Coalition

Of the three main parties, none is clearer about how they intend to fight the next election than the Liberal Democrats. Their message will be that they’ll make the Tories be fair and Labour economically responsible. Their ground game will fight for every inch in the seats they hold but effectively withdraw from the rest of the country. I suspect that this strategy will yield the Liberal Democrats around 40 seats and, if there’s another hung parliament, the balance of power again. But this near-term strategic certainty obscures a bigger question, what are the Liberal Democrats for? This is a question that Jeremy Browne, the former Lib Dem minister, is

Sajid Javid is the new Culture Secretary. Javid has impressed as a junior minister at the Treasury. He has learnt the political ropes fast despite only becoming an MP in 2010 and having done very little in politics before that. Javid’s appointment will please modernisers and the right alike. The right will be pleased that this Eurosceptic, Thatcherite has made Cabinet. Modernisers will be pleased that the Tories have their first Muslim male Cabinet Minister. Javid comes with a back-story that is all too rare in British politics. He is the son of a bus driver and was the first person in his family to go to university. His father,

Poor Jeremy Browne. Sacked for believing in the government in which he served*. Then again, no-one claims politics, or life, is fair. So it is good to see Mr Browne taking his revenge. He has written a book and been speaking to the papers, telling the Telegraph that: “Our lack of self confidence and our willingness to be defined as being a party of timid centrists rather than bold liberals means people look at us and may be reassured that we will be a brake on the other two, but that’s hardly a reason to vote for us. “Nick Clegg took a risk to take us from being party of protest to

David Cameron’s plan to renegotiate Britain’s membership of the European Union has long been regarded as a major obstacle to a second Tory-Lib Dem coalition. But, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, this is no longer the case. The Lib Dem logic is essentially that any deal that other European leaders are prepared to offer Cameron is one that they can accept as well. One Clegg confidant tells me that when it comes to the renegotiation, ‘It is not us David Cameron is going to have a problem with but the Tories.’ Indeed, there are parts of the renegotiation that the Liberal Democrats are already on board with.

Ed Miliband is mooting a tuition fees cut, to a maximum of £6,000 a year according to reports. I graduate in 2016. If Labour wins the next election, I’ll be in one of only 4 cohorts to pay £27,000 for their education. If I’m really unlucky, I might get lumped with a graduate tax too. It’s not my plight, however, that’s got Labour talking about tuition fees again. Instead, it’s the government’s admission that the current policy is likely to be more expensive than planned: official estimates suggest that 45 per cent of students will never pay back their loans. Just 3.6 per cent more and the new system would

In a speech given at Tilbury Port in Essex, Chancellor George Osborne hailed cuts to business and personal taxes this week as the ‘biggest in two decades’ – and committed to ‘fight for full employment in Britain’. Here’s what he said:- Thank you for coming here to Tilbury Port, this morning. We’re all here at the start of the most important week of changes to our tax system for a generation. These are the biggest cuts to personal and business taxes for two decades, and we’re making our benefit system more affordable and fairer too. Changes which will affect the lives of millions of people. Whether you are working or

George Osborne was on Andrew Marr this morning announcing support for a new garden city at Ebbsfleet in Kent and the extension of Help to Buy on new build homes until 2020. The Tories hope that these policies will show both that they are planning for the long term and that they are supporting aspiration. But what struck me as most significant was Osborne’s response when told by Marr that he was sounding more like a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. He instantly replied, ‘Conservatives believe in lower taxes, Liberal Democrats want to put taxes up.’ We already know that Osborne believes that the rest of the deficit can be

The Tory leadership is not best pleased with James Brokenshire, the Immigration Minister whose ill-judged speech turned a media spotlight onto the Cameron’s nanny. There are mutterings in Downing Street about the speech having being submitted for clearance very late. But Number 10 can’t escape its share of the blame for this fiasco. First, the speech should never have been cleared. The problems it would cause were obvious, which is why one Lib Dem tells me ‘we all fell out about laughing when we read it.’ Second, Brokenshire should never have been appointed to this job. When Mark Harper resigned as immigration minister because his clearner was working in the

Lib Dems are excitedly travelling to their Spring conference in York, which kicks off this evening with the traditional rally (hopefully a stand-up free one, though). Vince Cable and Tim Farron will be cheering the troops at tonight’s event, with Nick Clegg offering a Q&A tomorrow and his main speech on Sunday afternoon. Party figures expect the conference to be reasonably serene: there are no party rows this year, and the only real bickering is manufactured Coalition stuff, rather than a genuine crisis. As I explain in my Telegraph column today, one of the things the Lib Dems are increasingly keen to do is to argue that key policies and

