James Forsyth

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it's an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat. If you'd done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary,  has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling data and consumer targeting. As a result, the  number of Liberal Democrat seats on the list more than doubled.

No government ever wants to look like it is in office but not in power. This is why this country’s inability to deport Abu Qatada is causing such concern in Conservative circles. David Cameron will be well aware of the symbolism of the issue. In his conference speech this year, he boasted that “For years people asked why we couldn’t get rid of those radical preachers who spout hatred about Britain while living off the taxpayer……well, Theresa May – a great Home Secretary - has done it – and she’s got Abu Hamza on that plane and out of our country to face justice.” Today, Cameron declared himself ‘completely fed up’ with the fact that Abu Qatada is still here.

Tonight was a good one for the Tory whips. What looked last week like it could have been a tricky vote on a Labour motion to delay the fuel duty rise, turned into a relatively easy government win. There were only nine Tory MPs absent from the vote and every other Tory MP backed the government. Now, the reason there was no rebellion was, at least partly, because Treasury ministers dropped a fair few hints that there would be action on fuel duty in the autumn statement. Robert Halfon, who has led a sustained campaign on this issue, said after the vote that it was ‘Right to wait until’ the autumn statement on this issue. The question for Osborne now is whether he can find enough money to scrap the rise outright rather than just postpone it for a few months.

We are now closer to the 2015 election than the 2010 one. We also expected by now to have the coalition’s mid-term review, the document that will set out its priorities for the second half of its term in office. But its publication has now been delayed until January. This is because the debates about what new policies to include in it are still going on. The quad—David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander—met on November 1st to discuss various ideas for it. They were, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, joined by Oliver Letwin and David Laws for this meeting with the Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood also present. Dominating the meeting was ‘earn or learn’.

After his Today Programme interview this morning, it seemed almost inevitable that George Entwistle would have to resign as director general of the BBC and this evening, in a dignified statement, he has. I suspect that Entwistle’s won’t be the last resignation before this saga ends. Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, appears on the Andrew Marr show this morning and he will have to show grip. The time is fast approaching when Patten will have to pick between his BBC job and his various other roles, including being Chancellor of Oxford.

Few people have been more important to Tory modernisation than Nick Boles. He co-founded Policy Exchange, the think tank that has developed most of its policy ideas, and has been a tireless—and tieless—advocate of it. But one of the things that has always marked Boles out is his willingness to think and reflect. In an interview with The Spectator this week, Boles — who was promoted to the government in the last reshuffle — assesses what he and his fellow modernisers got right and wrong. He concedes that the modernisers lacked ‘a strong, economic message’ and that they became too carried away with ‘media zeitgeist’ issues like ‘chocolate oranges in W.H. Smith and some of the environmental messages and the work/life balance stuff’.

It was a stormy meeting of the 1922 Committee tonight. The cause of controversy was last week’s defeat of the government on the EU Budget and whether or not the rebels — led by Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless — had cooperated with Labour. Kris Hopkins, of the loyalist 301 group, read out Carswell’s letter to colleagues saying that he had had no direct contact with the rebels. He then said that seeing as the Mail on Sunday reported this weekend that Carswell had, everyone present should write to the paper and complain about its inaccurate report. The irony was, I’m told, rather effective. But this was not the end of the matter. Anne Main complained that those who had rebelled or abstained were being sent the equivalent of white feathers.