Conservative party

What’s the point of Ed Miliband? Does the Opposition leader have any purpose in life other than to provide ritual entertainment for the Tory wrecking crew at PMQs? Having spent the New Year listening to lethal attacks from his dearest supporters, Mr Miliband has now seen his leadership shrivel to a pair of policy statements which rival each other in desperation and barminess. The first, outlined by Liam Byrne this morning, is a fantasy tax on banking, ‘to create 100,000 jobs’. The second is Labour’s new position on the government’s austerity programme. This would baffle the dippiest and trippiest resident of Alice in Wonderland. We hate the cuts. We back

As revealed in Rachel Sylvester’s Times column (£) today: “Richard Reeves, Mr Clegg’s political adviser, draws a graph that plots ‘Government unity and strength’ against ‘Lib Dem identity’ as two lines, one going down and the other up, between 2010 and 2015. The lines cross in 2012. ‘Every minute of every day between now and the election we will turn up the dial on differentiation,’ says a strategist.” So I’ve pasted my own version of the Reeves graph above to, erm, get it on paper, as it were. Of course, it’s not surprising that the Lib Dems — or, indeed, the Tories — would do more to distinguish themselves as

This morning’s Guardian scoop about Michael Gove’s suggestion that the nation should present the Queen with a new Royal yacht for the Jubilee is the talk of Westminster. But the full correspondence indicates that Gove was not proposing any taxpayer funding for a new Britannia.   Gove refers to ‘David Willetts’s excellent suggestion for a Royal Yacht’. This proposal was made in a letter from Willetts to the Prime Minister on the 5th September, which was copied to various colleagues. Willetts writes that Rear Admiral Bawtree sees The Future Ship Project for the 21st Century ‘as a potential replacement for the Royal Yacht Britannia’.   Willetts says that ‘The proposed

With Scottish independence very much the issue of the week, we thought you might enjoy this Spectator leader from 1979, arguing for a ‘No’ vote in that year’s referendum on Scottish devolution: To preserve the Union, 24 February 1979 ‘So, Sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement?’ ‘Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.’ The Scotland Act, which comes before the judgement of the Scottish people on Thursday, is certainly laughable. Would that it were no more than that. If the Scottish Assembly is instituted it will be the most important constitutional change the United Kingdom has known since the Irish Free State came into

Political cultures differ. In Iran, for example, hyperbole is expected in all political conversations. So slogans always call for ‘Death to the US’, and nothing less. In Britain, of course, the use of language is more even-tempered, but other rules apply. Blaming the civil service for failure is considered OK, but charging an individual official, even a Permanent Secretary, for the same is considered off-limits. If a minister were to try it, then he’d be accused of trying to pass the buck on towards defenceless officials. But, as Camilla Cavendish points out in today’s Times (£), failure is often also the fault of senior officials who, despite problems in the

Miliband survives! That news should steady Labour nerves. For today at least. Their leader has the knack of turning near-certain defeat into absolutely-certain catastrophe, but he bumbled through PMQs this afternoon without suffering a serious setback. He has so little ground from which to attack the government that he had to lead on a niche issue. Rail fares. He asked the prime minister why the operating companies have managed to hike prices by 11 per cent on the busiest routes. Cameron: ‘Because of a power given to them by the last Labour government.’   With that lethally terse response the PM sat down. To his credit, Miliband wasn’t rattled. But

As much as I dislike the phrase ‘the third way’, it sums up what the coalition has done today. Given the choice between hobbling or accommodating Alex Salmond and his referendum on Scottish independence, it has decided to do neither and both. In the words of the Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, speaking in the House just now, the referendum will be ‘made in Scotland, by the people of Scotland’ — just so long as Westminster okays it first. Maybe that’ll make more sense if we look at what, specifically, was announced today. Moore’s main point was that any referendum held by the Scottish government, without the approval of the UK