Coalition

Friday

James Forsyth

Clegg confirms the reshuffle

Nick Clegg’s statement just now was notable for how he stressed that he would like Chris Huhne back in the Cabinet if Huhne emerges from these current difficulties. This echoes what he said in his exchange of letters with the departing Energy and Climate Change Secretary. Cameron — notably — made no such comment in his letter to Huhne.   The reshuffle is widely as expected with Ed Davey coming into the Cabinet and Norman Lamb taking his post in the Business Department. But David Laws, who is already acting as an unofficial policy adviser to Clegg, doesn’t make a formal return to the government. Instead the spare pay roll

Peter Hoskin

Huhne resigns

We’ve just had a short statement from Chris Huhne — and, unsurprisingly, he’s resigning as Energy Secretary. His words and demeanour, though, were strikingly defiant. He described the CPS’s decision as ‘deeply regrettable,’ adding that, ‘I’m innocent of these charges, and I intend to fight this in the courts, and I’m confident that a jury will agree.’ In terms of a reshuffle, the likeliest outcome is that Ed Davey will glide into Huhne’s former job, and Norman Lamb will in turn take Davey’s place as a junior business minister. But there may be a pause before that’s confirmed, as Nick Clegg is currently travelling back to London from the Lib

James Forsyth James Forsyth

What Huhne’s case means for the Lib Dems

The biggest danger for the Liberal Democrats from this coming trial is that it turns the party into the butt of everybody’s jokes. Having gone into government and lost much of their original support by taking tough decisions, they have consoled themselves with the hope that they have now established themselves as a serious political party.   Their aim at the next election will be to present themselves as a credible party of government who will make the Tories more compassionate and Labour more fiscally responsible. But at the top party they are aware that there is a danger that a trial of Chris Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce

Peter Hoskin

Keir Starmer’s statement on Huhne

And here’s the full text: ‘This statement is made by the Crown Prosecution Service in the interests of transparency and accountability to explain the decisions reached in the cases of Mr Christopher Huhne and Ms Vasiliki Pryce and to explain the time taken in arriving at these decisions. A criminal complaint was made to Essex Police in May 2011, alleging that Ms Pryce had accepted responsibility for a speeding offence committed by Mr Huhne in 2003. That complaint was investigated by Essex Police and a file was passed to the CPS in late July 2011. The CPS advised that further investigations should be made, including obtaining certain material from a

Peter Hoskin

Chris Huhne charged by the CPS

The CPS was building up to a bang, not a whimper, after all: the Director of Public Prosecutions has just announced that Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce will have criminal charges brought against them for ‘perverting the course of justice’. Both will appear in court on 16 February. We have not yet heard from the minister himself, although there are reports that he will resign to ‘clear his name’, etc. And even if he didn’t volunteer to leave, all signs are that Cameron and Clegg will act on the advice of the cabinet secretary and shunt him out anyway. And his replacement? As it stands, the Lib Dems’ Ed Davey

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The strange survival of Labour England

Any CoffeeHousers with a taste for schadenfreude should read David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman. We have to move beyond big government, he declares. We need a growth strategy. I’m not sure if any Labour leader has ever argued otherwise: maybe, as Miliband implies, it has found one now. But, as I ask in my Daily Telegraph column today, what’s worse: a party that’s stuck in 1983, or a modernising movement that’s aiming for 1987? But talk to any Tory, and it’s hard to find any who think the 2015 election is in the bag. Four factors should prevent us from writing off Labour’s chances: 1) David Cameron is

Thursday

James Forsyth

Clegg faces a potential dilemma over Chris Huhne

Neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg is a fan of Chris Huhne. The Prime Minister would, by all accounts, shed few tears if Huhne had to step down.   But I suspect that the deputy Prime Minister will be hoping that tomorrow does not bring any adverse developments for the Energy and Climate Change Secretary. If there were to be charges, Clegg would be placed in a very difficult position. He would, despite his efforts to hide behind the Cabinet Secretary, have to decide whether the man he narrowly beat to the Lib Dem leadership could stay in post. This would be a lose-lose situation for Clegg for obvious reasons.

Daniel Korski

Don’t expect repatriation in this Parliament

When David Cameron wielded his veto at the European Council in December many Tories thought this was the beginning of a process of repatriation of powers from the EU. Myself, I thought it would be the high water mark of the government’s Euro-scepticism — and so it has proven. But things are about to get even worse for the Bill Cashes of this Parliament. In the short-term, at least.   Why so? Well, the government appears to be concluding that it will not get a receptive ear from its European partners on any repatriation bid. The other European leaders are simply too busy fixing the euro to even read any

Wednesday

Sebastian Payne

The politics hovering over the Falklands

With HMS Dauntless and now Prince William gliding across the Atlantic to reinforce Britain’s claim on the Falklands, there’s no denying that tensions with Argentina have been raised. But let’s not get carried away. As Admiral Sir John Woodward reminded us last week, the latest round of defence cuts rules out, or at least undermines, a British counter-invasion. The deployment of our shiniest boat is, in reality, the sum total of what Britain can do to scare off any invasion. And there could be another barrier to the government’s hawks, other than resources: namely, the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg did try to rally support for our cause on a trade

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour vote to the Tories’ benefit

Labour has just marched into the trap that George Osborne set them and voted against the benefits cap — again. As one gleeful Tory says, ‘we’re going to make sure everyone in the country knows how they voted on this.’   I suspect that in every Labour-held marginal that the Tories need to win to get a majority in 2015 the benefit cap will feature prominently on Tory literature. Labour MPs will be faced with the unenviable task of explaining why an able-bodied household where no one works should receive more in benefits than the average wage.   The cap chimes with the public’s sense of fairness — as the

