Conservative party

The Tories’ attempts to erase their own online history are wider than first thought. After ‘cleaning up’ their website by hiding pre-2010 speeches and announcements, The Guardian’s Alex Hern reveals that the WebCameron videos have been made private on YouTube: ‘Now it has emerged that every video on the Conservatives' YouTube page that dates from before 2010 has been removed or marked as private. Videos such as Ask David Cameron: Shared ownership, EU referendum, PMQs are now marked as unavailable on YouTube. Others, such as Boris Johnson at the pre-election rally in Swindon, and David Cameron down on the farm, are now unlisted, ensuring that only users with a direct link can see them.

Voters in the North love Tory policies but hate the Tories. That’s the headline from some new YouGov polling on what voters in different parts of the country feel about the political parties and their policies. An overwhelming majority of voters in the North support cutting net immigration, same-sex marriage, the benefits cap, Help to Buy and raising the income tax allowance — all policies enacted by Conservatives in government. But, when asked which party they would consider voting for, 39 per cent of respondents in the North said that they would never consider voting Tory: Why do some many people in the North detest the Tories?

Remember Cameron's hug a husky speech? Or his lecture on 'the need recast politics for the digital age?' Well, good job you do because the Tory party has been trying to purge their online history, according to Computer Weekly. As Mark Ballard explains, someone at CCHQ has used a robots.txt file to block Google (and other search engines) from indexing the files: ‘...the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010. 'It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been a role model for Cameron and Osborne's "open source politics".

David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet yesterday evening rehearsed some basic political arguments that will be honed between now and 2015. Cameron made a decent assault on Labour over the cost of living: ‘There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers’ money....At a time when family budgets are tight, it is really worth remembering that this spending comes out of the pockets of the same taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve.’ The logical corollary of that statement is pretty obvious: smaller government and tax cuts are the solution to the cost of living crisis.

In the average Tory seat, only around 0.5% of Tory voters are Tory members. Grants Shapps, the Tory chairman, wants to change this. He’s written to every Tory MP asking them to take charge of a push in their seat to raise this percentage to 3. If this drive succeeds, Tory membership would rise to 800,000 plus. Opinion among Tory MPs on this move is divided. Some think that the era of the mass membership political party is over. Others, though, argue that increasing membership is doable—even if Shapps target is a tad too ambitious. There is also the issue of how the Tories can increase their presence in areas which they have been absent from for t0o long. At the moment, only two Tory members have associations which pass the Shapps’ size test.

I can just about take bien pensant lefties attacking UKIP for ‘scaremongering’ about immigration and accusing the party of being racist and prejudiced and so on. After all, a good many of them would have unlimited and unrestricted immigration to this country – and I can at least see a logical and moral case to that argument, even if I don’t agree with it. But from a front bench Tory? I don’t know if you saw the ridiculous Anna Soubry MP spouting hypocritical bilge on Question Time. It was emetic. Accusing Nigel Farage of ‘putting fear into people’s hearts’ over the issue of immigration. How she could do that with a straight face is beyond me.

This week, David Cameron will announce the creation of a series of policy commissions charged with drawing up policies for the next Tory manifesto. Strikingly, every commission will include on it the chosen representative of the Tory backbenches. The groups will, as I say in the Mail on Sunday, be made up of the relevant Cabinet Minister, a member of the Prime Minister’s policy board and the MP in charge of the 1922’s policy work in this area. The Downing Street Policy Unit will provide the secretariat. Number 10’s hope is that by bringing MPs into this process, they’ll feel more loyal to the manifesto once it is produced. As one source puts it, Cameron is 'reaching out and hugging people close’. But this strategy is not without its risks.

One of the odd things about the polls at the moment is that the Tories lead on economic competence and leadership, traditionally the two most important issues, yet trail overall. There are, I argue in the column this week, three possible explanations for this polling paradox. The first possibility is that Ed Miliband is right, that the link between GDP growth and voters’ living standards is broken. A consequence of this is that voters put less emphasis on economic management in the round. Instead, they want to know which party will do most to help them with their cost of living. Then, there’s the possibility that the traditional political rules don’t apply in this era of coalitions and four party politics in England.

One of the stranger rows since the Coalition formed has been over Tory chairman Grant Shapps/Michael Green, and whether or not businesses he ran before entering politics were engaged in unlawful activity. How To Corp, which Shapps founded before passing his share to his wife in 2008, sold a software called TrafficPaymaster, which copied content from other websites so that clients could make more money from Google advertising. Labour MP Steve McCabe complained about the firm to Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer and the Metropolitan Police, and today the Met have responded.

A year ago the electoral strategies of the two main parties seemed set. The Conservatives would stand as the party of prudence, claiming to have saved Britain from a Greek-style meltdown through austerity measures which, though painful at the time, had eventually borne fruit in the shape of a private sector-led recovery. Labour, meanwhile, would stand as the party for public investment, promising to repair what it saw as the damage wrought by cuts. Since then, things have got better for the Tories than they could have imagined. Not only did a threatened triple-dip recession fail to materialise, but revisions to economic data concluded that Britain did not even suffer a double dip.