Nick clegg

The future of the 50 per cent tax rate is growing issue within the coalition. Unlike most government wrangles, this one doesn’t split on partisan lines, with the yellows on one hand and the blues on the other. The debate is largely being forged by personalities. George Osborne is well entrenched; Eric Pickles weighed-in for the race last weekend, saying that he wanted people “to keep more money in their pockets”, indicating that he hopes the rate is temporary. (He went take a swipe at Vince Cable's mansions tax, which he described as a "big mistake".)   It’s David Willetts’ turn this weekend. The Times reports (£) that Willetts believes the tax must stay for the time being.

Nick Clegg laughed-off the dousing of blue paint he received in Glasgow yesterday, like one of Noel Edmonds’ unwitting victims. Today, Clegg has turned into the grinning douser: drenching his coalition partners in yellow paint by saying that the European Convention on Human Rights will not be watered down. Writing in the Guardian, Clegg says that the Conservatives are right to seek operational reform of the European Court of Human Rights, but the common ground ends there. He says that “the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights have been instrumental” in preventing injustices from council snooping to the misuse of DNA records and that the incorporation of human rights into domestic law was a “hugely positive step”.

The Prince of Darkness has made a rare foray into the light of public life. He uses an article in today's Times (£) to do a little waspish mischief about the coalition and the Liberal Democrats. He writes: ‘The Lib Dems are beginning to behave like an internal opposition. Staking out positions in the media, drawing public lines in the sand and making threatening noises when something is not to their liking is not the way to address their political problems of the past year. These led to their trouncing in the May elections and the AV referendum.

David Cameron promised that looters would feel the full force of the law. Courts have been sitting round the clock holding defendants on remand and issuing stern sentences. This is causing disquiet in some circles. Lib Dem MPs complain that the government has overacted, incapable of resisting the temptation to take draconian decisions without adequate scrutiny. Tessa Munt told the Guardian that the government’s approach “smacks of headline grabbing by Conservatives, not calm, rational policy-making.” Lady Hamwee also told the paper that it would be a “great pity if what [the justice secretary] Ken Clarke has been doing – finding a better way of sentencing – was to be undone.

As David noted earlier, the big headline in Nick Clegg’s speech this morning is that the government will hold some kind of inquiry into the riots after all. This climb down in the face of demands from Ed Miliband makes it all the more baffling that Cameron didn’t announce his own inquiry earlier. If he had taken the initiative, he could have determined both its terms of reference and membership which would have ensured that it came up with the right answers. But, in policy terms, I suspect the more important announcement is that prisoners leaving jail will now be placed straight into the work programme. The work programme, masterminded by Chris Grayling, promises to be one of the coalition’s most successful initiatives.

David Cameron’s convictions are best expressed in anger. Cameron exuded an air of the patrician yesterday with his righteous moral certainty. This may have made some observers squirm, but others would have seen this seething performance as the essence of leadership in crisis. Cameron is likely to sustain this tone in parliament today. He will say that there is a “sickness” in our society and set out his plan for curing the malaise. The political class has already offered the government a panoply of options to pursue, but the coalition is expected to stand by its current course of education and welfare reform; if anything, these riots confirm their necessity.

The Liberal Democrats are in something of a purple patch at the moment, dominating aspects of government policy in the media. Last weekend, Danny Alexander broke his usually modest mould to stand square behind the 50p rate, in contrast to Boris Johnson and George Osborne. The debate encapsulates the current vogue for the coalition partners to accentuate their differences. Today, enter Vince Cable pursued by a mansion tax. In an interview with the Telegraph, the Business Secretary concedes that the 50p rate is not a permanent fiscal instrument, but its removal (after 2015 when the income tax threshold has been raised to £10,000) will require a concession from the Conservatives.

Aside from Boris's exhortations to George Osborne, one of the most ear-catching lines of the day has been uttered by Jeremy Hunt. "I think the relationships between politicians and the media got too cosy," said the culture secretary on Radio 5 this morning. He's certainly not the first to make the point, but he is one of the most prominent Conservatives to do so. The words, I suspect, were chosen to cool the heat rising from yesterday's lists of meetings between ministers and media organisations. Hunt himself, it was revealed, has met seven times with News Corp types since the general election. Hunt's admission also opens the prospect of a fevered struggle between the Tories and the Lib Dems to appear less cosy with the media establishment.

