Uk politics

Monday

James Forsyth

Feldman’s defenders weigh in

From our UK edition

Friends of Andrew Feldman have launched a vigorous defence of the party chairman ahead of this afternoon’s board meeting. A long-serving member of the party board, a Cabinet Minister and a senior Number 10 source have been phoning around offering their backing to him. They argue that when Shapps and Feldman were co-chairmen, there was a clear division of labour with Shapps involved in the ground campaign and Feldman taking charge of the money and administrative matters. So, it should be Shapps—not Feldman—who takes responsibility for what went wrong with Road Trip 2015.

Isabel Hardman

Labour claims 75 per cent of members oppose air strikes in Syria

From our UK edition

Just minutes before the crunch Shadow Cabinet meeting about the Labour stance on air strikes in Syria, the party has released figures showing an overwhelming majority oppose UK bombing in Syria. This is the statement: 75 per cent of Labour Party members responding to weekend consultation oppose UK bombing in Syria A sample of this weekend's consultation of Labour Party members, carried out in response to an email from Jeremy Corbyn, issued Friday 27th November, has shown that 75 per cent of Labour party members who have responded oppose UK bombing in Syria. 107,875 responses were received of which 64,771 were confirmed as full individual Labour Party members. The remainder included affiliated supporters and registered supporters.

Isabel Hardman

Mark Clarke and the safe seat myth

From our UK edition

How did those accused of bullying in the Conservative party’s youth wing get away with it? The central party, which appears to be slowly waking up to the fact that it can’t mark its own homework with an internal investigation into the events preceding Elliott Johnson’s death, may have been so desperate for help ferrying its limited number of young activists around the country that it jumped at the offer from Mark Clarke (who denies all the allegations put to him over the past few weeks). But those unhappy at the state of affairs seem to have been held back from complaining by something else: the threat to their careers. Account after account of the scandal includes references to the need to impress the powers that be enough to get a safe seat.

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Tory bullying scandal: why Grant Shapps had to go

From our UK edition

After weeks of terrible stories about the bullying rife in the Tory youth wing, former party chairman Grant Shapps has resigned as a minister, with a formal statement expected later today. David Cameron was believed to be furious that Number 10 had been implicated in the stories about Mark Clarke and the death of Elliott Johnson, with the publication of letters of praise from the Prime Minister to Clarke about his RoadTrip initiative. It is unlikely that Shapps, who was demoted as party chairman to the role of international development minister in the summer, will have resigned voluntarily. For some months his allies had believed he was on his way back to the Cabinet. So why did he have to go?

James Forsyth

The EU renegotiation is now the biggest obstacle to Osborne making it to Number 10

From our UK edition

At the start of this week, everyone was wondering how George Osborne was going to get out of trouble on tax credits, avoid a deeply damaging row over police cuts, all while still keeping to his surplus target. But thanks to the Office for Budget Responsibility upgrading its forecasts, Osborne was able to scrap the tax credit changes, protect the police budget and maintain his plan for a £10 billion surplus by the end of the parliament. But now, an even bigger challenge awaits Osborne: the EU renegotiation. I argue in my Sun column today that it is now the biggest threat to his chances of becoming Prime Minister.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Hilary Benn didn’t see Corbyn’s Commons speech on Syria before he gave it

From our UK edition

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t show his Shadow Foreign Secretary a copy of what he was going to say in response to David Cameron’s statement on Syria, Coffee House understands. Sources have told me that Hilary Benn was spotted sitting outside Corbyn’s office this morning before the Prime Minister made his Commons statement. Benn appeared to be waiting for something. When I asked his spokesman whether Benn had been given advance sight of Corbyn’s planned response to the Prime Minister, the spokesman said ‘no’.

