David cameron

Wednesday

Jonathan Davis

The ‘in’ and ‘out’ campaigns? Claptrap on both sides!

Is there a genuinely independent go-to guide for anyone who cares about the future of the UK economy but isn’t sure how to cast their vote in the Brexit referendum? Two-thirds of voters are said by unreliable pollsters to have made up their minds already, which leaves at least a third undecided. As the strident rhetoric and tendentious factoids of the two campaigns intensify, the need for dispassionate analysis could not be greater. So it seems a good time to take counsel from one of the City’s wisest greybeards. Rodney Leach — Lord Leach of Fairford — did as much as anyone, as a leader of Business for Sterling, to

Tuesday

Hamish Macdonell

What a change – Cameron can actually look forward to his visit to Scotland

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

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s EU referendum troubles were so inevitable

Britain’s membership of the European Union is a matter of principle and emotion for most Tory MPs. But it is also a matter of party management. David Cameron would have had an easier time as Prime Minister in the last parliament had he realised that while Conservatives will always want to bang on about Europe, the ferocity of and damage caused by those bangs still depends on how the leadership responds. Cameron didn’t want to hold a referendum, and ducked and weaved away from MPs demanding one. Now he is trying to ‘gag’ pro-Brexit ministers using civil service guidance to prevent them accessing documents that have a ‘bearing’ on the

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can Cameron and Boris keep a lid on it?

David Cameron’s slap down of Boris Johnson on Monday was one of the most brutal, and personal, that I’ve seen in six and a half years of reporting on parliament. But, as I report in my Sun column today, Number 10 are now keen to calm things down. Indeed, even some of Cameron’s closest allies now concede that the tone he took with Boris on Monday was a mistake. I’m told that Cameron and Boris have been in contact and are now exchanging, dread word, ‘bantery’ texts. One well-placed source is clear that the ‘PM’s tone will be much more emollient from now on’. Though, given how irritated Cameron is

Steerpike Steerpike

Coffee Shots: Boris vs Dave

The week the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London have been at loggerheads over the EU. After Boris Johnson declared his support for Brexit, David Cameron launched a thinly veiled attack on him in the Commons. So, can expect to see a ‘posh bloke’ fight before the referendum takes place? Is it feasible that David Cameron and Botis Johnson will end up having a posh bloke fight like in Bridget Jones over the Brexit thing? — Graeme Swann (@Swannyg66) February 23, 2016 Swann, the former international cricketer, asks if Johnson and Cameron will recreate the fight between the two posh public school boys in Bridget Jones’s Diary when Daniel Cleaver — played by Hugh

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why will no one in the cabinet admit to being a Europhile?

One of the oddest features of the cabinet majority for staying in the EU is that almost no one in it admits to being a Europhile. How is it, then, that the very last-century ideas of Edward Heath, Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine and Chris Patten can still exercise so much power over those who have so strongly and, in some cases, consistently criticised the EU in the past — Philip Hammond, Theresa May, Michael Fallon, Sajid Javid, Oliver Letwin, Liz Truss, Stephen Crabb, and, of course, David Cameron himself? Obviously one factor is that Tory MPs have found it convenient in recent years to adopt Eurosceptic protective colouring in their constituencies.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron dismisses second referendum idea as ‘complete fiction’

Has David Cameron settled on a strategy for dealing with his opponents in the EU referendum? The Prime Minister was clearly caught on the hop by the decisions of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to back the ‘Out’ side at the weekend, and his angry digs at the Mayor in the Commons on Monday showed that. But later in the week, the Prime Minister tried to patch things up a little by saying that Boris was a ‘great friend’, which suggested an attempt at least at calming things down. But today in response to Michael Howard’s decision to back Brexit, Cameron said that claims made by those like the former

Michael Howard

Michael Howard: why it’s time to leave the EU

Michael Howard has said he believes Britain should leave the EU. The former Conservative leader said David Cameron’s attempts to renegotiate had ‘met with failure’. Here, in an extract from his article published in the Daily Telegraph, he says Britain is better off out of Europe: Europe’s leaders may spurn the possibility of a new round of negotiations. They – and others – will certainly deny any possibility of this kind between now and our vote. They want us to vote to remain. The Prime Minister says that the possibility of further negotiation is “for the birds”. We shall see. But if he’s right it will just mean that Europe’s

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 February 2016

Home David Cameron, having continued talks through the night in Brussels, announced that he had achieved a ‘special status’ for Britain in the European Union and would call a referendum on it for 23 June. One concession he had wrung was that, for seven years, Britain could decide to limit in-work benefits for EU migrants during their first four years in Britain. ‘I do not love Brussels; I love Britain,’ he said. The cabinet met next morning, and six members left by a back door to promote their support for the campaign to leave. The biggest beast among them was Michael Gove, and the others were Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith,

Dot Wordsworth

Special status

‘Special status?’ said my husband. ‘You mean like executioners, butchers and undertakers in Japan?’ I hadn’t suggested that, but had been thinking aloud about the phrase which, according to David Cameron, now describes Britain’s position in Europe: special status. My husband once went to Japan, which, he thinks, makes him an expert. He learnt about the ancient monkey performances given by people called Burakumin, a sort of untouchable. Apart from performing with monkeys, which was banned in the 20th century, they have been associated with unclean trades such as those he mentioned. Special, as I have remarked before, is slippery. The special relationship between Britain and America has at times

