David cameron

I suspect that ‘Weekend secrets of the “chillaxing” Prime Minister’ (£) is one of the last headlines that Number 10 wanted to see this Saturday. It is acutely sensitive about the idea that Cameron doesn’t work hard enough, a charge that it thinks is as unfair as it is damaging. But perhaps more interesting than the details of the Prime Minister’s Sunday routine — a ‘crap film’ and a few glasses of wine at lunch — is what Francis Elliott and James Hanning reveal about the Cameron-Hilton relationship. As Cameron’s biographers, Elliott and Hanning know the Cameron circle extremely well and they provide an intriguing perspective on what has happened

I doubt that Angela Merkel is looking forward to the G8 summit very much. It will mostly consist of the other world leaders telling her to give ground on austerity. But I suspect that Merkel won’t budge much, if at all. She clearly believes that the Greeks can be whipped into line by telling them that the election is really a referendum on euro membership. Hence both her suggestion of a simultaneous referendum on election-day and her backing for the European Central Bank cutting off support to Greek banks which shows that while there’s no formal mechanism for ejecting a country from the single currency there are ways of doing

The Cameroons have long taken comfort in their belief that Ed Miliband will never be Prime Minister. They have seen him as a firebreak between them and electoral defeat. Three things have driven their conviction that the Labour leader will never make it to Number 10. First, their belief that he fails the blink test: can you see him standing outside Number 10? Second, the next election will almost certainly be fought on the economy, Labour’s weakest area. Their final reason was a sense that he would never get the full support of those on the Labour side who know how to win elections. But recent events suggest that this

The 1922 elections were not a clean sweep for the loyalist 301 Group slate, they missed out on one of the secretary position. But they have pretty much succeeded in purging the ’22 and the Backbench Business Committee of the so-called ‘wreckers’. Indeed, the only ‘wrecker’ who has survived is Bernard Jenkin who remains on the ’22 executive. But, significantly, I understand that Stewart Jackson, who spoke up in defence of Nadine Dorries at ’22 last week and was very critical of David Cameron at the weekend, came — in the words of one who has seen the actual voting numbers — ‘within a whisker’ of being elected to the

The news that Rebekah Brooks and Charlie Brooks have been charged with perverting the course of justice means that there’ll be at least one trial involving friends of the Prime Minister before the next election. In cynical political terms, that Charlie has been charged as well as Rebekah creates an additional political problem for David Cameron. Part of Cameron’s explanation for how close he got to Rebekah Brooks has always been that she married an old school friend of his. Undoubtedly, the Charlie Brooks connection added a genuine layer of friendship to relations between Rebekah Brooks and Cameron. I suspect that if it was not for Charlie Brooks there would

Elections to the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers have always been a test of the relative strengths of the right and left of the party. But this year, the split is between those who are backing the broadly pro-leadership 301 Group slate and those who view the ’22 as more of an alternative voice. The contest has become particularly heated after last week’s fiery meeting of the ’22 Committee. Intriguingly, Stewart Jackson, who was barracked when he tried to defend Nadine Dorries for her ‘posh boys’ attack on Cameron and Osborne, is standing for the executive. Given what he wrote on Sunday and that he resigned as a PPS over

For the Tories to have any hope of winning a majority, they have to face up to reclaiming seats in the North, but can they do so under Cameron? David Skelton from Policy Exchange suggests not in an interview with the Northern Echo today, where he outlines the ‘Cameron problem’: ‘You can’t get away from the fact that the Tory party looks pretty public school, pretty Southern and quite gilded. The fact is that the Tories can’t win an election if they can’t appeal to aspirational working-class voters in the North and the Midlands…If the Tories can’t find a way to get across the fact that voting Tory has become countercultural in

It is two years to the day since David Cameron first entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. To mark the occasion, here’s James Forsyth’s cover story from the time on the deal that put him there: Can this marriage of convenience work?, James Forsyth, 15 May 2010 ‘It is not the prize. It is a means to the prize.’ This is how one long-time political ally of David Cameron described the Tory leader’s entrance into Downing Street at the head of a coalition government. The deal with the Liberal Democrats which has put Cameron in Downing Street is, as this Cameron ally admits, ‘an arranged marriage not a love