Isabel Hardman

Shadow Cabinet members threaten resignations over Syria row in Labour

From our UK edition

Tonight Labour’s Shadow Cabinet is in uproar over what many of its members see as a fundamental breach of trust from Jeremy Corbyn in writing to the parliamentary party without telling them. ‘Why would you do that?’ asks one shadow minister in utter bafflement. They thought it odd that Corbyn had read from a printed statement about his position on strikes in the meeting, rather than addressing them directly, but odder still that he just hadn’t thought to tell them that he would be writing this letter. There is a suspicion that this evening’s letter is part of a co-ordinated effort with grassroots organisation Momentum to make MPs’ lives miserable over the next few days as they are subjected to furious lobbying from their local parties.

Isabel Hardman

Corbyn writes to Labour MPs to say he cannot support air strikes

From our UK edition

Jeremy Corbyn has written to his MPs to say that he cannot support air strikes in Syria. In a letter sent to the parliamentary party this evening, the Labour leader writes that ‘I do not believe the Prime Minister’s current proposal for air strikes in Syria will protect our security and therefore cannot support it’. But the Shadow Cabinet will meet again on Monday, when we will attempt to reach a common view’. Now, there are a number of possibilities here. The first is that Corbyn will allow a fully free vote on the matter, having discussed this with the Shadow Cabinet.

Isabel Hardman

Corbyn won’t support intervention in Syria, but what will he ask his frontbenchers to do?

From our UK edition

It would be a great surprise if Jeremy Corbyn did personally back British air strikes against Islamic State in Syria. So the most interesting thing about his response to the Prime Minister’s statement was whether the Labour leader gave much of a clue as to what he would require his party to do when a vote comes to the Commons. The Shadow Cabinet will meet shortly to discuss this, and from the looks on the faces of some of his shadow ministers as he spoke, it appears that Corbyn will face some debate about the points he made. Corbyn did not rail against the Prime Minister’s desire for action, but asked for more detail on what he envisaged. His questions did sound a little familiar, though.

Isabel Hardman

Cameron sets out his case for bombing Islamic State in Syria

From our UK edition

In the past few minutes, David Cameron has published his response to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the case for British action against Islamic State in Syria. You can read the response here. The Prime Minister argues that the threat to Britain is so great that ‘now is the time to scale up British diplomatic, defence and humanitarian efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict and to defeat ISIL’. 'The threat Isil poses to Britain and to our citizens today is serious and undeniable’, he says, warning that Britain must act before the terrorists succeed in an attack again this country. Cameron’s challenge from MPs was to set out what Britain could actually achieve by joining the strikes, and what the objective of the campaign would be.

Isabel Hardman

John McDonnell hasn’t worked out how to attack the government

From our UK edition

John McDonnell is very peeved this morning that a stunt that he pulled in the Commons to get attention has got attention. He’s also relieved that though a guest on Radio 4 whose family experienced the brutality of the Maoist regime said on air that she found his stunt with the Little Red Book ‘chilling’, she told him away from the microphone that she understood what he was doing. But he’s pleased, overall, because at least everyone now is talking about the Tories kow-towing to the Chinese, and definitely not about what on earth he was thinking to produce the red book in the Commons yesterday.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Why the tax credit cuts had to go

From our UK edition

In the peroration of his statement today, George Osborne declared that the Tories were ‘the mainstream representatives of the working people of Britain.’ This is how he wants to position the Tories and it is why the tax credit changes had to go: they were getting in the way of the Tory attempt to rebrand themselves as the workers’ party. By ditching the tax credit changes, the Tories can now return to this theme—and can try and gain maximum political benefit from the national living wage. Osborne believes that with Jeremy Corbyn / John McDonnell leading the Labour party, the Tories have a real opportunity to pick up support from low income voters who wouldn’t normally have thought of voting for the Tories.

Isabel Hardman

Ministers seek spending review sanctuary in international development budget

From our UK edition

One of the things to look out for in today’s spending review is the number of spending pots that have suddenly become very relevant to the international development scene. A number of Secretaries of State for unprotected departments have worked out that the best way to save some of their budgets from being slashed is to count them as overseas development spending, which therefore means they don’t need cutting. One of the reasons ministers are doing this is that the decision to continue with ring-fencing for politically important spending areas such as international development, pre-16 education and the NHS places a huge burden on the other unprotected departments. That’s quite obvious, but the lopsided nature of the state will become even more obvious today.

