David Cameron reinvents himself as the most brutal street fighter in the Commons

By Andrew Gimson 
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If the noise at Prime Minister's Questions continues at its present deafening level, David Cameron and Ed Miliband will soon be unable to hear anything, and will be reduced to communicating with each other in sign language. Or perhaps they have already gone deaf, which is why each man ignores what the other has to say.

Here is a flavour of Mr Cameron's oratory: "They don't want to hear...they're paid to shout....they've [i.e. the trade unions have] bought the policies, they've bought the candidates and they've bought the leader...It's not the party of the people, it's the party of Len McCluskey."

These taunts led Labour MPs to roar louder and longer than I can ever remember them doing, as if determined to blot out their insufferably rude opponent. Mr Miliband, his demeanour that of a child who is being bullied at school but is determined not to give in, tried to get his own back by asking Mr Cameron "how much his party has received in donations from hedge funds" and by describing him as "a man owned by a few millionaires".

The Speaker, John Bercow, complained that we "can't just have a wall of noise", and appealed for "some basic manners", but for much of the time a wall of noise is what we got. The curious thing is that Mr Cameron has excellent manners when he chooses to use them. But perhaps he has decided his good manners have deprived him of "authenticity", that elusive quality seen as so desirable in a modern political leader.

So instead we got Mr Cameron as a sarcastic bully, seizing every chance to goad Mr Miliband, of whom he at one point said: "No wonder he thinks like Buddha - he wants to be reincarnated and come back as a proper leader." I may have the start of this quotation slightly wrong, for the noise made it almost impossible to hear the exact words, but the urge to mock and humiliate Mr Miliband was clear enough.

A week ago these tactics proved highly effective in setting the political agenda and forcing Mr Miliband to react to questions about the trade unions' power over the Labour Party. The relentlessness of the onslaught was what made it so effective. Yet one could not help wishing for a greater use of light and shade. The worst thing for Mr Miliband would be to be laughed at by his own side, because Mr Cameron had made jokes about him, or had sympathised with the difficulty of his task.

But perhaps the Prime Minister has decided he does not wish to overdo it, and precipitate the downfall of Mr Miliband. Labour MPs are to be forced to support their own leader against the taunts of Mr Cameron. The Prime Minister has reinvented himself as the most brutal street fighter in the Commons, It is a disconcerting and coarsening transformation - or perhaps it is just an act, for every so often Mr Cameron gives one of those quick smiles which suggest he knows he is just pretending.

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Just when Cameron thought it was safe to get back into the water...

By Paul Goodman
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One of my old friend Daniel Hannan's favourite lines from Shakespeare is taken from Hamlet. There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave/To tell us this.  He quotes it when a statement has been made of the bleeding obvious.

I couldn't help but think of those lines when I read today about the results of a YouGov survey carried out by this site's old friend Professor Tim Bale of Sussex University, which found that -

• 53 per cent (gasp) feel they are not respected by the Tory leadership.

• 44 per cent (shock) say they spend no time on party activity in an average month.

• And only 19 per cent (horror) believe that the party will win an overall majority at the election.

Someone somewhere could have saved themselves time and money by looking back at a recent ConservativeHome members' survey, which found that -

• A third of Tory members want a pact with UKIP.

• One in three think Cameron is the heir to Blair.

• 15 per cent believe that there will be a Conservative majority in 2015.

Actually, add those who believe that there will be a Tory minority Government next time round or a Coalition, and the proportion believing Cameron will be in Downing Street then rises to over half.

I'm not greatly moved by the YouGov finding that one in five activists are "seriously considering" voting UKIP.  What they might do is one thing.  That so many want a pact is another.

Furthermore, it isn't clear whether those votes for UKIP may come at 2014's euro-elections or at the general election next year, or both.

None the less, the moral of the story is that Cameron's charm offensive will have to go deeper, faster and longer if it is to stand a chance of succeeding.

