Politics Archives

Sunday

30 Sep 2018

Conservative party conference, day one: The Spectator guide | 30 September 2018

The Conservatives return to Birmingham and Theresa May has defied some predictions by even making it this far. But can she keep the show on the road? Or will the Tory party conference be as big a disaster as last year’s gathering? Here are the highlights to keep an eye out for today: Conference listings: 10.00 – 12.00 Hall 1, ICC Birmingham MEETING OF THE NATIONAL CONSERVATIVE CONVENTION 14.00 – 14.45 Symphony Hall WELCOME TO CONFERENCE Chairman of the Conservative Party Mayor of the West Midlands 14.45 – 16.30 Symphony Hall GLOBAL BRITAIN Secretary of State for International Trade Secretary of State for International Development Secretary of State for Defence

Saturday

29 Sep 2018

Steerpike

Angela Rayner rallies against common sense

Conservative conference weekend is here, prompting the usual effort by Labour to mis-cast the Tories as a party of rich toffs. However, this seems to have backfired for Angela Rayner. This morning she posted a widely shared image of the Conference website, which is selling last-minute tickets at inflated prices: Tory party conference for the few (with plenty of cash) not the many 😳 pic.twitter.com/SYpu43SeFl — Angela Rayner 🌹 (@AngelaRayner) September 28, 2018 However, Mr S is delighted to inform Ms Rayner that all is not as it seems. Tickets for the Conservative Party Conference have been on sale since January, at a much-reduced price of £50, and £20 for

Rod Liddle

Why can’t lefties argue properly?

The main problem with lefties is that they can’t decide in their own minds what exactly they want. And sometimes want two paradoxical things simultaneously. So, among the Twitter reactions from Corbynistas to my appearance on Question Time last Thursday was this: ‘I hope he dies a long and painful death TONIGHT.’ I mean come on mate, make your bleedin’ mind up. At least the injunctions that my wife and daughter should be raped and murdered had a certain internal consistency about them. They’re a lovely bunch, no? What was lacking in the responses, much as it was lacking in my co-panellist Ian Lavery’s response (he just shouted OOOTrageous OOOTrageous

Katy Balls

CCHQ gives out Boris Johnson’s phone number

There had been a general consensus among Conservative MPs that this year’s Tory conference would be an improvement on the last so long as Theresa May could get through her speech without coughing. However, it seems the forces that be may have other ideas. With the conference due to kick off tomorrow in Birmingham, CCHQ have found themselves in the news for all the wrong reasons over their conference app. A glitch in the app meant that for at least an hour anyone who used it could access private details of people attending the event. Several Twitter users boasted about getting hold of Boris Johnson’s personal mobile number – along with

James Forsyth

The Tories need a domestic agenda

Brexit dominates the headlines going into Tory conference. But as I say in The Sun this morning, the absence of a domestic agenda is an even bigger problem for them than their divisions over Brexit. Labour have over the last few days set out their vision for Britain. Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with it and think the attitude to property rights revealed by its plan for ‘inclusive ownership funds’ is downright alarming. But give Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell this, their agenda is undoubtedly clear and bold. As one Cabinet Minister says, half admiringly, ‘they’re hungry’. The Tory party’s problem is that it isn’t giving the country a vision of

Friday

28 Sep 2018

Dominic Green

Republicans must drop Kavanaugh before it’s too late

Remember how the Democrats tried to block Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court by dredging up accusations of sexual assault? You don’t, because they didn’t. The Democrats played dirty politics against Gorsuch, but there were no allegations of sexual assault about Gorsuch, because there was no smoke from which to fan a fire. So Democratic attempts to block Gorsuch’s nomination turned on his judicial record. Now consider the considerable amount of smoke summoned by Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. I reckon I might have been the first and only voice in a right-of-centre publication to say that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh had enough of the ring of truth to render Kavanaugh

Isabel Hardman

The Tories need to remember how to fight Labour

As you’d expect on the eve of Tory conference, everyone in the party is offering plenty of advice for Theresa May. Some are tugging the Prime Minister leftwards, while others are fretting that the Conservatives risk abandoning their values. There’s Jacob Rees-Mogg arguing that the Tories need to support the institution of the family, Sam Gyimah worrying that the party has ‘lost our way’ and is both ‘talking business down’ and ‘ignoring the concerns of voters’, Boris Johnson complaining about, well, quite a lot, and Liz Truss saying Labour’s latest PPB ‘does capture the heart of where we need to be as a party’. And it’s not even the real

Steerpike

Revealed: Seumas Milne’s bumper pay rise

At party conference last week, several Labour front benchers poured scorn on ‘fat cat bosses’ with excessive earnings. Jeremy Corbyn himself promised to end the country’s culture of ‘greed is good.’ It appears, though, that a bit of greed isn’t so bad when it comes to lining your own friends’ coffers. The Evening Standard reports today that Corbyn, who earns around £140,000 a year, has given his closest aides whopping pay rises of up to 26 per cent. The average salary of his three best paid advisers is now £94,421, four times the salary of a London nurse. Corbyn’s closest ally, former Guardian hack and champagne socialist Seumas Milne is

Steerpike

Corbyn crashes Tory conference

The 2015 Conservative Party conference in Manchester stood out for its ugly scenes – with protesters hurling eggs at attendees. Jeremy Corbyn inflamed tensions further by attending a rally on the eve of that conference which called on Tories to be ‘thrown out of Manchester’. Is a similar series of events on the cards this weekend when members gather in Birmingham? Corbyn notably stayed away from subsequent conferences in 2016 and 2017 which coincidentally were much quieter affairs. But this year the threat of an angry horde of SWP sorts is concerning both CCHQ and the Birmingham police. Mr S is informed that Conservative HQ are aware of the fact PM-in-waiting

