Uk politics

Monday

James Forsyth

Bumper turnout for Tory Euro-sceptic meeting

I hear that 124 Tory MPs attended the inaugural meeting of the Tory ginger group pushing for renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe. Those present included at least one minister — Theresa Villiers, several PPS and a few whips who were keeping a beady eye on proceeding. George Eustice, the convener of the group, told the room that he wanted the group to work with the government rather than against it and that he wanted front-benchers to feel comfortable attending the meetings. The group intends to put out a series of proposals as to which powers should be repatriated before issuing a white paper on how the government should renegotiate

David Blackburn

Osborne lays out his support for Vickers

George Osborne made a firm statement on the Vickers report this afternoon; if he felt uneasy about the proposed abolition of his seat or Natalie Rowe’s latest sally against him it didn’t show. As expected, he accepted Vickers’ proposals “in principle”, giving himself and his coalition partners enough room to manoeuvre within an agreed timetable that is equitable to both parties. Osborne also said that the annual £7 billion burden of Vickers’ capital requirements “should fall on shareholders and the wholesale debt holders, not small depositors or taxpayers.” Politically, it’s imperative that he achieves that objective. There is yet uncertainty on the subject and Barclays sought a clarification earlier this afternoon.

David Blackburn

Bernard Hogan-Howe named as new Met commissioner

Theresa May has named Bernard Hogan-Howe as the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Hogan-Howe was the early front-runner and a finalist for the role last time round. He is apparently highly respected within the police force and has been a successful chief constable in Merseyside. His appointment has come earlier than was expected: the talk at the end of July was of completing the process later in the autumn. This suggests that the government is keen to repair the damage to its relationship with the Met and the reputation of the police caused by the phone hacking scandal and the riots. This will be essential if the coalition is to deliver its ambitious police

David Blackburn

Boundary review leaked

The Boundary review, which was embargoed, has been leaked. Here are some immediate headlines from the proposals: George Osborne’s Tatton seat appears to have been abolished, though you imagine he’ll have little difficulty in finding anohter. After much speculation that his Twickenham seat would be subsumed, Vince Cable may have survived. The new seat covers what appears cover to be a fair tranche of his current area, but it’s not exactly clear. Either way, Cable is someone you’d expect to find another berth if necessary.  Zac Goldsmith’s Richmond Park seat has been reworked, inheriting some wards from Lib Dem held Twickenham, and may now be a tougher proposition to hold. Ed Miliband’s minions, Chuka Umanna and Sadiq Khan, might fight over

David Blackburn

Vice girl Rowe takes another hit at Osborne

“I said to George [Osborne] jokingly that when you’re prime minister one day I’ll have all the dirty goods on you, and he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine,” says Natalie Rowe, a former madam of the Black Beauties escort agency, in an interview with ABC’s PM programme. She adds, “It’s been said in the newspapers that he was at university. He wasn’t. At the time he was working for [former Tory leader now foreign secretary] William Hague…I remember that vividly because he called William Hague insipid.” This is not the first time that Rowe has made these allegations against Osborne, as the above picture attests. The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Managing the boundary changes

MPs are queuing down the corridor on the first floor of Portcullis House as they try to get hold of a copy of the proposed boundary changes which have just been released under embargo. Boundary changes can make a huge difference to an MP, converting a marginal into a safe seat and vice-versa. Boundary reviews are a whip’s nightmare as they will set MPs of the same party against each other. The danger for the two coalition partners is that MPs’ take to rebelling on emotive issues for their parties in an attempt to win any selection head to head. This is why Cameron went out of his way to

David Blackburn

Vickers provides the best of both worlds for George and Vince

It’s the moment of the truth for Britain’s banking sector: the publication of the Vickers report. The headline is as expected: the Commission recommends the imposition of a ringfence on banks’ ‘core operations’ (such as consumer deposits and small business lending) from the riskier elements of their business. According to the FT (£), the banks will have discretion over where the ringfence will fall, giving lenders and users a degree of flexibility, which suggests that Vickers is not recommending the full separation of retail and investment banking, as some had hoped. Vickers also proposes that banks reserve 10 per cent of the capital in their ringfenced operations to guard against future crises, which is expected to

