Tory MPs write to Prime Minister demanding that subsidies paid to "inefficient" onshore wind turbine industry are "dramatically cut".

David Cameron has been hit by a major protest by Conservative MPs demanding that the £400 million-a-year subsidies paid to the "inefficient" onshore wind turbine industry are "dramatically cut".

Chris Huhne has resigned as Energy Secretary after being charged alongside his ex-wife Vicky Pryce with perverting the course of justice over speeding cover-up allegations.

The Conservatives demand answers about links between the Labour Party and the chief executive of a charity facing allegations of financial mismanagement.

In the party horserace, 2011 was the year of not much happening. In fact, it was a year of exceptional boringness on that front, punctuated only by a small and quite possibly transient boost for the Tories after the EU veto in December. But behind that headline of ‘no change’, there were interesting shifts on other fronts.

It has been one of the most pervasive dictums of the last 18 months - that massive cuts to public services will make this government unpopular and halt them in their tracks. It has been echoed not only by lefties but also Tories, who are over-joyed that despite the cuts they are riding high in the polls. I bought into this theory initially, but I don't any more. My point is to say that raisin...

Joe Kennedy always claimed he'd avoided the crash of 1929 by getting out of the market as soon as he noticed that even shoe shine boys were talking about hot shares. His logic was that as soon as everyone started piling into the market, shares prices would cease to reflect real underlying values and instead they'd bubble up right until the inevitable correction. In the same spirit, I think I see t...

When David Cameron wielded his veto at the European Council in December many Tories thought this was the beginning of a process of repatriation of powers from the EU. Myself, I thought it would be the high water mark of the government’s Euro-scepticism — and so it has proven. But things are about to get even worse for the Bill Cashes of this Parliament. In the short-term, at least.
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Labour has just marched into the trap that George Osborne set them and voted against the benefits cap — again. As one gleeful Tory says, ‘we’re going to make sure everyone in the country knows how they voted on this.’   I suspect that in every Labour-held marginal that the Tories need to win to get a majority in 2015 the benefit cap will feature prominently on Tory lit...

As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before Miliband got up, allowing Cameron to press the Labour leader on the issue even before he had started speaking. Tory MPs kept coming back to the benefit cap — there were five questions on it in all — allowing Cameron to repeatedly moc...