David cameron

Wednesday

Steerpike

Cruddas’s revenge

Roll up, roll up, Cameron-bashers everywhere. Peter Cruddas is planning to blow some of the £180,000 he won in libel damages against the Sunday Times with a ‘Victory Party’ at his City offices on 17 September. Cruddas was falsely accused of charging donors for access to Number 10, and he’s somewhat piqued at having got naff-all help from Dave when the story broke. This is a ‘thank you for standing by me party’ and it promises to feature in the book that Cruddas is writing about his bust-up with Downing St. The invitation warns: ‘You might be asked some questions by a ghost writer who will be in the audience.

Monday

James Forsyth

The wrong choice for Britain’s EU ambassador

David Cameron is committed to an EU referendum if he’s still Prime Minister after the next election. We also know that he’d like to lead the ‘In’ side if he can get a good enough deal. Given this, the fact that the FT is reporting that Ivan Rogers, the PM’s Europe adviser, is the frontrunner to be Britain’s ambassador to the EU is particularly disappointing. Rogers is a cerebral chap who knows the EU and its institutions back to front. But what he is not is someone who is a natural at driving a hard bargain. As one insider says, ‘he’s not a tough negotiator like Cunliffe’, a reference to

Thursday

Rod Liddle

This cant about protecting children from porn is really about protecting the coalition

I have tried very hard to become an afficianado of pornography, seeing as it is by far the most popular pastime in the world. Also, it annoys a lot of people that I don’t like, so I feel I should put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. But the trouble is, the scenarios never quite rattle my cage. I find myself despising the men involved, and disliking the women, before even the cap has been removed from the lubricant. This is an impediment to full enjoyment, feeling averse to the grunting, smug male half-wits and the unnaturally supplicant — and usually tattooed — ladies. I sometimes wonder

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The spotlight shifts to Labour

Politics abhors a news vacuum. So with the government on holiday, attention shifts to the opposition. This is why oppositions normally have a whole series of summer stories ready to fill this vacuum. But, oddly, we have heard little from the Labour front bench in the last ten days or so. One consequence of this is that criticisms of Ed Miliband’s leadership by the Labour backbencher George Mudie are going to get more play than they normally would in tomorrow’s papers. There’ve been none of the attacks on a government that you would expect from the opposition in the penultimate summer before a general election. It is hard not to

Wednesday

James Forsyth

EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson will not be standing in 2015

Boris Johnson will not stand for parliament at the next election, The Spectator understands. The Mayor of London has told the Cameron circle that he will not seek to return to the Commons in a pre-2015 by-election, nor will he stand at the general election. Boris’s decision not to be a candidate in 2015 indicates that he expects Cameron still to be Prime Minister and party leader after the general election. He has told friends that he has no desire to spend three years serving under Cameron. He reasons that if Cameron loses, creating a Tory leadership vacancy, he’ll be able to persuade an MP to rapidly stand aside for

David Blackburn

David Goodhart tells David Cameron how to tackle immigration by reforming the EU

Much, if not all, of the discussion about immigration in recent days has barely mentioned migration from the European Union, which, given the scale of such migration, was an oversight. Freedom of movement is sacred in Brussels – and indeed elsewhere on the continent. But the times they are a changing. The accession of Bulgaria and Romania has alarmed leaders on the frontier between old and new Europe, in capitals like Berlin, Stockholm and Copenhagen, where there is concern about the effect of a further wave of immigration on employment and public services. The think tank Demos says, in its response to the EU Balance of Competencies Review, that David

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Shapps’s trinity of Labour weaknesses

Grant Shapps’ latest broadside against Labour shows how keen the Tories are to frame the next election not as a referendum on their performance in government but as a choice between them and Labour. Shapps wants voters to think about the fact that the alternative to David Cameron as Prime Minister is ‘Miliband and Balls’ driving up Downing Street before they cast their ballots. The Tory Chairman’s speech, due to be delivered at Policy Exchange this morning, also shows where the Tories think Labour are vulnerable. Tellingly, he talks about ‘Miliband and Balls’ rather than just Miliband; the Tories believe that Balls’ presence is a reminder to voters of the

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Tory activists are feeling more confident. What about the Lib Dems?