Peter Hoskin

Your six-point guide to the Green Budget

As promised earlier, here’s my more detailed supplementary take on today’s IFS Green Budget. I’ve distilled it down into six points, but obviously there’s much, much more in the actual document itself. I’d recommend that you read the chapters on public sector pensions and pay, the 50p rate, and child benefit, in particular, if you’re so minded — as they’re very good summaries of some complicated fiscal areas. Anyway, here are my points: 1) The scary graph. As it does every year, the IFS has produced what I call the ‘scary graph’. It shows what our debt/GDP ratio would look like for decades hence under various circumstances. Even extending Osborne’s

Tuesday

James Forsyth

Fred shredded down to size

The removal of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood serves the coalition’s political purposes. It shows them being tough on a bad banker and reminds everyone that these problems happened on the last government’s watch and that Alex Salmond was cheering on RBS’s bid for ABN Amro. There are even some in government who are up for a fight over clawing back part of his pension or past bonuses believing it would put both Goodwin and the human rights act in the dock. This is not to say that the removal of his knighthood was not merited. Goodwin didn’t do much of a service to banking, after all. There’s another lesson in this:

Peter Hoskin

<del>Sir</del> Fred Goodwin

And so Fred Goodwin has lost his knighthood. Here’s the Cabinet Office statement (and some of my previous thoughts here): ‘It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled. This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on the advice of the Forfeiture Committee, which advised that Fred Goodwin had brought the honours system in to disrepute. The scale and severity of the impact of his actions as CEO of RBS made this an exceptional case. In 2008 the Government had to provide £20bn of new equity to recapitalise RBS and ensure its

Jonathan Jones

The Tories are extending their lead on the economy

It looks like Dave’s still made of Teflon. Even after the economy shrank by 0.2 per cent and the unemployment rate rose to its highest point since 1995, the public still think his party is better at handling the economy than Labour. And the Tories’ lead on what is by far the most important issue to voters hasn’t just survived all this bad economic news — it’s actually grown. Before Christmas, 31 per cent said the Tories would best handle the economy, against 27 per cent for Labour. In today’s YouGov poll, that four point lead has trebled to become a 12 point lead — the biggest since autumn 2010:

Monday

James Forsyth

Modernisation 2.0

One of the flaws of Tory modernisation was that it was never interested enough in pounds and pence. Social issues, the environment and public service reform were what the modernisers specialised in, not economics. But tonight’s Macmillan lecture by Nick Boles, one of the most intellectually influential modernisers, is devoted to the subject of how Britain’s global competiveness in the global economy can be improved. His argument is that: ‘What really threatens the general wellbeing of the British people is the stalling of productivity growth and the certainty that the next 20 years will expose them to competition that is vastly more intense than anything we have ever seen. If

Jonathan Jones

The tuition fee effect, revealed

The coalition’s tuition fee rise will put young people from poor backgrounds off applying to university — or so we were told by Labour and the National Union of Students. But now we can actually put that claim to the test. UCAS today revealed how many of that first year group to be affected by the rise have applied to university. So what does those number tell us? Looking at the headlines resulting from the release, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Team Miliband have been vindicated. ‘University applications plunge 9% after tuition fees are trebled,’ proclaims the Daily Mail. ‘Thousands give up on university because of tuition fees,’ says

Sunday

James Forsyth

Peston: Hester will not take bonus

Stephen Hester’s decision to waive his bonus, revealed by Robert Peston just after 10 o’clock, will be a source of great relief to David Cameron and George Osborne. A story that could have dragged on for weeks, undermining their argument about fairness has just lost most of its potency. Ed Miliband, though, will be able to claim — with some justification — that it was the threat of a Commons vote on the matter that led to Hester renouncing his bonus. But this isn’t quite the end of this business. There’s now the question of what happens to the bonuses for other members of staff at RBS and then there

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour seizes on Hester’s bonus

The issue of Stephen Hester’s bonus is going to carry on hurting the government. Labour has now announced that it will use an opposition day debate on 7 February to hold a parliamentary vote on the issue. The coalition will either have to lose, an admittedly non-binding vote, or whip its MPs to go through the lobbies in defence of Hester’s bonus. As Labour showed when it used the threat of a Commons vote to push Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to abandon its bid for full control of BSkyB, the bully pulpit of Parliament can be extremely effective. These votes also bring out tensions within the two coalition parties. I

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

A skewed response to a skewed question

‘A clear majority of people in Scotland now back independence, according to an exclusive poll for the Sunday Express. Using Alex Salmond’s preferred referendum question, the Vision Critical survey found 51 per cent would vote ‘yes’ with 39 per cent against. If such a dramatic result were repeated in the autumn of 2014, the First Minister would have an absolute mandate to negotiate an end to the Union with England.’ So runs the story. CoffeeHousers may have spotted two of the snags: the poll uses Salmond’s laughably loaded question, and seems to have been conducted by a chain of opticians. Further inspection gives a sample size of around 2,000 people,

Peter Hoskin

The government’s Hester problem intensifies

First there was Fred Goodwin, now there’s Stephen Hester. The chief executive of RBS is fast becoming the bête noire of the British banking system, thanks to his roughly £1 million share bonus which, we learn in the Sunday Times (£) this morning, may be topped up with an extra £8 million over the next few years. Little wonder that Iain Duncan Smith admitted on the Marr show earlier that there may be a severe public backlash, and that the government could suffer from it. He suggested that it would be better, for all concerned, were Hester just to forego the million. It’s one of those debates where it’s easy