Conservative party

The pre EU referendum skirmishing stepped up a notch today. Chris Grayling became the first member of the Cabinet to start making the case for Out. While Vote Leave and Stronger In tangled over the question of a second referendum. As I write in the magazine this week, Vote Leave is increasingly keen on the idea of promising a second referendum on the terms of exit if Britain votes Out. The idea is that this would ‘de-risk’ voting Out and protect the campaign against claims from IN that Britain would get an awful deal from the rest of the EU if it voted to leave. I understand that George Osborne

David Cameron has strong views about the family; often ones that ought to remain inside his head. He quite is keen on marriage and good parenting, but how to make this into a government policy? He offers some thoughts in his speech today. His words: ‘In the end, getting parenting and the early years right isn’t just about the hardest-to-reach families; it’s about everyone. We all have to work at it. And if you don’t have a strong support network – if you don’t know other mums or dads – having your first child can be enormously isolating… Of course [kids] don’t come with a manual, but is it right

David Cameron might have announced this week that Cabinet Ministers will be allowed to campaign for Out come the EU referendum. But Downing Street is doing what it can to limit how many ministers take up this offer. At the moment, the consensus view around the Cabinet table is that four Cabinet Ministers are going to be for Out—Chris Grayling, Theresa Villiers, John Whittingdale and IDS—with another—Priti Patel—highly likely to. As I say in The Sun today, if Cameron can keep the number of Cabinet Outers down to four or five, Number 10 will be delighted. Cameron will be able to say that the vast majority of the Cabinet support

Liam Fox’s new year party at the Carlton Club has become the traditional start to the Tory Party’s year. This year there were 11 Cabinet members including the Chancellor, Home Secretary, Defence Secretary, Business Secretary and Boris Johnson. I’d say that most of the Tory MPs there are ‘leavers’, who have this week been given permission to campaign freely against a ‘remain’ campaign expected to be led by the Prime Minister.  So in this way, the old Tory wars are about to start again. I look at this in my Daily Telegraph column today. This is not Eurosceptic vs Europhile. This will be a battle between Eurosceptics: the ones who think

As expected, David Cameron is to suspend collective responsibility for ministers who wish to campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. The Prime Minister will give a statement this afternoon in which he is expected to announce a free vote on the matter. Ministers will not be able to speak out until after the renegotiation has concluded, which is fair enough as it would undermine Cameron’s authority to have them campaigning for Brexit before they’ve even seen what he has brought back. This is not a surprise – the whips had been working on this assumption for months – but it does show that the Tory leader is trying

David Cameron’s pledge to his MPs that none of them who want to stand again in 2020 will be left behind as a result of the boundary changes is a sign that the Prime Minister thinks party management will be seriously important this year. A fight between MPs over fewer constituencies would have been bad for party morale, and inevitably theories about MPs favoured by the party leadership being kept safe would have spread through the party. But given the changes aren’t being submitted until 2018, the decision to announce the ‘no-one left behind’ pledge now suggests that Cameron thinks 2016 is a good year to calm any Conservative nerves

There is no point in anyone trying to defend Oliver Letwin’s 1985 memo to Margaret Thatcher in which the then aide to the Prime Minister argued that white people were not prone to public disorder and that regeneration of inner city areas would only result in those from ethnic minorities setting up ‘in the disco and drug trade’. No-one has really tried, though Tim Montgomerie has rather kindly said that in his experience, the Downing Street policy chief doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. But it’s clear that at some point the gaffe-prone minister had a racist thought, and that he was comfortable enough with that thought to put

Was a political knighthood ever more deserved than Lynton Crosby’s? His personal involvement was the difference between defeat and victory – he kept Ed Miliband out of No10. As Tim Montgomerie  observed earlier, a hereditary peerage would be in order for that alone. We saw, in 2010, what a Tory general election campaign looks like if left in the hands of a Tory leadership more noted for its enthusiasm in campaigning than their expertise. Crosby distilled down the Tory offering and encouraged Cameron to drop the misnamed ‘modernisation’ agenda which had so narrowed the party’s popular appeal (and halved its membership). Crosby focused on the basics: tax cuts, efficiency, jobs, prosperity. The

