Conservative party

How do the Tories deal with UKIP? The party likes to split on most issues, and it has got a nice little fault line running across it at the moment on whether to squash the party as 'fruitcakes', or, as Conor Burns eloquently argued on Coffee House this morning, engage with the problems and anxieties that are driving Tory voters towards Nigel Farage. If UKIP does have a good showing in the local elections later this week, one side will blame the other for taking the wrong course. MPs like Burns will worry that colleagues such as Ken Clarke will have insulted their own voters, or that the party's obsession with whether all those nice-sounding pledges really add up has missed the point.

In a detailed interview on the Sunday Politics, Nick Clegg claimed that neither the Home Secretary nor Downing Street have ever proposed to him that Britain should temporarily leave the European Court of Human Rights so that it can deport Abu Qatada. Clegg was adamant that ‘no one has put a proposal to me.’ Under questioning from Andrew Neil, Clegg defended his decision to block any communications data legislation in the Queen’s Speech. He maintained that the proposals were ‘neither workable nor proportionate.’ Clegg conceded that the UKIP offer was ‘very seductive’ to voters. But he then attacked them for their flat tax proposal.

The married couple’s tax allowance is back on the agenda. After Conservative Home’s exclusive yesterday, David Cameron has confirmed that he will introduce one before the end of this parliament. This would allow couples to share a proportion of their personal allowance, lowering the tax bill for those household where one person stays home to look after the children. Cynics will suggest that this is a good time to float a policy particularly popular with the party base given that there are county council elections on Thursday. But Cameron is a bigger enthusiast for recognising marriage in the tax system than most of his Cabinet colleagues. In opposition, George Osborne always worried that it looked like a measure designed to encourage mothers to stay at home.

There was a startling late entry for the first volume of my biography of Margaret Thatcher. On the day after she died, I received an email from Haden Blatch. Mr Blatch’s father, Bertie, was the chairman of the Finchley Conservative Association when it selected her in 1958. I had asked Haden for information before, but he had not got round to it. Now he revealed that his father had come home from the Finchley selection meeting and explained that Mrs Thatcher had not really won the vote. Her rival, Thomas Langton, had just pipped her. Blatch senior, however, was very keen on Mrs Thatcher, and thought that Langton, who ‘was born with a silver spoon in his mouth’, would easily get in somewhere else, whereas she, being a woman with young children, would not.

David Cameron and the Tory party appear to be emerging from a period of marriage counselling that has gone particularly well. The leader is making more of an effort with his backbenchers generally (James examines this in his column tomorrow), and tomorrow's papers bring yet more news of reconciliation. The Prime Minister is beefing up his political policy operation by appointing a panel of bright and impressive MPs to help him, and promoting Jo Johnson to be his head of policy and a Cabinet Office minister. Those MPs aren't just impressive, though: some of them, including Jesse Norman and George Eustice, are also rebels. This is a big gesture to say that the troubles of the past year and a bit should go behind the party now as it gets in shape for 2015.

When Cabinet met this morning, ministers didn't discuss the Communications Data Bill, which the government hopes to get into the forthcoming Queen's Speech. But there is a growing sense in Westminster that it won't make it out of the Commons alive - if it even manages to make it into the Commons. Here are three different scenarios for what could happen to this controversial piece of legislation: 1. The Bill fails to make it into the Queen's Speech. Discussions about the legislative programme for the next parliamentary year are taking place at the moment.

There are times, I confess, when I wonder about politicians. They are a rum breed and it still seems possible to rise to quite elevated heights without possessing very much of an idea about anything. Consider the cabinet minister quoted in this Telegraph article: Mr Cameron won the leadership promising to modernise the party, but one Cabinet minister said it should now “move on” to more “traditional” Conservative issues such as welfare reform and immigration control. “The 'toxic’ issue has been neutralised,” the minister said. “Now we can move on to the red meat Conservative issues.

David Cameron's local election kick-off speech today notably contained no reference to UKIP, but 12 mentions of Labour. The Conservative leader and his colleagues concerned with campaigns are on a damage-limitation exercise about the party's chances in the local elections, and as well as taking the attack to Labour on the policy front - arguing that the Tories have freed councils from Labour's restrictions, kept council tax down and reduced local government waste - a plank of their strategy involves attacking Labour's prowess in southern council seats. The key phrase which you can expect to hear whenever there is evidence that the Labour campaign is faltering in the south is 'Labour's Southern Discomfort'.

Parliament's only just back from Easter recess and already there's a threat of rebellion in the Commons. The Growth and Infrastructure Bill returns to the Commons tomorrow afternoon for 'ping-pong', and a number of MPs are agitated about an amendment that passed as a result of a rebellion in the Upper Chamber. In March, the Lords passed an amendment from Tory peer Lord True which would allow councils to opt out of a policy giving homeowners the right to extend their homes without planning permission. The government is naturally seeking to overturn that amendment, but Tory MPs aren't convinced.

It is one of the paradoxes of modern British politics that in the post-war era the power and hold of political parties have declined and our system has become more presidential. But the two most electorally successful leaders of this era have both been deposed by their respective parties. This has created problems for both parties, as today’s Sunday Politics with Andrew Neil demonstrated. After John Reid had been on to discuss Tony Blair’s comments on Ed Miliband, Grant Shapps was up to be questioned on Margaret Thatcher’s legacy for the Tories. Shapps was reluctant to declare that the Tories are a Thatcherite party. Trying to suggest that it is but only to the extent that it is also a John Major party.