David cameron

David Cameron’s speech yesterday was one of the most important he has given as Prime Minister. I’d urge you to read the whole text just to see how absurd some of the opportunistic, party political attacks on it have been. As I say in The Mail on Sunday, they’ll be a huge amount of resistance in Whitehall to the course that the PM is charting. But he is surely right that state money and recognition should not be going to any group that does not promote integration and believe in the liberal values on which this country is based. To do anything else would be fundamentally illiberal. A lot of

As shocks go, Politician Uses the Correct Statistic is not particularly electric stuff. But I was struck nonetheless by Cameron’s claim in his speech earlier that, “we still have the fourth largest military budget in the world.” You see, Gordon Brown used to exaggerate this figure by various sneaky methods – and so, by his account, we’d be second in the military spending league table, rather than around fifth. Whereas Cameron had it spot on. Here’s what the latest top ten looks like, going off the best measurement that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute knows (see their explanation here): On the face of it, this would appear to be

I wish I could tell you that the main topic of conversation in Westminster today is Egypt and the future of the Middle East. But it isn’t. It is those Sally Bercow photos.  But if it wasn’t the picture of the Speaker’s wife naked but for a sheet that MPs were talking about it would be IPSA, the expenses body, following the publication of their claims for September and October. MPs detest IPSA. They believe, with good reason, it to be arrogant and inefficient. So strong is MPs’ opinion on this front, that David Cameron told Tory MPs late last year that if IPSA hadn’t sorted itself out by April,

One yawn every minute. That’s how PMQs felt today. Foreign affairs dominated the session as Ed Miliband and the Prime Minister exchanged lofty words about the Cairo demonstrations and the spread of democracy around the world. Doubtless they felt they struck a suitably elevated tone but to the viewers they came across as a pair of prep school smart-alecs trying to sound like great statesmen disposing of liberated peoples after the fall of empires. Egypt and Afghanistan were both treated to a torrent of high-minded vacuities. David Cameron found the demonstrations ‘incredibly moving.’ Ed Miliband was impressed by the sight of ‘hundreds of thousands of people facing overwhelming odds to

A weird, sprawling kind of speech from David Cameron in Davos this morning. It started off on an unusually, if expectedly, gloomy note: all talk of Europe’s debt-induced decline in the face of competition from India, China and Brazil. And he emphasised, of course, that Britain would, and should, stick to its current trajectory of “tough” deficit reduction. But it’s where it went from there that was more striking still. Cameron contrasted his position with that of “the pessimists”. These people, he claimed, have a charter which includes propositions such as, “we in Europe are incapable of solving our debt and deficit problems,” and, “we’re attached to liberal values that

There’s a febrile atmosphere in Westminster tonight. The coalition is poised for a frontal assault on the privileges of the House of Lords and there is an expectation that today’s dramatic developments in the phone hacking saga are the beginning of something not the end. The coalition’s actions on the Lords have been prompted by Labour’s filibustering of the AV bill. But there’s no guarantee that it will succeed. First, it has no majority in the upper house. Second, a lot of Tories peers are worried about just how many Clegg inspired changes to the constitution the coalition is pushing through. On the phone hacking front, there’s a sense that a dam broke today: the rogue