Conservative party

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 will join in urging Murdoch to withdraw his company’s bid to takeover BSkyB.

"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 assure you of this," he said in his speech this afternoon, "we are as committed to modernising our public services as we have ever been.

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 Scottish seats at Westminster.

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, no place for wagging fingers.

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 a better Prime Minister than Cameron?

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 he would not go into Downing Street if the Tories won the election.

The political plates on phone hacking are shifting rapidly. The story has now ‘gone mainstream’ following the accusations about how the phones of Milly Dowler and the parents of the Soham victims may have been hacked.  Politicians are racing to catch up. Ed Miliband is rapidly moving into a more robust position. The Labour leadership doesn’t want to appear vindictive, to turn this into Labour v. Murdoch.