Should ministers have so many special advisers? Should a party that promised to cut the number of these SpAds if it came to government admit that it got this wrong, having increased their number? The arguments in favour of more of these political staffers in government are well-rehearsed: if they’re good, they add expertise and political nouse to a department and they make it easier for ministers to communicate what they’re up to. Some are hopeless at both these things, but the best ones – and there are many excellent ones in both main parties at the moment – often keep the show on the road and ensure reforms actually

David Cameron is warming to the idea of making Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. As I write in The Sun this morning, Cameron is drawn to the idea of sending Boris to the Foreign Office in a post-May reshuffle. But a Cabinet ally of the Prime Minister stresses that Boris will have to be ‘unequivocally yes’ come the EU referendum if he is to be Foreign Secretary. It is easy to see why the idea of doing what it take to bind Boris in before the referendum is gaining traction in Number 10. Polling shows that Cameron backing Britain staying part of the EU gives the In campaign a big boost.

If the responses to last week’s Paris agreement on tackling climate change are anything to go by, you’d think politicians were warming to the issue. David Cameron said that ‘this generation has taken vital steps to ensure that our children and grandchildren will see that we did our duty in securing the future of our planet’. But the political excitement around the summit was not part of a trend, but a mere spike in interest. Politicians don’t talk very much about green issues at present. They barely discussed the environment at all during the election, and generally see it as being of such low salience that they needn’t talk too

Many suspect that the latest delay on a third runway at Heathrow is actually the government bending to the will of Zac Goldsmith. On the Daily Politics today, the Conservative’s London mayoral candidate said he hadn’t been consulted on the latest delay — all the communications have been one-way from him to the government, apparently — but he still welcomed the decision: ‘It’s an important issue, but it’s not as important as housing, it’s not as important as policing or TFL investments or any of these other issues, so I am delighted that Heathrow is not going to be the dominant issue in the run up to the Mayoral election, of course I am’. Goldsmith also argued this is

The last time David Cameron sat down with The Spectator for an interview, he was on a train and looking rather worried. There were just weeks to go until the general election and the polls were not moving. At the time, almost no one — and certainly not him — imagined that he was on the cusp of a historic election victory that would not just sweep the Tories to power but send Labour into an abyss. This time, we meet on another train. But he’s far more relaxed, reflecting on winning The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year award and recalling how election night brought him some of the ‘happiest

Lucy Allan has come under fire this month after she was accused of faking a death threat from a constituent. The Conservative MP posted a message from a user by the name of Rusty on her Facebook which asked her to rethink her stance on Syria airstrikes. While the message was hardly polite, the worst part came at the end with a sign-off that read ‘unless you die’. However, the email’s author denied writing the final line and posted on her Facebook to confront her about the edit. Since the incident Allen has released a statement admitting that she did add the line ‘unless you die’. However, she insists that this was

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreendelusion/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Steph Smith discuss whether all young politicians are oddballs” startat=1130] Listen [/audioplayer]Whenever the curtain is pulled back on youthful political activism, the picture is ugly. Three years ago, in Young, Bright and On the Right, the BBC followed students at Oxbridge fighting like vipers to get ahead in their university Conservative clubs. Along with the inevitable three-piece suits, wildly invented accents and endless talk of what ‘the party’ expected, there was also that characteristic lack of awareness that ‘the party’, like the rest of the world, remained largely indifferent to them. Now the suicide of a 21-year-old called Elliott Johnson has brought this world back

David Cameron has just said that the Commons will debate extending air strikes against Islamic State to Syria on Wednesday. Given that Cameron has repeatedly made clear that he wouldn’t bring the issue back to the Commons unless he was confident he could win a vote with a clear majority, this must mean that he calculates that Labour granting its MPs a free vote means that he now has the numbers he needs. Speaking from the Cabinet Room, Cameron argued that this ‘was the right thing to do’ as the UK’s allies had asked for this country’s help and because Islamic State does not respect the Iraqi / Syrian border,