Politics blog + European Union

Lord Pearson, the outgoing Ukip leader. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA

British public life is the poorer today in consequence of the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch as leader of the UK Independence party. There has been something both engaging and dotty about his career – which made him the perfect man to lead Ukip in an appropriately ineffectual way.

PG Wodehouse would have loved him, and could not have invented a character so wacky and wayward as Pearson's joint deputy, Viscount Monckton, who is currently being hounded by the House of Lords for claiming to be a member – which he never has been. They are both Thatcherites run to seed.

Unfortunately for those of us who enjoyed Pearson's accident-orientated year as leader and felt it was the best possible solution to the Ukip question, he seems to have noticed his own unsuitability too. Hence this morning's statement that he is not best equipped to handle this leadership lark.

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David Cameron prepares for a fight with France and Germany over Turkey's admission to the EU. Photograph: Pool/REUTERS

The European Union has perfected the art in recent years of offending Turkey.

I remember a miserable evening in Luxembourg in 2005, during the British presidency of the EU, when formal membership negotiations with Turkey were meant to open. A predictable snag within the EU meant that foreign ministers, under the chairmanship of Jack Straw, could not confirm that the talks would actually begin.

Abdullah Gul, then the Turkish foreign minister who is now the country's president, is no fool. And so he told the foreign ministers that he would not sit in a hotel room in Luxembourg while the EU foreign ministers worked through their differences. Continue reading...

David Cameron, pictured with Angela Merkel in Berlin, has embarked on a rapprochement with the EU. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

Did Peter Mandelson play cupid for David and Angela?

It is well known that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was deeply upset when David Cameron abandoned the main centre right grouping in the European Parliament.

Word went out that Merkel wanted to sever ties as a sign of her displeasure. That never quite happened, leading Tories to believe that Merkel realised she would always have to keep lines open to a future British prime minister.

But now we learn that there was an unsung hero who ensured that Angela and David hit it off the moment he entered No 10. Yes Peter Mandelson, patriot and pro-European, made sure that Angela never gave up on David.

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Samantha Cameron with a Madame Tussauds waxwork of her husband David today. Photograph: Rex Features

Hélène Mulholland with all today's politics news as it happened, including Nick Clegg's appeal to the public to nominate laws to be repealed, and William Hague's attempt to increase UK influence in the EU

David Cameron in Brussels last week. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA

While we're waiting for George Osborne's budget let's look on the bright side over the coalition and Europe. It's usually the sensible thing to do, as Esther Rantzen points out in a different context today – it's her 70th birthday – in the Daily Mail.

Happy birthday, Esther, and well done David Cameron over your handling of the sensitive T-word at last weekend's European council – or summit as we used to call them when they mattered more. If the chancellor is half as calm at 12.30 we will all sleep more soundly.

After his trip to Brussels – no more gallivanting to Corfu or Cannes for the summer summit, alas – Cameron reported to MPs yesterday in a tone that seems not to have outraged his Eurosceptics or sent the Mail editor's blood pressure in a northerly direction.

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David Cameron walks with European Commission president José Manuel Barroso to the EU summit in Brussels. Photograph: Virginia Mayo/AP

As an avid Anglophile, the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, is clearly aware of the old English saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Barroso laid on a full English breakfast this morning for David Cameron when Cameron paid his first visit as prime minister to the Berlaymont headquarters of the European commission in Brussels. Over scrambled eggs and bacon (though no beans) in his top floor dining room, Barroso told Cameron that he was administering "exactly the right medicine" to tackle Britain's record fiscal deficit.

This – and Barroso's declaration that the EU should focus on promoting economic growth rather than building up its institutions – was hailed by Cameron as "music to my ears".

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David Cameron and the European commission president José Manuel Barroso in Brussels. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images

Join Hélène Mulholland for rolling coverage all the latest political developments as they happen

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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Cameron is off to Paris tonight for dinner with Nicolas Sarkozy before flying to Berlin tomorrow to see Angela Merkel. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

On the airwaves a few minutes ago Alistair Darling used the untypically flashy phrase "displacement activity" to describe Germany's obsession with regulating the hedge funds at a time when the euro teeters on the brink of what Angela Merkel – also untypically flashy – calls its existential crisis.

