Zac goldsmith

The Sunday papers resound with the sound of Tory MPs thinking aloud about how to deal with ill-discipline: principally expenses and harassment. On harassment, the Sunday Times reports the 1922 Committee is considering its own regulation plans after deciding that placing the complaints procedure in the hands of whips might lead to scandals being ‘hushed up’ because politics would win out over justice. Committee chairman Graham Brady has said: ‘We have taken independent advice and had preliminary conversations with Acas [the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service] about how an appropriate grievance procedure might best be structured.’ On expenses, Douglas Carswell and Zac Goldsmith make the case, yet again, for voters

Day five into the Maria Miller debacle and the calls for her resignation keep on coming. As Isabel reported earlier, more MPs are starting to break cover. Many of the critical Tories are speaking to the press anonymously, but some have been more vocal, especially the younger MPs who sit in marginal seats – who are more conscious of the slings and arrows of outraged voters. Here’s a breakdown of some MPs who have criticised Miller publicly and what their motivations might be: Esther McVey ‘I can honestly say it wouldn’t be how I would have made an apology’ The Employment Minister is widely tipped for promotion in the near

Something strange is happening in the world of green Conservatism. After the PM decided to take out the ‘green crap’ last year, greeny Tories might have been forgiven for beating a bit of a retreat and licking their wounds. Well, if they did, they didn’t take much time to do it: now they’re fighting hard with a new vision for Green Toryism. Today the Conservative Environment Network re-launched with a pamphlet called Responsibility and Resilience which argues that true Conservatism is the best worldview for environmental policy. It contains quite an interesting mix of voices, from Zac Goldsmith to Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, who has written an essay on natural

If you were hoping for great drama over the Davies Commission’s interim report, you’ve got a while longer. As Patrick McLoughlin made clear in the Commons today, you’re unlikely to hear anything more than ministers repeatedly arguing that something must be done about Britain’s aviation capacity. Just not anything in particular this side of the 2015 general election. The Transport Secretary said: ‘I know that colleagues on both sides of the House will have their views on the content of the commission’s interim report, and in particular on the choices made in shortlisting these options. My principal concern as Secretary of State for Transport is to protect the integrity and

Loan sharks got a biff on the nose at PMQs today. Cameron wants to cap the sum that each of us can borrow. Ed Miliband was puzzled. This is a U-turn, he said. When he proposed to cap energy bills Cameron called it ‘Marxism.’ Cameron shrugged this off. And he gloatingly invited Miliband to ‘congratulate us’ for pushing through an important reform. Tricky for Ed. When the government filches your idea, you can’t complain without seeming to oppose your own position. Miliband moved to the looming winter crisis which he seems to be looking forward to. Last year an additional 31,000 deaths were recorded. All the PM’s fault, apparently. ‘Any

The Prime Minister presumably believes we face a critical shortage of airport capacity in London. Why else would he signal a possible U-turn on what was a headline pre-election promise? He knows that one reason west London voters backed the Conservatives in the last general and local elections was his decision to rule out any prospect of building Labour’s 3rd runway at Heathrow. But if that is how he feels, why on earth would he commit to doing absolutely nothing for three years? I am yet to meet anyone who believes an airport review should take anything like so long; indeed the majority of options have been studied to death.

The stock Cameroon line on Boris has always been that he might be a rival to George Osborne, Michael Gove, Phillip Hammond, Grant Shapps and other future leadership contenders, but he isn’t one to David Cameron. This line, though, is becoming rather tenuous. For it is becoming clear that the London Mayor isn’t thinking about a Tory leadership election as some far-off, distant event. Certainly, the assiduousness with which he and those around him are reaching out to those left feeling bruised by Cameron’s reshuffle suggests a desire to build a support base for a rather more imminent contest. There have been attempts today to laugh off Zac Goldsmith’s offer

