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David cameron

Friday

Daniel Korski

Are the Tories ready for joined-up government?

The Civil Service is readying itself for a new government. The BBC has already reported a discussion of efficiency savings among senior officials. In another part of Whitehall, work is a foot on how to set up a National Security Council should the Tories win. I have in the last few weeks been interviewing ex-ministers and senior officials as research for a RUSI paper, due out soon after the election, on how to improve the government’s security set-up. Traipsing around various departments, a number of interesting conclusions have come to light: – Conservative ideas for an NSC are not the same as the government’s NSID committee, however much ministers say

David Blackburn

Darling in cloud cuckoo land

Labour can’t lay a finger on the Tories over national insurance. And desperation has morphed into hysteria. Alistair Darling has just told Sky News that David Cameron contradicted George Osborne and that the Tory plan is “unravelling”. “He is going to have to find deeper cuts, some experts are saying tens of thousands of jobs will go,” he said. “He’s had to go on to say that he’s going to have to cut which will mean job losses.” Now, Cameron said: “Even after our plans for public sector pay and pensions, benefits, ID cards – yes, it’s still not enough. I accept that.” But that does not contradict George Osborne,

Peter Hoskin

Cameron is Mr Reasonable on Today

Another day, another party leader on the Today Programme.  This time it was David Cameron, and his interrogator was Evan Davis.  My quick capsule review would be that the Tory leader did quite well, sounding measured and reasonable for most of the twenty minutes – which is certainly better than Brown managed yesterday.  But for more, read on… Unsurprisingly, Davis led on this morning’s FT interview with Peter Gershon, the Tories’ efficiency advisor, who has fleshed out some of the party’s spending plans.  This was the most aggressive segment of the interview, with Davis asking how many job losses would be incurred by a “£2 billion saving on public sector

Thursday

Martin Bright

Why Labour Needs To Be Much Fleeter of Foot

It is difficult to fault Cameron’s idea of a national volunteer force. While the Labour Party was forced to spend today defending the National Insurance hike, the Tories were able to seize the intiative with a genuinely far-sighted proposal. All the more galling for the government that this idea has been rattling around in Labour circles for at least a year. Cameron has stolen Labour’s clothes on this just as he did on co-operatives. David Lammy will be seething. His ideas for compulsory civic service were promoted in the pages of Prospect a year ago. He has been lobbying within the Labour Party for the policy for considerably longer. Unfortunately,

Daniel Korski

Win one for the Gipper

A Cameron government has the potential to change Britain – but not much else beside.  A Tory loss, however, could change much more. The Cameron Tories are a bellwether for Conservative movements in a number of countries, including the US. If they succeed, they will prove a powerful model for many moderate Republicans who believe their party is in an earlier post-Major phase – angry, divided and negative. If David Cameron fails to defeat Gordon Brown, few Republicans will look across to their British cousins for inspiration. The party will eschew any modernising project for a while longer and stick to their equivalent of IDS. In this scenario, the Republicans

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hope springs eternal

The Tory press conference this morning, launching their plan for National Citizen Service, shows how they hope to run a two track campaign. On the one hand, they want to be hammering Labour over their plans to increase National Insurance — Cameron called it a ‘a recovery killer, an economy killer, a job killer’ and said that Labour wanted people to pay ‘taxes for government waste’. On the other, they want to be presenting hopeful, optimistic ideas like a National Citizen Service. This fusion campaigning enables the Tories both to be attacking Labour and presenting themselves as the party that is offering a positive alternative. National Citizen Service is very

Wednesday

Martin Bright

What the Party Leaders Are Saying

I really enjoyed Anne McElvoy’s Standard column today. She is absolutely right to identify the false notes of day one of the election campaign. Gordon Brown really was talking nonsense about his ordinary middle-class background and David Cameron should certainly drop the glottal stop. She is right to say that neither has any clarity of vision yet. For what it’s worth I agree with Kevin Maguire agreeing me that Labour looked more confident on day one and that the Tories seemed nervous. On day two, Cameron was beginning to get into his stride and Brown’s interview with NIck Robinson was awful. The wall-to-wall media coverage is almost all completely absorbing,

