Uk politics

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Tories now see ‘fruitcakes’ and ‘clowns’ as serious voters impatient for change

We’ve only had a few results through in the local elections, but already the parties are giving their verdict on the way last night worked for them. One thing to watch today is the development of a Tory line on UKIP. There hasn’t been one in the run-up to polling day, but will there be a concerted effort from the Conservative leadership to produce a clear message about what Nigel Farage’s success means for the Tories? Grant Shapps certainly managed to stick to the Tinkerbell strategy of trying not to say ‘UKIP’ or ‘Nigel Farage’ in his Today programme interview. But he also stuck to the sympathetic portrayal of those

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Nigel Farage, the anti-politician

Nigel Farage was in full anti-politics mode this morning on the Today programme. He railed against ‘three frontbenches that look and sound the same’ and ‘haven’t done a proper day’s work in their lives.’ Farage is determined that Ukip be can both a protest party and a party with policies. He wants to offer himself to anyone who is fed up with the established order and wants to stick two fingers up at the main political parties. But he also wants to advance a radical policy prospectus. Interestingly, he said he wasn’t a Tory but he had been a supporter of eighties radicalism. So far, the Farage approach appears to

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Local elections: UKIP’s ‘phenomenal performance’

What few results there have been so far suggest that UKIP has scored about a quarter of the vote and gained more seats than Labour.  A ‘phenomenal performance’ says Prof John Curtice. Nigel Farage now looks like the main winner, suggesting that his party is mutating from an EU protest party into a being broader party of the working class. The local elections have nothing to do with the European Union so there’s no rational reason that one-in-four voters would chose UKIP — unless they believed the party was addressing their concerns on wider issues. The reason that David Cameron’s referendum pledge did not shoot the UKIP fox is that

Thursday

Peter Jones

The arts, the Ancient Greeks and Maria Miller

The Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has said the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its economic, not artistic, value; it must ‘hammer home the value of culture to our economy’. The ancients would have wondered what she was taking about. There was no concept of ‘the arts’ in the ancient world; nor any concept of ‘art’, at least among the Greeks. What we call ‘art’ was, in Aristotle’s definition, ‘the trained ability to make something under the guidance of rational thought’. It was, in other words, craftsmanship. So ‘artists’ were regarded rather as we would regard car mechanics or dentists. The only time the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour hold South Shields with Ukip 2nd and Lib Dems 7th

The result is now in from South Shields. As expected, Labour have held the seat. Ukip have come second, with the Tories third and the Liberal Democrats a spectacularly bad seventh. Ukip’s second is more impressive when you consider that they didn’t even stand in the constituency in 2010. It is a sign that they are fast becoming the default protest party across England. Only a handful of county councils are counting overnight, and they are all Tory controlled. But John Curtice, the elections expert, has already told the BBC that Ukip looks like doing as well as the polls suggested. At 12.15am, Ukip is averaging 26% in the BBC’s

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Tory Tumbrils Begin to Roll for David Cameron

As I type this, pundits in London are stiffening themselves for the tough task of over-interpreting local election results and projecting wildly unrealistic forecasts for the next general election on the back of a mid-term election in which the electorate is of an entirely different type to that which will vote in 2015. It’s a grim job but someone has to do it and it’s better that it be done with enthusiasm than with any sense of proportion. Mercifully, my friend and former boss Iain Martin is not one of those types. Be that as it may, however, he has written a column for Friday’s Telegraph that is both typically

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Nigel Farage’s tax flip-flop shows us where he’s trying to take his party

We might this week have seen some scrutiny of UKIP candidates, but so far we’ve seen little scrutiny of their policies. But the better the party does, the more policy scrutiny it will start to come under. This is what makes UKIP’s changing tax policy so interesting. It tells us a lot about where Nigel Farage is trying to take his party. At the last election, UKIP was committed to a flat tax. There is an intellectual purity to this idea – see Allister Heath’s book on the subject – but it is hard to sell to voters as it would result in ‘the rich’ paying a lower rate. After

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs think they’re psychic. But Cameron’s exciting them with false omens.

