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Good morning,
Welcome to your Sunday politics briefing from Tim Shipman.
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Today:
- Tory candidate quits over EDL revelations
- Ukip faces National Front questions
- Clegg dragged into donor scandal
- More Ed-aches for Miliband
- “Big doorstep offer” from Conservatives on housing
- Tories on the attack over defence
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2015 general election
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A week in politics: from boring to bonkers
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Last week I ventured to suggest that the budget would be boring. Four days on, the consensus is that I was right. While the Observer’s Opinium poll has the Tories three points ahead of Labour, the YouGov survey in The Sunday Times has Labour back in front by two points. It’s all margin of error stuff. We’re still essentially tied. George Osborne’s personal rating is up a bit and more people think the budget was good for them than not, but it has not shifted the dial significantly.
Yesterday details of the leaders’ debates (half of which are not debates at all) were completed and Downing Street is already declaring victory. There will be just one seven-way gabfest, on April 2. When Cameron and Miliband take on Jeremy Paxman, Kay Burley and a studio audience this Thursday they will appear separately, not together. Labour yesterday dropped its demands for a head to head contest. Not a few in Westminster will wonder whether La Burlers against El Paxo, national treasures both, might not be the more interesting of the rivalries.
For reasons that escape me, Labour have agreed to let Miliband join a second free for all on April 16, already dubbed “night of the nonentities”, when all the non-coalition parties will duel. This is high risk since they will be the only establishment party for others to snipe at and will get caught between fusillades of Farage and incoming complaints from the left-wingers in the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymru. Labour say Downing Street had Nick Clegg excluded but the Lib Dem leader’s prize is greater: a Question Time special alongside Cameron and Miliband (though they won’t be on screen together) a week before polling day.
The Mail on Sunday’s Survation poll puts Labour four clear but finds that as many as one in eight Labour voters would prefer David Cameron to be prime minister. Thanks to his comms director Craig Oliver’s guerrilla campaign to avoid a one on one, Cameron has dodged a bullet, but he hasn’t sewn up the election.
Away from issues of leadership, many Tories will conclude that they still need a game changer. They should be careful what they wish for. The quest for that mythical entity has left one of their candidates emblazoned across the front page of the Mail on Sunday.
Political hacks are rarely surprised by the antics of those who seek to govern us. The Commons contains all human life in its rich and varied depravity. But just occasionally Westminster gasps at the extraordinary weirdness of those who crave a seat on the green benches. It was with awestruck amazement that people gazed last night upon the face of Afzal Amin, Conservative candidate in Dudley North.
Amin, pictured, a former Army officer who has worked with princes William and Harry, has been filmed meeting the English Defence League to ask for them to canvass for him. Worse than that, he seems to have offered to pay them, a breach of the law. He also offered to be a steadfast supporter of the EDL cause. The tape suggests that Amin asked the EDL to stage a protest about a local mosque, provoking community tensions that he could then help to diffuse. He seems to have believed that this would garner him 4,000 votes to unseat the sitting Labour MP, Ian Austin.
I am struck, not for the first time, that too many people engaged in frontline British politics believe they are living and working in House of Cards, with its labyrinthine Machiavellian scheming, when in fact they are straight out of The Thick of It, the ultimate modern incarnation of tragedy as farce.
Politics attracts the talented and tormented, idealists and ideologues, the principled and the perverse. Most strikingly, it attracts more than its fair share of risk takers, gamblers, and fantasists; the kind of people who live their lives in a divinely ordained parallel universe of their own creation. Vetting can only show what skeletons candidates have in their cupboards. It cannot show the delusions in their own heads. In seeking to behave like A. B’Stard, Amin has ended up looking simply A. B’Surd.
He has been suspended by the Tories. We should entertain the possibility that he will have some exotic explanation that satisfies party bosses and does not lead to the end of his political career when they meet to discuss his fate on Tuesday. But then we should also entertain the idea that the Sun will not rise this morning just because it has done on every other morning in recorded history.
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2015 Election Countdown
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46
days to go
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2015 general election
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Meanwhile, on planet Ukip...
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The immediate beneficiaries of Amin’s self-immolation are Ukip, who will now have a clear run at defeating Labour in Dudley. Lord Ashcroft’s latest marginal poll already had them pushing Amin into third place, which may be why he sought his game changer.
Nigel Farage is on the Andrew Marr show this morning. But if he’s hoping to be talking about his party’s economic policies, which are to be unveiled next week, he may first be in for a few awkward questions of his own.
The party was plunged into fresh crisis last night after claims that it has failed to kick out three senior figures with links to the National Front (NF). A whistleblower has passed The Sunday Times a tape of David Soutter, the party’s head of candidates, telling a meeting of Ukip officials in Grimsby that one of the party’s MEPs and a senior official were once “card-carrying members” of the far-right group. And he appeared to suggest that Victoria Ayling, Ukip’s candidate in Great Grimsby, was also a member of the NF, something she has denied.