A Conservative Home poll, which found that a majority of activists believe that the coalition is good for Britain, is the latest little boost for David Cameron, so says Paul Goodman. The Tories are having a good the summer; confidence is building. Yet there is, as numerous commentators and MPs are keen to stress, some way to go before the party can think of a majority. This means that the Lib Dems, who are likely to hold the balance of power in any future hung parliament, deserve some attention. There is not much meaty polling about the attitudes of Lib Dem activists; but, what there is, is quite telling:   Clegg and Co (or

Monday

James Forsyth

The demise of 111 spells trouble for the government

From David Cameron’s declaration that you could sum up his political priorities in the three letters N H S, to the commitment to increase the health budget every year, the Cameroons have sought to reassure on the health service. They want voters to believe that it is safe in their hands. This is what gives the row over the NHS’s 111 helpline number its political importance. Labour, still fuming at how the Tories used the Keogh review to attack its record on the NHS, is trying to use the help-line’s problems to show that ‘you can’t trust David Cameron with the NHS’. The other problem for the government is that

Sunday

James Forsyth

The three places where the Tories want to hit Labour hardest

In the last few months, the Tories have–quite deliberately—behaved like an aggressive opposition. They’ve sought to constantly attack Labour, trying to force them onto the back foot. Even with David Cameron and George Osborne away on holiday, the Tories are determined to keep doing this. On Wednesday, Grant Shapps will launch the Tories’ summer offensive against Labour. He, in the kind of language more commonly used to promote summer horror films than a political agenda, will invite voters ‘to imagine a world where Ed Balls and Ed Miliband end up back in Downing Street.’ This is all part of the Tories’ efforts to link Miliband to Gordon Brown and memories

David Blackburn

Commons committee worsens the Tories’ immigration headache

Yesterday saw a spate of articles about the government’s immigration van pilot scheme. And today the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) damns immigration figures as a ‘blunt instrument’ and not ‘fit for purpose’. The nub of the problem is that the methodology is outdated, having been designed in a time when migration was in the 10,000s a year rather than the 100,000s. A sample size of 5,000 identified through the International Passenger Survey, which is drawn from UK ports and airports, is not sufficiently broad to construct accurate estimates. New methodology is required, PASC says. You can read the whole thing here. This will – and should – raise further questions

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Lynton Crosby: I didn’t discuss plain packaging with the PM

After weeks of the Prime Minister and his team dancing on a semantic pinhead over whether they discussed plain cigarette packaging with, or were lobbied by, Lynton Crosby, the man himself has made a rare public intervention. The Press Association reports him denying that he had ‘any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister’ on plain packaging. Crosby added: ‘What the Prime Minister said should be enough for any ordinary person.’ But it wasn’t really, because David Cameron did rather lose his cool on the Marr Show at the weekend, telling Andrew Marr that his insistence that Crosby had ‘not intervened’ was ‘the only answer you’re getting’. While

Monday

Isabel Hardman

PM’s porn crackdown replicates Tory EU campaign success

Further evidence of Number 10 finding a hard-headed campaigning zeal reaches this blog, in the form of a campaigning website called Protecting Our Children. It includes a petition ‘to support David Cameron’s call for ISPs to introduce Family Friendly Filters as soon as possible’, and facts about internet safety and what it is that the ‘the Prime Minister and ISPs have worked together to ensure’. If you can hear a faint sound of bells ringing as you browse this site, that’s because it is a carbon copy of the LetBritainDecide website. Tory MPs, including those who don’t always put their hand up to support the Prime Minister, are tweeting away

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Can we trust the state to censor porn?

