Conservative party

It is probably reasonably cold comfort to him, given he’s already lost his Cabinet job, but Grant Shapps has today seen a Wikipedia administrator who accused him of editing his own page and those of other ministers reprimanded. Wikipedia conducted an investigation, which concluded there was no evidence Shapps was connected to an account called Contribsx which made edits to his profile. It said the administrator in question, who operated under the name ‘Chase me ladies, I’m the Cavalry’ (but whose real name was Richard Symonds), ‘struggled to provide an accurate timeline’ on blocking the account and coverage of the account in the Guardian. The site’s Arbitration Committee said Symonds

Over the last few weeks, a string of senior Tories have urged Zac Goldsmith to run for Mayor of London. Goldsmith is, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, regarded by the Tory hierarchy as giving the party the best chance of keeping City Hall blue. In a contest that it will be very difficult for the Tories to win, Goldsmith scrambles the race—what other Tory would get Green second preferences? The attraction of Goldsmith is particularly strong as Nick Ferrari, as Daniel Boffey writes in the Observer, is unlikely to throw his hat in the ring. At the top of the Tory party, there is a belief that

Given that Zac Goldsmith once likened the possibility of himself running for City Hall to ‘a suicide mission‘, it comes as little surprise that not everyone in the Tory camp is ecstatic about the Richmond Park MP’s rumoured London mayoral bid. Mr S understands that there are concerns that after Labour increased its control of the capital in the general election, the Old Etonian, who is currently the odds-on favourite to be the Conservative candidate, may be viewed as too posh to appeal to the more diverse London boroughs. As a result, Steerpike hears that there is growing support in the Conservative camp for Syed Kamall to go for the top job. As the working-class

The first PMQs after an election victory is a moment to savour for a Prime Minister. He knows that the result gives him a trump card he can play again and again. So, it was unsurprising that Harriet Harman made little progress against Cameron. He treated it as a gentle net session, meeting each question with a slightly more aggressive and expansive answer. He did, though, seem slightly discombobulated by Ed Balls’ absence. Early on he made a joke about Balls’ defeat and then looked over to where Balls used to sit to drive the point home, but Balls – of course — wasn’t there. The main event today, though,

Westminster is still recovering from the 2015 election but some Conservatives are already thinking ahead to 2020. Two of Conservative HQ’s activist movements, Team 2015 and Roadtrip 2015, were key in mobilising support on the ground, as well as getting out the vote. Although Team 2020 is a long way off from hitting the stump, a key member of the Tories’ operation is planning to continue this work from outside the party. Grant Shapps’ former chief of staff Paul Abbott is leaving Conservative HQ to run Conservative Way Forward, the Thatcherite pressure group that counts tub-thumpers Norman Tebbit, Liam Fox and Conor Burns among its patrons. Abbott previously worked for

Number 10 has not given an official denial that David Cameron has ruled out pulling out of the European Convention on human rights, with the Prime Minister’s official spokeswoman today saying that the manifesto was ‘absolutely’ the best guide to the Prime Minister’s position on human rights reform. This is what the manifesto says on human rights: We will reform human rights law and our legal system We have stopped prisoners from having the vote, and have deported suspected terrorists such as Abu Qatada, despite all the problems created by Labour’s human rights laws. The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of

David Cameron has to walk two tightropes on Europe, and at the same time too. The first is to negotiate a deal with other European leaders that satisfies the bulk of his Euro-sceptic party. If this was not difficult enough, simultaneously Cameron has to show voters that the European question isn’t consuming all of his government’s energies. For despite its importance, it still rankles relatively low on the public’s list of priorities. To address the latter point, I’m told that Cameron will make a major domestic policy announcement in the week of every EU summit in an effort to show that he is not taking his eyes off the home front.

On election night, between the exit poll suggesting the Conservatives would be back in a coalition government and the slow realisation that they were heading for a majority, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon was heard remarking to colleagues that the UK might just end up maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP after all. He was banking, for a few hours anyway, on the DUP playing enough of a role in the formation of the next government that the Tories would have to commit to maintaining spending at that level – the target set by Nato and endorsed by David Cameron – in order to bring Nigel Dodds and

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/defeatingisis/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Rob Oxley discuss David Cameron’s EU negotiations so far” startat=1493] Listen [/audioplayer]We have just had a very insular general election campaign, but the mood at Westminster is now determined by news from foreign capitals. There was a flurry of excitement last Wednesday when the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaüble, suggested linking the British renegotiation to eurozone reform. It led to much talk of a European ‘Grand Bargain’, with Germany and the northern European countries given greater supervision of eurozone finances, the French and the southern Europeans given an explicit, written commitment to ‘solidarity’ within the currency union, and the British offered single-market protections, an opt-out