David cameron

The Daily Telegraph has an interesting splash tomorrow. Its headline reads: 'Shaun Bailey, the Prime Minister's only black aide, was 'frozen out by David Cameron's clique'. It quotes a 'friend of' Mr Bailey, a Hammersmith candidate once given the prime warm-up slot to Cameron in the Tory conference. This friend says rather a lot, and below is a summary: 'They just didn’t get what Shaun was saying. He kept challenging them saying, 'Why are we not saying this?’ … He went into Downing Street and the first thing he said was, 'The only political conversation you need to have publicly is about the cost of living’. He also gave plenty of warning that if they wanted to talk about being a diverse party, people have to see it.

There are two talking points in Westminster this week. One is about who is up and who is down following the local council elections. This finds the Cameroons privately pleased that the Tory party has largely kept its head despite the Ukip surge, the Labour side worried about whether they are doing well enough for mid-term and the Liberal Democrats relieved that their vote is holding up in their parliamentary seats if nowhere else. The other conversation is more profound. It is about why close to one in four of those who bothered to do their democratic duty last week voted Ukip. The rise of any new party is a statement of dissatisfaction with the existing establishment. But what is striking about Ukip is the diversity of its appeal.

Last week I chided those in SW1 who were criticising David Cameron for appointing yet more Old Etonians to his staff without first checking their own teams for signs of blue blood. Now news reaches me that Downing Street has not done much to counter the original charge. Etonian stereotypes were alive and well during Jo Johnson’s first meeting with the government’s special advisers. A humble state educated aide could not help but notice that all the OEs gravitated to one side of the table. ‘Jo Jo’ was joined by Cameron’s chief-of-staff Ed Llewellyn. And when Rupert Harrison, the chancellor’s brain, entered the room, he was drawn to the ‘right side’. It was almost a school reunion.

The dust is settling from the County Council elections and, crucially, the Tory party seems to have stayed steady. Yes, David Davis has had a pop at the number of Old Etonians surrounding the PM and 20 MPs have called for a mandate referendum. But there is no sense of mass panic or revolt. Partly this is because David Cameron had already started doing the things he was going to be told to do after this result. As one Downing Street source remarks, ‘the shift is already well under way.’ He points to the tougher measures on immigration and welfare coming up in the Queen’s Speech and Number 10’s new efforts to involve Tory MPs in policy-making. Another thing steadying the Tory party’s nerves is that Labour did not do that well on Thursday.

To the relief of Conservative Campaign Headquarters, relatively few Tory MPs have taken the opportunity of the County Council election results to sound off. The most prominent exception to this rule is David Davis. Now, a DD intervention doesn’t have quite the same purchase as it used to—he’s made rather too many of them in recent years. But his comments are revealing of the huge amounts of class tension inside the Tory parliamentary party. He complains that the rebellions of Jesse Norman and Nadine Dorries have been treated differently because one went to Eton and one to state school. I suspect, though, that the actual explanation is that Dorries crafted hers to cause as much personal and political damage to the Prime Minister as possible.

As we revealed on Coffee House earlier, David Cameron has now distanced himself from the 'fruitcake' characterisation of UKIP that he's employed in the past. Here's what he said: Cameron: Well I think there are major lessons for the major political parties, for the Conservatives, I understand why some people who've supported us before didn't support us again, they want us to do even more to work for hardworking people to sort out the issues they care about, more to help with the cost of living, more to turn the economy round, more to get immigration down, to sort out the welfare system. They will be our focus, they are our focus, but we have got to do more. Interviewer: You once called UKIP fruitcakes, do you still stand by that?

As I type this, pundits in London are stiffening themselves for the tough task of over-interpreting local election results and projecting wildly unrealistic forecasts for the next general election on the back of a mid-term election in which the electorate is of an entirely different type to that which will vote in 2015. It's a grim job but someone has to do it and it's better that it be done with enthusiasm than with any sense of proportion. Mercifully, my friend and former boss Iain Martin is not one of those types. Be that as it may, however, he has written a column for Friday's Telegraph that is both typically acute and evidence of how the Tory winds no longer blow in David Cameron's favour.

David Cameron's refusal to say 'UKIP' on the radio today was rather entertaining, but it does highlight a strange problem that the Conservative party has brought upon itself for these local elections. Here's his exchange with Martha Kearney, which you can listen to below, from 8m 49s in: Cameron: 'My role is to get around the country and I've enjoyed doing it in the last couple of weeks, to get around the country and to talk about the government's policies, local policies, what the Conservatives are doing. I think there is a real appetite for…' Kearney: Is it a strategy, not to say UKIP? Cameron: No, not at all, it's a - but you know, as I say, you only get a limited bandwidth in this life and I'm determined to use my bandwidth to talk about the positive benefits of my party.

David Cameron is really trying to reach out to his party at the moment. The announcements of a policy board of MPs and a policy chief who is also an MP were intended to show that it's not just the inner circle that calls the shots. Jo Johnson appears to have received a bigger promotion than initially announced: today's Sun reports he's not just leading on policy, he's also taking over from Oliver Letwin in writing the manifesto. But appointing Chris Lockwood to the policy unit has added to the impression that the PM really trusts his friends and those who hail from the same social circle. He did, after all, name this journalist as one of his friends in evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. It is an unfair impression: a proper look at the policy board reveals MPs from a range of backgrounds.

[caption id="attachment_8508921" align="alignright" width="140"] Chris Lockwood[/caption] Downing Street has pulled off a coup with the recruitment of Chris Lockwood, the US editor of The Economist, to the new Downing Street policy unit. Lockwood is one of the brightest and most insightful people in journalism and one imagines that he wouldn’t have left a prime perch at The Economist if he did not think that the new Policy Unit will have real heft. Lockwood is close to Cameron: he was one of the six journalists that the Prime Minister listed as a personal friend in his evidence to Leveson. In 1993, as reported in the Elliott and Hanning biography of Cameron, Lockwood was part of a group that went on a villa holiday to Italy with Cameron and Samantha Sheffield, as she then was.

The married couple’s tax allowance is back on the agenda. After Conservative Home’s exclusive yesterday, David Cameron has confirmed that he will introduce one before the end of this parliament. This would allow couples to share a proportion of their personal allowance, lowering the tax bill for those household where one person stays home to look after the children. Cynics will suggest that this is a good time to float a policy particularly popular with the party base given that there are county council elections on Thursday. But Cameron is a bigger enthusiast for recognising marriage in the tax system than most of his Cabinet colleagues. In opposition, George Osborne always worried that it looked like a measure designed to encourage mothers to stay at home.

When David Cameron spoke at the 90th anniversary party of the 1922 committee earlier this week, he used glowing terms to praise its chairman Graham Brady and urge backbenchers to 'stick to our guns'. Anyone would think he hadn't tried to abolish it in effect by allowing ministers to attend and vote shortly after the Coalition had formed. That the Tory leadership backed down on this, in spite of winning the vote that would have introduced the change, was well-reported at the time. But one of the key things that precipitated the climbdown has been a secret until now.

David Cameron and the Tory party appear to be emerging from a period of marriage counselling that has gone particularly well. The leader is making more of an effort with his backbenchers generally (James examines this in his column tomorrow), and tomorrow's papers bring yet more news of reconciliation. The Prime Minister is beefing up his political policy operation by appointing a panel of bright and impressive MPs to help him, and promoting Jo Johnson to be his head of policy and a Cabinet Office minister. Those MPs aren't just impressive, though: some of them, including Jesse Norman and George Eustice, are also rebels. This is a big gesture to say that the troubles of the past year and a bit should go behind the party now as it gets in shape for 2015.