And there's no evidence that the good news about Abu Qatada, the Wharton referendum bill, the benefits cap and so on has made much difference to the disillusioned mood of many activsts.

Three reasons why Cameron wants to stick with HS2

By Paul Goodman
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There is a double-edged case against the Government's H2 project, whether one believes in high speed rail or not.  If one doesn't believe in it at all, it follows that the £50 billion that will be spent on the plan (or whatever the sum eventually turns out to be) would be better spent on other communications projects - including high speed broadband as well as rail.  And if one does believe in high speed rail in principle, it is all arse-about-face to plan the HS2 route first and airport expansion later.

This logic is eating away at business and political support for the scheme.  The CBI has said that HS2 needs to "wash its face" after the latest escalation of costs, and Peter Mandelson has suddenly labelled the project "an expensive mistake".  Although Labour repeated its support for the scheme after his remarks, it was scarcely likely suddenly to announce a change of view.

Nonetheless, opponents of the project claim that Maria Eagle, the Shadow Transport Secretary, is keenly aware that the plan will do nothing much for Liverpool (where her constituency is), and Ed Balls is bound to have an eye to the costs.  In doing so, he is reflecting traditional Treasury caution, which some also claim to detect in George Osborne.  Philip Hammond is known to have considered, when Transport Secretary, the merits of a review.

Why, then, is the Government pressing ahead with the plan?  I think there are three main reasons.

• David Cameron's personal commitment to HS2.  The Prime Minister has bought hook, like and sinker into the Andrew Adonis-inspired logic of building a new line rather than refurbishing an old one - and seems to share with the former Labour Transport Secretary, a tenderness for this grand projet.  One critic of the plan told me that in his view HS2 has become a legacy issue for Cameron - and once Prime Ministers have settled on legacy issues, it's very hard to budge them.

• “I am in blood/ Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." In other words, it's relatively easy for a government to commit to a grand scheme such as HS2, but extremely hard for it to escape the commitment.  Cancellation would bring with it both an actual and reputational cost.  It would also expose the Government to Labour attack, which is especially feared given the third reason, namely -

• HS2 has become a symbol of Conservative commitment to the midlands and north.  This may seem strange, since some polls find that the project is no more popular there than elsewhere.  But local councils and chambers of commerce near the route are generally for the plan, and cancellation would expose Downing Street to assault from them, too.  HS2 will be pushed near the front of some Tory MPs' manifestos in 2015, curious though that may sound.

Furthermore, Cameron will be well aware that the scepticism-to-hostility the scheme arouses elsewhere isn't reflected in the Commons, where Conservative opposition tends to come from MPs who are directly affected by the route (most noticeably in Bucks) and fiscal hawks.  There are not many Bucks MPs, and there are fewer fiscal hawks on the Tory benches than one might believe.

Very simply, HS2 isn't research on animals or the Iraq War or same sex marriage: MPs aren't been lobbied by their constituents to vote against it.  So they don't.  The project will grind on; successive Transport Secretaries will come to the Commons with fresh and bigger estimates of the cost; most MPs will turn a blind eye - and it will stagger its way to completion when we are all even older, unless the courts or Treasury civil servants kill it off first.

Cameron brings Len McCluskey before a wider public by using him to beat Miliband

By Andrew Gimson
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The Prime Minister gets more brutal by the week. Untroubled by any sense that he might be demeaning his office, he sets out to beat the living daylights out of Ed Miliband. It is not a pretty sight, but I suppose the Prime Minister could say he is just respecting our adversarial tradition of politics.

Mr Cameron enjoys being adversarial. Every so often he cannot refrain from giving a quick flash of amusement at some particularly cruel remark he has made. Today these were almost entirely devoted to suggesting that Mr Miliband is the helpless prisoner of Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite trade union.

Mr McCluskey got dragged into everything. Here, too, one might say Mr Cameron is demonstrating his respect for tradition. The Tories used to love suggesting that Labour was in the pocket of the trade unions, and here was Mr Cameron perpetuating this accusation thirty years after Margaret Thatcher broke the unions' power.

