General election

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_16_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Lord Pearson and Damian Green discuss Ukip and the Tories” startat=81] Listen [/audioplayer]How odd that David Cameron is still threatening us with ‘Vote Ukip, get Labour’, even after the Heywood and Middleton by-election, which Ukip nearly won with thousands of Labour defections. But if the Conservatives do lose the next election by a Ukip-sized margin then Cameron has only himself to blame — for the second time in a row. I know because I tried to stop it happening in 2010 when I was leading Ukip. Soon after Ukip came second in the 2009 EU elections, David Willoughby de Broke and I went to see Tom Strathclyde, then Tory

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_5_June_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Delingpole and Michael Heaver debate whether Ukip stands for anything” startat=1222] Listen [/audioplayer]There are many words that you might associate with Nigel Farage, but moderniser probably isn’t one. Yet the Ukip leader is embarking on the process of modernising his party. He has concluded that it cannot achieve its aims with its current level of support. So he is repositioning it in the hope of winning new converts even at the risk of alienating traditional supporters. If this sounds similar to what David Cameron did after winning the Tory leadership in 2005, that’s because it is. Interviewing Farage during his triumphant European election campaign, I was struck

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

In one sense David Cameron is lucky that the Conservatives do not enter 2014 with a lead in the polls. If they did, the Prime Minister would be under pressure for stitching up the Fixed Term Parliaments Act with Nick Clegg, thereby denying himself the chance of doing what all strong governments have done over the past 35 years, with unfailing success: going to the country after four years. Barring a vote of no confidence, we already know the date of the next election: 7 May 2015. With the exception of John Major in 1992, no Prime Minister who waited five years has won re-election since Clement Attlee in 1950

The mood was grim when David Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers convened for a crunch meeting on 4 February this year. The economy had shrunk in the final three months of last year; the country was on the verge of a triple-dip recession, unprecedented in modern times. The government was in dire political straits. Those present discussed the situation with appropriate solemnity. But the tension was broken when Rupert Harrison, the Chancellor’s chief economic adviser, passionately declared that the economy would be going ‘gangbusters’ by late summer, early autumn. Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, chuckled and joked that he would take a note of that confident