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.
Ukip’s autumn conference made the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was supposed to be a showcase of how grown up the party is these days, but it ended up being about Godfrey Bloom calling women ‘sluts’ and hitting a journalist. In the conference hall, Nigel Farage bounded onto the stage to a strange
Boris Johnson spoke to the 301 group of largely pro-Cameron Tory MPs last night. The meeting was open to all, but I hear that around 48 MPs turned up in the end. One MP present mutters that ‘it wasn’t a huge turnout. The all-party parliamentary beer group attracts more attendees’. Naturally, Boris was late. My
This week is offering quite a lesson in how politicians answer difficult questions. Yesterday Philip Hammond said people like him didn’t ‘do’ yes-no questions, and today Patrick McLoughlin, the latest victim of the floods rota that sees a new minister trying to make sense of the whole thing each day, showed us how you can
We certainly didn’t learn much new about David Cameron from his flooding press conference this afternoon. We already knew that his approach to crises is to let things get rather bad for a little while, and then, with his back against the wall, to perform well as a statesman taking control of a messy situation.
That Danny Alexander struggles with appearing to have gone native in the Treasury has been well known in Westminster for a long time. He gets on well with George Osborne on a personal level, and I reported in December that he’d been rebuked for accidentally using the Tory term ‘global race’. Today Nick Clegg was
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
