David cameron

If the expected happens today, the political debate will rapidly move to whether Cameron should offer some concessions to Clegg to bolster his position. I hear there are two camps in Downing Street on this question with Steve Hilton a particularly ardent advocate of the no more concessions line.   Hilton’s position may surprise some but makes sense when you consider how his public service reform programme has, as Ben Brogan writes today, already been diluted for political reasons.    My current expectation is that there won’t be many concessions to Clegg. One well placed Tory told me last night that “Clegg picked the question and the date. He can

There was an eerie, eve-of-battle calm about today’s PMQs. The real bust-up isn’t due till Friday. The votes will be in, AV will be out, Clegg will be down and Huhne will be calculating his next move. Before today’s session everyone expected Labour to co-ordinate an ambush and try to light Cameron’s ever-combustible fuse. But the chamber was under-populated and the opposition hadn’t troubled to devise a battle-plan. Miliband carried the fight to the PM. With an assured forensic performance he methodically built up the case against Cameron as a promise-breaker, a question-dodger and a budget-slasher. Cameron dealt with the assault by absorbing rather than repulsing it. But at the

David Cameron became most animated on the Andrew Marr show this morning when the subject of Libya came up. It was clear that he remains passionately convinced that the course he has taken is the right thing to have done. The Prime Minister refused to comment on the Gaddafi regime’s claim that one of Gaddafi’s children had been killed in a Nato airstrike and wouldn’t be drawn on the question of whether the government considers the Gaddafi family legitimate targets. But given that, as Cameron himself noted, the Gaddafi family is running the military operation and ordering moves against civilians then they surely are legitimate targets. Also if the allied

The Royal wedding and gossip about super injunctions is rather dominating conversation at Westminster today. But there is still some politics going on. Patrick Wintour in The Guardian has the beginnings of the recriminations that will follow a No vote in the referendum. Relations between the Lib Dems and the Yes campaign are pretty bad at the moment. Clegg’s camp is happy to tell journalists about what they see as the myriad failings of the Yes campaign. They complain that the Yes campaign has been too slow on the draw, let the No side define the debate and failed to get any message across. The Yes campaign’s response to this

Aside from the “Calm down, dear” drama, there was something else worth noting from today’s PMQs: David Cameron trying for a calmer debate on the deficit. He admitted that his government is not really being that much more aggressive than Gordon Brown would have been. They’re cutting £8 for every £7 that Brown and Darling proposed for 2011-12, he said. It’s a line that Nick Clegg road-tested in his speech to the IPPR last week, and it represents a new and welcome strategy. To date, the rhetorical differences have been stark. The Tories have said: we’re the big bold cutters, Labour are deficit deniers. Labour has replied: your cuts are

Something has undoubtedly changed in the coalition in the past fortnight. Even those at the centre, who have been most loyal to the concept of coalition, are now happy to complain about the other side and its behaviour. But I’m still sceptical of all the early election speculation which has been sparked by Jackie Ashley’s very clever Guardian column. The main reason why I don’t think it will happen is the Cameron brand. Ever since David Cameron became leader of the Conservative party, the top of the party has believed that the protection of the Cameron brand is essential to electoral success. Cameron has too much personally invested in showing