Nick clegg

Nick Clegg has announced a review into male primogeniture, but subscribers to The Spectator will – as so often – be already well-briefed on the subject. We ran a piece on this in Thursday’s magazine by Rachel Ward, the firstborn of the younger brother of an earl. This in itself will be enough to earn her a ribbing from some commentators on this blog, I imagine, but her thoughts on the subject are fascinating. Here’s a sample: “At the reading of the will after my father’s recent death, I was firmly reminded of my place by certain clauses bestowing his ‘residuary estate’ ‘upon trust for my first son “A” during his

For weeks now, the genteel coalition has been getting grubbier. Today the Deputy Prime Minister cut loose and went into campaign mode as the leader of the Liberal Democrats. With both eyes on preserving his party’s loosening roots in local government, he assaulted (£) Conservative and Labour councils for cutting services. Clegg was not assisted by the more prominent Lib Dems in local government: the ubiquitous councillor Richard Kemp, the Lib Dems’ chief at the Local Government Association, asserted, almost with a note of relish, that the party is going to get a ‘kicking’. It probably will. But, as James argues, Clegg’s immediate concern after 5 May will be to

I wrote earlier that the immigration debate can bite back — and it’s already done just that. Speaking this morning, Vince Cable has labeled the Prime Minister’s speech as “very unwise,” and at risk of “inflaming extremism.” That, lest it need saying, is the same Vince Cable who’s a member of Cameron’s government. In theoretical terms, what this clarifies is the parameters of the Coalition Agreement. While almost every policy that Cameron highlights in his speech is part of that document, it seems that the Lib Dems don’t have to agree with the way he sells them. The point is being made, this morning, that the idea of reducing net

Nick Clegg’s interview with Jemima Khan (née Goldsmith), in which he admits to crying regularly to music, is already coming in for predictable mockery. But the point that Clegg makes about how his job is affecting his kids is worth dwelling on.   Clegg is not the only coalition minister to fret about this. Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s wife, wrote earlier this year about how she worried about the psychological effect on her children of people verbally assaulting her husband in front of them. During the Labour leadership contest, Ed Balls, for all his faults, spoke movingly about his concern over how he would protect his kids from what was

Nick Clegg is campaigning in Leicester today, ahead of the local election. The Labour party has just confirmed that Sir Peter Soulsby has stood down as MP for Leicester South today to seek election as the town’s Mayor. A happy coincidence? Probably not. Labour are already running a coherent campaign in Leicester. Michael Crick points out that the by-election will fall on 5 May, together with the local council elections, the Mayoral election and the referendum on the alternative vote.  A party spokesman has opened new parliamentary candidate Jonathan Ashworth’s (who used to work for Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband) campaign by saying: ‘Both Peter and Jon will offer the

Relations between the coalition partners are fraught at present, more of which in the column tomorrow. The main cause of this tension is the AV referendum which is pitting the two sides against each other in an increasingly bitter fight. But even by recent standards, Chris Huhne’s response to the Tory chairman Sayeeda Warsi’s claim that AV would help the BNP is dramatic. As Patrick Wintour reports, Huhne has accussed Warsi and the No campaign of indulging in an ‘increasingly Goebbels-like campaign.’ This latest riposte follows Huhne’s letter at the weekend which made clear that the No campaign’s tactics were threatening the existence of the coalition. The next nine months