The Tories have backed business protests at government plans to include complex cuts to pension tax relief for high earners in the pre-election finance bill that will implement this week's Budget

A Conservative government would continue multi-million-pound state funding of trade unions in spite of the party's hardline rhetoric against strikes, David Cameron's union envoy has told the Financial Times

With 15 polls already published so far in March, it’s time for a mid-month reality check on the state of the parties. Some parts of the media watch the polls with breathless excitement, investing even the smallest fluctuations with a significance well beyond what they can bear: a bad-tempered PMQs, a 24-hour Westminster Village row,

Buried deep in the Sunday Times is the Tories’ answer to the problem that is Lord Ashcroft. James Tyler is a fund manager who has donated £250,000 to the Tory party since 2007. He is that rare creature: a multi-millionaire who is both resident and domiciled in merry old England. Tyler’s chief attraction for the Tories is his virulent opposition to what he terms ‘the morons&#...

George Osborne must have changed breakfast cereals, or something, because he's suddenly a different man.  After the Tories muddied their economic message to the point of abstraction a few weeks ago, there's now a new clarity and directness about the shadow chancellor's languange.  Exhibit A was his article in the FT last week.  And Exhibit B comes in the form of his a...

The Observer today carries a story about the curious lack of photos of the Conservatives’ black and asian candidates in Barking and Dagenham. The candidates exist (to the Tories’ credit) and their names and contact numbers are on the leaflets, but the photos are all white. The Conservatives denied that the move amounted to deliberate “airbrushing”

DAVID Cameron committed the Tories to imposing a new tax on banks yesterday as both main parties battled to convince voters they would claw back billions of pounds from the fi

GEORGE Osborne yesterday said that he would allow the swingeing cuts planned by an incoming Conservative government to be delayed for a year in Scotland.

The Tories are still not on course to win the general election outright, as two more opinion polls pointed to a hung Parliament.

Everyone has been guessing at what Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats would do if the voters return a hung parliament after the next election. The Lib Dem leader has sent all kinds of mixed signals. But if there is one person worth listening on the party’s intentions it is Julian Astle, the head of CentreForum, Britain’s leading Liberal think-tank, and a former political advisor to P...