The most sweeping censorship is always the most objectionable. In principle, however, there is nothing wrong with David Cameron’s sweeping proposal that the customers of internet service providers must prove that they are 18 or over before they can watch online pornography. The rule for liberal democracies is (or ought to be) that consenting adults are free to watch, read and listen to what they want. It stops child pornography – because by definition children are not consenting adults – and it could stop children accessing pornographic sites. Children are no more able to give informed consent to watching pornography than they are to appearing in it – if ‘appear’

Sebastian Payne

Porn, porn everywhere. But will David Cameron’s proposals actually work?

Has the Prime Minister been too naïve in cooking up plans to tackle unadulterated online access to porn? Today’s Daily Mail is totally ecstatic at the proposals, but fails to take into account how difficult regulating the Internet can be. Unless David Cameron decides to go for the totalitarian Great Firewall of China approach — which filters every tiny piece of traffic, known as packets — the proposals will have a similar effect to alcohol prohibition. Porngraphy will go even deeper underground; into the encrypted untraceable bowels of the web which are nigh impossible to infiltrate. Some of Cameron’s proposals are not entirely useless. Opt-in filters for Internet providers will work much like Google SafeSearch already

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s porn announcement shows unusual media aggression

If it was front page warmth and approval he was looking for, the Prime Minister’s sudden crackdown on internet firms has been a resounding success. Just the sort of thing to stir up even more good feeling as the Conservative party bounces from one bit of good news to another. He has of course provoked a fierce row between libertarians and conservatives about whether a filter is the right thing, whether it will work, and whether the Prime Minister and his adviser on the sexualisation of childhood Claire Perry have conflated legal porn and illegal child pornography. And the strange thing was that the talks between Maria Miller and the

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Well-organised differentiation could help Cameron avoid Coalition break-up pressure

That senior Tories are urging David Cameron to break up the Coalition early so the Conservatives can fight the election unencumbered by those pesky Lib Dems is hardly going to dent the Prime Minister’s chillaxing this summer: his party is in a good shape and the timing of Graham Brady and Bernard Jenkin’s intervention in the Sunday Telegraph suggests they are genuinely trying to be helpful rather than cause internal party strife to damage the Prime Minister. All the indications from the top are that both Tories and Lib Dems want to go all the way with this Coalition, and those who might benefit from an early split, such as

Thursday

Steerpike

Philip Blond for Mayor of London?

While David Cameron, assisted by a trio of pyjama-clad children and the Chancellor, was entertaining the ladies and gentleman of Her Majesty’s Loyal Press Corps in No. 10, right-wing elements of the Conservative Party were carousing by the river in Chelsea. IDS, Welsh Secretary David Jones and venerable right-wingers Sir Gerald Howarth and Graham Brady joined former Tory head of press Nick Wood and his cohort from Media Intelligence Partners for a rabble-rouse. Unlike the Downing Street soiree in the Rose Garden, this was not a champagne free-zone. Ûber-wonk Philip Blond was overheard discussing his plans to run for Mayor of London. And as the evening wore on, Blond began to try

Steerpike Steerpike

Cameron whiter than White’s

David Cameron has rescinded his membership of White’s. The most prestigious of the St James’s clubs was the unofficial headquarters of the Tory party at the end of the 18th Century and his late father Ian used to be its chairman. As the political row over all-male memberships rears its head once more, the Prime Minister has read the lie of the land correctly here. When he became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, young Dave was attacked for turning a blind eye to the all-male policy of the Tory supporting Carlton Club. Picking his ground wisely then, he used his position to persuade the club to relax its

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Cigarettes and alcohol and Lynton Crosby

Cigs and booze. These issues dominated PMQs today. Ed Miliband tried to portray the PM as a puppet of ‘Big Tobacco’ whose decision not to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes was influenced by his electoral guru, Lynton Crosby. Had the PM ever ‘had a conversation’ with Crosby about fag packets? Shifty Cameron dodged sideways and declared that Crosby never ‘lobbied me about anything’. ‘Weasel words,’ said Miliband, looking triumphant. He quoted a Tory GP, Sarah Wollaston, who labelled the decision ‘a day of shame’ for the government. Up popped the lady herself from the backbenches. Dr Wollaston begged the PM to re-think his decision against ‘minimum unit pricing’, which she