Coalition

It is hard to watch Chris Grayling’s interview with Andrew Neil on BBC1’s Sunday Politics and not conclude that Britain’s relationship with the European Court of Human Rights needs changing. The Justice Secretary effectively concedes that he can’t, as Lord Chancellor, vote to maintain the ban on prisoners voting. But ‘Parliament has the right to overrule the European Court of Human Rights.’ So we’re not stuck, Britain can do what it likes. Or, more accurately, what Parliament votes for. It looks likely that we’ll end up with Parliament resolving to uphold the ban on prisoner voting, but with the Secretary of State – as Lord Chancellor – obliged to sit

Say what you will about Nick Clegg’s decision to take a different stance from the Prime Minister on Leveson, but the Deputy Prime Minister has this week effected another big change to the way Westminster government works. He has sent party members an email today explaining why he felt it was necessary to make a separate statement to David Cameron in the Commons on Thursday. The Lib Dem leader writes: As you may have picked up, the Prime Minister and I disagreed; there is not yet an agreed ‘government line’. That’s in part why we had to make separate statements – a major departure from Parliamentary protocol, apparently. I’m often

George Osborne has recruited Neil O’Brien, the director of the leading centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, as an adviser. O’Brien will start work in the New Year with a particular focus on the next phase of coalition policy development. I also suspect that O’Brien will have a major influence on Tory thinking heading to 2015 and beyond. The Northern Lights report he commissioned at Policy Exchange is regarded in Tory circles as one of the most important assessments of the challenge facing the party in trying to win a majority. I understand that Osborne has been impressed by the work that O’Brien has produced at Policy Exchange. At Policy Exchange,

As teams in secure rooms in Downing Street pore over the half dozen copies of the Leveson report, which arrived this morning, the Liberal Democrats are already starting to work out what they’ll need to do if David Cameron and Nick Clegg find they cannot agree on the government’s response. The Lib Dems have approached the Speaker to find out whether there is a possibility that Nick Clegg could give his own separate statement following Cameron’s own response in the Commons tomorrow afternoon. Sources say they hope that this is an unlikely scenario, but add that ‘he would like to be able to make his position clear in Parliament’ if

Some tickets to the Spectator’s next debate, ‘No Ifs, No Buts: Heathrow Must Have a Third Runway’, are still available. Tim Yeo, chairman of the energy and climate change select committee, and Jon Moulton, chairman of Better Capital, and influential Tory backbencher Graham Brady will be speaking in favour of the motion, while Daniel Moylan, Boris’ right hand man, and John Stewart, chairman of the ClearSkies campaign, will oppose the motion. Click here for more information and the box office. In the piece below, Cheryl Gillan MP, the former Secretary of State for Wales, discusses many of the economic issues that surround this vital political debate. The danger of putting the cart before the horse

On the Sunday Politics just now, Grant Shapps confirmed to Andrew Neil The Spectator’s story that 20 of the 40 Tory target seats at the next election are Liberal Democrat held. Shapps stressed that it was nothing personal about the Liberal Democrats but just a reflection of what needed to be done if the Tories were to win a majority. When asked why voters in Liberal Democrat Ministers constituencies should prefer a Tory majority to the current coalition, Shapps cited the need to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights as well as the global economic race. This suggests that these issues will

On Monday, the government is set to announce its alcohol strategy. It is expected that this will call for a minimum unit price of 40p. As Graham Wilson reports in The Sun, this idea is a personal favourite of the Prime Minister but opposed by several influential members of the Cabinet. These ministers worry that it’ll be seen as the rich man taking away the poor man’s pleasure. Given the media reaction to the pasty tax and the caravan tax, this is a legitimate concern. They also fear that a successful legal challenge to it, which is a distinct possibility, would do further damage to the government’s reputation for competence.

The Tories have a 40:40 strategy for the next election. The aim is to defend their 40 most vulnerable seats and try and win 40 others to give the party a majority. So which 40 are in their sights? Normally, it’s an easy one to answer: you just look at the last election and count which seats have the most narrow Tory defeat. If you’d done this, there would only be 9 Liberal Democrat MPs on the Tory hit list. But the Liberal Democrat vote has changed radically since the last election. So Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary,  has drawn up a new list, added in demographic factors, current polling

No government ever wants to look like it is in office but not in power. This is why this country’s inability to deport Abu Qatada is causing such concern in Conservative circles. David Cameron will be well aware of the symbolism of the issue. In his conference speech this year, he boasted that “For years people asked why we couldn’t get rid of those radical preachers who spout hatred about Britain while living off the taxpayer……well, Theresa May – a great Home Secretary – has done it – and she’s got Abu Hamza on that plane and out of our country to face justice.” Today, Cameron declared himself ‘completely fed

We are now closer to the 2015 election than the 2010 one. We also expected by now to have the coalition’s mid-term review, the document that will set out its priorities for the second half of its term in office. But its publication has now been delayed until January. This is because the debates about what new policies to include in it are still going on. The quad—David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander—met on November 1st to discuss various ideas for it. They were, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, joined by Oliver Letwin and David Laws for this meeting with the Cabinet Secretary Jeremy

Nick Clegg and David Cameron still can’t agree over the future of the boundary review, and their continuing stalemate led to legislation on individual voter registration being shelved indefinitely in the House of Lords. An amendment to the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill tabled by Labour’s Lord Hart and backed by Lib Dem Lord Rennard would have delayed the changes until 2018 – in line with Nick Clegg’s pledge of revenge this summer that the review be delayed until after the 2015 election. The problem is that Cameron didn’t know about the amendment until his staff read about it on Paul Waugh’s blog, and he apparently lost his rag with

Cutting the EU budget is a very good idea. Much of it is spent inefficiently and its priorities are all wrong, 40 percent of it goes on agriculture. Given that a cut would also be popular with voters, why doesn’t David Cameron propose one? The reason is that there’s virtually no chance of getting agreement to it. If there’s no agreement, the EU will move to annual budgets decided by qualified majority voting—stripping Britain of its veto. But Labour’s tactical positioning in calling for an EU budget cut has been, as Isabel said earlier, extremely clever. It has left Cameron defending a complicated position which puts him on the wrong

The economy is out of recession. It grew by 1 per cent in the third quarter of this year, which is the fastest quarterly growth rate since 2007. This positive number makes it a lot easier for the coalition to claim that the economy is ‘healing’. Expect to see ministers heading to TV studios to talk about how a million more private sector jobs have been created, how there are record number of new start ups and that inflation is down. Being out of recession makes it a lot easier for the coalition to defend its economic record. Today’s number should also serve to boost consumer confidence, to provide a