David cameron

The announcement, yesterday, of Nick Boles' proposal for a Lib-Con electoral pact conveniently coincided with the opening of an election court hearing into a particularly unpleasant battle between former Labour minister Phil Woolas and his Lib Dem opponent, Councillor Elwyn Watkins. The most serious allegations against Mr Woolas, who won the seat with a 103 vote majority at the last general election, are that he deliberately lied in accusing Mr Watkins of being “in league with extremist Muslims ... and prepared to condone death threats against Mr Woolas,” and that in election pamphlets he falsely accused Mr Watkins of receiving funding from abroad.

At least this government is honest. ‘There will be,’ Europe Minister David Lidington says, ‘no referendum on the transfer of competence or power from the UK to the EU during this Parliament’. The government will ensure that there are no more EU power transfer treaties; but, as Douglas Carswell, Tim Montgomerie, and Bill Cash all note, the Lisbon Treaty is self-ratifying. The EU has already picked the coalition’s lock and garnered new powers for itself – notably the extension of the EU arrest warrant. The EU could be an economic superblock with the muscle to influence the globe strategically and culturally. But its current political operation is unnecessary and deplorably un-democratic.

Nick Clegg’s speech today is meant to be one of a pair with David Cameron giving the other tomorrow. The speeches mark an attempt to set out an agenda for the government that goes beyond deficit reduction. The idea is that Clegg’s speech called ‘horizon shift’, which is all about making government policy more long term, goes hand in hand with Cameron’s speech tomorrow on ‘power shift’, the government’s plan to devolve power down. This twin-pronged approach came out of the political Cabinet at Chequers at the end of the last parliamentary term and a recognition that the coalition must be seen to be doing more than just reducing the deficit. In terms of political strategy, the next few weeks are crucial for the coalition.

The Big Tent just got a little bit bigger with the appointment of Stephen Green as trade minister. As most of the papers point out, landing the HSBC boss is something of a coup for the coalition. David Cameron was struggling to fill the role, but he's ended up with someone who is widely credited with steering his bank through the worst of the financial storm. Even HSBC's purchase of a dodgy sub-prime company in 2003 has done little to tarnish Green's reputation. Now that he's in government, though, it's worth pointing out that he is yet another minister who has warned of a double-dip recession. Here's how the FT wrote up a speech of his in July: "'We are three years into a crisis that is far from over,' he said.

So, Cameron and Clegg end the summer break much as they started it: with a public statement on the aims and successes of the coalition government. Their article in today's Sunday Telegraph hops across all the usual touchstones – reform, deficit reduction, people power, and all that – but it lands with an unusually combative splash. In anticipation of tomorrow night's bellwether vote on the AV referendum and redrafted constituency boundaries, the two party leaders write: "This is an important moment for political renewal. We have different views on the future of our voting system. But we both recognise that there are genuine concerns about the current system. And we emphatically agree that the decision is not, in any case, for government alone...

As we drift into the weekend, Labour are stepping up their attacks on Andy Coulson. Already today, Tom Watson, Alan Johnson, John Prescott and Chris Bryant have all drawn noisy attention to the allegations made in that New York Times Magazine article about phone tapping and the News of the World – and their efforts have already pushed the story to the top of the BBC news agenda. Indeed, Bryant has even called for David Cameron to sack Coulson. Labour types will no doubt repeat that message constantly over the next few days. So far, the Tories are standing behind their comms chief. A statement from No.10 reiterated that Coulson "totally and utterly denies" the allegations made against him.