Conservative party

For months now, Number 10 has been fretting about what to do about Romanian and Bulgarian immigration. From the end of this year, any Romanian and Bulgarian will be able to move here in search of work. Downing Street knows that if they come in large numbers it’ll negate everything that the government has done to try and get immigration under control. Fairly or not, it’ll be fatal to the Tories’ reputation for competence on this issue. David Cameron is, as today’s Times and Mail reveal, now planning a major intervention on this issue. He wants to achieve three things. First, show that his government is handling the issue better

In September 2012 Mr Steerpike revealed that 14 Tory MPs had signed letters to Graham Brady, the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, calling for a leadership challenge to David Cameron. Today, Adam Afriyie, the alleged leader-in-waiting (who has not written to Graham Brady), called a vote on his amendment to James Wharton’s EU Referendum Bill. The amendment is designed to bring forward the plebiscite to 2014, because it’s Afriyie’s belief that delaying the vote until 2017 will cost the Tories the next election. Mr Afriyie won just 15 votes. A coincidence? Probably not, but it’s certainly a telling sign of just how small the real anti-Cameron brigade is. Douglas Carswell, Nadine Dorries and Andrew Rossindell were among the dissenters. Guido

Another outbreak of the Tory Modernising Wars! What larks! Nick Boles’s speech to Bright Blue, a newish think tank for metropolitan swells folk who think the Tory message needs rethinking, has, as it was designed to, caused a minor rumpus. Rod Liddle thinks Boles is off his head. Iain Martin is kinder but concludes the Cameroons are still obsessed with fighting the wrong battles. Other commentators are gentler still, conceding that Boles is asking the right question but that he’s searching for answers in the wrong places. Nick Denys and, to some extent, Paul Goodman fall into this camp. On the other hand, Ian Birrell and Matt d’Ancona essentially agree

Another interesting contribution to the great debate from Nicholas Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford and someone who is considered ‘influential’. Nick has explained away the Conservative Party’s unpopularity in the polls, and its likely defeat at the next General Election, on a failure to proclaim loudly enough on liberal issues. The party should be ‘shouting from the rooftops’ about such issues as gay marriage, he said. I assume he means being in favour of gay marriage. I wonder if the rest of the country sees it that way. Have you ever heard, anywhere – outside North London – anyone express dissatisfaction with the Conservative Party because it is

‘On their own’ – those are  Nick Clegg’s watchwords for the 2015 election. His speech on the economy last week was spun as ‘one of his strongest attacks ever on the Labour Party’; but, while Clegg certainly did say that Labour would seriously damage your wealth, he remembered his mantra: ‘So don’t be fooled again: you cannot afford Labour. Let loose in government on their own they would wreck the recovery – costing jobs, driving up interest rates and undermining the growth needed to cut tax bills and fund public services. They cannot be allowed to undo all of the sacrifices that have been made and everything that has been

The Tories’ attempts to erase their own online history are wider than first thought. After ‘cleaning up’ their website by hiding pre-2010 speeches and announcements, The Guardian’s Alex Hern reveals that the WebCameron videos have been made private on YouTube: ‘Now it has emerged that every video on the Conservatives’ YouTube page that dates from before 2010 has been removed or marked as private. Videos such as Ask David Cameron: Shared ownership, EU referendum, PMQs are now marked as unavailable on YouTube. Others, such as Boris Johnson at the pre-election rally in Swindon, and David Cameron down on the farm, are now unlisted, ensuring that only users with a direct link

Voters in the North love Tory policies but hate the Tories. That’s the headline from some new YouGov polling on what voters in different parts of the country feel about the political parties and their policies. An overwhelming majority of voters in the North support cutting net immigration, same-sex marriage, the benefits cap, Help to Buy and raising the income tax allowance — all policies enacted by Conservatives in government. But, when asked which party they would consider voting for, 39 per cent of respondents in the North said that they would never consider voting Tory: Why do some many people in the North detest the Tories? Apparently, the Conservatives

Remember Cameron’s hug a husky speech? Or his lecture on ‘the need recast politics for the digital age?’ Well, good job you do because the Tory party has been trying to purge their online history, according to Computer Weekly. As Mark Ballard explains, someone at CCHQ has used a robots.txt file to block Google (and other search engines) from indexing the files: ‘…the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010. ‘It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google,

David Cameron’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet yesterday evening rehearsed some basic political arguments that will be honed between now and 2015. Cameron made a decent assault on Labour over the cost of living: ‘There are some people who seem to think that the way you reduce the cost of living in this country is for the state to spend more and more taxpayers’ money….At a time when family budgets are tight, it is really worth remembering that this spending comes out of the pockets of the same taxpayers whose living standards we want to see improve.’ The logical corollary of that statement is pretty obvious: smaller government and

In the average Tory seat, only around 0.5% of Tory voters are Tory members. Grants Shapps, the Tory chairman, wants to change this. He’s written to every Tory MP asking them to take charge of a push in their seat to raise this percentage to 3. If this drive succeeds, Tory membership would rise to 800,000 plus. Opinion among Tory MPs on this move is divided. Some think that the era of the mass membership political party is over. Others, though, argue that increasing membership is doable—even if Shapps target is a tad too ambitious. There is also the issue of how the Tories can increase their presence in areas

I can just about take bien pensant lefties attacking UKIP for ‘scaremongering’ about immigration and accusing the party of being racist and prejudiced and so on. After all, a good many of them would have unlimited and unrestricted immigration to this country – and I can at least see a logical and moral case to that argument, even if I don’t agree with it. But from a front bench Tory? I don’t know if you saw the ridiculous Anna Soubry MP spouting hypocritical bilge on Question Time. It was emetic. Accusing Nigel Farage of ‘putting fear into people’s hearts’ over the issue of immigration. How she could do that with