Conservative party

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is to drop his normally conciliatory voice to attack the Tories at the Lib Dem party conference in Brighton. So what? you may well ask. The mild-mannered Alexander is unlikely to strike the fear of God into his listeners, assuming that anyone beyond the conference hall will be listening, or indeed that the conference hall is full: Brighton being lovely at that time of year. Besides, bursts of splenetic outrage at one’s coalition partners have become a feature of conferences, particularly since last year’s unhappy AV referendum. There is, dare I say it, a suggestion that they are choreographed for the TV

Last night the BBC aired a brilliant horror-movie (viewable on iPlayer) called ‘Young, Bright and on the Right.’ It followed two young men, one at Oxford the other at Cambridge, trying to make their way in student Conservative party politics. One of the stories – of a young man from a one-parent family in Yorkshire whose father had been in prison – was genuinely interesting. Rather than being happy about himself and his background, he had become someone else. Though he presented this as being essential in order to get on in Conservative party politics, I am not certain he was right. Having never been involved I can’t say for

Boris Johnson has just reminded us how potent he can be at undermining the government right here, right now. At a press conference today on the Olympic legacy, the Mayor of London said: ‘The government totally understands people’s appetite for this: they can see the benefits of sport and what it does for young people. They understand very, very clearly the social and economic advantages. I would like to see, frankly, the kind of regime I used to enjoy – compulsory two hours’ sport every day.’ And there we have it. Boris deploys his old trick of appearing to flatter the government while also managing to brief against it. It

The campaign to draft James Delingpole into Parliament, revealed here yesterday, is gathering pace. Delingpole himself has broken cover to declare that he was already moving to Northamptonshire – the scene of the upcoming by-election. ‘I’m torn, I must say… though I can’t claim to have taken quite as many drugs as Louise Mensch apparently has, I did make a pretty heroic go of it in my younger, longer-haired days.’ But it’s not all fun and games. ‘On the other hand, I’m skint,’ says the right-wing scribe. In a long rant against the Tories, he confirms that if he were to run it would be on a UKIP ticket –

Has Nick Clegg handed Ed Miliband the keys to Downing Street? Most political commentators believe that killing off the proposed boundary changes, which would have handed the Conservatives anywhere between five and seven additional seats at the next election, will result in David Cameron being a one-term Prime Minister. One of the reasons the Tories were so keen on changing the make-up of the electoral map was to counter the rise in the number of people living in urban areas across the country. In order for the Conservatives to stand any chance of winning a majority at the next election they have to target approximately 32 marginal seats (defined as

What really excites Tory donors and MPs about Boris isn’t the antics on a zip wire but his ability to make Conservative arguments in an appealing and commonsensical way. The latter is the quality that Boris himself values most in politicians: it was the reason he gave for backing Ken Clarke for the leadership in 2001 despite their differences on Europe. On the Today programme this morning, Boris managed to make Conservative political hay out of the Olympics without sounding like a crass partisan. In a jolly manner, he argued that the Olympics were profoundly Conservative in that you saw that competition drives up standards and that there’s a ‘direct

If yesterday was the peak of enthusiasm for Boris Johnson’s hopes for the Tory leadership (Guido noted that every broadsheet commentator discussed the Mayor of London in their Saturday columns), then today is very much the morning after. The first sobering voice came from William Hague as he popped up on Sky News to warn Boris against a leadership putsch. ‘Boris is doing a great job as Mayor of London and people love him the more they see him, and that’s great… but I think it is true to say – and certainly it is true for me – that I hope and believe that we are not looking for

One of the criticisms of the idea of Boris Johnson as a potential Prime Minister is that he doesn’t look the part and isn’t serious enough. The argument goes that it is all very well for the Mayor of London to jape around, but quite another thing for the Prime Minister to (Phil Collins produced a very punchy version of this point of view (£) in The Times this week). But as Charles Moore argues in his column, this argument misses that ‘conventional politics is now failing more comprehensively than at any time since the 1930s, and that Boris Johnson is the only unconventional politician in the field.’ It is precisely

In recent weeks, Downing Street has been repeatedly told by Tory MPs that if proposals for an elected element in the House of Lords were brought back to the Commons, the next rebellion would be even bigger than the 91 who voted against second reading. Downing Street, as the Telegraph reported this morning, has now accepted that Lords reform will have to be dropped and there is talk of a formal announcement to this effect as early as Monday. But, intriguingly, I understand that David Cameron does not intend to abandon efforts to get the boundary reforms through. This, as Isabel noted this morning, has the potential to cause a

It’s a strange old world when a Prime Minister backing his own Chancellor is worth reporting. But this afternoon the Prime Minister was asked by Sky News whether he was going to reshuffle George Osborne. Naturally, he answered: ‘George Osborne is doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances and he has my full support in going on and doing that job. He’s not going anywhere.’ Kay Burley then pressed Cameron on whether this meant Osborne would still be Chancellor at the next election. He replied: ‘Yes.’ Now, this was quite obvious anyway. Osborne’s stock is certainly down amongst Tory MPs, many of whom are still smarting after watching the

After Boris’s re-election as London mayor, his departing aide Guto Harri complained that the dry but effective campaign had rather taken the ‘bubbles out of the champagne’. Well, the Olympics is certainly putting them back in. Boris keeps taking opportunities that no other politician would dare to—the zip wire ride today being the latest, and most dramatic, example. The question is where does all this end, is it all just Olympics hi-jinks that will be forgotten when the flame leaves Stratford or is it just the next stage of the Boris for PM campaign? In my column in the magazine tomorrow, I say that it does seem to be more