David cameron

Friday

Freddy Gray

Don’t be daft – last night’s vote was nothing to be ashamed of

Are you ashamed of your country and depressed following last night’s vote against intervening in Syria?  David Aaronovitch  the journalist is. I do not give a fuck what this means for Miliband and Cameron. It’s the message it sends to Assad that counts. I am ashamed. — David Aaronovitch (@DAaronovitch) August 29, 2013 Tim Shipman of the Daily Mail is. Glad I’m in France today, a country that understands the responsibilities of being a military power — Tim Shipman (Mail) (@ShippersUnbound) August 30, 2013 So is Sarah Vine, the columnist, as well as, apparently, her husband Michael Gove. Paddy Ashdown says that Great Britain is plunging towards ‘isolationism’. Even our own Toby Young

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Syria defeat: What next for David Cameron?

Having lost last night’s vote, David Cameron needs to spend today fighting back. There are quite a few ways he can do so. He can easily brush off the more excitable charges: that he faces a leadership challenge, or that Tories will come for him at party conference. They won’t. Cameron was elected to fix Britain, not Syria, and he’s doing quite well with the day job. Employment is at a record high, schools and welfare are being reformed, crime’s down. Cameron has not been defeated on a cornerstone of his foreign policy, but on a plan to join an American missile strike that may not take place. It was

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Syria defeat: what happened to the whips?

There are a number of serious implications of tonight’s result. But it’s worth briefly considering the whipping operation in the hours leading up to this vote. Firstly, there was no rebel whipping operation (as in, no backbenchers leading others to revolt, totting up numbers and issuing rebuttals of government claims) as there has been on other votes such as the Lords and EU budget and referendum rebellions, which means MPs were only being pulled away from the government position by their own instincts. Or they were being left to wander away from the government position. From the conversations I’ve had with MPs, the government whipping operation continued to be pretty

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Government LOSES Syria vote

In a surprise result this evening, the government lost its motion on Syria, with 272 MPs voting for and 285 voting against. The Prime Minister responded to the vote in the Chamber, with MPs on the Labour benches shouting ‘resign!’. He said: ‘Let me say the House has not voted for either motion tonight, I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons. It is very clear tonight that while the House has not passed a motion, it is clear to me that the British parliament reflecting the views of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron attacks Blair’s ghost in Syria debate

Tony Blair would have had less of a presence in today’s Commons debate on Syria if he’d actually turned up to it. The former Prime Minister was threaded throughout the speeches, and no more so than in David Cameron’s address to MPs. Cameron was keen to emphasise at every opportunity the difference between the government’s response to the current situation and the Blair government’s handling of the Iraq war. He was quick to refer to it, saying ‘I am deeply mindful of the lessons of previous conflicts’, and later said that Iraq ‘poisoned the well’ of public trust on military intervention. Though as James pointed out as the debate was

John O'Neill

Decline in net migration stalls

Good news today for the OBR (who want a constant flow of more than 140,000 immigrants a year to support Britain’s debt burden and ageing population) and bad news for David Cameron (who thinks immigrants are a drain on Britain’s welfare state). Statistics show that in the year ending December 2012, net migration to the UK was 176,000, up from 153,000 in the year ending September 2012.The latest figure is equivalent to 482 more people a day entering the country than leaving it. Net migration is the figure that Cameron wants to be down ‘in the tens of thousands’ by the end of the parliament. It’s been heading down since June 2011. The drop

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22: Peter Hitchens and Alan Mendoza debate British intervention in Syria

Is David Cameron pushing Britain into a war without a purpose? On the latest View from 22 podcast, the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens vigorously debates Alan Mendoza from the Henry Jackson Society on this week’s developments in Syria. Why should Britain increase its involvement in Syria? What benefit would it bring to our nation? And how has the Prime Minister evolved from a leader who once said ‘democracy should not be dropped from 40,000ft’ into a foreign policy hawk? Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hardman also discuss how this week’s parliamentary business on Syria will play out between the coalition partners. Are the Tories and Lib Dems united? We also

Douglas Murray

David Cameron’s wars: How the PM learned to love precision bombing

What is the one consolation for an MP who has beaten all their colleagues to the top job? It can hardly be the luxury of having your life, circle and income open to alternate snorts of envy and derision. Nor can it be the quagmire into which nearly all attempts to solve the nation’s domestic problems now fall.  Only one thing allows prime ministers of a country such as Britain to feel they have power. That is exercising it. And nothing exercises power more than deciding which wars to fight. In opposition, David Cameron did not much like the idea of war, and derided his colleagues for their admiration of

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron’s retreat on Syria vote: why it happened and what it means

To be fair to David Cameron, he’s not the only leader who’s performed a volte-face in the past 24 hours. If you’d listened to Ed Miliband yesterday afternoon, you might have been forgiven for thinking that he was quite likely to support the government’s motion on Syria, so long as it was and ‘legal’ and had specific and limited aims. listen to ‘Ed Miliband: Labour would consider supporting limited action in Syria’ on Audioboo

The Spectator

Audio: politicians mull intervening in Syria

Their holidays interrupted, MPs are trying to decide what they think about Syria as they return to Westminster for tomorrow’s House of Commons debate on military action. For those trying to make up their minds, and work out what everyone else thinks, Coffee House has compiled a helpful briefing of audio clips from across the political spectrum. Here’s David Cameron sounding like an eleven-year-old boy with a box of toy soldiers: listen to ‘Cameron: Use of chemical weapons ‘cannot stand’’ on Audioboo   Here’s the Labour front-bench being characteristically vague: listen to ‘Ed Miliband: Labour would consider supporting limited action in Syria’ on Audioboo listen to ‘Douglas Alexander: ‘Labour has never

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Syria is not Iraq (but at least the Iraq War had a clear objective)

