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.
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Tonight Clacton is set to return the first elected Ukip MP to the House of Commons. The Conservatives have already tried to factor in Douglas Carswell’s defection as something they can cope with – and this has been made quite a lot easier by the tribal anger that Mark Reckless provoked when he announced he
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listen to ‘Podcast: Nick Clegg’s speech’ on audioBoom
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Nick Clegg will, as promised, use his conference speech today to announce waiting time targets for mental health treatments. The Deputy Prime Minister, as part of government efforts to bring mental and physical health onto an even keel, introduce targets for the first time and pledge some (although not very much) more money to help
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One of the most striking things about the Lib Dem conference is not that the party has decided to be mean about the Tories in a mildly obsessive and weird way, but that Nick Clegg and colleagues have also been softening the red lines that could really stop them returning into coalition with the Conservatives.
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Nick Clegg may feel he’s got his party in a reasonably good place and a reasonably good mood. But he has just been defeated by the Lib Dem conference on his attempt to change party policy to allow airport expansion in the South East. As part of the policy paper on the economy, delegates were asked
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The Liberal Democrats now have an official party policy that football clubs wanting to win is a cause for concern. The party’s conference has just approved a motion, which Coffee House reported on yesterday, complaining that ‘winning has become the primary motive in the sport’ and about an ‘influx of overseas investment’. The motion was amended slightly,
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The Lib Dems haven’t really announced many enormous policies so far at their party conference. Yesterday’s speech from Vince Cable was more notable for its loyalty than it was for its focus on ‘bolstering’ apprenticeship pay and ‘clarifying’ and ‘enhancing’ workers’ rights. But unless they’re planning to go for the 2013 Tory strategy of not
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In the past few years, Nick Clegg has come to blows with his party activists at his annual conference question-and-answer session over the policies his party has had to support while in government. The Deputy Prime Minister has, at times, grown rather grumpy as the grassroots harangue him on issues they wish he’d show more
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The Lib Dem conference is always a chance to see which side of the party is winning the debate internally. Normally, the Left dominates the grassroots – which is why the party leadership always makes a bigger deal of criticising the Tories than it does although last year the economic liberals in the party tried
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Though they didn’t call them ‘red lines’, the Liberal Democrats did spend yesterday making clear the things they won’t accept if they have to work with the Tories in another coalition after the 2015 general election. Today’s Financial Times sets out a line that the party is apparently happy to cross: the EU referendum that
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Danny Alexander clearly wanted to come across as casual and jovial for his speech to the Lib Dem conference. He wasn’t wearing a tie. His top button wasn’t done up. Neither were his cuffs because the Chief Secretary to the Treasury had, after years of politicians using it as a figure of speech, rolled up
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The Lib Dems are in an amusingly sweary mood this weekend at their conference, with Danny Alexander telling the Sun on Sunday that he’s p****d off with the Tories for stealing his tax policy, and Lord Ashdown talking about shits and bastards last night. Vince Cable today promised ‘more colourful language’ about his coalition partners
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Lib Dem conference rallies are always a little like spending Christmas with a family you don’t know: quite baffling but rather endearing. There’s the uncle who tells the same jokes every year (Paddy Ashdown, telling the conference that he’d been asked in the street by a ‘little man’ whether he ‘used to be Paddy Ashdown’
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Does it matter that the Tories can’t spell out how they’d fund the tax cuts they announced at their party conference this week? Labour has launched a clock which monitors how long it’s been since David Cameron promised these cuts without any detail on how they’d pay for them. But last night on BBC This
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One of the biggest pledges of the Conservative party conference wasn’t actually made at the Tory conference. It’s being set out today by Chris Grayling and is the Tory plan to strip European judges of their powers over British laws. The Conservatives will scrap the Human Rights Act and introduce a British Bill of Rights
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When press officers from Ukip enticed journalists along to a press conference at the end of the summer by promising that it would definitely be worth their while, they showed they weren’t exaggerating. That press conference was where Douglas Carswell defected. So today when Ukip told hacks that it would definitely be worth their while
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When he saw colleagues in the tearoom on Friday as the Commons debated air strikes against Isis in Iraq, David Cameron told them that he’d actually been rather nervous about Ed Miliband’s Labour conference speech. The Labour leader has delivered two fantastic ones that set the agenda for the past two autumns, the Prime Minister
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The Tories will protect the NHS budget, David Cameron will announce in his speech to his party conference today. Extracts of the Prime Minister’s speech, which he will deliver in Birmingham later today, include a promise to ‘protect the NHS budget and continue to invest more’. Cameron will repeat George Osborne’s argument that ‘you can
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Why is Nicky Morgan the Education Secretary? She’s long been billed as a rising star in the government and has put in some very passionate and impressive performances on the conference fringe this year. But her speech to the Conservative conference hall this afternoon didn’t really answer that question. It was workmanlike, and its main
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Will George Osborne get away with his conference gamble that hits working families? The Chancellor’s speech would have received a far worse reception on the front pages of today’s newspapers had it not been for the announcement on GPs offering a seven-day service. But it remains a topic of debate in the party. Today at