David cameron

Perhaps, the greatest testament to Steve Hilton’s influence in Downing Street is that everyone chuckles when you ask if anyone will replace him. His role in Number 10 as the senior adviser was one he had carved out for himself so that he could work on what he wanted to. It is deliberately designed not to fit on any ‘org chart’, the kind of document that the post-bureaucratic Hilton has little patience for. Hilton was for years caricatured as being not really right-wing. But, in reality, the opposite is true — he was, in some ways, the most right-wing man in Downing Street. Few matched him on subjects like 50p

When David Cameron headed to Brussels last December, it was far from certain that he would veto the proposed treaty. It was only when Nicolas Sarkozy proved totally uninterested in accommodating Britain’s demands that the Prime Minister decided that he could not sign up to it. In a way, Sarkozy did Cameron a favour. Imagine if Britain had got the safeguards the Prime Minister wanted and had signed up to the treaty. How would he then have reacted this week, when the Irish announced that they were going to hold a referendum on it? The pressure from the Tory benches to let the British people vote on it would have

Michael Gove for leader? There have been several suggestions to this effect recently — not least from Toby Young in his debut column for the Sun on Sunday. But Tim Montgomerie today quotes one of Gove’s advisors on ConservativeHome, saying that the education secretary has ruled himself out on the grounds that he doesn’t have the character for the job. This certainly squares with what Gove told me in September 2008. The interview was published here, but I’ve looked up my notes and can reprint his answer in a little more detail.   I put to him a Westminster rumour that he promised Sarah Vine, his wife, that he’d never

When David Cameron addressed Tory MPs on Friday, he told them that the London Mayoral elections were ‘the binary moment of 2012’. He argued that if Labour lost in London, one of their traditional strongholds, it would be a disaster for Ed Miliband. In the Cameron narrative, a Boris victory in May would mean that the Labour leader would remain under pressure and continue to be the subject of regular attacks in the press. Interestingly, there are Liberal Democrats close to Nick Clegg who share this analysis. Their worry is that a Livingstone victory combined with bad local election results for Lib Dem could turn the deputy Prime Minister back

There have always been two types of Tory modernisers. Both wanted to talk about issues that the party had neglected — public services, the environment and the like. But the soft modernisers were more prepared to compromise ideologically, to go with the flow of the age. The hard modernisers’ interest, by contrast, was in applying Tory thinking to these areas. Michael Gove’s education reforms are, perhaps, the best example of hard modernisation in action. As Charles Moore puts it in the Telegraph today, ‘Mr Gove offers an attractive combination — complete loyalty to the Cameron modernisation, but a Thatcher-era conviction politics as well’. Encouragingly, the balance within the Tory party

Talking to a Downing Street adviser earlier this week, I was struck when they observed that a ‘2014 election wouldn’t be too bad really. David would have done his best, Nick would have done his best. But they just couldn’t make it work anymore.’   The Tories have spent some time recently contemplating the possibility that the coalition might not run for the full length of the parliament. At a recent Chequers away day, the prospect of the Liberal Democrats walking out in 2014 was openly discussed.   That this possibility is even being talked about is revealing of the mood inside the coalition, which is the subject of my

Let’s be honest. I shouldn’t say this but I can’t help it. I’m fed up. The NHS reform process has been dragging on for months, and still there’s no end in sight. Ed Miliband brought it up at PMQs for the third week running. The position remains the same. Miliband loves it. Cameron lives with it. The PM claimed that 8,200 GP practices are now practising his reforms and the Labour leader replied with a list of professional bodies — nurses, doctors, midwives, radiologists — who oppose them. And that’s exactly the trouble, for me, at least. If the issue were a race-horse some crazy campaigner would plunge beneath its