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Sunday, December 7

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Good morning,

Welcome to your Sunday morning political briefing from Tim Shipman.

In this week's edition

  • Coalition chaos after autumn statement
  • Salmond to stand for Westminster
  • MPs boost bill for wages of family and friends
  • Poll: Voters point finger of blame at coalition
  • Morgan vs. Gove

Any tips or feedback tweet us @TimesRedBox.

Top News
Autumn statement
Game of Moans

George Osborne wanted this week to be all about the economy - and he has got his wish, though perhaps not in the way he expected. On Tuesday evening, when he tucked himself up in bed, stamp duty reform secreted in the back pocket of his pyjamas, dividing lines with the Labour party ready to be drawn in indelible ink on the frontal lobes of an attentive electorate, the chancellor had good reason to be satisfied.

This morning he wakes to find himself at the heart of two Game of Thrones style clashes of clans, the first with his coalition partners and the second with that hardy perennial opponent of Conservative governments through the ages, the Church of England, in the person of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yes, we expected differentiation between Tories and Lib Dems. Just five months before the start of the election campaign, how could it be otherwise? But Osborne seems to have been genuinely taken aback by the truculence of the “yellow peril” this week.

First came the Vince Cable onslaught in cabinet on Wednesday, criticising both Osborne and by implication Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander for signing up to such draconian spending cuts in the next parliament. I’m told even Clegg rolled his eyes at David Cameron when Cable did his Uncle Fester act. And then the DPM refused to sit next to Osborne when he delivered the statement to MPs. The chancellor has already accused the Lib Dems of backing him in private while “slagging off” his plans in public.

This morning Osborne reminds me of Peter Finch in Network; he’s mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it any more. In an article for The Sunday Times he brackets the Lib Dems with Labour as a danger to the recovery, warning that both parties would lead to a “return to economic chaos”. He says Clegg and Alexander are plotting to hit families with “hefty income tax rises” and an increase in national insurance. For a man whose relationship with Alexander has long been the strongest glue in the coalition, to hear him taunt the Lib Dems for “arguing with themselves”, and state that “it’s hard to work out exactly what they think”, this is a remarkable intervention. I’ve heard some fruity language from Tories about their Lib Dem partners, particularly in private, in the past. But I’ve never experienced such punchy words from someone so senior.

To recap, the coalition parties agree on the timetable for eliminating the deficit but not on the means of doing so. Osborne wants it all achieved with cuts, the Lib Dems prefer some tax rises. Then, from 2018, Osborne wants to keep cutting to achieve a surplus, Alexander wants a less aggressive approach. If he is upset by his colleague’s outburst, the Sun columnist Louise Mensch has some advice: "He should defect to the Conservative party," the former Tory MP writes, "where he has a great and serious future."

The chancellor won Wednesday’s news cycle with his stamp duty reform but by Friday the public debate was about the sort of country Britain might become under continuing austerity. In his article Osborne rejects the idea that he is taking Britain back to the pre welfare state years, pointing out that when he has finished real terms public spending will be back only to 2002 levels, before Gordon Brown turned on the spending taps.

But the intervention of the archbishop, who wants state backing for food banks, will only fuel the idea in some minds that the Tories are engaged in a scorched earth policy against the poor.

In the Game of Thrones, if the Tories are the Lannisters, the Lib Dems are beginning to resemble an embattled outpost of the Night’s Watch. But the Church may just be Daenerys and her dragons: an elusive opponent hard to defeat by conventional means.

In a powerful essay for the Mail on Sunday Justin Welby compares what he has seen in Britain to the Democratic Republic of Congo and demands state support for food banks. Iain Duncan Smith has repeatedly clashed with food bank providers. Today is not perhaps a good day for further details to emerge of how IDS might cut welfare. His plan to limit child benefit to two children (supported by Cameron but not by Osborne) is back on the table. And now he’s also looking at plans to cajole lone parents back to work when their children are two rather than three as at present.

There are other autumn statement stories out there that could prove awkward for the chancellor. The Sunday Times reveals that the small print of the Office of Budget Responsibility report shows that immigration will actually rise next year and will never fall below 105,000, meaning that Cameron’s target of tens of thousands of new arrivals seems destined never to be met. Just as damaging, the OBR has admitted that the assumptions in its figures about Britain’s EU contribution is that the European Commission will succeed in extracting €4bn more from member states at a meeting later this month. That’s £2.4bn in sterling, of which Britain will have to fork out £400m.

All this will create openings for Labour. But they are not without their own internal strife. In The Sun on Sunday, Damian McBride urges Ed Miliband to “tell the truth” about future government spending.


