Liberal democrats

The Lib Dems are considering scaling back their fight for Maajid Nawaz to win the Hampstead and Kilburn seat after the row about his ‘Jesus and Mo’ tweet, I have been told. This very marginal seat, which Labour’s Glenda Jackson holds with a majority of just 42, had been one of the Lib Dems’ key target seats. But a very well-placed senior source tells me that after the ‘Jesus and Mo’ row (which Nawaz had an extremely bad-tempered debate about with Mehdi Hasan and Mo Ansar on yesterday’s Newsnight), those involved in the party’s campaigns have privately concluded that the candidate has seriously damaged his chances of winning the seat

Hattie Harman tried to crack Clegg today. The deputy prime minister, standing in for David Cameron, explained carefully that his boss was visiting, ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.’ Not a title the Israeli Tourist board has got round to using. Hattie wasn’t on her best form. She tried to draw Clegg as a hypocritical house-slave attempting to duck responsibility for his master’s actions. But she plodded through her jibes. Over-rehearsal had killed her hunger to perform. And Clegg met all her accusations with a simple ploy. Blame Labour. It worked every time. On the bedroom tax Clegg had the support of the figures. A million and a half are

Jovial Lib Dem Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael addressed lobby journalists over lunch today. Speaking from his experience as the party’s former chief whip, he managed to praise the discipline of his party in the Coalition. But he also recalled a rather tense episode with Chris Huhne refusing to return to the UK to vote: ‘One thing which I was thinking about recently was that Chris Huhne, in the interests of tackling climate change, had managed to be at some big summit in Cancun, so was not available to take part in the division on the day and it was one of the features of Chris’s political operation that when the

Since I became the Deputy Prime Minister I have had the privilege of spending a bit of time representing Britain’s interests in other parts of the world. I have visited Latin America and Asia to boost exports. I have been to Africa, where we are building better education systems as well as helping fight corruption, poverty and disease. I have travelled to different parts of Europe and the United States to promote British trade. And while each trip varies from the last, there is a thread which runs through them all: you get to see Britain through other people’s eyes. Everywhere I have been – every nation around the planet

Lib Dems are excitedly travelling to their Spring conference in York, which kicks off this evening with the traditional rally (hopefully a stand-up free one, though). Vince Cable and Tim Farron will be cheering the troops at tonight’s event, with Nick Clegg offering a Q&A tomorrow and his main speech on Sunday afternoon. Party figures expect the conference to be reasonably serene: there are no party rows this year, and the only real bickering is manufactured Coalition stuff, rather than a genuine crisis. As I explain in my Telegraph column today, one of the things the Lib Dems are increasingly keen to do is to argue that key policies and

Nick Clegg spent this morning singing the Lib Dem equivalent of Take That’s Back for Good, telling his target voters from the teaching profession that whatever one of his colleagues had said or did, they didn’t mean it. The Deputy Prime Minister was trying to apologise for comments by Vince Cable, who had rather clumsily underlined a valid point he was trying to make about the need for better careers advice in schools by suggesting that teachers ‘know absolutely nothing about the world of work’. ‘I know that Vince did not intend to offend teachers,’ pleaded the Deputy Prime Minister on his LBC radio show. He then described the profession

A dramatic Cabinet this morning as the Tories ambushed the Lib Dems over the contents of the Queen’s Speech. First, Cameron took them by surprise by demanding that a recall bill be included in the speech. This was quite a slap to the Liberal Democrats seeing as just last month they were publicly blaming Cameron and Osborne for the fact that a recall bill was not going to be included in the Queen’s Speech. But this wasn’t the only bit of Tory aggression this morning. For Osborne then took up the baton, pushing for the inclusion of an EU referendum bill in the coalition’s legislative agenda. David Laws and Nick

[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

The Coalition is merely cohabiting now – that much has been clear for a while. But one partner doesn’t seem to acknowledge quite how unreasonable its behaviour is. The Lib Dems have been cheesing off the Tories with what have appeared to be an increasing number of increasingly heated attacks: from David Laws wading into the Ofsted row to Ed Davey attacking ‘diabolical’ and ‘wilfully ignorant’ Tories, and from even ‘native’ Danny Alexander making dire (but specific) threats about his dead body and taxation to Nick Clegg describing George Osborne’s call for further cuts in welfare spending after 2015 as a ‘monumental’ mistake. But today at his monthly press conference,