Tuesday

Camilla Swift

The SNP don’t care about foxes. It was all a pack of lies

From our UK edition

So, it turns out that the SNP weren’t that bothered about the plight of foxes after all. Back in July, you might remember, David Cameron was forced to backtrack on his plan for a parliamentary vote on relaxing the hunting ban, after the SNP decided to vote against any changes. This, of course, came after Nicola Sturgeon wrote in February: ‘the SNP have a long-standing position of not voting on matters that purely affect England — such as fox hunting south of the border, for example — and we stand by that.

Isabel Hardman

Len McCluskey turns on Jeremy Corbyn

From our UK edition

Either Len McCluskey is, in the Corbynista narrative, a Tory, or things are going badly wrong for the man his union endorsed for the Labour leadership. The York Press reports that the Unite leader told an audience in York that Jeremy Corbyn ‘has to come to terms with his leadership’, that he ‘can’t necessarily say the first thing that comes into his head’ and that his comments about shoot-to-kill were ‘inappropriate’. What this shows - unless Len McCluskey really is a red Tory - is that even those union bosses who have been agitating for years for Labour to move left have been shocked by how disorganised and naive his operation has been since taking the helm of the party.

Isabel Hardman

Labour increasingly nervous about Oldham West and Royton by-election

From our UK edition

A number of Labour MPs are campaigning in Oldham today, with fears growing in the party that it could be in serious trouble in the by-election there. Even though Michael Meacher won the seat in May with a 14,000 majority, the fears that I reported last week about white working class voters turning away from Labour and plumping instead for Ukip seem to be growing. No MP who has been there has anything positive to say about what they’ve seen, other than that their candidate, Jim McMahon, is hugely impressive. Some Labourites with a good knowledge of the seat are worried that the party may do well in postal votes, but perform poorly on polling day itself. ‘It therefore depends on us having a sophisticated postal vote operation in order to win,’ says one source.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Tory whips woo Labour MPs ahead of Syria vote

From our UK edition

As David Cameron confirmed in his statement to the Commons today, he will set out his strategy on attacking Islamic State in Syria on Thursday. MPs will then get the weekend to consider their positions, with a vote expected next week. A number of odd things are happening in preparation for this vote. One is that the Tory whips are being incredibly nice to people they normally ignore: Labour MPs. I understand that there is a briefing scheduled for Wednesday for Labour MPs at the Ministry of Defence, with a similar one for Tory MPs at a separate time. As I said this morning, it looks as though Labour MPs will help Cameron get the ‘biggest possible majority’ that he told the Commons he was after.

Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs in despair at Corbyn’s ‘poor’ response to defence review

From our UK edition

Labour MPs have had plenty of opportunities over the past few weeks to look miserable. But today the party looked its most miserable ever as Jeremy Corbyn responded to David Cameron’s statement on the Strategic Defence and Security Review. Even the frontbenchers, particularly Tom Watson, looked unhappy. Andy Burnham looked even more doleful than usual. On the backbenches, MPs such as Dan Jarvis and Caroline Flint wore masks of agony. Chris Leslie had his arms crossed defensively, looking miserable. Diane Abbott appeared to be a little snoozy. Helen Goodman was slumped in her seat in what appeared to be despair. Labourites afterwards described the response as ‘poor’.

Isabel Hardman

Corbyn facing a ‘point of reckoning’ over Syria vote

From our UK edition

Pro-intervention Labour MPs are increasingly confident that they will help David Cameron get a majority for British military action against Islamic State in Syria. They also believe that the amount of support for such action will bring what one frontbencher describes as a ‘point of reckoning’ and another describes as a ‘turning point for the party’. This is because Corbyn is going to have to concede that he must give the Labour Shadow Cabinet a free vote on the matter, otherwise there will be a ‘bloodbath’, sources warn. A number of Shadow Cabinet members are minded to vote in favour of action if Cameron presents a sufficiently well-thought-out plan. And they would expect a free vote, or else.