Conservative party

I’m presenting Week in Westminster at 11am on Radio Four today, and get to choose four topics for discussion. My political nodes were, of course, amputated for the purposes of this production. Here are the topics I chose: 1. Young vs Old. Osborne stepped on a landmine on Thursday: he didn’t expect his pension tax (minor, as Charles Moore argues in the Telegraph) to cause such a reaction. But I suspect he hadn’t realised the depth of feeling in this emerging clash of the generations. Osborne’s idea for freezing pensioners’ tax threshold was lauded on Twitter but lambasted in (most of) the press.

The big Budget news tonight is that the personal allowance will rise to £9,205. This is a larger increase than expected and, intriguingly, will be paid for — in part — by a couple of billion more of spending cuts. So, the Lib Dems see considerable progress on their main budget priority, raising the income tax threshold to £10,000, but this will be partially funded by something Tory MPs have been calling for, more spending cuts. It also appears that the coalition will further increase the pace of its corporation tax cuts as well as introducing a new higher rate of stamp duty for £2 million plus houses. There’ll also be a slew of anti-avoidance measures to accompany the reduction in the 50p rate.

The most important political changes are those that will not be reversed. I think that both directly elected mayors and police commissioners fit this mould. I can’t imagine voters choosing to cede the ability to hold power to account that these positions will give them. Tellingly, more people in London now favour independence for the capital than want to scrap the office of mayor. Police commissioners and mayors also provide the Conservatives with a massive opportunity to rebuild the party in urban Britain, as I argue in my column this week. The Conservatives have little chance of gaining overall control of the council in, say, Leeds. But they could win a mayoral poll there.

Nick Clegg’s assertive performance at PMQs today was a demonstration of the fact that he now feels more confident than he has since his failure in the AV referendum. The deputy Prime Minister doesn’t crouch defensively at the despatch box anymore, and he brushed off some rather good one-liners from Harriet Harman. She joked that the only thing the deputy Prime Minister stands up for these days is the PM entering the room.   Clegg and his team feel that things are looking up for them, that they are setting the agenda. Even the Lib Dem’s lowly poll rating isn’t dampening their mood.   So, what does this change mean for the coalition? Senior Tories claim to be delighted that Clegg is happier, claiming it makes him easier to deal with.

David Cameron’s plane has just landed in Washington. The next few days should provide him with a set of images that will portray him as a significant figure on the global stage. The Obama administration is giving Cameron the full works: a huge event on the White House lawn and the kind of banquet that is normally reserved for heads of state. This is an arrangement that benefits both sides. The Obama re-election campaign wants to foster the sense that the President is friends with a Conservative British Prime Minister given that their Republican opponent in the fall will accuse him of being a left-wing radical. I suspect, though, that Downing Street will be rather worried that the arrests of Charlie and Rebekah Brooks could overshadow the opening day of the visit.

The combination of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights is, I predict, going to give David Cameron an increasing number of headaches in the coming months. As Fraser wrote yesterday, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky’s principled resignation from the coalition’s Commission on the British Bill of Rights has revealed that this body was never really serious about dealing with the problem. The exposure of this Commission as merely a holding device will add to the pressure on the Prime Minister to clarify what he actually intends to do about the problem.

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start.