James Forsyth

Europe, as everybody knows, is one of those issues on which a Tory leader needs to pay particular attention to the words he uses. This makes David Cameron’s behaviour in recent weeks all the odder. First, we had that Brussels press conference in which Cameron sounded rather too enthusiastic about the EU for his own side’s tastes. This was followed by his Sunday Telegraph piece in which he stressed that ‘the two words “Europe” and “referendum” can go together’ for him. Now, those close to Cameron complain that the two positions were perfectly compatible and that in the first instance he was quoted selectively.

With Parliament heading off for recess, politics will — barring some unforeseen event or the Eurozone crisis moving into one of its acute phases — be dominated by the Olympics for the next few weeks. David Cameron will be hoping that the global CEOs arriving in town will bring some good investment news with them. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, will revel in the global media attention. Indeed, Boris is already demonstrating an ability to brush off the organisational hiccups that other politicians can only envy. But most ambitious Tories will spend the summer thinking about the reshuffle, currently pencilled in for the third of September ahead of a Tory parliamentary dinner on the fifth.

This morning’s press conference by David Cameron and Nick Clegg marked an attempt to scotch all the talk of the coalition moving to confidence and supply sometime before the next election. Cameron declared that he was more committed to the coalition than he was back in 2010. He also stressed that he believed Britain needed stable government ‘throughout this term’, an implicit rebuke to all those Tories talking about a move to minority government in 2014. Nick Clegg, for his part, spoke about how this was going to be a ‘proper coalition government for a full five years’.

At the top of the coalition there’s a concerted effort to calm tensions, to de-escalate after its ‘Cuban missile crisis’. As part of that, I understand that David Cameron has indicated privately that if the Lib Dems do not get their elected peers, he won’t push the matter of the boundary reforms. I’m told he has no desire to end up in a situation where he’s sacking Lib Dem ministers en masse for voting against the government. Although, officially Number 10 is still stressing that it expects government ministers to vote for them when they come back to the House of Commons.

Perhaps what most depressed the Liberal Democrats this week was the sense that the two main parties were rejecting the idea of coalition. One described to me how depressing he found it during the Lords reform debate to watch the Labour front bench revelling in every Tory intervention on Nick Clegg. At the top of the Lib Dems, there’s now a real worry that both Labour and the Tories would try and govern as a minority government after the next election if there’s another hung parliament rather than form a coalition. This would lock the Liberal Democrats out of power.  All of this makes Andrew Adonis’ comments in The Times today particularly striking.

The difficult birth of the parliamentary inquiry into Libor and banking standards continued today with a controversy over which members of the Treasury select committee have been appointed to it. To general surprise, Andrea Leadsom, one of the better questioners on the committee, has been left off. This is particularly odd given that she is a former banker with real knowledge of the industry. John Mann, the pugnacious Labour MP, has also not made the cut. He has responded by labelling the coming inquiry a ‘whitewash’. What makes Leadsom’s omission particularly odd is that the Tory MP selected to join Tyrie on the inquiry is Mark Garnier, who is also a member of the 2010 intake. So, this is not a question of parliamentary seniority.

The continuing failure to build another runway in the south east, let alone a new airport, is an act of economic self-harm. Trade used to follow the flag, it now follows the flight path. This makes it particularly depressing that the government is pushing back its aviation strategy yet again. As one Tory MP said to me earlier, ‘if we’re not serious enough about growth to build another runway we should just go home’. David Cameron needs to do what it takes to get another runway through. If that means moving Justine Greening, a long-time opponent of a third runway at Heathrow, from transport then he should do it. Indeed, Greening — good on the media and not a ‘posh boy’ — would be a good choice for party chairman.

By tradition, David Cameron stands outside meetings of the 1922 waiting to be summoned in. This meant that several late-arriving rebels had to walk past him on their way in. By and large, things were fairly cordial. But there was some tension at various points. Cameron started with a tribute to the Chief Whip, which got the MPs banging the desks. Some are taking this as a signal that Patrick McLoughlin is to be retired in the reshuffle. But those present thought it was more of a public admission that the whipping problems of the last few weeks have not been caused by the Chief but by Number 10 and coalition. There was, as usual, much talk of taking the fight to Labour.

The government’s apparent decision to pull the programme motion on the Lords Reform Bill is an admission that it would have lost the vote tonight, and heavily. The rebel numbers have more than held up today and by mid-afternoon even previously loyal MPs were contemplating jumping in to the rebel camp. The question now is what the coalition does next, does it plough on with the bill and try to guillotine it at a later date or quietly drop it. Certainly, the Tory opponents of the bill are in no mood to back down. They are making clear that even if the government comes back offering twenty days of debate they’ll still oppose it.

Charlotte Leslie becomes the latest star of the 2010 intake to come out against the coalition’s version of Lords reforms. Explaining her decision, she emphasised to The Spectator her concerns that while the new Lords would be elected ‘they would not carry the great benefit of democracy, accountability'. As Leslie points out, this means that a Lord ‘could get elected on a myriad of populist promises, then fail to honour any of them'. She also has worries about the loss of expert knowledge from the chamber when it is elected. But her objections are, perhaps, best summed up by her attack on the argument that Tories should vote Lords reform through for the sake of the coalition: 'This is not about our inter-relationship in the next 800 or so days to come.

One instructive way to think about Tuesday’s vote on Lords reform is, do you want to have proportional representation used to elect people to the Westminster parliament? I suspect that most people on the centre-right would answer no to that question, and with good reason. In the current British system, PR would work against the centre-right’s political interests.   It is for this reason that the term rebel is a bit of a misnomer for those Tories trying to thwart the coalition’s plans for Lords reform. The likes of Andrew Griffiths, an adviser to Eric Pickles when he was party chairman, and Angie Bray, a former Central Office staffer, are party loyalists far more than they are rebels.