David cameron

Osborne got his chance to audition for Number 10 today. He hasn’t the fluency and the synthetic chumminess of Cameron. And his emotional range is far narrower than the PM’s. He’s like Nigel Lawson, cool, uneasy, watchful. His brain-power is more than his head can bear and there’s a detached, arrhythmic otherness about him. He’s uncongenial, in the way a good Dr Who should be, but he can’t ad lib at the despatch box. If he’s interrupted he glances upwards, (with worried eyes and Nixon conk), and stares out, bewildered and a little frightened. With a script, and plenty of rehearsal, he has authority even though his basic mode is, ‘I told you so’. He does a good line in swotty, schoolboy scorn.

There is a simple political test for the autumn statement, does it make the economy Topic A again? The Tories’ election strategy relies on the economy being the dominant issue of the campaign. If it is not, it is very hard to see how Cameron and co can win.   The Tories want everything to be seen through the prism of the economy. Hence Osborne’s emphasis this morning that he can only put an extra £2 billion into the NHS because the economy is strong.   In recent months, immigration has supplanted the economy as voters’ top concern. This has been to Ukip—and not the Tories—benefit. This is why Cameron’s speech last Friday was designed to shut the issue down.

One of the aims of David Cameron’s big immigration speech was to settle the issue with his backbenchers before returning to talk about the economy. Based on conversations I’ve had this morning with the key movers and shakers in the eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, he hasn’t got very close to settling the issue at all. Indeed, I suspect that there will be trouble before long. Members of the hardcore of eurosceptics I describe in this week’s politics column are unhappy with what they think is a lack of ambition from the Prime Minister. They feel he’s been flirting with them a bit too much on this issue and has led them on to believe he would announce something much bigger than he then produced.

David Cameron will make his ‘game-changer’ speech on immigration tomorrow in which he is expected to say that the UK will leave the EU if it does not secure reforms that allow the government to deny benefits to migrants. He will say: ‘If we cannot put our relationship with the EU on a better footing, then of course I rule nothing out.’ This is not the emergency brake or points-based system that the PM seemed to hint at previously and therefore unless there is more in the speech, some of his MPs may feel rather let down. Many were today saying that they expected it to be reasonably small beer, but others will be pleased at the conditionality Cameron is now attaching to Britain’s ongoing membership.

'Apologies everyone and especially to our Leader' tweets Rachel Johnson after a very rude word appeared on her Twitter feed about the Prime Minister: Apparently the columnist and famous sibling was 'hacked'. Mr S knows how these things are: you go out of the room for five minutes and bam! your naughty sibling has seized your computer and written all sorts of cuss words under your name about some chap he doesn't like... https://twitter.com/RachelSJohnson/status/537283459895816192 https://twitter.

There may well be a battle in Labour for the party’s soul, but the same is certainly true of the Tory party. Owen Paterson’s speech today to Business for Britain is proof of that, with the former Environment Secretary arguing that Britain should leave the European Union. Paterson is certainly applying pressure on David Cameron before the election, arguing that he ‘doubts Britain’s ability to represent itself on the world stage’, but he is also auditioning for another big job, that of the leader of the ‘Out’ camp in the 2017 referendum. There are a number of Conservative big beasts who already think that David Cameron will end up campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU no matter how good or bad the renegotiation settlement they get is.