Coalition

George Osborne’s commitment to a third high speed rail link in the future has gone down well this morning with a nice spread of business groups, northern MPs and Conservatives worried about the Tory appeal (or lack thereof) in the North. It has even gone down well with Nick Clegg, who has released a statement welcoming the Chancellor’s commitment, while of course arguing that the Lib Dems got there first. Clegg’s spokesman said: ‘Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats have led the charge in government to rebalance our economy so that it benefits 100,000 square miles of the country, rather than just one square mile in the City of London.

Danny Alexander doesn’t suntan well, but he looks more freckly than normal when we meet in HM Treasury.  He’s just back from the seaside town of Nairn in the Highlands, where, as the most senior Scot in the Cabinet, he’s been sent to fight in the front line of the Battle for Britain. People were queuing to sign up to the Better Together campaign, he says, and he has high hopes of defeating Alex Salmond on 18 September. It all added up to something rather rare for a Liberal Democrat: the feeling of being on the winning side in an election. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he has been

As expected, Nick de Bois’ amendment to the Criminal Courts and Justice Bill passed 404 votes to 53. It owes nothing to the Conservative frontbench, which abstained for reasons I’ve tried my best to outline here (it’s difficult to explain something that doesn’t make a grab deal of sense, especially when both parties have voted in different ways before, as on the boundary changes). And it owes nothing to the Liberal Democrats, who opposed the measure in Cabinet and in this vote. The result this evening is an example of the way the Coalition has reshaped the workings of government. Can’t get the Cabinet agreement you need on a policy?

David Cameron addressed the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers earlier this evening. The meeting was upbeat because of the introduction of the winner of Newark by-election Robert Jenrick and brief because Cameron had to go off and see the Queen. Cameron only took a handful of questions but all touched on Europe. Cameron defended opting back into the European Arrest Warrant, saying it was part of being touch on terrorism. He also said that he knew that there were those ‘in this room’ who wanted to leave the EU altogether but the only way you’ll get an In Out vote is with a Tory government. Unsurprisingly, Cameron aimed plenty of

The way the Lib Dems have responded to the Trojan Horse revelations must be causing the Conservatives to thank their lucky stars they took Tony Blair’s advice on shaking up the public sector and prioritised school reforms at the start of the Coalition, rather than leaving the reforms until later. Nick Clegg’s comments about academy oversight and curriculum requirements this morning did rather suggest that if they’d had their time again, his party would only have backed legislation with a rather different character. Naturally, the Conservatives in the Education department aren’t particularly impressed that this morning the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that ‘you need to get the balance right’ on

The Tories have held Newark with a comfortable majority of 7,000 plus. The party will be relieved to have won and delighted with the size of their majority over Ukip which was far larger than the 2,500 that Nigel Farage had been predicting earlier in the night. There will be relief in Downing Street and CCHQ that they have sidestepped this banana skin. Considering that the by-election was a result of the disgrace of the previous Tory MP Patrick Mercer and took place only 11 days after Ukip had topped the poll in the European Elections, it had the potential to be a disaster for the Tories that could have

‘There are three stages to any coalition,’ House of Cards creator Michael Dobbs told me at Tuesday’s annual Macmillan Lords vs Commons tug-of-war in the grounds of Westminster School. ‘First there is the seduction, tearing off each other’s bodices over five days of negotiations. Then came the consummation in the Rose Garden, followed later by a period of sober reflection.’ And which stage are we in now? I asked the Tory peer ‘The “sod off” stage.’

Chris Leslie’s speech today is intended to show that Labour is very fiscally responsible. It’s a noble task, and one the party knows it needs to hammer away at as much as it does on the cost-of-living, otherwise voters may not see that Labour is the trustworthy solution to the problem the party is highlighting. That said, the meat of this speech is very technical, and given it was delivered to the Institute of Chartered Accountants, perhaps not quite aimed at swing voters. Leslie is shouldering a big burden here, because the main thrust of his speech is that his party could not get elected in 2015 and promise unicorns

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_29_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the Lib Dem’s internal warfare” startat=818] Listen [/audioplayer]Nigel Farage is pretty good at giving people hangovers, and on Monday morning all three Westminster party leaders woke up with one. Ukip’s victory in the European elections represents the first time in more than a hundred years that Labour or the Tories had not won a nationwide vote. It showed that the old allegiances on which our politics are predicated have broken down. It also reminded us that none of the parties are national affairs any more; Labour came third in four regions, as the Tories did in six. On this result, Ukip have

