David cameron

Will The Sun’s story about David Cameron leaving his daughter in a pub be politically damaging? Not in the least, I suspect. These stories only hurt if they seem to fit a trend of behaviour, or confirm what everyone suspects. But no one, even the prime minister’s harshest critic, could accuse him of neglecting his family or failing to prioritise his children. Those who have seen him around his kids usually come away feeling amazed, and envious, by the way he can just flick a switch, no matter how tough things are politically, and go into ‘family mode’: baking cakes, playing Star Wars games, being the model father. This is

Gordon Brown, Sir John Major, Ed Miliband, Harriet Harman, Alex Salmond, Nick Clegg, George Osborne and David Cameron will appear before the Leveson Inquiry next week, for what will be the inquiry’s last week of evidence. All eyes, of course, will be on Cameron, who is due to appear on Thursday. He will be embarrassed once again by his past proximity to disgraced News International executives, and his handling of the News Corp BskyB takeover. He previewed his likely answers on BSkyB in an interview with Andrew Marr last week. He said that his intention was for Vince Cable to marshal the bid, but that was scuppered by Cable’s preposterous

There has been much speculation that Labour might insist on a referendum on Europe. This has been fuelled by numerous factors: the parlous state of the Eurozone, the increasingly likelihood of a 2-speed Europe and, above all, the fact that David Cameron doesn’t want the Tories to ‘bang on about Europe’, especially when in coalition with the Lib Dems. There have been a series of high-profile Labour interventions on the subject in recent weeks. Both Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls, arch-schemers both, have mulled the question in public, and the appointment of Jon Cruddas, a pronounced Eurosceptic, as the party’s policy reviewer, tickled fancies still further. But, today Ed Miliband

When David Cameron reshuffles his top team, one of the questions he’ll have to answer is what relationship he wants between the Conservative party and the coalition government. The Liberal Democrats have a deputy leader in Simon Hughes and a party president in Tim Farron who are quite often used by their leadership to try and put distance between them and the coalition. But there is no one who performs that role for the Conservatives.   Interestingly, Sayeeda Warsi has made clear that she would like to be freer to attack the Lib Dems. I also suspect that if she is moved in the reshuffle, whoever takes on the role

As the Jubilee celebrations draw to a close, attention once more returns to events in Europe. There’s a distinct sense among politicians, and especially coalition ministers, that what is happening there will change British politics in a huge way. As one senior MP said to me over the weekend, if a country leaves the Euro then the economic crisis that follows will reset the rules of the politics.   Measures that would have been deemed impossible six months ago will suddenly be on the cards. We’ve already seen a flash of this with Theresa May’s suggestion that the freedom of movement across the European Union could be suspended in the

One of the issues that David Cameron is contemplating at the moment is the timing of the reshuffle. I hear that he devoted a considerable chunk of last week to thinking about the structure he wants for the government.   The pressing matter that has been delaying the move is doubts over whether certain ministers could survive or not; no Prime Minister wants to freshen up his government only to have to make more changes a few weeks later. So, it was deemed to be impossible to do one before Jeremy Hunt appeared before the Leveson Inquiry. Now, some in Number 10 think that the Prime Minister will have to

In a bid to make Tory MPs feel more involved, Downing Street is inviting small groups of them to see Andrew Cooper, David Cameron’s director of political strategy, and Stephen Gilbert, the PM’s political secretary. Patrick Rock, who acts as the political liaison to the civil service run policy-unit, also attends. The first of these meetings took place recently, with a dozen MPs attending.   Those who were present describe the presentation as being frank about the government’s recent difficulties, it uses the term omnishambles, but also trying to offer reassurance. There was much talk about how Margaret Thatcher’s position at this stage in the political cycle post 1979 and

A visibly relieved David Cameron gave a statement outside No. 10 earlier today about the successful rescue of four aid workers from a cave on the Afghan/Tajikistan border, including a Northern Irish aid worker, Helen Johnston. The Prime Minister said he had personally authorized the operation, which must have been some decision given the recent history of such rescues. He praised British troops, and gave a brief mention to American ones for carrying out ‘a related operation’. But I was struck by the difference in emphasis between Cameron’s video statement and that of the British commander in Kabul, for whom the main point of the rescue was its multinational nature. Ms

It has become the conventional wisdom in Westminster that Jeremy Hunt’s career will turn on his appearance before the Leveson Inquiry tomorrow. Friends of Hunt have today been arguing that the Inquiry’s focus should be on how he carried out the quasi-judicial role. They are saying that once appointed to it, Hunt behaved — unlike Vince Cable — properly. They concede that Hunt’s texts to Fred Michel were overly familiar. But they maintain that, unlike Adam Smith’s texts, they gave away nothing about the state of the bid process. On the charge that Hunt misled Parliament, when he told it on the 25th of April that ‘I made absolutely no

Nick Clegg did not show his Berlin speech on the Euro crisis to Number 10 or the Foreign Office before releasing it to the media. This is quite remarkable. Up to now, there has been a recognition that while the Liberal Democrats may try and differentiate themselves from the Prime Minister on various things, the government must speak with one voice on the deficit reduction strategy and foreign policy. No credible country can afford to send mixed messages to either the bond markets or foreign governments. Clegg’s freelancing on this issue is a reminder of how Europe remains the biggest ideological fault-line in the coalition. When David Cameron formed the