David cameron

Thursday can’t come soon enough for shadow Cabinet loyalists. They believe that the Rochester by-election will provide Ed Miliband with some ‘breathing space’ and turn the spotlight on David Cameron’s troubles with his own side.   To be sure, losing another seat to Ukip will be bad for Cameron and the Tories. But based on conversations I’ve had in the past few days, I don’t think it will cause the crisis that many expected just a few weeks ago. Equally, Labour won’t gain any positive momentum out of a by-election in which it comes third.   There are, I say in the Mail on Sunday, two reasons why the expected

Philip Hammond’s interview in The Telegraph this morning is striking for several reasons. First, Hammond admits that Britain isn’t going to regain full control of its borders in the renegotiation. As he puts it, ‘“If your ambition is that we have total unfettered control of our own borders to do what we like, that isn’t compatible with membership of the European Union, it’s as simple as that. And people who advocate that know jolly well it is not compatible with membership of the European Union. So if that’s what you want, you’re essentially talking about leaving the European Union.”   But he does seem to think that agreement on something

Well this is a pleasant surprise. After all the years of indifference, David Cameron has condescended to notice us. Not just notice us but want us too. His come-hither smiles and fluttering eyelashes are enough to bring a blush to the cheek. Faced with losing yet another by-election, the Prime Minister is telling  Labour and Liberal Democrat voters that they (we) should vote Conservative to stop Ukip in Rochester and – presumably – in every seat in Britain where Ukip is a contender come May. OK, I can hear my friends and comrades asking: what’s the deal? What do we get in return for calming our heaving stomachs and handing

I spent an hour today following David Cameron around a school in Rochester as part of his latest campaign visit in the by-election. The school, Strood Academy, was candidate Kelly Tolhurst’s alma mater, and has the benefit of being in a snazzy building, which looks nice for photos. The children in the school were obviously thrilled that the Prime Minister was there: they didn’t know until he appeared on the premises and as he walked into a citizenship class, all the students’ eyes widened with surprise. He was mobbed as he walked through the building, with children turning to each other shouting ‘I shook his hand! I’ve got to tell

On Friday, Mr S boarded the Thames cruiser the Silver Sturgeon to join TV presenter and former tennis pro Andrew Castle in welcoming heavy hitters Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray back to London for the ATP World Finals. But for Castle, it was a less experienced tennis player who was weighing on the former British No.1’s mind. ‘I played a charity match with Nick Clegg last month,’ the presenter, who regularly puts his old chum David Cameron through his paces on court, sighed during the Moët & Chandon Thames river cruise. Although Nick Clegg had previously described the match as ‘great, great fun,’ Castle confided to Steerpike that relations between

Well, the Labour party certainly knows how to give the appearance of a fight when its back is against the wall. Many MPs and supporters have spent quite a lot of this fine autumn day tweeting frantically that this morning’s unpleasant headlines (summarised in their full gory glory by James here) are a plot by the media to stop their thoroughly decent leader making it to Downing Street and why aren’t we all writing about the problems that David Cameron has with the Conservative party instead? They protest too much: if lobby journalists were organised enough to compile time sheets, most of us would quite clearly have spent the bulk

Labour might be mired in misery this week, but at least it can take comfort that around the corner is the Rochester by-election, which the Conservatives look set to lose. Not one MP returning from campaigning against their former colleague Mark Reckless honestly thinks they’ll win, even if they tweet nice things and post aggressive videos. Let’s just remind ourselves of why losing this constituency is particularly painful for the Conservatives. They spent their conference calling Reckless a ‘dickhead‘ and saying they thought they could win the by-election because he was a liar, and he didn’t have the same personal appeal as Douglas Carswell in a constituency considered far less

By rights, Jean-Claude Juncker should be in dire political trouble this morning, not lecturing Britain about paying an extra £1.7 billion to the European Commission. Documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists suggest that while Juncker was Prime Minister of Luxembourg, 548 comfort letters were issued to various international businesses about their tax arrangements. These letters allowed multinational companies to get away with paying minimal amounts of tax anywhere but Luxembourg despite the majority of their business being done elsewhere, the ICIJ alleges. The ICIJ claims that more than 340 companies secured secret tax deals with Luxembourg. The ICIJ alleges that the deal with FedEx left 99.75 per

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ruby Wax and Andy Puddicombe join Mary Wakefield to discuss the quasi-religion of ‘mindfulness’.”] Listen [/audioplayer] A new survey of British religious attitudes is out. It reveals a surprising degree of hostility to religion, and an unsurprising degree of muddle. David Cameron’s claim that Britain is a Christian country looks refuted, for more than 60 per cent of respondents said they are ‘not religious at all’. Presumably this must mean that less than 40 per cent call themselves Christian? Er, no – 56 per cent say they are Christian. It seems that Britain has a strong contingent of nonreligious Christians, like secular Jews. The most striking finding is