James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
This morning has not been a good one for the government. There’s been an embarrassing admission that 28 days detention will simply lapse on Monday, the Conservative party chairman is delivering a speech that the vast majority of Conservatives think is muddle-headed at best, and the Prime Minister finds himself in a public debate with
Andy Burnham crossed a line today in using Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, to take a pop at the Education Secretary. Burnham, mockingly citing a recent Vine column, argued that the fact that the Goves have a cleaner ‘raises further questions about whether he is living in the same world as the rest of us.’
Michael Gove has reignited talk of a Tory Lib Dem pact by urging people in Hull to vote Lib Dem to keep Labour out at the local elections. Gove’s intervention was not planned but it does reveal how he thinks. Gove’s department is the most coalitionised. Not only is there a Lib Dem minister there
David Laws has penned a robust defence of the coalition’s economic policies for The Guardian. He points out that the big dividing lines in politics are on the economy and then goes onto say: ‘Ed Miliband is betting that economic recovery will be derailed, and while trying to reconcile many divergent views in his party,
Mary Ann Sieghart has a great piece in the Independent today about how, inadvertently, we have designed a system that almost encourages young people to drink irresponsibly. As she argues, a lot of problems have come, oddly, from making it harder for people to drink under age in pubs. As Sieghart puts it, ‘And because
David Cameron’s interview on the Today Programme this morning was another reminder of what a hard year it is going to be for the government. The bulk of it was devoted to Cameron doing his best to defend and explain the government’s planned reforms to the NHS. Cameron, normally so assured in these interviews, seemed
Iran’s nuclear programme is the most likely source of a major global conflict. So it is highly significant that the outgoing head of Mossad recently told the Israeli parliament that technical problems meant that Iran might not be able to make a bomb until 2015. These technical problems have, as a riveting piece in the
Ed Miliband’s speech today contained an interesting compliment to Margaret Thatcher. He said that the challenge for Labour now was to ‘change the common sense of the age’ as the Tories had done in the 1970s. Miliband’s argument is that Labour need to articulate an entirely new political economy. As he put it,’ we can’t
The Liberal Democrats’ current problems can be traced back to 28 October 1943. The Liberal Democrats’ current problems can be traced back to 28 October 1943. On that day, the House of Commons decided that the bombed Commons chamber should be rebuilt and its oblong structure preserved. This ensured that the British tradition of confrontational
Sayeeda Warsi’s attack on the ‘right wing’ of the Conservative party has had a predictable impact. There is fury that the party chairman is attacking a section of the party, it is something that a considerable number of Tories will never forgive her for. It is also being pointed out that there were a lot
Andy Sparrow is reporting on his live blog that the Lib Dems have conceded defeat in Oldham East and Saddleworth. We won’t have a full result for a couple of hours yet. But all the signs are that Labour’s majority will be substantial, well over the 1,000 mark that Lib Dems were talking about earlier
The May 5th date for the AV referendum is under threat because the bill paving the way for it might not get through the House of Lords in time. The problem is that the referendum bill is linked to the plan to equalise constituency sizes which Labour is steadfastly opposed to. So Labour lords are
Tomorrow’s vote in Oldham East and Saddleworth is the first big event of the political year. It is a marginal seat that Labour just held at the last election, beating the Liberal Democrats by a touch over a hundred votes. But the by-election has been caused by the Lib Dem candidate taking the Labour MP
The first PMQs of the year was a bad tempered affair. The Prime Minister had clearly decided that attack was the best form of defence, hurling insult after insult across the despatch box. He accused Ed Miliband of being a ‘nothing man’, told him that his Shadow Chancellor can’t count and that he doesn’t count
The trouble over the European Referendum Bill rather sums up the current state of the relationship between the Conservative party leadership and its more truculent backbenchers. The Bill was meant to be something to cheer up the troops. But it has ended up going down so badly that the whips have been left tearing their
‘it was a deranged individual living in a time and place where anger and vitriol had reached such a fever pitch that we had dehumanized those in public life’ The words of Andrei Cherny on the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords are worth reflecting on. Political discourse has a tendency to hyperbole. But sometimes people need
Ed Miliband’s press conference today was a classic example of clever opposition politics. He and Alan Johnson said that Labour would continue the bonus tax on the banks for one more year. This policy has the twin advantage of maximising the coalition’s discomfort over the whole issue of bankers’ bonuses and expiring well before the
Matt d’Ancona’s piece in The Sunday Telegraph arguing that the coalition should stick to its long term strategy and ignore the slings and arrows of the daily news cycle makes an important point. The Blair governments would, undoubtedly, have achieved more if they had done this. But the circumstances for the coalition are different in
One of the most worrying developments of recent years has been a belief that any adult who wants to teach or help children should be suspected of immoral tendencies. This has led to a belief that even the most innocent of actions should be seen as perverted until proved otherwise. It is harder to find
Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are locked in a political duel, and only one of them can survive. Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are locked in a political duel, and only one of them can survive. In the new politics, what helps Clegg hurts Miliband and vice versa. This unusual dynamic makes next week’s by-election