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[/audioplayer]Before David Cameron heads off for his summer holiday, he’ll be presented with a first draft of the Tory manifesto by Jo Johnson, Boris’s younger brother and a cautious, well-organised thinker. He dislikes publicity almost as much as the Mayor of London relishes it. Radical ministers lament that Johnson doesn’t like pushing their recalcitrant colleagues too far, but despite this, the early hints are that the manifesto will be a surprisingly bold document.
There will, though, be one thing missing from this draft: what to do about the English question. A member of the Tories’ home affairs manifesto committee group says that the subject was considered too contentious to discuss before the Scottish independence vote on 18 September.
This caution is understandable. Any plan to bar Scottish MPs from voting on certain issues would have been grist to the nationalist mill.
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