Blog Posts by Alex Stevenson

The timing of the Eastleigh by-election couldn't be worse for a government suffering a horrible start to 2013. Less than a month has passed since David Cameron and Nick Clegg injected some much-needed direction into the ailing coalition. But the temporary morale boost from the midterm review already seems to have faded into the past. This year has seen a succession of policy nightmares embattle the unity and sense of purpose of this government. The coalition, an unwieldy vessel at the best of times, is being battered by a perfect storm. Life in government for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has never been harder.

The problem is one of instinct. Across three very different issues, the Tory and Lib Dem mindsets have been fundamentally at odds. If life was like this all the time, this government simply couldn't function. They can't go on like this.

First came David Cameron's EU speech. After so many months of delays and buildup, the anticipation before this major reworking has

As I write this, voting is underway in the Commons chamber. Lib Dem ministers are, for the first time, voting against their Conservative colleagues in government. Some will feel a strange sense of exhilaration as they do so. They're making a mistake: this is bad news for both parties.

For too long the Lib Dems have been sidelined, ignored, abused by their Tory colleagues. They were handled with contempt by the Conservatives during the electoral reform referendum. They have been trampled on by a media confused and unyielding to the realities of coalition politics. This sort of treatment was nothing new to British politics' third party, whose very existence has puzzled all other political activists and created a very thick skin among its own.

The problem was this pugnacious anti-establishment 'otherness' eventually led to trouble. Clegg, probably the most despised mainstream politician of the 2010s, personifies the Lib Dem thick-skinned mindset. It was his bombastic handling of Lords

David Cameron's EU referendum promise might be politically popular, but he is exposing British democracy to a mechanism much more dangerous than initially meets the eye.

If Cameron is prime minister after 2015, he has made clear, his second term in Downing Street will feature a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. Referendums are a good thing - or that's the knee-jerk reaction anyway. They're certainly wildly popular with voters, who like any opportunity to get their view across and feel like they have a say. The political classes instinctively welcome the idea. But those who have looked more closely at what referendums involve take another view.
"I tend to be very wary of referendums," says Lord Norton of Louth, who in addition to being an influential peer on constitutional issues is also professor of government at the University of Hull. He cites research showing that plebiscites around the world show they tend to be mainly used by autocratic regimes to get the answer they

David Cameron has let domestic politics triumph over diplomacy. The closer you look at his EU referendum speech, the more it becomes clear his goal is winning power in 2015.

At present the prime minister is seriously off-track to achieve his number one priority, re-election. Promising an EU referendum is going to help him achieve that. Tory activists are already welcoming the speech as an harbinger of a positive campaign, thinking their job of taking seats from Labour has just got a lot easier.

Labour's initial response is muddled at best. What a contrast with Cameron, looking straight ahead into the television camera and viewers' living rooms, stating: "It will be an in-out referendum. Legislation will be drafted before the next election. And if a Conservative government is elected we will introduce the enabling legislation immediately and pass it by the end of that year... it is time for the British people to have their say."

The Tory party will unite behind Cameron's quest for a

As the US' closest ally, Britain is affected more than any other country by the decisions Barack Obama will take. So, as Obama's inauguration in Washington DC heralds the start of the US president's second term in the White House, here's a run-through of the most important challenges coming up in the next four years.

1 – A less pushy America

Obama tailored his approach to foreign affairs against the bold interventionist 'I'm right, and I'm going to prove it with shock and awe' technique of the George Bush years. The Democrat president's quieter approach to foreign affairs will continue to have a direct impact on Britain because of the UK's closeness to the States. This is part good and part bad, Xenia Dormandy, a senior fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, believes. "People still have strong memories from the Bush years of what they saw as an aggressive, unilateral approach," she says. "The quieter Obama approach reflects positively on the US and on the UK."

The downside is that when

There's something about the way parliament's only Oscar winner delivers her answer to my opening question which makes me think she's delivered this line many, many times before.

"I was told I was replacing one form of theatre with another," Glenda Jackson says, remembering her switch from acting to politics on winning a seat in the Commons back in 1992.

"I said if that was the case then the Commons is remarkably under-rehearsed, the lighting is appalling and the acoustic is even worse."

Trying to unpick the politician from the actress, and vice versa, is obviously going to be harder than it looks.

This is an interview to tread carefully in. I've been told Jackson shied away from even talking about her acting past for many years, because she was so fed up with people only wanting to talk to her about one thing. Now she's approaching the end of her political career, having made clear she won't want to stand again in 2015, so is perhaps in a more reflective mood. Jackson seems drawn to

Who cares about Mali, anyway?

Mali is not what Yes, Minister's Jim Hacker once dismissively categorised as a TPLAC (Tin Pot Little African Country). This north-west African country produces some of Africa's finest music. And until January 2012 it was one of the continent's most impressive democracies, having turned itself around after a period of military dictatorship in the early 1990s. Since then, trouble has been rearing its ugly head. A coup from junior military officers ended that period decisively with the establishment of a junta in the capital, Bamako.

What's that got to do with anyone in Europe?

It's the north of the country which is the headache. The regions of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao have been sporadically affected by an insurgency fuelled by the nomadic Tuaregs, whose mercenary fighters flocked over the border into northern Mali after Muammar Gaddafi's demise. Their Movement for the National Liberation of the Azawad and a group called Ansar al-Din have become increasingly

David Cameron's frustrating Europe obfuscation can be traced back to his other big crisis on the issue: abandoning the Tories' "cast-iron guarantee" over the Lisbon treaty referendum.

There's a lot of headscratching going on in Westminster right now about David Cameron's upcoming Europe speech. Quite right, too. He's all for Britain being in Europe, but thinks Europe should give Britain more powers back, but thinks Britain should choose whether it's in Europe, but isn't going to let that choice take place any time soon. Simple, really.

The real key to understanding Cameron's approach is to look back at the only other time when, as Tory party leader, he has had to confront the Europe monster head on. Then, as now, the aim was to preserve as much flexibility as possible.

A lot has changed in British politics since 2009, but in one respect life was not so very different: the leader of the divided Tory party had no option but to make a painful policy adjustment on European issues. It