Conservative party

With the cuts comes the candy: the sweet-tasting morsels which, it is hoped, will prevent tomorrow's Budget from being too much of a collective downer for the nation.  We're already hearing that a council tax freeze will be pencilled in for next year, and you can expect a few more treats besides. National insurance, for instance, is looking like an obvious candidate. From George Osborne's perspective, these sunnier measures will serve a two-fold purpose.  Like I say, it will be hoped that they keep the public on board with the government's project: stick with us, the message will run, and you'll get more of this in future.  But they will also be used to bind the coalition together.

It's days like this when you realise just how stuck Labour are in a Brownite groove.  Everywhere you turn, there's some leadership candidate or other attacking the government for choosing to cut public spending this year.  Ed Miliband claims that the Lib Dems have been "completely macho … completely cavalier" about cuts.  Andy Burnham says that this year could "damage us in the long run".  And even those who aren't chasing the leadership are getting in on the act: Alistair Darling writes that the coalition has "a fiscal policy that undermines fragile growth". So we already know what Labour's broad response to this week's Budget will look like.  But it got me a-wondering: what will their response to next year's Budget be?

It's hard to overestimate the significance of Tuesday's Budget. George Osborne's statement won't just determine the course of our economy for the next few years, but also the political life of this government. Spending cuts and tax rises may not inevitably "fracture the coalition," as Peter Oborne puts it in the Mail today. But they certainly have the potential to. Happily for the coalition, the current political mood is so geared towards fiscal restraint that there will be little immediate opposition to Osborne's general plans.  That will come once the effects of spending cuts are felt in individual constituencies  – months, even years, down the line.

The announcement that Lord Trimble will join the Israeli review into the flotilla incident is a reminder that he has no role in the current government. Trimble takes the Tory whip and given that the party is not overly supplied with Nobel Prize winners, it is a bit of a surprise that no role has been found for him. In opposition, the word was always that relations between him and the new leadership of the Ulster Unionists, the Tories’ electoral allies in Northern Ireland, were not great. But the UUP leader has resigned since the election. Now, it may well be that Trimble himself is the obstacle. Even his admirers admit that he is not the easiest man in the world to get along with. Or, it might be that Trimble is a victim of the Coalition.

ConservativeHome conducted a poll into prominent, right-wing Tory backbenchers. Unsurprisingly, David Davis topped the poll. 70 percent of respondents hold that David Davis represents their views and 54 percent believe he articulates those views effectively. John Redwood and Daniel Hannan were some way behind as DD’s closest rivals. Davis’s chief weapon is communication. Plain speaking and from a working class background, people easily identify with him; and he expresses an acute intelligence in simple terms, something that John Redwood has failed to do. And whilst Hannan has charisma, Davis has more - the fruit of a decade at the forefront of British politics.

In this new world of Coalition politics, there is a difference between Conservative party policy and government policy. There are things that the Conservatives would like to do but can’t do because they didn’t win a majority. As Tim wrote this morning, this provides an opportunity for the Conservative parliamentary party to fill this gap. When the backbench policy committees of the 1922 are set up, they should start working on developing, detailed policy ideas rather than just critiques of Coalition policy. The Prime Minister should encourage this for three reasons. First, it would provide him with a series of possible options for the next manifesto.

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.

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.