Conservative party

The approach that the Liberal Democrats take to social care over the next few weeks and months will be the best guide we have to how they now view the future of the coalition. If, in the coming all party talks, they effectively ally with Labour and try to score points off the Tories by suggesting that their coalition partners are ‘too mean’ to fund a solution to the problem then it will be apparent that they have moved fully into distancing mode and are preparing to position themselves as the party who restrained the Tories. This would imply a Lib Dem exit from the coalition sometime well before the 2015 election.

Before writing my column for The Spectator this week I asked one of the most clued-up Eurosceptics on the centre right what opt-outs Britain should push for in any negotiation over an EU treaty change. His answer, to my surprise, was "forget that, we should just leave". This answer took me aback because this person had been the embodiment of the view that the European Union could be reformed from within. But people are dropping this view at a rapid rate for reasons that Matthew Parris explained with his typical eloquence in The Times (£) yesterday. I wrote in The Spectator this week that two Cabinet ministers now favour leaving the EU only to learn soon afterwards that the real number is three. Iain Martin writes that half of all Tory MPs now favour leaving.

The news, via a leaked letter, that Boris Johnson now opposes high-speed rail will come as little surprise to the government. Boris has been moving to this position for quite some time and the Department for Transport resigned itself to the mayor coming out against the scheme earlier this week. Recently, one of Boris’ senior aides visited the Department for Transport and said that the mayor would only support the scheme if there was an additional tube line from Euston as part of it. But when the Department for Transport pushed for details of where this line would go to, and how it would be engineered it became apparent that this was more of a rhetorical point than a negotiating position. Oddly, the politics of Boris’ position could work out for both sides.

The Foreign Secretary finds himself in the rather unique position today of trying to deal with the consequences of a crisis that he largely predicted. In May 1998, William Hague gave a speech warning that the single currency would lead to social unrest as governments tried to cope with one size fits all interest rates. It is a reminder of how much Hague was swimming against the tide of bien-pensant opinion that Michael Heseltine claimed this prediction was so extreme as to drive the Tories off the centre ground. But what is, perhaps, more interesting than Hague’s vindicated view that the euro, in a crisis, would be the ‘economic equivalent of a burning building with no exits’ is his view on how European governments would resolve the problem.

In 1997 New Labour was not just a domestic programme; it was a foreign policy too. Known as the "Neue Mitte" in Germany, Blair's Third Way soon attracted such converts as the German chancellor, the French prime minister and the Danish leader. In the end, it produced few results for Britain, failing – much as Harold Wilson did in the 1970s – to curry favour for the UK through party political links with other leaders. But for a few years, much as New Labour looked across the Atlantic to the Democratic Party, so Europe's Social Democrats looked across The Channel. International recognition for his deficit reduction plan notwithstanding, David Cameron has no such effect so far. But some have been swayed by his domestic agenda.

Further to Daniel’s piece about declining immigration in Europe, it is worth highlighting this passage from Iain Martin’s column in the Mail: ‘But once in Downing Street, Cameron was confronted by research from his personal pollster, Andrew Cooper, which confirmed the true extent of public concern about high levels of immigration. Ironically, Cooper was one of the very modernisers in the Tory Party who did not want Cameron to be tainted — as he saw it — by being seen as tough on immigration in the run-up to the election. But now he has changed his tune — and taken the Prime Minister along with him.

Sayeeda Warsi’s upbraiding of Pakistan for not living up to Jinnah’s ideals is another sign of how the government believes Baroness Warsi to be uniquely able to speak to Britain’s most difficult ‘ally’. David Cameron and his circle were thoroughly impressed by how Warsi managed to cool tempers in Islamabad following the Prime Minister’s criticism of Pakistan, in of all places India, for facing both ways in the war on terror and have been using her since to speak to the country’s leadership.

One of the staples of the Westminster summer party season is speculation about future leadership contests and so I rather suspect that Ben Brogan’s piece on the coming George Osborne Boris Johnson leadership contest will be much referenced in the coming weeks. Any speculation about a future leadership contest is, obviously, absurdly premature. If a week is a long time in politics, six years is almost a geological era. But the prospect of Obsorne versus Johnson is, as Tim Montgomerie puts it, so ‘delicious’ that Westminster Village people will take any excuse to talk about it. What makes the contest so appetising is that Osborne and Johnson’s strengths are so different. Osborne plans everything out, Johnson flies by the seat of his pants.