Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
One thing worth noting from today’s PMQs – and indeed from all the sessions since the start if the year – was how many MPs left early. They are now not taking the sessions seriously enough to stay to the bitter end because they tend to involve the two party leaders talking at one another about their pet
How will Prime Minister’s Questions go today? Both party leaders have had to deal with troublesome MPs this week, with Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind both falling prey to the Dispatches/Telegraph sting. But Ed Miliband may feel that he can continue his theme of cracking down on paid directorships and consultancies, which Labour is
For a while the Tories had hoped they could get away with dodging questions on defence spending until after the election. Even as the pressure within their own party for a commitment to the 2 per cent of GDP set by Nato, ministers were either saying they didn’t want to ‘pre-judge’ the Strategic Defence and
To be fair to Natalie Bennett, she took the rather admirable step of apologising on the Daily Politics for being so woeful in her disastrous interview with Nick Ferrari this morning. But the whole episode tells us a lot about how the Green party views its appeal to voters. Yes, yes, it’s embarrassing that a party
Naturally, when George Osborne and Ed Balls squared up in the Commons this afternoon for a showdown on the HSBC tax row, it wasn’t a particularly pretty affair. There was shouting, heckling, yowling – and the backbenchers were pretty aerated, too. Indeed, the Tories had turned up intending to throw the Shadow Chancellor off pace
Can the Tories really avoid any proper discussion of their spending plans for the Ministry of Defence before the election? Though the international situation is so unstable, the party has clearly decided that as defence spending is not an election issue, it won’t talk about it. Perhaps they’d get away with this given Labour is
Will any of the General Election TV debates take place? Labour hopes they will, and today Douglas Alexander has written to Grant Shapps demanding that the Tories commit to doing the head-to-head debate with Ed Miliband, even if all the smaller parties are tying themselves up into fights over he seven-way debate. Alexander writes: ‘In
Even if the two MPs caught up in today’s sting, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, are found to have done nothing wrong, their parties cannot be seen to be protecting them. Straw was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party last night and this morning Sir Malcolm Rifkind has had the Tory whip removed. Rifkind
Naturally, the parties set to benefit the most from any allegations of impropriety against MPs are the ‘anti-politics’ bunch: Ukip, the Greens and the SNP. You can always when the Greens think there are some votes to be snaffled from Labour by how quickly they issue a press release condemning the latest policy or revelations that
This week, the two main parties plan to make iconic pledges that they hope will appeal to their core vote, but that are pretty poor policy. David Cameron will today pledge to keep ‘pensioner perks’ – universal benefits for older voters such as the free bus pass and the winter fuel payment – while Labour
Politicians know they need to be more natural, less spun, and more honest about what they think. But most of them carry on sounding unnatural, spin-doctored and cagey because they’re worried about the media will do to them if they speak their minds. They fear being pounced upon by journalists keen to write up their
Could Labour’s tuition fees policy be its own tuition fees moment, of the same order as the moment it endlessly needles the Lib Dems about? Well, the decision, when it’s made, won’t have the same dramatic effect as the Lib Dem about turn in 2010, because Labour candidates haven’t been posing with signed pledges and
It’s pretty tough to find good news in suicide statistics, but today’s figures for 2013 are particularly grim reading. The number of suicides increased from 2012, and the male suicide rate is now at its highest since 2001. The male rate of suicide has increased significantly since 2007, where it stood at 16.6 deaths per 100,000
Ed Miliband has sent an angry letter to David Cameron this afternoon, demanding that he ‘set out in detail a reform agenda for the EU and a strategy for building the alliances needed to deliver it’. Now, David Cameron is quite used to receiving angry letters about Europe, but mostly they come from members of
Michael Fallon is worried about Vladimir Putin repeating his tactics in Ukraine with other countries. The Defence Secretary told newspapers that he was ‘worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing Nato’. This morning Nick Clegg said that while there was ‘no evidence right now’ that the Russian President was seeking
Will the Tories really dock benefits from obese people and those with drug or alcohol addictions if they refuse treatment? Even though David Cameron reaffirmed his commitment to the policy in his speech in Hove yesterday, anyone who is getting rather over-excited about it could probably expend their energy on something else as this looks
Opponents of plain packaging for cigarettes are trying to work out how to derail the vote in the Commons introducing the law, Coffee House has learned. There is considerable frustration in the party that plain packaging is being introduced so close to the election, as MPs feel it is a distraction from the campaign. Other
Here are some observations from the ‘incendiary’ letter from the House of Bishops that has upset the Tories so much. ‘Our electoral system often means that the outcomes turn on a very small group of people within the overall electorate. Greater social mobility and the erosion of old loyalties to place or class mean that
Presumably as a way of getting out of an endless debate about receipts, Ed Balls has issued a letter with some detailed questions about tax evasion and HSBC (as opposed to tax avoidance and window cleaners). The letter asks three questions: 1. Why has there only been one prosecution out of 1,100 names? Was the
Well, those tax attacks worked out well, didn’t they? Tax avoidance is on the front pages of the newspapers, but not in a way that benefits either main political party. Even though George Osborne’s guide to minimising your tax bill has gone viral, Labour isn’t benefitting because it has ended up talking about receipts for