James Forsyth is former political editor of The Spectator.
David Cameron’s Oxford gaffe is refusing to die down. Whenever I’ve called Tory MPs or other members of the Conservative family in the last few days, it has been the first subject they have wanted to raise. People are genuinely perplexed — and worried — as to why Cameron said what he said. As Pete
The coalition’s decision to ‘pause’ its NHS reforms has left an open goal for its opponents, and they’ve been busy tapping the ball into this empty net this morning. At its conference up in Liverpool, the Royal College of Nursing has, predictably but embarrassingly, declared that it has no confidence in the health secretary. Back
Prisoner voting is back on the agenda. The European Court of Human Rights has rejected the British government’s appeal and declared that the coalition has six months to draw up proposals to change the law. David Cameron now has to decide whether to ignore the Strasbourg Court or go against the will of his
When a Prime Minister gets his facts wrong as spectacularly as David Cameron did yesterday with his comment that ‘only one black person went to Oxford last year’ everyone wonders why. Now, the simplest explanation is that it was a straight cock-up. One of the pitfalls of these Cameron Direct events is that errors can
The headline measure in the Vickers Review—the need for a ring fence between retail and investment banking—should not harm the City’s global competitiveness as it only applies to banks with a UK retail operation. For everyone else, Vickers would leave London as a relatively good place to do business: far more certain than Hong Kong
The Vickers Review into the future of banking appears to have prevented a possible coalition row. The Tories and the Liberal Democrats have had different views on what to do about the banks, with the Lib Dems keener to break up the banks come what may and the Tories more worried about preserving the competitiveness
When spring arrives in England, the Prime Minister likes to roll up his sleeves and do a spot of gardening at his constituency home. When spring arrives in England, the Prime Minister likes to roll up his sleeves and do a spot of gardening at his constituency home. This year, he’ll have to find another
Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on. Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah
David Cameron is determined to get away from the idea of an annual Cabinet cull. He has repeatedly told friends that he doesn’t want to reshuffle the Cabinet until March 2012. But The Times, the most pro-coalition paper, today uses its leader column (£) to call on Cameron to reshuffle straight after the May elections.
Ahead of this morning’s Cameron, Clegg, Lansley event on the NHS, it is worth reminding ourselves of what Nick Clegg was saying about these reforms back at the start of the year. On January 23rd, he went on the Andrew Marr show and had this exchange: ‘ANDREW MARR: Huge change to the NHS just coming
Get your guide to body language out for tomorrow morning Cameron, Clegg and Lansley will be doing a joint event on NHS reforms. The three men all have subtly different messages to get across and there are concerns in Tory circle that Clegg will use the occasion to present himself as the defender of the
The most important planks of the coalition’s social mobility strategy are its education and welfare reforms. Raising the standards of state education in this country will give far more children a chance to get on in life. While reducing the number of children brought up in workless households will, hopefully, halt the development of a
A weary-looking Andrew Lansley has just finished answering MPs’ questions following his statement announcing a delay to the coalition’s NHS reforms. The statement left us none the wiser as to what is up for review in the listening exercise the coalition is about to undertake. What it did demonstrate was both Lansley’s encyclopedic knowledge of
What is going on with the government’s health reforms is highly unusual. Normally, once a bill has gone through second reading and committee stage in the Commons there are very few changes made to it. But the coalition is considering some fairly significant changes to the Health and Social Care Bill in a bid to
The NHS is, as Nigel Lawson once remarked, the new national religion of this country. This makes it difficult to discuss the subject in a rational matter and any attempt to reform it is likely to run into its own Pilgrimage of Grace as Andrew Lansley and the coalition are discovering. The government’s problem is that
Sometimes, one does really wonder about the British judiciary. Its decision to issue injunctions which bar people from talking to their MPs about an issue, as revealed in The Times this morning, displays a shocking contempt for parliament. It suggests that the court have learned little from the Trafigura case. The justification for these so-called ‘hyper
A longer version of James Forsyth’s interview with Eric Pickles, the Cabinet’s surprisingly intellectual bruiser There are politicians who shy away from confrontation and those who relish it. Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, is firmly in the latter camp. As we sit around a small table in his room in the House
There are few things that irritate an MP in the chamber of the House of Commons more than the sight of all the journalists in the press gallery walking out in the middle of a debate. There are few things that irritate an MP in the chamber of the House of Commons more than the
An interview with Eric Pickles, the Cabinet’s surprisingly intellectual bruiser There are politicians who shy away from confrontation and those who relish it. Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary, is firmly in the latter camp. As we sit around a small table in his room in the House of Commons, he entertains with
Libby Brooks’ piece in The Guardian today is shameful. Writing about the violence that followed last weekend’s march, she argues that the ‘relevant question is not whether or how to condemn those acts – but if any coherent agenda lies behind them and how important it is for that to sit neatly with the agenda