A decade ago, I was sure that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do. I persisted in that belief for a long time too, well beyond the point at which most supporters of the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power had recanted their past enthusiasm. The link between 9/11 and Iraq was quite apparent. Not because (despite what some mistaken people insisted) Saddam had any involvement in the atrocity but because removing tyrants and dictators seemed the best way of spreading the pacifying forces of commerce and democracy that might, in time, render Islamist extremism and terrorism obsolete. Why Iraq? Because it was there and

The Spectator

David Cameron and Barack Obama’s latest call on Syria – a readout

David Cameron and Barack Obama spoke last night again about the situation in Syria. Below is a readout of the call from Number 10: ‘The PM spoke to President Obama last night to further discuss the serious response to last week’s chemical weapons attack in Syria. ‘Ahead of today’s NSC, it was an opportunity for the PM to hear the latest US thinking on the issue and to set out the options being considered by the Government. ‘Both leaders agreed that all the information available confirmed a chemical weapons attack had taken place, noting that even the Iranian President and Syrian regime had conceded this. And they both agreed they

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Audio: Cameron, Clegg and Miliband on Syria and what their statements tell us

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband this afternoon gave statements on Britain’s response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria. There were important similarities between the statements which are worth examining. Here is what we learned: 1. The action must be legal. Miliband told the cameras after the meeting that ‘when I saw the Prime Minister this afternoon I said to him that we the Labour party would consider supporting international action, but only on the basis that it was legal’. Meanwhile Clegg and Cameron both insisted that the measures being considered were legal. Clegg said: ‘Any steps we will take will have to be legal. This Government,

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

Cameron and Obama warn Assad of ‘serious response’

David Cameron spoke to Barack Obama yesterday about the situation in Syria. A Number 10 spokesman gave the following read-out of the call: ‘They are both gravely concerned by the attack that took place in Damascus on Wednesday and the increasing signs that this was a significant chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. The UN Security Council has called for immediate access for UN investigators on the ground in Damascus. The fact that President Assad has failed to co-operate with the UN suggests that the regime has something to hide. ‘They reiterated that significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response

Thursday

Alex Massie

Is Ed Miliband a) hopeless, b) on course to become Prime Minister or c) both?

I have never quite understood Ed Miliband’s appeal. He always reminds me of Cuthbert Cringeworthy from The Bash Street Kids. I find it hard to imagine him becoming Prime Minister. Something just feels wrong about that. I’m not alone in wondering about this. Brian Wilson, the former energy minister, wrote yesterday that Miliband still has a kind of credibility problem. People just don’t think he’s quite ready for the top job. They may not be able to say exactly why they’re unimpressed by Miliband; they just know they are. Not so fast my friend, responds John McTernan today. Ignore all the chattering and blethering about Labour’s slide in the polls and

Monday

Fraser Nelson

David Cameron denies he’s planning another coalition. Good.

I’m just back from three weeks away to find the summer momentum very strongly behind the Tories. A ComRes poll suggests that the majority of Labour supporters think Ed Miliband is doing badly, and things are going so strongly for the Tories (as George Trefgarne writes) that the odds on a Tory majority are shrinking rapidly. So why would Cameron be planning for another coalition, as my colleague James Kirkup writes in his Telegraph splash today? His piece has struck a nerve in No. 10, which is strongly denying that the Prime Minister is thinking of anything other than a Conservative majority in 2015. There are, I’m told, no plans

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Two nations, two cultures? Britain is divided by the Trent, not the Tweed.

Of the many certainties those Scots in favour of independence hold to be self-evident two in particular stand out. First that Scotland and England are fundamentally different places whose political cultures are so divergent  they can no longer sensibly be expected to live together. Secondly that the British state is moribund and impervious to practical reform. They are nice theories. They persuade Yes voters that independence is both necessary and virtuous. The only wonder is why so many Scots seem so stubbornly hesitant about accepting these obvious truths. This may have something to do with the fact that neither of them is actually true. At least not obviously true. Take the second article of

Sebastian Payne

Like fracking, HS2 will define David Cameron as a progressive or protective conservative

Why is David Cameron still backing High Speed 2? It’s controversial inside his party and divisive in the Tory heartlands. Despite a government task force set up to promote the business case for the new railway, the anti-HS2 brigade are winning the war of the words, as evidenced by Fleet Street’s recent attacks on the project. The Mail on Sunday splashed yesterday with leaked analysis on how HS2 is going to result in vast amounts of disruption in beautiful parts of the country. Not exactly a new revelation but the full impact of the construction is only being realised now. With this knowledge, Melissa Kite argues in the Guardian today that Cameron is only pushing ahead with the

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Number 10 should beware accidentally briefing EU renegotiation shopping list

This is how the Downing Street spin machine works: a Bad Story that may make your core vote very upset appears in the papers. You brief that you are doing something Very Serious in response to said Bad Story and hope that when it comes to the meeting where you have to raise said Very Serious measure, the media will be getting worked up about a will or the latest pronouncement by a leading light in Ukip about women in the workplace. Today’s example of this rule is the briefing to The Times that Downing street wants to put ‘curbing the right of EU migrants to benefits at the heart

Friday

Bobby Friedman

John Bercow reinvents being Speaker of the House of Commons

If only he’d read the job description a little bit more closely, we might have avoided all these rows. Unfortunately for John Bercow, the man who loves the sound of his own voice more than anything else, the role of Speaker really doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Traditionally, the Speaker has taken a definite back seat, bellowing the odd ‘order, order’ in the Commons but otherwise maintaining a rather reticent and impartial position. Judging by Bercow’s behaviour over the past few months, it would seem that he hasn’t got the memo. This summer alone, he’s travelled to Romania, Burma and New Zealand, observing wryly at his final destination