David Blackburn

Bolton’s nobody’s backyard

Fresh from a turbulent plane journey, David Cameron is stalking around Bolton. As Pete notes, Warburtons is Bolton’s family owned bakery and its endorsement may prove significant in a region of marginals. The party that wins Bolton North East wins the election – that has been the case in every election since 1950 except in 1979. Ruth Kelly’s old haunt, Bolton West, is no Labour stronghold either: her replacement, Julie Hilling, is defending a nominal majority of 2,064. These two seats come 115 and 114 respectively on the Tories’ target list. To the north lies Rossendale and Darwen, where boundary changes have benefitted the Tories for once; it is 77th

Peter Hoskin

How the Tories are decontaminating their associations with Big Business

Over the past couple of years, Big Business (as in, “being in hock with…”) has been deployed almost as an insult against the Tories.  But they’ve now used their campaign on national insurance to turn their business associations into an advantage.  Exhibit A: the above picture (via PoliticsHome) of Cameron’s visit to the Warbutons HQ in Bolton, where the company owner has come out in support of Tory proposals.  It sends the message that Big Business doesn’t just mean the financial services, and a lot of people, in a lot of regions, rely heavily upon it for their livelihoods.  And too right, too.  Expect plenty more like this from the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Straight out of the Brown textbook

What was probably Brown’s last PMQs performance as Prime Minister was classic Brown. He answered questions that hadn’t been asked, dodged ones that had, rattled off list after list of tractor production figures and mentioned Lord Ashcroft at every opportunity. But, as he has in recent months, he had some one liners to get off including the jab that Cameron ‘was the future once’, an echo of Cameron’s put down of Blair.   But that line couldn’t disguise the fact that Cameron got the better of Brown. Cameron’s speed on his feet just makes him better in this setting. His response to the heckle that the business leader he was

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 7 April 2010

Stay tuned for live coverage of PMQs. 1200: We’re about to start.  Brown is flanked by Harriet Harman and Jim Murphy.  Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling and Alan Johnson are also on the front bench.  The heavy hitters are out in force… 1201: And here we go, for what could be Brown’s last ever PMQs as Prime Minister.  He starts, as usual, with condolences for fallen soldiers. 1202: The first question is as plantlike as they come: will Brown take £6 billion “out of the economy”?  Brown spins the usual dividing line about investing in frontline services, adding that the Tories would risk a “double dip” recession.  Hm. 1204: Massive cheer

Daniel Korski

Goodbye world, see you in a few weeks (for a proper EU dust-up)

With plenty of domestic issues to debate, the election campaign promises to see little intrusion from the outside world – barring Russia invading a small neighbouring country, a terrorist attack or another financial meltdown. Nor will Britain say much to the world in the next couple of weeks; ministers will be be represented at international meetings, for example in NATO, by senior officials, and Britain’s diplomats have been told to keep quiet. As soon as the election is over, however, there will be plenty of action. The Cabinet Office is busy planning a quick update of the National Security Strategy, and then will come a slightly longer Security and Defence

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Inauthenticity, meet skewer

We’re not even one day into the election campaign proper, and already the internet is fulfilling its role as the Exposer-in-Chief of spin, deceits and slip-ups aplenty.  I direct you towards Guido’s post on Brown’s – ahem – impromptu support at St Pancras station earlier.  Or Left Foot Forward’s account of the omissions from Cameron’s list of The Great Ignored.  Or Sam Coates’s tweets about the #stagemanagedelection.  And there’s plenty more where they came from. In a campaign where inauthenticity is going to get skewered at every turn, politicians clearly need to go about things differently.  But there are all too many signs that they’re stuck in the old, familiar

