Conservative party

David Cameron will today support calls from his MPs to keep the Conservative party neutral during the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. The Times reports this morning that the Conservative party board will meet to discuss whether or not the party machine should remain strictly neutral. This would mean the campaign to stay in the EU, which the Prime Minister is expected to support, could not use campaign data gathered by CCHQ, or organise activists using the party’s structures. A Number 10 source tells me that Cameron will be represented at the board, and that his view is that the party should be neutral during the referendum. The meeting

Even though the Tories got their way on yesterday’s vote on tax credits, in which they managed to get a laws-of-physics-defying majority of 35, they cannot regard this matter as settled. Indeed, there is still a serious threat of a revolt on this matter. George Osborne held individual meetings with each of the handful of Tory MPs who were seriously worried about the policy, which lowers the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises. That strategy of wearing down each MP on their own rather than allowing them to work as a group clearly worked as in the

Jeremy Corbyn has been Labour leader for less than 48 hours and the Conservative party is already managing to set the tone of the debate. In a piece for POLITICO Europe today, I look at how the Tories are feeling about Corbyn’s victory over the weekend and their plans to deal with it. Some MPs feel sad that Labour is no longer a serious party. ‘Saturday was a sad day for our country and the Labour Party — I am not laughing,’ says one influential Tory MP. ‘The party of Ramsay Macdonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair has now been reduced to Jeremy Corbyn’. But any sorrow however is overwhelmed by jubilation that the next

It’s official: the Tory leadership contest is well and truly underway. No matter that everyone’s interested in the Labour result this weekend and no matter that David Cameron hasn’t even set a date for his departure. This evening, at a drinks reception in a parliamentary lair, Owen Paterson announced that he would be drawing up a set of robust Tory policies for whoever wants to stand as leader to adopt. Speaking to a group of MPs, peers and hacks, the Tory MP said that his think tank UK 2020 – which he said he set up after ‘I was fired’ by the Prime Minister – would work on a series

Following the government’s first Commons defeat of the new parliament, I understand that ministers are not going to try to reverse the primary legislation that introduces a ‘full fat’ version of the purdah restrictions on what central and local government can publish during the EU referendum campaign. But what the government can do to get its way is to use a statutory instrument to set out certain exemptions from those purdah restrictions. This was what the government amendment to new clause 10 of the legislation will allow: that changes to purdah can be introduced through secondary legislation, which must be approved by MPs. This means ministers can try again at a

So as predicted on Coffee House earlier, Tory rebels and the Labour frontbench did manage to conspire together this evening to defeat the government on purdah. The Commons voted against amendment 53 to the EU Referendum Bill 285 ayes to 312 noes, and then did not oppose Labour’s amendment 4, which means that a ‘full fat’ version of purdah has been approved by MPs. The Labour celebrations of this defeat were notably muted: it’s difficult to get too excited when your own party is in turmoil. But David Cameron has just suffered a defeat on a matter that the whips and ministers had been scheming over for months. First they snuck

Was there ever a more unilluminating political idea — for voters rather than practitioners — than triangulation? For those readers so pure and high-minded that they have not followed politics for 20 years, I should explain that triangulation came from Bill Clinton, was imported by Tony Blair, and is now practised by David Cameron. Clinton’s adviser, Dick Morris, put it thus: ‘The President needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party’s views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate.’ The Tories’ adoption of the Living Wage is the latest example. This concept, almost as mystically bogus as the medieval

Will the Tories scrap the Lib Dems’ silliest vanity project, free school meals for infants? The Daily Mail reports today that they might, amid spiralling costs and with the spending review approaching. Nick Clegg announced this daft scheme at his party’s conference in 2013. It sounded ever so wholesome when the Deputy Prime Minister promised a ‘healthy lunch’ for every child in reception and years 1 and 2. But the scheme – which also cost a lot more than intended to implement – was daft because it didn’t improve life for poor children. Sure, it was a nice ‘retail offer’ to parents who can afford to pay for lunch for their

A Jeremy Corbyn victory in the Labour leadership race now seems like a racing certainty. The consequences of this for Labour have been much discussed but in the magazine this week, I look at what it would mean for the Tories. The first, and most obvious, thing to say is that it would make 2020 the Tories’ election to lose — and they would have to make an epoch defining mistake to do so. But some Tories are worried about the prospect of a Corbyn victory. This isn’t just because they fear that bad opposition leads to bad government. But because they fret that Cameron and Osborne’s response to it will

Will ministers really avoid a defeat on the question of purdah in the EU referendum bill on Monday? They hope that amendments, tabled today (and attached in full here in advance of their publication tomorrow), will stop Conservative MPs flocking to Labour’s new clause that it has tabled to add to the Bill. But Labour sources tell me that they’re still considering voting against the amendment which brings back purdah but with a substantially narrowed scope. And given it only takes a handful of grumpy eurosceptics to vote against to make a defeat, the whips can’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Some eurosceptics I’ve spoken to think this

In this week’s Spectator, I profile the 2015 intake of Tory MPs: a bright, pragmatic bunch who don’t like to call themselves Thatcherite. Ministers who have sat in the Commons Chamber and heard maiden speeches from this new bunch have been seriously impressed, with some remarking that they’ve wondered what they’ve done with their own lives after hearing the extraordinary experiences that the new intake have brought with them into the Chamber. Those extraordinary experiences include working as postmen, teachers, doctors, rural auctioneers, and nurses. There are very few political animals who’ve slaved as special advisers before becoming MPs, or whose families are political dynasties. But the bulk of these

Watching the very pleasant Liz Kendall on television this week, I was struck by how extraordinary it is that more than 40 years have now passed since the Conservatives selected a woman leader and still the Labour party cannot bring itself to do so. (Although, come to think of it, it took Labour 142 years to catch up with the Conservatives in selecting a Jew, so perhaps we have another century to wait.) I am not necessarily saying that Ms Kendall is the answer — she seems able, but inexperienced — but there does appear to be a serious barrier to women at the very top of the Labour party.

What are the best political positions for Labour and the Conservatives to take to win back more voters? The Tories want to maintain and extend their victory, while Labour is trying to work out how to unite the left and encourage more people to turn out for the party. These two parties used to focus their attention on swing voters in the centre-ground, but politics has fragmented too much for that now. Things are, naturally, more difficult for Labour. The scale of its 2015 defeat means that just taking votes and seats from the SNP, Plaid and the Greens is insufficient to give the party a majority in 2020. The