Oliver Letwin MP

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

During the boom years, it seemed most people had little interest in the Autumn Statement, and who could blame them?

The statement was generally used just to confirm how rosy things apparently were.

For many years,  as I discovered myself when I was Shadow Chancellor, neither the media nor anyone else paid any attention to [...]

View from Westminster

Government is partly about having a vision of the future and taking pro-active steps to make a reality of that vision.

But government also inevitably involves reacting to circumstances and events.

The Government has had plenty to react to over the last few months — notably the uprisings in Libya and the ongoing euro-zone crisis. [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

Silly season was turned on its head this year with politicians and press alike having plenty of hard hitting events to contemplate over the summer.

The riots brought MPs scuttling back to Westminster in the middle of August, and the aftermath – together with Libya and the state of the world economy – were [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

As you will have noticed, dear reader, there have been plenty of hard hitting stories over the past few weeks.

Newspaper closures, phone-hacking, bailouts, strikes, by-elections and the continuing rumblings of the Arab Spring have dominated headlines.

I have decided, however, to use my column to write about the visit of the Chinese Premier, an [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

This last month has been – among other things – a month for visits.

First, there was that remarkable visit by the Queen to Ireland.

Relations between the UK and Ireland have had a chequered history through the centuries.  The contribution of each to the history and culture of the other is of course immense [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

My work in London involves walking once or twice a day between the Cabinet Office and Parliament.

This trip normally consists of a very pleasant, albeit busy, walk down Whitehall and into the Palace of Westminster, soaking up the buzz of what some call the Westminster bubble. 

However, when taking this trip in the week [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

There are times in your life when you realise the implications of the choices you have made.

One of these came to me a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself involved in the discussions at the National Security Council and Cabinet that led to the UK’s role in the international Libyan intervention.

It [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

One of the most extraordinary things about government is the sheer breadth and variety of its concerns and activities. This has come home to me even more forcibly in the last few weeks than it had in the previous few months.

The amazing sequence of revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have, [...]

VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER

Amidst all the very serious – and inevitably very controversial – things that the Government is doing, the Westminster village has been amusing itself with two rather spectacular side shows.

One – to which it is perhaps best to allude only gently – is the rather exciting poses struck by the Speaker’s wife.  I [...]

The Christmas holidays (rather shorter for some of us than others) are now firmly over and Westminster is back to work with a vengeance.

From my own point of view, the dates of Parliament sitting are not particularly significant, since both constituency work and the work of government go on regardless of the Parliamentary timetable – [...]