David cameron

Stay tuned for live coverage of PMQs from 1200. 1202: And we’re off.  John Maples asks Brown to clarify our objectives in Afghanistan.  Brown says that “since 2001, our main objective has been to stop terrorism”. 1204: In response to a question from Anne Begg, Brown says he is “committed to increasing the diversity of Pariament”. 1205: Cameron now.  He asks whether to maintain support for the Afghanistan mission, we’ve got to “make more visible progress”.  Brown repeats his point about “tackling terrorism,” and that the mission also aims to bring “social and economic development” in the country.  He adds that the Government will review “equipment and resources” after the

Kitty Ussher’s article in today’s Evening Standard made me think again about the consequences of the MPs’ expenses scandal. Kitty will be leaving us at the next election because she wants to put her family first (a reworking of the old “more time with my family” formula). Her question is a fair one: “Am I alone in wanting to see my young family in that crucial gap between school ending and lights out?” It is right that she resigned as a minister, but I do wonder about the scale of this shock to parliament. The combination of almost certain electoral oblivion and expenses revelations means that we will lose two

If the Tory leader is as canny a political operator as I think he is then he should adopt Compass’s idea of setting up the Post Office as a not-for-profit company immediately. The idea from the left of centre think tank had been dismissed too quickly by Downing Street, which seems determined to alienate as many Labour MPs as possible (having done a pretty successful job with the party’s members and voters). Cameron has talked the talk about his support for co-operatives and mutual organisations. He should now extend his support to the not-for-profit sector in what would be a hugely symbolic statement of intent.

I thought the Cameron-Clegg show (or was it the Clegg-Cameron show?) provided us with an interesting new double-act today. Was this the dry-run for the coalition following the next election? The two men didn’t look entirely uncomfortable in each other’s company, I thought.  The government’s position on the Gurkhas is so patently unjust that it provided the opposition with the easiest of open goals. As James has said, of course soldiers who have fought for this country should have the right to live here. It is hard to see what constituency ministers thought they were appealing to in resisting this.

I always get it in the neck here when I quote Polly Toynbee. But maybe I will get away with quoting her quoting Professor Danny Blanchflower, who, like me, is warning against losing a generation to the recession. Here’s the relevant passage from Polly’s column in today’s Guardian: “The man now on a mission to persuade Nos 10 and 11 to move fast is the only monetary policy committee member who saw the coming crash. Ministers are listening as Professor David Blanchflower urges emergency spending to prevent mass youth unemployment. With 800,000 under-25s out of work and another 600,000 leaving school this summer, he wants the budget to borrow £90bn to rescue

At the height of the internal Labour Party coup against Gordon Brown just before the last Labour Party conference even the Prime Minister’s greatest detratctors agreed that he did the international economic stuff rather well. I remember one senior Blairite heavyweight suggesting that after his removal, Brown should be allowed to occupy a new role as a roving economic ambassador. Since then, his reputation for economic competence has undergone an assault from which few would recover. But, whatever his opponents might say (and Fraser is right to say that it was largely done with smoke and mirrors), the G20 summit ended up as something of a triumph or Gordon Brown. I

A lot of us have been wondering what Westminster might be like under the Tories. What, for instance, would the parliamentary press lobby look like under a Cameron government? A return to deference, perhaps. Would the gentlemen and the ladies of the press take their information dutifully from the PM’s spokesman or woman (who would presumably be called a spokesman) and put it straight in the paper? We now have an indication from the behaviour at Eric Pickles’s bash (quite literally) last night that we may see a different kind of throwback to the days of boozing and brawling that seemed a distant memory.

I had the pleasure of guesting on Jon Pienaar’s political podcast yesterday. Inevitably we ended up talking about the death of Ivan Cameron and found ourselves lost for words. But Jon made a very interesting point. He noted that the story showed how little we really know about the lives of our prominent politicians, however much we might think they are public property. We talked about whether this tragedy will change the way we do politics in this country and decided that it probably won’t. Jon raised the example of the death of Labour leader John Smith, when everyone thought everything would change and nothing did. But I think something

The Conservative Party’s reliance on Michael Ashcroft has always mystified me. How a once great political party has allowed itself to become quite so dependent on one man, I will never know? The conventional wisdom is that his money rescued the Tories from the abyss. It is certainly true that Ashcroft’s pamphlet, Smell the Coffee, was a cogent analysis of the reasons behind the Tories’ defeat in the 2005 election. But his continued position at the heart of the Conservative Party machine can only really be explained by a nagging feeling of insecurity within an organisation that has grown used to defeat. Now the Electoral Commission has finally decided that donations made