Politics

Downing Street confirmed today that the Prime Minister will meet US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Downing Street this week. It sounds like a sensible plan, given Romney is so close to Obama in the polls at present. But there’s just one tiny little problem. I have, in my shorthand notes from a lobby briefing on 5 March 2012, a quote from the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, which says the following: ‘As a general rule we do not meet candidates in foreign elections.’ Then the spokesman was talking about David Cameron’s failure to meet François Hollande, who was in Britain while campaigning against Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

Tim Montgomerie has some excellent intelligence on ConHome this morning that Francis Maude is about to gain a new PPS. The Cabinet Office Minister’s former aide was Angie Bray, who was sacked after voting against the government at the second reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill. But Maude’s replacement PPS, Stuart Andrew, is also a rebel. He was one of the 81 who defied the three-line whip in the autumn to vote for a backbench motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. As Tim points out on his blog, this is a sign that rebels might still have a hope of a job in the

Bringing the UK Border Agency to heel has been one of the mammoth tasks facing ministers since the coalition formed. Ministers have recently been rather keen to suggest that backlogs in claims and migrants disappearing without a trace were coming under control – Immigration Minister Damian Green said at the start of this month that ‘we have gripped it and dealt with’ the problem of people overstaying their visa, for instance. But lest senior staff at the UK Border Agency were starting to pat themselves on the back for a good job well done, the Home Affairs Select Committee has released a damning report this morning which says performance is

The report published this week by Louise Casey, the Government’s ‘Troubled Families’ Tsar, has attracted a fair amount of criticism, but what it does illustrate is the chaotic lives these families lead – and the implausibility of thinking that their problems can be solved by the kind of flagship social policies traditionally favoured by either Conservatives or Labour. As Isabel put it, Conservative ‘reform of the welfare system will pass many of the families by. In these stories there is no calculated decision to opt out of the labour market because of generous benefits, more an endless failure to cope with life and the way it has worked out’. Likewise,

David Cameron’s decision to convene an inner Cabinet of seven Tories to advise him is a sensible move. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, calling this group together shows that Cameron knows he needs help handling his party. I understand that it meets regularly with a particular emphasis on the Conservative party side of coalition management. One Cabinet minister told me recently that the Prime Minister spends more time on coalition management than any other subject. To date, this has too often been at the expense of party management. Inevitably, if you spend most of the time thinking about what the Liberal Democrats will accept you begin to

‘Unfortunately, it’s not enough.’ That is, broadly, the conclusion of John Longworth, the director of the British Chamber of Commerce, who has penned a visceral critique of the government’s economic policy in the Observer. Nothing, it seems, is sufficient: half-hearted infrastructure investment, non-existent aviation policy, lethargic borrowing to business, and regulatory reform that leaves businesses ‘mired in a thicket of red tape’. Longworth laments economic policy being determined by ‘political short-termism, electoral calculation and presentation’. This swipe at George Osborne adds to the sense that professional and international bodies are turning on the chancellor, after the IMF’s warning last week (rather callous of it, considering that Osborne has been following