Uk politics

Friday

James Forsyth

Cameron needs to show that life is better under the Conservatives

From our UK edition

The election of a new Labour leader means that proper politics has resumed. David Cameron now knows who he needs to beat to win the next election. As I argue in the magazine this week (subscribers), if the Tories are to secure a majority in 2015, they’ll need to do better among those in households with an income of thirty-odd thousand or so, what pollsters call the C1s. The last time the Tories won outright, they got 52 percent of the C1 vote—more than double Labour’s total. But in 1997, Labor and the Tories split this group evenly. The Tories have never fully recovered from this.  In 2010, the Tories garnered 39 percent with this group, a mere three percent swing since 2005.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

A small step for Labour, not a giant leap

From our UK edition

I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He's unknown, and voters haven't had a chance to dislike him yet. That's not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble. But tomorrow's Guardian shows precious little sign of a conference bounce. The two parties were level before the conferences – a remarkable achievment for a leaderless party. The Tories took three years to do the same. It was one of many reasons that inspired our cover story last week, "Labour leaps forward". The illustration, by Morten Morland, was a horse without a rider. What might Labour achieve with a jockey?

James Forsyth

An example of union hostility against people who want to do their jobs

From our UK edition

Amongst BBC political staff, there’s mounting concern about the plans for a strike during Tory conference. One of them said to me at Labour conference that they just didn’t know what to do, they had been put in an impossible position by the decision to call the strike on such politically important days. These journalists fear that striking during Tory conference would undermine the corporation’s reputation for impartiality. So, a whole host of them wrote to their union rep asking him to make representations on their behalf.

Peter Hoskin

What to make of Warsi’s electoral fraud claim?

From our UK edition

Exactly as the headline says, really. Interviewed by Mehdi Hasan in this week's New Statesman, Sayeeda Warsi claims that the Tories "lost" at least three seats in the election because of electoral fraud. The article observes: 'This is the first time a senior minister has made such a blunt and specific allegation about the impact of electoral fraud on the general election result. Can she reveal the names of those seats? 'I think it would be wrong to start identifying them,' she says, but adds: 'It is predominantly within the Asian community. I have to look back and say we didn’t do well in those communities, but was there something over and above that we could have done? Well, actually not, if there is going to be voter fraud.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron road tests his anti-Ed message

From our UK edition

After Fern Britton's triumph over Gordon Brown a couple of years ago, we should know that This Morning interviews can have a certain bite to them. But if you needed more convincing, then how about David Cameron's appearance on the show this morning? Lurking behind all the talk of baby Florence and the Obamas, was a sprightly discussion of both defence cuts and the new Labour leader. Cameron was combative on both. Most noteworthy were Cameron's attacks on Ed Miliband. I imagine they will set the template for how the anti-Ed operation is conducted in future. The main aim, it seemed, was to defuse Miliband's talk of an optimistic New Generation – a woefully specious phrase, to be sure, but one that some Tories fear might gain traction.

David Blackburn

Smutty Hattie closes the conference

From our UK edition

Those earnest, pale and dimpled young men who staff the Labour party need to watch their drinks: Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’ is a haven for a well-heeled cougar. Inspired by Lady Bercow of Easy Virtue, Harriet Harman closed the Labour conference with a soliloquy in lust.   A cynic would say it was HRT talking, but Hattie was in playful and coquettish mood, as she often is - you know, young at heart and all that. More importantly, she was effective. Though I cringed through bits of her homily of the bordello - praying she’d segue into less alarmingly evocative subjects like gender equality, VAT and rape anonymity - she put nationalised train-set gags into relief, and didn’t sound like a human adenoid.

David Blackburn

Boles’ immigration revolution

From our UK edition

Nick Boles’ Which Way’s Up? is gaining a quiet cult following in Westminster, and John Redwood has unearthed Boles’ radical approach to immigration. Boles dissents from the view that happiness in Sweden’s utopia rests on pay equality; he observes that it is a homogenous society that has controlled mass immigration. He writes: ‘We will not be able to sustain a social contract in which schooling and healthcare are provided to all citizens free of charge and are funded by taxation if we continue to allow, every year, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to join the queues at A and E and send their children to British schools.

