David cameron

Ed Balls has announced today that he’d scrap even the tiny tax break that George Osborne is planning to offer next year, thus drawing another dividing line with the Tories. Cameron’s proposed tax relief is not about promoting marriage, or favouring any lifestyle over another. He wants to make the government more marriage-neutral. That means eroding the bias against marriage, which is one of the most pernicious poverty traps in the British today. When I was writing for the News of the World, I was contacted by a reader who said that he loved his family, but had concluded they’d be (financially) a lot better off without him. He sent the calculations, and they were all correct.

One of the more remarkable exchanges of today's PMQs was the intervention by John Woodcock towards the end of the session. He surprised colleagues by calling the failure to intervene in Syria 'shameful': 'This week marks three years since the bloodshed began in Syria. More than two and a half million people have fled the country and the dead can no longer even be counted. We must all bear responsibility for our shameful failure to intervene. But they are supposed to be the ones - they are supposed to be the ones running the country. So what renewed effort will his government make to end the slaughter before all hope fails?' It's worth noting that Woodcock supported Labour's amendment but did not vote on the government motion on Syria.

David Cameron and Angela Merkel held a working dinner last night in Hanover ahead of their visit to a digital trade fair today. Naturally, they discussed Ukraine, and Number 10's readout of the call this morning says 'they both agreed that the priority is to de-escalate the situation and to get Russia to engage in a contact group as swiftly as possible'. Cameron also spoke to Vladimir Putin yesterday, with the Russian President telling the Prime Minister that 'Russia did want to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis' - although presumably in Putin's mind that doesn't involve quite the same level of compromise as those words might initially suggest.

Why the surprise? Of course the Prime Minister would employ a nanny from somewhere like Nepal. David Cameron is simply taking part in the familiar upper-middle class game of 'Exploited Third World Labour Top Trumps'. The more backward, far-flung and desolate the country of origin, the higher your nanny scores. And, incidentally, the cheaper she is likely to be. Nepal scores a very commendable fifty points. Right now I’ll bet Osborne is trying desperately to source a skivvy from Kyrgyzstan, or perhaps a member of the Melpa tribe from Papua New Guinea, with their strange binary counting system and facility for pig-rearing. Nick Clegg has gone for easy points with a Belgian (thirty points for a Walloon, fifteen for a Flem).

Great excitement in Westminster today over David Cameron's Nepalese nanny (as a member of James Brokenshire's metropolitan elite) and whether the Prime Minister had a role in Gita Lima obtaining British citizenship. At this morning's lobby briefing, a Number 10 spokesperson was asked whether Cameron had played a role in getting Lima a British passport. The spokesperson replied that they were 'not aware' of any involvement from the PM. Now I understand that Number 10 have checked the relevant documents and are shortly to release a statement confirming that the Camerons did not write a letter in support of their nanny's passport application. Samantha Cameron was simply named as the nanny's employer on the application form, as is required.

David Cameron spoke to Barack Obama on the phone last night. That's pretty difficult to imagine, isn't it? A man on the phone. Screw up your eyes and furrow your brow all you like: you'll never quite make that mental leap to imagining what a chap on the phone really does look like. So thank goodness that the Prime Minister is there to help you out. Last night he didn't just tell us that he'd been on the phone, he tweeted out a photo of him on the phone with a Serious Phone Face. Still a bit difficult to imagine, though, isn't it? He should have added an audioboo of him talking in his Special Phone Voice. It's not the first time Cameron has helped us imagine what he looks like on the phone, though.

We all know what’s wrong with ya-boo politics. Today we saw what’s right with it. Instead of the usual shouting match we had a calm, well-mannered, (and deadly dull,) debate. Miliband devoted all six questions to Ukraine. The party leaders tried to outdo each other in self-importance, bombast and name-dropping. ‘High sentence’ was very much the style. In Miliband’s estimation we face, ‘the biggest crisis on this continent since Kosovo.’ So for him the tangled history of Europe reaches all the way back to the 1990s. His verdict followed. ‘These actions deserve to be condemned unreservedly,’ he said unmelodiously. Cameron blathered about the EU leaders’ summit tomorrow.

As James exclusively revealed on Coffee House this morning, an ambush took place at this morning's Cabinet meeting on legislation for an EU referendum and recall of MPs. Downing Street confirmed this at today's lobby briefing, with the Prime Minister's official spokesman saying that: ‘I don't think it's any secret that Conservative members of the Cabinet would want to see an EU referendum bill, and that point was made. With regard to recall, well of course we don't... try to pre-brief the Queen's speech... but the Prime Minister made clear his commitment to introducing that.

Jaw-dropping news tonight: the Daily Mail’s James Chapman reveals that Patrick Rock, the deputy director of the Number 10 policy unit and a long-serving political ally of David Cameron, has resigned after being arrested on child porn charges. Rock was one of Cameron’s Downing Street fixers. The two had worked together as SPADs to Michael Howard and Rock was very much part of the old special adviser network. So, when Cameron and Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff, were looking for a trusted hand to beef up the domestic side of the Downing Street operation they turned to their old colleague, Rock. Rock’s influence in Downing Street had ebbed slightly in recent months. Jo Johnson had been brought in over his head to run the Policy Unit.