Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Tories split between rival parties

David Cameron is holding another one of his parliamentary party meetings this evening to discuss party strategy and rally the troops. Normally these things are quite well-attended, save a few conscientious objectors who think these events are an attempt by Downing Street to undermine the 1922 Committee. But today’s one might look a little quieter, or at least see some MPs slipping out early. The reason is that David Davis is holding one of his very good parties in the ‘naughty corner’ of Portcullis House tonight.

Isabel Hardman

Has anyone seen Nigel Farage?

‘Ukip seems to have imploded,’ one ‘mainstream’ politician remarked to me yesterday. ‘We haven’t heard anything from them.’ True, Ukip have been rather quiet since Christmas, but anyone in the Tories or Labour who is dancing around imagining that they’re set fair for an election without Nigel Farage has got rather carried away. The truth is that Farage’s party has decided to stay a little quiet for a few weeks, at least while the main parties slug it out over who would really cut the deficit and who really cares about the NHS. Sources tell me that they think the effect of all these launches, counter-launches, dossiers and dossiers debunking dossiers is to make the electorate even more fed up with mainstream politicians.

Isabel Hardman

What will the Lib Dem ‘red line’ on a ‘Snooper’s Charter’ mean for a future coalition?

One of the obsessions that will only get worse over the next few months - along with checking every poll that comes out every day to see whether you’re six points up, four points behind, or level-pegging - is what ‘red lines’ the parties will set out for their Coalition negotiations. David Cameron has made his EU referendum one, and it turns out that this isn’t as much of a problem for the Lib Dems as all their huffing and puffing on the subject would have you believe. Nick Clegg has been setting more red lines because he is the leader of the party that wants to talk about coalitions, as opposed to the two main parties that would still like to talk about majority governments, however implausible that may now seem.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Tories drop weak policy areas for ‘six election priorities’ launch

Why have the Conservatives left out immigration and the NHS - two of the three issues that voters consistently cite as the most important in forming their decision about who to back in the General Election - out of their list of six priorities? Among the deficit, jobs, taxes, education, housing and retirement there is no room for the health service, immigration or Europe: which also tend to be the things David Cameron and Ed Miliband fight most vehemently over at Prime Minister’s Questions. Labour is very pleased about this, and is pretending to be very cross that the Prime Minister is ignoring the NHS.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Charlie Hebdo’s journalists were murdered for doing. Now people are being attacked simply for being

After Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, an argument doing the rounds was that it would have been better not to publish cartoons that were deliberately provocative when the magazines had already suffered violent attacks. Why should the journalists put themselves and others, including Muslim policeman Ahmed Merabet, at risk of death? Now two people are dead in a kosher grocers in eastern Paris, perhaps those who thought that it unwise to publish aggressive cartoons can have a think again. Five or six people are believed to be being held hostage in the shop. The shop sells kosher food. Jews buy kosher food. The attackers appear to be killing people not for what they have been doing, but for who they are. Killed for being Jews.

Isabel Hardman

Circle’s exit from Hinchingbrooke is a serious blow to competition in the NHS

This morning’s announcement by Circle that it will be leaving the contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital makes it even more difficult politically for anyone who believes in greater competition in the NHS to make their case. Opponents of private sector involvement in healthcare provision will say - with good reason - that this shows you cannot trust anyone other than the public sector to stick with a hospital in the tough times. Proponents will point out that ultimately providers leaving is better than entrenched failure. But in a way Circle needed to perform in a way that was atypical of the market: I had to succeed and it had to sty the course of its contract. That it hasn’t puts back the case for markets in the health sector by a very long way.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron will refuse to take part in the TV debates if the Greens are not included

Unsurprisingly, David Cameron has this afternoon said he won’t take part in the TV election debates if the Greens are no included in one of the line-ups. Currently the proposal is for Cameron vs Miliband, then Cameron vs Miliband vs Clegg, then Cameron vs Miliband vs Clegg vs Farage. The Greens have been excluded, as have the SNP and Plaid Cymru. This is the exchange between the Prime Minister and ITN’s Tom Bradby: Me; 'Time is running out; are you saying you are not going to go in as it stands unless at least the Greens are in?' Him; 'Correct.' — tom bradby (@tombradby) January 8, 2015 Why is Cameron so anxious about the Greens all of a sudden?

