Westminster

A government relaunch of the sort we've endured this week is inevitably a fraught, fragile affair. The problem with such enterprises is that they have this unfortunate habit of drawing attention to the fact that it is, well, a relaunch. Downing Street may hope differently but a relaunch inevitably draws attention to the very failures the relaunch is supposed to put behind us. You wouldn't be doing this if things were going well, would you Prime Minister?  Of course things are not going well. Nor will they get any better any time soon. Yesterday's Essex reprise of the chummy Downing Street coalition presser was a mistake. A necessary or at least understandable one perhaps but a mistake nevertheless. That's a river, as an old Greek said, in which you cannot bathe twice.

Of all the cockamamie ploys favoured by this government, House of Lords reform is close to being both the most pointless and the most aggravating. Iain Martin hints at this in his recent Telegraph post but he is, in the end, too kind to the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the sort of wheeze favoured by undergraduates blessed with second-class second-class minds. It is close to pointless because even if anyone outside the tiny world of "progressive" think tanks thought this a vital issue there is no evidence that it is in the slightest bit necessary. Which explains why it is aggravating. Th House of Lords, as presently constituted (that is, by patronage, divine blessing and a modest measure of hereditary good fortune), may not "make sense" but, despite everything, it works.

Today's top Westminster read is James Kirkup's article on the Treasury smart set. It builds a good foundation from which to argue that for all David Cameron and George Osbourne dislike being compared to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, there remain good grounds for making that kind of comparison. And already we can see, as James says, some daylight between Numbers 10 and 11. Perhaps we should not make too much of this. Cameron and Osborne remain exceedingly close. Even if most Prime Ministers lose patience with thier Chancellors their relationship is not bound to end acrimoniously. Nevertheless, they begin from a position less propitious than that which faced Blair and Brown when the Labour pair moved in to Downing Street.

Amidst the economic doom and gloom (though all the forecasts are always wrong so who knows how things will look by 2015?), the politics of the coalition government remain interesting. So Danny Alexander's performance on Newnight tonight was very interesting. The Chief Secretary of the Treasury told Jeremy Paxman that the Liberal Democrats were committed to the new spending and borrowing plans announced by George Osborne yesterday. Furthermore, the spending cuts announced for the first two years of the next parliament (though said plans can only be aspirational since they cannot, surely, bind the next parliament?) would be part of the next Liberal Democrat manifesto. I doubt Tim Farron or Simon Hughes or even Vince Cable think this a good idea.

Well, James, hang on a minute. The three "schools of thought" you identify in relation to last night's Tory rebellion on Europe are not three distinct schools at all. That is, one may consider the Tory party "unmanageable" on europe and believe that the leadership got caught up in the madness yesterday. But it is your final school that really have it wrong: The third lot are the ones who have grasped the significance of last night's events. Despite being loyalists, they are in no doubt about the need for Cameron to change his style of party management. They want him to stop acting like a medieval monarch and start behaving in the manner of someone who is first among equals when it comes to his parliamentary colleagues. Up to a point.

In principle, I agree with Fraser's admirable post previewing Monday's debate (summarised excellently by ConservativeHome here) on an EU-referendum but I suspect that wily old Blairite John Rentoul is right to argue that there was no way the government could wash its hands of the affair since, whatever it chose to do, The headlines would be about a divided Tory party, come what may. Which is reasonable enough since the Tory party is divided. Granted, the primary division is between the Get Out Now team and the Renegotiate Everything team but the point remains: this has been a blunder. The government has mishandled this affair and been embarrassed by its own backbenchers. Nearly half the non-payroll Tory vote declined to back the Prime Minister yesterday.

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?