David Blackburn

Forget the culprit, the MoD leak suggests that Fox doesn’t have Cameron’s confidence

From our UK edition

Liam Fox is sombre rather than sombrero. A man to reckon with, you’d have thought - determined to fight dangerous cuts to Britain’s over-extended defence budget and an apostle of the Tory right. Which makes yesterday’s leak all the more extraordinary. The question is not who leaked this incendiary letter, but why Fox wrote it. The night before an important National Security Council meeting, and Fox has an important point to convey. Why not ring the Prime Minister? Go round to No.10 for chat? He is the Secretary of State, but he has to communicate matters of confidence and competence between himself and the PM with such formality, and in such impassioned language. The idea that Fox wrote it to leak it is preposterous.

Peter Hoskin

When Brown beat Blair in an election

From our UK edition

With the merry dance of shadow cabinet elections upon us, it's a good time to look back on the last time Labour went through all this. There's a useful list of all the results from the 1992 Parliament here, but here's my summary of some of the more eyecatching outcomes: 1) Gordon Brown, from hero to zero (to Chancellor). In 1992, Gordon Brown came top of the shadow Cabinet rankings. By 1996, he had dropped to 14th. And bear in mind that the number of MPs standing fell from 53 to 26 over the same time. As we all know, though, he still made it to the Chancellorship.   2) Blair less popular than Prescott.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Farewell David Miliband

From our UK edition

There we have it, David Miliband has announced that he is standing down from frontline politics. In his statement just now, he fluted all the anticipated notes. "The party needs a fresh start from its new leader," he started, before adding that, "I genuinely fear perpetual, distracting and destructive attempts to find division where none exists, and splits where they don’t exist, all to the detriment of the party." He said he will stay on as an MP, although he wants to do further work in the areas of education, the environment and foreign policy. It puts something of a fullstop under his career at the top of the Labour party, although I'm sure that new paragraphs will be written in future. How will he be judged? With a mixture of respect and mockery, I expect.

Fraser Nelson

Pastures new for David Miliband?

From our UK edition

David Miliband's logic is difficult to fault. If he stayed, he would be treated as the torch bearer for those disgruntled Labour members who feel they were robbed. Without him, such people have no one to turn to. New Labour will now dissolve. 'Progress' - supposedly for the next generation of Blairites - held their meeting in a Manchester venue named the Comedy Store and that says it all. Game over: as Neil Kinnock put it last night "I've got my party back".   No matter how loyal he would be, David Miliband could not but be seen as a focal point for the (many) Labour MPs who hate all that. Sure, it is a bit odd his saying on Monday "the fightback starts here" and on Wednesday "well, good luck with it guys - I'm offski". But it's better than the alternative.

James Forsyth

David Miliband keeps the door ajar

From our UK edition

The list for the shadow Cabinet elections shows that no David Miliband supporter who was going to stand for the shadow Cabinet has decided not to run following Ed Miliband’s victory. It’ll be intriguing to see what the party balance of the shadow Cabinet is following these elections. There is an expectation that Yvette Cooper will top the poll now that David Miliband is not standing. David Miliband’s decision not to stand was as expected. As one fellow hack pointed out to me the other day, if David had stayed on the public would never have worked out which Miliband was which and the press would have constantly looked for a split story.

James Forsyth

Miliband’s Balls dillema

From our UK edition

After one of the many sections in Ed Balls’ speech on the economy, there was a telling moment as Ed Miliband clapped half-heartedly with a thoughtful look on his face. One could almost see him trying to work out with whether he agreed enough with what Balls was saying to make him shadow Chancellor. There are dangers in both him making Balls’ shadow Chancellor and not. If he does make Balls shadow Chancellor, then it be a Neil Kinnock and John Smith situation all over again: the leader will have ceded control over economic policy. But if he doesn’t, then he’ll have an aggrieved Balls on his hands and considering all the other problems the new leader has to deal with, he might not want to add this to the list of them.

