Uk politics

Thursday

Matthew Parris

OK: I’m convinced: one EU referendum might not be enough

From our UK edition

We now have to take seriously the possibility that in the EU referendum Britain will vote to leave. I had hardly contemplated that. At the time (in January 2013) I saw the Prime Minister’s pledge to consult the electorate as a tactical move, designed to conciliate his party. It may well have helped David Cameron hold off the Ukip at the last general election, and secure the winning edge his party achieved. But those of us who supposed (as did I) that the electorate would never vote to leave, so a referendum was a pretty low-risk gamble with our membership of the EU, may wonder now if we were right.

Mark Palmer

Bring back the bungalow!

From our UK edition

Sheila Pugh is 91 and in good health. She lives on her own in Congleton, Cheshire, where she takes pleasure in cooking for herself and moving about the place with a dustpan and brush, albeit a little gingerly at times. She has a private garden with a pond and views over arable land. A lot of her friends and a great number of people of a similar age have had to move into retirement or care homes, cashing in their savings and surrendering their independence in the process. Mrs Pugh’s good fortune and the difference between her and so many other ninetysomethings is simple: she lives in a bungalow. ‘It’s a real lifeline for her,’ says her daughter, who is a friend of mine. I get that.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: The clash of the victims

From our UK edition

Corbyn’s PMQ’s strategy is now clear. Hopeful emailers send their lifestyle details to Labour HQ and a computer sifts the figures to find the voter likeliest to cause the prime minister’s cheeks to blush purple with shame. Today’s lucky winner was Kelly, (no surname given), a single mum on £7.20 per hour who works for 40 hours a week while caring for a disabled sprog. Did the prime minister know how much the tax credit deductions will cost her? Cameron hadn’t a clue so he talked about the rising minimum wage and falling council rents. Corbyn gave the answer: Kelly loses £1,800 a year. The question assumes that we all live in a dysfunctional boot-camp run by Whitehall.

Isabel Hardman

Jean-Claude Juncker accused of saying that the UK doesn’t need the EU

From our UK edition

The 'Out' campaign in the EU referendum has seized on comments made by Jean-Claude Juncker where he appears to say that Britain doesn't need the European Union. He 'appears' to say it in the sense that the key word is rather muffled - and his team are insisting he said Britain does need the EU. You can listen to his comments in the European Parliament below, and it’s worth listening as it’s not clear whether he said ‘personally I don’t think that Britain needs the European Union’ or ‘personally I do think that Britain needs the European Union’. https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/jean-claude-juncker-says-that-britain-does-not-need-the-eu His aides are insisting that he meant that Britain does need the EU.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour MPs prepare to rebel for first time against Corbyn: but it won’t change anything

From our UK edition

John McDonnell has tried to explain why he U-turned on the fiscal charter this afternoon, saying that he has only ‘changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics’, not the principles of the matter. He told Sky News: ‘I have changed my mind, but I haven’t changed my mind on the principles of what the charter is standing for which is we need to tackle the deficit and we will tackle the deficit. Labour will tackle the deficit – we are not deficit deniers, I haven’t changed my mind on that. ‘But I have changed my mind on the parliamentary tactics.

Isabel Hardman

Gove wins battle over Saudi prisons contract

From our UK edition

The government is pulling out of the £5.9 million deal to run a prison in Saudi Arabia, Number 10 has announced, after a row between two Cabinet ministers surfaced in the press. Downing Street also said that David Cameron was writing to the Saudi authorities to raise the ‘extremely concerning’ case of Karl Andree, a British pensioner sentenced to 350 lashes after being caught with homemade alcohol. But the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman said that the Andree case wasn’t linked to the decision on the prison deal, and wouldn’t answer questions on when the decision was made.

