Tories

If Murdo Fraser can boast that a bare majority of his colleagues are backing his leadership campaign, Ruth Davidson enjoys the support of many of the party grandees. Indeed with the likes of Michael Ancram and Lords Forsyth and Sanderson in her corner it's tempting to suggest her campaign amounts to Yesterday's Men for Tomorrow's Woman. The best thing Ruth - whom I've known for many years - has done in this campaign is pledge to support cutting income tax. Not because there's any prospect the Tories will be able to deliver this any time soon but because it sends an overdue signal about what the party believes in. It offers a contrast with the other parties that, however fledgling, has the chance of taking flight one day. There needs to be much more of this.

Good god, #Catflap shows no sign of abating. And people are losing their minds over it. Poor old Tim Montgomerie is the latest fellow to see the rumpus as an excuse to get rid of Ken Clarke. Apparently a "Cabinet minister should never publicly attack a colleague" and so Ken must be sacked as soon as possible. Personally, I'd rather Cabinet Ministers ceased behaving like idiots and since May is the idiot in this case, if a head must roll it should be the Home Secretary's. She started the Catflap after all and only in the topsy-turvy political land could Ken carry the can for telling the truth while May escapes without censure despite wilfully (or, if you prefer, carelessly) misleading the public. And what is Ken's crime?

If one hype video was weird, the other shown to delegates in Manchester this afternoon (but designed to be seen on blogs and Facebook and so on) was good politics in the service of a good cause. Or, if you really must, vice versa. As Matt d'Ancona tweeted, the Cameroons aren't just Maggie's children, they're  Live Aid kids as well...

Like most sensible folk I have a grand opinion of Alan Cochrane and, this being the case, alert readers will know that this is by way of a throat-clearing before we move on to the business of suggesting that his latest Daily Telegraph column is a little less persuasive than the Sage of Angus would like it to be. As Alan concludes: It is hard not to sympathise with what Mr Fraser is trying to do. Something dramatic does need to happen to galvanise centre-right supporters in Scotland and the idea of a completely separate party but which is part of an electoral pact with the UK Conservatives in the Commons has been kicking around for decades.

There are three things to be said about Murdo Fraser's willingness to put his own party out of its misery: this is not a new idea, it is not enough, on its own, to spark a centre-right revival in Scottish politics and it is a brave way to begin a leadership campaign. Tactically it is a risky ploy; strategically it makes sense. Put all this together and there's every chance, yet again, that nothing will come of it.  For that matter, it may be a mistake to make this the crucial issue in the leadership campaign. The Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party may be feeble but it is also stubborn and most of the time it is guided by a kind of paleounionism that will lead to its extinction.

What does Independence in Europe mean in 2011? That's one of the questions Alex Salmond and the SNP have preferred not to ask, far less find an answer to. Way back in the dog days of the Thatcher-era Jim Sillars coined the slogan as a way to demonstrate that Scotland, small and on the periphery of the continent, would not be cut adrift and helpless were her people persuaded to back the Scottish National Party's vision for independence. It was a canny move: reassuring and progressive and other nice and cosy things. That was then and this is now. The ongoing crisis in Euroland necessarily means things have changed. The euro is not the safe harbour it once promised to be and this awkward fact, like so many other troublesome details, is a problem for Salmond.

The best parts of David Cameron's speech this morning were those passages spent defending the government's plans for police reform and secondary education in England. This should not be a surprise: whether you agree with them or not, these are relatively coherent policies that have enjoyed the benefit of long gestation. The rest of the speech, alas, was a humdrum tour of long-familiar bromides (families are good!), items pulled from discount bins ('elf and safety!) and impossible promises just vague enough to escape obvious ridicule ("a clear ambition that within the lifetime of this Parliament we will turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families in the country"). Perhaps it has to be this way.

If a riot has a hundred causes then it's caused by everything and anything and any all-purpose, universal explanation for it is bound to be implausible. When a 31 year old teacher is among the first people charged in the aftermath of the worst of the violence you can put away your handy explanations about youthful alienation and all the rest of it. Of course that's doubtless a factor but it doesn't explain why the majority of those who might be thought most likely to take to the streets did not in fact do so. Indeed, as I suggest in passing in a piece for the Daily Beast, if these disturbances remind one of anything much it's the riots that convulsed France back in 2005.

First things first: defence policy is difficult. Even more than is generally the case in other departments every decision made at the MoD is a question of trade-offs. This is true of all aspects of the brief: policy, personnel, procurement and so on. If you do this you can't do that and so on. Add the timescales involved and the realities of inter-service rivalry plus some unhelpful sniping from the Treasury and you can see why the MoD can become pretty dysfunctional pretty damn quickly. Nevertheless... Is anyone impressed by Tory defence policy? No, I didn't think so. Neither the Prime Minister nor his Chancellor appear to have much interest in Defence issues and it shows. Then again, at the MoD Liam Fox is hardly master of all he surveys either.

Tim Montgomerie suggests that we all at least try and keep the News of the World scandal in some degree of perspective. This is a worthy thought but not one that's likely to fly very far given the febrile mood at Westminster. Moreover, Tim's reasons for calling for calm are not, perhaps, quite as persuasive as they might be. For instance, pointing out that all these abuses occurred while Labour was in power is, while true, not terribly relevant. Ed Miliband may have been a member of that government but he wasn't involved in courting News International. Besides, it's the Tories who are in power now and, reasonably enough, their relationship with the Murdoch empire is of more consequence now than whatever yesterday's men did yesterday.