Nick clegg

Only one party can be happy with the local elections results so far, Ukip. Nigel Farage’s party has so far added 86 councilors to its tally and these results suggest that Sunday, when the European Election votes are counted, should be a good night for the party. Labour’s results have been mixed to disappointing. Their best news of the night was picking up Hammersmith and Fulham off the Tories. Knocking over one of the Tories’ flagship councils will delight Labour. But Hammersmith is a region where the demographics have been running against the Tories, look at how Shaun Bailey failed to win the parliamentary seat last time. Labour has also

Nick Clegg used to joke that he should include Ken Clarke in any list of senior Liberal Democrats. But Mr Steerpike hears things have moved way beyond that. Ken, who revealed to the Spectator that he was hoping for a coalition even before it was on the cards, is now acting with the Lib Dems on the notorious Home Affairs committee of the Cabinet. This little-known body is supposed to approve all moves the government makes — but it is now being used to allow Cleggy to veto anything he likes. He then holds the policy hostage, the demands a price for its release. So, for example, he’d try to veto

We have had much occasion to reflect, recently, on Disraeli’s dictum that Britain ‘does not love coalitions’. It’s now becoming depressingly clear that coalitions don’t much love Britain either. What started off as functional coalition government has descended into the most appalling policy blackmail which I looked at in my Daily Telegraph column yesterday. I said that granting ‘minority’ status to the Cornish was the result of such a horse-trade. We’ve had more examples today. The Daily Mail has stood up the fact that the Cornish move was in return for Clegg approving a £600 million reform of Town Hall pensions. The Times leader joins this theme, saying the horse trading is

I am beginning to think that Dominic Cummings has driven Nick Clegg round the bend. The Lib Dem leader should want this row over universal free school meals to go away; it is a massive distraction with elections only six days away. But he can’t help himself from keeping it going. So, today we have a joint Gove Laws op-ed in The Times declaring that they are not at loggerheads over the policy. This is accompanied by a news story which reveals that Clegg demanded that Gove write the piece. The piece also reveals, rather unhelpfully, that some schools are not on track to deliver the policy in time for

The Cold War that everyone in Westminster thought would never kick off is well and truly under way. Time was when ministers and advisers imagined that the letters and internal briefing documents detailing the dirty laundry of this government would stay firmly locked in Whitehall desks. But in the past few weeks, the leaks have increased, and they seem to be spreading around the village. Nick Clegg was confronted with the latest on the World at One this afternoon: a document showing that the Cabinet Office has given the Deputy Prime Minister’s favourite free school meals policy a red rating, meaning it is at risk of failing. Clegg tried to

What will become of the other big coalition row that’s burning away alongside free schools? David Cameron was asked today about the plans to introduce mandatory sentences for repeat knife offences, and made some very supportive noises again, which the Tories signed up to Nick de Bois’ amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill think is a sign that they’ve made the right decision. He suggested that Nick Clegg could change his mind about it – and some have taken this as a sign that there’s a compromise on the cards. The Conservatives tell me they are ‘looking carefully’ at de Bois’ amendments, but the Lib Dems say they

In today’s Guardian Nick Clegg sets out his reasons why he is stopping the government tabling clauses that would require mandatory sentences on second conviction for possession of a knife. Quite simply: I don’t agree with Nick. His argument for doing nothing further is simply that we are doing enough already. True, the latest Crime Survey of England and Wales released by the Office for National Statistics shows knife crime is down by four per cent on last year. But that will be little comfort to the victims of knife crime and their families. Yet again this week we learnt of another fatal stabbing – this time of a 17

Labourites are very pleased with their latest party election broadcast, featuring the ‘un-credible shrinking man’, Nick Clegg, growing smaller and smaller at the Cabinet table as the Tories around him hatch various evil plans to ruin poor people’s lives through the bedroom tax, cuts to the NHS and tuition fees. If you are already inclined to think the Tories are evil and Nick Clegg a bit of a weakling, you’ll enjoy this video. Which suggests that Labour is entirely playing to its base here. It’s not even Ed Miliband’s cost-of-living crisis pitch to hardworking families up and down the country who are a bit cheesed off that their lives don’t