Miliband managed to defend himself for a minute or two by asking about the troubles in Egypt. In justice to Mr Cameron, it should be recorded that he at least did not blame what is happening in Cairo on Mr McCluskey. The Prime Minister told us the Foreign Office was advising "against all but essential travel" to Egypt "except for the Red Sea resorts", and for a moment we feared he was going to make some tasteless joke about how at home Mr McCluskey would feel in a resort of that political complexion.

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Cameron doesn't want to take Tory MPs on over pay, as he did over expenses

By Paul Goodman
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After the expenses scandal broke, David Cameron was skewered by the Morton's Fork of having to choose between the voters and Conservative MPs.  The former wanted the latter to return public money; the latter believed that their claims had been correct, and that for them to be compelled to make repayments was unjust.  Many were consequently angry when Cameron put himself on the side of the voters, and their fury was heightened by what some of them saw as double standards: members of the leader's circle, they claimed, were treated more indulgently than others.

Interesingly, the signs are that the Prime Minister wants to make a different choice this time.  He is reported to have said: "Whatever Ipsa recommends we can't see the cost of politics or Westminster going up. We should see the cost of Westminster go down."  That form of words provides cover for support for an IPSA package that would balance a rise in MPs' pay with a cut in their pensions.  Whether or not this happens remains to be seen.  But in the meantime, as a Cabinet member told me earlier today, Cameron is keen not to compromise his charm offensive to backbenchers, which has coincided with a Labour dip in the polls - and of which this Friday's Party-backed EU referendum bill in the Commons is a part.

James Wharton's Referendum Bill puts pressure on Miliband to rise above dithering tempered by opportunism

By Andrew Gimson 
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James Wharton’s Referendum Bill, which the Commons will debate for the first time next Friday, is starting to concentrate the minds of the more alert members of the Opposition. For while the Labour Party has said it will boycott that particular Bill, which it pretends to find too partisan, it knows it cannot indefinitely boycott the question of whether or not the British people should be allowed to decide whether or not we remain in the European Union.

Today’s Guardian reports that some members of the Shadow Cabinet now believe Labour should call for a European referendum as early as May 22 next year, when the European and local elections will be held. One can see why such a proposal might attract them. It would not merely enable Labour to claim that it was “more democratic” than the Tories, because it wanted to consult the people sooner. An early referendum might cause carnage among the Tories, by exposing the split between those who want to get us out of the EU and those who want to stay in.

Mr Wharton’s Bill seeks to write in to law David Cameron’s proposal for a referendum in 2017, by which time he hopes to have renegotiated the terms of our membership. Ed Miliband and his colleagues are worried that were they to commit themselves to this timetable, and were they to get back into power in 2015, their first two years in office might be dominated by the impending European referendum, which they might then lose.

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David Cameron should never be free of the fear that his own MPs might sack him

By Andrew Gimson 
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“Conservative Members of Parliament constitute the most elusive and mendacious electorate imaginable.” So says Robin Harris in his excellent new biography of Margaret Thatcher, Not for Turning, when he turns to describing how her own MPs got rid of her. Harris observes that the Conservative Party’s “somewhat bizarre rules” for electing its leader were “originally conceived for when the party was out of power and not intended to displace a sitting Prime Minister”.

In 1989, when the first challenge to Mrs (as she then was) Thatcher was made, all that was required was a “stalking horse”, Sir Anthony Meyer, and two other MPs who proposed and seconded him.  The taboo against challenging a leader who was also Prime Minister was broken by that rebellion, and at the end of the following year Mrs Thatcher was swept away by her own MPs, who were terrified that she was leading them to electoral ruin.

