Coalition

Sir George Young’s appointment as chief whip is testament to both the respect David Cameron holds him in and the Prime Minister’s intense dislike of reshuffles. This is the second time that Cameron has asked Young to step in after a colleague has imploded, the first time was in 2009 when Alan Duncan was caught complaining about how MPs were ‘treated like shit’ and ‘forced to live on rations’. I suspect, though, that one thing that marked Young out this time was that his appointment would not require any other changes in the government ranks. Sir George is one of the politest people that you’re ever likely to meet. I

Conor Burns, the Conservative MP who resigned from the government over Lords reform, is livid with Nick Clegg’s smug declaration that the Liberal Democrats are not going to abstain from the Tories’ vote on electoral boundaries but actively vote with the opposition. It’s revenge on Burns and his cohort of true blues for killing the yellows’ beloved Lords reform bill earlier in the year; and it suggests that the rulebook has gone out the window: ‘It appears to prove what many have long feared: it’s one rule for the Conservatives, who have to resign or be sacked to vote against the government, and another rule for the Deputy Prime Minister who just

This is a story that’s going to run and run until MPs walk through the lobbies next year in the vote approving the boundary reforms: senior Tories are plotting to buy the Lib Dems off from blocking changes to constituencies by offering them state funding of political parties. The latest plot has surfaced in today’s Financial Times, with one Conservative minister telling the paper that the Lib Dems are ‘basically out of money’. As expected, the Lib Dems are rejecting the story, arguing there is no way that the party would do a deal on party funding when their plan to vote down the boundary reforms is revenge for the

Grant Shapps, the perky new Tory chairman, has just been grilled on The Sunday Politics by Andrew Neil about the Tories’ majority strategy. In a sign of how tight the next election will be, Shapps stressed that you don’t actually need 326 seats to have a majority in the Commons because Sinn Fein don’t take their seats. He said he was able to “reveal” the Tories’ 40/40 election strategy:  “We’re going to defend our [40] most marginal seats, and we’re going to go and attack the 40 seats that we will need to win. We’re going to focus and target on those seats in a way that we’ve never done

Number 10 will be pleased with the press coverage this morning of David Cameron’s conference speech. It has received a good write-up in nearly every centre-right newspaper. Cameron will today return to normal Number 10 work, addressing how to commemorate the centenary of World War One. Over the next few months, it’ll be intriguing to see how he strikes the balance between his party duties and his Prime Ministerial ones. Since the reshuffle in September, Cameron has been more political and his conference speech brought together his governing strategy and political strategy. This conference speech has, in many ways, fired the gun on a two and a half year election

The only mention that the Liberal Democrats received in David Cameron’s speech was a reference to the fact that they, unlike the Tories, had not been committed to real-terms increases in the NHS budget. Combine this with the fact that the speech saw Cameron pit the Tory view of the world against Labour’s and one could see an attempt to write the Liberal Democrats out of the script. The absence of the Liberal Democrats from the speech was, I’m informed, quite deliberate. Cameron’s implicit message was that the really big things the coalition is doing — education and welfare reform and the structural changes to the economy — are Conservative

Talking to senior Liberal Democrats and Conservatives about Ed Miliband’s speech, it is striking how similar their analyses of it are. Despite coalition, we’re entering into a period of stark government, opposition dividing lines. Pretty much everyone admits that Miliband has put to bed the question of his leadership of the Labour party and moved himself out of the IDS category. But they argue that he’s not dealt with Labour’s biggest weakness, the public’s belief that it spent and borrowed too much. One influential Liberal Democrat accused Miliband of ducking the generational challenge that is the deficit likening his speech to one in 1942 that didn’t mention there was a

Beyond whispering about a possible Lib-Lab pact, what actual policy evidence is there for the two parties looking to work together? Quite a lot, it turns out. The basis of a joint programme appears to be forming, with the parties already converging on a surprising number of policies. Here are some of the areas where Lib Dems and Labour would be quite comfortable with one another: Splitting up retail and investment banking Ed Miliband announced yesterday that he’d break up banks’ retail and investment operations. This policy is more associated with Vince Cable than any other politician, and the Business Secretary was a strong proponent of the plan when he

This conference season marks the half way point to the next election and we can see the political battle lines becoming clearer. The Tories, as their new poster campaign shows, intends to hammer Labour as the party that has learnt nothing from its mistakes. The argument of the coalition parties, which Nick Clegg previewed in Brighton, will be that the world has changed but Labour is stuck in the pre-crash era with its borrow and spend economics. Ed Miliband for his part wants to run as the man who is ‘on your side’. Today’s policy announcement taking aim at pension charges and the energy companies are designed to resonate with

Jo Swinson has just given what, by my count, is her third platform speech of the conference. All of them have been competently delivered and got her message across. She has an impressive ability to carry the hall with her. One can see why so many of those around Nick Clegg view her as the solution to the Lib Dems’ women problem. At the moment, all five of the party’s Cabinet ministers are men. Given her qualities as a communicator and her age—she’s 32, one would be tempted to tip Swinson as a future leader. But her seat is a problem. Her majority in East Dunbartonshire is only a touch

Vince Cable’s speech yesterday setting out how he thinks there’ll be another hung parliament was a significant moment. It was clear last night, that it had placed in peoples’ minds the question of whether Cable was more likely to hold Lib Dem seats than Nick Clegg and whether he would be able to better exploit a second hung parliament. This has added to the importance of Nick Clegg’s speech tomorrow. I understand that on Wednesday Clegg will be forceful rather than apologetic, it will be a book end to his sorry over tuition fees. He intends to use it to set out where he is taking his party. The Liberal

Never a man to avoid confrontation, Vince Cable decided to tackle gossip about his conversations with Labour head on when he appeared on stage at the Lib Dem conference this lunchtime. He has ‘excellent communications with politicians across the spectrum’, he joked, then reached into his pocket for his phone, joking that he had a message from Ed. He followed the same pattern as Tim Farron in criticising Labour’s record in government, just to make clear that the Lib Dems are fervently independent, rather than hankering after partnership with one party or another. But it was interesting that the majority of mentions for other parties in the Business Secretary’s speech

Distinctive not destructive — that’s Tim Farron’s view on how the Liberal Democrats can redefine themselves within government. Speaking to the New Statesman after his muted conference speech today, the Lib Dem president blamed the media’s narrow perception of the coalition for a misunderstanding of their partnership with the Tories. Tantalisingly, he made reference to a potential partnership elsewhere: ‘We’re either seen as cats in a sack or having a love-in. No one seems able to understand that this is a just a business arrangement…a relationship that could exist with another party’ Sadly, Farron made no reference to whom exactly that might be with. He did admit that the rose-garden