Tag: “David Cameron”

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 [...]

Whether or not David Cameron rushed forward today’s move on alcohol pricing to distract from the granny tax row, I am pleased he has shown that the issue of Britain’s drink problem is firmly on the agenda. When I was making a recent Panorama on ‘Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics’ I was aware that the Prime Minister [...]

If the frontbench had accepted Ed Miliband’s invitation to raise their hands if they were going to be better off as a result of the Budget, we’d have seen an awful lot of fingers in the air. I understand why instead they squirmed and, in George Osborne’s case, sank a little deeper into the green [...]

I am due to be sitting on the This Week sofa with Michael Portillo on Thursday, when doubtless post-Budget discussion will dominate. As regular viewers will know, the show kicks off with Andrew Neil asking Michael and his fellow close-up sofa-occupant for their ‘moment of the week’. This week’s will probably emerge from tomorrow, but [...]

Half way through George Osborne’s BBC interview with Andrew Marr yesterday, I got a bit bored and tweeted that there seemed little purpose to the interview other than to remind people of two things we already know – that we have a coalition government, and that the Budget is on Wednesday. This was, I now [...]

As the papers fill up with pre-Budget speculation (most of which will be wrong) and as the Lib Dems wriggle around over health, and Nick Clegg and Vince Cable fight proxy battles over mansion taxes and tycoon taxes, a new and highly vulnerable front is opening for both of them. Crime. One of the many [...]

I just did a short interview on Five Live on the fall-out (literally in the case of relations between Britain and Italy) from the failed attempt to rescue two hostages in Nigeria. I was preceded by an Italian politician who was venting her spleen at David Cameron’s failure to consult his Italian opposite number until [...]

I got in last night to catch sight of Nick Clegg talking about child benefit on the news. Now I didn’t see the start of the report, but if I read the words and body language right, I thought that rather than agitating as the Lib Dem leader in advance of the Budget, he was [...]