Conservative party

It's a funny thing, reading the speech on AV that Nick Clegg delivered to the IPPR this morning. It starts off as you might expect: putting some distance between his party and the Tories. Everything is Liberal-this and Liberal-that, while "conservatives" are cited as the opponents of change and choice. But then, from nowhere, comes one of the most brutal attacks on Labour that Clegg has delivered in some time. "For every £8 we are cutting they would cut £7," he quivers. "To deny that reality is to treat the British people like fools." The New Statesman's George Eaton has sifted through the numbers here, but the main point is simply the sheer force of Clegg's words.

Barack Obama's budget plan has become a political debating point on this side of the Atlantic. Ed Balls set the ball a-rolling in an article for the Guardian this morning, which effectively claimed that the President isn't planning to cut the deficit as quickly as George Osborne is. "The truth is that it is Osborne himself who is isolated," is how he pugnaciously put it. But the Tories' Matthew Hancock has since responded — on Coffee House, as it happens — arguing that, actually, the Obama Plan is simpatico with what Osborne is doing. By way of hovering above the red-on-blue scrap, we thought we'd put together a comparison of Osborne's and Obama's budgets for the benefit of CoffeeHousers.

It must be Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau season at the Commons' film club. A string of odd political couples has stalked stages across the land this morning, supposedly pronouncing the merits or demerits of the alternative vote. David Cameron and John Reid were the oddest: the Prime Minister’s well-heeled insouciance contrasting with his lordship’s winking Glaswegian charm. It’s good fun, without being hugely constructive. Cameron and Reid joked that they agreed on nothing beyond FPTP, before embarking on a distended muse about party politics and that old canard 'Britishness'. Things were little better for Ed Miliband, who spent a large portion of his conference listening to Vince Cable explain why he wasn’t resigning from the government.

For weeks now, the genteel coalition has been getting grubbier. Today the Deputy Prime Minister cut loose and went into campaign mode as the leader of the Liberal Democrats. With both eyes on preserving his party’s loosening roots in local government, he assaulted (£) Conservative and Labour councils for cutting services. Clegg was not assisted by the more prominent Lib Dems in local government: the ubiquitous councillor Richard Kemp, the Lib Dems’ chief at the Local Government Association, asserted, almost with a note of relish, that the party is going to get a ‘kicking’. It probably will. But, as James argues, Clegg’s immediate concern after 5 May will be to ensure that the coalition returns to something approaching normality.

Vince Cable’s attack on the PM’s speech today is just the latest elbow to be thrown in what has been a fractious few weeks for the coalition. The immediate cause of these rows has been the need for the Lib Dems to assert their distinctiveness before the May elections and tensions over the AV referendum. The Lib Dems, who feel that their leader is being ‘swiftboated’ by the Tory-funded No campaign, have been increasingly assertive in the last month or so. But there are dangers to this strategy. For one thing, it has eroded trust within the coalition. Ministers are now not being frank with each other because they don't want what they say in private, turning up in the papers.

David Cameron’s Oxford gaffe is refusing to die down. Whenever I’ve called Tory MPs or other members of the Conservative family in the last few days, it has been the first subject they have wanted to raise. People are genuinely perplexed — and worried — as to why Cameron said what he said. As Pete pointed out earlier, Bruce Anderson — the commentator who is David Cameron’s longest standing media supporter — warns that the Prime Minister is fuelling fears of government encouraged discrimination against the middle classes. Another long standing Cameroon loyalist said to me earlier, that he now worried that Cameron just felt too guilty about his own upbringing to be an effective PM. I think these fears are, hugely, overblown.

Prisoner voting is back on the agenda. The European Court of Human Rights has rejected the British government’s appeal and declared that the coalition has six months to draw up proposals to change the law.   David Cameron now has to decide whether to ignore the Strasbourg Court or go against the will of his MPs, who voted overwhelmingly to oppose giving prisoners the vote in response to the court’s initial decision. In many ways, ignoring the court is the safer option. Tory MPs aren’t inclined to back down on this issue and if Cameron tried to make them he would create a lot of ill-will and take an awful kicking from the press.