And we will have one for Hammond, for what it’s worth, if the armed forces are refused further cash that they need.
The new Defence Secretary’s rawness may make him more likely to dig in against the Treasury than otherwise – precisely because he has a point to prove.
Plus: We need a Housing Minister who will do for new homes what Michael Heseltine did with development corporations in the 1980s.
The FT has the balanced “Grim outlook overshadows housing drive” while the Times goes for “Hammond eases off austerity”. The i has “Hammond’s hard-hat budget”.
And Conservative activists applaud a call to end “the fetishisation of the Green Belt”.
Plus: Osborne’s regrets, vintage Heseltine – and, after Germany, to Brighton, for what is claimed to be the biggest conference Labour has ever held.
The Somerset MP strongly supports Theresa May, denies anti-Etonian prejudice in public life, and says a Catholic could perfectly well be PM.
It is doubtless bad manners to ask, on day two of his new job, what he will do next. But posing the question and trying to answer it is irresistible.
CCHQ has been taken to task elsewhere for imposing lists of candidates on seats with no connection to it. It certainly hasn’t done so in this case.
Plus: May needs Johnson. My election predictions. Strange selection decisions. And: why I decided not to put my name forward for the seat in which I grew up.
Britain has a tradition of democracy, and Britons shunning elections are not, typically, making a stance against that.
The uncomfortable question is this: has the push for expansion altered the nature of these institutions? If not, why do they tolerate jaw-dropping illiberality?
The Lord Chancellor has enraged the judiciary by not speaking up for it in what it saw as an hour of need.
The Lord Chief Justice’s recent attack on the Lord Chancellor is unprecedented. Is she right for the job? Or is the job itself flawed?