From the Western Mail:IEUAN WYN JONES has come close to ruling out the possibility of a "Rainbow" coalition involving Plaid Cymru, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats after next year’s National Assembly election.Plaid’s annual conference opens today in Aberystwyth with the unveiling of a series of radical ideas that could be included in the manifesto.In a pre-conference interview with...

There is an extraordinary story on the Daily Telegraph website this evening (and, I believe, on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper). It reveals that Jonathan Djanogly, a justice minister and Tory MP for John Major's old seat of Huntingdon, hired a firm of private detectives to conduct an undercover investigation into his aides and colleagues.The Telegraph says: Investigators employed by Mr Djanogly used subterfuge to trick several people, including the MP’s constituency agent, into discussing their concerns about the politician.Their findings were set out in a private report sent to the Huntingdon MP in July 2009 which concluded that aides in his local party believed he was a poor politician and had lied over his expenses claims, through which he paid more than £13,000 for a...

The idea that the editor of a national newspaper would not insist on knowing the sources of a controversial story before he published it is absurd. That is why it is so hard to believe that Andy Coulson was not aware the News of the World journalists were engaged in phone hacking.But will it be such a disaster for David Cameron if Coulson is forced to resign?When Coulson went to work for him, the appointment was widely seen as marking a change in Conservative strategy. Coulson would provide some red meat for the redtops, in contrast to the touchy feely approach which Cameron and Steve Hilton had hitherto adopted.Given that I believe this approach was a touch of genius that detoxified the Conservative brand and brought the party close to the near impossible feat of winning the last...

According to the BBC:Boundary changes for the next Scottish Parliament elections suggest a possible electoral boost to the Conservatives, according to expert analysis. Professor David Denver's study said that if the new constituencies had been in place at the 2007 poll, the Tories might have won three extra seats.However, the Scottish National Party would have remained the largest...

...not to hard to guess what, if Dan's the man doing the proposing:A Tory Euro MP has called for a referendum on whether the UK should stay in the European Union, describing it as a "major" constitutional issue.Daniel Hannan said this had been "repeatedly promised" by several prime ministers but never delivered.The decision by MPs on Monday to hold a referendum on UK electoral reform...

I covered briefly the prospective Carmarthen MP, Jonathan Edwards' rather OTT boasts about his online presence prior to the last election- but four months on he is now being interviewed as the constituency's MP, so he must have done something right:THE day I met Carmarthen MP Jonathan Edwards, the Red Arrows – which he feels are a waste of money – were proving a force to be reckoned with....

Further to this post, from Monday morning's Scotsman.THE Scottish Government has confirmed it is poised to drop its flagship plan for an independence referendum in this parliament, despite spending three and a half years preparing for the vote.First Minister Alex Salmond is set to abandon plans to put his referendum bill before MSPs and will instead appeal directly to the electorate to back...

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague (pictured above left) has received “100% support” from Prime Minister David Cameron, after the beleaguered Mr Hague decided to speak out about his private life because he could no longer put up with allegations about his sexuality. Mr Hague also received the backing of his local constituency Conservative party after issuing a statement yesterday in which he denied having had an “improper” (i.e. gay) relationship with his special adviser, Christopher Myers (pictured above right), who resigned as a result of the “pressure” put on his family due to ”untrue and malicious allegations” circulating on the internet. Now far be it for this blog to speculate about the fact that Mr Hague and Mr Myers regularly...

I fell out with The Economist a while, ago but over this summer I’ve been drawn back by a series of excellent articles on the barmies taking over right-wing politics in the US, central Europe’s increasingly economic and ethnic volatility and the UK government's developing radicalism.Indirectly connected to the latter is this piece on the present position of Alex Salmond within the larger...

On the face of it a bold move from Salmond:ALEX SALMOND is set to take the biggest gamble of his political career by placing independence at the heart of his bid for a second term of office.The First Minister has conceded his Referendum Bill is "likely" to be defeated at Holyrood and will now build the SNP’s strategy for next year’s Scottish election around the party’s flagship policy. In a...

