Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman

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.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Ministers fail to sell themselves on playing field sell-offs

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 the Olympics, he was trying to crush reports that under this government, schools are continuing to reduce their sports facilities in return for money. You can watch the film of Cameron with his sheet of paper here. The problem is that this sheet of paper wasn't actually correct when it said there were only 21 sell-offs, and as Christopher Hope reveals in today's Telegraph, there were actually 35 applications to sell school playing fields, of which 30 were approved.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Hague stands firm on Assange

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 on allegations that he raped one woman and sexually assaulted another in August 2010. He denies both charges and has spent the past 56 days hiding in Ecuador's embassy, where it was today confirmed that he is being granted political asylum. The police still intend to arrest Assange as soon as he leaves the embassy, but Hague's press conference locks the foreign secretary into stand-off with his Ecuadorian counterpart, Ricardo Patino.

Isabel Hardman

Housebuilding slumps

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 previous quarter. If you compare the figure for starts in this quarter to those in the same quarter last year, there has been a 24 per cent drop. The number of completions has also fallen by five per cent between the first and second quarters of this year, but has risen seven per cent on last year. If you burrow into the figures, which you can find here, you'll also see a sharp drop in the number of housing association homes being built since last year.

Isabel Hardman

A-level results crib sheet

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 because tough new rules on the exams came into effect this year. Last year results remained static for the first time in a decade, and this year, they saw a drop. The number of marks at A or above fell 0.4 per cent to 27 per cent of total grades awarded. Just under 7.9 per cent of entries were marked at the top A* grade, a fall from 8.2 per cent in 2011. The overall pass rate has only increased marginally to just under 98 per cent.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris accuses Cameron of ‘pussyfooting’ on growth

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 to 'make a very powerful statement of ambition for London' involving new infrastructure and even a new airport: 'The government needs to stop pussyfooting around. I don't think you can rely on Heathrow. Even if the government was so mad and wrong to try to do the third runway or mixed-mode, those solutions would rapidly run out of usefulness and time.

Isabel Hardman

Good jobs news goes against grain

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 2010. In the three months to June 2012, 29 million people were in work, up by 201,000 on the previous quarter. The employment rate rose by 0.4 per cent to 71 per cent, and there are 4,000 fewer unemployed young people.  The number of unemployed people fell by 46,000 to 2.56 million.

Isabel Hardman

A nice new row for the coalition

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 be worth examining whether it was possible to go further than the Vickers proposals on this area. Today's Financial Times fleshes out what going further might entail. Vickers had originally proposed banning the retail operation of a bank from selling interest rate and currency swaps, but this was dropped in the white paper on banking reform. Now Clegg and the Business Secretary Vince Cable want to re-open talks on this issue.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Usain Bolt, tax campaigner

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, he would be taxed 50 per cent on his global sponsorship and endorsement earnings, and on any appearance fees he receives. The Treasury granted an exemption for the Olympics to ensure athletes would not stay away because of the hit on their earnings. 'As soon as the law changes, I'll be here all the time,' Bolt said. This has inevitably attracted the sort of moralising about paying tax that ministers normally make a superb mess of.

Isabel Hardman

Bercow calls ‘no-hopers’ to order

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 newspaper, the Speaker also made some other interesting comments about his own role.

Isabel Hardman

Fares rise brings fresh cost of living woe to Tories

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 per cent, which means tickets will be even more expensive than originally expected. Don't forget rail fares already saw an average 8 per cent rise at the start of this year. Some tickets will rise by a further five percentage points if other fares on a network are kept lower as a balance. Before he was reshuffled from the transport brief, Philip Hammond described trains as a 'rich man's toy'.

