps because it wrote the following 5 days before the speech was made on 22 April 1999. End this liberal war, The Spectator, 17 April 1999 We can now see how liberals start wars, and wage them. First, they notice on television that people are being ill-treated or murdered. The victims have to be European, for then President Clinton and

David Cameron’s much trailed speech to the UN is tinged with frustration. He will say, “You can sign every human rights declaration in the world but if you stand by and watch people being slaughtered in their own country, when you could act then what are those signatures really worth? The UN has to show that we can be – not just united in condemnation, but – united in action acting in a way that lives up to the UNs founding principles and meets the needs of people everywhere.” That seems to be a fairly thinly veiled reference to the global community’s indifference to oppression in Syria. The lack of action

One of the most striking things about Lib Dem conference has been how up for a scrap over Europe the party’s ministers are. Every single Lib Dem Cabinet minister has, over the past few days, ruled out any attempt to repatriate powers from Brussels. Given that the Conservative party wouldn’t forgive David Cameron not attempting to use any new treaty negotiation to try and regain control of various issues (see David’s blog from earlier), this puts the Prime Minister in quite a dilemma. Personally, I expect Cameron will go for the repatriation of powers. The AV referendum showed that when he has to choose between really angering his party or