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.
What next after Luciana Berger’s victory from the opposition benches on smoking in cars with children? Yesterday MPs were making all sorts of dire warnings in the House of Commons about what might happen next and supporters of the ban are dismissing them as trying to find a slippery slope when this is just a
In Westminster this morning, Cabinet ministers are looking nervously at their diaries. They’re wondering whether they’ll be the next to get the call asking them to try to smooth down the comms mess the government has made of the floods. Eric Pickles didn’t make a great go of it this weekend. Philip Hammond has just
So is the ban on smoking in cars with children, backed by MPs this evening by 376 votes to 107 against, a good idea? As James observed earlier, it is fascinating to see how quickly opinions have shifted even in the past few weeks. The PA division lists have 100 Conservative MPs voting against, and only
There is one important line in Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture which shows the Labour leader is trying to come to terms with some of the difficult questions that he knows he must answer before 2015. Labour knows that it will have to close hospitals to improve services. But it also doesn’t really want to
In the past few days it has become increasingly difficult to tell what the Number 10 strategy is for responding to the floods. As one Tory MP remarked to me earlier, ‘there is a whiff of the Hurricane Katrina about Number 10’s handling of the floods. It’s the inconsistency of government comms and policy. First
The pegs are definitely coming out of Michael Gove’s education big tent, although it’s not just the Secretary of State who is pulling them out. Time was when Stephen Twigg could only make strangely consensual-yet-critical humming noises at the despatch box during departmental questions. Now Tristram Hunt is able to find sufficient difference between his
Ed Miliband is delivering the Hugo Young lecture tonight, and will focus on ‘people-powered public services’. All the briefing so far sets it out to be one of those ‘intellectual underpinnings’ speeches, rather than something that sets the world on fire (although Miliband does, to his credit, have a habit of pulling impressive speeches out
Just when the Lib Dems thought the Lord Rennard row had calmed down, the peer announces that his lawyers have demanded that he be reinstated as a member by Thursday, or he will take legal action. His spokesman has confirmed that a ‘pre-action protocol’ has been sent to the party which notifies it that certain
‘I’ve kept my counsel up to now,’ said Chris Smith, loftily, when he appeared on the Today programme. Perhaps by the end of the interview, in which he managed to distance himself from previous policy pronouncements while defending his staff to the hilt, he wished he’d kept his counsel too. Those opening words suggested that
It’s a week since Harriet Harman claimed it was ‘raining men’ in the Tory party, and yet the debate still rages about whether the Conservatives have a ‘women problem’. Tory backbencher Tracey Crouch has written a forceful piece for the Mail on Sunday on why she felt Ed Miliband’s intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions on
Immigration Minister Mark Harper has resigned after being informed that his cleaner was working illegally in this country. Here is the exchange of letters between Harper and David Cameron: Letter from Mark Harper to the Prime Minister 7 February 2014 Dear Prime Minister In April 2007 I took on a cleaner for my London flat.
Ukip’s campaigning team has been working so hard to make it into second place in Wythenshawe and Sale East that when I arrived at their very purple shop in Sale town centre yesterday, the big panic was not so much a shortage of leaflets as a shortage of clean pants. One of the staffers has
I’m in Wythenshawe and Sale East today with Ukip’s by-election candidate John Bickley. I’ll have a full report of the party’s exploits later, but for the meantime, here’s a chat I had with Bickley about the campaign. listen to ‘John Bickley: ‘If there was an Olympic medal for hypocrisy, Labour would win gold’’ on Audioboo
David Cameron will tell Scots this morning that the UK wants Scotland to stay a part of the Union. That he’s giving this speech at all is being read in some quarters as a sign that he’s at least underwhelmed by the show put on so far by Better Together leader Alistair Darling. The PM’s
What are the Coalition parties going to do for the next few months in the run-up to the general election? Judging by the way the Liberal Democrats have behaved this week, they’re going to spend a great deal of time talking about Michael Gove, which isn’t encouraging for anyone who got a little bored of
This evening, Conservative MPs have been told that Aidan Burley, the MP for Cannock Chase who attended a Nazi-themed stag do is standing down in 2015. He said: ‘After a difficult time I have decided to announce I will stand down at the next general election. I will continue to work for the people of
Aside from his ding-dong over floods with Ed Miliband at PMQs today, David Cameron also faced questions from backbenchers who have been affected by the floods. Conservative Graham Stuart asked whether the Prime Minister shared his ‘outrage at the false choice presented by the Chairman of the Environment Agency between protecting urban and rural areas
‘I know a few people who could arrange just that,’ remarked a Tory MP this morning on reading Danny Alexander’s remarks in the Mirror that the Conservatives would reduce the top rate of tax to 40p ‘over my dead body’. He told the newspaper: ‘The top rate of tax has been an issue of late.
The Conservatives have just held a party meeting where Lynton Crosby was supposed to be reading them the riot act over their behaviour in the past few weeks. But the MPs leaving seemed to think it was ‘lovely’, ‘very positive’ and ‘all very tame’, which sounds like an unconventional roasting. The meeting focused on turning
George Osborne’s evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee was dispiriting for a number of reasons. The first was that he told the peers that the chances are that politicians will still be struggling to ensure that housing supply keeps up with demand in 10 years’ time. He said: ‘I imagine if we