What would a minority Conservative government look like? It is now widely accepted, by Jack Straw among many others, that a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats would, sadly, have been unworkable. The numbers didn’t add up, we suffered real difficulty – whichever account you believe – negotiating with Labour, and there was the ever-present threat of nationalist lobbying. So the alternative was a Conservative minority government. And what would this government have been able to pass through parliament with the support of the next biggest party Labour? What policies would be implemented by a minority Conservative government with Labour’s blessing? Academies. This is perhaps where we as a party have compromised the most. But under the worse-coalition, the flagship...

How petty is this?Another little Labour plot appears to have had more success. Before the general election, the Scottish Roman Catholic hierarchy, including Cardinal Keith O'Brien, agreed that the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, could meet Benedict XVI during the Glasgow leg of the papal visit in September. Opposition to the plan came from Labour, the SNP's major rival north of the border, and when...

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott is clearly not put off by coalition from his pursuit of Tory donors and their tax statuses. Today it is Jon Wood, whose tax affairs have been in the papers with Lord Oakeshott saying, “Now is the time to take big money out of British politics”. You can read more...

For the Conservatives it’s the quitting of their next treasurer, David Rowland, whilst for Labour it’s John Prescott warning of the Labour facing bankrupcy (the context for which you can see in these...

Two illegal donations totalling £101,500 dating back to 2004 and 2006 have been forfeited by the Conservative Party. The issue came to light after it was revealed that over £1m in donations taken by the Conservative Party and booked as being from RF Trustee Co Ltd were not in fact donations from the company but from a series of individuals. As a result, the Conservative Party re-examined the donations and discovered it had accepted £1,500 in 2004 from an unidentifiable source and £100,000 in 2006 from Mrs Joanna Kate King, who was not on the electoral register at the...

This comes from David Torrance's Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy and concerns the founding of the 1922 Committee and the death of a coalition.The Carlton Club meeting of 1922 was integral to the development of the Conservative Party as a more democratic organisation, and to a country struggling to come to terms with the realities of the post-war era. A revolt by a group of junior ministers was the first hint that something was afoot, and in October backbench Conservatives decided to overthrow their leader, Austen Chamberlain, and withdraw from the coalition. Following speeches from Andrew Bonar Law, a Canadian Scot, and Stanley Baldwin, a half-Scots laird who affected a 'man of the people' image, MPs voted 185 to 85 in favour of discontinuing the six-year coalition and...

A belated follow-up to this story:An SNP councillor at the centre of vote-rigging allegations has been cleared of wrongdoing by the party.Jahangir Hanif faced claims he had falsely signed up new members to the Nationalists.However, the SNP’s governing National Executive Committee has ruled the allegations did not stack up.The row blew up last month after Hanif announced his intention to stand...

A headline only The Daily Mail could deliver:"Scots outrage over darker mornings as Cameron backs plan to move clocks forward permanently"He's even going to deny them their own time-zone, the fiend:He (Cameron) insisted, however, that there would not be separate time zones north and south of the...

I thought about clipping this onto an earlier EU-related post, but on reflection, it deserves its own space.I’m not sure if technically John Redmond was one of Major’s original “bastards”, but if not, he was sure certainly rowing in the same direction. Which makes this post all the more thought provovoking at this particular juncture.Hague and Cameron, in contrast, are more Europhile, albeit...

A quick update on Philip Lardner, whose suspension as a Conservative candidate during the election following homophobic comments we covered back in April – and who had previously been suspended by the Conservatives in 2008 for praising Rhodesian leader Ian Smith. After he made the homophobic remarks this year, he was also suspended from his teaching job. He has now been reinstated, but given a formal written warning over his behaviour. Hat-tip: Stephen...

I missed Cameron's less than convincing "answer" on the West Lothian Question yesterday.Toque has the details...

The following three graphs are from the Electoral Commission and show income and expenditure for the three main political parties as reflected in their annual accounts. There are some important exceptions to what they show, such as the money brought in and spent directly by election candidates, though from what I know of these exceptions they paint a similar picture to those annual accounts of the relative trends over time. As Stephen has often noted on this site when reporting on the quarterly donation figures, the Liberal Democrat figures show a consistently higher level of income in this Parliament than in previous ones. The net assets figures also show how the Liberal Democrats have been consistently in the black, unlike either of the other two main parties. Note: the graphs have...

I wrote just after the General Election:Conservatives and Unionists presently dozing in Northern Ireland and Scotland, in particular, need to wake up and give themselves a serious shake because there is one a hell of a battle ahead.They've pulled the quilt over the head and kept on snoozing with the inevitable results:Support for the Tories has fallen significantly in Scotland as the...