Isabel Hardman

Herbert’s ‘boring waffle’ betrays unease on police commissioners

'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 his repeated refusal to pin down any figure for the percentage of voters who will trudge out of their homes on a cold and possibly rainy November evening to vote for the commissioners betrayed an unease about how well these elections are going to work out in practice. Herbert and his colleagues will know that a low turnout will be awkward, not least once the new commissioners are in place and start taking unpopular decisions.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems toy with airport plans

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, Stansted and Gatwick, and calls for UK aviation policy to be based on: accessibility from north and south, growth with the UK's carbon budgets, minimal impact to the local population, minimal impact on the local environment and maximum hubbing potential. This is not surprising, but if conference approves the motion in full, it will make life awkward for the coalition, which is coming under increasing pressure to increase airport capacity in the South East.

Isabel Hardman

Labour plays a sensible game on school sport

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 questions from the media about an awful security breach, total gridlock in central London or worse. But the Prime Minister did rather let himself down by being drawn into the inevitable debate about sports provision in the state education sector during the Games. That discussion started so early into Britain's rise up the medal table that at the time it was impossible to assess whether state-educated athletes were pulling their weight.

Isabel Hardman

The economy needs more than the Olympics to perk it up

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 general success of the Games so far, I want to issue a general word of caution to the Olympo-sceptics, who will be itching to return to their gripes. They will say there will be no increase in sporting participation, and no economic benefits, and that we will not succeed in regenerating east London. Well, just remember one thing, everyone. These Olympo-sceptics were proved decisively wrong about the Games. They will be proved wrong about the legacy as well.

Isabel Hardman

Voters doubt coalition will survive to 2015

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 Democrats will stay in partnership until 2015. This has fallen from 33 per cent two weeks ago. Overall, 54 per cent of voters believe the government will collapse before the next general election, and only 19 per cent think the two parties will pull apart a few months before the election in order to campaign separately.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

CLG vs National Trust, round 2

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 of opening up old wounds with organisations whose members tend to be Conservative voters, but that they already feel planning reform is truly done and dusted. CLG sources point to the fact that out of the 480,000 units with outstanding planning permission, work has not yet started on 226,000, more than 81,500 are on hold and 136,700 are moving to the point where work will begin on site.

Isabel Hardman

Cameron digs a hole on school sports

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, improves core strength, balance, and co-ordination. Dancing was good enough for the Great British swimmers, who took up ballet before the Olympics to improve their technique. Just up the road from Downing Street are the Pineapple Dance Studios, founded by a former model who lost three stone from dancing. David Cameron would do well to visit them and watch the sweat dripping down the studio walls in the midst of a fast-paced jazz class.

Isabel Hardman

Libor isn’t working

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 of the British Bankers' Association already suspected back in 2008: that Libor as it currently stands is 'no longer fit for purpose'. The FT reports that Wheatley will suggest scrapping Libor altogether and replacing it with a rate based on actual trades that would be overseen by a new independent body. This would remove the 'incentive to manipulate' Libor that Timothy Geithner highlighted.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

People’s Pledge pulls voters in to support EU referendum

Holding a vote on the European Union in the middle of the summer holidays and while the Olympics are in full swing seemed to rather stack the odds against the People's Pledge campaign. But when the results of the two votes in Hazel Grove and Cheadle came through this evening, the turnout in these two marginal constituencies was just as stunning as the outcome itself. Both constituencies saw a 35 per cent turnout, with 88.5 per cent of Hazel Grove residents voting in favour of a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, and 86.6 per cent supporting a plebiscite in Cheadle. That's a bigger turnout than we saw at this year's local elections.

Isabel Hardman

Boris the jellyfish stings again

Boris Johnson has just reminded us how potent he can be at undermining the government right here, right now. At a press conference today on the Olympic legacy, the Mayor of London said: 'The government totally understands people's appetite for this: they can see the benefits of sport and what it does for young people. They understand very, very clearly the social and economic advantages. I would like to see, frankly, the kind of regime I used to enjoy - compulsory two hours' sport every day.' And there we have it. Boris deploys his old trick of appearing to flatter the government while also managing to brief against it.