Soutter said all three were cleared to stay in Ukip.
A Ukip spokesman said that Soutter’s statements were “inaccurate”, adding: “None of our MEPs has been a member of the National Front.” The party is sticking to the line that Ayling “was a politics student who said that she attended some NF events in a spirit of inquiry”.
In a second headache for Farage his chief of staff, Raheem Kassam (a larger than life character who sometimes seems to live in a soap opera he has scripted himself), has been reported to the police amid allegations of fraud. He is locked in a bitter dispute over advertising revenues from The Commentator website, where he once worked with its owner, Robin Shepherd.
Kassam locked him out of the website and its Twitter feed by changing the passwords when the row blew up in 2013. Shepherd went to police in January, alleging that Kassam had fraudulently obtained money by passing himself off as the owner, or co-owner, of the site. That is bitterly contested by Kassam, who insists that he helped to found the website. Kassam reported Shepherd to police for harassment before the fraud accusation was lodged.
Scotland Yard confirmed to my colleague James Lyons: “An allegation of fraud was made to police on January 27, 2015. Officers from Westminster are assessing the allegation. An allegation of harassment was made to police on January 23, 2015. There has been no arrest.”
In a third blow for Farage, my colleague Sanya Burgess has got to Rob Comley, former chairman of Young Independence, the party’s youth wing, who has quit Ukip. He says the party “offers young people no hope and no policies”. Thomas Booker, 24, who last month stepped down as leader of Ukip’s lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender (LGBT) society, branded Farage “sinister”.
There is more to make Farage choke on his beer in the Sun on Sunday, which has got hold of a new book that purports to lift the lid on his antics in Brussels. It describes the Ukip leader as a “clown” who behaved “like a Saturday night drunk”.
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Lib Dem destiny
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Clegg dragged into donor scandal
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The main winner of the Amin implosion, however, could well be Nick Clegg, who is this morning facing potentially damaging allegations about the latest Lib Dem donor scandal.
The Sunday Times puts on its front page the new revelations worked up by the Dispatches team. Paul Wilmott, a former hedge fund manager, was recruited by the team behind the documentary, and approached the three main political parties with a significant cash donation. His one request, however, was that he not be identified as the donor.
Back in November, Wilmott met Clegg at a function with Lord Strasburger, the Lib Dem fundraiser. The potentially damaging thing for Clegg is that he appears to have explained how publicity might be avoided. The Lib Dem leader said the fact that donations were recorded by calendar year was “a very useful thing”. This meant that Wilmott could have made two donations under £7,500 in both 2014 and 2015 without passing the threshold at which an individual must be named under Electoral Commission rules.
In January Wilmott gave the party a potentially-illegal donation of £10,000 – in the name of his stepfather. The next day Strasburger wrote an email, thanking him for “your stepfather’s generous donation”. The cheque was cashed in February.
The extraordinary narrative of these events can be read here.
In a statement, the Liberal Democrats said that they “had no reason to believe that the donation was made other than by the person named on the cheque”.
There is no suggestion that Clegg knew that the donor was thinking of using a relative as a “proxy donor”, which is potentially illegal.
Lord Strasburger has quit the party whip and referred the matter to the Electoral Commission. He denies any wrongdoing. The commission is establishing the facts “before determining what further steps to take”.
- Channel 4 Dispatches, How to Buy a Meeting with a Minister, is broadcast at 8pm tomorrow
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Labour leadership
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Three Ed-aches for Miliband
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So, amid all this Tory, Ukip and Lib Dem sleaze, Labour are the big winners, right? By dint of appearing only fourth in today’s list of shame they may raise a glass. But Ed Miliband is also facing embarrassment over donations this morning.
It has now emerged that his only recently unmasked hedge-fund donor has invested almost £10m in a private healthcare company that makes money out of the NHS. Martin Taylor, who has funnelled almost £600,000 into Labour coffers over the past three years, runs Nevsky Capital, a company based in Mayfair that manages a fund with a $14.9m (£10m) stake in UnitedHealth.
The American health insurance giant, which is worth more than $100bn, has run NHS-funded GP surgeries in the past and is bidding for other NHS work including one contract worth £1.2bn. Cue claims of hypocrisy by the party campaigning against, er, NHS privatisation. James Lyons has the story.
Nor will Miliband be filled with the joys of brotherly love when he reads the fantastic 4,000 word Sunday Times Magazine cover story on how his brother David conquered New York, a great piece of digging by Iain Dey and a great headline: “Celebrity Big Brother”. Dey has got several board members at his charity, International Rescue, talking and unsurprisingly the elder Miliband still entertains the prospect of leading Labour if it all goes wrong for Ed.
