Theresa may

One of the risks for Theresa May in her battle with Number 10 over reform of stop-and-search powers is that the Home Secretary loses some of the capital she has built up with BME voters over the plans. Last summer, black newspaper The Voice ran an edition suggesting that Labour could be losing the black vote and specifically pinpointed May's work on stop-and-search as a sign that the Tories were starting to appeal to groups they'd previously alienated. But this week May is back in The Voice with an op-ed on deaths in custody. You can click on the image to view the article in full. It is significant, though, that the Home Secretary is unable to mention her work on stop-and-search reforms.

The row over the Immigration Bill is by no means over. It will go to the Lords next, where peers will doubtless have a few things to say about certain aspects of it. Theresa May is still in a hurry to get it through Parliament, so there will likely be some interesting tricks from the government side to try to speed things up. But Conservative MPs are also very concerned about something they backed last night which gained far less attention. The Home Secretary rushed out an amendment on Wednesday night which would render 'stateless' foreign-born terror suspects. The details are actually rather alarming: someone who had already naturalised in this country would have their passport taken away from them.

Yvette Cooper chose to focus her attack at Home Office questions on the government's position on Syrian refugees. She continually pushed Theresa May on whether the the Home office would change its position and sign up to the UN's refugee programme. May replied that the United Kingdom has a 'fine record' when it comes to the amount of money it is providing in aid, and has accepted several thousand asylum seekers from Syria. But added that 'I am indeed working with the Foreign Secretary to look at what further support can be provided by this government and further announcements will be made on that in due course.' Cooper pressed further, telling her that a minority of refugees did need extra help.

As predicted, Labour did make use of the Times's story about Theresa May's row with the Prime Minister over stop-and-search at PMQs today, using a backbench question from Steve Reed, who explicitly linked to Cameron's 'fear of Nigel Farage'. David Cameron gave a rather mollifying answer, telling the Commons that 'stop-and-search does need reform' and that 'what's really important is that stop-and-search is used properly but we don't add to the burdens of the police'. listen to ‘PMQs: Does Cameron's fear of Farage mean he'll block stop-and-search reform?

For the Conservative party, 2013 has been the year of Lynton Crosby. Just over a year ago, the Wizard of Oz was appointed David Cameron’s chief election strategist. Now he’s full-time. His brief is to make sure the Tories in government have a clear message – something that eluded them in the 2010 campaign. And to see that the message is articulated in deeds, not words. In April, the Prime Minister described his own strategy by using a quote from the late Keith Joseph: ‘the right thing to do is to address the things people care about; to fix yourself firmly in what Keith Joseph called the “common ground” of politics’. As opposed to the middle ground of Westminster. Here’s the six top incursions into this middle ground. 1.

Ministers don't comment on leaked reports, as Theresa May said on the Today programme this morning, but they can jolly well make clear what they think of them, especially if those leaked reports are quite helpful to calming Conservative backbench grumbles. The Home Secretary didn't distance herself from the leak in the Sunday Times that she wants a 75,000 cap on the number of EU migrants per year, and repeated David Cameron's call for reform of freedom of movement, saying: 'What the Prime Minister has said and what I said is that in looking at reform of the EU we need to look at this whole question of the arrangements of new countries that come in, so-called accession countries.

Theresa May accepted her Spectator Politician of the Year award with the quip: 'It used to be a joke that I lock them up and Ken Clarke lets them out, now they say I lock them up and Chris Grayling throws away the key.' The right wing press, as Ken Clarke is given to calling it, is much enamoured with Grayling and May. ConservativeHome’s Mark Wallace describes them as the ‘dynamic duo’, and writes a long appreciation of their ‘increasingly strong message on crime’. There is, of course, as Wallace concedes, more to governing than messages. The Mail on Sunday carries a small item about reoffending rates under the headline ‘scandal of prisoners who strike again’.

Ed Miliband stole the show at this year's Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards. The Labour leader, who won a new prize called Political Speech of the Year (for the energy freeze pledge, which ‘transformed his fortunes’), took the chance to read out a Sunday Sport story which accused his ‘Belgian communist’ father of ‘killing a cat’ when cycling through the British countryside during the war. Ed charmed the crowd by being funny, good on camera and, you know, normal. Home Secretary Theresa May, who took the Politician of the Year award, despite her recent burka-related difficulties, was a hoot.

Aside from having to explain her government's policy on clothing that might be used as a disguise, Theresa May did pull it out of the bag, again, in that statement on Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed's TPIM. Her short speech at the start wasn't anything to write home about, simply setting out the bare bones of what was being done to find the terror suspect. But it was in her response to Yvette Cooper that the Home Secretary really got her eye in. She took a rather disapproving tone to answer Cooper's questions, telling her that she was wrong to suggest that TPIMs were in some way a watering down of Labour's control orders.

It is a good thing that government ministers come to Scotland sometimes. It is a bad thing that they insist on opening their mouths when they do. Earlier this year we endured the spectacle of Philip Hammond making an arse of himself; today it has been Theresa May's turn to make one wish cabinet ministers would, just occasionally, contemplate the virtue of silence. The Home Secretary was in Edinburgh to warn that an independent Scotland would be a dangerous place. It would, in fact, be left out in the cold. It would not, you see, be part of the English-speaking-world's Five Eyes intelligence-poolling network. The UK, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will continue to share information. Little Caledonia will be left on the outside, all forlorn, friendless and at risk.

Much of the coverage of today's Immigration Bill has centred around those controversial 'go home' vans, now ditched because they only sent one person home. Theresa May told the Commons this afternoon that 'we won't be rolling out the vans, they were too much of a blunt instrument'. In response to a question from Keith Vaz, she said: 'What I said to the right honourable gentleman is I didn't have a flash of blinding light one day and walk into the Home Office and say, I know, why don't we do this?' What I have done is looked at the interim evaluation in relation to the vans.

There's a lot of interest in Jeremy Browne's revelation in the Times this morning that senior Tories have already been trying to persuade the sacked Lib Dem Home Office minister to defect. Browne bats this away by showing that he really is a true Lib Dem with the only evidence that his fellow yellows will accept. 'Not many people have delivered more leaflets than me,' he protests. It's also worth asking why Lib Dems are quite so obsessed with shopping trolleys: Browne uses the same image that Clegg used to criticise Theresa May this spring. But what's just as interesting is what Browne has to say about his struggles in the Home Office. On those controversial 'go home' vans, he says: 'I wasn't told about the vans. I wasn't copied into the paper that was circulated in the Home Office.