This morning's Guardian has an interview with his Vinceness by Decca Aitkenhead.As she reminds us, Vince Cable is "widely tipped as the minister most likely to resign from the coalition". Vince's own words suggest this is unlikely:"According to the papers," as he says himself, "I'm miserable, alienated, and on the brink of resignation." For many Labour voters – and a lot of disillusioned Lib Dems too – Cable's resignation would represent some sort of moral triumph, or at the very least, a return to politics as normal. "But that's simply not where I am," he says.In fact what we have now is politics as normal - or at least politics as it was before Tony Blair became prime minister. A Cabinet of strong personalities with sometimes differing views is just what we should expect.I also...

A follow-up to my recent post about the murdered MP, Ian Gow:Twenty years after he was killed by the IRA, there are calls for a permanent memorial to Sussex MP Ian Gow.Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell says a permanent tribute is needed to remember the former treasury minister, who was killed by the IRA."He was a magnificent member of this House and somebody that I believe should be...

From IC Wales:A Tory AM who has championed the cause of more powers for the National Assembly has failed to be selected as a candidate for his home constituency in next year’s election.David Melding, who has been a regional list AM for South Wales Central since the Assembly’s inception, is seen as the intellectual heavyweight in the Assembly’s Conservative group.But he was beaten by Dr...

If true, this is indicative of a Prime Minister who had completely lost touch with public opinion:The latest (ex-miinster to criticise Gordon Brown) is John Denham the former communities secretary, who wishes that Brown had backed his one big idea – for local celebrations for St George's Day.His "modest proposal" was accepted across government, but when it reached No 10 it was instantly...

Leicester City Council expects to have to cut its budge by £100 million and lay off up to 1000 members of staff, but still intends to buy an iPad for every councillor after next year's elections.The devices are currently being tried out by a few councillors, and the Leicester Mercury quotes a "senior councillor" as saying: "As soon as we all heard that three councillors were getting iPads everyone started asking for one."It all sounds very childish.I am also puzzled by the comments of the Conservative group leader Ross Grant. He is quoted as saying: "I've asked for council agendas to be e-mailed as PDF files to the iPad so I no longer need printed documents. This could save the council money in the long term."But if he wants to receive his agendas that way he could read them on a...

Bruce Anderson in the Daily Telegraph:Twenty years ago today, a fine man was foully murdered. Ian Gow had been one of Margaret Thatcher's close associates. No one on the UK mainland had been more resolute in defending the cause of Ulster Unionism. So he attracted the IRA's enmity. Even if not actually in uniform, he fell in battle against terrorism: a battle in which he had been a proud...

The BBC reporting that the BBC Trust has said the BBC is doing a grand job:BBC news coverage of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales has "significantly improved", the BBC Trust says.It follows a review published in 2008, in which the BBC was criticised for "falling short of its own high standards" and failing to meet its core purpose of helping inform democracy. Since then, the number of...

David Cameron's strong support for Turkey to join the European Union (which would eventually give free movement without borders for over seventy million Turks within the EU) is certainly a talking point. Far from being the eurosceptic Prime Minister many were keen to hail him as prior to the General Election, Cameron is very keen to see the EU expand.His declaration however that those who oppose such a move must be driven by either protectionism, nationalism or prejudice is very dangerous. Many on the Conservative backbenches will strongly disagree and not take kindly to being labelled by their Party Leader. Cameron is also playing with fire if he wishes to brush off those with concerns of the potential impact of Turkey joining the EU as having a quasi-Islamophobic agenda. The vast...

David Davis has been overheard making jokes about Clegg and Cameron at the Boot & Flogger wine bar in South London. (This is a venue where I have been overheard myself, but that is a story for another day.)Quite why this is seen as an important news story, I do not understand. But well done to Nick Clegg for handling it so capably today.What I do know is that to observe that two men like each other and work together well and then say, in effect, "hur, hur, hur, they must be gay" is cheap and ignorant (as we say here in Leicestershire).In this case I suggest this observation comes from frustrated ambition. For no very obvious reason Davis has convinced himself that he ought to be Tory leader and holds a grievance against David Cameron as a result.Still, Harriet Harman makes similar...

You wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but yesterday was a good day for the Liberal Democrats in local by-elections - a gain in Torbay and several holds elsewhere. Helen Duffett has the details.Conservatives are more open minded about electoral reform than you might think, says our new friend Edward McMillan-Scott on politics.co.uk.Big Think has some essential summer reading on environmental politics.The Lord Chief Justice has allowed appeals in two criminal cases where Crown Court judges made orders that they should be heard without juries, reports Solicitors Journal. Good news for all who believe in trial by jury.The northern navigable reaches of the Yorkshire Derwent are explored by narrow boat on Epiphany blog.Film Studies for Free has a wonderful list of web resources on...

As quoted in the Guardian:"Maybe it's the shape of the missiles but every time Trident is mentioned there is an outbreak of priapism on the Tory backbenchers. There is a real risk that the whole strategic defence review will be skewed because of the obsession with Trident. It makes no sense whatsoever to exclude Trident, the strategic deterrent, from a proper strategic...

Recent mentions of the attention being paid to the election expenses of Zac Goldsmith in Richmond and of Adrian Slade inevitably put me in mind of this story.In 1981 Adrian Slade won the Richmond seat on the Greater London Council for the Liberal Party, defeating the sitting Conservative Edward Leigh in the process. The Conservatives then lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses for the contest.The process, however, left Adrian facing ruinous legal expenses. His friends rallied round and staged An Evening At Court on Sunday the 23 January 1983 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, to help him raise the money. As Smarter than the Average! tells you in exhaustive detail, many of the greats of British comedy performed that...

I am immeasurably amused at the story about the pre-election adverts filmed by the Conservatives but never shown. It showed two “good-looking” young men in a sports changing room shower. One says “It feels so right. I am going to tell everyone.” According to the Sunday Times, the other then puts a hand to his friend’s mouth as part of an embrace and replies “I think I am too.” The camera then pans around to reveal the two men’s team-mates looking on “in horror”, a Vote Conservative slogan is then revealed. The advertisement was to be one of a series linked to “I’ve never voted Tory before” billboard campaigns that were criticised for being rather bland and then mimicked with spoofs across the internet. Another...

I'm frankly astonished by the approach Zac Goldsmith, Tory MP for Richmond Park, took with Jon Snow of Channel 4 news - judge for yourself! I suspect Goldsmith thought that by bringing up irrelevant rubbish he'd talk out Jon Snow, but it comes across dreadfully badly. Awful really. If he can justify and get away with not declaring the bulk of the cost of election boards to his campaign and off-loading some of the cost to local election candidates when the boards mentioned only one candidate's name (Zac Goldsmith) and one candidate's huge photograph (Zac Goldsmith), with absolutely no mention of the local election candidate and the bulk of cost totally undeclared, then electoral law requires review. The representative of the Electoral Commission seemed to think (judging by his interview on...

Andy Crick has a major problem with the coalition government: "My problem is that, notwithstanding some of the measures in the budget, like the dodging of a meaningful capital gains tax increase, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with much of what is being done. This is a difficult position to be in when I want to maintain my independence and critical faculties."If you missed Zac Goldsmith's extraordinary performance on Channel 4 News last night, hurry over to Caron's Musings for the video and some sensible comment.Another fount of good sense, The Wartime Housewife, strikes a blow against Outnumberedism. She is looking forward to the school holidays and seeing more of her children.BLDGBLOG has a photograph of the 18th-century ship that has been discovered during building work on the...

Kind of defeats the purpose of setting up the ECR in the first place:William Hague's instructions to the European Conservatives and Reformists group in the European Parliament, in which the British Tories sit, were decisive in securing a crucial positive vote on the European External Action Service (EEAS), EurActiv has learned.Without a decisive call by UK Foreign Minister William Hague to...

Both the Conservative MP for Harborough Edward Garnier (Solicitor General, no less) and Liberal Democrat councillors in Market Harborough are campaigning against closure of the town's magistrates court.Are they all supporting spending cuts at a national level and opposing them locally?There is something of that, certainly. But I think there is more to it than that.As far the coalition has a shared ideology, it is a scepticism about big, centralised solutions. So it is legitimate to ask whether moving every trial to Leicester will save money and whether doing so will meet the need for justice to be seen to be done.My former headmaster did famously fall asleep on the Bench at Harborough court once, but I still support local justice for local...