“No pacts or deals will be done with Ukip, David Cameron told his backbenchers yesterday. … Nigel Farage’s showing in Thursday’s local elections prompted three Tory MPs to repeat their call for the two parties to come to a national agreement under which candidates would not fight each other at next year’s general election. … But the Prime Minister said: ‘We are the Conservative party. We don’t do pacts and deals. We are fighting all out for an all-out win at the next election.” – Daily Mail
> Today: ToryDiary – Farage casts a big shadow across Westminster. Stepping out from it is Cameron’s new challenge.
> Yesterday:
“Conservative MPs should ditch David Cameron if they want to win next year’s general election, Nigel Farage has said. … Mr Farage was asked by The Telegraph if Tory MPs should challenge Mr Cameron for the leadership if they wanted to win the election. … Speaking in a pub in Basildon, Essex, the Ukip leader said: ‘If they want to win the next election they have got to get one – but it is none of my business what they do.'” – Daily Telegraph
> Yesterday: WATCH – Farage – “It’s a very good night for UKIP”
“…Miliband faced murmurings of discontent at all levels of the party, up to the shadow cabinet, amid signs that Labour is struggling to look like an opposition party on the eve of a general election victory. … As part of the fallout, some shadow cabinet members say they were crowded out of a campaign that failed to project Labour as a team that includes strong women such as Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper. There is also anger that Miliband focused too much on policy rather than projecting an empathy with voters’ sense of alienation from the political class.” – The Guardian
And comment:
> Yesterday: LeftWatch – How has Labour performed?
“Nick Clegg insisted last night that he would not quit as Liberal Democrat leader after his party suffered its worst local election results in 30 years. … As experts suggested the Lib Dems could lose up to 20 MPs at the general election next year, the party lost control of two key council strongholds: Kingston-upon-Thames to the Conservatives and Portsmouth to no overall control. … By last night, Mr Clegg had lost 283 councillors, with 13 boroughs still to declare, and he is braced for further humiliation tomorrow when the results of the European elections are announced.” – Daily Mail
> Yesterday: Iain Dale’s column – Can we now put signs up all over Britain, saying: “LibDems: losing here”?
“The threat to Mr Cameron’s position had been receding in recent months as improving economic data and a gradual recovery in opinion polls underpinned party unity. However, the results of the very large poll of about 25,000 voters by Lord Ashcroft, the former Tory vice-chairman, are about to darken the party’s mood as MPs prepare to return to the last session of this parliament. … Full details of the survey of next year’s election battleground are to be released at a meeting of the grassroots activist organisation Conservative Home but it is understood to make worrying reading for Mr Cameron.” – The Times (£)
“The poll by former Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, now a leading pollster, suggested significant numbers of those who voted Ukip this week are already planning to vote for other parties next year. … Only 52 per cent of those who voted Ukip in the European elections say they will probably vote for the party again at the 2015 election. Over a fifth – 21 per cent – already say they will vote Tory, 11 per cent Labour, and 14 per cent say they do not know what they will do.” – Daily Mail
> Today: Lord Ashcroft on Comment – We don’t yet know how many people voted UKIP in the European elections – but here’s what they think
“The Major Projects Authority (MPA), the quango that assesses how effectively large schemes are being implemented, yesterday concluded that its worst rating was not bad enough to accommodate all the failings associated with Universal Credit. … The fact that the Government published the damning study amid the announcement of local election results led to accusations that ministers were seeking to ‘bury’ bad news.” – Daily Mail
And comment:
“She swats away talk of leadership ambitions, but Westminster insiders are clear that she has begun subtle and not-so-subtle manoeuvres to put herself next in line. A speech a year ago was seen as highly significant – and earned May a rebuke from Michael Gove for disloyalty to Cameron. Though seen as chilly and not particularly clubbable, May is said to have become more active in meeting colleagues and journalists, while careful never to do anything so crude as expressing open ambitions. Cameron himself, indeed, is said by one colleague to ‘adore’ her.” – Esther Addley, The Guardian
“Fracking should take place in Tory heartlands of south-east England ‘in the national interest’, energy minister Michael Fallon has said, despite expert warnings that there was not enough oil in the region to spark a ‘huge bonanza’. … A British Geological Survey study of the ‘Weald’ basin revealed that 4.4bn barrels of shale oil was likely to lie in the area, primarily beneath Surrey, Sussex and Kent.” – Daily Telegraph
“A Scottish government promise to expand free childcare in the event of independence is based on economic analysis that ‘simply doesn’t add up’, the UK Treasury says. … Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: ‘This is typical of the nationalist elite who think they can con voters by inventing mothers that don’t exist and then assume that they will all get back into work. They will say anything, no matter how far-fetched to get their way.'” – Financial Times
“More NHS foundation trusts have ended the financial year in the red than at any time in NHS history, hospital regulators have said, as a huge nurse recruitment drive to improve care in the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal takes its toll on hospital finances. … In further evidence of growing pressure on the NHS, Monitor’s annual report on the performance of England’s 147 foundation trusts found that yet more hospitals are failing to meet Government waiting times targets.” – The Independent
“An academy school has been ordered to end contracts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds with companies run by its governors. … Durand Academy in Brixton, south London, was told by the Department for Education’s funding arm that the arrangements were clear conflicts of interest and must stop this year.” – The Times (£)
“The heads of Britain’s largest supermarket chains have admitted that they regularly ignore expiry dates on food in their own homes. … Executives from Tesco, Waitrose, and Marks & Spencer said they overlooked use-by dates, while the bosses of the Co-op, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s said they ignored sell-by and best-before dates.” – The Times (£)
“The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. … For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.” – Financial Times
“Eighty years ago, politicians had to be grand and serious enough to command an empire. Now they have to be Just Like Us. The bar we set for our leaders has fallen. It is a kind of psychological survival mechanism: instead of waging a traumatic and unwinnable fight against decline, we embrace it. We make a virtue of the quotidian and the petty. An MP with Rory Stewart’s characteristics – a global habit of mind, a facility for languages, an unwaveringly serious bearing – used to be the model to emulate. In today’s Westminster, this Tory backbencher is exotic and, for some, quixotic.” – Janan Ganesh, Financial Times
“…the British eurocrat faces a special kind of scorn. A breed apart, they are the unloved orphans of eurocracy. Derided at home as pampered, overpaid, rulemaking fanatics, they are the faceless men riding the gravy train (or so the cliché goes). Meanwhile in Brussels they are at best forever apologising for their truculent countrymen or at worst facing suspicion as a perfidious fifth column.” – Financial Times
“Now the curse of Cameron is about to strike again after Downing Street revealed that the Prime Minister is now the proud owner of a pair of uber cool ‘Beats’. … The £199 headphones were the only ‘gift’ that Mr Cameron received in the last few months that he decided he would pay money to keep.” – The Independent
“Chuka says the most important thing is to know how much a bacon sandwich costs. … ’70p,’ I say. ‘No, wait. £58?’ … ‘Actually I have no idea either,’ says Chuka.” – Ed Miliband’s week, according to Hugo Rifkind, The Times (£)