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.
From our UK edition
Beyond the slew of amusing ‘No man’s hand’ photos of the beleaguered François Hollande trying and failing to find support from other European leaders, there are a number of implications for the British political scene of the beleaguered French leader’s latest crisis, in which he has been forced to admit that taxes have been too
From our UK edition
Ed Miliband did vow to ‘relentlessly’ focus on the cost of living crisis facing hardworking families up and down the country (hopefully someone will develop a shorthand outline for this rather lengthy saying to save the pens of journalists who have to write it down repeatedly at launch events over the next 12 months) in
From our UK edition
David Cameron’s New Year message (and his accompanying Times op-ed) is an upbeat call to stick with the Tories to get the job done. He writes of his desire to ‘turn Britain into the flagship post-Great Recession success story. A country that is on the rise’. And in his video message he focuses on the
From our UK edition
In the autumn Nick Clegg annoyed some in the Labour party by telling his conference that ‘Labour would wreck the recovery’ and that ‘the Conservatives would give us the wrong kind of recovery’. Some senior figures such as Lord Adonis said it suggested Clegg was predisposed to partnership with the Tories as wrecking is so
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The Sun on Sunday’s story this morning that senior Tories have opened talks with Boris Johnson about a campaigning role for the Mayor follows some advice offered by James Forsyth in the pages of this magazine back in May. In his politics column, James argued that Boris needed a role in the 2015 campaign to
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It turns out that Alex Salmond needn’t worry too much about the re-emergence of that pesky row about advice on an independent Scotland’s membership of the European Union. He’s got arguments that are far more powerful than all that to convince Scots of the value of independence. In the latest issue of Idea, a magazine
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While Anna Soubry’s short joke about Nigel Farage on Marr has been causing the biggest row, it was actually Vince Cable’s interview earlier in the programme that was clearly intended to annoy. The Business Secretary has been quite quiet of late, particularly after a rather humiliating conference season. But today he went much, much further
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In the latest episode of Tea at 22, I interviewed Conservative business and energy minister Michael Fallon on his work in two Whitehall departments, Tory EU policy, and the party’s approach to Ukip. Fallon was the Spectator’s Minister of the Year for 2013. He had some very interesting points about how the Business department in
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When he spoke to the 1922 Committee on Wednesday, David Cameron told MPs that the Conservative attack on Labour must not involve fighting the party on its own territory. He named payday loans as one of the issues that Ed Miliband and co want to create an ‘evil Tories’ narrative on. But another one that
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The Prime Minister is in Brussels today, trying to drum up support for stricter immigration controls on new countries joining the European Union. How much traction this gains will tell us a great deal about how successful his overall renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the EU might be. David Cameron’s supporters argue that the tide
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There was a food bank debate yesterday in the House of Commons. We all know that, but what few people can tell you is what was said. Instead, there is a furious debate raging about whether the Tories were laughing at poor people not having enough money for food, or whether Labour MPs were laughing
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Vince Cable’s Today interview was remarkable for two reasons. The first was that the Business Secretary announced that he doesn’t want to ‘rush into legislation’ on zero hours contracts and instead wants to have another look at exclusivity agreements, where an employee is forced to work for one company only, even if they offer very
From our UK edition
David Cameron received a rapturous banging of desks at the final meeting of the year for the 1922 Committee this evening. My sources have given me a run-down of what was said. Backbenchers were, I hear, very cheered by some of his words, particularly on his 2015 strategy. The Prime Minister told his MPs that
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A Prime Minister can leave PMQs happy if he’s sent his troops off for Christmas in a good mood. Today David Cameron managed that, weaving in festive jokes through a list of statistics that shot Labour down. He was helped by the fact that Ed Miliband didn’t have a coherent line of attack at all,
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You might be forgiven for thinking that the Conservative party has spent the past month or so taking all the green rubbish – or ‘crap’ as one source close to the Prime Minister was quoted as saying – out and forgetting it ever loved environmentalism. But visiting Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker’s office
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The Prime Minister’s announcement today that he is fast-tracking his curbs on ‘benefit tourism’ was designed to reassure worried MPs that the government really is moving as fast as it can to do anything it can ahead of the lifting of transitional controls on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants. When these curbs, which mean all EU
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One thing that has been abundantly clear about the Tory plan for Ukip is that it will involve a long, slow ‘squeeze message’ (more on that here) that has already been deployed: the vote Ukip, get Miliband line. Naturally, Ukip is keen to counter that and argue that in fact this early squeeze message to
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If you were hoping for great drama over the Davies Commission’s interim report, you’ve got a while longer. As Patrick McLoughlin made clear in the Commons today, you’re unlikely to hear anything more than ministers repeatedly arguing that something must be done about Britain’s aviation capacity. Just not anything in particular this side of the
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In the past few minutes, the Airports Commission has published its interim report. It’s the first big opportunity for there to be a political row over aviation capacity since the government kicked the issue into the long grass, and Sir Howard Davies’ shortlist in this interim report certainly provides some opportunities for a row. The
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If a Prime Minister uses a phrase as historically loaded as ‘mission accomplished’ to describe the situation in a country, it suggests that he’s pretty confident that things are – and will continue to be for a good chunk of time – all hunky dory there. Today David Cameron touched down in Camp Bastion and