Monday

James Forsyth

Labour MPs tear strips off each other at party meeting

From our UK edition

Whenever the Parliamentary Labour Party meets, journalists gather outside the room in the hope that those leaving the meeting will reveal what went or that the argument will get so heated that they will be able to hear what is going on behind closed doors. Those of my colleagues who turned up to tonight’s PLP meeting were very much in luck. George Eaton reports that Ben Bradshaw, the former culture secretary, left declaring the meeting ‘a total f*** shambles’ and that Emily Thornberry could be heard loudly upbraiding MPs for texting journalists about what was going on inside this supposedly private meeting. So, why was his meeting so rowdy? Well, many MPs are still furious about having had a Jeremy Corbyn leadership imposed on them by the party membership.

Isabel Hardman

Labour U-turn on fiscal charter to ‘underline our position as an anti-austerity party’

From our UK edition

John McDonnell has just made his first U-turn as Shadow Chancellor, announcing that Labour will vote against the fiscal charter on Wednesday - having previously told the Guardian that it would support it. Labour’s support for the charter was previously to show that it wants ‘to balance the books, we do want to live within our means and we will tackle the deficit’, but in a letter today to MPs, McDonnell says: ‘I believe that we need to underline our position as an anti-austerity party by voting against the charter on Wednesday.’ Labour will publish its own statement on budget responsibility before the debate. The new politics does look rather like the old politics right now, with straight talking still apparently including rapid changes of heart.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

What the Vote Leave campaign needs to do next

From our UK edition

The cross-party ‘Vote Leave’ campaign launches today, with an impressive list of backers from politics and business. It is run by Matthew Elliot and Dominic Cummings, and has MPs from across the spectrum supporting it. This is what it needs to do next: 1. Get the official designation from the Electoral Commission. Vote Leave is the favourite to get the Commission’s funding, free mailing and campaign broadcasts. It is trying to underline that it is the better of the two campaigns - the other being Arron Banks’ Leave EU campaign - by showing off how many people from across the political spectrum it represents. 2. Work out what to do with Nigel Farage. Farage is one of the key figures who managed to make this referendum happen.

Thursday

James Forsyth

BoJo gets his mojo back

From our UK edition

The Tories had a good few days in Manchester. But one Tory had a particularly good week, Boris Johnson. A week ago, Boris looked becalmed. As we said in the Spectator, he was struggling to make the transition from being Mayor of London to being both the Mayor and an MP. But this week, he has delivered the best speech of his political life, shown new Tory MPs his talents, and renewed his relationship with Tory activists. It was telling that when Cameron paid tribute to Boris during the leader’s speech, the hall gave him a standing ovation. Now, the tricky thing for Boris will be coming up with a follow up to this and he still has several months where he has to be in two places at once, City Hall and the Commons. But he finds himself in a far better position than he did a week ago.

Isabel Hardman

Labour justifies Corbyn’s Privy Council ‘snub’

From our UK edition

Jeremy Corbyn is not attending today’s Privy Council meeting, which is being written up as a ‘snub’ in some quarters and dismissed as totally unimportant in others. The Labour leader’s spokesperson has issued this statement: ‘Although Jeremy was unavailable for today’s meeting, he has confirmed he will be joining the Privy Council. ‘As the Prime Minister and others did, it is far from unusual to miss the first meeting due to other commitments.’ Corbyn’s non-attendance is neither a snub nor totally unimportant. His spokesperson does make a good point that David Cameron didn’t cancel all other engagements in order to attend his Privy Council meeting and the Labour leader does intend to go.

James Forsyth

The Tories are still anxious to reach out. And that’s a very good sign

From our UK edition

Post-election party conferences usually follow a standard pattern. The winning party slaps itself on the back while the losers fret about how to put together an election-winning coalition. But this year, there’s been no talk of compromise or coalition from Labour. They seem happy to be a protest party, unbothered that voters disagree with them on the economy, welfare and immigration. And the Tories, instead of relaxing or moving to the right, have obsessed anxiously about how to broaden their appeal, to make their majority permanent. This determination to look for new converts is a product of the election campaign. Weeks of looking at polls that indicated they were on course for defeat served as a near- death experience for the Tories.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

What could the Conservative party offer a working class teenager from Moss Side?

