David cameron

Although Nick Clegg is under increasing pressure in some quarters to write a tell-all book about his time in coalition, the closest he has got to this so far is by signing up to an agency that has advertised his services for up to $55,000 per speech. Happily, Clegg’s former speechwriter comes at no such cost. Phil Reilly has started a blog detailing his time working for the former deputy Prime Minister. In this, Reilly recalls a phone hacking joke he wrote for Clegg back in 2010: ‘For days, Nick Clegg had been toing and froing over whether he could tell a joke about Andy Coulson. It was September 2010 and

Lord Sewel has announced he is taking a ‘leave of absence’ from the House of Lords. In a statement sent to the Parliamentary authorities this evening, Sewel says he will be stepping out of the limelight until the investigation into his alleged behaviour is complete: ‘I wish to take leave of absence from the House as soon as it can be arranged. I also wish to make clear that in doing so I have no intention of returning to the House in any way until the current investigations have been completed, when in the light of their outcome I will review my long term position. I believe this is compatible

No one can deny that the SNP has made Westminster pay more attention to Scotland. Five years ago, it was surprising—and, in many ways, shocking—how uninformed most MPs were of what was happening in Scottish politics. That is one of the reasons why the independence referendum was treated as a second-order issue – until people realised quite how close it was going to be. But that has all changed now with the 56 SNP MPs making their presence felt in the Chamber. This is particularly true of Downing Street because with Angus Robertson having two questions at PMQs each week, David Cameron—who prepares assiduously for these sessions—needs to know what is

The Prime Minister’s Birmingham speech on radicalisation and Muslim communities in the UK given earlier today is a rather important one. Regular readers will know that I’m not easy to please in this area, but it seems to me that David Cameron has come to understand the real problem of Islamic extremism and has been developing his attitudes towards that problem. There might be any number of reasons for this, but the most likely one is simple observation. Anybody can see that there is a problem, and a Prime Minister who has oversight on the intelligence and security threats that never come to fruition as well as those that do

‘Put that on your leaflets,’ snarled Cameron at PMQs. Inwardly he was gloating. Labour voted against Tory welfare reforms last night so the PM was able to boast that Labour is fighting the new living wage. Some say Cameron is lurching to the left with his Five Year Plans and his state-controlled pay rises. The same applies to law and order. He’s getting a pinkish tinge. Philip Davies asked him to review the regulations governing early release for serious offenders. Cameron said he’d give it a go. It’s not good enough, he seemed to imply, having murderers murdering people shortly after gaining their freedom by promising to become pillars of

It has only taken the SNP 68 days to jettison its principles for some good old Tory bashing. On the Today programme, Nicola Sturgeon gave three reasons as to why the SNP will be voting against relaxed foxhunting restrictions in England. Combined with an ‘overwhelming demand from people in England’ and a potential future debate about Scottish foxhunting laws, the First Minister happily admitted that the decision had ‘less to do with foxhunting’ and more to do with giving David Cameron a kicking: ‘Since the election, David Cameron’s government has shown very little respect to the mandate that Scotland MPs have. On the Scotland Bill, reasonable amendments backed by the overwhelming majority of Scottish MPs have been voted down. The English

Virginia Utley, my secretary when I edited this paper, has written to Prime Minister and Chancellor, jointly. She asks, ‘Please could you tell me what a family is?’ Nowadays, she goes on, you teach us that a family can be made up of men who love men or women who love women, who must therefore be equally entitled to marry one another. ‘Now,’ she continues, her sister and she ‘both think boys are very nice but neither of us met one we quite liked enough to marry… So my sister and I have bought a house together and have lived happily there for years and years and years.’ So, ‘Please

The first thing that needs to be said about the near-universally panned proposal for English votes for English laws we debated in the Commons this week is not, ‘why the rush?’ but ‘where’s the seriousness?’ If we want to have a constitutional settlement to a problem which the PM and Chris Grayling see as being such a large one, we need to arrive at a solution that’s going to stick. Going about it the way the government currently intends to is not going to end up with a viable, long-term answer. And Tory MPs like David Davis who have made this point are quite right about how counter-productive rushing through