For more than year Westminster has assumed that David Cameron would have a Tory crisis to deal with after the European Elections. Whenever anyone remarked on the Tories unifying, someone would say ‘well, wait until after the Euros’. The conventional wisdom was that the Tories coming third would lead to a slew of senior Tories pushing for more robust policies on immigration and Europe and more and more Tory MPs calling for a pact with Ukip. But this morning, Cameron has fewer problems than either Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg. The fact that the Tory party has responded so calmly to coming third in a nationwide election for the first

This weekend was always going to be an unpleasant one for Nick Clegg. The delay between the council results on Friday and tonight’s European Election count meant that the pain was going to be drawn out for the Liberal Democrats, giving activists plenty of time to vent their anger at the leadership. So far, the anti-Clegg mutterings have been fairly limited. There are no big beasts calling for him to go. This could change after tonight’s results, especially if the Lib Dems come behind the Greens. But I suspect that three things will keep Clegg safe. 1). He’s made very clear he won’t go without a fight. Trying to force

Only one party can be happy with the local elections results so far, Ukip. Nigel Farage’s party has so far added 86 councilors to its tally and these results suggest that Sunday, when the European Election votes are counted, should be a good night for the party. Labour’s results have been mixed to disappointing. Their best news of the night was picking up Hammersmith and Fulham off the Tories. Knocking over one of the Tories’ flagship councils will delight Labour. But Hammersmith is a region where the demographics have been running against the Tories, look at how Shaun Bailey failed to win the parliamentary seat last time. Labour has also

We have had much occasion to reflect, recently, on Disraeli’s dictum that Britain ‘does not love coalitions’. It’s now becoming depressingly clear that coalitions don’t much love Britain either. What started off as functional coalition government has descended into the most appalling policy blackmail which I looked at in my Daily Telegraph column yesterday. I said that granting ‘minority’ status to the Cornish was the result of such a horse-trade. We’ve had more examples today. The Daily Mail has stood up the fact that the Cornish move was in return for Clegg approving a £600 million reform of Town Hall pensions. The Times leader joins this theme, saying the horse trading is

I am beginning to think that Dominic Cummings has driven Nick Clegg round the bend. The Lib Dem leader should want this row over universal free school meals to go away; it is a massive distraction with elections only six days away. But he can’t help himself from keeping it going. So, today we have a joint Gove Laws op-ed in The Times declaring that they are not at loggerheads over the policy. This is accompanied by a news story which reveals that Clegg demanded that Gove write the piece. The piece also reveals, rather unhelpfully, that some schools are not on track to deliver the policy in time for

The Coalition has been much more of a success than anyone could have predicted when it formed in 2010. It hasn’t just held together for spending cuts, but has passed important reforms to welfare and education. It’s important to repeat that now, when the partnership is growing increasingly tired and snappy. The parties spent yesterday pecking at one another over whether or not to introduce tougher mandatory sentences for repeat knife offences. They won’t produce a Queen’s Speech bursting with legislative excitements, either. But one of the things that this Coalition has shown us is that it’s not just the policy red lines that make a difference to whether a

Coalition relations are growing more fractious and sour. Even departments where the rapport between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems had been respectful, such as Justice, are starting to bicker publicly. Today the Mail splashes on a row between the two parties over knife crime, in the week of the stabbing of teacher Ann Maguire. Nick Clegg has refused to support mandatory minimum sentences for repeat knife offences, and the normally secret letters discussing the measures have made their way into the pages of a newspaper. Only a few months ago, ministers and advisers thought things were going sufficiently well in most parts of the Coalition (aside from Education, which

Danny Alexander’s comments to the BBC that, in the event of another hung parliament, the Lib Dems wouldn’t make a confidence and supply deal with either the Tories or Labour, is the clearest statement yet of the leadership’s position. The Clegg circle believes that a second term in government is crucial to consolidating the changes that he made to the party, to making the Liberal Democrats think like a party of government. Not everyone in the party is so keen on a second coalition. One influential Lib Dem MP told me a few months back that he thought a post 2015 coalition with either party would be a disaster for

Despite the stream of very good economic news (as described by Fraser and James), you won’t catch ministers saying that the crisis in living standards is ‘over’ because there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Trussell Trust, the Christian charity, has today published new statistics on food bank use. The headline figure is shocking: “913,138 people received three days’ emergency food from Trussell Trust foodbanks in 2013-14 compared to 346,992 in 2012-13”. The trust says that this is merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’ because the figures do not account for other foodbank providers. There is also, the trust says, no way of estimating how many people are