Isabel Hardman

Refusing the Greens ‘major party’ status is bad for voters (but good for the Greens)

Who benefits from Ofcom’s daft draft ruling that the Greens not be listed as a ‘major party’ for the General Election? Well, though the Greens are cross and have warned about the ‘damage it risks doing to British democracy’, they must know that this will help cement their credentials as an anti-establishment party. Nothing quite like a ruling shutting you out from having the same number of party political broadcasts as the major parties to make your supporters feel as though the Establishment is out to get you. And that sort of feeling is good for attracting supporters. It certainly worked after the broadcasters decided they would exclude the Greens from the television debates: the party’s membership shot up.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour seeks urgent question on A&E crisis

Andy Burnham has put in a request for an urgent question on the A&E crisis, I have learned. The question, which the Speaker has yet to decide whether or not to grant, is as follows: URGENT QUESTION Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the major incidents that have been declared at a number of hospitals and on A&E performance in England. This might seem rather unsurprising at first glance, and it would be on any other day of the week. Today Ed Miliband will face David Cameron at PMQs and as I blogged earlier, it would be extremely odd if he didn’t use his questions to the Prime Minister to ask about the NHS.

Isabel Hardman

How will Ed Miliband use the A&E crisis at PMQs?

Towards the end of 2014, David Cameron was finding PMQs ‘boring’. He knew that it was turning into a session where each week both he and Ed Miliband basically said the same thing over and over again, usually with a long string of statistics that the other couldn’t quibble while in the Chamber. He would talk about the importance of a strong economy, while Miliband would talk about the NHS. And then everyone would filter back out of the Chamber having learned nothing. Well, today the Prime Minister will probably find PMQs takes the same ‘boring’ format, but if Miliband crafts something less stunningly dull than a string of statistics (which both men are guilty of) then he could make the exchanges really quite difficult for the Prime Minister.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Labour only hurts itself by whinging in public

Ed Miliband’s office has complained that no-one told them about Angela Merkel’s visit to London, which takes place tomorrow. They are apparently very irritated about no-one telling them, even though the Foreign Office isn’t required to flag up visits like this anyway. But worse than that, they were given warning: in the newspapers. Here are the first few paragraphs of a story published by the Times on 27 December, entitled ‘Merkel puts culture and G7 on agenda for visit’: ‘Angela Merkel will make Britain her first overseas visit of the year in a sign of the importance that she attaches to her relationship with David Cameron.

Isabel Hardman

Has Ukip given up persuading one would-be Tory defector?

Has one Ukip defection become less likely? Before Christmas, top Tories were falling over themselves to tell Basildon and Billericay MP John Baron how much they valued him and how seriously they were taking his demands for proper compensation for nuclear test veterans. Baron was very high on the list of MPs likely to defect to Ukip, and did little to assuage the fears of his colleagues by saying things like ‘never say never’ when asked if he might leave the Tories. But this week Ukip selected a candidate in his constituency, which suggests that the party has given up on the Tory MP moving over to join the People’s Army.

Isabel Hardman

Is the NHS ‘crisis’ too complex for politicians to solve?

Is the NHS in crisis, or isn’t it? Jeremy Hunt doesn’t want to use the word, telling the Today programme that ‘there’s a huge amount of pressure’, while Norman Lamb argued that ‘I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis’ but ‘I readily acknowledge that the system is under intense pressure’. Few politicians want to describe something they’re notionally responsible for as ‘in crisis’ (though Lamb isn’t afraid to use pretty strong language about some areas of his portfolio, including mental health). But whatever word they use, ministers know that things aren’t hunky dory in accident and emergency departments at the moment - and this hasn’t been a cold winter.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Will any party really offer an election message of ‘hope, not falsehood’?