Tory leadership
Who's up next?

The subtext of much of the coverage this morning is whether it has enhanced Tory chances of winning the election and Osborne’s hopes of succeeding Cameron as party leader.

In my Focus piece on the autumn statement, which also has the fullest details you will find this weekend on that cabinet meeting, there is an account of a dinner on Wednesday evening at which senior Tory MPs discussed the relative stock prices of Osborne, Boris Johnson and Theresa May.

One who was present said: “We concluded that George had done us good but even the pro-George people said, ‘Yes, but he’ll never be leader’.” A senior backbencher added: “The stamp duty policy is a good one but I don’t think it’s an election game changer. Colleagues went home optimistic. But people see George as the finance director, not the managing director.” Adam Boulton also pours cold water on Osborne’s chances of a move next door.

I’m told Osborne expects Boris Johnson to make it into the final two of a contest and he would hope to be the second. His biggest threat is May, because she can keep him out of the run-off with party members. With that in mind, he has been advancing the career of Sajid Javid, the culture secretary, who could combine Osborne’s political operation with the votes of the 2010 intake to run as Osborne’s front man. But there are growing doubts that Javid, who is yet to strike a pose that has not been pre-approved by Dave and George, is not yet oven ready. “Improving stock”, mutters one Osborneite with faint praise.

Similar thoughts about May and Javid have found their way to the ears of the Sunday Telegraph, where one senior Tory tells Iain Martin: “George is starting to panic that Sajid Javid won’t make the final cut and get into the top two. That means he wouldn’t have a candidate if there is a leadership election.”

Osborne is right to fear May. The Sun on Sunday reveals that the the home secretary has drawn up plans for voters to remove police and crime commissioners from office – which, it just so happens, means that they could kick out the mayor of London. While she talked the cabinet through the idea last week, Boris didn't hear about it until The Sun contacted his office yesterday.

May thinks Boris deeply unserious, and that’s exactly the kind of brutal politicking and deft media management (her special advisers always take a gun to a knife fight) that the uber-loyal Javid has so far failed to engage in. If he wants the job, he needs to expand his allies in the parliamentary party and the media dramatically, and to roam off script occasionally.

Nick Clegg will appear on The Andrew Marr Show shortly. Matthew Hancock, the business minister, will be on Murnaghan on Sky News after 10am. David Gauke, the financial secretary to the Treasury, and Chris Leslie, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, will join Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics from 11am.

2015 Election Countdown
150 days to go
Referendum fallout
By Eck, he’s back

If it feels like only yesterday since he left frontline politics in Holyrood, that’s because it pretty much was.

Alex Salmond is expected to announce his candidacy for the UK parliamentary seat of Gordon – a constituency currently held by the Liberal Democrats. The former first minister won’t face a fight with the incumbent MP, Sir Malcolm Bruce, who is standing down ahead of the election.

For a man who has criticised Westminster politics more than most, he hasn’t ever been too far from the green benches. He was last seen in the House of Commons back in 2010, before stepping down as MP for Banff & Buchan after 23 years.

Follow the comings and goings of SW1 throughout the week on the Red Box website

Scottish Labour leadership hopeful Jim Murphy former Scottish first minister Jack McConnell will be with Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News from 10am.

War in Afghanistan
RAF may face Taliban again

"Britain's armed forces have reached a major landmark today," this briefing reported six weeks ago. "The UK's combat mission in Afghanistan is officially over."

Asked last year whether troops were leaving Afghanistan with the message “mission accomplished”, the PM responded: "Yes, I think they do."

Yet The Sunday Times reveals today that Britain is considering whether to send warplanes back to the country to help the Afghan army. The move would need support from some 70 UK troops on the ground.

President Ashraf Ghani has twice directly asked for assistance from David Cameron and the prime minister has pledged to help him get the resources he needs. On the political side, Downing Street says the PM’s preference is to get others to do the heavy lifting. But a British general has told the paper that he expects the UK to send fast jets and medivac help next year.

Speaking to the ST, Abdullah Abdullah, Afghanistan's chief executive officer, has described the departure of international forces as too abrupt.

A No 10 spokesman said: “We have talked to Nato allies about how they can assist the Afghans if necessary and understand that they intend to cover this.”

