David cameron

While a storm has blown up between Nigel Farage and Brendan Cox this morning over the role played by Angela Merkel’s migrant policy in the Berlin Christmas market attack, the Today programme managed to find a man with a possible alternative explanation for the carnage: Brexit. Yes, really. This morning’s show ended with a man, introduced as a political scientist who has advised the French and German governments on counter-terrorism, offering the wisdom: ‘Brexit isn’t helpful…I mean so-called Islamic State were celebrating Brexit…we need to grow stronger, we need to find responses which are not only security-based , we need a common foreign policy.’ The idea that Islamic State ‘celebrated’

When The Spectator was founded 188 years ago, it became part of what would now be described as a populist insurgency. An out-of-touch Westminster elite, we said, was speaking a different language to the rest of London, let alone the rest of the country. Too many ‘of the bons mots vented in the House of Commons appear stale and flat by the time they have travelled as far as Wellington Street’. This would be remedied, we argued, by extending the franchise and granting the vote to the emerging middle class. Our Tory critics said any step towards democracy — a word which then caused a shudder — would start a

The Prime Minister’s office is a small, unimpressive room in 10 Downing Street with miserable views and unexceptional furniture. Since moving in, Theresa May has spruced it up — but only a little. There is now a large glass meeting table; her predecessor preferred to chat on the sofas. She has also delved into the government art collection to retrieve two pictures of Oxford, where she honed her interest in politics and met Philip, her husband. She has also picked a painting of an English country church (she is of course a vicar’s daughter), and that’s about it. It’s a place for work and — very occasionally — interviews. We

‘Bad policy.’ ‘No discernible impact on the key outcomes it was supposed to improve.’ ‘Deliberate misrepresentation of the data… a funding model that could have been designed to waste money’. ‘A waste of £1.3 billion’. ‘Failed’. The media’s treatment of the troubled families programme, whose evaluation has recently been made public, cannot have cheered David Cameron in his last week as an MP. History does not look likely to be kind to his great social policy. We should, however, be grateful to the former prime minister for his quixotic attempt to do the right thing on a massive scale. Because in doing so he exposed the fallacy which has dominated

Poor old David Cameron. His defeat in the referendum campaign left critics saying he was the worst Prime Minister ever. Now, it seems, it’s not only his legacy which falls short of some of his predecessors. Having quit Parliament, Dave was planning to use the next year to cash in on his memoirs. When his book was first touted, there was talk of the former PM earning a multi-million pound payment. Some said his advance could even match – or beat – that of Tony Blair, who picked up £4.6m for his book ‘A Journey’. Instead, the actual amount Cameron will earn is something of a disappointment. It’s being reported

It’s no surprise that the Tories held their seat overnight in the Witney by-election. Yet what seems remarkable (at least on the face of it) is the extent of the swing back towards the Lib Dems. The party saw its share of the vote jump from seven per cent two years ago to nearly a third of the vote this time around. That pushed the party’s candidate, Liz Leffman, into second place and has got Tim Farron excited. The Lib Dem leader went as far as saying the result shows the ‘Liberal Democrats are back in the political big time’. That’s not quite the case yet. After all, this is

Since the EU referendum result led to David Cameron’s resignation, the former Prime Minister’s friendship groups have experienced a change of fortune. While the Chipping Norton set have simply found themselves cut out, over in Notting Hill they are turning on one another. In fact, things have got so bad that Cameron’s friends are no longer able to invite the whole gang to their infamous dinner parties. In an interview with the Times, Simon Sebag Montefiore — the historian at the heart of the Notting Hill set — bemoans the fact that Michael Gove’s decision to back Leave has now led to the group splitting into two camps of  #TeamDave and #TeamGove. ‘It’s

Under David Cameron, it was sometimes tricky to tell who was in charge at the DWP. Iain Duncan Smith favoured a softer approach to welfare reform while over at the Treasury, George Osborne’s interventions were more nakedly political. It all came to a head in March when IDS resigned after Osborne announced £4bn of cuts to disability benefits. That was just over six months ago and seems like a distant memory in the pre-referendum haze. Yet it’s rapidly becoming clear that under Damian Green, things will be very different at the DWP. As with other areas of Government, Theresa May’s work and pensions secretary has marked a signal departure with

What is Theresa May’s greatest weakness as she goes into conference season? The Prime Minister had such a good start to the job that it’s easy to forget that she has the same problems that David Cameron did in terms of parliamentary arithmetic and fractures in her party over Europe. For Cameron, the parliamentary arithmetic was most difficult because there was a hardened core of eurosceptics who distrusted him, and because he and George Osborne had a habit of trying to sneak half-baked policies such as huge cuts to tax credits past MPs and hope that they wouldn’t notice (which they nearly didn’t). But for May, there is already an

There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just two weeks after a negotiated ceasefire appeared to have provided some respite, a war of attrition in Syria’s second largest city is escalating into a vast human tragedy. Last Saturday, a bomb dropped by Syrian government forces knocked out a pumping station which had been supplying water to two million people, 250,000 of whom are besieged in the rebel-held east of the city. On the same day, at least 45 people, many of them children, were killed by barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians — a now common occurrence. Food

Although David Cameron’s political career took a nose dive after the EU referendum result, he has been doing his best to ensure that his old chums don’t too badly out of the situation. Take for example, Ed Llewellyn — Cameron’s former Chief of Staff. As well as being given a peerage in Cameron’s resignation honours, Llewellyn has been appointed her Majesty’s Ambassador to France. While it had been previously reported that Cameron was lining up his mate for the plum job, the news has been confirmed today with a statement from Boris Johnson: ‘Ed Llewellyn is hugely well qualified for this post and I look forward to working with him. He