Uk politics

So, Sadiq Khan will be Labour’s London Mayoral candidate, while Jeremy Corbyn looks likely to become Labour’s leader tomorrow. The two have worked together during their campaigns, with their staff consulting closely on tactics. But they’ve also worked together in the past. In Emma Crewe’s book, The House of Commons: An Anthropology of MPs at Work, Corbyn tells an anecdote about what life was like as a serial rebel: Towards the end of the last Labour administration a phone call between then whip Sadiq Khan and Jeremy Corbyn tended to go something like this: Whip: ‘Hello there Jeremy, just wanted to check how you are planning to vote on Tuesday.’ Jeremy:

The next project for eurosceptic Tory MPs is to get a free vote for government ministers on the EU referendum. They want David Cameron to tell his frontbenchers whether or not they can campaign for a different stance to the one he’ll take (even if he wants to give the impression he might advocate leaving or remaining), and they want him to do it at the Tory conference in a few weeks’ time. One of the reasons the eurosceptics want this is that it will make it easier for them to add the names of senior ministers to their lists of supporters of leaving the EU, and to do so as

It’s official: the Tory leadership contest is well and truly underway. No matter that everyone’s interested in the Labour result this weekend and no matter that David Cameron hasn’t even set a date for his departure. This evening, at a drinks reception in a parliamentary lair, Owen Paterson announced that he would be drawing up a set of robust Tory policies for whoever wants to stand as leader to adopt. Speaking to a group of MPs, peers and hacks, the Tory MP said that his think tank UK 2020 – which he said he set up after ‘I was fired’ by the Prime Minister – would work on a series

Following the government’s first Commons defeat of the new parliament, I understand that ministers are not going to try to reverse the primary legislation that introduces a ‘full fat’ version of the purdah restrictions on what central and local government can publish during the EU referendum campaign. But what the government can do to get its way is to use a statutory instrument to set out certain exemptions from those purdah restrictions. This was what the government amendment to new clause 10 of the legislation will allow: that changes to purdah can be introduced through secondary legislation, which must be approved by MPs. This means ministers can try again at a

So as predicted on Coffee House earlier, Tory rebels and the Labour frontbench did manage to conspire together this evening to defeat the government on purdah. The Commons voted against amendment 53 to the EU Referendum Bill 285 ayes to 312 noes, and then did not oppose Labour’s amendment 4, which means that a ‘full fat’ version of purdah has been approved by MPs. The Labour celebrations of this defeat were notably muted: it’s difficult to get too excited when your own party is in turmoil. But David Cameron has just suffered a defeat on a matter that the whips and ministers had been scheming over for months. First they snuck

Will the Tories scrap the Lib Dems’ silliest vanity project, free school meals for infants? The Daily Mail reports today that they might, amid spiralling costs and with the spending review approaching. Nick Clegg announced this daft scheme at his party’s conference in 2013. It sounded ever so wholesome when the Deputy Prime Minister promised a ‘healthy lunch’ for every child in reception and years 1 and 2. But the scheme – which also cost a lot more than intended to implement – was daft because it didn’t improve life for poor children. Sure, it was a nice ‘retail offer’ to parents who can afford to pay for lunch for their

Until recently, the Tory leadership has been reluctant to plan how they would respond to a Corbyn-led Labour party. They just couldn’t believe that Labour were actually going to elect him. At the Cabinet’s pre-holiday get together at Chequers, the conversation about how to take on the new Labour leader was premised on the idea that either Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper would win. But now the Tories are working out how they would tackle Corbyn. (Though, two Cabinet Ministers have told me this week that they expect Cooper to pip Corbyn at the post). The Tory leadership is keen to avoid sounding triumphalist about the prospect of facing the