David cameron

Despite the brave smiles, the senior Lib Dems are wearing long faces. Matthew Parris considers (£) the collapse of the Conservative vote in Oldham East and Saddleworth as a disaster for the Lib Dems, their own vote sustained by an influx of Tory voters. The Tories may not recover that support, but that does not ease the Liberal Democrats’ dilemma. Parris observes: ‘Privately Nick Clegg will have drawn from this the only sane conclusion, but it is one that I’ve found the Liberal Democrats strikingly reluctant to discuss. It is that in the seats where his party stands a chance next time, it must either re-engage the sympathies of its

Today saw the latest Cameron Direct event, and the Prime Minister defended his government’s position of bankers’ bonuses and Europe, and he devoted a section to profess the fortitude of the coalition itself. But Cameron realises that he needs to offer positive news, both to a country acclimatising to austerity and to a party that has broken out in a rash of ill-temper. Fuel duty was his chosen tonic. There were no commitments, but Cameron promised to review the level of duty or road tax as part of the March budget. This lends a little weight to the rumours that fuel duty and/or road taxes might be cut or a

David Cameron made significant waves yesterday both at Prime Minister’s Questions and in a Sun article about reforming Britain’s antiquated trade union laws.  He was responding to a favoured tactic of the new wave of militant trade unionists: threatening action at times that most inconvenience or imperil the safety of the general public.  We have seen this with the FBU’s dispute (over Bonfire Night), Unite with British Airways (over the Christmas period), and the RMT with London Underground (again, over Christmas).  Some union leaders now seem prepared to ruin what should be the two biggest highlights on our national calendar: the Royal Wedding in April and the Olympics in 2012.

After David Chaytor’s conviction last week, the dominoes just keep on tumbling. Today, it was Eric Illsley’s turn to confess to his expenses-related sins – and he did so by pleading guilty to three “false accounting” charges in Southwark Crown Court. Given that he’s still MP for Barnsley Central – although now as an independent, rather than the Labour MP he was elected as – that makes him the first sitting parliamentarian to face sentencing as a receipt offender. A dubious accolade, to be sure. In terms of day-to-day politics, the next question is whether Illsley will be able to hang on to his seat. He could, theoretically, remain in

My prediction for this week: we’re going to see a whole lot of defiant frontage from Nick Clegg. The last parliamentary session closed with him under attack over tuition fees; this one begins with the possibility of heavy defeat in Oldham East – and he’s got to respond accordingly. Hence his interview on Today this morning, in which he dismissed the idea of a Lib Dem drubbing in May’s local elections as “total nonsense,” and stressed that the coalition is “setting in motion a number of very liberal reforms”. There was also a warning over bonuses, along the usual lines, for state-owned banks. But the most intriguing news in Lib

Matt d’Ancona’s piece in The Sunday Telegraph arguing that the coalition should stick to its long term strategy and ignore the slings and arrows of the daily news cycle makes an important point. The Blair governments would, undoubtedly, have achieved more if they had done this. But the circumstances for the coalition are different in one crucial regard: it could fall far more easily. What keeps keep Tory Cabinet ministers up at night is the fear that the Lib Dems could dump Nick Clegg and that a new leader would then pull the party out of a coalition. At the moment, this seems like an unlikely prospect—not least because it

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but David Cameron interviews better in print than he does on screen. He’s almost too polished on television. His supreme confidence and tendency to guffaw at his scripted jokes can grate. But in print his assurance has an affable, human quality. The Daily Mail has interviewed him today. Most of the piece is a lifestyle feature – Dave at home attending to Florence’s evening feed as he watches Newsnight. It is vacuous fare, but it strikes a brilliant contrast with Ed Miliband’s rout at the hands of the nation’s housewives on the Jeremy Vine Show, where there were echoes of Gordon Brown’s excruciating unease with

The Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election is fast shaping up to be the event that will set the tone for the first quarter of the political year. The unique circumstances in which the vote was called makes it particularly hard to predict, no one is quite sure whether there’ll be a backlash against Woolas or one against the Lib Dems for going to court to overturn the result. As I say in the magazine tomorrow, if the Lib Dems were to win, it would give Clegg the breathing space he so needs at the moment. Lib Dem worries about what the coalition is doing to them politically would subside, temporarily