From our UK edition

David Cameron had the best warm-up act possible today for his speech: before he was speaking, Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson had her turn. It’s a bit odd to describe someone who has been Scottish Tory leader since 2011 as a ‘rising star’, but the truth is that Davidson’s profile has been rising over the past year, and not just because of the Scottish referendum. Her speech was a pretty good demonstration of why this MSP should get an even higher profile in the Tory party across the UK: passionate, insightful, clear and human. Seb explains her key message, which was that the Tories cannot be ‘seen as decent technocrats’, here.

Isabel Hardman

Who really won in the battle over right to buy?

From our UK edition

David Cameron’s key policy theme in his conference speech was housing, and it included the announcement that the government is accepting housing associations’ offer of a voluntary extension of the right-to-buy to their tenants that allows them to avoid legislation. The Prime Minister said: ‘And in our manifesto, we announced a breakthrough policy: extending the Right to Buy to housing association tenants. Some people said this would be impossible. Housing associations would never stand for it. The legislation would never pass. ‘Let me tell you something. Greg Clark, our brilliant Communities Secretary, has secured a deal with housing associations to give their tenants the Right to Buy their home.

Isabel Hardman

Tories could delay telling tax credit claimants how much money they’ll lose from cuts

From our UK edition

The Tory revolt on tax credits looks likely to dominate this autumn. Many Tories across the party now regard this as conforming to a similar pattern as the 10p tax row under Gordon Brown, and few expect the cuts, which lower the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises, to come to fruition in their current form. There are three camps of Conservatives on tax credits. There’s the large group who think the cuts seriously undermine their claim to be the party of working people and are wrong because they take £1,300 off those on low incomes, and will be altered soon enough.

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s conference speech shows the essay crisis Prime Minister has finally planned ahead

From our UK edition

Clearly, the best thing a Prime Minister can do is announce that he doesn’t want to be Prime Minister for much longer. David Cameron has just delivered the clearest, most passionate and most authentic speech of his premiership to the Tory party conference, and all of it was founded on him not standing again as party leader in 2020. Early on, he said: ‘We’re only halfway through. For me, that has a very literal meaning. I can say something today that perhaps no Prime Minister has ever really been able to say before. I’m starting the second half of my time in this job. As you know, I am not going to fight another election as your leader. So I don’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Let me tell you: I am in just as much of a hurry as five years ago.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron makes home ownership the focus of his ‘turnaround decade’ conference speech

From our UK edition

David Cameron’s conference speech today will include plans to increase home ownership, which has become a personal mission of both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. The Tories convinced that people are more likely to vote for them if they are homeowners, and are well aware of polling that shows most people want to own their home in this country. So David Cameron will overhaul planning rules that his advisers believe slow down development - the section 106 requirements that mean developers must include affordable homes for rent in their plans - so that more homes that people can afford to buy are built. This reform will see the Tories trying to rebrand ‘affordable housing’.

Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs grumpy about ‘arm candy’ photo rota

From our UK edition

One of the fun jobs that new Tory MPs have to perform at conference is joining the special rota to follow David Cameron around. This isn’t a new rota, but it seems to have especially annoyed a number of the rather impressive 2015 intake, particularly some of the female MPs who think they are being used as arm candy. The rota involves walking with the Prime Minister between buildings so that when he is photographed, he has an entourage of supportive MPs with him, and so that they get their chance to have a picture of them walking with the PM in the national media. The photo above, of new Eastbourne MP Caroline Ansell, is one such example.

James Forsyth

Has Boris just set an impossible bar for Cameron’s EU renegotiation?

From our UK edition

Boris Johnson’s speech today was the best that I have ever heard him give. It was a potent cocktail of political vision, humour and optimism. But the most significant line it was about Europe. He declared that: ‘It should be up to this parliament and this country – not to Jean-Claude Juncker – to decide if too many people are coming here’ It is impossible to read this as anything other than a demand that freedom of movement rules are fundamentally altered as part of the UK’s renegotiation with the EU.