Conservative party

The PMQs attack No 10 was expecting from Labour on the Coalition’s planned spending cuts did not materialise and today’s was another relatively quiet affair. It started with a minute’s silence in memory of those who died in the shootings in Cumbria. Harman asked one question on gun laws before moving on to the electoral roll and whether it is fair to redraw the boundaries on a roll that does not include three and a half million people. Harman would be on quite strong ground here except for the fact that the boundaries were redrawn under the last government using this electoral register, a point Cameron made. When Harman moved

George Osborne’s Asia trip has now been rounded off with a meeting of the G20 finance ministers in South Korea and he is now heading back to Britain and his Budget preparations. The trip must be marked up as a success for Osborne. In its communiqué, the meeting implicitly endorsed Osborne’s two major moves since becoming Chancellor, cuts this year and the setting up of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility:  ‘We welcome the recent announcements by some countries to reduce their deficits in 2010 and strengthen their fiscal frameworks and institutions’ No one can doubt that the Tories have comprehensively won the argument for in-year cuts. With a growing domestic

Two groups in the Conservative party that have worried most about Con-Lib government are the social conservatives and the neo-conservatives. The latter have been particularly worried about UK relations with Israel. There is a real concern in parts of the Conservatives Party that three factors would come together to sour Anglo-Israeli relations: what the neo-conservatives see as the Foreign Office’s knee-jerk Arabism, the presence of many supposed Arabists in Cameron-Hague’s teams, and the anti-Israel bias exhibited by many leading Liberal Democrats. Whatever the truth of these allegations, they are held with considerable fervour. But Nick Clegg’s reaction to the conflict shows that the Lib Dem leader is both holding to

Surprise, surprise – Menzies Campbell doesn’t sound 100% taken with the coalition in interview with Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend.  This is, don’t forget, the man who encouraged the Lib Dems to seek a deal with Labour at the last minute.  And here he claims that he “would have found it very difficult to make the kind of arrangement with David Cameron that Nick Clegg has obviously found so easy.”  He adds that: “…there is this determination to make [the coaltion] work and nowhere is that more obvious than in David Cameron and Nick Clegg.  I mean, they are quite extraordinary, the extent to which their views coincide

The newly-elected 1922 Executive is another demonstration of the strength of the right wing of the Conservative party. Paul Goodman notes that of the seven MPs elected to the executive who were are not new to Parliament, six are on the right. The only one who isn’t is Nick Soames, who is a special case. As one member of the ’22 executive said to me earlier today, Soames, because of his immense popularity and standing in the party, transcends his factional labelling. Of the five new MPs elected to the exec, three — Robert Halfon, Charlie Elphicke and Priti Patel — are definitely on the right of the party. On

Polly Toynbee was on ‘mute’ on Sky News in my office, the remote wasn’t working, which is frustrating because I’d love to hear how someone mounts a passionate defence of why local government should have monopoly control of state schools. Very few things in politics are indefensible, but a system which doles out sink schools to sink estates is one of them. When Michael Gove was a journalist, he described comprehensive education as the greatest betrayal of the working class. And now, as Education Secretary, he is outlining a system that will give the poor the same choice of schools that the rich have. Who on earth could be against