Conservative party

One of the striking things about the wall to wall hackgate coverage on the 24 hours news channels is the absence of Tory voices defending the Prime Minister. It is coming to something when the leader of another political party, Nick Clegg, is doing more to defend the PM than most of the Tory members of the Cabinet. One minister told me earlier that Number 10 was having trouble getting people to go on TV to bat for the PM. While many Tories are wondering where their party chairman is, in these circumstances you would expect her to be touring the TV studios. Cameron’s political spokeswoman Gabby Bertin is doing

As British helicopters pound away at Libyan targets, another battle is being waged inside the Ministry of Defence’s fortress-like building. The fight is over the post-2015 budget, and it is an arduous one. After the uniform-creasing settlement the MoD got in the Spending Review last year, the Prime Minister said in the House of Commons on 19th Oct 2010 that while the precise budgets beyond 2015 would be agreed in future reviews, his “own strong view” was that the MoD would see “year-on-year real-term growth in the defence budget in the years beyond 2015.” So far so good — the MoD budget may have to fall now, in line with

The news that the government is to support Labour’s motion tomorrow calling on Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to withdraw their bid for BSkyB is a victory for Ed Miliband — and a sign of how all political parties are rushing to distance themselves from Murdoch. George Osborne likes to say that the ‘first thing you have to do in politics is learn to count’ and the truth was that the government didn’t have the votes to block this motion even if it wanted to. Tory MPs had no desire to be seen to be voting for Murdoch in the present climate. But it is still remarkable that the Tories

“It’s like Blair and Brown — but without the acrimony.” So sayeth one Cabinet Office source, describing the prolonged build-up to today’s public services White Paper to me a couple of months ago. His point was that, although the yellow and blue halves of the Downing Street operation are genuinely chummy with one another, their differences can still put a block on reform. In his story, the Tories are like Blair, striving to go further, faster, stronger. Whereas the Lib Dems can occasionally stand in the way. So what has been blocked from the White Paper? Listening to David Cameron today, you wouldn’t guess that anything has been. “Let me

There have long been suspicions in Westminster that David Cameron uses John Major as an out rider, the last Tory Prime Minister advances an idea that allows the current one to gauge opinion on it. Certainly, Major and Cameron are close. Remember how Major was used by Cameron in the days following the indecisive general election result. So there’ll be suspicions that Major is out riding for Cameron with his speech, covered in the Sunday Telegraph, arguing that the Scottish Parliament and Executive should be handed powers over everything apart from foreign, defence and economic policy. In exchange for this, the Scots would accept a reduction in the number of

If you strain your ears, and listen very carefully above the din of the phone hacking scandal, then you may just hear Nick Clegg’s voice wafting across the Channel from Paris. Our Deputy Prime Minister is on the Continent today, delivering a speech that, in other circumstances, might have made more of a splash. This is, after all, a speech in which he stands up for the eurozone, and chastises those eurospectics — some of them within the coalition parties — who are eagerly anticipating its collapse. Or as he puts it himself: “A successful eurozone is essential for a prosperous UK. So there is no room for Schadenfreude here,

Schoolboy rivalries never quite go away – just look at the ongoing competition between Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Even though it was Cameron who held up Johnson’s arm in a symbolic victory gesture after Boris became Mayor of London in 2008, you wonder if Cameron had his doubts. After all, Cameron never actually approached Johnson about the post, initially choosing Nicholas Boles as the Conservative candidate. Furthermore, Boris Johnson refused to rule out a future bid to become Prime Minister. With the increasing unpopularity of the coalition government and its leaders, the Spectator decided to conduct a(n admittedly unscientific) poll of 75 people: would Johnson, the ‘cycling mayor’, make

The Guardian’s story that News International believes that Rebekah Brooks was on holiday when Milly Dowler’s phone was allegedly hacked will place further pressure on Andy Coulson, who was her deputy editor at the time. This is the second piece of trouble for Coulson in the past 24 hours following last night’s revelations. Some in News International are unapologetic about how Coulson is being treated. They say that if Coulson had not gone into Downing Street then the whole phone hacking saga would not have got a second wind and there wouldn’t be all this trouble. Indeed, they allege that Coulson had assured a senior figure at News International that