A dramatic Cabinet this morning as the Tories ambushed the Lib Dems over the contents of the Queen’s Speech. First, Cameron took them by surprise by demanding that a recall bill be included in the speech. This was quite a slap to the Liberal Democrats seeing as just last month they were publicly blaming Cameron and Osborne for the fact that a recall bill was not going to be included in the Queen’s Speech. But this wasn’t the only bit of Tory aggression this morning. For Osborne then took up the baton, pushing for the inclusion of an EU referendum bill in the coalition’s legislative agenda. David Laws and Nick

The Coalition is merely cohabiting now – that much has been clear for a while. But one partner doesn’t seem to acknowledge quite how unreasonable its behaviour is. The Lib Dems have been cheesing off the Tories with what have appeared to be an increasing number of increasingly heated attacks: from David Laws wading into the Ofsted row to Ed Davey attacking ‘diabolical’ and ‘wilfully ignorant’ Tories, and from even ‘native’ Danny Alexander making dire (but specific) threats about his dead body and taxation to Nick Clegg describing George Osborne’s call for further cuts in welfare spending after 2015 as a ‘monumental’ mistake. But today at his monthly press conference,

While Number 10 is pouring cold water on suggestions that the Prime Minister might rule out a second coalition in the 2015 manifesto, his MPs have given it a rather icy reception. If the hints about him preferring a minority government to governing with the Lib Dems were supposed to reassure those on the Right that he does love them more than he loves Nick Clegg, they seem to have backfired rather. Instead, Conservative MPs I’ve spoken to today are annoyed for a variety of reasons. The first is that backbenchers feel any plan to rule out a coalition in the manifesto is counterproductive. It’s worth noting that Number 10

It seems the launch of the new Liberal Democrat website is not going very well. Apparently the party of tuition fees and Nick Clegg is ‘untrusted’. ‘What should you do?’, it asks. Lib Dem HQ will be hoping most people do not click ‘Get me out of here!’ come 2015. With their recent overtures to Labour, those that do vote yellow should certainly ‘understand the risks’.

Nick Clegg’s comments on Radio 4 about the possibility of a coalition deal with Labour in 2015 are significant, not because the Deputy Prime Minister is airing the possibility of the Lib Dems striking a deal with the left rather than the right, but because of his shift in rhetoric. Clegg was perfectly clear in his ‘No, no, no’ speech at the party’s 2013 autumn conference in Glasgow that the Lib Dems could do a deal with either party and would tone down the excesses of a Tory or Labour-led government. But his language back then annoyed some people. He said: ‘Labour would wreck the recovery. The Conservatives would give

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on how the floods will define the PM’s legacy” startat=1218] Listen [/audioplayer]It is all hands to the pump in Downing Street. The entire No. 10 operation from the Prime Minister down to the Policy Unit is focused on the floods. ‘We are all on a war footing,’ declares one official. David Cameron is spending his time poring over maps of the affected areas. ‘It is quite remarkable,’ says one minister who attends the Cobra meetings on the floods, ‘to hear the Prime Minister asking Gold Command about individual farms.’ Cameron knows that the floods will be a defining moment for his government. If

What are the Coalition parties going to do for the next few months in the run-up to the general election? Judging by the way the Liberal Democrats have behaved this week, they’re going to spend a great deal of time talking about Michael Gove, which isn’t encouraging for anyone who got a little bored of that particular ding-dong around the time of the childcare debacle. They’re certainly not planning to do much in the way of legislating, either. At today’s Business Statement in the House of Commons, Angela Eagle mocked Andrew Lansley for announcing very little in the way of government business: ‘I thank the Leader of the House for

David Laws’ attack on his former BFF Michael Gove is leading the news bulletins today, and rightly. Its wider significance lies in that the Liberal Democrats have decided it’s time to start picking fights not just with Tories in general but Michael Gove in particular. So Gove, having offered all that hospitality to David Laws, finds the guy he thought was his clansman wield the dagger on the instructions of his commander. This isn’t quite Westmister’s equivalent of the Glencoe Massacre, but the dynamics of the coalition have changed – in precisely the way that James Forsyth outlines in his political column this week. The LibDems’ support halved soon after