Oddly, David Cameron’s most voluble supporter throughout the phone-hacking psychodrama has been Nick Clegg. The deputy prime minister took to the airwaves when no Tory dared or wanted to. Earlier today, Clegg gave a speech-cum-press conference and he defended the prime minister again, saying that he had very little to add to Cameron’s statement yesterday. He also defended Cameron over unanswered questions about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of BskyB; Clegg said that Cameron had “nothing to do” with the deal, although he added that Vince Cable’s reservations had been vindicated. Clegg then elaborated on media regulation. Unsurprisingly, he insisted that the status quo must change.

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has responded to Rupert and James Murdoch rejecting their request to give evidence to them, by issuing a summons. My understanding is that parliament cannot compel them to attend because they are not British subjects. But others think that as long as they are in the country they can be forced to come to parliament. That a select committee chaired by Margaret Thatcher’s former political secretary is prepared to issue this summons shows how much the standing of the Murdochs has changed in the past ten days. MPs are pretty much united in their fury that News International figures failed to give proper answers to previous select committee hearings on this matter.

What Jeremy Hunt's letter this morning started, Nick Clegg has just finished. Thanks to the Deputy Prime Minister, it is now even clearer that the coalition is reluctant for Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB deal to go ahead. "Look how people feel about this, look how the country has reacted with revulsion to the revelations," he exhorted in interview with the Beeb, "so do the decent and sensible thing and reconsider, think again about your bid for BSkyB." The question now is what's meant by that "reconsider" — whether it means the government is pushing for a delay, or for Murdoch to drop the bid altogether. But, either way, it's several degrees firmer than anything they've said previously.

If you strain your ears, and listen very carefully above the din of the phone hacking scandal, then you may just hear Nick Clegg's voice wafting across the Channel from Paris. Our Deputy Prime Minister is on the Continent today, delivering a speech that, in other circumstances, might have made more of a splash. This is, after all, a speech in which he stands up for the eurozone, and chastises those eurospectics — some of them within the coalition parties — who are eagerly anticipating its collapse. Or as he puts it himself: "A successful eurozone is essential for a prosperous UK. So there is no room for Schadenfreude here, no place for wagging fingers.

Gosh, this phone hacking scandal is moving at a pace. Fresh from the wire comes news that even the government is reviewing its advertising contracts with the News of the World; signs that Jeremy Hunt won't budge on the BSkyB deal; as well as further interventions by everyone from Ed Miliband to Boris Johnson. Overarching all that, though, are the hardening differences of opinion between the Tories and the Lib Dems. The yellow half of the coalition is going further and further in pushing for both an enforced pause to the BSkyB deal and a judge-led inquiry into the whole mess. Both Lord Oakeshott and Simon Hughes have called for the former. Nick Clegg's email to party members last night called for the latter, as did Chris Huhne on the Today Programme earlier.

The approach that the Liberal Democrats take to social care over the next few weeks and months will be the best guide we have to how they now view the future of the coalition. If, in the coming all party talks, they effectively ally with Labour and try to score points off the Tories by suggesting that their coalition partners are ‘too mean’ to fund a solution to the problem then it will be apparent that they have moved fully into distancing mode and are preparing to position themselves as the party who restrained the Tories. This would imply a Lib Dem exit from the coalition sometime well before the 2015 election.

Amid all the union sturm und drang yesterday, it was easy to forget about last night's Parliamentary by-election in Inverclyde. But a by-election there was, after the death of the seat's previous Labour MP, David Cairns, in May. And the result was in some doubt, too. After the SNP's strong showing in last month's corresponding Scottish Parliamentary election, there was a sense, beforehand, that Labour's majority could be whittled down to naught. But, in the end, it wasn't to be. Labour won with a comfortable majority of 5,838 and a vote share of 53.8 per cent, albeit it down on the 14,416 and 56 per cent they secured in last year's general election.