David cameron

David Cameron’s speech today is a sign of his frustration with the eurozone. Numbers 10 and 11 are increasingly irritated by how eurozone leaders are refusing to accept the logic of their project. What Downing Street is keen to avoid is another wasted year as Angela Merkel gears up for her reelection campaign. So, intriguingly, we see Britain throwing her weight behind Hollande’s support for project bonds. Cameron also uses the speech to again back eurobonds, which Merkel is firmly opposed to as she knows that this would mean Germany effectively standing behind everyone else’s debt. I can’t see a resolution to this crisis coming anytime soon, though. The economics

The 1922 elections were not a clean sweep for the loyalist 301 Group slate, they missed out on one of the secretary position. But they have pretty much succeeded in purging the ’22 and the Backbench Business Committee of the so-called ‘wreckers’. Indeed, the only ‘wrecker’ who has survived is Bernard Jenkin who remains on the ’22 executive. But, significantly, I understand that Stewart Jackson, who spoke up in defence of Nadine Dorries at ’22 last week and was very critical of David Cameron at the weekend, came — in the words of one who has seen the actual voting numbers — ‘within a whisker’ of being elected to the

The news that Rebekah Brooks and Charlie Brooks have been charged with perverting the course of justice means that there’ll be at least one trial involving friends of the Prime Minister before the next election. In cynical political terms, that Charlie has been charged as well as Rebekah creates an additional political problem for David Cameron. Part of Cameron’s explanation for how close he got to Rebekah Brooks has always been that she married an old school friend of his. Undoubtedly, the Charlie Brooks connection added a genuine layer of friendship to relations between Rebekah Brooks and Cameron. I suspect that if it was not for Charlie Brooks there would

Elections to the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers have always been a test of the relative strengths of the right and left of the party. But this year, the split is between those who are backing the broadly pro-leadership 301 Group slate and those who view the ’22 as more of an alternative voice. The contest has become particularly heated after last week’s fiery meeting of the ’22 Committee. Intriguingly, Stewart Jackson, who was barracked when he tried to defend Nadine Dorries for her ‘posh boys’ attack on Cameron and Osborne, is standing for the executive. Given what he wrote on Sunday and that he resigned as a PPS over

For the Tories to have any hope of winning a majority, they have to face up to reclaiming seats in the North, but can they do so under Cameron? David Skelton from Policy Exchange suggests not in an interview with the Northern Echo today, where he outlines the ‘Cameron problem’: ‘You can’t get away from the fact that the Tory party looks pretty public school, pretty Southern and quite gilded. The fact is that the Tories can’t win an election if they can’t appeal to aspirational working-class voters in the North and the Midlands…If the Tories can’t find a way to get across the fact that voting Tory has become countercultural in

It is two years to the day since David Cameron first entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister. To mark the occasion, here’s James Forsyth’s cover story from the time on the deal that put him there: Can this marriage of convenience work?, James Forsyth, 15 May 2010 ‘It is not the prize. It is a means to the prize.’ This is how one long-time political ally of David Cameron described the Tory leader’s entrance into Downing Street at the head of a coalition government. The deal with the Liberal Democrats which has put Cameron in Downing Street is, as this Cameron ally admits, ‘an arranged marriage not a love

Today’s Cameron-Clegg event was meant to be very different from the one in the Downing Street garden two years ago: grittier, more real. Watching it, one was struck by the fact that the two leaders still seem comfortable in each other’s company. The dynamics between them are better than those between Blair and Brown two years in. But, thanks to the compromises of coalition, they lack a compelling growth message for the here and now — as opposed to the long term — at the moment. One of their other problems is that coalition makes everyone focus that much more on the political process. The ears of every journalist pricked