Conservative party

In one sense David Cameron is lucky that the Conservatives do not enter 2014 with a lead in the polls. If they did, the Prime Minister would be under pressure for stitching up the Fixed Term Parliaments Act with Nick Clegg, thereby denying himself the chance of doing what all strong governments have done over the past 35 years, with unfailing success: going to the country after four years. Barring a vote of no confidence, we already know the date of the next election: 7 May 2015. With the exception of John Major in 1992, no Prime Minister who waited five years has won re-election since Clement Attlee in 1950 — and he only clung to power with a miserable five-seat majority.

David Cameron's New Year message (and his accompanying Times op-ed) is an upbeat call to stick with the Tories to get the job done. He writes of his desire to 'turn Britain into the flagship post-Great Recession success story. A country that is on the rise'. And in his video message he focuses on the signs that the country is already rising. Downing Street is keen to stress that this message is no Blair/Brown-style relaunch of the government with a shiny new logo and a plan. It is the Prime Minister trying to encourage optimism about Britain's best days lying ahead of it, but that 'recovery is real, but it’s also fragile'.

For the Conservative party, 2013 has been the year of Lynton Crosby. Just over a year ago, the Wizard of Oz was appointed David Cameron’s chief election strategist. Now he’s full-time. His brief is to make sure the Tories in government have a clear message – something that eluded them in the 2010 campaign. And to see that the message is articulated in deeds, not words. In April, the Prime Minister described his own strategy by using a quote from the late Keith Joseph: ‘the right thing to do is to address the things people care about; to fix yourself firmly in what Keith Joseph called the “common ground” of politics’. As opposed to the middle ground of Westminster. Here’s the six top incursions into this middle ground. 1.

The Sun on Sunday's story this morning that senior Tories have opened talks with Boris Johnson about a campaigning role for the Mayor follows some advice offered by James Forsyth in the pages of this magazine back in May. In his politics column, James argued that Boris needed a role in the 2015 campaign to reach voters who might otherwise be turned off by the Tories: 'Persuading the public that Labour can’t be trusted with office again is necessary but not sufficient. To achieve victory, the Tories must connect with the electorate in a way that they are currently not. That means Cameron finding a role for Boris; he’d be well suited to being the chief Cameron surrogate. 'Those around Cameron fret about whether Boris can be trusted or not.

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 just pandering to prejudice and uncertainty and anger. There has been a surge in Ukip, but you can't outdo Ukip.

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.

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 the reality is different, but at least this is a plan rather than a lack of awareness of the issues).

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 marginal seats of Crewe & Nantwich and Great Yarmouth, and the safe seats of Folkestone & Hythe and Bognor Regis and Littlehampton.

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 stop the inevitable post-European elections panic.

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 at the top of the parties have no idea what it's like'.

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.

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 of living standards and back onto the Tory question of economic competence.

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 keen to use the Mayor's comments as a stick with which to beat the Conservatives as a whole.