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.
After being too busy talking to ‘normal people’ in Cornwall last Wednesday and missing previous PMQs presumably to do the same, Nick Clegg will not only be attending this Wednesday’s session, he’ll be taking it. David Cameron won’t be around because he’s visiting Turkey this week, and so the Deputy Prime Minister will step into
It has been quite difficult for anyone following the growth food banks over the past few years to avoid growing dispirited. The debate in Parliament runs along the lines of the Tories pretending food banks and food bank demand don’t exist and Labour claiming that food banks and rising food bank demands are all the
If the Coalition started cohabiting earlier this year, it has now moved into the phase where the two parties are posting mean things about each other on Facebook and trying to get the kids to take sides. George Osborne has a grump in today’s Sunday Times about the emphasis that the Lib Dems want to
A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with
Nigel Farage has waded into the row about a mother being asked to cover up while breastfeeding her baby by suggesting that women should avoid ‘openly ostentatious’ behaviour. The Ukip leader told LBC: ‘I’m not particularly bothered by it but I know that a lot of people do feel very uncomfortable and look, this is
George Osborne has in the past year assembled a coterie of advisers to help him become more human, more stylish, thinner and more in touch with voters. But this morning it seemed he’d turned to his Cabinet colleague Iain Duncan Smith for media training before popping up on the Radio 4’s Today programme, as the
One notable absence on the government frontbench during the Autumn Statement today was Nick Clegg, who is in Cornwall today. The Deputy Prime Minister is in Cornwall today, visiting a number of different places, all of which seem to be in Lib Dem constituencies. A source close to Clegg points out that he already knew
Labour has had a poor run of Autumn Statement and Budget responses for a couple of years now, and with only today’s statement and the 2015 Budget to go before the General Election, the stakes were pretty high for Ed Balls. The Tories had clearly turned up expecting him to do a terrible job, and their
George Osborne has delivered an autumn statement that, provided it doesn’t unravel in the next few hours, should give him very good headlines. He has abolished the old, unfair system for stamp duty and claims that his new system means 98 per cent of people buying new homes will pay less stamp duty as a
Ed Miliband has just managed to have a really good PMQs on a day when there is such a big story following the session that it will barely get reported. The Labour leader focused on broken promises, and cleverly managed to force the Prime Minister to talk about immigration by asking about the failure of
George Osborne’s pitch at today’s Autumn Statement will be for voters to give the Tories another five years leading the government to finish the job of balancing the books. Today the Prime Minister’s official spokesman summed up the address from the Chancellor that we’ll hear in just over half an hour as ‘an Autumn Statement to
A lot of focus today will be on how Labour would cut the deficit (and perhaps how George Osborne actually plans to get it done rather than just talking about it, given the Item Club warning that deficit reduction will plateau). Ed Balls has been arguing this morning that Labour would ‘balance the books in
A number of papers seem to have got themselves into a sufficient pickle over whether or not Muhammad is the most popular name in this country that Hacked Off has decided it’s a good opportunity to take a pop at the press. The Muhammad story cropped up this week because of a survey from a
The Conservative party is all abuzz this afternoon, but it’s not about the Autumn Statement. They’ve been told that there is a three-line whip vote on ‘something’ on Thursday. Not even the whips know what the vote is on, other than that they must tell MPs to turn up. Labour is also on a three-line
The European response to David Cameron’s immigration speech last week was pretty positive, but at some point between now and the formal renegotiation, someone was going to chuck a fly in the ointment. Last night Poland’s deputy foreign minister Rafal Trzaskowski told Newsnight that his country would have a ‘red line’ against Britain treating immigrants
How much of a role should the government have in building homes? The vogue these days is for talking about localist solutions and helping the private sector to grow, but today Danny Alexander signalled a significant shift in the other direction. As he launched the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury
George Osborne is choreographing his autumn statement week to make things as difficult as possible for Labour. At present senior ministers are travelling the country handing out nice things to voters as they unveil details of the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan. Yesterday’s roads bonanza has been replaced by a garden city, better flood defences and
Labour is very pleased with the amount of attention it garnered for its new private schools policy when Tristram Hunt unveiled it last week. So it was natural that the Shadow Education Secretary used this as his main line of attack at today’s Education Questions. He set the scene first using one of his shadow
George Osborne has been looking forward to this particular Autumn Statement for a while because it is the opportunity for him and other colleagues to tour the country like Santa with a large infrastructure sack, handing out £15bn of road improvements to marginal constituencies and helping voters feel as though the recovery is making their
It’s very fashionable these days to be despondent about the quality of our politicians. They’re all lazy liars who look only to their interests and neglect their duties to their constituents because they’d rather be grunting and snorting around a trough before sticking their snouts in it. And while the expenses scandal, resignations and court
