Blog articles tagged with Dennis Skinner

David Cameron’s petulance will cause him long-term problems

by Jamie Reed MP / 02 May 2012 09:55

Charles Colson, Richard Nixon's ‘hatchet-man’, died last week. Had he lived, he would have been able to give David Cameron plenty of advice about how to handle the deepening self-inflicted crisis he is now embroiled in. I expect his opening piece of advice would have been, "David, control your temper and stop digging..."

I first saw David Cameron at the despatch box at an early point during the last Parliament, before

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Partisan mud-slinging over party funding reform

by Caroline Crampton / 26 Mar 2012 16:17

It’s a well-known rule of politics that if you sling enough mud you everyone gets so dirty you can’t tell who started it.

In his statement to the House of Commons on party funding this afternoon, an angry Francis Maude illustrated this to a fault. As I said earlier, it was a tactical decision by the prime minister to send a senior Conservative minister out to bat for him in Parliament on

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PMQs: Labour try to separate Nick Clegg from his own party

by Ben Duckworth / 14 Mar 2012 13:14

When Nick Clegg stands in for David Cameron at PMQs (a reasonably rare event), you know there is one likely outcome. 1) The DPM will become angry

We can now add a couple more details after today’s event: 2) He appeared to link boundary reviews and House of Lords reform as if one cannot happen without the other and; 3) Dennis Skinner called for him to have a chat “man-to-man” (about what he really thought about Tory

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Lansley plays hide and seek at health questions

by Caroline Crampton / 21 Feb 2012 15:46

Andrew Lansley had one of those unfortunate ‘meeting the public’ experiences that politicians have to go through from time to time, when he was heckled on his way into the No 10 meeting on the Health Bill yesterday.

It seems to have made him shy – at health questions today, he seemed more than happy to let his junior ministers do most of the talking. He provided a masterclass in what I

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In appreciation of Jacob Rees-Mogg

by Alexander Wickham / 23 Jan 2012 11:26

With his array of bespoke suits, utterly superb spectacles and a voice than isn’t far short of perfection, Jacob Rees-Mogg quite understandably invokes feelings of reverence amongst his growing band of followers.

Last week he tabled a ‘fantabulous’ (his word, not mine) amendment to the Daylight Saving Bill that would grant his county of Somerset its own time-zone, meaning that clocks from Taunton to Bath would be set fifteen minutes behind those

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PMQs goes back in time

by Amber Elliott / 18 Jan 2012 13:06

It was a déjà vu PMQs today, with Ed Miliband claiming the government was taking us "back to the 1980s".

Maybe the Commons hadn't time-travelled that far, but we were certainly going back to 2011 – a quick count suggests it was the fourth time in three (sitting) months that Labour led with an attack on unemployment.

Safe ground is best for Miliband at the moment. And his unemployment arguments were extremely

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