David cameron

Labour are on the up. They strolled Oldham. They’ve recruited great armies of Clegg’s defectors. And they’d win a majority if a general election were held tomorrow. There’s been a lot of excited talk in Westminster about Tom Baldwin, Labour’s new communications attack-dog, coming in with his fangs bared and sharpening up their tactics. Well, it ain’t working so far, if PMQs is anything to go by. Ed Miliband had his dentures in today. He was humourless, slow to react and sometimes inaudible. His questions didn’t resemble even the most basic PMQs battle-plan, namely, a pre-meditated onslaught culminating in a simple powerful message presented in a memorable one-liner.

The man known to the Cameroons as ‘The Master’ casts a long shadow. David Cameron has re-launched his public service reform agenda and there was more of a whiff of Blair in the air. His speech was understated. He eschewed references to radicalism and appealed to continuity instead. The favoured phrase of the moment is ‘evolution not revolution’, and Cameron traced the lineage of his reforms to those of the thwarted Blair administration (and the market reforms of the Thatcher and Major years). He was so deep in New Labour’s intellectual territory that he was at pains to stress that the ‘spending taps have not been turned off’.

Ed Miliband has had three launches in three months – but, much as I hate to admit it, things are getting better for him. His party are now consistently ahead in the polls, so in my News of the World column today I look at what’s going right. Here are my main points: 1) Cameron’s embrace has, alas, proved toxic for the Lib Dems. I have been impressed by Nick Clegg since he entered government. I’d like to see him rewarded for the tough decisions he took, and in more ways than being named ‘politician of the year’ by the Threadneedle/Spectator awards. But it just isn’t happening. The ‘merger’ model of coalition that they have chosen (as opposed to the Holyrood model used in Scotland in 1999-07) has robbed them of their identity.

Despite the brave smiles, the senior Lib Dems are wearing long faces. Matthew Parris considers (£) the collapse of the Conservative vote in Oldham East and Saddleworth as a disaster for the Lib Dems, their own vote sustained by an influx of Tory voters. The Tories may not recover that support, but that does not ease the Liberal Democrats’ dilemma. Parris observes: ‘Privately Nick Clegg will have drawn from this the only sane conclusion, but it is one that I’ve found the Liberal Democrats strikingly reluctant to discuss. It is that in the seats where his party stands a chance next time, it must either re-engage the sympathies of its former supporters who are defecting to Labour, or it must throw itself upon the mercies of Tory sympathisers.

Today saw the latest Cameron Direct event, and the Prime Minister defended his government’s position of bankers’ bonuses and Europe, and he devoted a section to profess the fortitude of the coalition itself. But Cameron realises that he needs to offer positive news, both to a country acclimatising to austerity and to a party that has broken out in a rash of ill-temper. Fuel duty was his chosen tonic. There were no commitments, but Cameron promised to review the level of duty or road tax as part of the March budget. This lends a little weight to the rumours that fuel duty and/or road taxes might be cut or a fuel duty stabiliser introduced to cheer anxious motorists and avert the threat of strikes.

David Cameron made significant waves yesterday both at Prime Minister’s Questions and in a Sun article about reforming Britain’s antiquated trade union laws.  He was responding to a favoured tactic of the new wave of militant trade unionists: threatening action at times that most inconvenience or imperil the safety of the general public.  We have seen this with the FBU’s dispute (over Bonfire Night), Unite with British Airways (over the Christmas period), and the RMT with London Underground (again, over Christmas).  Some union leaders now seem prepared to ruin what should be the two biggest highlights on our national calendar: the Royal Wedding in April and the Olympics in 2012.

After David Chaytor's conviction last week, the dominoes just keep on tumbling. Today, it was Eric Illsley's turn to confess to his expenses-related sins – and he did so by pleading guilty to three "false accounting" charges in Southwark Crown Court. Given that he's still MP for Barnsley Central – although now as an independent, rather than the Labour MP he was elected as – that makes him the first sitting parliamentarian to face sentencing as a receipt offender. A dubious accolade, to be sure. In terms of day-to-day politics, the next question is whether Illsley will be able to hang on to his seat. He could, theoretically, remain in place if his sentence is under a year's jail time.

My prediction for this week: we're going to see a whole lot of defiant frontage from Nick Clegg. The last parliamentary session closed with him under attack over tuition fees; this one begins with the possibility of heavy defeat in Oldham East – and he's got to respond accordingly. Hence his interview on Today this morning, in which he dismissed the idea of a Lib Dem drubbing in May's local elections as "total nonsense," and stressed that the coalition is "setting in motion a number of very liberal reforms". There was also a warning over bonuses, along the usual lines, for state-owned banks. But the most intriguing news in Lib Dem Land is much more sedate than all that – revealed, as it was, in an unassuming paragraph at the bottom of a Sunday Times story (£) yesterday.

Matt d’Ancona’s piece in The Sunday Telegraph arguing that the coalition should stick to its long term strategy and ignore the slings and arrows of the daily news cycle makes an important point. The Blair governments would, undoubtedly, have achieved more if they had done this. But the circumstances for the coalition are different in one crucial regard: it could fall far more easily. What keeps keep Tory Cabinet ministers up at night is the fear that the Lib Dems could dump Nick Clegg and that a new leader would then pull the party out of a coalition. At the moment, this seems like an unlikely prospect—not least because it would almost certainly lead to a general election. But it does only require the support of 75 Lib Dem local parties to call a leadership vote.