Will David Cameron really consider staying on as Prime Minister for the 2020 election as well? Ever since the Sun on Sunday reported that some of the Tory leader’s colleagues were agitating for him to continue, there has been feverish speculation about whether he will. Those MPs in favour of a longer reign from Cameron
Ukip have been accused of being too politically correct. Yes, you did just read that sentence correctly. In a somewhat bizarre scenario, Nigel Farage’s former senior aide Raheem Kassam has taken issue with the phrasing of a new list of appointments in the party. After Ukip released a press release announcing new positions, including Mark Reckless’s
I used to consider myself to be in tune with the general public on politics, by which I meant – on the loony wing of the Tory party. After all, I told myself, we have widespread public support on crime, immigration, Europe and most issues involving morality. Things had only gone wrong because a modernising
There is no argument fiercer in feminism than the argument about prostitution. Say you want to ban it and the libertarian feminists denounce you as a ‘whorephobe’. Say you want to legalise it, and radical feminists denounce you as the tool of the patriarchy. Inevitably, Amnesty International felt it had to intervene. And, this week,
So Morrisons have announced that – after long discussions with farmers’ unions over the price of milk – they will launch a new brand of milk, which will be 10p per litre more expensive than their usual milk. The brand – named ‘Milk for Farmers’, will go on sale in the autumn, and the extra
Michael Gove has suggested that civil servants take inspiration from George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Jane Austen and George Eliot, when writing correspondence. The recent invitation to compose a memo generated by either the Department of Education or the Ministry of Justice as it might have been written by a writer you would like to
The results are in. After scrolling through today’s papers, ‘Correction of the day’ goes to the Times for an apology which brings new meaning to the age-old question ‘is the Pope Catholic?’ Buried on the paper’s letters page is a gem of an apology concerning an article they ran about Karol Wojtyla, the first non-Italian Pope since
The Labour leadership candidate Andy Burnham, who has worked in politics for 21 years, makes much of his life outside the Westminster bubble. As well as releasing a campaign video designed to show off his Northern working-class roots, he told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics that part of the reason he is ‘rooted’ in
Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in the Labour leadership race to the extent that it will now be something of a surprise if he doesn’t win. YouGov has published a poll putting Corbyn 32 points ahead of Andy Burnham on first preferences on 53 per cent and 21 per cent respectively, and 24 points ahead of
‘I already hate Sam. He’s too chavvy.’ Can you imagine the outrage that would kick off if someone said that about a contestant on a reality TV programme? But that’s essentially what happened to Flora Shedden, a 19-year-old candidate on this year’s Great British Bake Off who was accused of being ‘too posh’ on social media.
If reports that Pearson will soon sell their stake in the Economist magazine are to be believed, Mr S hopes that the publication’s latest ‘cover’ won’t dent the brand’s value. Steerpike understands that the usually independent-minded magazine has received a number of complaints from readers after they ran a cover on Egypt’s Suez Canal project with the title ‘Egypt’s
If you’re at all ambitious in Westminster these days, the most important thing is to show that you’re not a professional politician. Generally, the accepted definition of ‘professional politician’ is someone who has done something normal as far away from Westminster as possible before entering Parliament. But some alter the standard definition at their convenience
Sweden’s education performance has faltered in the past decades, with scores tumbling in the OECD’s international Pisa survey since the early 2000s. Both the Guardian and the BBC have recently looked into this phenomenon. There’s no shortage of explanations for the poor results, but British enemies of school reform have latched on to one of them: the
According to some of the more far-left members of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman is a Tory. The somewhat surprising claim came after she told her party to abstain on the Tories’ Welfare Bill, leading 48 MPs to break whip and vote against it. However, seemingly keen to silence the naysayers — in an interview
Unless something entirely undetected is happening in the Labour membership, Liz Kendall is not going to be elected party leader in the next few weeks. Today in an interview with the World at One, she said she was ‘definitely’ the underdog in the contest and that though ’I know I’ve got a long way to
The BBC’s Creative Director, Alan Yentob, seems to have spent the last week or so dashing from studio to studio in an attempt to influence the corporation’s broadcasters from saying nasty stuff about a charity of which he was, until it imploded, chairman. The incompetently-managed Kids Company is now mercifully defunct. Yentob has subsequently admitted
People like to support successful teams. That’s why there are far more Chelsea fans now than there were 20 years ago. It’s why, in Scotland, Celtic and (until recently) Rangers carved up the country between them. And it helps explain, a little, why the SNP is now polling at 62 percent. You read that correctly:
Politicians are doing an excellent job responding to the Calais migrant crisis – if you’re assessing them against the rules of a Summer Crisis, that is. Today we have yet another ‘crackdown’ on employers who give jobs to illegal immigrants, with James Brokenshire announcing that ‘rogue employers’ will feel ‘the full force of the law’
Forget Tories4Corbyn, a new craze is taking hold of Conservative politicians across the country. With Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity now at an all-time high, he has amassed a hoard of female fans who have described him as sexy in ‘a world weary sea dog’ sort of way. Now it seems the Tories too want in on the action. In a bid
The Tories are on a mission to brand themselves the Workers’ Party while Labour messes about with its leadership contest. The party has got the energetic Robert Halfon as its Deputy Chairman, and he is fizzing with ideas on how to improve the Conservative appeal to working class voters to the extent that they start