David cameron

Word reaches me that the St. Stephen’s Club in Westminster is set to close at the end of the year due to falling membership and lack of revenue. This fine old Tory Club was formed by Benjamin Disraeli in 1870 and was originally housed where Portcullis House now stands, before moving to its current location on Queen Anne Gate.  I hear that the management committee reluctantly decided to call time last week. The bad news comes as the Club celebrates its 50th anniversary in its current home (being opened by then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1962). The club shot to fame in 2010 as the favoured location for David

Aside from the party conferences, two big set piece events are looming large in Downing Street’s thinking: the coalition’s mid-term review and the autumn statement. Both of these are expected to be heavy on economic measures as the coalition tries to get growth going again in the face of the headwinds coming off the continent. I understand that extra runways at Stansted are being considered in an attempt to boost aviation capacity in the south east. David Cameron is also trying to boost the enterprise agenda of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cabinet minister Lord Young. He brought forward a meeting on it scheduled for September 5th to Thursday last week. He’s

One of the criticisms of the idea of Boris Johnson as a potential Prime Minister is that he doesn’t look the part and isn’t serious enough. The argument goes that it is all very well for the Mayor of London to jape around, but quite another thing for the Prime Minister to (Phil Collins produced a very punchy version of this point of view (£) in The Times this week). But as Charles Moore argues in his column, this argument misses that ‘conventional politics is now failing more comprehensively than at any time since the 1930s, and that Boris Johnson is the only unconventional politician in the field.’ It is precisely

It’s a strange old world when a Prime Minister backing his own Chancellor is worth reporting. But this afternoon the Prime Minister was asked by Sky News whether he was going to reshuffle George Osborne. Naturally, he answered: ‘George Osborne is doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances and he has my full support in going on and doing that job. He’s not going anywhere.’ Kay Burley then pressed Cameron on whether this meant Osborne would still be Chancellor at the next election. He replied: ‘Yes.’ Now, this was quite obvious anyway. Osborne’s stock is certainly down amongst Tory MPs, many of whom are still smarting after watching the

David Cameron is using the Olympics today to strike a more upbeat tone after yesterday’s GDP gloom. The Prime Minister is speaking at 10am at a global investment conference to pitch for business from 180 chief executives from around the world. Cameron will tell the conference that he is ‘determined that Britain will be on of the great success stories’ in rebuilding its economy, and will say: ‘There will be no more passionate supporter of Team GB than me. But I’ve got a job to do this summer. And a big part of that job is to get behind British business… and do everything I can to help secure the

Downing Street confirmed today that the Prime Minister will meet US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Downing Street this week. It sounds like a sensible plan, given Romney is so close to Obama in the polls at present. But there’s just one tiny little problem. I have, in my shorthand notes from a lobby briefing on 5 March 2012, a quote from the Prime Minister’s official spokesman, which says the following: ‘As a general rule we do not meet candidates in foreign elections.’ Then the spokesman was talking about David Cameron’s failure to meet François Hollande, who was in Britain while campaigning against Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

The report published this week by Louise Casey, the Government’s ‘Troubled Families’ Tsar, has attracted a fair amount of criticism, but what it does illustrate is the chaotic lives these families lead – and the implausibility of thinking that their problems can be solved by the kind of flagship social policies traditionally favoured by either Conservatives or Labour. As Isabel put it, Conservative ‘reform of the welfare system will pass many of the families by. In these stories there is no calculated decision to opt out of the labour market because of generous benefits, more an endless failure to cope with life and the way it has worked out’. Likewise,

Europe, as everybody knows, is one of those issues on which a Tory leader needs to pay particular attention to the words he uses. This makes David Cameron’s behaviour in recent weeks all the odder. First, we had that Brussels press conference in which Cameron sounded rather too enthusiastic about the EU for his own side’s tastes. This was followed by his Sunday Telegraph piece in which he stressed that ‘the two words “Europe” and “referendum” can go together’ for him. Now, those close to Cameron complain that the two positions were perfectly compatible and that in the first instance he was quoted selectively. But given the importance that it is attached

With Parliament heading off for recess, politics will — barring some unforeseen event or the Eurozone crisis moving into one of its acute phases — be dominated by the Olympics for the next few weeks. David Cameron will be hoping that the global CEOs arriving in town will bring some good investment news with them. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, will revel in the global media attention. Indeed, Boris is already demonstrating an ability to brush off the organisational hiccups that other politicians can only envy. But most ambitious Tories will spend the summer thinking about the reshuffle, currently pencilled in for the third of September ahead of a Tory parliamentary dinner

The coalition is doing pretty well, thank you very much. In case last week’s rebellion of the 91 on Lords reform and continuing tensions over Europe had you fooled, up pops the Prime Minister this morning with a soothing comment piece in the Sunday Times.  David Cameron tries to shrug off Lords reform within three paragraphs of his op-ed. ‘What’s far more significant is that we are working together on so much else – and after last week, it’s vital that everyone reminds themselves of that fact,’ he argues. As part of his health-check piece, the Prime Minister details signs that the coalition is functioning well. When he mentions the

Have the Tories’ manoeuvres over Lords reform signalled the end of the coalition? In this week’s magazine, our leader argues that Tuesday’s rebellion shows that Tories are back in full force, while James Forsyth writes that a coalition break-up date before 2015 is now not a case of if, but when. But Nick Clegg is not the only party leader to suffer from Tuesday’s Lords revolt. In this week’s View from 22 podcast, recently-resigned PPS Conor Burns MP accuses David Cameron of not appealing sufficiently to his own party: You see this so often when you watch interviews on television – someone speaking for the coalition, you see someone speaking

The post-match analysis of last night’s vote on the House of Lords Reform Bill shows the Prime Minister has a bigger rebel problem on his hands than he might have initially thought. It is true that there is a significant hardcore within the Conservative party of rebels who happily defied the whip on the other big rebellion of this Parliament – October’s vote on holding a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. But that group only accounts for 57 per cent of last night’s rebels. The 81 in October did not simply increase by 10 to 91 last night. The table below shows that there were 39 MPs