Nick clegg

Today’s announcement of childcare subsidy, up to the value of £2,000 per kid under the age of 12, is welcome news. As The Spectator argued last week, this is perhaps the smartest single move the Chancellor can make – too many highly-skilled women want to work, but cant afford to as they’d face Europe’s highest childcare fees. And then the Treasury has to spoil it all by lying about the policy. The government website has this to say: The first thing parents need to know is that the scheme is not ‘tax-free childcare’ at all. So how on earth does the Treasury justify claiming otherwise? Its explanation is below:- ‘For every

Simon Jenkins has written a bizarre piece in the Evening Standard. As well as answering that, I’ll explain a few others things about it. Unfortunately, he has completely misunderstood the basics of the universal free school meals fiasco. He writes: ‘Gove decided, by a deal with Nick Clegg, that running every school meant insisting every child have a “proper meal”. The order went out over Christmas. Gove would be first to admit he has never run a whelk stall and was surprised to discover that schools were having trouble becoming Jamie Oliver academies overnight… Comrade Stalin himself would have warmed to the tears of gratitude.’ Where to start?! Simon Jenkins clearly thinks

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

For those who missed Dominic Cummings, recently departed Michael Gove adviser, on BBC Radio 4’s World At One, here’s the extraordinary transcript which confirms what Coffee Housers will have feared. He didn’t give an interview, but responded to the BBC’s questions (below) about Nick Clegg’s plan to give free school meals to all school pupils – even the offspring of millionaires. And to me, this sums up why coalitions are a bad idea. The junior partner gets desperate for a jazzy-sounding idea to call their own, so ambush their senior partner. An announcement is made, for reasons of spin and nothing else. No policy work is done. The expectations of

I much recommend Nick Clegg’s weekend speech. Since it was given at the Liberal Democrat Spring some people may have missed it. There is hardly a line that cannot draw a laugh. My favourite passage is this subtle reference to UKIP: ‘An ungenerous, backwards looking politics has emerged in Britain. The politics of blame has found an acceptable face: it wears a big smile and looks like someone you could have a pint with down the pub. So I’m drawing a line in the sand. I am going to defend the tolerant and modern Britain we love, and I am going to start by showing people what’s at stake at the

Nick Clegg’s spring conference speech seems to have been written entirely with Nigel Farage in mind. The Lib Dem leader has decided to go after the Ukip chief, and today’s address was the latest example of the old party of protest directly engaging with the new one. Where Farage had a slogan about loving Britain and voting Ukip (which would have been better if it hadn’t been borrowed from the BNP), Clegg had a whole Love Actually-esque speech about it, ranging from affectionate asides about cups of tea and queues to this country’s love of freedom and its generosity. It was pretty difficult to disagree with anything that the Deputy

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

As James exclusively revealed on Coffee House this morning, an ambush took place at this morning’s Cabinet meeting on legislation for an EU referendum and recall of MPs. Downing Street confirmed this at today’s lobby briefing, with the Prime Minister’s official spokesman saying that: ‘I don’t think it’s any secret that Conservative members of the Cabinet would want to see an EU referendum bill, and that point was made. With regard to recall, well of course we don’t… try to pre-brief the Queen’s speech… but the Prime Minister made clear his commitment to introducing that.’ The spokesman said he didn’t accept the premise that the Prime Minister had changed his

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,

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

He asked… and Nigel said yes. The Ukip leader and his party colleagues had whipped Westminster into a state of great suspense in the 24 hours between Nick Clegg’s phone-in on LBC and Nigel Farage’s own appearance on the station. And Farage took his time to say ‘yes’ to the Lib Dem leader’s challenge to a live debate on the EU ahead of the European elections. He said: ‘I nearly choked on my bacon roll when I heard Nick Clegg say he wanted to have a debate about the big European question because this was the guy three years ago advocating an in/out referendum who now says there shouldn’t be

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’.