David cameron

A few years ago, when I was serving with the Grenadier Guards in Iraq, I was part of a team tasked with looking after the visiting Secretary of State. There were five Defence Secretaries during my short spell in the army – a sign, perhaps, of the lack of attention the last government paid to the armed forces. Some were impressive, some less so. One was famous for falling asleep during briefings, but the one I was accompanying in Basra was wide awake. He wished to carry out of the most important missions facing Cabinet members in a warzone: conduct an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio Four. He asked if we could turn off our own radios, so as to reduce the background noise – and seemed amazed and a not a little put out when we refused.

The PMQs attack No 10 was expecting from Labour on the Coalition’s planned spending cuts did not materialise and today’s was another relatively quiet affair. It started with a minute’s silence in memory of those who died in the shootings in Cumbria. Harman asked one question on gun laws before moving on to the electoral roll and whether it is fair to redraw the boundaries on a roll that does not include three and a half million people. Harman would be on quite strong ground here except for the fact that the boundaries were redrawn under the last government using this electoral register, a point Cameron made.

As Ben Brogan notes, there was a clean symmetry to David Cameron’s speech this morning: the crisis was Labour’s fault; therefore, Labour is to blame for the painful measures needed to restore stability. As Cameron put it: ‘I think people understand by now that the debt crisis is the legacy of the last government. But exactly the same applies to the action we will take to deal with it.’ Cameron made constant reference to the actions of the ‘previous government’. As a foretaste of what the Independent Office for Budget Responsibility will expose, Cameron alleged that Alistair Darling withheld estimates that Britain will be repaying £70bn per annum in debt interest by 2015.

David Cameron is caught between a rock and a hard place. His government is rightly committed to its AfPak policy and the need to keep ties with the United States strong and close. But the Prime Minister and his aides probably also know that the assessments offered by a number of senior military officers of the campaign are rose-tinted, and suspect that the US administration may pivot and head for the exit far quicker than is comfortable for its allies. This is a tough choice; a wrong move could damage transatlantic ties and set back the fight against Jihadism. Staying the course will mean greater opposition from both Right and Left.   Unhelpfully, the government is also beginning to see signs of the kind of sniping from the Army that beset the Labour government.

Two groups in the Conservative party that have worried most about Con-Lib government are the social conservatives and the neo-conservatives. The latter have been particularly worried about UK relations with Israel. There is a real concern in parts of the Conservatives Party that three factors would come together to sour Anglo-Israeli relations: what the neo-conservatives see as the Foreign Office’s knee-jerk Arabism, the presence of many supposed Arabists in Cameron-Hague’s teams, and the anti-Israel bias exhibited by many leading Liberal Democrats. Whatever the truth of these allegations, they are held with considerable fervour.

The shootings in Cumbria this morning meant that today’s PMQS was always going to be a subdued affair. David Cameron was impressive, though.  You wouldn’t have guessed it was his first time answering questions and he controlled the pace of the session expertly. There were fewer people on the front bench than last week meaning that Nick Clegg was more visible than he had been during the opening of the Queen’s Speech debate. Clegg sat to Cameron’s right while Hague was on his left. Harriet Harman asked some cleverly constructed questions, her ones protesting at plans for those accused of rape to be given anonymity are never going to be easy to dismiss.

I hope CoffeeHouse readers will forgive the attention I am heaping on the Afghanistan War these days, but the campaign is moving into a decisive phase with a July donor’s conference in Kabul that Hillary Clinton is reportedly attending, a “peace jirga” scheduled to consider plans to negotiate with the Taliban and only a year to go before the first US combat troops begin heading home. No 10 is now letting it be known that the Prime Minister, his key Cabinet ministers, generals and aides will gather shortly to discuss the mission. A sort of condensed Obama review of the UK contribution.

David Cameron has made his first podcast since becoming Prime Minister. There are a couple of noteworthy points: he didn’t name-check any Lib Dems (a slight if perhaps telling oversight); and he reiterated his call for a ‘transparency revolution’, allying accountable public services with a new style of open politics. The coalition will 'rip-off the cloak of secrecy... and rebuild public trust in politics.'  Oh the difference a day makes. Recorded on the train down from Yorkshire yesterday, pithy catchphrases such as ‘by the time we've finished, they (politicians) will have far, far fewer places to nowhere to hide’ sound a little insensitive today. But I’m nit-picking. It’s an excellent spiel: clear, direct and contrite.

Surprise, surprise – Menzies Campbell doesn't sound 100% taken with the coalition in interview with Andrew Neil on Straight Talk this weekend.  This is, don't forget, the man who encouraged the Lib Dems to seek a deal with Labour at the last minute.  And here he claims that he "would have found it very difficult to make the kind of arrangement with David Cameron that Nick Clegg has obviously found so easy."  He adds that: "...there is this determination to make [the coaltion] work and nowhere is that more obvious than in David Cameron and Nick Clegg.