Conservative party

Far from it being Mr Steerpike’s prerogative to call a former editor of the Spectator a wally, he was rather amused by Boris’s latest escapade. Now we can all relive those classic moments when the Mayor of London was hunting for a seat in Parliament, with ‘Where’s Boris?’ – a Wally-style search-and-find picture book, out next month from Orion. Another step toward immortality for BoJo. How many other wannabe PMs have made it into children’s book hero format?

Vince Cable’s speech today was loyal and funny. Cable was, unlike in some previous years, very much on message. He lavished praise on Clegg for having turned the Liberal Democrats into a party of government. He ended his speech by telling the activists that ‘there is a lot to be proud of and we must be proud of it’ to the delight of Nick Clegg, who was rather distractingly wearing jeans in the conference hall. Cable also attacked both the Tories and Labour. He joked that the Tories were turning into Ukip without the beer and Labour into Hollande-style socialists but without the sex. The most aggressive part of his

The Lib Dem message in Glasgow this week in simple, you can’t trust either Labour or the Tories to run the country on their own. On Marr this morning, Nick Clegg said that the country was being offered a ‘dismal choice’ between ‘sticking your head in the sand’ with Labour or ‘beating up on the poor’ with the Tories. Clegg was determined to get his anti-Tory lines out there. He accused George Osborne of a plan to ‘savage unprotected public services’ and again and again attacked the Tories for being ‘economically extreme’ and supposedly wanting to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. He also drew another red

The Conservatives do not have a problem in the North. As Policy Exchange’s report, Northern Lights, highlighted if you took the TransPennine Express train from Liverpool to Newcastle you would find that 13 of the stops are in Conservative held seats and 19 in seats held by Labour. The Tories’ real problem is in attracting support from urban voters, especially those living in inner city areas. To put this into context the party does not have a single councillor in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield. Twenty out of London’s 32 boroughs are held by Labour. Just nine are Conservative. Yet Boris Johnson has won two consecutive Mayoral contests. So it can be done.

Does it matter that the Tories can’t spell out how they’d fund the tax cuts they announced at their party conference this week? Labour has launched a clock which monitors how long it’s been since David Cameron promised these cuts without any detail on how they’d pay for them. But last night on BBC This Week, Tom Watson summed up why the Tories feel they can make this attack: ‘I don’t think we can be more austere than the Tories now: I thought those freezes were cruel last week and will have very bad social consequences and the Labour party doesn’t believe in that, and so we’ve got to make

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman review the conference season” startat=604] Listen [/audioplayer]The Tories leave Birmingham in far better heart than when they arrived. They feel that they have succeeded in setting the terms of debate this week. On tax and spending, their baseline is now what Labour will be judged against. listen to ‘Podcast special: David Cameron’s speech’ on audioBoom

It is easy to inflate the importance of speeches made at party conferences. Particularly when those speeches are the last such set piece events before a general election. But they are still, in the end and at bottom, a distillation of what matters most to a leader. A guide to his priorities; a demonstration of his faith. Somewhere along the line David Cameron has lost that faith. He was elected leader of the Tory party in desperate times and became Prime Minister in dismal times. In both instances he triumphed, at least in part, because he persuaded his audience that though he might look like a traditional Tory he was

Like all MPs suspected as potential Ukip defectors, Chris Kelly is being hounded by colleagues, whips and journalists all desperate to find out what he’s up to. He and his family are distressed by the pressure that the MP is under and suspect that Ukip are putting his name about to create a smoke screen around the next defector. Kelly has told his long-term girlfriend that he is not defecting. His girlfriend’s mother is Nadine Dorries, who says Kelly is so loyal to the government that she’s quite ‘disappointed’ he doesn’t take more principled stands against it. But she is confident he will not defect. Neither, in case you’re wondering,

If you’re a Tory MP who hasn’t been paying much attention to the news and is wearing paisley pyjamas tonight, the Conservative whips are looking out for you. They’ve sent a message out to their party warning them off the ‘woman’ who managed to entrap Brooks Newmark into revealing his bedwear and long-term economic plan. The message, passed to Coffee House by an amused Tory, reads: ‘Please take care with a “Sophie Witams”. You follow her on Twitter. “She” is the person who ensnared Brooks Newmark. Please check you haven’t been approached. You should certainly having no contact and take care.’ It’s nice to know whips are so concerned about protecting their

What made Mark Reckless decide to defect? Coffee House earlier revealed the timeline that led to the Tory MP standing on the conference stage in Doncaster today, but after his announcement, he sat down with a small group of journalists and explained why he’d decided that Ukip was the right party for him. It started with a row in Oxfordshire. Before explaining, Reckless first refused a glass of wine, and when it was pointed out that sipping water was a little unusual for a Ukipper, he told the group that ‘I’m not a big drinker’, adding sheepishly ‘I had an unfortunate incident some time ago as some of you will

By 524 votes to 43, the House of Commons has voted to support air-strikes against Islamic State in Iraq. The margin of victory is not surprising given how limited the motion was, it rules out ground troops and makes clear there’ll be another vote before any action in Syria. But in a sign of the unease of some on the Labour side, Rushanara Ali, who represents George Galloway’s old seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, has resigned from the front bench over Labour’s support for the motion. Indeed, the first estimates are that 24 Labour MPs voted against while just five Tories opposed. The question now is whether, and when,

The 1922 Committee meets at 2pm today, and William Hague will address it. The meeting was originally arranged to discuss the post-referendum settlement for Scotland and England, and English votes for English laws, but Iraq may well dominate the session given tomorrow’s recall. Those MPs who weren’t sufficiently fortunate or troublesome to have been invited to the Chequers summit on the English settlement on Monday will get an update and a chance to pitch their view in. The party seems, by and large, pretty happy with the way Number 10 has handled this matter so quickly, and the amount of contact they have had from the whips. But the peace may yet