Daniel Korski

The Tunnel Ridge Fault election

At times the chasm between Britain’s political parties is as great as the San Andreas Fault. Sometimes the difference is more like a small rift, a matter of tone not policy. In this year’s election, the difference between the parties is somewhere in between, like the lesser-known Tunnel Ridge Fault in Eastern California. In part, the appearance of only minor differences may explain why the polls are showing such different things; some predict that Labour will hang on to power, others that the Tories will be able to win. But campaigning will bring out the differences between the parties – and the party leaders – into full view to an

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Behind enemy lines

Well, well Gordon Brown has started his election campaign in a constituency that is notionally a Tory seat. Rochester and Strood is being fought for the first time at this election but the invaluable UK Polling Report tells us that the Tories would have just won this seat in 2005. I suspect that Brown has headed to Kent on the first day of the campaign in an attempt to show that Labour haven’t written off the south east despite coming fifth there in the European elections and that Labour is still a national party. David Cameron is off to Birmingham and Yorkshire and the shadow Cabinbet are fanning out across

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron launches the ‘modern Conservative alternative’

Reaganesque was the word that sprang to mind watching Cameron’s launch event. Standing on the terrace of County Hall with Parliament behind him, providing the snappers with some great images, Cameron spoke about the ‘modern Conservative alternative’ to five more years of Gordon Brown. The implicit message was youth and vigour. This was one of those occasions where the visuals matter more than what was actually said. The no-notes speech contained a string of attacks on Labour’s waste and the prospect of five more years of Brown. But Cameron was careful to sandwich this with some optimism. At the start he said that a vote for the Tories was a

Martin Bright

The Inter-Generational Election

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has kicked off the election campaign with possibly the most depressing article I have ever read about British politics. Jetting off to the States for an academic engagement, the old curmudgeon says he feels no regret at missing an election in which he has lost interest.  This say more about the author of the piece than the election, which promises to be the most fascinating in my adult life. But then I am nearly twenty years younger than Mr Wheatcroft. His central argument is that the Labour and Conservative messages are uninspiring. The Labour government will admit that the situation is dire, but claim it would be worse

Peter Hoskin

Now’s the time

If there’s anything we don’t already know about today, then I’m struggling to find it.  The election will be declared for 6th May.  Brown will make a pitch which bears close resemblance to his interview in the Mirror today: “We have come so far. Do we want to throw this all away?”  Cameron will say that the Tories are fighting this election for the “Great Ignored”.  Clegg will claim that the Lib Dems represent “real fairness and real change”.  A hundred news helicopters will buzz around Westminster.  A thousand blog-posts (including this one) will have headlines to the effect of “And so it begins…”.  And we’ll all read the Guardian’s

Monday

Daniel Korski

Have a gay time

Chris Grayling’s erstwhile view that Britain’s inn-keepers can interpret anti-discrimination legislation as they see fit belongs where he originally found it: in the biggot bin. There is no place for anti-gay views in British politics, or the Conservative Party. This is not just a question of electioneering — ie currying favour with a symbolically important segment of the electorate – but is a matter of decency. Homosexuals have as much place in modern Britain as everyone else. A worrying part of the airing of Grayling’s (now-disavowed) comments is that it has given Labour an excuse to tarnish the Conservatives with an anti-homosexual brush. Grayling’s words had barely hit the airwaves when the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The true cost of Brown’s debt binge

When Alistair Daring admitted last week that there would indeed be job losses arising from the proposed National Insurance hike, it would have struck Gordon Brown and Ed Balls like root canal surgery. This blows wide open the main part of Brown’s election deceit: asking the public to look at the advantages of the borrowing, and not contemplate the flip side to the debt coin. Not to ask where the repayments will come from, or the impact of those repayments on the jobs of the future. No wonder Darling is today being made to claim the opposite. The grim truth is that every job “protected” now, due to debt, will