House of commons

Today’s declaration (£) by Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy that Nato’s operation in Libya will continue until Gaddafi leaves power marks a shift in their rhetoric and makes explicit that regime change is the war aim. This has led to calls to recall parliament, most notably from David Davis on the World at One, to debate this change. Parliament merely voted to enforce the UN resolution which was not a mandate for regime change. The government would be well advised to heed these requests. It would be the best way of maintaining the necessary political support for the mission. Now that regime change is the explicit war aim,

Cameron was at pains to disguise it, but his impatience finally gave way at PMQs today. What a contrast with the last 24 hours. The nemesis of Gaddafi, the terror of Tripoli, the champion of the rebels, the moral conscience of the West, the world’s latest and greatest international tyrant-buster had to return to earth, and to the House of Commons, to deal with enterprise zones, disability benefits, carbon trading price structures and all the belly-aches of the provincial grockles who put him where he is. What a chore. Ed Miliband had a pop at him on police numbers. The Labour leader asked a clear and simple question. ‘Will there

If you want to get an MP going, just ask them what they think of IPSA — the new expenses watchdog. The body is hated: when Cameron joked at PMQs this week that it should be relocated to Croydon there was laughter across the House. IPSA is regarded as rude and inefficient. When Tory MPs were in a particularly grumpy mood before Christmas, David Cameron went to the ’22 and promised that IPSA would either have to mend its ways or be mended. Today’s revisions to the rules by IPSA (£) will go some way to addressing the concerns of MPs. The old rules only allowed children to be treated

The House of Commons has just voted by 557 to 13 to support Britain’s participation in the enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. This came at the end of six and a half hours of respectful debate rounded off by a speech from the Foreign Secretary that reminded us why he was for so long regarded as the best parliamentary performer on either side of the House. Hague offered an assurance that if the mission changes, the government will return to the House. This was widely understood to mean that no ground troops would be committed without the support of the House. He also confirmed that the costs of

The Davis Straw motion on keeping the ban on prisoner votes has just passed by 234 votes to 22. It is a crushing victory on what was a very good turnout given that both front benches were not voting. The 22 against the motion were a bunch of Liberal Democrats plus the Ulster MP Lady Hermon, the Plaid MPs Jonathan Edwards, Elfyn Llwyd and Hywel Williams, the Green Caroline Lucas,   Labour MPs Barry Gardiner, Kate Green, Glenda Jackson, Andy Love, Kerry McCarthy, John McDonnell, Yasmin Quereshi  and  one Tory Peter Bottomely, David Cameron now finds himself between a rock and a hard place. His MPs hate the idea of giving

Balls is a bit like a vampire – he has bite, but he works best in the darkness. In the House of Commons, with those lights shining on him, his powers drain. George Osborne had the better of him in their brief exchanges at Treasury Questions. Balls led on the snow joke. But Osborne had pre-empted that earlier, when he first stood up. Balls teased him about going to Klosters in the winter, but these things only work in newspapers where you can run a picture of Osborne in ski gear. It leaves the House cold.   The key Osborne line was that Balls is “the man with a past”

For once, I am in total agreement with Nigel Farage: the best way for Sally Bercow to help her husband is to take a vow of silence. Her recent Cleopatra act diverted attention from the persistent indignity of parliament’s relationship with IPSA, but it has done little to raise the diminutive Speaker’s diminutive reputation.   Flushed with embarrassment, Mrs Bercow spent most of Friday afternoon insisting that the Evening Standard had distorted her. She went into yummy mummy mode, confiding to Twitter that she was baking cakes for her son’s lunch box – nice rather than naughty. She gave no immediate explanation for posing in a sheet; but who doesn’t loiter semi-naked at the

David Davis and Jack Straw have joined forces to resist the enforcement of prisoner voting rights, an emotive issue bequeathed to the hapless coalition by the previous government. Beside the obvious moral question concerning prisoners’ rights, Davis hopes to open a second front in the struggle over sovereignty with the European Union. He told Politics Home: ‘There are two main issues here. First is whether or not it is moral or even decent to give the vote to rapists, violent offenders or sex offenders. The second is whether it is proper for the European court to overrule a Parliament.’ Unless Davis has confused his articles, his second point is invalid.

There is no sign of the heir to Blair at the Commons Liaison Committee this afternoon; in fact, David Cameron has been possessed by the ghost of Gordon. So far the Prime Minister’s answers have been cumbersome and statistic-heavy; and his delivery has had the dexterity of a three-legged elephant. He will have expected cannons to the left of him, but to the right as well? If he imagined that Tory backbenchers would coo appreciatively he will have been sadly disabused. Andrew Tyrie, James Arbuthnot and Bernard Jenkin have eviscerated him over the conduct of the strategic defence review. They deplored the culture of leaks and counter-briefing and probed Cameron

Courtesy of Andrew Sparrow’s ever-superb live blog of the political day, from Brown’s appearance before the Commons development committee: “Let’s not get into this in any detail because it’s a diversion from what we’re doing, and I think it’s unfortunate that this is the sort of question that is the first question to this committee from a member. Let’s put it this way, most former prime ministers have rarely spoken in the house at all. I have decided obviously to concentrate on my constituency work and on some of the work that I’ve been doing internationally. But, at the same time, I have taken a very big interest in some

We are about to find out how many coalition MPs are lobby fodder. In half-an-hour or so, the House of Commons is going to vote on whether any reduction in the number of MPs should be matched by an equivalent reduction in the number of ministers. If this measure is defeated, the power of the executive will be increased, the payroll vote will be a larger proportion of the House than it is today. Sadly, it looks as if the executive will defeat Charles Walker’s amendment. Tory MPs admit that there is absolutely no intellectual defence for the government’s view that the number of MPs can be reduced by 10

At last, Nick Clegg got his chance to pretend to be PM today and he used it to give a dazzling impression of Gordon Brown.  Opposing him, Jack Straw was off-colour. Hoarse of throat and hunched of stance, he did his best to bring some clarity to Britain’s new mission in Afghan – Operation Leg It. He asked if the exit date of 2014 was ‘absolute or conditional’. Keen to offer value for money Clegg responded to a single question with two answers. He expected ‘no troops in a combat role’ by 2015 – not 2014 – although our departure was dependent on the Afghans’s ability to secure their own