Conservative party

Who represents the biggest obstacle to a Tory majority in 2015? The natural assumption is Labour, but it's looking more and more likely that the party David Cameron should be most worried about is UKIP. Tim Montgomerie has written in the Times this morning (£) about the reason behind this, the 'split of the right-wing vote': 'Team Cameron has always believed that the Tories’ right-wing voters could pretty much be taken for granted. The theory was that they had nowhere else to go and that Mr Cameron had to devote all his energy to winning swing voters.

There’s barely disguised fury among Conservative ministers about Ed Davey’s claim that the coalition may well be more pro-European than the Labour government was. One complained to me earlier that it was typical Lib Dem mischief making and that ‘if they are not going to behave like normal ministers then we shouldn’t either’. Indeed, this minister went on to suggest that William Hague should publicly slap down Davey for his comments. I doubt this is going to happen. Davey is the leading Lib Dem on the Cabinet’s European Affairs Committee and I suspect there’s little appetite in the Foreign Office for a coalition row over Europe.

They're languishing in the polls, their leader is considerably more unpopular than either David Cameron or Ed Miliband, they face a difficult set of local elections in May — and yet the Lib Dems still seem relatively upbeat at the moment. Why so? Mostly, I think, it's because they feel that asserting themselves is starting to pay off. Not in votes, perhaps, but in perceptions. They cite the Budget as a defining moment in this respect: they got the increase in the personal allowance that they wanted, the Tories got most of the blame for everything else. That's why I suspect some Lib Dems will be quietly delighted at the last couple of days of news. Yesterday, the web surveillance plan. Today, secret justice.

The grumbling in the Conservative party at the moment is reminiscent of Tudor court politics. No one is prepared to criticise the king directly so instead various personal favourites of the monarch are targeted. At the moment, the chief proxy for discontent is Andrew Feldman. To the Cameroons’ critics, he sums up everything that is wrong with the way the PM and his team do politics. Feldman is co-chairman of the party not because of his standing in the party or the country but because he is a friend of Cameron. To further irritate their critics, their friendship dates back to them serving together on the ball committee of their Oxford college many years ago. As a friend of Cameron, Feldman has got away with errors that would have finished off others.

The bad headlines continue for Downing Street this morning, with the Telegraph front page declaring ‘Tory MPs round on Cameron and Osborne’. Of course, Tory backbenchers griping about their leadership is nothing new and, usually, ‘concern that Government policies are being poorly explained to voters’ or a suggestion that ‘a senior MP should be appointed as full-time Conservative Party chairman’ wouldn’t make the front page. But after the two week onslaught Downing Street has just suffered — from granny tax to cash for access to petrol panic to pasties — the disgruntled chattering reverberates that bit louder.

Have the opinion polls ever looked more discouraging, overall, for the Tories during this government? Not that I can remember, although I'm happy to be corrected. Not only does YouGov's poll for the Sunday Times (£) have Labour ahead by nine points, but there are also some pretty dismal supplementary findings. For YouGov, both David Cameron and the coalition score their lowest approval ratings since the start of this Parliament. For ComRes in the Independent on Sunday, 72 per cent of respondents reckon the government is ‘out of touch with ordinary voters’; 81 per cent say the government created ‘unnecessary panic’ over fuel; and so on. It's probably no surprise that Tory MPs are now telling the Indy that ‘It is a friggin' shambles’.

Today's ‘cash for access’ revelations (£) are, taken individually, less perturbing than last week's. What we learn is that David Cameron (and other ministers) met with donors on occasions (and at locations) other than those already disclosed, and that Peter Cruddas was more involved with this process than Downing St would have us believe. There is very little added to the most serious allegation from a week ago: that big money donors could gain special insights in the policy process, or even involve themselves in it. But, taken as a whole, today's revelations are extremely tricky for Cameron. Not only do they keep the story going, but they also highlight how absences of transparency will often be probed and exposed.