David cameron

First, a little bit of history: as recently as last Christmas, I was a member of the Liberal Democrats. I can’t remember why I joined them, and I can’t remember why I left – which strongly implies that I put very little thought into either – but that’s a story for another time. As a member, I was part of a group within the party that wanted to pull it in a more classically liberal direction: a smaller state, lower taxes and greater personal freedom. The idea of a party committed to greater personal freedom, but not greater economic freedom, always struck me as equal parts ridiculous and confused. If

You may not have expected anything less, but it’s still encouraging to see the new government pay so much attention to Afghanistan. After David Cameron’s meeting with Hamid Karzai last week, no less than three ministers have visited the country today: William Hague, Liam Fox and Andrew Mitchell. And Whitehall’s number-crunchers are busy trying to find extra money for the mission. There’s a sense, though, that all the attention actually represents an underlying shift in focus. In his interview with the Telegraph today, Liam Fox is surprisingly forthright on Afghanistan, suggesting that our troops won’t hang around to fully rebuild the country: “What we want is a stable enough Afghanistan,

In tomorrow’s Spectator we have an interview with Graham Brady, tipped to be chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs – which David Cameron has just proposed to abolish in his 4.30pm meeting with MPs today. Technically, he is proposing to dilute its membership by including the payroll vote, thereby making it synonymous with the parliamentary party. So the backbenchers would not have a voice of their own. And Mr Brady’s position would be much less important. Here is an extract from tomorrow’s interview: In the era of Blair-style landslides, the likes and loves of backbench MPs mattered little: the government’s majority was big enough to force through most

One of the things that critics of the LibCon coalition keep coming back to is the question of what will happen in European, local and other elections. Will the two governing parties stand against each other? And how can they differentiate themselves when they support the same policies? To many, it seems like David Cameron and Nick Clegg are suggesting that we all walk backwards – odd, uncomfortable and unlikely to ensure progress. But why is this so odd? This kind of electioneering happens in many other countries. Take Denmark. There, a Liberal-Conservative government has been in power for almost a decade and across several elections, yet the two governing

There is a massive difference between rebellious talk and actual rebellion. But some of the language surrounding the 55 percent rule has been striking. When I told one senior MP that David Cameron had said on Sunday that he would whip this vote, the MP shot back defiantly, ‘you whip if you want to.’ David Davis’s intervention on the issue on the World at One was particularly significant. Having called the 55 percent rule ‘just a terrible formula for government’ it is hard to see how he can support the measure. It is also hard to imagine that a man who picks his fights so carefully would have marched so

David Cameron’s first broadcast interview from Downing Street contained two significant pieces of news. First, George Osborne will commission an independent audit of the public finances and state spending on Monday. I suspect that this audit will reveal that things are even worse than the official figures suggest. The political purpose of this audit will be to provide cover for the necessary cuts, to show that they are necessary because of Labour’s economic mismanagement. I also expect that the new Office of Budgetary Responsibility will provide a new, more cautious set of economic forecasts. The other piece of news was Cameron confirming that the vote on the 55 percent clause

Spare a thought for poor Theresa May. Judging by the reaction so far, she now faces the unenviable task of shouldering almost everyone’s preconceptions about Tory women in government – with Caroline Spelman, Baroness Warsi and the lower-profile Cheryl Gillan for back-up. She will no doubt continue to disappoint feminists and irritate reactionaries, and she will do so while responsible for the notoriously unwieldy Home Office, which has rapidly taken over from the Department of Health as the ministry where political careers go to die. Representation in politics does matter. It is not unreasonable to claim, as Katharine Viner did in Thursday’s Guardian, that “democracies simply don’t work unless they