David cameron

Of all the findings from today’s ICM poll for the Guardian, I imagine this one will concern the Tory leadership most: “Just two months ago, 49 percent of voters said they thought Cameron and Osborne would do better than Darling and Brown, but that figure is 38 percent today.” They’re still ahead of Brown and Darling – who are langushing on 31 percent – but the drop is still pretty striking.  What’s more, it seems to go against conventional wisdom about fixing the fiscal mess we’re in.  While they could still go further in setting out a few specifics, the fact is that the Tory pair have spent the last

Is it just me, or have the Tories developed a slightly harder edge in the couple of days since the Pre-Budget Report?  We had an unusually acidic address from David Cameron yesterday, in which he likened Brown ‘n’ Darling to “joy-riders in a car smashing up the neighbourhood,” and criticised the PBR for its “irresponsibility, basic deceit and complete lack of moral principle”.  There have been a couple of quite powerful attack posters from CCHQ.  And now we’ve got George Osborne saying that Brown may have “betrayed the responsibilities of the office he holds.” “So what?” you say, “they’re the Opposition – it’s their job to oppose.”  Well, yes, of

Few columnists are read more carefully in Conservative circles than Danny Finkelstein. He is extremely well connected in the Cameron circle and enjoys something of a mind-meld with George Osborne. Danny’s column today is the argument for sticking to the modernising message. It does, though, contain one significant criticism of the party, its dependence on David Cameron.   This Cameron dependence has been a problem for a while. But the leadership itself must take most of the blame for this. They have used Cameron for almost every announcement that they view as important and that has sent a message to the media that if it doesn’t come from Cameron the

There are a couple of noteworthy snippets in today’s FT interview with George Osborne: the claim that the Tories may not take corporation tax as low as it is in Ireland; the outline of a “five-year road map” on business tax policy, etc.  But, I must admit, it’s this passage which jumped out at me:    “[Osborne] says his Tory conference speech in October, which included plans for a public sector pay freeze and an increase in the state retirement age, ‘was an important moment’ that showed a mental leap to being ‘an alternative government, not just an opposition’.” These self-bestowed titles – “alternative government,” and the like – are

If you’d like a step-by-step preview of Labour’s next election campaign, then do read Alastair Campbell’s latest blog post.  All of Brown’s attacks from PMQs are in there, and then some: “tax cuts for the rich”; a lack of “policy heavy lifting” on Cameron’s part; the Tories “haven’t really changed”, etc. etc.  The spinmeister has been in closer contact with Downing Street recently, and it shows.  It’s all gone a bit bar-brawling. The Tories now face a choice between, broadly speaking, three different responses: i) Ignore Campbell.  Even though James was right to highlight the differences between now and the Crewe & Nantwich byelection – which I wrongly skipped over

The Tories are in mild shock following PMQs, they never expected Cameron to get clunked like that. Brown is clearly going to try and use Tory inheritance tax policy to ram home the message that a Cameron government will be a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich. But the Tories are taking comfort from their belief that Brown’s ugly class war politics won’t work, pointing to how they failed in Crewe and Nantwich. But the attacks on Edward Timpson backfired, at least in part, because Timpson was a bad target. It is hard to portray someone as an out of touch, uncaring toff when their family

The opinion polls are continuing to feed the story that the Tories are in trouble. Tonight’s Politics Home data which shows Cameron’s personal ratings dropping 15 points in the last 10 weeks follows a string of polls where the Tories have failed to break through the forty percent mark. Tory morale has been a bit shaken by these polls; Cameron could do with a decisive win at PMQs tomorrow to gee up the Parliamentary party. But turning these numbers around is, I suspect, going to require some policies that show us what David Cameron’s irreducible core is. Oddly enough, I don’t think these policies have to be particularly popular but