Conservative party

The Tories may have won the general election but that doesn’t mean they have won the argument. The Good Right, a project setup by Times columnist Tim Montgomerie, hopes to offer guidance on where the Conservative party can go over the next few years. Last night, Montgomerie hosted a dinner at Old Trafford to examine what Conservatives are doing to tackle poverty featuring four of the most interesting thinkers in the party — Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith, Sajid Javid and Ruth Davidson. They all argued that the Tories need to do more to show their compassionate side as well as understand why people dislike them. Each of of the speakers had different areas of emphasis but the broad message was the same.

Michael Gove is the Justice Secretary, but his speech to the Tory conference this afternoon showed that he is so much more than that - or at least that he’s interested in so much more than just his brief. The most striking thing about it was that it was a challenging speech for those sitting in the hall, rather than one where he repeatedly challenged Labour on the party’s new direction under Jeremy Corbyn. It wasn’t just that he prompted the conference to applaud his line that it was a Conservative, not a Lib Dem, who ensured equal marriage for gay and lesbian people - which they did, with a very small number of delegates either refusing to clap or shaking their heads.

As expected, Zac Goldsmith has won the Conservative nomination for next year's Mayor of London race with a sweeping 71 per cent of the vote - but on a distressingly small turnout. Anyone in London could vote by paying £1, so there had been hopes of a high turnout - figures of 60,000 were mentioned. But a pitiful 9,227 turned out to vote, from a city of ten million. Given the excitement caused by Labour's leadership race, this is hugely disappointing for the Tories — and bodes ill for the race now in prospect. If the turnout was bad for Zac, it was worse for everyone else. Syed Kamall, an MEP for London, was second with 16 per cent.

When David Cameron announced that he wouldn’t serve a third term, he made it inevitable that Westminster would spend much of his second term wondering about who would succeed him. Well, in the new Spectator, Nicky Morgan becomes the first Cabinet Minister to make clear that she is interested in standing when Cameron steps down. She says that ‘A lot of it will depend on family’ but makes clear that she believes there needs to be a female candidate in the race and hopes ‘that, in the not too distant future, there will be another female leader of a main Westminster political party’. What I was most struck about when interviewing Morgan was how, when I asked her what her pitch for the top would be, she didn’t shy away from the question.

The Conservative Party board has agreed that CCHQ will remain strictly neutral throughout the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. Sources report that this afternoon's meeting concluded that it was in the best interests of the party that its campaign machine be inaccessible to either side in the campaign. MPs had warned of a split if Tory party resources had been made available, particularly if they were made available for the side of the campaign that David Cameron ends up backing, which is expected to be 'In', while many Tory members are in favour of leaving. Earlier, Coffee House revealed that David Cameron was in favour of neutrality. But there will now be questions about the definition of neutrality. Does this include no data being shared with either camp?

Even though the Tories got their way on yesterday’s vote on tax credits, in which they managed to get a laws-of-physics-defying majority of 35, they cannot regard this matter as settled. Indeed, there is still a serious threat of a revolt on this matter. George Osborne held individual meetings with each of the handful of Tory MPs who were seriously worried about the policy, which lowers the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises. That strategy of wearing down each MP on their own rather than allowing them to work as a group clearly worked as in the end only David Davis - who is irreconcilable anyway - and Stephen McPartland voted against, with Andrew Percy abstaining.

Jeremy Corbyn has been Labour leader for less than 48 hours and the Conservative party is already managing to set the tone of the debate. In a piece for POLITICO Europe today, I look at how the Tories are feeling about Corbyn’s victory over the weekend and their plans to deal with it. Some MPs feel sad that Labour is no longer a serious party. ‘Saturday was a sad day for our country and the Labour Party — I am not laughing,’ says one influential Tory MP. ‘The party of Ramsay Macdonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair has now been reduced to Jeremy Corbyn’. But any sorrow however is overwhelmed by jubilation that the next election appears to be in the bag for the Tories.

It’s official: the Tory leadership contest is well and truly underway. No matter that everyone’s interested in the Labour result this weekend and no matter that David Cameron hasn’t even set a date for his departure. This evening, at a drinks reception in a parliamentary lair, Owen Paterson announced that he would be drawing up a set of robust Tory policies for whoever wants to stand as leader to adopt. Speaking to a group of MPs, peers and hacks, the Tory MP said that his think tank UK 2020 - which he said he set up after ‘I was fired’ by the Prime Minister - would work on a series of challenging policy papers over the next few months, which would provide a platform for a future leadership contender.

Following the government’s first Commons defeat of the new parliament, I understand that ministers are not going to try to reverse the primary legislation that introduces a ‘full fat’ version of the purdah restrictions on what central and local government can publish during the EU referendum campaign. But what the government can do to get its way is to use a statutory instrument to set out certain exemptions from those purdah restrictions. This was what the government amendment to new clause 10 of the legislation will allow: that changes to purdah can be introduced through secondary legislation, which must be approved by MPs. This means ministers can try again at a later date to get their way on the sort of purdah (a skimmed, rather than full fat, version).