Even though there has been some reeling back today from the suggestion that David Cameron is on the brink of wowing his party with a bit of legislative red meat on an EU referendum, it won’t stop Tory backbenchers trying to force the leadership’s position on this matter. The problem is that Conservative MPs are starting to see themselves as psychic agents. They vote for something that their party doesn’t want to happen and get called a rebel. A few months later, that rebellion becomes official party policy. One rebel joked to me earlier this week that ‘I don’t rebel against my government, I just vote two or three weeks ahead

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Frank Field interview: Labour needs to do something dramatic to win back its lost working class voters

There’s one government adviser who still feels Steve Hilton’s absence very keenly indeed. ‘He was always thinking ahead, how do we set the debate rather than endlessly react to it, that was why he was such a delight to work for. All the time he was racing ahead. It was difficult to keep up with him. I just thought he was brilliant, he was just wonderful.’ But it’s not a Tory MP or spinner who is missing the Prime Minister’s ‘blue-sky’ guru: this adviser is Labour MP Frank Field, appointed by the government when it formed to work with David Cameron on how to tackle poverty. He suspects that it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The EU Referendum Bill won’t appear in Parliament any time soon

Some Tories are all aquiver today after the Prime Minister’s radio hint yesterday that he might be prepared to introduce an EU referendum bill in this parliament after all. Here are David Cameron’s words on yesterday’s World at One that are supposed to set your heart pounding: ‘I think we need to demonstrate absolutely that we are serious about this referendum; we’ve said we’re going to hold it, we’ve said it’s going to be an in-out referendum, we’ve set a date by which it must be held. I look forward to publishing a bill, to getting support for it, to doing everything I can to show to people at the

Charles Moore Charles Moore

When Michael Heseltine turned up at a Thatcher book signing

At the launch of my biography of Margaret Thatcher, I was flattered to see Michael and Anne Heseltine joining the signing queue. It was very sporting of him. When they reached me, Anne asked for my inscription, but Michael said he wished his copy to be blank so that he could quickly sell it. I think — unusually for him — that he misunderstands the way this strange market works. The most common question I am asked by audiences about Mrs Thatcher is something to do with Carol and Mark. Did she bring them up successfully? Was she a good mother? etc. The fact that this comes up so often

Philip Ziegler

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, by Charles Moore, and Not for Turning, by Robin Harris – review

It is a measure of Lady Thatcher’s standing that her death has been followed not only by the mealy-mouthed compliments from political opponents which are normally forthcoming on such occasions but also by robust denunciations. Nobody would have sung ‘Ding, dong, the Wizard is dead!’ after the deaths of Jim Callaghan, John Major or Alec Douglas-Home. Even the more controversial Harold Wilson got a bland send-off in his obituaries. Ted Heath was asked by a journalist whether it was true that, when he heard of Margaret Thatcher’s eviction from the party leadership, he had exclaimed ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’. No, he replied, after some deliberation. ‘What I said was “Rejoice! Rejoice! Rejoice!”

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

The Tories have failed to agree a line on UKIP

David Cameron’s refusal to say ‘UKIP’ on the radio today was rather entertaining, but it does highlight a strange problem that the Conservative party has brought upon itself for these local elections. Here’s his exchange with Martha Kearney, which you can listen to below, from 8m 49s in: Cameron: ‘My role is to get around the country and I’ve enjoyed doing it in the last couple of weeks, to get around the country and to talk about the government’s policies, local policies, what the Conservatives are doing. I think there is a real appetite for…’ Kearney: Is it a strategy, not to say UKIP? Cameron: No, not at all, it’s

