David cameron

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

When Bill Clinton was asked if he had ever smoked marijuana he uttered the infamous cop-out that he had smoked it but had not inhaled. David Cameron’s position on hunting has been similar. He cannot deny that he once rode to hounds with his friends in the beautiful English countryside where he spends weekends. But he has never said much about the experience other than it was terribly challenging to stay on the horse. Rather than saying ‘I enjoyed it’, he has always been careful to give the impression that hunting was going on around him, so he did it, and he survived to tell the tale. But he didn’t

This time tomorrow, we’ll have had the first projections from the Greek referendum. We will have an idea as to whether the country has said Oxi or Nai. At the moment, the polls make the referendum too close to call. Whatever the result, there’ll be no quick deal between Greece and its creditors. But if the Greeks vote Oxi, then the country could be forced out of the Euro by the ECB cutting off assistance to its banks. If that were to happen, then the Eurozone would have to move to integrate very quickly to prevent Portugal, Italy, Spain and even France being pushed towards the Euro exit the next

Now that the Davies Commission has made its recommendation, the ball is back in the government’s court. The biggest immediate challenge the government has to face is David Cameron’s 2009 remark that ‘the third runway at Heathrow is not going ahead, no ifs, no buts.’ As James noted at PMQs today, the Prime Minister’s body language did not suggest he is particularly favourable towards Heathrow. But now the Airport Commission report has been received by the government, the buck has been passed to the Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin. While Cameron said in the Commons that a decision will be made ‘by the end of the year’, McLoughlin said it would be

The EU referendum makes me suspect that the grownups don’t know what they’re doing. I can see how we got to this point but it seems absurd that something so fundamental should be up – not just  for debate but possibly even – for reversal. It is doubly absurd because David Cameron has said that he will be campaigning – as you would expect of a conservative – for the status quo. So why are you doing this? I mouth at the television, wishing heartily that he would fight his internal party battles on his own time. Bewilderment is, it seems to me, one of the main forces behind this referendum. Some