Blog Posts by Alex Stevenson

The opening three months of 2013 just about sum up the flavour of this coalition: one-third desperate unity, two-thirds mutual loathing.

It was in order to address the latter that David Cameron and Nick Clegg began their year by striking a note of togetherness. Their midterm review was supposed to inject a bit of sprightliness into their ailing alliance. Instead it served to highlight their broken promises, underlining the challenges of running the country together now there is more of this government in the past than there is ahead.

The differences bubbled away throughout January. Boundary changes saw the Lib Dems stick to their guns and defeat the Conservatives, triggering "fury" among Tories desperate to get away from their despised colleagues in Whitehall. Discovering that this was the issue, of all the others, where the junior party were finally discovering their backbone was too much for some Conservative MPs, who spent at least a week quivering with anger. On gay marriage, the

"The most important thing for any of us is the people that we love and that is what makes us human," David Miliband told me during the final stages of the leadership campaign he hoped would see him crowned leader of the Labour party.

"That's not something we go around advertising. Now, we then love our football teams, we have our holiday we enjoy, we have our favourite places and favourite people. That's something that comes out in due course.

"I think there's a real danger of underestimating the British public in this. They want to see beneath the surface. And it's important that we respect that. They want consistency and they want clarity. The real person comes from those virtues."

For a man whose private thoughts and public actions have been at the centre of what makes him fascinating for so many years, this was a revealing observation. Miliband was on the brink of being usurped by the ambition of his younger brother - and the decisive influence the trade unions hold over the system

It is the sort of proposal which would send the Dowager Countess calling for her smelling salts and the Earl of Grantham steeling himself for social change with a stiff upper lip. After centuries of macho oneupmanship, a Conservative backbencher is now suggesting ending the system of primogeniture for good.

The rule of primogeniture, which sees the succession of hereditary peerages pass to a male even if the son is born after a daughter, has long been a headache for dispossessed females. The problems it poses have driven Sunday night entertainment from Pride and Prejudice to Downton Abbey.

Now it's the 21st century and most viewers of these costume dramas will assume this particular headache is a thing of the past. Women have come a long way. Even the monarchy is changing its succession rules, meaning Kate Middleton's first child - regardless of whether it is a boy or a girl - will become the third in line to the throne.

The stakes may not be as high as in the past, for families of

The newspapers, depending on their political leanings, will either write about the 'downgraded chancellor' or his 'aspiration nation'. Their stories about his 'every little helps' Budget will go down a treat in the pub. But his measures, while populist and giving him something to talk about for an hour today, do not resolve the terrible fix the British economy now finds itself in. Here's five reasons why your life has got a lot worse since the chancellor delivered his fourth Budget yesterday.

The economy is in big, big trouble

You knew this already. But you didn't know how bad it's getting till yesterday lunchtime.  Last December the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had estimated growth in 2013 would amount to 1.2%. This was itself a big downgrade. Today it halved that assessment to just 0.6%, a drastic reduction. Osborne blamed headwinds in the global economy and the eurozone for the hiccup, and suggested the situation would deteriorate further if the eurozone continues to

This is awkward for both of us. Radicals like Carswell are not accustomed to receiving accolades from the system. "I don't win that many awards in the House of Commons. I certainly don't get any from the whips' office," he says. Nor are lobby journalists supposed to spend their time feting the elected representatives they report on.

But it is precisely because this particular MP is so different from the mainstream that I am now sitting opposite him. Carswell has emerged as the winner of a Politics.co.uk project seeking to find the MP who has liberated themselves the most from the straitjacket of the party system. Our jury members praised his ability to foster his trademark independence of spirit while maintaining all the fundamental views which make him a Tory MP.

I'm speaking to Carswell in his office in Portcullis House, the despised modern block for MPs which provides our parliamentarians with utterly anonymous office spaces. Lots of the inmates here, inspired by their surroundings,

Photo: Rasiel SuarezBy Hugh Bayley MP

Richard III died in battle on August 22nd 1485, and Henry Tudor became King of England. Richard's body was buried hurriedly by Franciscan Friars and was lost for over five centuries.

His reputation was trashed by a pesky playwright from Stratford-on-Avon, but I suppose Shakespeare needed to curry favour with the Tudor royal court in order to get the licences necessary to stage his plays. That's politics! History is always written by the victor. But people in York stuck up for Richard – a pious man who championed the north of England and often judged civil cases in favour of the common people and against the aristocracy – many of whom turned against him, of course, in the War of the Roses.

In February, following the archaeological excavation, the University of Leicester confirmed that a skeleton found was, beyond reasonable doubt, that of Richard III.

Since then there has been a huge debate over where his remains should be finally laid to rest. Twenty-five thousand

Margaret Hodge has won plaudits for her work as parliament's penny-counter in chief - but it's her time fighting far-right extremism which underlies her work defending taxpayers' money.

"I'm very privileged!" Margaret Hodge burbles as we sit down. She is cramming me in between commitments, gulping down some sort of tomato-ey soup, and laughs loudly when I suggest she is, in her words, "non-establishment in an establishment room!" Her office, with its oak-panelled walls and Pugin wallpaper and "fantastic" view of the River Thames far below, is as grand as they come in the Palace of Westminster.

Most MPs are obliged to put up with office space outside the main parliamentary building, giving them a tiresome traipse to and from the Commons chamber every time the division bell rings. Not so Hodge. Even in the days before the Portcullis House office block was built and most backbenchers were effectively homeless, the public accounts committee (PAC) chair was always granted a grand space in

This was the moment they had been waiting for. The families and friends of the patients who died unnecessarily in the NHS – especially the 1,200 patients who lost their lives while supposedly under the care of the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust between 2005 and 2009 – have spent years frustrated and angry at the seemingly endless abilities of the NHS' most senior official, Sir David Nicholson, to evade responsibility. They have found it impossible to understand how Nicholson – who was the chief executive of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority at the time of those deaths – could possibly not accept the most basic principle of accountability and resign for what happened on his watch. Today he faced MPs on the Commons' health select committee. It was a big day for all concerned.

They might have expected at least a degree of contrition, a shred of humanity. What they got was farce. "I'm absolutely sure there is somewhere in there an apology," he muttered. A while later, he was able