By Lord Ashcroft
Dear Nigel,
As you know I have taken quite an interest in UKIP’s fortunes, and what they portend for the Conservatives. I have followed your career with interest, and I must confess I always enjoy your contributions. I particularly liked your joke that you worked hard in the City of London for twenty years, at least until lunch time.
But there is one thing I wonder about. What exactly are you up to?
By Lord Ashcroft
This article was first published in the Financial Times
There is a ritual, and even a specialised vocabulary, for midterm local elections in the UK. In advance, they are always a “crucial test” of the government’s popularity, and the opposition’s ability to turn poll ratings into votes. Next comes expectation management, when incumbent parties brief that they will lose practically all their councillors, and the challengers claim they expect to gain hardly any, in the forlorn hope of bamboozling political reporters.
By Lord Ashcroft
You may be interested to know that you can hear more about my activities and views on polling, politics, charities and other matters by following me on Twitter: @LordAshcroft
By Lord Ashcroft
Forty-five years ago this weekend, Enoch Powell warned of what he saw as the consequences of immigration. The anniversary of the “rivers of blood” speech is a good moment to ask how far Britain is regarded as a multicultural society. It is also an opportunity to look further at the attitudes of minority voters towards politics in general and the Conservative Party in particular.
By Lord Ashcroft
Dear Ed
It is evidently the season for offering you well-intentioned advice. Since I spend rather a lot of time finding out how the voters see things, I thought you might appreciate a view from the other side of the fence. (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
The past week has been one of great loss for Britain. It has also contained an anniversary which has, not surprisingly, gone unremarked: it is now 21 years since the Conservative Party last won a general election with an overall majority.
Some will recall 9 April 1992 more clearly than most – not least the man who then headed the Conservative Research Department’s Political Section. Can that 25 year-old aide to John Major have imagined that despite its fourth consecutive victory and 14 million votes (a total which remains a record), his party’s standing with the public would be reversed within a year – and that the next Conservative Prime Minister to enter Number 10 would be him?
By Lord Ashcroft
I have numerous memories of Margaret Thatcher and all of them are fond ones. To me, she was not just a colossus of British politics but also a fiercely loyal friend when I was under fire. Her death today, aged 87, has saddened me greatly.
I credit Margaret Hilda Thatcher with rekindling my interest in politics after I had drifted away from it for well over a decade. I had admired her from afar long before I knew her – and not just because she was Britain’s first (and to date only) woman Prime Minister. (more…)
By Lord Ashcroft
Nobody who listened to George Osborne’s Budget speech could have been in any doubt about what he was trying to say. If anyone missed the message about “aspiration” at the first mention, or the second, they would surely have picked it up by the sixteenth. Yawn! The aim of building an “aspiration nation” and helping “hard working people who want to get on in life” was reinforced days later by David Cameron in his immigration speech, in which he also found three opportunities to remind us that Britain was in a “global race”, a theme he first introduced at last year’s Conservative conference.
By Lord Ashcroft
Imagine becoming Chancellor at a time of record public borrowing. The country’s banking industry is engulfed by gargantuan losses, and our European trading partners are flat on their backs because of their failed single currency. The energy infrastructure needs the biggest ever investment in new power plants. The population is ageing rapidly, and the nation’s already overtaxed workers and businesses face growing burdens. Meanwhile, a group of new economies is emerging, each educating more engineers, mathematicians and scientists than Britain and able to produce more at a lower price.
George Osborne doesn’t have to imagine.
By Lord Ashcroft
The budget deficit remains the central fact of British politics. The deficit constrains everything the government does, or can plan to do. Restoring the country’s finances remains the coalition’s priority, and rightly so, but this is proving harder than it hoped or expected.
One reason for this is that while Conservatives favour public spending cuts in principle, they often oppose them in practice. Ministers are evidently fighting to protect their own territory. MPs and activists call for spending to fall faster, but to rise in their own favoured areas. Vested interests and lobby groups protest, but that is their job – just as it is the Chancellor’s job to make decisions.
None of those decisions is easy. But one is overdue, and has the unusual advantage of being both popular and helping the Chancellor achieve his fiscal goals.