In 1998, when new rules were brought in which gave Conservative Party members the right to choose the new leader from a shortlist of two drawn up by MPs, the opportunity was taken to avert future leadership challenges by what might turn out to be only a handful of MPs. Under these rules, which remain in force, 15 per cent of MPs must write in confidence to the Chairman of the 1922 Committee to demand a vote of confidence on the leader.

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PMQs: David Cameron and Lynton Crosby set out to destroy the Labour Party

By Andrew Gimson
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Lynton Crosby has never lobbied David Cameron on anything to do with cigarettes or alcohol. The Prime Minister insisted, when challenged on this point, that he is only interested in learning one thing from Mr Crosby: "How we destroy the credibility of the Labour Party." Mr Cameron added that this was a subject in which Mr Crosby has "considerable expertise", but is something Labour is even better at doing for itself.

One might add that this is also a subject in which Mr Cameron has considerable expertise. On leaving Oxford, he went straight into the Conservative Research Department, where he mastered the technique of making a close study of Labour policy in order to demonstrate, with the help of quotation, that it is riven by fatal contradictions.

So what we get nowadays at Prime Minister's questions is a perpetual assault by Mr Cameron on the Labour Party, of a kind which a gifted desk officer in the Conservative Research Department of the late 1980s might make. It is a professional performance, but also a rather mean-spirited and constricted one. In vain the Speaker, John Bercow, told the Prime Minister to concentrate on government policy. Mr Cameron was more interested in the Opposition's policies. At frequent intervals he would give yet another example of something Labour had got wrong before declaring "What a complete shambles", "Another shambles", "Just another display of extraordinary weakness" and so on and so forth.

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Cameron: No "moral equivalence" between the Assad regime and the Free Syrian Army

By Harry Phibbs
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The Prime Minister's interview with Dermot Murnaghan was broadcast this morning on Sky News.

The section on Syria was a bit tortuous as David Cameron clearly believes that arming the Free Syrian Army would be the right thing to do but is constrained from directly saying so.

He was asked about whether arming the rebels was necessary to put pressure on President Assad to stand down:

"Well in terms of what the UK has done, we’ve worked with European partners to lift the arms embargo. We have made no decision to arm the rebels and I recognise that would be a big and important decision and we said very clearly that we haven’t made that decision. But the point of lifting the arms embargo was really twofold.

"Once was it felt to me as if there was almost a moral equivalence Europe was saying, between President Assad who you know, is now using chemical weapons to poison and kill his people, more equivalence  between him and the Syrian opposition who we have actually after all recognised as legitimate spokespeople on behalf of the Syrian people.

"So it was right to lift the arms embargo off them for that case but I think also right to send a very clear message to Assad that he shouldn’t think he can just win this conflict in a military way. That he should feel pressure. That he should make sure that the regime is effectively at the negotiating table as well."

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Commons sketch: Cameron wages an unEdifying war of attrition against Balls

By Andrew Gimson
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David Cameron got the better of this bar-room brawl, but despite the involvement of the two Eds, the contest was not an Edifying one. It became all too clear from these scrappy exchanges that the Prime Minister is determined to seize every chance to kick Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor: to unEdify him, as it were. Ed Miliband performed respectably enough as Leader of the Opposition, but was reduced for much of the time to the role of a spectator.

Would Labour reverse the Government's cuts in the spare-room subsidy, or  bedroom tax, or whatever one wishes to call it? The question was put to Mr Balls, not Mr Miliband. Mr Balls's denial that the last Labour Government was profligate was treated as one of the most significant statements of the last ten years, and one that "is going to be hung around his neck forever".

One fears it will certainly be hung round his neck until the next general election in 2015. When I use the word "fears", I mean that to those of us who follow politics with some attention, this style of debate might start to become  slightly wearisome. But Lynton Crosby has never been a trainer who worries about such aesthetic questions as whether his man's mode of fighting is elegant. Mr Crosby clearly wants Mr Cameron to remind people at every turn that Labour cannot be trusted with the economy: a message to be conveyed by kicking, scratching and pummelling Mr Balls for week after week after week.

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