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.
When Ed Miliband peaks, he really knows how to do it. His speech at last autumn’s Labour conference was magnificent. Given the pressure on him to convince the unions to back his reforms to their links to the Labour party, you’d expect he’d have picked today’s address to the Trades Union Congress conference to deliver
Listen to Osborne and Balls’ exchange at Treasury questions here:- listen to ‘Osborne at Treasury Questions: ‘We’re enjoying this’’ on Audioboo ‘I hope this is not our last encounter across this despatch box,’ George Osborne said rather slyly to Ed Balls this morning at Treasury questions. ‘Because we are enjoying it.’ The Tories were in
Ed Miliband thought he’d delivered the speech of his life at last year’s Labour conference. But though it knocked the socks off everyone in the conference hall, it wasn’t enough: the Labour leader is having to deliver to one but two speeches to save himself this autumn. Today he will try to sell his union
Nick Clegg gave his monthly press conference today. It might kindly be described as ‘wide-ranging’, which is often code in journalese for ‘not offering very much’. But the Deputy Prime Minister did offer a few nuggets which are worth exploring. The first is that he was very keen to put his name on the list
One of the Tories’ real failings over the past few years has been to ignore the spores of a problem, and then wait until it has mushroomed into something they can’t handle. Take the bedroom tax, food banks, or zero hours contracts: all of which Labour has managed to brand as a sign of the
Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman are keen to encourage unity at the TUC conference this week, while giving the impression they are determined to forge ahead with reforming the union link to the Labour party. Harman’s speech to the TUC dinner will include a call for unity and an attempt to explain the need for
George Osborne’s speech on the economy today will show how much the Chancellor’s stock has risen in the past year. It also shows that in spite of the embarrassing defeat on Syria two weeks ago, the Conservatives still feel they can be confident about their appeal to voters, because things are going well on the
Sarah Teather’s decision to stand down at the 2015 election won’t surprise many people who know what a battle the Lib Dem MP would have had to hold onto her Brent Central seat. Her majority is only 1,345. But her public reason for standing down is interesting, too, even if some may suspect that the
After going all out over the Falkirk selection row, Labour rather quietly issued a statement this afternoon conceding that neither Unite’s candidate Karie Murphy, nor constituency party chair Stephen Deans, nor the union itself were guilty of any wrongdoing. The party’s statement said: ‘The Labour Party began an internal process to examine the controversy surrounding
There are a number of obvious differences between last week’s vote in Parliament and the forthcoming Congressional vote on Syria. But today when he gave his closing statement at the end of the G20 summit, Barack Obama highlighted another very interesting divergence in the way he is approaching the vote. Asked whether he understood the
As well as having another extended Hugh Grant moment about how great Britain is (excluding David Beckham’s feet, but including One Direction), David Cameron got his chance to hit back at Russia’s intransigence on Syria this afternoon as the G20 summit drew to a close. Nodding to the lengthy declaration issued by the leaders –
Another day, another promise that a government project will be in time and on budget. Yesterday it was universal credit, today it’s High Speed Rail, with a letter from the construction companies behind the project in the Telegraph. The letter, signed by chief executives and chairmen of Arup Group, Atkins UK, Balfour Beatty, Kier Group,
Universal credit is having a bumpy ride: but whose fault is it? Yesterday’s Commons urgent question on the National Audit Office report turned into a bit of a blame game, with Iain Duncan Smith saying rather bitterly that he had expected his department to meet the challenge of delivering this big reform. His response to
Even though Vladimir Putin slotted Syria into the G20 agenda last night, no-one seriously thought that this meant the world leaders would come to a proper agreement on what to do about the conflict. In the last few minutes, David Cameron has told journalists covering the summit that ‘divisions are too great’ for a deal,
What a nice host Vladimir Putin is. Shortly after world leaders gathered in his country for the G20 summit in St Petersburg, a briefing from the President’s official spokesman that Britain is ‘just a small island no-one pays any attention to’ made its way into the media. Nothing like rubbing the nose of one of your
David Aaronovitch’s furious Times column this morning described Ed Miliband as a vulture, swooping down on problems caused by this government rather than leading. If he wanted another example of how this leadership style has affected the rest of the Labour party, he could have done worse than to attend the Commons urgent question on
Iain Duncan Smith was in an aggressive mood when he appeared before MPs this morning to explain the latest awkward report on universal credit to the Commons. He combined his anger with a plethora of jargon. This made for an interesting debate, as it’s very difficult to sound punchy and angry while talking about ‘agile
There’s nothing wrong with the Prime Minister turning up to PMQs with a snappy line that he wants those watching to remember. But sometimes as the exchanges wear on, the risk grows that the clever line isn’t going to get a showing because the questions haven’t been quite right. And so the line gets shoehorned
Jesse Norman’s departure from the policy board hasn’t come as a huge surprise to many Tory MPs: I was with one after the vote who was subjecting his twitter feed to a lengthy examination to work out whether Norman was stranded overseas. The only evidence available was that Norman went to a beer festival on
Jesse Norman is to leave the Number 10 policy board after abstaining in last week’s vote on Syria, I have learned. It was made clear to the Tory MP, who is known to have disagreed with the government’s position on Syria, that this was an inevitable consequence of avoiding a three-line whip vote. But I