David cameron

Don’t expect ‘fireworks’ from the Budget one of Osborne’s closest political allies told me this week. Ahead of the Budget on Wednesday the Chancellor finds himself hemmed in by the EU referendum, fraying Tory discipline and the worsening global economic situation, I say in my Sun column this week. A Budget four years out from a general election is normally when a government takes some risks. But I doubt Osborne will be doing much of that on Wednesday. First, he doesn’t want to do anything to make the EU referendum more difficult for the government to win—the intensity with which David Cameron is campaigning reveals how worried he is about

In their interview in the Christmas edition of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth asked the Prime Minister whether he now considered that his intervention in Libya had been a mistake. David Cameron accepted that matters could have gone better since the fall of Gaddafi, but insisted that ‘what we were doing was preventing a mass genocide’. Like Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi’s genocide seems to have been a fiction. It was reiterated over and over again by government and in the media in order to whip up support for the imposition a no-fly zone in March 2011. However, there was never any convincing evidence. Later that summer

Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, made a typically brilliant intervention in the EU referendum debate by arguing that ‘Whoever does not believe in Europe, who doubts Europe, whoever despairs of Europe, should visit the military cemeteries in Europe.’ Cicero made just this point to his brother Quintus, who in 59 bc was about to embark on his third term as governor of Asia Minor (now western Turkey): ‘Asia ought to remember that, if she were not governed by us, she would hardly have been spared the disasters of external war or internal discord. But our government cannot be maintained without taxes, and Asia ought without resentment to pay

Pro-Brexit Tory Cabinet Minister would, I suspect, not be complaining about the government’s referendum campaign tactics if they didn’t fear that they were effective. Whatever you think about how he has done it, David Cameron has driven the risks of leaving the EU up the agenda this week. He has pushed the Out campaign onto the back foot. This is what makes Boris Johnson’s appearance on Marr tomorrow morning so important, I argue in my Sun column this week. Out need Boris to drive their agenda as successfully as Cameron is pushing IN’s. The interview is a big moment for Boris too. It will be the biggest test yet of

Jezza is one of the oldest Out campaigners in the Commons. He’s not quite the ‘Father of the Outs’ – Bill Cash claims that honour – but the Labour leader is next in line. Yet the referendum has led him to a shrewd, albeit unprincipled, decision. If your enemies are tearing each other apart, pull up a chair and enjoy the show. Hence his silence on Europe. A slow but strengthening civil war has begun within the Tory party and the vote itself will sound the death-knell for many a high-profile Conservative. So Corbo’s pleasant task is to sit back and wait for the funerals. Meanwhile he’s obliged to pick

With the exception of Gordon Brown – and he was always so dour it was impossible to tell what he was thinking – there hasn’t been a Prime Minister in living memory who has actually enjoyed coming to Scotland. Margaret Thatcher became spiky and aggressive when she crossed the border – well, more spiky and aggressive than normal. John Major seemed to regard it as a duty he had to endure, while Tony Blair made no pretence about it: he just hated it. David Cameron, though, has always tried hard when in Scotland. Perhaps, deep down, he would consider it ill-mannered not to be as engaging and courteous as he