Ed Miliband today promised that Labour will offer ‘hope, not falsehood’ in its General Election campaign. It’s a bold pledge given the party is making so much of the claim that the Tories want to reduce public spending to levels not seen since the 1930s - a claim that has foundations made of something oddly similar to sand. Similarly the Tories have today produced an interesting dossier that Miliband’s party has interestingly called ‘dodgy’ because it contains a number of ‘assumptions’. As James explains, that’s part of the plan, as Labour now has to say which cuts it wouldn’t reverse and which it would.

Isabel Hardman

Nick Clegg’s new year pitch for eternal power

Nick Clegg has clearly had an exciting Christmas. He used his first press conference of the year to talk about people playing footsie, exes leaving late-night voicemail messages, frantic January sales shopping and body parts. He was using all these vivid images, dreamt up while he was working out how to deal with Labour’s ‘decapitation strategy’ in his own constituency, to make a pitch for him to remain in power for as long as possible. Forever, hopefully, but at least after the next General Election. The Deputy Prime Minister warned repeatedly of the risks of 'having a parliament which is held hostage, every hour and every day and every week, by a shifting array of factionalist parties’.

Isabel Hardman

Parties launch onto General Election roller coaster

It's the first day back for MPs and even though we are still months, not weeks, away from the General Election, the parties are all already launching themselves down the campaign roller coaster. Ed Miliband is launching his General Election campaign today and the action will start to shift from the now dull and empty House of Commons to seats around the country. Both sides have spent the past few months predicting a dirty and tough campaign, and if today's diary is anything to go by, they'll all be utterly shattered by polling day too, with a tough pace to keep. We have a speech from Ed Miliband, a press conference from a good chunk of the Tories on Cabinet and Nick Clegg's press briefing all before lunchtime. Yet no-one seems to be planning to say anything new.

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

What the first 2015 election posters tell us about the campaign

If you want a glimpse of the sort of election campaign we’re facing for the next few months, these posters from Labour and the Conservatives tell you everything you need to know. [caption id="attachment_8954872" align="alignnone" width="621"] The poster and the porkie[/caption] The Tories want to encourage voters to stay on the (apparently German rather than British and apparently heading nowhere) road to recovery, even if that involves leaping around between different measures of the deficit in order to give the impression of momentum. They want to talk about the economy because that’s their strongest issue. Similarly Labour is staying where it is most comfortable, threatening the end of the NHS as we know it in posters released this weekend.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Tony Blair, master of communication, claims his warnings about Labour were ‘misinterpreted’

Politicians really are quite unfortunate people, aren’t they? Always being misinterpreted. It’s almost as though they speak another language (some Commons debates suggest they do, anyway) and journalists wilfully translate them wrongly. Today Tony Blair has claimed that his remarks about a lefty Labour party losing to a right-wing party have been ‘misinterpreted’. This is what he told the Economist: - There could be an election ‘in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result’ and when asked if that means a Tory win, ‘Yes, that is what happens’. - ‘I am convinced the Labour Party succeeds best when it is in the centre ground.

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Why the Tories are stirring up a row on hunting

Why on earth are the Tories using the quiet news period between Christmas and New Year to talk about fox hunting? It’s a question many Conservative MPs are asking, worrying that it will only make their party look more posh and out-of-touch to most voters. Other than that Boxing Day is good day to place a story about hunting (check out Camilla’s festive mount in the Telegraph today), placing the story at all seems like an odd idea. Even Labour are quite chuffed with the story, as it’s not exactly an offensive against the Opposition. They haven’t just used it to bash the Conservatives, but also to needle Ukip on whether the party supports a ban or not. But why have the Conservatives given the Opposition a bit of a gift?

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Listen: Lucy Powell tries to dodge questions on leaked Ukip document with ‘it’s irrelevant to you!’

How has Labour managed to make such a mess of its response to the leak of a document on dealing with Ukip that came out on Monday that it's still having to talk about it on Friday? I've been baffled by the poor crisis comms this week - until I heard Lucy Powell, vice-chair of the party's General Election campaign, trying to field questions on it today on the Daily Politics. Her tactics were to tell the interviewer that the origins of the report were 'irrelevant', an old but useless tactic of spinners that generally encourages the journalist to think the story even more relevant than they did when they started the interview.