Conservative party

Sajid Javid's promotion to Culture Secretary will not surprise his many fans. And it underlines an advantage that the Conservative party has over Labour right now - the talent in its back benchers. The Tories, quite simply, have far more MPs who could be Prime Minister - thanks to the hugely successful recruitment process that David Cameron ran after becoming leader . One of them is Sajid Javid, who is interviewed by the Mail on Sunday today – this was done (as ever) months earlier by James Forsyth in the Spectator (his interview here). They're both worth reading, as I suspect Javid is one of these guys we'll be hearing a lot more from in coming years.

Class war. It's not very classy, is it? But it's Labour's big thing at the moment, the class-of-politicians-crisis, which it thinks works well with the other crisis facing hardworking families up and down the country that the party likes to talk about, and allows Ed Miliband to duck awkward things like responding to the Budget. He and his henchmen have spent the past week and a half talking as much about Etonians as they have pensioners. On Tuesday, Rachel Reeves had her go, banging on about rich Tories buying Lamborghinis. Ed Balls was the follow-up act on Wednesday (having already had a first shot last week with his jokes about the PM's friend 'Bingo'). He told the Commons that: 'When the hon.

In the past 30 years British English has received a number of loan words from Arabic, words which would have meant very little to our young grandparents but are now familiar enough to be used metaphorically: jihad, fatwa, taliban, dhimmi. Almost all refer to religion and religious conflict, and have a slightly unwelcome ear to most people. (It wasn’t always like this, of course; Arabic has in the past given us a number of terms, from zero to orange to racket and nadir, not to mention countless scientific phrases).

Mark Field, MP for Westminster, has set up a brand new campaign group of Tory backbenchers called Managed Migration - as opposed, you might think, to the unmanaged sort we have at present. But he's not actually in favour of managing migration in the conventional sense; he wants the PM to drop the party's commitment to containing overall numbers of net migrants to the ‘tens of thousands’ though there seems fat chance of that just now.  Big increases in net migration, he says, are a tribute to the recovering economy. He's got a point in one sense. As the economy improves, fewer Brits want to leave, which has an effect on net numbers.

Tory MPs from less privileged backgrounds than their leader have developed a fun new game to play in the members’ tea room: drawing up definitive rankings of Polite Old Etonians and Rude Old Etonians. I hear that the polite list includes Jesse Norman, Zac Goldsmith and Jacob Rees Mogg, while the rude list features not only the PM but his chief whip Sir George Young, who is accused of 'arrogance’. Apparently Sir George doesn’t say hello to people in the corridor. Keen bean Rory Stewart is also on the rude list: 'People don’t mind ambition in parliament, but vaulting Shakespearean ambition is a bit of a turn off,' whispers one game player. Will an Etonian ever lead the party again?

The Labour party's reaction to today's opinion polls will tell us a great deal about how well Ed Miliband has really invested in his party. If the backbenchers feel they have a stake in the Labour leader, and as though he is worth fighting for - which Conservative MPs have often not felt about Cameron, leading to them airing their dirty laundry in public - then the panic in the party won't break out beyond John Mann's intervention today. The backbencher told Pienaar's Politics that 'of course it's a warning shot and it would be naive to think otherwise. I think the message is that we need to be much clearer and I think simpler in putting across what our alternative is and what we stand for.' Mann said this wasn't just a Miliband problem but also the Shadow Cabinet and the whole party.

George Osborne got the front pages he wanted this morning. 'A budget for Sun readers' proclaims his target newspaper. But Labour, which doesn't have very much to say about the Budget, has been celebrating Grant Shapps' unfortunate infographic which he tweeted last night which takes a rather David Attenborough-style tone when describing what hardworking people like to do in their spare time. 'Cutting the bingo tax and beer duty to help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy' the image says. Labour is delighted and many Tories are horrified. George Osborne has been pressed repeatedly about it on his post-Budget broadcast tour.

Budget day tomorrow, and I'm sure many of you will relish the reminder that you are, in George Osborne's reported view, 'successful' because you pay 40p tax band. It's better than that, in fact. I know of men who ask their partners to make obscene references about their tax contribution during intimate moments, about how they are part of the 15 per cent of taxpayers who are reducing the deficit and making Britain the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Stranger still, Osborne is reported to have said, although he denies everything, that the 40p tax made people more likely to vote Conservative.

Unsurprisingly, Michael Gove's FT interview in which he attacked the 'preposterous' number of Old Etonians around David Cameron - widely interpreted as a sally on behalf of George Osborne - has gone down like a lead balloon with the Prime Minister. I understand that Cameron had a stern word with the Education Secretary over the weekend, with one source telling me that 'he was torn a new one and given a right royal bollocking'. Cameron has made it very clear to Gove that his words were 'bang out of order' and that his aim is to focus on the Cabinet job in hand, not go on freelance missions. Meanwhile, those supporting Boris's leadership ambitions are deeply amused by the amount of energy being expended by the Osborne camp on furthering his prospects on the Tory backbenches.