Top News

Sunday comment


1. Will Boris try to end the 'Osborne supremacy'?
- Iain Martin, The Sunday Telegraph

2. George Osborne cuts, Ed Miliband thrusts... and Nick Clegg runs away
- James Forsyth, The Mail on Sunday

3. Ed has two choices on cuts
- Damian McBride, The Sun on Sunday

4. Moody, angry, naive: yes, he was flawed but Gordon Brown did save the world
- Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer

5. The BBC IS biased – against power of all kinds
- John Rentoul, The Independent on Sunday
Tory policy
PM pledges millions in fight against child abuse

Apart from hammering home messages about the economy, the big event for David Cameron this week is a major international conference on combating child abuse pornography on Thursday. The prime minister is set to pledge £50m towards a new fund to tackle child sex exploitation online, the ST reveals. Fifty countries will this week attend a Downing Street summit on the issue.

Ministers are working with Unicef after Cameron asked the United Nations body to expand its role and help to tackle child abuse images on the web.

Labour however is preparing to launch an attack on the government’s record, accusing the Home Office of failing to press the National Crime Agency to investigate 20,000 people suspected of viewing such images online.

Diana Johnson, shadow home affairs minister, said the government should not have scrapped Childbase in 2011, a programme used by police to match images seized on a suspect’s hard drive against confirmed child abuse images. The government will this week launch a new image-matching system, Child Abuse Image Database (Caid).

Sam Gyimah, the education minister, will be on the Sunday Politics at 11am.

SW1
MPs boost bill for wages of family and friends

The expenses scandal seems like a long time ago.

The amount of taxpayers’ money MPs have spent paying relatives and loved ones each year has risen by more than half since the 2010 general election. The Sunday Times’s new signing James Lyons reveals today that honourable members paid spouses, wives, husbands, children and other “connected parties” in their offices a total of £3.76m in the year to April. Figures obtained from Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) under freedom of information show that the bill has risen from £2.41m in 2010-11.

The number of MPs employing family members rose from 137 at the election to 167 last year and 168 relatives were on the public payroll, up from 141.That means that the average salary has climbed by about a third, from just over £17,101 to just over £22,400. MPs are limited to one family member or loved one under changes brought in by Ipsa four years ago, but they can carry on employing more if they did so before the election.

Forking out between £45,000 and £49,999 each year, Tory rightwingers Peter Bone and Christopher Chope pay their wives the highest wages.

Ukip comms chief and economic spokesperson Patrick O'Flynn will be on the Sunday Politics at 11am.

Poll
Who do you think is most to blame for the nation's problems?
Exclusive YouGov polling
Voters point finger of blame at coalition

In its latest exclusive set of polling for Red Box, YouGov has been looking into the blame game taking place in British politics (Callum Jones writes).

“The nation most blames the Conservative/Lib Dem government, rather than the last Labour government,” YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare points out.

Who’s at fault for the missed immigration targets? While 25 per cent said the “actions of the current coalition government”, 18 per cent suggested “the legacy of the last Labour government” was at fault. The PM’s big immigration speech last month was designed to tackle this troublesome issue for the Tories.

Who’s at fault for the missed deficit targets? 26 per cent blame Labour, and 30 per cent believe the fault lies with the coalition. However, as pointed out on the Red Box website last week, voters still blame Labour over the coalition for creating the need for spending cuts in the first place.

Who’s at fault for living standards not rising in recent years? In the biggest gulf (13 points) among the three questions, 35 per cent blame coalition actions; 22 per cent point the finger at Labour.

Stephan makes an interesting observation: “Ukip supporters blame them both equally for living standards, blame Labour for the deficit and the Conservatives for immigration.”

YouGov
Labour leadership
UnEdifying?

Ed Balls’ response to the autumn statement was widely regarded as a vast improvement on his performance a year ago. Whatever your views of the shadow chancellor (and he divides opinion more than most), he knows what he wants, where he is going and how he intends to get there. He is a full spectrum politician who, like Osborne, combines a grown-up understanding of politics with a nuanced view of tactics and strategy.

The Telegraph’s Scottish editor Alan Cochrane has outed Alistair Darling as a critic. He told Cochrane that Ed Miliband does not get “much of a look-in” on economic policy from his shadow chancellor.

According to Cochrane, Darling branded Balls "a difficult man". He is also quoted as saying: “I told Miliband not to give the other Ed the Treasury job in the shadow cabinet, which is why he gave it to Alan Johnson. But then Balls got it when Johnson, who didn’t know much about economics, had to resign.”

In the week that Gordon Brown announced he was leaving Westminster the quotes suggest a familiar lack of unity at the top of the party. Darling may have intended them as a criticism of Balls, but some will think they are more damning of Miliband. Labour says, of course, that all is well in the hen house.

