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.
Caroline Lucas’ arrest this afternoon at the Balcombe fracking protest might be quite useful for the Green MP, but it’s hardly going to give ministers a sleepless night. Lucas’ presence is actually rather distracting from a real problem that ministers do need to address: ensuring that communities feel they have a stake in the shale gas
Certain Labour types like to argue that this summer season of discontent for Ed Miliband is just a media mirage, made up mostly of journalists talking to each other. That might have a grain of truth: the corridors of Parliament are dusty and echoey at this time of year, and the only people found wandering
The latest tranche of advice for Ed Miliband contains pleas for the Labour leader to think the unthinkable and hire Frank Field as his welfare adviser to how that Labour was ‘serious’ about reforming the welfare system. This would represent quite a change of direction for the party, and would be what commentators like to
William Hague’s interview on the Today programme this morning included the gloomy warning the the turmoil in Egypt is unlikely to end soon. He said that ‘there may be years of turbulence in Egypt and other countries going through this profound debate about the nature of democracy and the role of religion in their society,
Ed Miliband has already managed to steal a big pile of clothing from the Tories by pinching the One Nation tagline for his own party. But this weekend Chuka Umunna offered the beleaguered Labour leader another Tory tag that he might not be quite so keen on. Trying to defend the party, the Shadow Business
Decca Aitkenhead has a history of producing revelatory August interviews that make tricky reading for the Labour leadership. Her 2008 interview with Alistair Darling involved the journalist following him around during the August recess and unleashed the ‘forces of hell’ against the then Chancellor when it was published. Her interview with Tom Watson in today’s
Unless you’re as optimistic as Jon Ashworth, it’s pretty clear that messaging-wise, Labour have had a pretty bad summer. There are many reasons for this that many wise people have examined in quite some detail and at quite some length, but one of the major strategic errors is that the party appears to have made
This is how the Downing Street spin machine works: a Bad Story that may make your core vote very upset appears in the papers. You brief that you are doing something Very Serious in response to said Bad Story and hope that when it comes to the meeting where you have to raise said Very
During silly season, bored journalists often entertain themselves by reading rather than deleting the slew of pointless press releases that land in their inboxes. Today’s winner was going to be a pitch that opened with the dangerous phrase ‘Good Morning, I hope you are well?’ (always a sign the PR is sending this release to
So both the Lib Dems and the Tories have yielded to the inevitable, and passed on the Joan LB Edwards donation to the Treasury. Their responses were swifter than even critical friends might have expected. The Lib Dems were first out of the starting blocks in the race to the moral high ground by announcing
An argument over a will is just the sort of thing this slow-moving summer needs. Today’s row isn’t between two factions of a family, but the two parties in the Coalition and the Daily Mail, which reports that a donation from a Mrs Joan LB Edwards was split between the two parties when her will
Last December, after one of the most brutal PMQs this Parliament has seen, David Cameron was walking through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster to address a 1922 Committee meeting. Ed Miliband had subjected the Prime Minister to a real savaging, and Labour backbenchers had loyally joined in, raising a constituent’s suicide and describing
The Electoral Commission’s latest release on donations to political parties in the second quarter of 2013 are quite handy for the Tories. Firstly, there’s the caveat that no party really benefits from discussing funding because everyone ends up looking a little bit grubby, and because the only thing grubbier and more unattractive to voters would
Even if Help to Buy is contributing to a bubble rather than the sensible restructuring of the economy that politicians promised before they started trying to scale that particular mountain, there are still reasons to be cheerful about the economy for the Tories this morning, on top of the delight offered yesterday by Chris Bryant’s
One of the more significant – but still rather underreported – shifts in Conservative policy in the past few months has been Theresa May’s review of stop and search powers. The Home Secretary told parliament at the start of this month that she could understand why some communities felt stop and search was used unfairly.
If you think the battle in the Tory party over policies can get bloody, spare a thought for the Lib Dems, who have to listen to their members as well as the differing views of their MPs. I write about how Nick Clegg and his colleagues at the top of the party are trying to
Justin Welby is a clever man. His comments about payday loan companies in Total Politics have managed to please both the left and right, which is no mean feat on such a controversial issue. How has he managed to do it? Well, the Archbishop has identified a social problem, of people accessing high-cost credit that
Naturally, today’s first estimate of Q2 GDP figures showing that the economy grew 0.6 per cent makes good news for the Conservatives. They can relax on their sun loungers (sorry, in their desk chairs in their constituencies as they work hard for local people) this summer knowing that though things are only getting better slowly,
Will Michael Gove’s education reforms really have a lasting impact? It’s a question that perturbs his supporters no end, as the Education Secretary is attempting to do a great deal in five years that a Labour government could still unpick. Perhaps the funding for more free schools, a key dividing line, announced in the 2015/16
Today’s broadcast from Len McCluskey Land was always going to be fun. For those of us who only lived through the tail end of the 1980s, the Unite General Secretary’s speech was a useful glimpse of that decade and the one before. It was also peppered with some great characters: a chap who Len called