Senior figures say he could return to Britain as a “white knight” after just five years, in 2018, under the terms of an informal deal he struck with charity chiefs. A spokesman for Miliband said: “David wants Ed to be prime minister. End of story.”
Not quite. The newsiest bits of the piece are collected here.
As if one overbearing character in Ed Miliband’s life were not enough, his equivalent of every family’s embarrassing uncle - Len McCluskey of the Unite union - has not stopped agitating. James Lyons is also reporting that he will move to sever the union’s link with the Labour party within weeks if Ed Miliband loses the election, according to a union insider.
Unite, Labour’s biggest donor, will hold a rules conference in July that could rewrite its constitution so that the union can fund other parties instead. The insider revealed that amendments proposing the change have been submitted for the event, which is held once every four years.
And as if that weren’t enough, the People has an interview with Neil Kinnock on what it’s like to be Ed Miliband. He bemoans coverage of the “two kitchens” affair but also warns about bacon butties: “Rule one when there are photographers around is do not eat.”
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Jim Murphy and Alex Salmond will be on Sky News after 10am.
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2015 general election
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And now... the serious bit
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Meanwhile, there’s an election on. Attention now turns to the campaign proper and the manifestos … but even they are probably three weeks away, such is the longest “short campaign” on record. However, I’ve had a firm steer that David Cameron is now prepared to follow Margaret Thatcher with a “big doorstep offer” on housing for working class voters. Essentially he’s supporting Iain Duncan Smith’s idea to let housing association tenants buy their homes at a discount price.
The second plan IDS was touting - to simply give away housing association properties to those who have worked for a year - has bitten the dust because Cameron’s aides believe it would cost votes among those who have worked for much longer to save for their own home.
I’m told the Conservatives are also set to order councils to sell off their big expensive council houses so they can use the money to buy or build more and cheaper social houses.
Lynton Crosby’s polling elves, backed up by what Tory MPs are finding on the doorstep, believe that support for Labour among the C2 skilled working class is “soft”, a phrase you also hear from some Labour MPs.
In a message directed at that key group of voters, Cameron today warns that giving Miliband the keys to Downing Street would threaten the “security of millions of families” with a toxic cocktail of rising unemployment and debt.
In an article for The Sunday Times, the prime minister contrasted the chancellor’s “responsible longterm budget” with Miliband’s stated desire to emulate the economic policies of François Hollande, the French president.
“Unemployment over the Channel is almost twice what it is in the UK. Our economy is growing seven times faster than France.
“Imagine if Miliband had been free to pursue his French dream – the fallout would be felt in catastrophic job losses, falling living standards, eye-watering debt and fast-diminishing hope in our future.”
Cameron says the goal of the budget was “rewarding those who work hard and do the right thing”. “Bit by bit, we are restoring the link between effort and reward,” he said.
Miliband has written for the Sunday Mirror, arguing that by failing to throw more money at the NHS, George Osborne failed to do enough. “The Tories might like hunting foxes,” he writes, “but their chancellor is no good at shooting them”.
The Lib Dem manifesto will call for a radical reform of drugs policy, ending the use of imprisonment for those caught with drugs for personal use.
The Lib Dems would also give cohabiting couples the same rights as married couples over property and pension rights. It would give couples who break up an automatic right to a stake in their family home. If one of them dies, the bereaved partner could also automatically inherit their home. The party also plans to allow heterosexual couples to have civil partnerships, which are now the preserve of homosexual couples.
Cameron is expected to fire the starting gun on the election this week. He is to see the Queen on Wednesday evening and parliament will be prorogued on Thursday. The prime minister will launch his campaign with a speech on Saturday and another after parliament dissolves on Monday 30th.
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UK and the world
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Tory MPs on the attack over defence
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The election might be beginning to interest even political journalists but MPs, particularly those with healthy majorities, are already looking towards the fun and games afterwards. It has become a common thought in Westminster that things will get really juicy only at 10.01pm on May 7.
For the Conservatives the real fireworks could come at the planned meeting of the backbench 1922 committee on the Monday after the election. I revealed this month that Cameron allies were planning a “save Dave” operation to shore up the prime minister’s position if he falls short of an overall majority. Yesterday my fellow Kremlinologist, the Guardian’s Nick Watt, revealed that Cameron allies are seeking to form a “praetorian guard” around him.
Today the ST has more,with news that backbenchers are planning to issue their own demands to the PM at the meeting, insisting that spending 2 er cent of GDP on defence is a red line in any negotiations and making clear that they would not accept any backsliding on an EU referendum. The latter will be easy enough to comply with, the former more difficult because it costs billions the Treasury does not have.
