James Forsyth

David Cameron is committed to an EU referendum if he’s still Prime Minister after the next election. We also know that he’d like to lead the ‘In’ side if he can get a good enough deal. Given this, the fact that the FT is reporting that Ivan Rogers, the PM’s Europe adviser, is the frontrunner to be Britain’s ambassador to the EU is particularly disappointing. Rogers is a cerebral chap who knows the EU and its institutions back to front. But what he is not is someone who is a natural at driving a hard bargain. As one insider says, ‘he’s not a tough negotiator like Cunliffe’, a reference to the current ambassador Jon Cunliffe who is leaving to join the Bank of England as a deputy governor.

Politics abhors a news vacuum. So with the government on holiday, attention shifts to the opposition. This is why oppositions normally have a whole series of summer stories ready to fill this vacuum. But, oddly, we have heard little from the Labour front bench in the last ten days or so. One consequence of this is that criticisms of Ed Miliband’s leadership by the Labour backbencher George Mudie are going to get more play than they normally would in tomorrow’s papers. There’ve been none of the attacks on a government that you would expect from the opposition in the penultimate summer before a general election. It is hard not to feel that Ed Miliband is being let down by a shadow Cabinet that isn’t being as energetic as it should be.

Boris Johnson will not stand for parliament at the next election, The Spectator understands. The Mayor of London has told the Cameron circle that he will not seek to return to the Commons in a pre-2015 by-election, nor will he stand at the general election. Boris's decision not to be a candidate in 2015 indicates that he expects Cameron still to be Prime Minister and party leader after the general election. He has told friends that he has no desire to spend three years serving under Cameron. He reasons that if Cameron loses, creating a Tory leadership vacancy, he'll be able to persuade an MP to rapidly stand aside for him. The news that Boris is not standing in 2015 will come as a relief to Cameron's allies.

From David Cameron’s declaration that you could sum up his political priorities in the three letters N H S, to the commitment to increase the health budget every year, the Cameroons have sought to reassure on the health service. They want voters to believe that it is safe in their hands. This is what gives the row over the NHS’s 111 helpline number its political importance. Labour, still fuming at how the Tories used the Keogh review to attack its record on the NHS, is trying to use the help-line’s problems to show that ‘you can’t trust David Cameron with the NHS’.

In the last few months, the Tories have--quite deliberately—behaved like an aggressive opposition. They’ve sought to constantly attack Labour, trying to force them onto the back foot. Even with David Cameron and George Osborne away on holiday, the Tories are determined to keep doing this. On Wednesday, Grant Shapps will launch the Tories’ summer offensive against Labour. He, in the kind of language more commonly used to promote summer horror films than a political agenda, will invite voters ‘to imagine a world where Ed Balls and Ed Miliband end up back in Downing Street.’ This is all part of the Tories’ efforts to link Miliband to Gordon Brown and memories of the last Labour government.

Harrods and The Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London don’t strike one as natural bedfellows. But they are both up in arms about the government’s immigration policies. Harrods is upset about the government’s plans to charge visitors from India, Nigeria and four other countries a £3,000 bond to come here, warning it will hit the London luxury goods market. While The Refugee and Migrant Forum of East London is threatening legal action over the vans going around various London boroughs warning illegal immigrants they could be deported. But, as so often, when we discuss immigration in this country we aren’t talking about the elephant in the room: Britain’s EU membership.

Alan Turing was one of the reasons why Britain won the Second World War. His mathematical and computing skills were vital to cracking the Enigma code. Yet, Turing committed suicide less than 10 years after the end of the war. A conviction for gross indecency for private, consensual gay sex followed by a sentence of chemical castration had taken its toll. Today, the House of Lords debates Lord Sharkey’s bill to grant Turing a statutory pardon. In The Times yesterday, Matthew Ridley argued that rather than a pardon, which would imply that Turing’s actions were criminal, the government should put him on a plinth in Trafalgar Square.

There’s a quiet Colonial takeover of British public life going on. An Australian, Lynton Crosby is in charge of the Tories’ political strategy. A South African, Ryan Coeztee performs this role for the Liberal Democrats and the deputy Prime Minister. While a Canadian, Mark Carney is Governor of the Bank of England and, arguably, the single most economically power figure in Britain. I argue in The Spec this week that the rise of these New Colonials tells us something important about this country, its flaws and its place in the world. Crosby, Coetzee and Carney are, in some ways, the missing meritocrats. They are filling a gap in British public life created by the return of the old, and not much improved, ruling elite.

PMQs today was not as noisy an affair as last week. But the opening exchanges between David Cameron and Ed Miliband still had plenty of needle in them: things are becoming increasingly personal between these two. The Cameron/Miliband exchanges were initially relatively even. I noticed a fair few Tory backbenchers having to stifle a laugh at Miliband’s line that Cameron was the Prime Minister for ‘Benson and Hedge funds’. His attack on Cameron’s ‘weasel words’ about whether or not Lynton Crosby had spoken to him about plain packaging, combined with Labour’s call for an inquiry by the Cabinet Secretary, will keep this story going.

The Conservative party hasn’t won a parliamentary majority for more than twenty years. If it is to start doing so again, then it will have to need to expand its pool of potential voters. Renewal, run by former Policy Exchange deputy director David Skelton, is a new Tory ginger group trying to focus the party’s attention on this problem. It launches tomorrow and, I suspect, that at least one of its idea will immediately catch the eye of the Tory leadership. It is proposing that the law should be changed so that not only should union members have to opt in to affiliate to a political party but they should also have a choice of which party to affiliate to. This would mean that those union members who choose to could donate to parties other than Labour.

In this increasingly secular age, you would expect the Archbishop of Canterbury to be a figure of diminishing importance. But Justin Welby is fast becoming the most politically influential Archbishop since the war. Part of Welby’s influence stems from the fact that both the Conservatives and Labour think that he is, secretly, one of them. I remember within days of his appointment being approacedh by a Tory minister and then by one of those closest to Ed Miliband. They both wanted to explain how Welby was going to help move public debate in their direction. One never had this kind of conversation about Rowan Williams whose views were thought not to be of this world.

Ed Miliband doesn’t take a risk unless he has to. In his first two and a half years in charge of the Labour party, he eschewed a dramatic confrontation with the trade unions. Some in his circle wanted him to take them on, as part of a broader campaign against vested interests, but they were ignored, to the relief of Tory strategists. That has all changed now. Miliband has been pitched into an argument with the unions that will determine whether he has a chance of reaching No. 10. The Labour leader was slow to react to the controversy about the union Unite allegedly trying to fix the selection of a candidate in the safe Labour seat of Falkirk.

That was as loud as the Prime Minister’s Questions that immediately preceded the last election. The Labour benches were clearly determined to ensure that there was no repeat of last week’s mauling of Ed Miliband. They barracked David Cameron from the off, even chanting ‘weak, weak, weak’ during his answers and almost every Labour question was on the propriety of the Tories’ relations with their donors. This, combined with a far stronger performance from Ed Miliband, ensured that the session ended with Cameron, not Miliband, on the back foot. Cameron’s problem is that Miliband is turning this from a debate about union influence on Labour selections into one about money — and when it comes to money, no party looks good.