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Tuesday 13 July 2010
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Liam Fox has been placed on the Downing Street naughty step. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
When David Cameron moved into Downing Street he probably thought that he would only ever banish his children to the naughty step.
But a member of the cabinet has been placed on the Downing Street naughty step after weeks of bad behaviour which has tested the prime minister's patience to its limits.
Liam Fox, the defence secretary, has been told in no uncertain terms by No 10 that he has gone off piste on too many occasions since his appointment to the cabinet in May. The defence secretary, an important figure on the Tory right who is now known as "13th century Fox" after his unfortunate description of Afghanistan, will not be sacked or demoted.
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Tuesday 6 July 2010
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Tory MPs are wondering whether Liam Fox will be one of the first Tories to resign from the cabinet. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Conservative MPs who lost out on ministerial jobs, after toiling on the frontbench during the hard years of opposition, are whiling away the hot summer months with a new game. In the bars and tearooms of Westminster they are placing bets on who will be the next minister to resign from the cabinet.
The game was disrupted when David Laws resigned as treasury chief secretary over his expenses. "I was most disappointed when David Laws resigned," one former frontbencher said. "It meant that I lost my bet that Iain Duncan Smith would be the the first minister to resign."
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Sunday 27 June 2010
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David Cameron is at his first international summit, working the room, turning on the charm, establishing the personal rapport that is vital in high-level politics. Sitting in a room alone with seven other top leaders over lunch and dinner – albeit with officials listening in from outside the room – must be the moment you realise with total certainty that you are prime minister.
He has also piled up four bilaterals, including a big one yesterday with Barack Obama, a man of real professorial intelligence, but he is also thinking domestic politics. He is strangely thrilled at the way in which Labour is attacking the Liberal Democrats for the big betrayal of joining the coalition, especially Nick Clegg's role in the axe-wielding, VAT-raising budget.
Why is the prime minister so happy? Well, he thinks the tone of the Labour attacks is driving the Liberal Democrats deeper into the arms of the Conservatives, and that from Labour's point of view this is hardly intelligent politics. It is creating a realignment in which Labour ends up on the wrong side.
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Wednesday 9 June 2010
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A coalition cabinet meeting in Downing Street last month. Photograph: Phil Hannaford
The Liberal Democrats really are in this together with David Cameron. Yesterday for the first time the Liberal Democrat members of the cabinet held a political cabinet with the Conservatives.
The very fact they had a political, as opposed to government, get-together shows how bound up the two parties now are. It was brief – a longer one will be held shortly – but they discussed how they were going to have to protect themselves from the coming Labour attack on their proposed cuts.
No one is under any illusion they will be doing anything popular. Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, predicted the country is heading for a nightmare.
The thinking at the political cabinet seemed to be to point out that Labour itself was committed to a similar cuts programme, but had not allocated a penny towards achieving this.
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Friday 28 May 2010
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Chris Patten believes David Cameron will return to the mainstream centre right in the European parliament. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
From the Olympian heights of the chancellorship of Oxford university, Lord (Chris) Patten makes public pronouncements with care these days.
So the coalition government will note with interest an intervention this weekend by the former Tory chairman on his favourite subject – Europe.
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Tuesday 25 May 2010
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George Osborne, Nick Clegg, David Cameron and William Hague listen to the Queen's speech today. Photograph: PA
Is this coalition government going to get away without an opposition?
Labour is otherwise engaged between now and September, and although Harriet Harman, the interim leader, will do her level best, this is a caretaker opposition.Some, such as Liam Byrne and Sadiq Khan, will be energetic. But many other leading figures – Alan Johnson, Jack Straw and Alistair Darling – have all said they wish to stand aside from the frontbench, and will struggle to grind through the gears. Lord Mandelson, the former business secretary, is on an extended holiday and has resigned from the shadow cabinet, as he is required to do. Lord Adonis, one of the most intelligent frontline Labour politicians, is writing a book on the coalition talks – surely a brief tome. The new intake of MPs will try to make a mark on standing committees, but they will make little impact.
The unions will do their best, and the TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, judging by his intelligent weekend speech to Progress, will try to prevent the unions mounting a charge of the very light brigade. As Unite is finding in its dispute with British Airways, strikes can cripple a union as much as a company. The Communication Workers' Union does not have many Tory backbenchers willing to side with it over the part-sale of the Royal Mail. Continue reading...
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Friday 21 May 2010
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Lib Dem and Conservative MEPs voted on opposing sides in the European parliament in Strasbourg. Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters
The love affair was great while it lasted. Richard Curtis now has a script for his next upper middle class English rom com and a plaque can be placed in the Downing Street garden to show where Nick and Dave were hitched.
