Conservative party

Boris Johnson will not stand for parliament at the next election, The Spectator understands. The Mayor of London has told the Cameron circle that he will not seek to return to the Commons in a pre-2015 by-election, nor will he stand at the general election. Boris's decision not to be a candidate in 2015 indicates that he expects Cameron still to be Prime Minister and party leader after the general election. He has told friends that he has no desire to spend three years serving under Cameron. He reasons that if Cameron loses, creating a Tory leadership vacancy, he'll be able to persuade an MP to rapidly stand aside for him. The news that Boris is not standing in 2015 will come as a relief to Cameron's allies.

Charming little spat between the Conservative Party and George Orwell’s old literary haunt, Tribune. The magazine, which is edited by a former Labour councillor, is up in arms because the Tories will only give it one free pass to their autumn conference. Given that the periodical has only three members of staff and is the chosen reading matter of what's left of the very left, Steerpike can see why the Tories reckon that one freeloading tribune of the people will be enough. But former Tribune editor Mark Seddon says: ‘It’s an outrage that they should pick on a small paper because it happens to be left-wing.’ A Tory insider hit back this afternoon: ‘This is typical of Labour’s something for nothing culture.

Everyone in SW1, it seems, has an opinion on this controversial scheme. Most people hate it. The general assumption is that this is a Tory stunt clothed as a government policy. The question is, though, has the van campaign been a successful policy pilot from a presentational point of view? Here are some thoughts: 1). The right-wing press. The Mail is utterly contemptuous. A leading column claims that only one illegal immigrant has stepped forward. The leader goes on to say that voters punish cheap stunts; what people want is action. And if that wasn’t enough, the paper’s front page (below) is uncompromising. All of this will have gone down badly in the Home Office, which has a good story to tell about reducing net migration. 2). Disaffected voters.

After weeks of the Prime Minister and his team dancing on a semantic pinhead over whether they discussed plain cigarette packaging with, or were lobbied by, Lynton Crosby, the man himself has made a rare public intervention. The Press Association reports him denying that he had 'any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister' on plain packaging. Crosby added: 'What the Prime Minister said should be enough for any ordinary person.' But it wasn't really, because David Cameron did rather lose his cool on the Marr Show at the weekend, telling Andrew Marr that his insistence that Crosby had 'not intervened' was 'the only answer you're getting'.

It's difficult to find a Tory MP who doesn't think Lynton Crosby is making their party more aggressive and impressive. The Wizard of Oz has been a good thing. Most MPs think his tough-talking vision for how the party can fight Ukip and Labour rather than fighting one another has made a huge difference. Crosby was hired to advise the party on strategy (as well as swear at people), but the one thing that makes a few MPs want to swear back is the possibility he has had some undue influence over the government's public health policy, which has zig-zagged one way and then another. As James said earlier, this row will keep going, and Number 10 did nothing after PMQs to slow things down.

One of the striking things about politics at the moment is how the Tories are behaving like an opposition, campaigning against Labour with even more intensity than they managed in 2009. The Tories intend to use the Keogh report, out tomorrow, to — in the words of one Number 10 insider — give Labour ‘both barrels’ over the NHS. As one Tory minister puts it, ‘Labour’s argument about Mid-Staffs is that it is one isolated, bad case. Keogh disproves that.’ As part of this, the Tories are going after Andy Burnham. The Tory leadership is convinced that Ed Miliband will move Burnham in the reshuffle, there’s a reason why people tend not to shadow in opposition the job they did in government, and want to be able to claim the credit.

The Conservative party hasn’t won a parliamentary majority for more than twenty years. If it is to start doing so again, then it will have to need to expand its pool of potential voters. Renewal, run by former Policy Exchange deputy director David Skelton, is a new Tory ginger group trying to focus the party’s attention on this problem. It launches tomorrow and, I suspect, that at least one of its idea will immediately catch the eye of the Tory leadership. It is proposing that the law should be changed so that not only should union members have to opt in to affiliate to a political party but they should also have a choice of which party to affiliate to. This would mean that those union members who choose to could donate to parties other than Labour.