The Cochrane book also contains a delicious anecdote about Alex Salmond taking the mickey out of his longtime supporter Sean Connery, doing impersonations of him behind his back. Salmond’s riposte, when presented with the evidence? “Sean and I have been friends for many years. No impression I could give could match Alan Cochrane’s impersonation of a journalist.” Holyrood’s loss is gaiety’s gain.

SW1
The Imp v the Stepford minister

There is also trouble at t’mill in Tory circles today. We know Michael Gove is a fan of Game of Thrones and the machinations of Tyrion Lannister. This morning the chief whip and former education secretary is accused of plotting like his hero, against his successor.

The Observer splashes on an interview with Nicky Morgan, who rejects as unhelpful Gove’s portrayal of the education establishment as a leftwing “blob”. The paper claims that Gove “can’t let go” and has continued to try to influence education policy.

When I did the first interview with Morgan as education secretary she pledged to continue the Gove reforms as well as to be nice to the teachers. But the Daily Mail in particular has run a series of articles branding her the mistress of the U-turn. Today her allies say she was never going to be a “Stepford minister”.

This rumpus has the potential to go toxic quite quickly. It would be strange if Gove, who is widely credited by Tory MPs with running one of the most successful reform movements of this parliament, did not continue to show an interest in education. Friends say he never wanted to leave. And while Downing Street thought he was growing too toxic, most Conservative MPs regret his departure. Morgan has a big test approaching when she has to decide how to approach plans for more grammar school places in Kent and the signs are she’ll reverse another of Gove’s decisions.

For Morgan and her allies to have chosen the newspaper and the journalist - the diligent Toby Helm - with whom Gove’s advisers most frequently clashed to air her thoughts will be seen in Goveland as an act of war. We await with interest the response of his former adviser Dominic Cummings. If it’s anything like his last 9,000 word missive on civil service failure, Morgan had better get her tin hat on.

I suspect that Gove himself, while irritated, may be secretly rather impressed. There is more than a little of Cersei Lannister’s ruthlessness about this intervention. Perhaps George Osborne should sign her up instead of Sajid Javid.

Donate now to the Sunday Times Christmas appeal: Save Syria's children

This weekend's briefing was edited by Callum Jones.

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What The Papers Said

The Sunday Times
  • Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, is coughing up £5m to call in ex-soldiers to teach character to school children. Her shadow, Tristram Hunt, has other ideas. He wants them to learn from Winston Churchill.

  • Lord Tebbit has condemned the Green party for selecting a council candidate who praised the Grand Hotel bombing of 1984, which paralysed his wife, as a “justifiable act of political warfare”. Remarkably, Ben Stanton was selected to replace Ben Duncan, who was expelled from the party earlier this year for describing soldiers, on Armed Forces Day, as “hired killers”.

  • Labour is to wage war on “bus barons” after the party unearthed figures suggesting that fares are up 25 per cent in four years and that 1,300 routes have been axed since 2010.


The Observer

The Mail on Sunday
  • Cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood is facing accusations that he is trying to bypass new rules which allow the PM to pick new permanent secretaries for government departments.

The Sunday Telegraph
  • James Harding, director of BBC News, has written a piece after Downing Street’s criticism of the corporation. Norman Smith's "editorial judgment was exactly right", he writes, adding: "John Humphrys did what John Humphrys is there to do."

  • Labour could cause a constitutional crisis by obstructing moves to ban Scottish MPs from voting on English laws, the justice secretary Chris Grayling has warned.


The Independent on Sunday
Agenda
Monday
  • Boris Johnson takes part in monthly LBC phone-in
  • Tristram Hunt and Sam Gyimah speak at Demos event
  • Ed Miliband takes part in Leaders Live Q&A
  • Harriet Harman takes part in LBC phone-in
  • Tessa Jowell gives LSE lecture on social integration in cities

Tuesday
  • Fire Brigades Union members set to go on 24-hour strike
  • Treasury committee questions experts on autumn statement
  • Chuka Umunna speaks at Progress event

Wednesday
  • Treasury Committee hears evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility regarding the autumn statement
  • Education secretary Nicky Morgan quizzed by kids in First News Hotseat event
  • PMQs
  • Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarth
  • Hereditary Peers' by-election

Thursday
  • Nick Clegg takes part in weekly LBC phone-in
  • Russell Brand and Nigel Farage appear on Question Time

Friday
  • EU development ministers meet in Brussels
  • Natalie Bennett, Jeremy Browne, Ken Livingstone and Jacob Rees-Mogg appear on Any Questions?
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