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.
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,
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.
Conor Burns, a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, gave a fascinating interview with Radio 4’s The World at One today about his memories of the Iron Lady. Like so many accounts, it focused on Thatcher’s disregard for opinion polls and focus groups. Burns said: ‘I think it’s a failure of politics that looks too much
MPs will pay tribute to Margaret Thatcher in the Commons tomorrow. One set of speeches worth listening to with some care will be those from the 2010 intake of Conservative MPs, raised during the Thatcher years, and often considered the group most enthusiastic about keeping her flame alive in the party. It is also likely
In 1983, a Spectator piece argued that ‘the most faithful followers of the Thatcher cult are to be found within the Labour Party’. Baroness Thatcher’s passing was always going to be as much of a test for the Left as it would be a sad day for the Right. The Labour leadership knew this, and
Germany has elections on the way, Spain is just about holding a lid on its economic crisis while keeping a wary eye on the uphill struggle that its neighbour Portugal faces to avoid a second bailout, and François Hollande has his own political crisis to deal with (and is apparently also mourning the death of
It’s 45p day in Westminster, and Ed Balls is trying to make the most of the end of a 50p rate his own party only imposed for a month or so before it left government. The story hasn’t made it to the front pages, aside from the Mirror getting cross about Nick Clegg going on
Tory backbenchers have written again to the Prime Minister demanding legislation guaranteeing a referendum in the next Parliament. Conservative MP John Baron delivered the letter, which bears more than 100 backbench signatures, to Downing Street this morning. While its existence was reported in the Sunday papers, Baron has now spoken exclusively to Coffee House about
One other area besides immigration where Tory MPs want their leader to go further than he feels he can is, unsurprisingly, Europe. There is growing pressure within the party for the Prime Minister to get legislation on the floor of the House of Commons which would guarantee a referendum in the next Parliament. This is
David Cameron knows that immigration is an issue that bothers voters, and that the mainstream parties have snubbed it in recent years to their detriment. So his speech today is partly an attempt to regain ground from UKIP, which fought a campaign in Eastleigh that was all about immigration, bringing every gripe back to that.
Boris Johnson makes a tricky interviewee. He’s charming, vague, witty and able to turn the conversation to his advantage with his ornate language and humour. If all else fails, he does something with his hair. But today the Mayor of London met his match with the equally charming and witty Eddie Mair on the Marr
It’s not just Nick Clegg who is having a good long think about immigration at the moment: David Cameron is as well. He’s got a big immigration speech on Monday, which shows how spooked the parties are by UKIP that they feel they need to at least address the topic, even if they insist that
Nick Clegg gave his ‘sensible’ immigration speech this morning. He started off by agreeing with Labour’s Yvette Cooper that politicians shouldn’t enter an ‘arms race of rhetoric’, and then spent a considerable part of the speech either attacking Labour or backing a policy that his own colleagues had previously attacked: a security bond system for
Without wanting to dwell too much on those Scary Graphs from the IFS yesterday, there’s one political point that’s worth mulling about the ones that charted the future of departmental spending. George Osborne knows that his ‘pain tomorrow’ approach means the years after 2015 are going to see even more cuts to public spending. He’s
So the latest twist in the surreal saga of statutory regulation of the press is that the campaign group which had unparalleled access to the three parties hammering out a settlement in the silent watches of the night now thinks there’s been a terrible mistake. Whoops! Hacked Off has put out a statement this afternoon
One other point worth noting from today’s IFS post-Budget briefing was the way the government has dealt with fuel duty over the past few years. Here’s a table showing how things have worked out in Budgets and Autumn Statements: So now there isn’t another fuel duty increase until September 2014. But when I spoke to
George Osborne’s critics like to deride him as the ‘jam tomorrow’ Chancellor. But according to the post-Budget briefing the Institute for Fiscal Studies gave this afternoon, he’s the ‘pain tomorrow’ Chancellor instead. It’s not that things really aren’t getting better, but that the bulk of the pain in terms of spending cuts and tax rises
MPs are debating the detail of the Budget today, and will doubtless pick over some of the lines from George Osborne’s round of interviews this morning, particularly the confusion over whether Help to Buy is available for those buying second homes. There are plenty of queries about whether the government’s new mortgage plans are actually
If this was a Budget for Sun readers, then it hasn’t quite worked out as well as George Osborne might have hoped. The newspaper sounded pretty cheery this morning with its story about the beer duty escalator. But here’s the front page for tomorrow’s edition: Now, this is clearly as much about Leveson and the
Ed Balls has just given his post-Budget briefing in parliament. The striking thing about Balls, no matter how much you might disagree with him, is how much he relishes these occasions. His whole face lights up, like a large Cheshire cat that has spied a snoozing mouse, as he goes in for the kill. He