Sunday

Hamish Macdonell

SNP stretch lead over woeful opposition

How long will Alex Salmond’s honeymoon with the voters of Scotland continue? Given that his next mission is to hold and win an independence referendum, much depends on his popularity and that of his party. Today, a third opinion poll puts support for the Scottish National Party at just under half of the national electorate. Angus Reid, polling for the Sunday Express, puts support for the SNP has now hit a remarkable 49 per cent. Given that the Nationalists only won 45 per cent of the votes in May’s election – enough to sweep all the unionist parties into the background – this new high just shy of 50 per

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Huhne ramps up the rhetoric on 50p

Chris Huhne’s comments to Prospect magazine about the 50p tax rate are typically provocative. The millionaire, former City boy accuses the Tories of wanting to abolish the 50p tax rate to help ‘their friends in the City to put their feet up’. He even suggests that the Lib Dems would not vote through any Budget that contained its abolition. Huhne’s intervention comes at a time when George Osborne is trying to build support for abolishing—or, at least cutting—the 50p rate. Tellingly, the letter from economists opposing the 50p rate was drawn up with the help of one of the Chancellor’s closest lieutenants. But, as with so much Lib Dem rhetoric

Saturday

James Forsyth

Hague says he’s been held back on Europe by the Lib Dems

William Hague’s comments in an interview with The Times that the Liberal Democrats are restraining the Tories on Europe will increase the grumbling among Tory backbenchers about the power of the junior coalition partner. Hague tells the paper that ‘A point of difference in our manifesto was the aim to repatriate some powers. Clearly that’s something I’m in favour of, but that’s the area we had to compromise on in return for other compromises.’ (In many ways this is a statement of the obvious. But in the current uncertain European environment, his remarks are news). In an attempt to reassure euro-sceptics, Foreign Secretary stresses that the Conservative party ‘would like

Friday

James Forsyth

Cameron’s well-schooled argument

When Michael Howard offered David Cameron the pick of the jobs in the shadow Cabinet after the 2005 election, Cameron chose education. Howard was disappointed that Cameron hadn’t opted to shadow Gordon Brown but Cameron argued that education was the most important portfolio. A sense of that commitment was on display today in his speech on education, delivered at one of the new free schools that have opened this term. His defence of the coalition’s plans to make it easier to sack bad teachers summed up its refreshing radicalism. He simply said, “If it’s a choice between making sure our children get the highest quality teaching or some teachers changing

Thursday

The Spectator

Who cares about abortion?

Thanks to Nadine Dorries’ amendment to the Health and Social Care bill, abortion rights have been discussed a great deal this week – both inside and outside of Parliament. In her cover article for this week’s Spectator (out today), Mary Wakefield says that this debate has revealed a “strange and unpleasant consensus… that abortion is not just a necessary evil, but a jolly good thing.” In the piece, Mary asks “Why are we so keen on abortion?”: “The fact is that unless you’re a fan of infanticide you’ve got to agree that somewhere along the slippery ascent from that little Alka-Seltzer of pluripotent cells to the birth of an actual

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Pickles to take charge of dealing with Britain’s 120,000 “problem families”

I understand that following a meeting in Downing Street this morning, Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, has been put in charge of dealing with Britain’s 120,000 “problem families”. In the aftermath of the riots, David Cameron promised to put all of these families through some a family-intervention programme by the time of the next election. This policy, though, was bogged down in the bureaucracy as it cut across so many different departments. Pickles’ department will now have sole responsibility for this commitment. It will receive extra budget, with the money coming from education and work and pensions, and staff to deal with this. As I revealed in

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How will Westminster respond to Vickers?

