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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
