Conservative party

After a seasonal interlude, rival Tories are back to doing what they do best: warring over the heart and soul of the party. In the cuddly corner, we have Bright Blue; a think tank of hoody-huggers who are imploring the PM to be nice to immigrants. The Guardian has been purring with approval since Bright Blue’s director Ryan Shorthouse ‘specifically called for the Tory Party to adopt a Liberal-Conservative manifesto for the election’: ‘At the moment, the messaging is quite negative and uninspiring – it’s not enough to win voters and gain momentum. We need to be more inspiring and bigger picture than that and we need a positive vision, not

In the latest episode of Tea at 22, I interviewed Conservative business and energy minister Michael Fallon on his work in two Whitehall departments, Tory EU policy, and the party’s approach to Ukip. Fallon was the Spectator’s Minister of the Year for 2013. He had some very interesting points about how the Business department in particular might look different under a Tory majority government, suggesting that the Lib Dems had held the Tories back in getting more young people into work. Asked whether the Lib Dems had left the labour market rather more gummed up than the Tories would like, Fallon said: ‘Yes we would certainly have liked to have

David Cameron received a rapturous banging of desks at the final meeting of the year for the 1922 Committee this evening. My sources have given me a run-down of what was said. Backbenchers were, I hear, very cheered by some of his words, particularly on his 2015 strategy. The Prime Minister told his MPs that the important thing to avoid is fighting Labour on their own territory. That means resisting being dragged into ding-dongs about payday loans and other pet issues that Labour likes to raise (the problem with this is that it creates a vacuum for Labour to invent its own description of what the nasty Tories think when

One thing that has been abundantly clear about the Tory plan for Ukip is that it will involve a long, slow ‘squeeze message’ (more on that here) that has already been deployed: the vote Ukip, get Miliband line. Naturally, Ukip is keen to counter that and argue that in fact this early squeeze message to encourage voters to think strategically is just wrong. To that end, party donor Alan Bown has taken out a full-page advertisement in the Telegraph today that argues ‘UKIP stand poised for a major breakthrough in 2015, within reach of victory in many seats across the country’. He outlines the results of four polls: in the

Today’s announcement that migrants cannot claim benefits if their English is so bad that they are unemployable looks suspiciously like another attempt by ministers to reassure fears about the end of those transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. And that is, in turn, an attempt to reassure Tory MPs that the government has done everything it can to keep Ukip at bay. But what is the Tory plan for Ukip? It needs to work out how to fight Nigel Farage’s party in the European elections, how to pre-brief the European elections (presumably by talking up Ukip’s chances so much that any result looks like a disappointment), and how to

Tory backbenchers are in an odd mood after PMQs. They weren’t happy about the leaders agreeing so readily on their pay, but their stances were hardly a surprise, and Labour MPs looked just as flat as Ed Miliband and David Cameron skirted around a possible cross-party deal on pay. But what’s striking is that while Tory MPs who do think they deserve a pay rise are angry that the leaders and ministers such as Philip Hammond have made it so clear that it cannot happen, they are not angry with Cameron specifically. Instead, they are angry with the executive in general, muttering darkly that this is another sign that ‘those

Remember that shopping list of EU reforms that Conservative party members sent ministers in the summer? Well, they’ve finally got a reply. I’ve got hold of a letter to members from Europe Minister David Lidington, which answers some of their concerns and gives us an interesting glimpse into where Conservative party thinking currently stands on European reform. The first point worth making is that while Lidington’s letter is very upbeat about the prospects of reform in Europe, the minister focuses on the opportunities for Europe-wide reform, rather than the likelihood of a new relationship with the EU for the UK. Of course, these changes can take place as part of

At the beginning of the autumn, strategists from all three parties assumed that the theme of the season would be Labour’s poll lead narrowing as the economic recovery picked up pace. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, Labour’s lead has remained and its own poll numbers have actually ticked up. This is, largely, thanks to Ed Miliband’s reframing of the political debate about the economy, making it about living standards But the autumn statement showed that when the political conversation is focused on the broader economy, the Tories have the better of it. Thursday has weakened Ed Balls, strengthened George Osborne and begun to move the political debate off Labour’s turf

Boris Johnson insisted today that critics of his comments about IQ had chosen to ‘wilfully misconstrue what I said’. He told LBC radio this morning that ‘what I was saying actually is that there is too much inequality, and my speech was actually a warning, as correctly reported by many newspapers, actually a warning against letting this thing go unchecked. Because if you look at what’s happened in the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been a widening in income between rich and poor – there’s no question about that.’ He also managed to fail an IQ test, which was an inevitable consequence of this whole debacle. But Labour is

Boris Johnson’s speech at the Centre for Policy Studies, much misrepresented, is still grabbing headlines. Boris gave the Margaret Thatcher memorial lecture, so it’s no surprise it has been interpreted as a bid to succeed her. But another relationship is just as intriguing: was Boris also stealing Michael Gove’s clothes? The Mayor said much about the significance of the Conservatives’ past, but the Govian aspects of his speech offer a glimpse of what the party’s immediate future might look like, particularly when it comes to a future leadership contest. Boris’ ‘cornflake packet’ argument about meritocracy is a classic piece of Govian thinking. Posing the question ‘what would Maggie do?’, Boris

One of the techniques that horror writers employ to make their novels as frightening as possible is to avoid describing their monster in any great detail. Read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and by and large it will be your own imagination filling in the details of Victor Frankenstein’s creation as the creature lumbers out of its inventor’s room and into the streets of Ingolstadt. Our imaginations frighten us far more than authors can. The same elision is at work in politics, except the authors aren’t doing themselves any favours. The Tories have a habit of staying very quiet indeed on a social problem, whether it be payday loans or something else