The Vickers’ report into banks will land on the Prime Minister’s desk tomorrow. It goes to the banks very early on Monday morning before being published later that day. The thing to watch for is how politicians react to it. We know that the report will propose some kind of ring fence. But what we do not know is how strict the ring fence will be and how quickly Vickers will want it implemented. As Robert Peston says the impact of the ring fence on the banks’ creditworthiness will be felt long before the actual ring fence comes into effect. Intriguingly, Ed Miliband is giving a speech to the TUC

Wednesday

Vidhya Alakeson

Willetts plays snakes and ladders

Social mobility has become something of a hot topic for the coalition. February’s Social Mobility White Paper made it the government’s number one social policy goal. Yet arguments over tuition fees have rather drowned out much of what they have to say on the topic, particularly when it comes to education and skills. So it was interesting to hear Higher Education Minister David Willetts restate the government’s case with a speech at the Resolution Foundation yesterday. Willetts, who has been called the poster boy of the think tank community, was as thoughtful as ever – and he didn’t mince his words. In a dig at much of the research on

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

So much was missing from today’s abortion debate

The anti-abortion lobby is unfortunate to have been lumped this week with Nadine Dorries as its unofficial spokesperson. Nadine is actually PRO-abortion, for starters, as she never seems to tire of pointing out. She does, however, possess many of the unpleasant characteristics associated with pro-lifers: she’s preachy, brimming with self-righteous zeal, and incapable of seeing her opponents’ point of view. She didn’t deserve to be barracked in the House of Commons today, perhaps, but the obnoxious way in which she argued for her amendment sealed its fate. It didn’t help, of course, that pro-life organisations steered well clear of Dorries and her amendment, which, in case you didn’t know, sought

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

50p tax isn’t just hurting the economy, but Treasury revenues too

So where were these 20 economists when Gordon Brown first set the 50p trap for George Osborne? Then, Brown’s gamble was that the Shadow Chancellor was a political strategist with little interest or expertise in economics, so he’d be unlikely to work out just how much the 50p tax would lose the Exchequer, or guess it could be more than £3 billion a year – with further, less calculable damage on Britain’s reputation as a home for entrepreneurs. This was when we needed those economists. At the time, all Osborne had to go on was the IFS which calculated it would cost £800m – assuming the rich were no more

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron Dorries exchange the most memorable moment of a quiet PMQs

The first PMQs of the new parliamentary term was a bit of a damp squib. Ed Miliband avoided the issue of the economy, presumably because he feared being hit by a slew of quotes from the Darling book. So instead we had a series of fairly unenlightening exchanges on police commissioners and the NHS. Labour has clearly chosen to try and attack the coalition from the right on law and order and security. There were a slew of questions from Labour backbenchers on whether the coalition’s anti-terrorism legislation was too soft. But I suspect that this PMQs will be remembered for the Cameron Nadine Dorries exchange. Dorries, irritated by how

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The conference season blues

Few things irritate the Prime Minister’s circle more than the insinuation that David Cameron is lazy. So Ben Brogan’s column this morning with its slightly barbed observations about the number of box-sets that Cameron finds time to watch will have been read through gritted teeth in Downing Street. Ben argues that Cameron will have to use his conference speech to show the country what he stands for and what he wants. This is, as Ben acknowledges, said about most leaders before nearly every party conference. But I understand that preparations for this year’s Tory conference are particularly chaotic. While the work on Cameron’s own speech is proceeding apace, the rest

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A growing argument about the 50p rate

With the Eurozone and American economies both at risk of a double dip recession, how to get the British economy moving again is going to be one of the defining political arguments of the autumn. A first salvo in that fight has been fired this morning with a letter to the FT from 20 economists calling for the immediate scrapping of the 50p rate because of the harm that it is doing to the economy as a whole. This letter will, one suspects, be privately welcomed by the Chancellor who is looking for ways to, at the very least, cut the rate. He has become increasingly convinced that it is