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.
The government has just published the Welfare Benefits Up-rating Bill, and everyone’s pointing to polls which underline their own point about whether limiting the rise in benefits payments to 1 per cent is going to play well with voters. Labour types are brandishing the Independent/ComRes poll, which says ‘a surprising high 43 per cent disagree’
Francis Maude’s latest plan to get the civil service working more effectively sounds very sensible: so sensible, in fact, that it’s a wonder it has taken so long. The problem is that he currently can’t be as sensible as he’d hoped when it comes to appointing senior civil servants. The headline announcement is that the
Tory MPs – and the occasional Lib Dem, too – were flocking around Andrew Mitchell in the Commons yesterday to show their support for the former chief whip. He is enjoying a new wave of support in his party, rather than languishing as persona non grata on the backbench. But the picture is still not
David Cameron’s appearance before the 1922 committee was designed to reassure his party, and he tried to do this by promising them that the Conservative party would be strong on Europe in 2015. It has been a hard term, and today’s PMQs was savage, so the Prime Minister decided to start his speech by telling
David Cameron made a perfectly good stab at explaining what the government is doing to support families who are struggling at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He said: ‘I agree with the right hon. gentleman that we need to do more to help the poorest in our country. That is why we have lifted the personal
As expected, today’s report from the Commission on a Bill of Rights offered little. With a membership evenly split between Tory and Lib Dem nominees, it was set up to fail. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who resigned from the Commission in March, tells me that this problem was exacerbated by the way in which it was run:
Ken Clarke’s announcement that the government will accept a major House of Lords amendment to the Justice and Security Bill might ease the legislation’s passage through the Commons. The Lib Dems and several senior Conservative figures, including Andrew Tyrie, have been pressing the government to accept the amendment, which gives judges more discretion on whether
It’s a big day for Chris Grayling: the long awaited Commission on a British Bill of Rights reports today. But the Justice Secretary is already setting himself up for disappointment, with reports swirling in the press that the Commission has failed to reach a strong conclusion. In any case, as Grayling acknowledges in his op-ed
Think the Commons is in uproar at the moment over gay marriage? Just wait until the legislation makes its way into the House of Lords. The received wisdom is that equal marriage will go into the upper chamber, but never make it out alive after a savaging from socially conservative peers. But is that true?
As the country approaches a general election, a party leader, desperate to reassure a key group of voters, makes a very silly pledge. He is as unequivocal as possible that, in spite of the big spending implications in a time of economic crisis, he will stick to this silly pledge to keep his target voters
Tony Blair is paying a visit to journalists in the Commons this week for a festive lunch. Last week, David Cameron complained to lunching hacks about the ‘gumming up’ of government; perhaps the former Prime Minister will wish to add his own thoughts today on the ingredients of that sticky gum that makes the progress
There’s nothing wrong with Nick Clegg putting some distance between his party and the Conservatives. Today the Liberal Democrat leader is going to open up about the gory details of government, explaining where his party has held the Tories back, and heralding a new era where he and colleagues are honest about what they actually
This week’s developments over gay marriage have left a febrile atmosphere in the Conservative party. As Fraser wrote yesterday, David Cameron seems to have driven his party ‘quite mad’ by pursuing the policy, and the mood in the tearoom after Maria Miller’s statement on Tuesday certainly seems to have underlined that. I understand from a
The debate over benefit uprating will run and run because both sides think they are winning. George Osborne thinks the public resent generous benefits rises. Liam Byrne and Ed Balls want to call this a ‘strivers tax’ and think blue collar workers will fall into their arms. Byrne told Coffee House yesterday that Labour will be hurt
Have you noticed, recently, that the Coalition has changed the way it behaves in public? Two years ago, had Nick Clegg dropped his support for major Home Office legislation, spoken out about his own opinion on drugs policy and taken such a different position on a proposed dramatic change to the way newspapers are regulated within
Ed Miliband is giving another one of his repositioning speeches today: this time about immigration and integration. We’re going back to the Labour leader’s school and his family again, as well as reminiscing about Olympics: none of which are exactly groundbreaking territory, given Ed explored the first two at length in his conference speech, has
By this stage in the Coalition, everyone would have expected at least one major bust-up between George Osborne and Vince Cable. But his evidence to today’s Treasury Select Committee suggested that the Chancellor isn’t so much involved in a stand-off with the Business Secretary as he is taking on his point of view. It was
Liam Byrne is a modernising, Blairite Labour MP, and in case you were in any doubt about that, he conducts his interview with Coffee House sitting next to a framed photograph of him with Tony Blair. The party’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary is well known for his modernising zeal, which has sometimes led him
Michael Gove has written to schools across the country telling them that they can deduct a day’s pay from staff who try to disrupt school time by carrying out ‘work to rule’ industrial action. This form of action involves teachers fulfilling their job description to the very letter, with the NUT and NASUWT issuing list
Downing Street has defended Maria Miller’s special adviser over the way she warned the Telegraph about the Culture Secretary’s connection to Leveson as it prepared a story on her expenses. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman has just told the lobby: ‘My understanding is that the special advice was raising legitimate concerns about the way in