David cameron

Boris needs to pay attention. As James Allen said, 'Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.' Given his colourful character, discussion so far about Boris’s leadership potential has focused on the man himself; but politics is about being in the right place at the right time, as Churchill would attest. Unprecedented levels of national debt, a stagnant economy, a healthcare system that isn’t delivering, a Eurozone that may yet collapse into meltdown, a chronic housing shortage, endemic low productivity and a state that has stretched its tentacles into so many areas of people’s lives it is proving extremely difficult to disentangle – these are just a taste of some of the challenges Britain is facing and it’s not clear how Boris would handle them.

YouGov have once again tested how a Boris-led Tory party would compare to a Cameron-led one in the polls. When they last did so in October, they found that Boris was worth a seven-point bump: with Cameron as leader, the Tories were nine points behind Labour; Boris narrowed the gap to just two. The results this time — reported by Joe Murphy in the Evening Standard — are very similar: the Tories do six points better under Boris than under Cameron. That's enough to eliminate Labour's lead entirely. With Cameron, it's Labour 37, Tories 31. With Boris, it's 37 all. As I said last time, switching to Boris probably would not be enough to give the Tories a majority.

Here is David Cameron’s problem in a nutshell. During his immigration speech on Monday he said: ‘Put simply when it comes to illegal migrants, we’re rolling up that red carpet and showing them the door.’ Just two days later it was once again made clear that the red carpet is firmly in place and no such door in sight. Abu Qatada came to the UK illegally on a forged passport in 1993. He is wanted in Jordan to face terrorism charges. Abu Qatada is an illegal migrant. Yet he ‘cannot’ be shown the door. The government needs to realise one thing: that as long as we remain a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, words like those spoken on Monday only show the British Prime Minister to be a wholly insignificant figure.

Theresa May has announced that the UK Border Agency is to be abolished.  In an unscheduled statement to the House of Commons, she described UKBA as ‘a troubled organisation’ with a ‘closed, secretive and defensive culture’. She said that the agency’s size, lack of transparency, IT systems, policy remit and legal framework ensured that its ‘performance was not good enough’. May declared that the agency will be split in two. One arm will deal with immigration and visa services, while the other tackles enforcement. May will also bring both arms back directly under the control of ministers, reversing the arms-length policy established by Labour in 2008.

David Cameron has just delivered his end of term address to the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers. The Prime Minister made little news apart from going out of his way to praise Maria Hutchings, making clear he had no truck with efforts to blame her for the party’s poor performance in the Eastleigh by-election. He stuck to the same messages that he had when addressing the parliamentary party the other week, one backbencher left complaining ‘we’ve heard it all before.’ But what should cause some concern Number 10 is how few MPs turned up to hear the Prime Minister. The audience was estimated at between 80 and 100, less than a third of the parliamentary party.

It's not just Nick Clegg who is having a good long think about immigration at the moment: David Cameron is as well. He's got a big immigration speech on Monday, which shows how spooked the parties are by UKIP that they feel they need to at least address the topic, even if they insist that they're not adopting Nigel Farage's terms of debate. As he writes his speech, Cameron will probably have in mind the looming problem of how many Romanian and Bulgarian migrants are coming to this country when transitional controls lift at the end of 2013. If he doesn't, he should, because that backbench debate from Mark Pritchard on this issue now has a date: 22 April.

Let’s have a breather. It seemed like a truce had been tacitly declared between the party leaders at today’s PMQs. Instead of going on the offensive, Cameron and Miliband turned their solemn and unified gaze towards the sorrows of the eastern Mediterranean. Miliband asked about Syria. Cameron used the opportunity to take a pot-shot at the EU, still agonising over the arms embargo. Their sluggish and dithersome talks, he said, reminded him of the hesitation that caused needless bloodshed in Bosnia. Cameron wants the rebels to get tooled up pronto and to finish off the appalling Assad regime. He called it ‘hateful’ three times, just be sure. Next the EU bank-raid in Cyprus. The immediate question of liquid cash produced this strange announcement.