The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 10 April 2014

Home Maria Miller resigned as Culture Secretary after a week of being the centre of a game of hunt-the-issue. She had paid back expenses, but only the £5,800 requested by the Commons standards committee, not the £45,000 suggested by the parliamentary commissioner for standards; she had apologised in the Commons, but her apology lasted only

It’s time to stop the omnishambles – and send Lynton Crosby to No. 10

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on Maria Miller’s resignation” startat=1057] Listen [/audioplayer]Yet again, the Conservative party has reminded us that it is quite capable of losing the next election. The events leading up to Maria Miller’s resignation are entirely consistent with a party that is so gauche, so accident-prone, so surprised by basic

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‘We were always an odd couple. I’m a man, she’s a woman — it was never going to work.’

Portrait of the week | 3 April 2014

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made ‘a commitment to fight for full employment in Britain’ and for the country ‘to have the highest employment rate of any of the world’s leading economies’. Wolfgang Schäuble, his counterpart in Germany, agreed that any EU treaty changes should ‘guarantee fairness’ to countries outside the eurozone.