David cameron

David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Spring Forum was one of the most Conservative speeches he has given in a long time. It was an address that was meant to reassure the party during what looks set to to be this government’s most difficult year. The Tory leader opened with a list of policy pledges delivered and they were all distinctively Conservative policies: making work pay, the EU referendum lock, teaching British history in schools, freezing council tax, capping immigration and doubling the operational allowance. There was further crowd pleasing material in a substantial section of the speech which attacked AV. Cameron sought to present the Tories as the moral,

Everyone knows that a media narrative is a difficult thing to change. So No.10 must be annoyed that so many newspapers, from the Telegraph to the Independent, are suggesting that David Cameron’s response to the Libya crisis has been “embarrassing,” and rejected by the US. But the Prime Minister would do well to stay the course and ignore the media for a number of reasons. First, just because US Defence Secretary Robert Gates is sceptical about a policy does not mean it is wrong. Somehow, the US Defence Secretary’s words are now taken as gospel in the British media and the PM is meant to repent immediately. Why? So what

I’ve spent ten minutes reading the same passage and still don’t understand what it means. It comes from Harriet Harman, quoted in the Independent, criticising the government’s Libya strategy: “The response to the terrible events in Libya has been a shambles. The key to their shambolic response lies in their ideology. If your perspective is that government is a bad thing and you want less of it, you’re not going to be on the front foot when the power of government is exactly what is needed.” Do you get it? Is the Labour MP saying that her party would have harnessed the power of the state, principally the military, and

Nick Clegg’s speech in Luton today on extremism is a challenge to large parts of David Cameron’s remarks on the subject in Munich just last month. Indeed, even the venue of the speech can be seen as a rebuke to Cameron who was attacked for giving a speech on Islamic extremism on the same day that the English Defence League was marching in Luton. Cameron’s speech, which was one of the best of his premiership, argued that ‘the ideology of extremism is the problem’ and that terrorism’s ‘root lies in the existence of this extremist ideology’. In the key section of the speech, Cameron declared: “As evidence emerges about the

It was Monty Python without the jokes. The focus of PMQs today veered surreally between crisis in north Africa and early swimming pool closures in Leeds. The session opened in Security Council mode with Ed Miliband politely asking the PM to brief us on the humanitarian disaster evolving in Libya’s border-zone. Cameron went into his statesman-of-the-year routine and announced that HMS York had docked in Benghazi with medical supplies.   At such moments the imperial ghosts of the Commons seem momentarily reawakened. Ed Miliband sounds like some Victorian stooge asking the Foreign Secretary to reassure the nation that an uprising in a far-flung oriental possession is being energetically suppressed. Having

The government’s game of catch-up on Libya continues apace. David Cameron came to the Commons to update the House on the current situation. His main message was now that we have the vast majority of our citizens out, we can have a policy. Indeed, the government is today openly admitting that it was hamstrung last week by the continuing presence of a large number of British nationals in Tripoli. Cameron told the House that ‘we do not in any way rule out the use of military assets’; a dramatic shift from the tone of his entourage on last week’s trip. At the moment, the main military option on the table