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February 19th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
James Forsyth
Last updated at 1:23 AM on 19th February 2012
David Cameron met with his closest allies to discuss the future of the party
On Monday, the Prime Minister gathered his closest political allies at Chequers to plot his political strategy between now and the next Election.
There were no Liberal Democrats present. This was just as well, given that concerns about them formed a key part of the discussions.
The 17 who were at the Prime Minister’s country retreat represented, in the words of one of those present, ‘the Cameron A Team’. Revealingly, few MPs were invited.
Apart from the Prime Minister, there were only three Ministers sitting around the dining room table – George Osborne, who is not only the Chancellor but also the Tories’ main electoral strategist; Oliver Letwin, the Minister for Government policy and the man charged with tying together all the various strands of the Cameron project; and Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin.
The rest of the guest list was drawn from the team of advisers that Cameron has built up around him.
This team is not particularly ideology-driven. Rather, it is based on an intense personal loyalty to the Prime Minister.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman, Craig Oliver, Ed Llewellyn, Chief of Staff and Kate Fall, Deputy Chief of Staff were amongst the attendees
It is mostly male; there were only a
few women present at the meeting – among them Cameron’s deputy chief of
staff Kate Fall and his increasingly influential political spokeswoman
Gabby Bertin.
Cameron the family man
David Cameron was left holding the baby last week.
Samantha Cameron took their two school-age children, Nancy and Elwen, away on a half-term break, leaving the Prime Minister at home with 18-month-old Florence.
This meant she was a regular sight in the offices of No 10.
Florence even attended its most important meeting, the 8.30am one where Cameron runs through the day’s agenda with his most senior aides.
But the culture is far from laddish: there was no kick-about on the Chequers lawn.
The Cameron team has always been tight-knit. His chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, and his senior adviser, Steve Hilton, who were there, have been part of the gang since the late Eighties.
But in the past year there have been several new arrivals whose influence was apparent during the meeting.
Andrew Cooper, the new chief political strategist who joined Downing Street a year ago, has brought to the operation a far greater focus on polling data.
Patrick Rock, an astute operator who worked with Cameron for Michael Howard at the Home Office back in the Nineties and who arrived in No 10 last summer, acts as its political early-warning system.
Julian Glover, a former Guardian journalist, has been hired as a speech-writer and Andy Coulson’s replacement, ex-BBC man Craig Oliver, has given the operation the televisual focus that it lacked.
The PM and his allies met at the country residence Chequers in Buckinghamshire
Cooper began by updating the group on
the latest polling data. The Tories, he told them, are seen as strong
on welfare and the deficit. But he warned that his numbers showed the
party to be vulnerable on both the cost of living and the NHS.
The
next item on the agenda was the economy. Here, there was an agreement
on the need for a major pro-enterprise push to show that Britain was
open for business.
The PM’s spin doctor David Hilton has been with David Cameron since the eighties
A
lunch of soup and baguettes was then served as the group talked about
the challenge posed to them by Alex Salmond and his bid for Scottish
independence. But things got really interesting when the meeting moved
on to what the Liberal Democrats would do.
Concern was expressed that they might walk out of the Coalition as early as the start of 2014.
This
worries the Cameroons because it would leave the Prime Minister heading
a Government that did not have a majority in the Commons. As one put it
to me: ‘What would we do as a Government for a year and a half?’
I
understand the Cameroons have begun to do some work on what their
agenda would be if they were left to govern alone for six to nine months
before a May 2015 Election.
But it is felt that running a minority Government from early 2014 onwards would be too much and that it would be too early to go to the country in search of a majority.
How to make sure the Liberal Democrats stay in the Coalition until 2015 is now a major preoccupation of Tory strategists.
Osborne was, apparently, particularly
interested in the idea that things the Lib Dems really want should be
pushed back closer and closer to the end of the Parliament to try to
ensure they stay in the Government until then.
If
this was not enough Liberal Democrat talk for one day, Cameron and
Osborne then returned to London for dinner with Nick Clegg and Danny
Alexander.
DERAILING CLEGG: PLANS OF THE TORY REBELS
Tory rebels think they have found the perfect way to derail Nick Clegg’s plan to reform the House of Lords. They plan to vote with Labour to defeat the timetable motion that sets out how many days of debate in the House of Commons should be devoted to the Bill.
If they won this vote, the Coalition would have to risk all of the Government’s time in the Commons being taken up by Lords reform if it wanted to push on with it. Or, simply drop it.
This would leave David Cameron with a very uncomfortable decision to make. He would either have to disappoint his deputy – and face losing Lib Dem support for the constituency boundary changes that the Tories view as crucial to their electoral prospects – or risk a situation where the Commons is stuck in a constitutional debate for months.
Significantly, these Tory rebels are not just the usual suspects. There are several new MPs who feel so strongly about this issue that they are prepared to defy the whip for the first time over it.
With what one senior backbencher calls ‘an organised resistance’ to Lords reform already established, this revolt could grow and grow.
A surprising candidate for a friendship with Meryl
Actress Meryl Streep has struck up a friendship with British politician Harriet Harman
The news that Meryl Streep is friends
with a British politician and has entertained her in New York will cause
excitement in Tory circles.
But the woman who played Margaret Thatcher on screen is, in real life,
pals with a woman at the opposite end of the political spectrum to the
former Prime Minister: Harriet Harman.
The pair’s friendship stems from
their shared feminist views.
When Harman visited New York last year, she was a dinner guest at the
double Oscar winner’s apartment, bought for £5.6 million in 2004.
The
word is that Streep is almost as good a cook as she is an actress.
Harman and Streep met up again at the Baftas last Sunday.
The Labour
deputy leader cheered on her fellow feminist as she picked up the best
actress gong for her performance in The Iron Lady – which must be the
only time Harman has been pleased by a Thatcher-inspired victory.
James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator
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