David cameron

Now that David Cameron has returned from his Portuguese fish-shopping exploits, the game of recall tennis that Westminster has been playing for the past few days has stepped up a few notches. Now it's not just Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon and other Cabinet members leaving COBR meetings who can be asked whether or not they think Parliament should return from recess to debate the situation in Iraq, but the Prime Minister himself. It's running like this: another Tory MP writes to the Prime Minister to say there should be a recall, or a senior party figure from the Lib Dems or Labour says there should be one.

Downing Street remains resolute that there will not be a recall of Parliament over the situation in Iraq. But Conor Burns, a Tory backbencher who resigned as a ministerial aide over Lords reform, has just joined calls for a recall by writing to David Cameron warning that helping to evacuate the religious minorities at risk is not enough. His letter, seen first by Coffee House, is pretty strong stuff. Burns tells Cameron that 'these people want a holocaust of everyone who does not share their brutal ideology. It simply cannot be enough to try and evacuate those [ISIS] want to kill and then leave them, as the Pentagon admitted last night, undiminished to continue their terror' and that 'there is more that we could be exploring to deal with the problem's source'.

Much has been made of the news that Boris Johnson intends to return to parliament at next year’s general election. The announcement, made in the Q&A session after his speech about London, Britain and the European Union, has got Westminster all hot and bothered. But another of Boris’s answers in that session also deserves to be highlighted. Gerard Lyons’s report for the mayor sets out 8 key points of European reform, ranging from changing the relationship between the Eurozone and non-eurozone countries, to the completion of the single market, to halting unnecessary regulations. But Boris went much further than this when responding to a question from Peter Wilding, director of the in-at-all-costs campaign British Influence.

Boris Johnson's speech this week is one of the few domestic issues really animating Westminster. He will argue that the UK should not be 'frightened' of leaving the EU, supposedly in contrast to David Cameron, who has always made clear that he wants to remain in the bloc. But it's worth remembering that Cameron himself has started to shift recently on how he'd vote in the 2017 referendum. When he returned to the Commons after losing his fight against Jean-Claude Juncker's bid to become President of the European Commission, Cameron changed his language on that vote.

In this week’s Spectator, Melanie Phillips argued that supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. The most appalling aspect is the silence in the face of all this of the political class. Here’s her suggestion for what Ed Miliband should say if he really cared about the rise of anti-semitism in Britain: ‘I am horrified, not just because of the resurgence of the madness from which my own family so grievously suffered in the Holocaust, but also because we on the left bear no small responsibility for this current obscenity. ‘Hamas has placed its rocket arsenals below hospitals, schools and mosques. It is using 12-year-old kids as human bombs against Israeli soldiers.

In this week's Spectator, Melanie Phillips argued that supposedly anti-Israel protests over the Gaza war have convulsed Europe in the worst scenes of open Jew-hatred since the 1930s. Even more appalling is the silence in the face of all this of the political class. Here's her suggestion for what David Cameron should say if he really cared about the rise of anti-semitism in Britain: ‘I am utterly appalled by the attacks on the Jewish people on the streets of Britain and in our public discourse. This hatred and bigotry is being fuelled by warped and distorted reporting about the Gaza war. ‘Newspapers and broadcasters are uncritically treating Hamas propaganda as fact.

The economy has recovered, and is steadily growing. That much is now clear. It has long been assumed that this will help the Conservative Party’s electoral fortunes. The logic goes that, having steered the country through difficult economic times, a grateful public will come out in their droves to thank them for it. But politics is never that simple, and the public are rarely so willing to give credit to politicians. While it may seem perverse to suggest that economic growth is harming the Tories’ electoral chances, continuing good news about the economy is making it less of an electoral issue. Voters are beginning to ask: ‘what next?’ David Cameron and the Conservatives are experiencing a voteless recovery.