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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When I arrived at St Paul’s at 6 o’clock this morning, a line of people, around 40-strong, had already set up camp with union flags (and one Canadian flag, too) opposite the church courtyard. The police officer drawing to the end of his night shift told me they had been there all night. Later, as
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David Cameron is giving a reading at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral later today, but this morning he gave his eulogy on the Today programme. He made the quite striking observation that ‘we’re all Thatcherites now’. In one sense this is quite an obvious comment: as countless commentators have observed over the past week and a half,
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Eric Pickles did manage to avert a defeat in the Commons on plans to let homeowners build extensions and conservatories without planning permission, but it’s worth asking how on earth the government managed to get in the position where its backbench was so worked up on a policy like this in the first place? The
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Michael Gove is at it again. Today he’s taken it upon himself to ‘heap further misery’ onto teachers with ‘reckless’ plans that would damage children’s education. At least, that’s what the NASUWT teaching union would have you believe. The Education Secretary has in fact published advice for schools on performance-related pay, which they can use
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There was a curious meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee this morning. The MPs took evidence from Oliver Letwin and Maria Miller, and then from Harriet Harman, on press regulation. An evidence session with Oliver Letwin is curious enough anyway, as the Minister for Government Policy does tend to speak as though
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So it doesn’t look as though last night’s ‘love-in’ that I reported went particularly well. Cheryl Gillan described planning minister Nick Boles last night as ‘completely unmoveable’. Meanwhile, Zac Goldsmith, leader of the rebels on the extensions row in the Commons, was on the Today programme this morning calling it an ‘odd policy’ and ‘very
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Parliament’s only just back from Easter recess and already there’s a threat of rebellion in the Commons. The Growth and Infrastructure Bill returns to the Commons tomorrow afternoon for ‘ping-pong’, and a number of MPs are agitated about an amendment that passed as a result of a rebellion in the Upper Chamber. In March, the
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When dolphins hunt fish, they gang up on them as a school, chasing them into the shallows. So it happens at the daily lobby briefing: when a morsel of a story appears and someone lets down their guard, the whole pack of journalists jumps in. Today the Prime Minister’s official spokesman was chased into the
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The first four pilots of the government’s £26,000 benefit cap for workless families launches today. While there’s a bit of debate today about the rights and wrongs of this particular benefit cut, it’s worth comparing it with another policy that has grabbed many more headlines. The benefit cap is, as James reported recently, one of
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Ed Miliband may have politely told Tony Blair what to do with his advice about the direction of the Labour party, but the former Labour Prime Minister’s allies aren’t quite so keen to let his New Statesman piece disappear into the party recycling bin just yet. On today’s political programmes, they popped up to drive
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Tony Blair asked Labour seven awkward questions this week, ranging from issues that everyone’s talking about to rather more quirky ones that the former Prime Minister would like everyone to talk about, like using advances in DNA to fight crime. It’s the mid-term, when parties start to wonder what they can tell voters they stand
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We’re only a few weeks away from the Queen’s Speech, yet there’s one significant piece of legislation from this session which has yet to be resolved. It has already caused one big row, and will certainly cause another one when it is published. The Snooper’s Charter, better known to the ministers as the Communications Data
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The Tories have released a local election broadcast, to be shown on the TV tonight. Unlike previous ones, it doesn’t have any awkward confusion between debt and deficit, preferring instead to focus on people looking a bit confused as they try to remember what the government has or hasn’t done on council tax, income tax
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David Cameron is setting off with his children to visit Angela Merkel on Friday. It’s part of his EU reform mission that started and was thrown off course on Monday following the death of Margaret Thatcher. As I blogged back then, the circumstances aren’t perfect, and one of the reasons for that is that France
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Nothing like a former PM poking their nose into your business, eh? John Major experienced what Daniel Finkelstein this week delicately described as ‘sub-optimal’ behaviour from Margaret Thatcher when he was in office, and today Ed Miliband has his own helpful little missive from his own former leader, telling him that if only he were
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Today’s debates in Parliament about Baroness Thatcher were supposed to be a tribute to the first female Prime Minister. If you were looking for the most faithful rendition of this, you should have been sitting in the House of Lords, not the Commons this afternoon. In the Other Place, the debate is always rather more
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MPs on the Defence Select Committee made a similar warning this morning about the UK’s withdrawal from Afghanistan as Con Coughlin made in The Spectator last month. He wrote that Britain’s ‘attempt to undertake a dignified retreat from Kabul has all the makings of yet another Afghan disaster’. You can read the full piece here,
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This afternoon’s tribute debate in the House of Commons will continue until 10pm, with many MPs wanting to pay their respects to Margaret Thatcher. There will be many speeches about how the former Prime Minister inspired and shaped the politics of those speaking. But there will also inevitably be those who want to talk about
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Well, that was inevitable. Sir James Crosby’s announcement that he wants to give his knighthood back and forego a slice of his pension is surprising only in that it came a little sooner after the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards’ report than everyone expected. He could have waited for a real public outcry to build,
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Any Tories who might be asking ‘What Would Thatcher Do?’ about some of the political rows bubbling away today would surely wonder what her response to the current benefits debate might be. She kept well away from welfare reform, but she did have strong views on the role of government in helping people get on.