Matthew Hancock

On skills, British children have been let down too badly for too long

Travel around Britain, and the paradox of our labour market quickly becomes apparent. There are far too many young people out of work, yet employers complain that they can’t get the people they want. That is because, for too long, young people have been denied the experience that employers want. This is what’s known as the ‘skills crisis’ and is one of the greatest problems facing Britain today. It is a problem this government wants to solve. Yes, employment has risen to a record high under the coalition but we’re painfully aware that this is not an end in itself. We want British dole queues to shorten. Look around the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

No more radical reforms, please, we’ve pushed our MPs too far

Nick Clegg is frustrated. He told callers on LBC this morning that ‘one of the most frustrating dilemmas that we have face in government is that we have thrown a barrage of initiatives at this problem to get the construction sector and house-building sector moving, it just takes longer than, I think, you or I would probably like.’ He did suggest that ‘we will, over the coming years, see a real step change, but where I share frustration with you is it takes so long to translate these new devices for getting house-building going into shovels and spades being put into the ground’. But what might be even more frustrating

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour is being forced to talk about ‘good borrowing’ before it is ready

It’s not a case of will they, won’t they when it comes to whether Labour would borrow more, but will they admit it and try to sell this plan to voters? In the past few days, we’ve seen the party trying to work this out in public. Ed Miliband, in his awkward World at One interview, knew that saying ‘yes, we’d borrow more to fund the VAT cut’ would provoke triumphant howls from his opponents, and so ended up nervously jabbering away as Martha Kearney asked the same question over and over again. But yesterday he told Daybreak that ‘I am clear about this: a temporary cut in VAT, as

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers nudge policy unit into private sector

The government’s ‘nudge unit’ has always been regarded as radical – or a bit wacky, depending on your outlook – and now this Cabinet Office division, officially known as the Behavioural Insights Team, is getting a bit more radical. It’s going into the private sector. A source close to Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude says the government is looking for a commercial partner for a joint venture in which the unit would become a profit-making enterprise: ‘As a mutual they will combine the benefits of private-sector experience and investment with the innovation and commitment from staff leadership. This accelerates our drive to make public assets pay their way.’ The nudge

Sebastian Payne

Ed Miliband faces calls to remove Ken Livingstone from Labour NEC after ‘disgusting’ remarks

Ken Livingstone’s remarks about the motives of the Boston bombing suspects have been widely condemned for suggesting that American foreign policy ‘fuels the anger’ that drove such young men into acts of terrorism. Tory chairman Grant Shapps has demanded the former Mayor of London apologise for causing offence: ‘These are irresponsible, insensitive and thoughtless comments which show why Ken Livingstone is not fit to hold public office. He should unreservedly apologise for the distress he has caused’ Brooks Newmark MP has gone one step further and written to Ed Miliband this afternoon, asking the Labour leader to also condemn the remarks and remove Livingstone from Labour’s National Executive Committee. Coffee House has seen a copy

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Exclusive: whips ask ministerial aides to snoop on their bosses

Not wanting to heap worries onto the Prime Minister when he’s just about found harmony with his party, but as well as the underused backbenchers I mentioned this morning, he might want to think about his party’s PPSs as well. Some of them feel they were offered their jobs with the promise that the role would become ‘turbo-charged’, but haven’t found the reality quite so glamorous. I hear that the last meeting Downing Street held for ministerial aides didn’t cheer many of them up. It wasn’t just that they were given a presentation on oral questions that most of them felt they’d heard about a year ago, or that the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

This Britain: Maria Miller confuses economics with pleasure and beauty.

Is it possible for a government minister to give a speech that is not a “keynote address”? That was my first thought upon reading Maria Miller’s speech at the British Museum last week. My second thought was remembering the old saw that any time a government minister talks about “culture” it is sensible to reach for your Browning.  Thirdly, I recalled that Maria Miller is the kind of Commissar whose officials think it sensible to threaten journalists. So I suppose that I was predisposed to think poorly of her speech on the economic importance of the arts. Well, it was still a rotten speech that lived-down to these low expectations. Given