But the Lib-Con coalition is now facing its first tiff. MEPs from the two parties voted on opposing sides in the European parliament this week.
The odd vote in Strasbourg may appear relatively trivial, but this one was pretty important, because it related to the Lisbon treaty – a major source of tension between the Lib Dems and the Tories in recent years.
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Wednesday 19 May 2010
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Theresa May, the new home secretary. Photograph: David Levene
The roar of a dinosaur is unmistakable. Flailing around in an unfamiliar world, the wretched beast lashes out as it struggles to understand how life will no longer be the same.
And so it was this morning on BBC Radio 4's Today programme when the veteran presenter, John Humphrys, showed how the older generation is struggling to come to terms with Britain's new political order.
In an interview with the home secretary, Theresa May, Humphrys expressed astonishment that the Conservatives could be giving ground on manifesto pledges as the price of agreeing a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
He seized on the Tories' agreement that the future of the Human Rights Act, of which they have been highly critical, would be decided by a commission. Continue reading...
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Tuesday 18 May 2010
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George Osborne is sending friendly noises to fellow EU finance ministers. Photograph: Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images
George Osborne, the new chancellor, has decided to abandon a tradition established by Gordon Brown when he held the job.
On the eve of meetings of EU finance ministers, Brown's team would brief a friendly journalist about how the chancellor would lecture the Europeans on their mistaken economic ways. Brown would then turn up briefly in Brussels, mostly ignore the other ministers round the table and read out a script that bore no relation to the hostile press briefing.
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Monday 17 May 2010
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The chief Treasury secretary, David Laws, and the chancellor, George Osborne, sit together during today's press conference. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters
Over the next week cabinet ministers can look forward to meeting David Laws, the super-brainy Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury. If ministers have not done their homework then their discussions will be, as the army saying goes, meetings without coffee.
That is probably an apt analogy. Laws said today that Liam Byrne, his predecessor who famously issued strict orders for coffee, had left him a handwritten note saying Britain had run out of money.
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Wednesday 12 May 2010
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Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretay, (right) looks mightily relieved as the Camerons arrive in Downing Street. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AP
The political world has naturally focused on the images of David and Samantha Cameron arriving in Downing Street and the handshake between the leaders of Britain's first peacetime coalition since the 1930s.
But it's worth taking a moment to consider three people who are mightily relieved by the coalition agreement but who will be overlooked in the excitement:
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Tuesday 11 May 2010
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David Cameron and George Osborne believe the Tory leader must be installed in No 10 to shore up his authority. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Amid all the excitement at Westminster, one question has been rather overlooked. Why has David Cameron thrown everything at Nick Clegg to seal a deal with the Liberal Democrats?
The Tory leader regards the Lib Dems as something of a political joke on the grounds that they say one thing in one part of the country and something completely different elsewhere. And yet he has invited them to join the cabinet.
Cameron is a passionate believer in the first-past-the-post electoral system. Yet he has offered the Lib Dems a referendum on introducing the alternative vote system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference.
Amid that background you might think that Cameron would be tempted simply to face down the Lib Dems and try to form a minority government with no outside support. Instead he has made a "big, open and comprehensive offer" that has gone far further than he imagined when he first started wooing Clegg on Friday.
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Friday 7 May 2010
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George Osborne at the Conservative headquarters in central London. Photograph: Linda Nylind
As the director of the Tories' general election campaign, George Osborne is facing a bumpy ride. Conservatives on the right and left of the party are united in thinking that Osborne must share much of the blame for a disappointing result.
Tories on the right are annoyed because they believe the campaign should have focused more on traditional Tory issues such as immigration. They say this was a major concern on the doorstep but was barely mentioned until David Cameron tore into Nick Clegg's plan to offer "earned citizenship" to long term illegal immigrants in the final television debate. The right say Cameron is too sensitive about undermining the party's moderate image.
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Gordon Brown arrives back at 10 Downing Street as the country looked set for a hung parliament. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Can Labour cobble together enough support to form a government?
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Wednesday 5 May 2010
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The "dreary steeples" of Fermanagh and Tyrone, mocked by Winston Churchill (above), could take centre stage in a hung parliament. Photograph: Rex Features
Are the "dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone" about to take centre stage in British politics?
Winston Churchill famously dreamt up this disparaging remark to say that little had changed in Northern Ireland after Europe had been shaken to its core by the first world war.
But the rest of the United Kingdom may be looking to those steeples in the coming days if voters elect the first hung parliament since February 1974. Continue reading...
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