James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
Nick Clegg has confirmed this morning that the coalition is looking at how to tweak its policy of removing child benefit from families in which someone pays the higher rate of income tax. As I wrote in the Mail on Sunday, there are three options being explored. The first is designed to address the fact
It is a sign of the influence that Steve Hilton has on the Cameron project that there have been more column inches devoted to his departure from Downing Street than there would be to most Cabinet resignations. But even after he heads to California in May, Hilton will still be part of the Cameron brains
David Cameron’s speech today is another reminder of how concerned the Tories are about losing their traditional advantage among female voters. The message that the Tories are cutting so that the country is passed on in a better state to the next generation is a direct response to the fact that the party’s polling has
The Cameroons believe they have come up with a policy that will deliver at least 20 more Tory seats at the next election. No. 10 is, understandably, determined to get this measure through: nothing else promises them anything like the same electoral dividend. But this silver bullet isn’t a tax cut or a new approach
Perhaps, the greatest testament to Steve Hilton’s influence in Downing Street is that everyone chuckles when you ask if anyone will replace him. His role in Number 10 as the senior adviser was one he had carved out for himself so that he could work on what he wanted to. It is deliberately designed not
David Cameron’s complaints at last night’s EU meeting about the lack of a growth agenda have, in part, been addressed by the new draft conclusions. Cameron — who was supported by the Dutch, Italians and Spanish — seems to have secured promises on the completion of the single market, deregulation and the services directive in
When David Cameron headed to Brussels last December, it was far from certain that he would veto the proposed treaty. It was only when Nicolas Sarkozy proved totally uninterested in accommodating Britain’s demands that the Prime Minister decided that he could not sign up to it. In a way, Sarkozy did Cameron a favour. Imagine
The changes announced to the work experience programme today have been designed to reassure the companies involved. Those on the scheme will now only face any benefits sanction if they commit the equivalent of gross misconduct. Once some big corporations started getting cold feet about the scheme some tweaks to it were inevitable. As Matt
When Rupert Murdoch visited the Sun newsroom recently, eyebrows were raised by the fact that he was accompanied not by James Murdoch but Lachlan Murdoch. James Murdoch, who has never had his father’s emotional commitment to the newspaper side of the business, has now stepped down as executive chairman of News International, though he remains
Today’s main PMQs drama came after the session itself had ended. Julie Hilling, a Labour MP who Cameron had said was ‘sponsored’ by the union whose leader threatened to disrupt the Olympics last night, said in a point of order that she was not ‘sponsored’ by Unite. The Labour benches were in full flow, jeering
The declaration by Len McCluskey, the leader of Unite, that public sector unions should consider disrupting the Olympics is going to re-ignite the whole debate about union power. McCluskey tells Andrew Sparrow that ‘The attacks that are being launched on public sector workers at the moment are so deep and ideological that the idea the
One quirk of the welfare reform debate is that many of the reforms won’t automatically apply in one of the parts of the United Kingdom with the worst welfare problems: Ulster. As Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland Secretary, points out in a speech tonight, ‘Northern Ireland has proportionately one third more households living on out
The letter from Nick Clegg and Shirley Williams to Lib Dem MPs and peers raises several interesting questions. The first of which is why did Clegg champion these health reforms back in the day? Four days after the first reading of the bill, the deputy Prime Minister had this exchange with Andrew Marr: Andrew Marr:
The mood of this morning’s ‘Growth Forum’ hosted by the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs and the Institute for Economic Affairs was summed up by Kwasi Kwarteng’s introductory remark that to meet the OBR’s ‘ambitious growth targets’, the coalition ‘can’t just bumble along’. The headline news coming out of the event is Andrew Tyrie,
When David Cameron addressed Tory MPs on Friday, he told them that the London Mayoral elections were ‘the binary moment of 2012’. He argued that if Labour lost in London, one of their traditional strongholds, it would be a disaster for Ed Miliband. In the Cameron narrative, a Boris victory in May would mean that
There have always been two types of Tory modernisers. Both wanted to talk about issues that the party had neglected — public services, the environment and the like. But the soft modernisers were more prepared to compromise ideologically, to go with the flow of the age. The hard modernisers’ interest, by contrast, was in applying
It has become clear over the last few weeks that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the coalition. Once, the rows between Tories and Lib Dems used to be about peripheral issues, but they are now about the central planks of government policy. In happier times, disputes used to lead to better
The coalition’s work on adoption is one of its more impressive bits of public service reform. It starts from the right premise, that adoption is vastly preferable to children being in care. It then uses changes to the regulations, transparency and a plethora of providers to try and increase the number of adoptions. It is,
The Work Experience scheme is a sensible policy innovation. Giving the unemployed structure to their days, the chance to earn some experience and learn some skills is surely preferable to doing nothing for them beyond bunging them some money every week. Indeed, I would say that it was by far the more compassionate policy. Chris
Talking to a Downing Street adviser earlier this week, I was struck when they observed that a ‘2014 election wouldn’t be too bad really. David would have done his best, Nick would have done his best. But they just couldn’t make it work anymore.’ The Tories have spent some time recently contemplating the possibility