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.
Moving people off sickness benefits and back into the workplace was never going to be an easy job. It’s a sensitive process dealing with all the grey areas that complex illnesses and disabilities throw up, and has always needed careful handling. But today ministers came under fire for the way they hold the company that
The two best fights to watch in Westminster this autumn will be about land: the shape of constituencies, and where developers will be allowed to build the new homes that ministers are increasingly seeing as the best solution to Britain’s growth problem. Tim Shipman reports in the Daily Mail today that the Quad is ‘thinking the unthinkable’
If you’re a minister, or even the Prime Minister, and you take to the airwaves holding a page of figures aloft, it’s always a good idea to make sure the figures are actually correct before you enter the studio. When David Cameron read out a break down of playing field sales on LBC radio during
William Hague took a robust line on Julian Assange at his press conference this evening. He made clear that the British government would not allow the Wikileaks founder safe passage out of the UK, and warned against using diplomatic immunity as a means of ‘escaping regular process of the courts’. Assange is wanted in Sweden
If ministers needed any more encouragement to improve the supply of new homes in this country, today’s figures on house building starts and completions from the Communities and Local Government department might just do it. Housing starts in England in the three months to the end of June fell by 10 per cent on the
This year’s coverage of A-levels has been a little different to that in previous years. Sure, there are still plenty of blonde twins coming out of the woodwork to take impressively high jumps in the air but there are no headlines about results breaking new records for the proportion of top marks awarded, and that’s
Last week Boris Johnson was in jellyfish mode, drifting along and delivering the occasional sly sting to the coalition. Now that the Olympics are over, the Mayor has launched something of a shark attack on his Westminster colleagues. In an interview with the Evening Standard, Boris accuses ministers of ‘pussyfooting’ and calls for the government
Ministers are generally cautious in welcoming falls in unemployment in case they represent a blip for just one quarter. But Iain Duncan Smith was pretty chipper this morning when the Office for National Statistics announced a fall in the jobless stats for the fifth quarter running and the strongest employment rise since the middle of
When Nick Clegg announced he was giving up the struggle on House of Lords reform, he named a number of policy areas that could fill the huge legislative void left by the collapse of the plans to overhaul the upper chamber. One of them was banking, and the Deputy Prime Minister told journalists it might
Living legend Usain Bolt is an unlikely mascot for those who campaign for reform of our tax system, but by confirming that he will continue to avoid competitions in the UK because of the amount of tax he would have to pay, he’s now the poster boy for the movement. If he attended races here,
John Bercow’s interview with the World at One was guaranteed to raise a few hackles across Westminster, and he certainly delivered on that by attacking ‘totally low-grade, substandard’ ‘no-hopers’ in the media. But well as revealing that he told his mother to stop reading the Daily Mail after reading something unpleasant about him in the
This morning’s announcement that the retail prices index rose to 3.2 per cent in July, up from 2.4 per cent in June, means commuters will see a 6.2 per cent rise in their train fares in January. Fares rises are currently calculated using RPI + 3 per cent. Analysts had predicted RPI would be 2.8
‘That’s just boring waffle!’ shouted Evan Davis on Radio 4 this morning when policing minister Nick Herbert refused to give direct answers to his questions on the turnout expected in the police and crime commissioner elections. Herbert repeatedly argued that ‘any turnout will confer greater legitimacy’ than the current system of unelected police authorities. But
The Liberal Democrats published the agenda for their autumn conference today, and one of the motions on the paper is on ‘a sustainable future for aviation’. Conference will debate the motion, tabled by Julian Huppert, on Sunday 23 September, and you can read it in full here. In essence, it rejects new runways at Heathrow,
It would be wrong to say that David Cameron has had a bad Olympics. After all, the Games went extremely well, both in terms of logistics and Britain’s wonderful medal haul. The Prime Minister is not responsible for the bouncy mood of the country at the moment, but he’s also not having to answer aggressive
We won’t know the economic impact of the Olympics until the GDP figures for the third quarter of this year are released, but today both Boris Johnson and Downing Street tried to strike an upbeat note. In his Telegraph column, the Mayor of London writes: ‘As we marvel at what they have done, and the
If the coalition leaders had hoped that announcing the demise of Lords reform during the Olympics would mean the government would enjoy a slightly easier ride, a poll released this morning by The Guardian suggests they were wrong. The ICM poll found that only 16 per cent of voters now believe the Conservatives and Liberal
Now that David Cameron has jumped on board the Treasury bandwagon in wanting to revise the National Planning Policy Framework, it’s looking like the Communities and Local Government department is going to be pitched into battle with the National Trust and other anti-development campaigners yet again. It’s not just that CLG ministers might be wary
The Prime Minister today criticised schools for filling their compulsory two hours of weekly sport with ‘sort of Indian dancing classes’. He said: ‘Now, I’ve got nothing against Indian dancing classes but that’s not really sport.’ Now, dancing isn’t really sport, is it? It’s dance. But it gets the heart rate going like the clappers,
The Financial Services Authority’s Martin Wheatley will take one of the first steps to cleaning up the banking industry’s reputation after the Libor scandal today when he publishes an initial discussion paper on his review of Libor. Wheatley is likely to confirm what it appears Sir Mervyn King, his deputy Paul Tucker and Angela Knight