David cameron

The Tories’ front of house team turned up today to try and stoke up a row about Labour’s spending plans. The Tory aim was twofold. First, to try and cement in voters’ minds the idea that Labour would spend too much, pushing up taxes and second to claim that Labour is in chaos when it tries to distance itself from previous spending commitments. The latter is why the Tories are so relaxed about people pointing out that various commitments in their own dossier do not appear in Labour’s official policy prospectus, the one issued after the party’s National Policy Forum.

In 2010, David Cameron stumbled in his first New Year broadcast interview over the Tory plans for a married couple’s tax allowance. This slip-up knocked him and his party off course and was a harbinger of the disastrous Tory campaign to come. Today, there were no such mistakes from Cameron as he appeared on Andrew Marr. Instead, he stuck to his competence versus chaos message and tried, fairly successfully, to avoid making any other news. In this campaign, we will see a more disciplined Cameron than the one who fought the 2010 election. The Tories are this time, in contrast to 2010, certain of what their message should be. One challenge for Tory and Labour alike in the next few months is to avoid getting drawn into hung parliament speculation.

Will Sir John Major be asked to lead Britain’s Europe renegotiations? The Telegraph diary raises this prospect – and it makes sense. As a former PM with clout and credibility he would be well-suited to the job, and has made the case for such an external negotiator in the past. His recent speeches about Britain's relationship with Europe have struck some as an audition for this job. When Sir John was on Andrew Marr’s sofa last month, he was asked about this directly: Major: I think there are some practical things that could be done that don’t infringe the principle but do meet the problem, but I think frankly they’re much more likely to be done if they’re not aired in public but discussed in private.

There’s little sign of a Christmas truce in the Conservative party this morning. Instead, the row between Theresa May’s camp followers and the rest of the Conservative hierarchy is still being played out in the newspapers. This might be a particularly public episode of it but this row has been going on in private for quite some time. The cause is really quite simple, Number 10, other Cabinet Ministers and CCHQ believe that May’s followers regularly put promoting her future leadership ambitions above the interests of the party. Harry Cole’s recent profile of May for Spectator Life which claimed that she had given up on Cameron and no longer rated him infuriated both Downing Street and CCHQ. May herself can’t plead ignorance in all this.

The increasingly bloody feud between Theresa May’s political operation and David Cameron’s has claimed another victim. Nick Timothy, May’s long-serving special adviser, has been spectacularly kicked off the candidates’ list. The precise reason for Timothy’s ejection from the list is in dispute - Paul Goodman has Timothy’s version of events on Conservative Home. But Timothy is not the first of May’s special advisers to run into trouble, Fiona Cunningham was forced to resign by Number 10 after— in a flagrant breach of the rules —Cabinet correspondence was published on the Home Office’s website. Timothy, though, is not leaving the candidates list without a fight.

Today’s Guardian long-read on the Scottish referendum is a great piece of journalism. Both Alistair Darling and Danny Alexander argue in it that when David Cameron stepped out of Downing Street and announced his support for English votes for English laws he allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to argue that Scottish voters had been hoodwinked.   Now, to be sure, Alex Salmond make much of Cameron’s announcement. In his Spectator interview he says that it showed that Cameron thinks Scots ‘heads zipped up the back’ and that he didn’t get the enormity of what had just happened.

As Fraser points out, David Cameron has gone from saying the deficit has been brought down by a third to claiming it has been halved, but with the often unspoken caveat that this is as a share of GDP. After the Prime Minister dropped this claim into his speech today without that very important small print, journalists grilled his official spokesman on whether Cameron was misleading voters at the afternoon lobby briefing. I’ve written up the transcript of our attempts to ask the same question many different ways. Journalist: When the Prime Minister said in his speech this afternoon the government had halved the deficit, did he qualify that in any way? Spokesman: How do you mean?

Tomorrow, in a sign of how keen the Tories are to keep the political debate focused on it, both David Cameron and George Osborne will give speeches on the economy. Cameron will announce that he is bringing forward a scheme to offer first-time buyers under 40 a 20% discount on 100,000 new home. This scheme had originally been slated for the Tory manifesto but will now be up and running before May. Inside Number 10, they hope that this scheme will help demonstrate that there are tangible benefits for voters to sticking with the Tories and their long term economic plan.   Later on, Osborne will use an address in New York to challenge Ed Miliband on whether Labour would repay any of the national debt.

Coming in from the pouring rain, I make my way to the office on the eighth floor of City Hall. With its curving windows, many books and bust of Pericles tucked away in a corner, it reminds me both of a classroom and the cockpit of a spacecraft. Its occupant is waiting for me, looking a little crumpled but less dishevelled than I had expected. He greets me very pleasantly but this is what I’m thinking. Here is the most famous person I have ever interviewed. In his own way, he is almost as iconic as the Queen or Churchill, the nodding dog in those insurance commercials. He is Boris, one of a tiny handful of politicians/celebrities instantly known by their first name.

Nick Clegg’s performance at PMQs reminded me of Field Marshall Bosquet’s verdict on the charge of the Light Brigade, ‘c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’. After a week in which the Lib Dems have been busy trying to differentiate themselves from the Tories, Clegg turned up at PMQs and delivered an aggressive defence of everything that the government has done. Indeed, I’m struggling to think of anything that Clegg said from the despatch box today that Cameron would have disagreed with. The session was also a reminder of the personal animosity between Clegg and the shadow Cabinet. Harriet Harman went for him over his party’s attitude to women, complete with reference to Clegg’s unfortunate GQ interview.