Conservative party

Labour have sprung a leak, and it's furnishing the Times with some high-grade copy. Yesterday, the paper got their hands on an internal party memo about economic policy. Today, it's one on how Ed Miliband should deal with PMQs (£). With this week's bout only an hour-and-a-half away, here are some of the key snippets: 1. The Big Prize. "The big prize is usually to provoke the PM into appearing evasive by repeatedly failing to answer a simple question, often one that requires a simple Yes or No." 2. Cheer lines. "It's important to have a cheer line that goes down well in the chamber and can be clipped easily by the broadcasters. Mocking humour us especially useful here, especially if it strikes a chord with Tory backbenchers to silence them." 3.

At last, The Guardian is reporting the grassroots rebellion in education. It has picked up on the story of Fiona Murphy who blogged on Coffee House yesterday about her trouble with the Tory-run council in Bromley. But hang on... the "grassroots revolt" of which the Guardian speaks is the councils, trying to protect their monopoly control over state schools. Here is the extract: "A flagship government policy has provoked a grassroots revolt against the coalition, with senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors lining up to attack the introduction of free schools, one of education secretary Michael Gove's most cherished projects...

May 2015 is an age away in political terms. But the question of what happens to the coalition after the next election is too politically interesting to be able to resist speculating on; even if this speculation is almost certainly going to be overtaken by events. Over at ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman asks if Cameron and Osborne share Francis Maude’s view that the coalition should continue after the next election even if the Tories win an outright majority. My impression is that they do. If the Tories won a majority of between 10 and 30, I’d be surprised if Cameron didn’t try and keep the coalition going. There are four main reasons why I think the Tory leadership would want to keep the Liberal Democrats in the government in these circumstances.

I'm on the train back from doing Radio Four's Any Questions – broadcast live from Derby, repeated at 1.10pm tomorrow – where I had a bust-up with Christine Blower of the NUT. CoffeeHousers may recall she was the star of a cover story we ran a few weeks back, about the campaign of bullying and intimidation levelled against headteachers who are trying to seek Academy status. She raised that article during recording, and things kinda kicked off. I told her she should be ashamed of the way her union thugs try to intimidate young teachers who seek to break away from local authority control and reach independence. She denied writing the words ascribed to her, I sought to read them to her – and things descended from there. Anyway, a few thoughts... 1.

Several of tomorrow’s newspapers lead on the IFS’ conclusion that those on the lowest income will suffer most from the cuts. This charge is problematic for the conclusion but far less problematic than it would have been if we hadn’t spent so much of the last few weeks discussing George Osborne’s decision to remove child benefit from families with a higher rate taxpayer in them. That change, however unpopular it may have been with normally Tory voters, inoculated the coalition against the charge that it was trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Osborne’s preparation of the ground has not, though, stopped the Lib Dems slipping down to 10 percent in the polls.

George Osborne was well received by the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers when he addressed them on the spending review earlier. There was much thumping of desks, the traditional sign of approval at meetings of the ‘22.   Talking to Tory MPs this afternoon, they are pretty happy with the package. They are glad that the money being taken out of the welfare budget means that the departmental cuts are less than expected. Overall, they think the package is politically sellable and has denied Labour that many targets.   One concern is about how local councils, including Conservative ones, might react to a 28 percent cut in their funding from central government.

Split-stories have their own momentum. As soon as you know that a certain secretary of state is in the dog house with Downing Street, you start seeing things through that prism. So when I saw that the press release on the government’s new national security strategy contained quotes from the PM, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and the Development Secretary, but not the Defence Secretary, I immediately regarded it – and perhaps wrongly – as part of the Westminster Fox hunt.   Liam Fox’s appearance on the Politics Show on Sunday was ill-advised.