Columns

James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss George Osborne's 2013 Autumn statement: [audioboo url="https://audioboo.fm/boos/1763353-isabel-hardman-and-james-forsyth-discuss-george-osborne-s-autumn-statement"][/audioboo] Next week’s autumn statement looks at first as if it should be easy for George Osborne. For the first time, he’ll arrive with unambiguously good news. He can announce an upgrade of the growth forecasts and that borrowing has come in lower than expected. Politically, however, his task is as difficult as ever. He has to wrestle back the initiative from Labour. Preparations for this ‘fiscal event’, to use the Whitehall parlance, have been intense.

Listen to James Forsyth discuss the tale of two political partnerships: [audioboo url="http://audioboo.fm/boos/1746142-james-forsyth-on-david-george-and-ed-ed"/] Six and a half years after Gordon Brown finally badgered Tony Blair out of Downing Street, the relationship between these two men still dominates British politics. Why? Because David Cameron and George Osborne, and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are, in their different ways, doing what they can to prevent history repeating itself. Their relationships are both informed by the Blair-Brown breakdown. Cameron and Osborne have quite deliberately structured their working lives to avoid replicating the tensions within New Labour. The pair shared a set of offices in opposition with their aides sitting in the same room.

John Bercow could go down as a great reforming Speaker of the House of Commons. It’s thanks to him, in large part, that the Commons chamber once again seems like the cockpit of the nation. But he now risks becoming the second successive Speaker to be ousted from his job. Even his friends admit that his inability to conceal his dislike for David Cameron and various Tory backbenchers has put his position in jeopardy. Bercow is a contrast to his predecessor Michael Martin. He is razor sharp and confident in his own judgment. No one doubts his intellectual ability. But Bercow has a large number of detractors. He’s gone from being on the hard right of the Tory party to a darling of the Labour benches — and he has picked up many enemies on the way.

Westminster has been gripped by talk of a referendum this week. But the excitement hasn’t been about the vote in ten months’ time that will decide whether Scotland remains part of the United Kingdom, but about the possibility of an EU referendum in four years’ time. South of Hadrian’s Wall, Scotland’s vote on independence is fast in danger of becoming the forgotten referendum. If the Scottish referendum is the forgotten one then the Welsh one is the one ‘nobody’s ever bloody well heard of’. Last week, David Cameron announced that there would be a vote in Wales to decide whether the assembly there should be able to vary the rate of income tax. This is, by any reasonable standard, a significant change to the fabric of the United Kingdom.

Ed Miliband’s aides used to scurry around the parliamentary estate, their shoulders hunched. A look in their eyes suggested that they feared their boss’s harshest critics were right. But times have changed. Now Team Ed marches with heads high. The success of his pledge to freeze energy prices has given them a warm glow. Five weeks on from the Labour leader’s conference speech, his commitment still dominates political debate. It has boosted his personal ratings, helped his party increase its support in the polls and convinced his supporters that he might be Prime Minister after the next election. In these circumstances, one might expect the Tories to be panicking. But they’re not.

The mood was grim when David Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers convened for a crunch meeting on 4 February this year. The economy had shrunk in the final three months of last year; the country was on the verge of a triple-dip recession, unprecedented in modern times. The government was in dire political straits. Those present discussed the situation with appropriate solemnity. But the tension was broken when Rupert Harrison, the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser, passionately declared that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn. Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, chuckled and joked that he would take a note of that confident prediction.

Ten days before polling day in 2010, it was clear that a hung parliament was the most likely result of the election. But when interviewed by The Spectator at the time, David Cameron refused to discuss what parts of the Tory manifesto were up for discussion in any possible coalition. He said simply that ‘all the things in our manifesto are what we want to achieve’. When pressed, he rather irritably replied, ‘I am not going to go through the manifesto in that way. The manifesto is what we believe in, that’s what we want to achieve and that is what matters.’ Even the offer of a pen and a copy of the manifesto, so that he could underline his core commitments, didn’t tempt the Tory leader.