Coalition relations are growing more fractious and sour. Even departments where the rapport between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems had been respectful, such as Justice, are starting to bicker publicly. Today the Mail splashes on a row between the two parties over knife crime, in the week of the stabbing of teacher Ann Maguire. Nick Clegg has refused to support mandatory minimum sentences for repeat knife offences, and the normally secret letters discussing the measures have made their way into the pages of a newspaper. Only a few months ago, ministers and advisers thought things were going sufficiently well in most parts of the Coalition (aside from Education, which

At the start of the year, some of the air seemed to have gone out of the Ukip balloon. The party’s warnings about the scale of Romanian and Bulgarian immigration to Britain hadn’t been borne out by events. But the debates with Nick Clegg enabled Nigel Farage to get his momentum back. In those debates, Clegg was too passive in the first one and then over-compensated in the second with the result that he ended up losing both of them. Clegg’s decision to not engage with Farage in the first debate meant that he missed his best chance to get under the Ukip leader’s skin. Strikingly, Farage admits to Decca

First the godly, then the godless, then the godly again. The public debate about whether Britain is indeed a Christian country, which the Prime Minister kicked off with his article in the Church Times saying that Britain should be evangelical about its Christianity, took legs when fifty-odd self-important atheists took issue with his remarks in a letter in the Telegraph and now the debate has a new spin after a group of academic philosophers wrote to the same paper (lucky letters editor) to contradict the atheists. “In important ways Britain remains a Christian country, as the Prime Minister has rightly claimed”, they wrote. “The establishment of the Church of England enshrines

David Cameron’s decision to hug-a-Christian seems to have worked pretty well, judging by the political response he’s provoked. For starters, his comments about Britain being ‘evangelical’ about its status as a Christian country managed to enrage the sort of people who also might annoy the churchgoing conservatives he needs to win back after the row over gay marriage. Today, he – and the secularists – got a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury who wrote on his blog: ‘It’s all quite baffling and at the same time quite encouraging. Christian faith is much more vulnerable to comfortable indifference than to hatred and opposition. It’s also a variation on the normal

Danny Alexander’s comments to the BBC that, in the event of another hung parliament, the Lib Dems wouldn’t make a confidence and supply deal with either the Tories or Labour, is the clearest statement yet of the leadership’s position. The Clegg circle believes that a second term in government is crucial to consolidating the changes that he made to the party, to making the Liberal Democrats think like a party of government. Not everyone in the party is so keen on a second coalition. One influential Lib Dem MP told me a few months back that he thought a post 2015 coalition with either party would be a disaster for

Is Britain still a Christian country? There is no straightforward answer to that question, as David Cameron discovered to his cost this weekend. The ongoing row began with an article the Prime Minister wrote for the Church Times last week, arguing that Britain should not be ashamed of its Christian ethos: ‘I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives’ In response to this, fifty notable public figures — from Tim Minchin to Terry Pratchett

David Cameron is doing God. He has followed up his comments about his faith at last week’s Downing Street reception with an article for The Church Times in which he declares that we should be ‘more confident about our status as a Christian country’ and ‘frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives.’ This is a strikingly different tone to the one that Cameron used to adopt. Back in opposition, he talked about his faith being ‘like reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes’. Personally, as I say in the magazine this

Of the three main parties, none is clearer about how they intend to fight the next election than the Liberal Democrats. Their message will be that they’ll make the Tories be fair and Labour economically responsible. Their ground game will fight for every inch in the seats they hold but effectively withdraw from the rest of the country. I suspect that this strategy will yield the Liberal Democrats around 40 seats and, if there’s another hung parliament, the balance of power again. But this near-term strategic certainty obscures a bigger question, what are the Liberal Democrats for? This is a question that Jeremy Browne, the former Lib Dem minister, is

Conviction politics is back. The two men making the political weather at the moment, Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage, both serve their politics neat. They have no interest in any ‘third way’. They stand for big, simple, defining ideas. They are both far closer to success than the establishment ever imagined they would be. Now the Liberal Democrat Jeremy Browne is trying to apply this outsiders’ formula to mainstream politics. Sacked as a minister six months ago by Nick Clegg, he is setting out the case for pure, unadulterated liberalism. His new book, published this week, is a deliberately bracing read. It is full of dire warnings about what will