Our ex-chancellor is right about the hedge funds, which were not responsible for the 2007-09 phase of the ongoing financial crisis. Merkel is right about the threat. So the displacement activity jibe could extend to us all, fiddling while the Treaty of Rome burns.

Here, the BBC is gearing up excitedly for the Clegg-Cameron launch of the final version of the coalition agreement. Vince Cable is threatening to privatise the Royal Mail (who would want to buy it?) while the new prime minister takes time to all-but-abolish the backbench Tory 1922 committee.

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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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Eastern European migration is going down. Click image for full graphic

Gordon Brown's 'bigot' gaffe has highlighted immigration from Eastern Europe yet again in the general election campaign. Here's the data you need to understand the debate

Nick Herbert. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

It is fascinating to read in today's Guardian that David Cameron is to dispatch the Tories' most senior gay frontbencher Nick Herbert to Poland to encourage the Conservatives' new rightwing allies in the EU to moderate their homophobia.

Fascinating, first of all, because the announcement comes hours before tonight's TV debate on international affairs, in which the Tories' new alliance will be a major point of discussion.

But fascinating also because last autumn, when journalists first began to point out that the likes of the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS) were homophobic (anti-gay views are central to its Catholic fundamentalist view of life) they were attacked by the Tory media machine for being part of a Labour-led smear operation. The stories were nonsense, they said, and Labour-inspired lies.

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Liam Byrne. Photograph: Martin Godwin

The day the Conservatives' European parliamentary colleagues march through the streets of Riga commemorating dubious deeds in wartime may seem a strange day for the Tory frontbench to praise the European commission. But today the Conservatives were praising the commission to the skies.

The commission had declared, as it does regularly, that the British government's deficit reduction plan does not go far enough. Alistair Darling and his henchman Liam Byrne want to reduce the deficit to just 4.4% by 2014-15. The commission says it should come to down further to 3% by then, meaning an extra £26bn of cuts.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning Kenneth Clarke, the shadow business secretary, fell into a small hole. He started endearingly by wandering down memory lane saying "in my day", forgetting he is supposed to be still very much in his day. He then endorsed the commission's call for a faster reduction of the deficit, at which point Byrne pounced, claiming Clarke had just committed his party to further cuts.
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Steve Hilton, the man in charge of detoxifying the Tory brand, is to share an office with the party's media chief, Andy Coulson. Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA

Love, it would appear, is breaking out at Conservative Campaign HQ. Andy Coulson, the party's communications chief, and Steve Hilton, its director of strategy, are now sharing the same office at the party's HQ on Millbank.

The Coulson-Hilton love-in is designed, no doubt, to scotch rumours of a clash between the two figures at the top of the party. The news that the "yin and yang" of the Tory campaign are sharing an office is disclosed today by Tim Montgomerie, the founder and editor of ConservativeHome. Montgomerie writes:

Steve Hilton, director of strategy, and Andy Coulson, director of communications, are now sharing an office at the heart of operations. The two men have taken over the third floor's last available meeting room and now sit opposite each other. This uniting of the party's yin and yang is the beginning of a big effort to ensure better communication of the party's strategy.

Coulson, the Essex boy who became editor of the News of the World, and Hilton, who has been the brains behind the detoxification of the Tory brand, are said to have differed over election strategy. The two men have always been on friendly personal terms. But Coulson was said to favour a harder edge while Hilton wanted to focus on a sunnier, optimistic message of the future in the mould of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" theme.
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I was ploughing through George Osborne's Mais lecture with an icepack on my temple a few minutes ago when raucous noises from the kitchen radio distracted me.

It was the sound of Nigel Farage, the Ukip MEP, accusing Europe's latest new president, of having "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk".

Oh dear, the Mais lecture will have to wait while we dispatch investigators to the European parliament in Brussels, where the incident took place.

Why, oh why, are the Brits rude so often in public nowadays when once they were a byword on the continent for good manners and understatement, inhibited reticence even? Is there an election looming?Continue reading...