David cameron

The King of Bahrain certainly doesn't seem to like it up him. In this week's Spectator, Kirsty Walker said her last complaint - before quitting journalism — was from the King objecting to her being rude about his regime. A Bahraini man has just been sentenced to six months in jail for ‘defaming’ the king on Twitter. Three similar Twitter users are up on similar charges next week. David Cameron should be making clear how appalled he is at this repression - except he is not in a very good position to comment. After last year's riots, police threatened to arrest users for inciting the looters. It seemed daft: would you really arrest people for writing posts, mostly moronic, on Twitter?

David Cameron spent yesterday campaigning for Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner candidates in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire. The visits, though, received scant national attention: the only coverage I’ve spotted so far is on page 33 of The Times. Talk to ministers and they maintain that the Police and Crime Commissioner elections are more visible out in the country than they are in London, where there’s no contest. They argue that the capital-centric nature of the media explains why the press keep writing the elections off as a damp squib. There is, I suspect, some truth to this charge. But an average turnout of only 20 percent would still not be impressive.

Dame Helen Ghosh's words about women and David Cameron's government have put Downing Street backs up this afternoon. Dame Helen, whose Civil Service career spanned thirty-three years culminated in a troublesome spell as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, told Cambridge students it was ‘difficult for women to get in’ when the Prime Minister favoured his male school chums. Lines such as ‘women don’t network. It is actually quite difficult for a woman to get in as part of an Old Etonian clique. They are far too busy doing other things’ have gone down particularly badly. However, I hear that Dame Helen was not totally adverse to a bit of networking.

The Prime Minister needed to reassure his own side at PMQs today on the EU budget and give his whips something to work with. He largely did that, saying almost immediately that his position was that at best, he’d like it cut and at worst, frozen. That Cameron has said he’d like it cut will give those of his backbenchers who stick with him tonight some cover. They’ll be able to say that they’re supporting the government which already wants a cut. Ed Miliband’s decision to lead on the issue and try and use it to paint Cameron as ‘weak’ has also made the issue more partisan. I suspect that a few Tory MPs who might otherwise rebel will balk at walking through the lobbies with Ed Balls.

Cutting the EU budget is a very good idea. Much of it is spent inefficiently and its priorities are all wrong, 40 percent of it goes on agriculture. Given that a cut would also be popular with voters, why doesn’t David Cameron propose one? The reason is that there’s virtually no chance of getting agreement to it. If there’s no agreement, the EU will move to annual budgets decided by qualified majority voting—stripping Britain of its veto. But Labour’s tactical positioning in calling for an EU budget cut has been, as Isabel said earlier, extremely clever. It has left Cameron defending a complicated position which puts him on the wrong side of public opinion and many of his own MPs.

In The Spectator this week, Charles Moore argued that David Cameron — despite his oft-stated desire to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership — doesn’t actually have a European policy. Charles’ criticisms have clearly stung. For in his Telegraph column, he outlines what post-2015, the Conservatives would seek in any renegotiation: “In essence, the scheme is to turn the EU into two concentric rings. The inner ring shares the euro and undergoes political union. The outer ring avoids both these things and has a looser, trading membership grounded in national parliamentary sovereignty. You could say that this split already exists, in fact if not in theory, but the difference is that, in the emerging model, the EU would be legally reconstituted.

The EU budget negotiation, now a month away, promises to be David Cameron’s next big European test. The Prime Minister has repeatedly declared that he wants to see the EU budget frozen at 2011 levels and that he’s prepared to use the need for unanimity to achieve that. The Economist this week has a very useful scene-setter for the budget talks. It sketches the contours thus: ‘Countries are coalescing around loose (yet often divided) groups. There are the 'friends of cohesion': the net recipients of regional spending, such as Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states. And there are the 'friends of better spending': the net contributors, such as Germany, France, Britain and several northern European states.

David Cameron's taunt at Ed Miliband yesterday during Prime Minister's questions that the 'good news will keep coming' was taken by some as a hint at today's GDP figures, which the PM has early access to. Now the chair of the UK Statistics Authority Andrew Dilnot has written to Cameron to rebuke him for the line. The letter, which you can read in full here, says: 'The Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008 states that recipients of pre-release access must not disclose 'any suggestion of the size or direction of any trend' indicated by the statistic to which the recipient has been given such access. It is clear from media reports that although this may not have been your intent, your remarks were indeed widely interpreted as providing an indication about the GDP figures.

Goodness, he’s enjoying himself. Ed Miliband is brimful of confidence these days and he handles himself like a master juggler at PMQs. He flicks out deft gags and acerbic asides while keeping the central question in the air. He’s having fun. And it’s a pleasure to watch. Greatly helpful to him is the government’s pledge to deliver at least one major and one minor cock-up every week. Last Wednesday it was Cameron’s improvised announcement that energy companies must give customers the lowest tariff. Today he tried to explain this. ‘There were 400 different energy tariffs last year,’ the PM told the Commons. ‘That’s totally baffling.’ ‘The only people baffled,’ said Miliband. ‘were his ministers last week.