That David Cameron is reportedly considering committing to minority government above coalition is a strong message to his backbenchers that he’s not preparing to hop back into bed with Nick Clegg and co in 2015. They have been growing a little feverish about the idea, and ministers have made it known in the party that they would vote against a coalition in any secret ballot on a new deal (provided, of course, that there is a secret ballot). This is good for party relations in the straightforward sense that Cameron is signalling to his backbenchers that he doesn’t like the Lib Dems as much as they suspect he does, but also

At Lib Dem conference last autumn, the Liberal Democrats couldn’t tell you often enough how they had saved the quango Natural England from the Tory axe. Both Nick Clegg and Ed Davey made a big deal out of it in their conference speeches, portraying the Tory desire to abolish it as evidence of their coalition partner’s anti-green agenda. But at the inaugural meeting of the Cabinet Committee on flooding, Clegg admitted that Natural England had made the situation on the Somerset Levels worse than it needed to be. According to a civil service record of the meeting, he said that Natural England and the Environment Agency’s approach of letting nature

Who knew Nick Clegg was so scary? As James revealed this morning, the Lib Dem leader has challenged Nigel Farage, never knowingly silent, to a televised leaders’ debate for the European elections. But the Ukip response isn’t quite so enthusiastic. The party’s director of communications Patrick O’Flynn has said that ‘it would be ridiculous if Nick Clegg were to refuse to extend his invitation to David Cameron and Ed Miliband too’ and that ‘we also want to know from David Cameron and Ed Miliband that they are not running scared and will be happy to present their case on the EU to the British public as well. We can see

It seems the launch of the new Liberal Democrat website is not going very well. Apparently the party of tuition fees and Nick Clegg is ‘untrusted’. ‘What should you do?’, it asks. Lib Dem HQ will be hoping most people do not click ‘Get me out of here!’ come 2015. With their recent overtures to Labour, those that do vote yellow should certainly ‘understand the risks’.

Nick Clegg’s comments on Radio 4 about the possibility of a coalition deal with Labour in 2015 are significant, not because the Deputy Prime Minister is airing the possibility of the Lib Dems striking a deal with the left rather than the right, but because of his shift in rhetoric. Clegg was perfectly clear in his ‘No, no, no’ speech at the party’s 2013 autumn conference in Glasgow that the Lib Dems could do a deal with either party and would tone down the excesses of a Tory or Labour-led government. But his language back then annoyed some people. He said: ‘Labour would wreck the recovery. The Conservatives would give

Just when the Lib Dems thought the Lord Rennard row had calmed down, the peer announces that his lawyers have demanded that he be reinstated as a member by Thursday, or he will take legal action. His spokesman has confirmed that a ‘pre-action protocol’ has been sent to the party which notifies it that certain individuals will be sued if Rennard’s suspension is not lifted. Contrary to some reports, neither party president Tim Farron nor any other individual is named in the letter: it is simply notifying the party that individuals responsible will be sued for costs as the Liberal Democrats cannot be sued as a party. It is highly

What are the Coalition parties going to do for the next few months in the run-up to the general election? Judging by the way the Liberal Democrats have behaved this week, they’re going to spend a great deal of time talking about Michael Gove, which isn’t encouraging for anyone who got a little bored of that particular ding-dong around the time of the childcare debacle. They’re certainly not planning to do much in the way of legislating, either. At today’s Business Statement in the House of Commons, Angela Eagle mocked Andrew Lansley for announcing very little in the way of government business: ‘I thank the Leader of the House for

‘I know a few people who could arrange just that,’ remarked a Tory MP this morning on reading Danny Alexander’s remarks in the Mirror that the Conservatives would reduce the top rate of tax to 40p ‘over my dead body’. He told the newspaper: ‘The top rate of tax has been an issue of late. Labour wants to take it back up to 50p, I think the 45p rate is the right place to be. I wouldn’t go to cutting below 45p – that would happen over my dead body. It’s better to say we are going to stick where we are.’ It’s worth pointing out that Alexander only means