Politics - Access Interviews

Ken Clarke

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Homeowners face painful rises in mortgage rates in coming years, Tory big beast Kenneth Clarke warns today. In an exclusive interview with the Evening Standard, he said rock-bottom loan rates protecting borrowers from the worst of the recession are bound to end, whoever wins the general election. “These are artificially low interest rates,” said the shadow business secretary with typical candour. “They obviously can't stay as low as this.

William Hague

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

The shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, has said that there was no "secret deal" over the tax status of Tory benefactor Lord Ashcroft and that Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time of negotiations about the peer's status, was informed of the details of the deal. He said: "The one thing I will concede on this - and which I think in retrospect was a mistake - was to say tens of millions because it may have cost him millions. We don't know, it may cost him millions into the future. "None of us can know - other than him, I suppose, and the tax authorities - what it has cost. But it was certainly an important change for him to go from being not resident in the UK."

Imran Khan

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

I don't have to do this,” Imran Khan tells me earnestly. “I could have a very easy existence. I could go on TV and make so much money, live like a king.” Instead the retired international cricketer, and former husband of Jemima Khan, has dedicated his life to politics back home in Pakistan. Jemima, the daughter of the late financier, Sir James Goldsmith, may just have bought a £15 million stately pile in Oxfordshire, but Imran lives hand-to-mouth on a farm outside Islamabad. He grows his own vegetables and tends cows on his land in the foothills of the Himalayas.

George Osborne

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

George Osborne, the Tories’ election supremo, is pumped up for the fight ahead. Integrity is the crucial difference between the parties, he tells Benedict Brogan.

Brendan Barber

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

A Conservative government would need to rethink its stance on drastic cuts in public spending and opting out of EU employment law if it wanted to avoid clashes with the unions, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress has told Public Servant, writes Dean Carroll.

Anna Arrowsmith

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

I have interviewed countless politicians over the years, of many a persuasion. Never before has one seen fit, while outlining her electoral credentials, to dwell on the pornographic films she has made in her lounge. Anna Arrowsmith, also known as Anna Span, is the new Liberal Democrat candidate for Gravesham in Kent. She is also the auteur of hundreds of “female-friendly” porn films. Her neighbours in Tunbridge Wells may or may not be disgusted to learn that some of these, including Be My Toyboy, were shot in the front room.

Alan Johnson

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Copies of the Evening Standard's hard-hitting series on London's dispossessed were sent to all MPs today, and one recipient who should understand it better than many of his colleagues is the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson. At the Home Office, he sits pin-neat in his grey suit, silver tie and polished square-toed shoes - a look the right side of spiv.

David Cameron

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, beware. It's the Titch! That busy little bee, Alan Titchmarsh, yesterday turned big-time political interviewer and subjected David Cameron to scrutiny - if that is the word - on primetime telly. It was not exactly the most policy-laden of discussions. To compare it to the work of Tomas de Torquemada, fiend of the Spanish Inquisition, would perhaps be an exaggeration. But it was at least shorter than Gordon Brown's appea

Nick Clegg

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, will be in a powerful position if the election leads to a hung parliament, but he refuses to be drawn on what he would do as kingmaker

Sir Simon Milton

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

London's streamlined organisational template – developed under Boris Johnson – could be replicated at the national level if the Conservative Party wins the general election, deputy mayor Sir Simon Milton has told Public Servant's Dean Carroll.

Winnie Mandela

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

My husband and I have just crossed Africa. On the final leg of our journey we had finally come to South Africa - a place that now went hand in hand with the name Mandela. My husband had been reluctant to come here but then he had followed his instinct and it had brought us to the Soweto door of the mystifying Winnie Mandela, a much celebrated and reviled woman of our times.

Peter Mandelson

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Business secretary says Ashcroft has Cameron 'by the balls' and that affair reveals 'fundamental weakness'. David Cameron's failure to confront his billionaire deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft over his tax status exposes the "fundamental weakness" of the Conservative leader and undermines his claim to be a moderniser, Lord Mandelson said tonight. In a highly personal attack, the business secretary said in an interview with the Guardian that Ashcroft had Cameron "by the balls", the affair showed Cameron was "too weak to pick a fight with his own party" and the Tories were "fundamentally unchanged".

Pauline Prescott

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Pauline Prescott talks to Ginny Dougary about public humiliation, private anguish – and why her husband now does the housework

Nick Clegg

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

He’s meditated in America’s mid-west, he’s set fire to cacti in Germany, his 8-year-old son has a master plan to catch Osama Bin Laden and he could become the most powerful player at the next election. He’s Nick Clegg and he spoke to ShortList’s Andrew Dickens.

Nick Clegg

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Nick Clegg believes any parties in a hung parliament would have to behave with maturity and work to create a solid government

Kimberly Quinn

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

In 2004 Spectator publisher Kimberly Quinn suffered a high-profile humiliation following her scandalous affair with the then Home Secretary David Blunkett. But with her husband’s support and her reinvention as a children’s author, she is finally moving on. Here, in her first interview since what she calls her ‘hubris nemesis’, she talks to Catherine O’Brien about ‘rebuilding a different kind of life’

David Cameron

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Tory leader and Witney MP David Cameron's revealed to Heart he may have delayed a Take That/Robbie Williams reunion. Gary is one of David's constituents, because he lives near Burford. David caught up with the Take That star backstage at a concert. The Conservative leader has been telling Heart: "I went to see him in his dressing room with the other members of Take That and we were chatting away. Suddenly I heard this bit of commotion behind me and I didn't turn around to start with - typical politician, carried on yakking. Then I turned around and it was Robbie Williams!

Rachida Dati

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

Rachida Dati caused a furore when she went back to work as France's justice minister only five days after giving birth last year. Now an MEP, she explains how her penchant for stilettos can coexist with her drive to succeed in politics.

David Cameron

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

It’s being so cheerful as keeps him going. I’m sitting in an office in the Norman Shaw buildings in the Palace of Westminster listening to what has gone so right for David Cameron. After six utterly disastrous weeks of campaigning by Conservative high command, his poll lead has taken as much of a battering as the headrest in Gordon Brown’s Jaguar.

Gordon Brown

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:45:24 +0000

General Election: It has been a hellish few days for the Prime Minister but, as he shows Mary Riddell and Andrew Porter, he has an appetite for the challenge and is happy to tackle the Tories. Does he or Fabio Capello, the England coach, have the worse job? “Fabio has quite a good time, doesn’t he?” Mr Brown replies. It is true that the antics of the divided national squad cannot fairly be compared to the Prime Minister’s woes. In the past week, Mr Brown has been beset by allegations of bad temper and bullying, not to mention the charge by his Chancellor that a frankness on Britain’s economic plight led to “the forces of hell” being unleashed.