Harry Mount

Diary – 25 February 2016

The Prime Minister is pretty angry with Boris. But the idea that they’ve competed with each other since school is wrong. Boris is two years older than Cameron — and differences in age are like dog years when you’re young. When I was 13, 15-year-olds seemed like grown-ups, 6ft tall with three days’ growth. When I interviewed Cameron last year, he said he’d hardly known Boris at Eton because he was in College — the scholars’ house — and two years above him. Cameron did remember Boris on the rugby field because he was so dishevelled and ferocious. And he watched him in a few debates at the Oxford Union.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Liam Fox accuses David Cameron of ‘breaking faith’ with voters on migration target

Quite naturally, those campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union have seized on today’s net migration figures as evidence that staying in won’t resolve voters’ concerns about immigration. Priti Patel has said that ‘the proposed deal will do nothing to reduce the level of immigration from the EU, and will leave unelected politicians in Brussels and judges from the EU court in control of our borders’. Liam Fox has decided to go further. He points out to Coffee House that it is impossible for David Cameron to both campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union and continue to commit to the net migration target – and that

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Today in audio: Brexit, the BBC and Corbyn’s dress sense

David Owen said it was time for Britain to leave the EU. Speaking this morning, the SDP founder said Brexit was a way of restructuring Europe in the way it needed to be. Owen went on to say there was no need for Britain leaving behind the EU to be a damaging process: Dame Janet Smith published her review into Jimmy Savile at the BBC. She said the management structure of the BBC was deeply referential. Janet Smith – whose report was criticised as an ‘expensive whitewash’ – said staff didn’t speak out ‘because they felt it was not their place’: The BBC’s Lord Hall said it was a ‘grim

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeremy Corbyn: David Cameron is jealous of my clothes

Yesterday PMQs descended into ‘Punch and Judy’ style politics after David Cameron responded to a heckle about his mother by laying into Jeremy Corbyn’s fashion sense. David Cameron criticised Corbyn’s shabby appearance: ‘Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.’ However rather than take the criticism on board, it appears that the Labour leader has gone into denial mode. Preparing for a television interview with Sky News this morning, Corbyn claimed Cameron is actually just jealous: ‘He is actually jealous of the jacket. You know what he is really jealous of? That I can go shopping in the greatest shopping centre in the world

Philip Kyle

The European Parliament: a sword of Damocles hanging over Cameron

David Cameron had a tough time trying to convince his European counterparts at the European Council; but hopefully he will be up for seconds when he goes head-to-head with the European Parliament. He paid its Members a long overdue visit last week, but only met with a select few. He will have to do more than that if he wants to avoid more drama. There is nothing Members of the European Parliament hate more than being left out. Add to that being told what to do by a Member State government and you are serving them a very bitter cocktail. There is not an awful lot of respect as it

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can David Cameron really stick by his net migration target now his EU deal is done?

The net migration statistics have, for quite a while, been an awkward quarterly occurrence that the Tories just have to sit through and pretend isn’t happening. Today’s release from the Office for National Statistics shows that David Cameron is still nowhere near hitting his pledge of driving net migration into the tens of thousands, with net long-term migration in the year to September 2015 at 323,000, up 31,000 from the previous year. EU net migration was 172,000, with a year-on-year rise that the ONS says is not statistically significant, while non-EU net migration was 191,000, which is roughly similar to the 188,000 in the previous year. A couple of years

David Owen

Lord Owen: ‘Now is the time to vote to leave the EU’

The vision of a European Common Market was a good one when in 1962 membership was first envisaged for the UK. Nevertheless, we were rightly warned even then by the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, that a federal Europe lurked in the background. As far back as 1971 Edward Heath’s White Paper on entry misleadingly promised ‘no erosion of essential sovereignty’. That was untrue then and is much more so today. European law does override British law and David Cameron has failed to achieve any Treaty amendment to change this. What we have contrived in the EU is the pretension that you can be partly a country and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tory dogfight

  [audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/insidethetorieseudogfight/media.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth, Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman discuss the Tory dogfight over Europe”] Listen [/audioplayer] Many Tories had doubts about David Cameron’s EU renegotiation, but only Boris Johnson was promised a piece of legislation to assuage his particular concerns. It was quite a compliment. The so-called Sovereignty Bill was, in effect, the Get Boris Onside Act. It was designed to deal with the Mayor of London’s fears about the relationship between the British parliament and courts and the EU. It was also mooted that Boris would be offered a top cabinet job — perhaps Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister was convinced that this combined offer would be

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Shouldn’t ‘preventable deaths’ really be called ‘homicides due to negligence’?

David Cameron was grilled today on plans for a ‘7-day NHS’. This is his attempt to iron out a slight kink in the NHS schedules. The trouble is that although our heroic doctors and nurses keep regular hours our deadly diseases are hopelessly unpredictable and like to smite us down whenever they feel a bit grim and reaperish. Perhaps we should write to them about it. In practice this means that NHS efficiency varies widely over the ‘7-day cycle’ or ‘week’ as it’s known. Get ill on a Tuesday and you’ll probably be at a party on Friday. Get ill on a Saturday and you’ll probably be at a funeral

James Forsyth James Forsyth

PMQs: Cameron delivers a knockout blow to a struggling Corbyn

This could have been a tricky PMQs for David Cameron. Instead, it will be remembered for Cameron ventriloquising his mother and telling Corbyn ‘put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem’. What gave this jibe its potency, is that it sums up what a lot of voters think of the Labour leader. It was not quite as Flashmanesque as it sounds. For it came in response to a Labour front bench heckle asking what Cameron’s mother would say about cuts in Oxfordshire. Even before Cameron floored Corbyn with that line, the Labour leader was struggling. He chose to go on the NHS and the