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.
Number 10 has appointed Tobias Ellwood has the Prime Minister’s parliamentary adviser on this year’s Nato summit, Coffee House has learned. Ellwood, who is currently PPS to Jeremy Hunt, will work as a link between MPs, peers and the Prime Minister. The summit will take place in Newport, Wales, on 4 and 5 September 2014.
The first week back in January is always a miserable one. Commuters stare miserably out of rain-streaked train windows contemplating the end of the festive season. More couples turn to divorce or relationship counselling than at any other time of the year. George Osborne did try his best to cheer us all up on Monday
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”David Goodhart and Tim Finch on Labour’s immigration woes”] Listen [/audioplayer]Victor Spirescu came to Britain last week looking for work washing cars, but seems to have landed himself with a career in broadcasting. The Romanian, who arrived on the first flight into London after restrictions on workers from Bulgaria and Romania ended on
Ed Balls’ softer language about Nick Clegg might be an inevitable repositioning of the Labour party in the run-up to another hung parliament in 2015, or it might be the shadow chancellor trying to get ahead of the game after the end to his 2013 was rather bruising. But it is worth mulling the sorts
We don’t quite know what Ed Miliband would really do about a lot of things just yet: this is the year when he plans (and desperately needs) to set that out so Labour isn’t just an Opposition that complains about things being expensive but a party that voters can imagine governing. But it’s significant that
Amid continuing confusion on what on earth the Tories do think about raising the minimum wage, George Osborne has had a go at clarifying things. He has just told Sky News: ‘Well look, I think everyone wants to see an increase in the minimum wage. I’d like to see an increase in the minimum wage,
PMQs was a rightly sombre affair, coming as it did only a few hours after the death of Labour MP Paul Goggins was announced. It has been striking to hear many MPs of all political persuasions pay tribute to Goggins as a ‘decent’ and ‘kind’ man, and those tributes were echoed in the Chamber. These
This lunchtime, Treasury minister Sajid Javid said there is a ‘strong case to look at’ raising the minimum wage, joining Matt Hancock as a Conservative minister prepared to say in public that there is a case for doing so. listen to ‘Sajid Javid: there is a ‘strong case to look at’ for raising the minimum
If George Osborne and David Cameron did fire the starting gun for the 2015 election campaign over the weekend and yesterday, then what will that campaign look like? Labour wants to say it will be a nasty campaign because this means they can talk about heir favourite bogeyman Lynton Crosby and Ed Miliband’s own emphasis
We already knew that the Chancellor would focus on welfare as a field ripe for further cuts in his speech in Birmingham today. When he delivered that speech, George Osborne announced that the Treasury’s current forecasts suggest that £12 billion of further welfare cuts are needed in the first two years of the next Parliament,
George Osborne has a funny way of saying ‘happy new year’. In his speech in Birmingham this morning, the Chancellor will describe 2014 as the year of ‘hard truths’ about how much more spending needs to be cut in order to close the deficit. So why is the Chancellor kicking off what most commentators are
One of the most significant things about David Cameron’s Sunday Times interview today was something he didn’t say. The Prime Minister made maintaining the triple lock for pensions for the next Parliament ‘the first plank of the next general election manifesto’, but he didn’t make any ‘read-my-lips’ promises about anything else related to those of
Beyond the slew of amusing ‘No man’s hand’ photos of the beleaguered François Hollande trying and failing to find support from other European leaders, there are a number of implications for the British political scene of the beleaguered French leader’s latest crisis, in which he has been forced to admit that taxes have been too
Ed Miliband did vow to ‘relentlessly’ focus on the cost of living crisis facing hardworking families up and down the country (hopefully someone will develop a shorthand outline for this rather lengthy saying to save the pens of journalists who have to write it down repeatedly at launch events over the next 12 months) in
David Cameron’s New Year message (and his accompanying Times op-ed) is an upbeat call to stick with the Tories to get the job done. He writes of his desire to ‘turn Britain into the flagship post-Great Recession success story. A country that is on the rise’. And in his video message he focuses on the
In the autumn Nick Clegg annoyed some in the Labour party by telling his conference that ‘Labour would wreck the recovery’ and that ‘the Conservatives would give us the wrong kind of recovery’. Some senior figures such as Lord Adonis said it suggested Clegg was predisposed to partnership with the Tories as wrecking is so
The Sun on Sunday’s story this morning that senior Tories have opened talks with Boris Johnson about a campaigning role for the Mayor follows some advice offered by James Forsyth in the pages of this magazine back in May. In his politics column, James argued that Boris needed a role in the 2015 campaign to
It turns out that Alex Salmond needn’t worry too much about the re-emergence of that pesky row about advice on an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union. He’s got arguments that are far more powerful than all that to convince Scots of the value of independence. In the latest issue of Idea, a magazine
While Anna Soubry’s short joke about Nigel Farage on Marr has been causing the biggest row, it was actually Vince Cable’s interview earlier in the programme that was clearly intended to annoy. The Business Secretary has been quite quiet of late, particularly after a rather humiliating conference season. But today he went much, much further
In the latest episode of Tea at 22, I interviewed Conservative business and energy minister Michael Fallon on his work in two Whitehall departments, Tory EU policy, and the party’s approach to Ukip. Fallon was the Spectator’s Minister of the Year for 2013. He had some very interesting points about how the Business department in
