Chris grayling

Sunday

David Blackburn

Davis for Home Secretary?

The Express’ William Hickey column reports that David Davis, not Chris Grayling, will serve as Home Secretary should the Tories win the election. Here’s what Hickey heard: ‘I’m now told there have been mounting whispers among MPs that Grayling could lose out to David Davis for the Home Secretary’s job should the Tories win the general election. Only this week Davis, who stood down from the shadow post last year in order to champion civil liberties at a by-election, signalled he was ready to return to frontbench politics if offered a “proper job”. A colleague tells me: “David has never really been part of Cameron’s inner circle but many of

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Tory welfare plan is welcome but does not go far enough

The Tories new welfare plan is, it seems, their old welfare plan – with a more ambitious timeline. It’s to be welcomed, but this is not the step change that you’d expect. In Jan08 Chris Grayling broke new ground when he proposed diagnosing all 2.7m on incapacity benefit for what work they could do (as opposed to the ‘ill’ or ‘sick’ binary distinction). Today, they express an ambition to get this done in three years. Set aside questions as to whetehr you can find enough doctors to do 2,500 “capabilty asssessments” every day – all this means is going a little faster on the original Freud proposal. There is a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Tories in the stocks

Here’s something new for party conference season: real people. About 200 of them. Firemen. Unemployed. And, yes, workers. They are brought to you courtesy of Victoria Derbyshire’s Five Live show, where I am sitting at the back listening to this mass focus group session. It has become (for me, anyway) an unmissable feature of the party conference season – a welcome injection of real life into the all-too-myopic conferences. Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet members turn up knowing that this session will be about all the normal, disinterested person will hear about the conference. Now and again, she asks them to clap or boo depending if they agree or disagree. It’s

Friday

David Blackburn

A glimpse of Home Secretary Grayling?

Chris Grayling’s reputation as a one-dimensional attack-dog was accentuated by his ill-judged comparison of Britain with Baltimore. The argument laid against Grayling is that he shouts about the government but provides no more than a whisper about policy. However, Grayling shows deep and nuanced consideration of policy when interviewed by Martin Bright in the Jewish Chronicle. Grayling’s subject is extremism and failing multi-culturalism. I apologise for its length, but here is the key section: ‘“I think the government has to make it absolutely clear that anyone in our country who espouses violence is not going to be able to do business with the government of the day and in many

Thursday

David Blackburn

The Baroness Scotland’s housekeeper scandal exposes the mess our immigration system is in

The news that the UK Border agency will launch an investigation into allegations that the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, employed an illegal immigrant is, obviously, highly embarrassing for the government. With his customary lack of style, the Tories’ attack-dog Chris Grayling commented: “This is a Government that says all small employers should be prosecuted if they don’t know the immigration status of their employees and yet we have senior ministers who can’t be bothered to make the checks themselves. There is a real ‘one rule for them, one rule for us’ attitude at the heart of this Government and it is a disgrace.” That overstates the case. I can’t imagine

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Man on wire

It’s a fairly quiet day in Westminster, so Chris Grayling’s comparison between Britain and the gangland ghettos portrayed in The Wire is probably getting more attention than it would normally – after all, it’s not like the Tories haven’t majored on the “Broken Britain” theme before now.  But, even so, I think he may have erred in mentioning the acclaimed US TV series.  While superb, it is, don’t forget, the show that the chattering classes love to chatter about.  So, now, much of the coverage is about the TV programme rather than the problems Grayling is highlighting.  As Paul Waugh points out over at his indispensable blog, Grayling’s appearance on