The Sunday Telegraph says that the former minister Owen Paterson will lead a battle to stop further defence cuts, starting with a speech in America.
But Tory demands on Europe could also scupper a new coalition from the other side. In the Observer senior Lib Dems Vince Cable and Tim Farron warn they won’t countenance a referendum at all.
If the Tories don’t control their candidates and the Lib Dems don’t manage their donors better, neither will have to worry about coalition talks at all.
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If Cameron renegotiates Britain's relationship with the EU and the British people vote to leave, what should he do?
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Exclusive YouGov polling
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Cameron should stay on if Britain quits EU – poll
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By a margin of over 2-1 the public overwhelmingly wants David Cameron to stay on as prime minister and Conservative leader if he wins enough seats to form a government with the Lib Dems, even if he has lost some seats in the election (YouGov’s Stephan Shakespeare writes). Forty-five per cent think he should stay on for the full five years, 9 per cent would want him to stay on for just part of the term, and only 25 per cent think he should make way for someone else immediately.
But what about a few years on, when we've had the EU referendum? In a YouGov poll exclusively for Red Box, we posed the question: "David Cameron has promised to renegotiate Britain's relationship with the European Union and then hold a referendum on the result. If David Cameron renegotiates Britain's relationship with the European Union and the British people vote to LEAVE the European Union, what should he do?"
Even then, by 45 per cent to 36 per cent people think he should stay on. The public wants him to leave his post only if if he fails to deliver any form of renegotiation and then does not hold a referendum. None of this may seem very surprising - but it does suggest that people have got used to him as PM and are in no hurry to change.
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YouGov
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The Sunday Times
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Prince Charles won't stop giving his opinions if the Supreme Court rules this week that letters revealing his “most deeply held personal views and beliefs” should be made public, informed sources have told the ST.
The Archbishop of Canterbury met Tony Blair in secret to enlist his help in the fight against persecuted Christians around the world.
The White House withdrew its support for Blair as Middle East peace envoy after he delivered a speech to Republicans viewed as critical of President Obama, Toby Harnden reports from Washington.
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The Observer
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This weekend’s Opinium poll shows a three-point budget bounce for the Conservatives, with Labour on 33 per cent and the Tories on 36.
Miriam González Durántez, the international lawyer and wife of Nick Clegg, has given a rare interview to the paper. “I’m like a tigress when it comes to my children,” she says. “What I am focusing on right now is how to protect them during the next few months’ campaign. Last time, I sent them to Spain, but now they are older, and one has exams.”
Daniel Boffey, policy editor, has been looking at the link between life peerages and party donations.
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The Sun on Sunday
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The Speaker spent almost £1,000 of public money on a 200-mile trip in a limo, while his aide spent £27 on the same journey by rail, the paper reports.
The paper picks up on the latest sharp political analysis from Noel Gallagher. "Ed Miliband can go f*** himself – as can f**ing Nick Clegg, as can Dave (Cameron)," the former Oasis star told *Loaded magazine.
Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, and eleven of his predecessors, have backed the Sun campaign for a monument to the war veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The international development budget is set to reach £15.3 billion by the end of the decade, the paper says.
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The Independent on Sunday
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The cost of "bed-blocking" – patients being kept in hospital because they can't be transferred into the community – has reached £287m, the paper says.
The Sindy has listed a dozen of the slightly stranger names to be featured on ballot papers in May.
Nigel Farage has been speaking to the paper in Kent. “Do I think my wife, a German passport holder, should be allowed to vote in this referendum? No I don’t – nor does she, by the way”
Cole Moreton has been following the campaign in Inverness, Danny Alexander's seat, and Mark Leftly has been to Rochester & Strood, which Ukip took from the Tories in a by-election last year.
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The Sunday Telegraph
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The Telegraph reports that six IRA suspects who are thought to be behind attacks on mainland Britain are facing new police investigations.
Owen Paterson, the former environment secretary, will accuse the government of “succumbing to temptation” by outsourcing national defence to Nato and the European Union. In a speech in America, he will also suggest that "Britain is not holding up its part of the defence bargain".
A new ICM Wisdom Index poll puts the Tories on 32 per cent, and Labour on 31.
The youth wing of the Green party has voted to ban Dame Vivienne Westwood from a tour of British universities, Robert Mendick reports.
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This morning's briefing was edited by Callum Jones.
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Monday
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- Boris Johnson participates in mayoral question time
- George Osborne and Ed Balls take part in Sky News Q&A sessions
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Tuesday
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- George Osborne takes questions from the Treasury select committee
- Final DPMQs session before election
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Wednesday
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- Final PMQs session before election
- David Cameron's last weekly meeting with the Queen before election
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Thursday
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- Channel 4 and Sky host live Q&As with David Cameron and Ed Miliband
- Scottish first minister's questions
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