Tag: “David Cameron”

I don’t suppose the two arrogant unapologetic posh boys who don’t know the price of milk (copyright Nadine Dorries) would ever listen to Alistair Darling. But they could do worse. Writing in the FT today, Labour’s last Chancellor sets out his ideas for how his successor George Osborne might get the economy going, including investment [...]

A Tory strategist (now there’s a rare bird) is quoted in the FT today as saying ‘I don’t think there will be a permanent impact [from recent troubles] if we can show we are a competent government.’ That may be true, though I doubt it; may be wishful thinking, indeed clearly it is; but the [...]

No, no, no Prime Minister … that media blitz yesterday was not the thing to do. I mean they were perfectly nice pictures, jacket off in the Today programme studio, striding red box in hand around Number 10, hitting said red box on train, factory visit, sit down with Nick Robinson in nice industrial setting, [...]

If, as is being widely suggested, Francois Hollande wins the French elections, and Nicolas Sarkozy becomes a rare, single-term President, there are one or two lessons David Cameron might try to draw on … once he has repaired the damage done to Anglo-French relations by effectively endorsing Sarko. The main lesson relates to hyperactivity. When [...]

It was on April 1 (apologies for inability to cut and paste links on the iPad but nobody has taught me yet!) that I suggested we should ‘watch out for a backlash on charitable and philanthropic giving.’ At the time, the debate was focusing on pasties and the so-called granny tax, but it was a [...]

I like the sound of this NASA scientist Prof Jim Hansen, who intends to use his acceptance speech for a major award on Tuesday to issue a fresh warning about man-made climate change. It has been mind-boggling to witness the way that climate change denial has become a right-wing political virility symbol, like low taxes, [...]

Even accepting that the media’s shift to a more negative take on the government is in part dictated by David Cameron’s decision to set up the Leveson Inquiry, he would be wise not to dismiss the change as an act of revenge pure and simple. Because in many ways I believe the media, which has [...]

I resisted the many requests from Sunday newspapers to offer crisis comms advice to Number 10 as a combination of granny tax, tax cuts for the rich, pasties, petrol panic and a Tory funding scandal combine to give the government a fairly choppy period. Partly this was because I remember once spotting Bernard Ingham, Maggie’s [...]

Just caught the BBC TV news headlines. Lead story new planning rules being brought in by the government. Second story a rise in the cost of stamps. So neither of them particularly good stories for the government; the first will lead to lots of angst among countryside campaigners, not to mention NIMBYism; the second will [...]

I enjoyed meeting the comedian Dave Gorman on Andrew Neil’s This Week programme, when he led a discussion on the etiquette of twitter. One of the points he made was that when something happens which is deemed to be big news among the twitterati, people with a lot of followers after a while get asked [...]