Theresa may

              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 that he hadn’t seen the text of the Home Secretary’s speech before she delivered it.

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 that it's losing ground with women at the moment, and that it'll take more than footage of Cameron taking his kids to school to recover.

Theresa May has banned an EDL march in Telford tomorrow, although the organisation will be allowed into the town to conduct a static demonstration. May has been a hive of hyperactivity since she returned from holiday, and this is yet another example of the government making a decisive gesture to amend for its perceived earlier indifference. It also looks like a strategic decision to contain that other unspoken working class resentment: immigration, and the hint of racial tension that it inspires from time to time. David Cameron was at pains yesterday to insist that the riots were a cultural issue, not a racial issue. He’s right.

As Theresa May put it in an impressive statement to the House earlier, “These allegations are not, unfortunately, the only recent example of alleged corruption and nepotism in the police.” She then vowed to open an inquiry into these matters, which will stand in addition to the two already announced by the government. The panel will have plenty to look at, as Michael White explained in the Spectator a few years back. John Yates has previous, by Michael White, 10 March 2007 When I was a young reporter on the London Evening Standard nearly 40 years ago I spent a lot of time in the press room at Scotland Yard, not learning very much.

The British Crime Survey is published today and the Home Office had prepared for the worst. For months now, figures close to Theresa May have been expressing their fear that the combination of Ken Clarke’s liberal prisons policy and economic hardship would cause a rise in crime for which the Home Office, graveyard for so many political careers, would be blamed. Today’s figures will have eased their disquiet somewhat, insulating them from Labour’s critique that police cuts are endangering society. The headline is that crime in England and Wales has remained stable over the last year, except for a 14 per cent spike in domestic burglaries according to the British Crime Survey and an alarming 35 per cent increase in domestic violence.

Today’s announcement on a proposed new National Crime Agency (NCA) is a key element in the government’s ambitious police reform agenda.  Recent political attention has focused on changes to police pay and conditions and budget reductions, but the structural reforms that Theresa May and Nick Herbert are pursuing matter more in the long-term.  And before it is dismissed as another attempt to create a “British FBI”, the background and rationale for the NCA is worth exploring. The NCA is much more than a rebranding of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) – the troubled organisation set up by Charles Clarke.