Uk politics

In 2012, Steve Hilton quit his role as David Cameron’s senior adviser in frustration at the compromises of coalition and the slow pace of reform. Since then, he has maintained an almost total vow of silence on British politics. He had no desire to say anything that could be turned into a tricky headline for the Tories. But with the Tories having won the election—and with a majority—Hilton is dipping his toe back in the British political water. As well as doing various events to promote his new book More Human, he is also joining the Cameroon think tank Policy Exchange as a visiting scholar.

As part of his new style of governing, David Cameron addressed Cabinet today with cameras recording the first bit. The idea was clearly to set out his mission for the Parliament, to set an idea in people’s minds of what it is that he stands for - just in case anyone had any doubts.

The party chairman in a general election winning campaign can normally expect a plum job as a reward, especially when that victory was against the odds. Tonight, though, Grant Shapps finds himself not in the Cabinet but a Minister of State at the Department of International Development. Shapps’ treatment is, at first, puzzling. After all, the Team 2015 network that he created appears to have done a decent job in neutralising the supposed advantage that Labour’s ground operation was meant to give it But those around the Tory leader, say that David Cameron simply became fed up with the odd allegations that kept popping up about Shapps. So, the fairness—or otherwise—of his treatment depends on whether these stories are true or not.

News has just broken that Iain Duncan Smith is to remain as Secretary for State for Work and Pensions. Now, normally a Cabinet Minister remaining in post would not be news but there had been repeated rumours that IDS would be shuffled out of this job. The fact that IDS is staying tells us, I think, two things. First, that even with £12 billion more of welfare cuts needed, Cameron wants the policy to be as much about saving lives as money. Second, the decision not to shuffle IDS shows a sensibly cautious approach to party management. Moving IDS, a former leader, from the job he loves doing would have caused upset. By keeping him in place, Cameron ensures the continued loyal presence round the Cabinet table of someone trusted on the Eurosceptic right of the party.

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master).

Tonight’s a nervous night if you’re an candidate for re-election in a marginal seat (or in Scotland). You might have an impressive get-out-the-vote operation, or you might have spent the past five years wheeling and dealing in Westminster on behalf of your constituents so that you have a strong personal brand, but it might be that voters just aren’t that into your party. Or, in spite of your best efforts, you. A good number of the Tory candidates in marginals who I spoke to today feel as though the race is too tight for them to have any idea whether they will be back in Westminster next week. The same goes for Labour and Lib Dems in Scotland, but for slightly different reasons.

With just 48 hours to go before we get to vote in officially the most boring election in history, the great and good are fretting over the apathy of the little people. We’ve seen the emergence of Poets Against Apathy — a group of northern scribes keen to shake the public out of its anti-political stupor — and numerous newspaper articles bemoaning the apathy of the masses. A whole section of the Guardian website is devoted to ‘Voter apathy’, featuring Owen Jones, Polly Toynbee, Charlie Brooker and others shaking their liberal heads over the disengaged. Brooker even refers to them as ‘idiots’ who say ‘Bah to everything. BAH BAH BAH.

As well as trying to prepare voters for what may happen after 8 May, David Cameron needs to make sure he has his party on board for the ride after the election, too. The 1922 Committee will need to approve a second coalition, but the hope in the Cameron camp is that this will be made easier by making the approval a show of hands from Tory MPs, rather than the secret ballot 1922 Committee chair Graham Brady wants. Two interesting points that loyalists advance is that the Lib Dems approved the 2010 Coalition with a show of hands and that many prominent 1922 Committee Executive members were against the plan to elect the Speaker by secret ballot that the government tried to introduce rather sneakily in its last few hours.