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.
Nick Clegg has had a good party conference, and wants to round it off with an announcement that will leave a warm glow in delegates’ tummies. So he’s announcing free school meals for all children in infant school from next September. This will be a key feature in the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech tomorrow afternoon,
What do the Tories make of Vince Cable’s crackdown on zero hours contracts? The Business Secretary’s review has been long-known, but yesterday he announced that he would ‘act against abusive practices in zero hours contracts, like exclusivity arrangements which prevent workers seeking alternatives’. Some read this as an overture to Labour, but from conversations that
Aside from the usual outright bashing of the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats do want to put some clear yellow water between their party and their coalition partners on subtler issues. They don’t just want to talk about the ‘Tea Party Tories’, as Vince Cable did yesterday, but also about some of the different decisions
Cabinet colleagues’ concerns over the housing bubble and immigration was only one facet of Vince Cable’s fringe interview this evening. What he told Steve Richards about the Coalition was also highly significant, and the biggest example of his freelancing to date. Where Cabinet colleagues have previously insisted that this Coalition is built to last, Cable
‘People think that I’m quite blunt,’ joked Vince Cable to Steve Richards at a fringe event this evening. The Business Secretary was being interviewed on his job, his relationship with Nick Clegg, and coalition politics, and he certainly made no effort to tone down that bluntness. There were ‘senior Conservatives’, he said who were also
It was so close that they had to count the votes in the conference hall, and even then, the Liberal Democrats only backed Nick Clegg on retaining the 45p tax above a return to the 50p rate by four little votes – 224 in favour of the 45p, and 220 in favour of the 50p.
Nick Clegg was in a jolly good mood this afternoon when he strode into the conference hall for his question-and-answer session. His success (which may be halted shortly when conference votes on tax) in three votes over the last two days n nuclear power, tuition fees and the economy meant that he could be confident
Another year, another speech by Vince Cable attacking those nasty Tories. After his rather undignified to-ing and fro-ing over the economy vote that left him looking confused and selfish while Clegg emerged looking rather bold and statesmanlike, the Business Secretary had just half an hour before he returned to the conference hall to speak again.
So after all the fuss, Nick Clegg did manage to win his vote on the economy: both on the amendment proposed by the left-leaning Social Liberal Forum, and on the motion itself. The Lib Dem leader put in a forceful performance when he summed up the motion at the end of the debate. Some of
So after all that fuss overnight, suddenly Vince Cable has decided that he can spare time to pop along to his party’s crunch debate on the economy, to vote and lend his moral support. Nick Clegg must be thrilled. What is the Business Secretary up to, initially planning to avoid the conference hall for ‘speech
Nick Clegg’s strategy of getting his party to approve his position on a number of contentious issues reaches its most awkward stage today, with the votes on the economy and taxes that are causing the greatest grief with activists. It’s complicated by Vince Cable’s plan to be a no-show at the economy debate in an
One of the Lib Dem leadership’s key aims for this conference in Glasgow is to move the party into a pragmatic mindset that involves accepting and moving on from certain contentious policies such as tuition fees, the Coalition’s economic policy, and nuclear power. So far that strategy seems to be working, with a number of
Danny Alexander is respected by his colleagues across the coalition (except Vince Cable – James reveals today that the pair are barely speaking) for a number of things, from his bean counting ability to his aptitude for giving a lengthy interview or fringe speech without moving a story on an inch. He tried to do
Ed Davey has a good story to tell his party about fighting the Tories to get a Lib Dem vision for energy policy into government. His speech today was supposed to underline that, and to a certain extent it achieved this, using the word ‘fight’ 15 times, and ‘battle’ four times. It was just rather
Who would the Lib Dems prefer to go into coalition with? We know what the party’s activists think, thanks to an Independent on Sunday poll that found them in favour of shacking up with Labour, and thanks to the Observer, we know what former party leader Lord Ashdown thinks (although he seems a little aerated
One of the many confrontations between the Liberal Democrat leadership and party activists this week in Glasgow is over tax. When conference debates its tax policy paper, ‘Fairer Taxes’, on Monday, it will vote on a motion that includes a reintroduction of the 50p rate of tax, should an independent review conclude that the cost
Nick Clegg is, on balance, starting his party’s conference in a reasonably strong position. There has been an amusing bitch fight today between party grandees, with Paddy Ashdown saying that ‘Matthew [Oakeshott]’s self-appointed position as a sort of vicar on earth for Vince does neither of them any good’, but largely Clegg can expect to
The Lib Dems have had a lot to get used to since coming into government: not least the growth of their conference from something that members could stroll in and out of with their knitting needles, and that only the most junior hacks were sent to. But only three years into holding conferences as a
José Manuel Barroso’s comments about euroscepticism might have revealed something rather warped about the Eurocrat mindset, but it has also provided quite an opportunity for David Cameron to show his party where his own loyalties lie. This afternoon the Prime Minister told Iain Dale’s LBC show that he planned to have a ‘pretty robust’ exchange
It’s two weeks since David Cameron looked rather sick in the House of Commons and Labour MPs jeered ‘resign’ following his defeat on Syria. On that night, all sorts of wild predictions were flying around about what this meant for the Prime Minister. But even some of the more sanguine commentary looked rather misplaced this