Ed miliband

Given that David Cameron will have a tougher fight than perhaps any postwar Prime Minister other than Thatcher, it’s a bit unfortunate that his team doesn’t like political combat. Losing to Rachel Johnson over forests last week exposed major weaknesses, and sent a message to the government’s enemies: that these guys have pretty poor political combat skills. Now word is out, the cuts protests in Liverpool today will be the first in a series of challenges. Cameron, too, is stung by the avoidable mistakes of the last few weeks – and is reshaping No.10 to account for them. Some changes are great, some less so, others downright worrying. Here's my overview: 1. The Big Society. Cameron has started from first principles.

Too much time at the barbers. That’s the opposition’s problem. Ed Miliband showed up at PMQS today after a long morning lounging in the chair having his hair coiffed and burnished. His darkly gleaming scalp now looks like the kind of thing toffs scrape their boots on after a morning’s shooting. And that’s precisely what the Prime Minister proceeded to do with him today. With no time for a strategy meeting beforehand Ed had just grabbed a list questions from the last PMQs-but-three.   He began by having a go at Cameron on youth unemployment. But we know how Cameron deals with that one. Been a problem for decades, old boy. Miliband then challenged him on the economy. And we know Cameron’s answer to that one too.

When Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership, there was much speculation that he’d be ‘Kinnocked’ by The Sun. His brother David had been the favoured News International candidate and ‘Red Ed’, as The Sun dubbed him, offered a fair few targets. But the paper has been giving the Labour leader a hearing in recent weeks. Ed Miliband has been to The Sun for dinner and today’s he written for the paper, attacking Cameron for breaking his promises on crime — classic Sun territory. Partly this rapprochement is a product of the fact that Labour are ahead in the polls. No paper can take the risk of writing Miliband off as a loser in the way that Hague and IDS were.

Cambridge University’s decision, leaked to The Guardian’s Nick Watt, to start charging fees of £9,000 a year from 2012 is an irritation for the Liberal Democrats who did not want any university to move to charging the highest fee possible straight away. It also threatens to overshadow Nick Clegg’s efforts to increase the social mix at Britain’s best universities. But the news has also reminded me of how tricky the question of university fees will be for Labour in 2015. If Labour says it is going to reduce the fees universities can charge, it will have to accompany this with a promise to increase state funding to make up the difference. If it doesn’t, I suspect that top universities might threaten to go private.

After a difficult few weeks for the Big Society, culminating in Liverpool’s nakedly political ‘withdrawal’ from the vanguard projects, Peter Oborne has already drafted an obituary for the Conservative's policy agenda.   As Oborne says, the Big Society goes to the heart of this government’s reason for existence, and its (real or perceived) failure would damage the Conservatives. But it's notable Labour has yet to come up with an alternative to the Big Society, or even a substantive critique of the idea. The problem for Miliband is that the Big Society agenda captures the centre ground of social policy – neither pro nor anti-state – and risks sidelining his party.

Cleggologists will mark down the Deputy PM's speech today as a typical effort. There was basically nothing in it that was new – but Clegg still put it across with more punch, and more persuasively, than most of his colleagues could manage. All of the slogans and pre-announced policies added up to something that sounded, fleetingly, like a plan for growth. Although we'll still have to wait for Vince Cable's review to see the outlines of that plan shaded in. Clegg's main point was straightforward enough: that the government has to, and will, go beyond deficit reduction to stoke the embers of the British economy. He then ranged across everything from the national infrastructure to – a theme of this week – endowing the British workforce with skills.

Open any mass-circulation newspaper and you will find plenty of insider's information about the Tory party. But precious little is known about their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats. After decades in the political wilderness, most editors reasoned that it wasn't really worth their while finding out what the party thought. After all, what difference did it make?   Well, times have changed. What the party thinks, what it does, and, crucially, what it won't do, really does matter. So to help us here at Coffee House, Julian Astle, a friend of the Lib Dem leadership and director of CentreForum, the liberal think tank, has agreed to answer a few questions.

One yawn every minute. That’s how PMQs felt today. Foreign affairs dominated the session as Ed Miliband and the Prime Minister exchanged lofty words about the Cairo demonstrations and the spread of democracy around the world. Doubtless they felt they struck a suitably elevated tone but to the viewers they came across as a pair of prep school smart-alecs trying to sound like great statesmen disposing of liberated peoples after the fall of empires. Egypt and Afghanistan were both treated to a torrent of high-minded vacuities. David Cameron found the demonstrations ‘incredibly moving.’ Ed Miliband was impressed by the sight of ‘hundreds of thousands of people facing overwhelming odds to ask for their democratic rights.

Ed Balls gets personal in his interview with the Times (£) today, but not in the way you might expect. For most of the piece he dwells on what the paper calls his "hidden vulnerability" – the effort to contain his stammer. And from there on, the politics seems a touch softer than usual. There are surprisingly few overt attacks on his opponents, and those that make the cut are considerably less violent that we're used too. Which isn't to say that the interview lacks politics. No sirree. Here's a ten-point selection of some of the political highlights (so to speak), with my added comments:      1) Doubling back on a double dip.