Peter Hoskin

Balls spills the beans

From our UK edition

File David Miliband's decision not to stand in the shadow Cabinet elections in the folder marked "Worst kept secrets in Westminster". Here's what Ed Balls has just told ITV: "I don't think David Miliband is leaving because of reasons of politics or ideology or policy. I don't think this is a political divide, I think this it's a personal decision. He's decided, and it seems he's decided in the last few days if he has, that for personal reasons he doesn't want to serve with his brother. I understand that because it must have been incredibly difficult to have lost to your brother in that way ... If as a brother you've decided that it's too difficult I think people would understand that. I don't think it's fair to find some big political split or divide here.

David Blackburn

Ed Balls saves the pitch till last

From our UK edition

Predictable lines from Ed Balls this afternoon. ‘DIY free schools’ are iniquitous; Michael Gove is like the child snatcher in Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. Naturally, he made a pitch for the shadow chancellorship. Nick Clegg was his target and his pitch was avowedly left-wing: 'It was Nick Clegg: the man whose own election leaflets said ’Vote Liberal Democrat or you’ll get a Tory government, who said ‘stop the Tory VAT bombshell, who said spending cuts now would be ‘reckless’ and put jobs and the recovery at risk.

David Blackburn

David Davis offers his counsel in good faith

From our UK edition

From his roost high on the backbenches, David Davis commands a luminescent eminence that he would not have had if he were a frontbencher. And as the current guardian of traditional right-wing Toryism, his words are clear against the often muddy context of coalition. Talking to the Mail's Andrew Pierce and Amanda Platell, he offers George Osborne and David Cameron some sagacious advice. He joins the chorus, now stalked by Ed Miliband, which urges the government to articulate its growth and recovery rhetoric. ‘We cannot be defined by a purely cuts agenda. If the only message the public takes away from the events of the next few months is one of retrenchment and loss of services, politically at least, we will have failed.

Fraser Nelson

Plugging the leak

From our UK edition

So did Liam Fox leak the letter? Only if he is suicidal. He's been around long enough (having been a frontbencher from the Major years onwards) to know how the game works. Briefing journalists is one thing, leaking a private letter is utterly counterproductive. It will make it harder for him to get the settlement he wants, and it will damage him by making him look as if he were responsible for it. I gather that the MoD is in a state of terror right now, with phone records and emails being trawled to find the guilty party. And whoever did this has such a crude understanding of media spin that they might well have been stupid enough to be caught. But in the history of Whitehall leak inquiries, the guilty party has never been discovered.

Peter Hoskin

Liam Fox does a David Miliband

From our UK edition

At least the political fates have a sense of humour. No sooner had David Miliband's frustration screamed into view last night, than the Tories were hit by a story that was similar in several regards: the leaked Liam Fox letter, expressing his anger over spending cuts. Here are a handful of those similarities: 1) Leakage. David Miliband's words for Harriet Harman were meant to be for their ears only, but the TV cameras picked them up. Similarly, Fox's letter was meant to be between him and the PM – but now it's splashed across the front page of the Telegraph. The only difference is that the Fox letter has been put out by someone in Whitehall, a politically interested actor.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

David Miliband torpedos his brother’s big speech

From our UK edition

Make no mistake: David Miliband has handled himself with a fair amount of dignity over the past few days. But now some of his frustration has simmered to the surface. ITV news cameras were trained on him earlier, and caught him leaning towards Harriet Harman as she applauded his brother's claim that the Iraq War was "wrong" (see from two minutes into this video). According to the lipreaders, he says to her: "Why are clapping? You voted for it." To which she replies, "I'm clapping because he's leader and I'm supporting him." The elder Miliband does not look impressed. To be honest – and although I didn't support the Iraq War myself – I feel some sympathy for his position here.

David Blackburn

Miliband goes Cameron-lite

From our UK edition

Well, it turns out that ‘Red Ed’ is really a social conservative. As both Pete and James say, his speech contained notable sallies into Cameroon territory – community and family. He didn’t follow Cameron’s trail to the metre, but fell into many of the same ditches. Two things struck me: 1). Ever the opportunist, Miliband sees that there is the kernel of a good idea at the root of the ‘Big Society’ and tried to exploit Cameron’s inability to present it. Miliband’s gave us the ‘Good Society’, a clear though sanctimonious slogan for community renewal. However, he, like Cameron, can’t define what he means by community. He talked about post offices, high streets and, of course, the local pub.