Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.
Ed Miliband has just managed to have a really good PMQs on a day when there is such a big story following the session that it will barely get reported. The Labour leader focused on broken promises, and cleverly managed to force the Prime Minister to talk about immigration by asking about the failure of
George Osborne’s pitch at today’s Autumn Statement will be for voters to give the Tories another five years leading the government to finish the job of balancing the books. Today the Prime Minister’s official spokesman summed up the address from the Chancellor that we’ll hear in just over half an hour as ‘an Autumn Statement to
A lot of focus today will be on how Labour would cut the deficit (and perhaps how George Osborne actually plans to get it done rather than just talking about it, given the Item Club warning that deficit reduction will plateau). Ed Balls has been arguing this morning that Labour would ‘balance the books in
A number of papers seem to have got themselves into a sufficient pickle over whether or not Muhammad is the most popular name in this country that Hacked Off has decided it’s a good opportunity to take a pop at the press. The Muhammad story cropped up this week because of a survey from a
The Conservative party is all abuzz this afternoon, but it’s not about the Autumn Statement. They’ve been told that there is a three-line whip vote on ‘something’ on Thursday. Not even the whips know what the vote is on, other than that they must tell MPs to turn up. Labour is also on a three-line
The European response to David Cameron’s immigration speech last week was pretty positive, but at some point between now and the formal renegotiation, someone was going to chuck a fly in the ointment. Last night Poland’s deputy foreign minister Rafal Trzaskowski told Newsnight that his country would have a ‘red line’ against Britain treating immigrants
How much of a role should the government have in building homes? The vogue these days is for talking about localist solutions and helping the private sector to grow, but today Danny Alexander signalled a significant shift in the other direction. As he launched the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury
George Osborne is choreographing his autumn statement week to make things as difficult as possible for Labour. At present senior ministers are travelling the country handing out nice things to voters as they unveil details of the 2014 National Infrastructure Plan. Yesterday’s roads bonanza has been replaced by a garden city, better flood defences and
Labour is very pleased with the amount of attention it garnered for its new private schools policy when Tristram Hunt unveiled it last week. So it was natural that the Shadow Education Secretary used this as his main line of attack at today’s Education Questions. He set the scene first using one of his shadow
George Osborne has been looking forward to this particular Autumn Statement for a while because it is the opportunity for him and other colleagues to tour the country like Santa with a large infrastructure sack, handing out £15bn of road improvements to marginal constituencies and helping voters feel as though the recovery is making their
It’s very fashionable these days to be despondent about the quality of our politicians. They’re all lazy liars who look only to their interests and neglect their duties to their constituents because they’d rather be grunting and snorting around a trough before sticking their snouts in it. And while the expenses scandal, resignations and court
Fridays in the House of Commons Chamber are rarely edifying experiences, and today a number of MPs and campaigners are very exercised that two backbenchers managed to talk out a private members’ bill which claimed to give tenants better protection against so-called ‘revenge evictions’. These evictions are when a tenant complains about the leaking bath
I’m not sure why everyone is so enraged by the pictures of fighting, shouting and arrests from Black Friday. British people have been exhibiting this sort of behaviour for years, whether it be at the open doors of a shop holding a sale or even trying to get into a Tube carriage (I was elbowed
One of the aims of David Cameron’s big immigration speech was to settle the issue with his backbenchers before returning to talk about the economy. Based on conversations I’ve had this morning with the key movers and shakers in the eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, he hasn’t got very close to settling the issue
David Cameron has just finished delivering his ‘game changing’ immigration speech. A lot of it was a narration of why immigration had made Britain the country it is, but why some voters were uncomfortable with it. You can read the full text here, but here’s the speech summarised in five quick points: listen to ‘David Cameron’s
If David Cameron’s speech today is more about backbench management than it is about his desperate desire to talk about immigration, then he needs to make sure that what he says is enough to satisfy most in his party. His aides and PPS Gavin Williamson were calling round key MPs last night to give them
David Cameron will make his ‘game-changer’ speech on immigration tomorrow in which he is expected to say that the UK will leave the EU if it does not secure reforms that allow the government to deny benefits to migrants. He will say: ‘If we cannot put our relationship with the EU on a better footing,
Toby Rowland didn’t have the ‘wit, imagination or inclination’ to invent the account he produced of Andrew Mitchell calling police officers ‘plebs’ at the gates of Downing Street. In any other circumstances that description would be rather devastating, but today it must have sounded rather sweet for the police officer when Mr Justice Mitting uttered
We are still waiting for David Cameron’s immigration speech, expected ‘this week’. The Conservatives tried to get their apology in early for failing to meet their target to get net migration into the ‘tens of thousands’, with a series of interventions starting this summer in which top Cabinet ministers started to highlight the problems with
It is quite normal in British politics for a political party to turn on itself after an election defeat — but the Tories now seem to be preparing themselves for civil war in the unlikely event of victory. Already, the tribes are forming and snarling at each other. As ever, Europe is the casus belli.
