David cameron

It started like a bit of good old political knockabout. PMQs opened with a planted question from Mark Menzies (Con, Fylde) asking the PM about Britain’s sick-note culture. Cameron, looking suitably grave, declared that the fake-sniffle problem afflicts even senior management. Ed Miliband, he told us, had recently claimed he was too ill to attend a rally called by health workers. Three hours later he was seen heartily cheering at a football match having been driven to the ground in a Rolls Royce. ‘What was it,’ asked Cameron, ‘that first attracted the Labour leader to the multimillionaire owner of Hull football club?’ This prompted howls and jeers from every part of the house. Ed Miliband ignored them.

Nassim Taleb, the Lebanese-American academic whom we interviewed in The Spectator last month, is the subject of a Radio Four profile by The Economist's Janan Ganesh that was first aired last Monday but will also be on Radio 4 at 21:30 this evening. David Willetts is interviewed, saying that Taleb's work underlines the folly of long-term forecasts because ‘the big events that shape the world today are those which no one predicted four or five years ago’. The discovery of Shale gas, for example, could utterly change Britain’s energy requirements. Taleb’s heroes are Burke and Popper: his emphasis is on the need for humility, on how hard it is for any government to know what’s going on in society.

No wonder David Cameron and Barack Obama were being so chummy: they both knew that they could help each other. The Times carries an intriguing story (£) on its front page this morning, about how the two men discussed a plan to get fuel prices down in the UK and the US. The idea is that both countries — and perhaps more — would release some of their oil reserves. And so supply would go up, and prices would come down. As would our reliance on the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Apparently, we're some distance from a deal yet, but you can see why both the PM and the President would want one to be struck — and soon.

David Cameron’s plane has just landed in Washington. The next few days should provide him with a set of images that will portray him as a significant figure on the global stage. The Obama administration is giving Cameron the full works: a huge event on the White House lawn and the kind of banquet that is normally reserved for heads of state. This is an arrangement that benefits both sides. The Obama re-election campaign wants to foster the sense that the President is friends with a Conservative British Prime Minister given that their Republican opponent in the fall will accuse him of being a left-wing radical. I suspect, though, that Downing Street will be rather worried that the arrests of Charlie and Rebekah Brooks could overshadow the opening day of the visit.

The combination of the European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights is, I predict, going to give David Cameron an increasing number of headaches in the coming months. As Fraser wrote yesterday, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky’s principled resignation from the coalition’s Commission on the British Bill of Rights has revealed that this body was never really serious about dealing with the problem. The exposure of this Commission as merely a holding device will add to the pressure on the Prime Minister to clarify what he actually intends to do about the problem.

News that Nick Clegg has brilliantly outmanoeuvred Cameron over the British Bill of Rights will come as no surprise to CoffeeHousers — we told you so last March. The panel was stuffed full of ECHR enthusiasts, balanced by Tories most of whose competence lay in other legal areas. Perhaps Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, the most clued-up of the Tory appointees, didn’t realise this when he joined the panel. He has twigged now, and has quit (or was eased out, depending on whose version of events you believe); observing that the ‘Lib Dem tail is wagging the Conservative dog’. As was evident from the start.

Recent reports have suggested that David Cameron is interested in swapping Cathy Ashton’s job as the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy for another commission post. But sources close to Number 10 tell me this ain’t happening. Supposedly, Cameron was interested in swapping Ashton’s current role for the post of commissioner for the internal market, currently held by the Frenchman Michel Barnier. But, in reality, this was never on the cards for a whole host of reasons. Foremost of these was that Nicolas Sarkozy was never going to give up the French claim to this job just weeks away from a French presidential election.

Cameron flies out to Washington on Tuesday, and when he gets there he’ll have no need to play the infatuated teenager. The days of Gordon Brown-style adulation are over, and Cameron has a more mature, less needy relationship with Obama. The truth is that there’s precious little he can learn from Obama, but there might be a thing or two he can learn from Mitt Romney. I look at this in my Telegraph column today. Cameron has never loved America, in the way that so many people in SW1 do. He toured America in his youth, but had never been to Washington until he became Tory leader. Cameron is more interested in the West coast, the latest theories from California about how information can change government. But from Obama? Not so much.

The debate on the 50p tax rate is moving fast. I was told by one Downing Street source today that ‘it is now more likely than not that it goes in the Budget.’ Now, obviously, there is a big caveat here. The Budget is not yet agreed: this is all subject to change. But I understand that the Chancellor is pushing hard to at least set out the roadmap to its abolition on the 21st March. I also hear that the Prime Minister is nervous about quite how determined Osborne is to do this. Cameron’s worry is that a Budget that tackles the 50p rate will be remembered solely for that — which would risk reinforcing the Tories’ reputation as the party of the rich.