David cameron

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

The Brexit bounce continues. HM Treasury has today released forecasts of the economists it follows, as it does every month. Last time, there was a flurry of downgrades and forecasts of an immediate recession. Now, these forecasts are being torn up by everyone, including by the FT (although you can bet the FT won’t report on the upgrades as eagerly as it did the downgrades). The average new forecast suggests GDP will grow by 1.8 per cent this year, far better than the 1.5 per cent forecast last month. This back to where the consensus was before the Brexit vote. The OECD, which had previously predicted “immediate” uncertainty after a

There’s a great scoop in The Times today. A political columnist, former chief leader writer of a national newspaper was, unbeknown to readers, acting as David Cameron’s chief stenographer for six years. In his columns he’d present himself as a former Tory official, retired and out of action. Full of self-deprecating anecdotes about what happened back in the day when he was working for William Hague. What he failed to disclose was that, in between writing opinion pieces for his newspaper and acting as its Executive Editor, he was scurrying off to Downing Street to take dictation for the Prime Minister on a monthly basis. He recorded Cameron’s ramblings, hoping a to use them for

David Cameron is not having the best of weeks and the Foreign Affairs Committee’s highly critical report on his Libya intervention will not improve his mood. When the Chilcot Report came out, Cameron made much of how the National Security Council structure that he had put in place had improved policy making. But the FAC report states that despite the National Security Council, there was still no coherent strategy for the intervention. Indeed, it calls for an inquiry into how the NSC actually makes policy. The Libya intervention might have prevented a massacre in Benghazi. But the chaos in Libya since, the migrant crisis and the increase influence of Islamic

Is David Cameron trying to trash his own reputation? First came the worst resignation honours list for decades, which seemed designed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about his chumocracy. And today, he has handed a gift to those who denounced him as a career politician, someone with no sense of public service, whose interest in politics ran out when he thought it could no longer be useful to him. “Brits don’t quit,” he told us a few months ago: now he has quit, twice. After telling us several times that he’d stay, to fulfil a duty to parliament and his constituents. Even Gordon Brown fought another election after leaving No10