Melissa Kite

Eric Pickles proposes TV debate 'watch parties' (Photo: UPPA)

I’m not sure whether to be inspired or depressed by some of the trendier campaigning tactics being tried out on us in this election. No doubt we are meant to feel empowered and engaged by all this interactive Twittering and Facebooking by our political leaders, not to mention manifesto covers made to look like posh wedding invitations.

But there’s a patronising edge to it.  The Conservatives, for example, have just published guidelines on how to get the most out of Thursday night’s television debates. Just when I was feeling all excited about David Cameron’s promise to free Britons to get on with running their own lives – treating us like adults, that sort of thing – his party chairman Eric Pickles issues the following advice on how… Read More

Something is troubling me about the Tories’ plans to reward married couples with tax breaks. In an interview timed to coincide with this key policy launch, David Cameron says the following about the great institution of marriage: “It’s a lucky thing if you just meet someone who makes you incredibly happy.”

You see, I don’t think the state should be intervening to help lucky people. Or that we unlucky singletons, who after all would love to be married but just haven’t had the romantic breaks, should be subsidising those who’ve already trampled us to the floor in the evolutionary race to find partners.

Married people are already enjoying countless advantages. They don’t need the Government to reward them further while the unlucky in love – Britain’s largest growing demographic  - continue to prop up the bars of our towns and cities looking mournfully for a mate.

Also, let’s be honest, married people aren’t stable… Read More

David Cameron speaks during Prime Minister's Questions (Photo: PA)

Get your ear muffs ready. This is going to be a loud, angry election. In my seat in the Commons press gallery just above David Cameron today, I actually had to put my hands to the sides of my head and still, by the end of PMQs, I had gnawing ear ache.

In the public gallery, voters looked on bemused. It really is impossible to capture just how loudly some politicians shout when you watch them on television. Anyone who doubts that Mr Cameron has a core of steel – not plastic, as Lord Mandelson would have it – should listen to him shrieking at Gordon Brown during these clashes. He really is quite frightening.

If the election was going to be fought on decibels he would have already won…. Read More

After a week of excruciating revelations, Jacqui Smith could be forgiven for being downcast.But in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, the Home Secretary is clearly far from giving up – on either her job or her marriage.

Ms Smith comes out fighting for both her political career and her husband Richard Timney in a forthright conversation with my colleague Patrick Hennessy.

In her first interview since the row over her expenses, she reveals how she really felt when she found out that Mr Timney had claimed two pay-for-view pornographic films from her parliamentary allowance.

She talks with frankness about the effect on her family. And she makes an intriguing comment hinting at frustration over how her expense claims were leaked.Ms Smith has faced criticism for claiming tens of thousands of pounds from the taxpayer in a “second-home” allowance for the family house in Redditch, by classing the London home she share… Read More

Oops. As EU leaders filed into a press conference at the Elysee Palace, Gordon Brown nearly made one of the oldest and most amusing mistakes in the book.He kept on chatting as if privately to his fellow European leaders even though he was sitting down at a table where the mikes had been switched on and hooked up to a sound system playing into the ears of about two hundred journalists through interpreters’ headphones.It is a system which has embarrassed many a world leader. Remember President Bush shouting “Yo Blair!” to the former Prime Minister at a similar event, not realising he was on a live mike?Well, Mr Brown was lucky. Unaware that the hoards of journalists in front of him were listening through their headsets, he started joking to the French President Nicolas Sarkozy about the fact that the front row of hacks were seated at tables.”We don’t give… Read More

Full coverage of UK PoliticsIn an entertaining item over at Coffee House, Daniel Korski looks at how Prime Minister Cameron might reshape Whitehall.

Hmmm, what new departments should David Cameron create?

He suggests a new Secretary of State for Veteran Affairs and a Secretary of State for Climate Affairs. 

It started me thinking of all the weird and wonderful government departments and ministerial jobs that have been created over the years, with dubious effect.

Here’s a selection of my own personal favourites when it comes to White(hall) Elephants:

The Detr, or Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. Basically a ministry created to give John Prescott something to do. An amalgam of transport and ‘all the other bits we can’t quite work out what to do with’.

Department of Productivity, Energy and Industry. Created by Tony Blair… Read More

Full coverage of UK politicsDavid Cameron has some good ideas from time to time but he also comes up with some right old clangers. Like his assertion today, made during his televised public holiday that children should be taught to drink alcohol safely.

Speaking to a group of young people (always a dangerous set-up) he said: “Some of the friends I had, the ones who had the biggest problems, were the ones who actually were never allowed to drink anything at home – whereas the ones who drink responsibly were the ones who were given a glass of wine or a small glass of beer or a shandy or something. That’s the right way to do it in the home.”

If the answer to alcoholism really is to teach children how to drink, then why don’t the Tories propose giving away free Dubonnet and soda in schools during break time, or… Read More

Full coverage of UK PoliticsMaybe it’s the pressure, but Labour ministers seem to spout the most awful nonsense when they are trying to dig themselves out of holes.

Take this from the Chancellor Alistair Darling on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One today: “I believe that Gordon Brown is the best Prime Minister. He is the best leader of our party.”

What does he mean “the best”? It’s not as if there is more than one is it? If he is really saying that Gordon Brown is the best Prime Minister we’ve got, then surely we are entitled to point out that being the best of one at something really isn’t all that much to boast about.

But there’s more of this banality. Mr Darling goes on: “He has a very clear sense of direction where he believes we as a country ought to go.”

Again, he… Read More

Gordon Brown leaves Israel today having performed quite a feat – he has “Brownifed” the Middle East peace process.

Gordon Brown just can’t escape the economyAmid barbed wire and grim checkpoints, the Prime Minister told Palestinians in Bethlehem that he was starting a new initiative to help them get affordable mortgages.You could just hear the people of the occupied territories asking what percentage above the base rate he was offering and whether they could also now buy their own refugee camps. By which I mean, of course, that this is the one thing they didn’t respond by saying.It was the same in Iraq at the weekend where he told battle weary soldiers about forecast economic growth in Basra.Mr Brown even took a business delegation with him to Israel including Sir Ronald Cohen and Lord Digby Jones, the trade minister…. Read More

One of the golden rules of speech making in foreign countries must surely be – don’t try to speak the lingo.Brown’s ‘Mazal Tov’ was almost unrecognisable

Footage of John Redwood miming the Welsh national anthem, which still haunts him to this day, should serve as a warning to all politicians that unless you are sure it is best not to go there.

But Gordon Brown ignored this rule and did his best to speak Hebrew during his speech to the Israeli parliament today. It was a close call.

The Prime Minister almost didn’t get the words out as he struggled with the pronunciation of a traditional greeting at the start of his address. He was trying to say “Mazal tov” or good fortune, and “shalom aleichem” or peace be with you. It came out unrecognisable.

He also called Menachem Begin, former Israeli prime minister, “beggin”, although some listening to the speech insist he… Read More