Blog Posts by Alex Stevenson

Yesterday's 'new bargain' has given Ed Miliband a heading for his blank sheet of paper. But the details still need to be filled in.

"It's all about tone," one of Ed Miliband's chief spinners told me after one of the Labour leader's more successful prime minister's questions. "The actual words don't matter."

That approach explains a lot about Miliband's style. He has refused to be rushed into a grand narrative, let alone policies, during his first 12 months in the job. Partly this is because he is the first leader of the opposition to know that he will be spending a full five years in the job. The resulting mental attitude has been: what's the rush?

Unfortunately for Miliband, there are problems with this approach. It makes him seem sluggish, dull and unconvincing as a politician. Only during the riots did he seem animated, spurred on by the urgency of the crisis. Yesterday's poll by ComRes suggests the riots were not enough to rescue his first year in the job. Just one in four people

He is a politician for the TV era. But unlike many gameshow hosts whose ratings are falling, Nick Clegg still has one of the best gigs in town.

Now that the Liberal Democrats are in government the character of their conference has changed. It is more corporate, more big business. Its fringe events are more likely to be about tax regulation than electoral reform, about helping small businesses rather than saving whales.

Yet some things never change. This is a party that refuses to shell out the copyright payments for proper music. Its tinned, generic background music, deployed as Nick Clegg strode out to deliver his second conference speech as a Cabinet minister, helped reassure the audience that some things never change.

For this speech Clegg, who is viewed a long way from his party's grassroots in political terms, was placed in the middle of them, his podium surrounded by supporters squinting in the bright lights. The positioning may have been because strategists wanted to prevent him

Having dodged another conference vote on NHS reforms, there may finally be light at the end of the tunnel for Andrew Lansley and co.

This spring the Liberal Democrats defeated the coalition's controversial planned NHS reforms at their party conference, sparking the unprecedented listening pause' which eventually led to over 1,000 amendments to the health and social care bill.

Six months later, as ministers prepare for the legislation to enter the Lords, its drive towards instilling competition and a market dynamic in the NHS is once again coming under fire. But this time, the Lib Dems' response looks to have weakened - just enough.

Activists did everything they could to secure a vote on the revised NHS reforms, which will be debated once again tomorrow. They were left frustrated after the federal policy committee decided to allow a one-hour debate without a vote, rather than a 30-minute debate with one at the end. It will not attract as many negative headlines as a result - thus

Vince Cable has a reputation for straight talking. It's got him into trouble once or twice in the last year. Maybe that's why so many Lib Dems turned up to hear him address the party conference in Birmingham.

Last year he had given the capitalists something of a lashing, sending the activists into a frenzy. This year Cable was more subdued, more measured. He resembled a Biblical prophet of disaster. If the Israelites had held party conferences before having to flee Egypt, it would probably have resembled something like this.

The beginning was subdued, dark, without much hope. In other words, a window into the souls of Lib Dems.

"These are dangerous times," he began slowly, blinking out at his audience from above his spectacles. By line eight he was comparing the economic situation to the troubles faced by a country in wartime. I half-expected the lights to flicker ominously. Delegates listened, attentively, to the Sage's wise words of doom.

Having established an atmosphere of

After 500 days in government, Liberal Democrats have even more reason to feel uncertain now than they did 12 months ago.

By the time the party arrived in Liverpool for last year's conference, their first which most could remember as a governing party, many of the early nerves suffered during the hung parliament period had subsided. The mood could be summed up as one of cautious optimism.

Now, after their first full year in power, the Lib Dems have a real opportunity to take stock.

Party leader Nick Clegg is accentuating the positive. "We've been in government in Westminster for 500 days: 500 days of delivery," he says in the foreword to the conference agenda document. And in addition to making the NHS "safe from any threat of backdoor privatisation", Clegg insists his party's ministers are putting "long-held Liberal Democrat ideas into practice". The pupil premium, tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners, a green investment bank - the list goes on.

It has not all been easy going,

The publication of England's redrawn political map is the first step in a lengthy process of political infighting.

Labour and the Conservatives will be going head to head, attempting to work out how effectively they can influence the process. Initially they'll be looking to come up with any viable counter-proposals which might limit the damage to their party. Then, once these have been published, they'll set about rubbishing the alternatives any other party has submitted. The scope for change is limited - but they'll do what they can.

The Liberal Democrats face a more challenging situation. The 2010 general election map shows that most of their seats are isolated, little blobs of orange surrounded by large swathes of red or blue. So most changes will affect them adversely. They're expected to lose around ten seats as a result - a much larger proportion of their presence in parliament than the 16 or 17 the Tories will lose - or the 25 seats Labour are expected to shed.

Dismay felt by

There is only one reaction to the "grave and shameful" treatment which led to Baha Mousa's death: utter horror. Which is why, when the inquiry's report attempts to explain the background for how this should come about, it is on distinctly shaky ground.

When does an interrogation become torture? When does treatment become cruel, degrading and inhuman? These are not black and white issues, which partly explains how the line can be crossed after many years of missed opportunities and neglect. The end result, it's clear, was horrific.

Baha Mousa died on September 16th 2003, two days after being detained by British forces serving in Basra, southern Iraq. He was an innocent 26-year-old hotel receptionist on September 14th. Two days later his body had 93 identifiable injuries, after being subjected to 36 hours of brutality. The gory details are truly shocking.

Let's try looking at this from the soldiers' point of view. They were engaged in the practise of 'conditioning' in a bid to extract as

Today Cameron turned the mockery treatment on Nadine Dorries, his latest political foe. There is nothing more dangerous in politics than descending into a figure of fun.

As every politician knows, the biggest enemies are always those found in your own party. So it's no surprise that the big contest in this lunchtime's prime minister's questions was between Cameron and the Tory backbencher who had called her party leader "gutless" at the weekend.

This was Nadine Dorries, perhaps the most effective right-wing troublemaker ever to emerge from the rolling fields of Mid-Bedfordshire, who is very experienced when it comes to winding up the PM. He has been interfering in her abortion amendment, which MPs are spending the afternoon debating. It tackles the question of who provides counselling for pregnant women considering an abortion - an ethical issue which MPs are allowed to vote on with their consciences, free of a party line this way or the other. Dorries was fed up that Cameron had made