Though the reshuffle, which continues today, saw very little movement at the top of the government, fans of the changes believe the Prime Minister still managed to remove one large obstacle to growth by taking the two women – Justine Greening and Theresa Villiers – opposed to a third runway at Heathrow out of the Transport department. Tory MPs I spoke to yesterday know that this will be one of the big rows of the autumn, as the commission examining aviation capacity gets to work. Some believe the government should get on with the decision, upset a few MPs whose constituencies are affected (including Vince Cable, who will be more

Hugh Robertson was trying to stick up for the Prime Minister this afternoon when he said David Cameron was ‘absolutely a man’. He was defending the government’s decision to stay right where it is on airport expansion, against Tim Yeo’s warning that to stick to manifesto pledges and commitments in the coalition agreement on Heathrow would make Cameron a ‘mouse’. So where does this leave the various options to solve our aviation capacity conundrum? Here is a rundown of the various solutions, and who supports them: Heathrow expansion Nine years ago, Labour presented a white paper proposing a third runway at the country’s busiest airport, to be built by 2015-2020. In 2009,

There’s a new member of The Spectator family, and she’s called Spectator Life. This is our new quarterly magazine focusing all the more civilised aspects of life — the arts, culture, travel, etc — and it comes bundled in, for free, with the main magazine. The first issue is available on newsstands this week, but, so you can try before you buy, here is one of its more political articles: an overview of the new generation of Tory rebels, by Toby Young. The Unwhippables, Toby Young, Spectator Life, Spring 2012 On the night of the great Tory rebellion over Europe, David Cameron had good reason to think that Zac Goldsmith

Adjust your calendars, CoffeeHousers. The parliamentary vote on an EU referendum is no longer set for next Thursday. As the Mail’s James Chapman revealed this evening, Downing Street has moved it forward to Monday so that David Cameron and William Hague can both attend. They would have been away on government business otherwise. What to make of this hasty measure? I suppose it could feasibly be seen as a scare tactic on the part of No.10: strengthening the current three line whip by making it very clear that Dave Is Watching You. But it’s far more likely that Cameron is appearing in order to set out the sorts of concessions

There is much excitement in Westminster at the moment about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign to end ‘discards’ under the Common Fisheries Policy. DEFRA and non-governmental organisations estimate that perhaps as much as 60 per cent of a catch will be returned dead to the sea because the CFP’s controversial quota system is based on the amount of fish caught. DEFRA has been pressing the European Commission to reform the quota system for years. At last, they seem to have succeeded. The commission is due to announce in July that the quota system will now be based on the amount of fish landed in port. With that apparently comes a concession to

Make what you will of his political agenda, but I think this is quite a refreshing admission from Zac Goldsmith today: “There are various things I have said in this campaign with absolute certainty. I said there will be no Heathrow expansion under our Government, there will be no charges for parking in Richmond Park and Kingston Hospital will be safe. If any of those promises are broken I will trigger a by-election and allow people to penalise my party.” It’s bound to rile some of his Tory colleagues, of course – particularly this close to the election.  But one of the upshots of Parliament’s recent spate of scandals is

Hold your breath, the ‘Zac’s filthy rich’ furore is coming to a front page near you. In addition to scurrilous insinuation about his tax status and the fact that he has spent Walpolean sums on campaigning in Richmond, Paul Waugh breaks the news that the Electoral Commission intends to investigate an allegedly impermissible donation Zac made to the Conservatives. An impermissible donation is of course illegal, but Goldsmith is innocent until the local Tory association’s case that his was an honest mistake made during the interim between moving out of Kensington and Chelsea and registering in Richmond is disproved. Other criticism is simply bunk. Goldsmith’s off-shore assets were determined by

That Zac Goldsmith has non-dom status is an embarrassment to the Tories. Given the anti-politics mood in the country, the whiff of hypocrisy is extremely dangerous to any political party and for the Tories anything that helps Labour’s effort to portray them as a party dominated by a wealthy clique is damaging. I suspect, though, that this story will only get bigger if it turns out that there are other Tory candidates who have non-dom status. Given the way candidate selection has been handled in recent years, there is no guarantee that CCHQ has established that all candidates are both resident in the UK for tax purposes and do not