Theresa may

For all the debate about Theresa May and border security, the big news has not been at Westminster today. Instead, people have been watching what is happening in Italy. For it is far from certain that Europe, or the Western world for that matter, has a bucket bigger enough to bail out a country that owes more than Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain do combined. As the New York Times reports, the European Central Bank is reluctant to step in and start buying Italian bonds because it fears that its previous bond buying efforts have simply enabled the Italians to avoid necessary reforms. It feels that only market pressure will

Hot summer, drippy autumn. Ed Miliband’s performances have declined steeply after the heady highs of July. He came to PMQs today badly needing to fight like a champion. Things looked rosy for him at the weekend. And they got better overnight. We learned that a pilot scheme to fast-track incoming tourists last summer had allowed Britain’s border controls to slip so far that visiting bombers and convicted sex-criminals were being greeted at Heathrow with high-fives, goody-bags and a slice of Theresa May’s blueberry tart. Or so it seemed. Worse still, a suspended UKBA official, Brodie Clark, had contradicted the Home Secretary’s statement and was threatening her with unfair dismissal proceedings.

So soon after taking on the right over the European Union, David Cameron didn’t want to be seeing negative headlines on another of their hot-button issues. But that’s just what he’s woken up to this morning, thanks to the revelations that the Home Secretary authorised the relaxation of border checks. As James said, May’s performance in the House of Commons yesterday left her looking safe for the time being – not least because of Cameron’s support for her, as evidenced by his sitting alongside the Home Secretary during her statement. But immigration is as potent an issue as ever. Unlike the EU, it’s one that the general public does think

I have apology to make. I wrote on Friday that I suspected Chris Huhne’s mistweet “fine, but I don’t want my fingerprints on the story” was the Climate Change Secretary briefing against a Cabinet colleague to a Sunday newspaper. This was a horrid allegation to make, suggesting that a member of Her Majesty’s Government would spend his time and energy trying to ridicule a colleague for the benefit of a Sunday newspaper. I now accept that he was not. It was for the Saturday edition of The Guardian. Huhne has just fessed up to Jon Sopel the Politics Show on BBC One: “In the Eastleigh News website is a recording

‘Cat-flap’ is the story that just won’t go away. A report in today’s Guardian claims that the whole story may have been lifted from a speech made by Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party. One colleague of May’s tells the paper that “Not only has Ms May been caught out making up stories about the Human Rights Act for cheap laughs, she has been plagiarising her clap lines from the UK Independence party.” In the grand scheme of things, this is hardly the most serious charge. There’s just enough truth to the cat anecdote for May to have some ground to stand on and most Tories, understandably,

The Ken Clarke and Theresa May cat-flap has sparked up again this morning, with the Justice Secretary accusing the Home Secretary of using “laughable child-like examples” to attack the Human Right Act. In some ways, it’s hard to take a political row about a cat particularly seriously. But this back and forth between May and Clarke is actually exposing something very important: the Liberal Democrats are not the only brake on Tory radicalism. At the moment, lots of Tory ministers – up to and including the Prime Minister – like to imply that they’d be doing far more on Europe, immigration and the Human Rights Act if it wasn’t for

              Today’s ‘cat-flap’ between Ken Clarke and Theresa May exposes one of the largest divides in the Conservative party today. May, along with most Tory MPs, wants to get rid of the human rights act, while Clarke and the attorney general Dominic Grieve want to keep it. May, to the surprise of her colleagues, used a pre-conference interview with the Sunday Telegraph to make clear her desire to get rid of the act. After this, there was always going to be a reaction from Clarke & Co. One ally of the Justice Secretary tells me that his comments today were spurred, in part, by an irritation

Back in June, Melanie McDonagh wrote that “the Tories are desperate to regain the female vote”. Today’s Guardian scoop, a government memo on the need to better appeal to women, proves she’s right. In places, the document reads as if it were written by a group of men to whom women are very much from Venus. They are careful to spell out the revelation that “of course women’s views differ as much as men’s”, and their response to discovering their weakness was apparently to find whoever they could in Number 10 without testicles and ask what they were doing wrong. However, it does at least show that the government recognises