Martin Vander Weyer

John McDonnell is on a mission to destroy the free-market economy as fast as he can

The least convincing thing said by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was ‘I believe we’ll be elected for a second term.’ In all his other remarks about plans for compulsory employee share schemes, workers on boards, higher corporate taxes, extended employment rights, attacks on the rich and below-market renationalisation of water utilities whose bosses he would fire, he talked about getting the programme done ‘within the life of a Labour government’ — with the clear implication that he thinks Tory turmoil might be about to give him a once-in-a-lifetime, one-term-only chance to make a reality of the recreation he lists in Who’s Who: ‘fermenting

Fraser Nelson

Alan Duncan on Boris: ‘publicity is his cocaine’

It’s no secret that quite a few Tory MPs think Boris Johnson is on manoeuvres and must be stopped. But none are as vocal as his former deputy in the Foreign Office, Alan Duncan. He recently tweeted that ‘I’m sorry, but this is the political end of Boris Johnson. If it isn’t now, I will make sure it is later.’ I asked him why he had responded in such a way, and we had an interesting conversation that I suggested we put on the record. He agreed, and we met recently in his Westminster home. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. FN: You attacked Boris in

Thursday

27 Sep 2018

Peter Jones

Quids and quos

The 5th century bc Athenian historian Thucydides proposed that the driving force behind interstate relations was power and fear. But the soldier-essayist Xenophon (d. 354 bc) thought that humiliation, of the sort that the EU recently heaped on Mrs May, lay at the heart of the problem. In his Cyropaedia, Xenophon wrote an extended essay on the achievements of the Persian King Cyrus the Great (d. 530 bc), founder of a huge empire stretching from Turkey to India. In it, Xenophon invented a conversation between the experienced Tigranes, future king of Armenia, and the young Cyrus on the subject of foreign domination. Tigranes pointed out that problems between states arose

The Spectator

Left in charge

The worst of Britain’s post-war mistakes, ideas we thought long dead, are once more in the air. Yet again there are plans for ‘workers on boards’ (the govern-ment, of course decides who’s a worker), and for mandatory price caps, based on the delusion that government can make things cheaper by diktat. Intelligent people are once more agreed that British employers should pay the highest minimum wage in the developed world — a policy estimated to condemn tens of thousands to unemployment. The tax burden is at a 30-year high, yet many assume we should make that burden still heavier — as if the country can be taxed to prosperity. The

Dominic Green

Was May attacking Trump in New York, or a blond populist closer to home?

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. Did British prime minister Theresa May take a shot at Donald Trump in yesterday afternoon’s address to the UN General Assembly? Or was Trump a proxy target for a blond populist closer to home, Boris Johnson? On Tuesday, Trump rejected the ‘ideology of globalism’ and defended the nation state and its ‘doctrine of patriotism’. The next day, May mounted the same stage and implicitly rejected Trump’s stance: ‘We have seen what happens when the natural patriotism which is a cornerstone of a healthy society is warped into aggressive nationalism, exploiting fear and uncertainty to promote identity politics at home and belligerent confrontation

Rodric Braithwaite

Behind the irony curtain

The comedy of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two glum Russian ‘tourists’ who denied on television that they were involved in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, seems set to run and run. The Moscow press tells us that Russia’s ‘Golden Brand’ has offered them a brand name for a company specialising in tourism, women’s clothing, and chemicals for the scent industry. The two tried to persuade the world that they had come to Britain simply to admire Salisbury cathedral, its 123 metre-high steeple and its ancient clock. Alas, they lamented, luck was against them. First they were driven back by snow. (Really? Russians can cope with snow. Russian trains,

Isabel Hardman

Labour’s conference has made it harder for its unhappy MPs to leave

Labour’s lost centrists weren’t just physically absent at the party’s conference: they were also absent from the debate. Perhaps those who had turned up from the ‘moderate’ wing of the party had expected frequent denunciations of ‘Blairites’ from the main stage, but it didn’t come. In fact, even in the fringes, the moderates came up far less as enemies than the unions and Momentum. This is partly because the Labour Party now feels very comfortable in its Corbynite skin and is more interested in ensuring it can deselect those moderates in the most efficient way rather than attacking them. But the moderates themselves are also quiet because they are on

Steerpike

Rupa Huq stretches the truth

Rupa Huq was the unfortunate Labour front-bencher sent out to explain the party’s latest Brexit policy on Politics Live this afternoon. Armed with the standard party line that Labour can somehow unite Britain on Brexit, she struggled under the strain of a classic Andrew Neil grilling. Moreover, Huq made the following bold claim: "We do represent the 25 most-Remain seats in the country…" @RupaHuq on the Labour message to voters "…but we do also represent the 25 most-Leave constituencies"#PoliticsLive https://t.co/udXeUK9I0G pic.twitter.com/KFcj6C0oIG — BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) September 27, 2018 A great soundbite, playing nicely into the Media Vs Jeremy, Government-in-Waiting narrative that Diane Abbot struggled with on Wednesday’s Newsnight. Unfortunately, technically

Steerpike

Theresa May’s spouse rebuke on shaky ground

After the Prime Minister turned her ire on a lobby hack this week for failing to ask her a serious question, Theresa May has now moved on to would-be journalists in the Tory party. In the latest edition of the House magazine, James Cleverly – the deputy chairman – interviews his boss. In the easy touch, pre-conference interview, Cleverly asks May if she ever seeks work advice from her husband Philip. However, he doesn’t get the answer he is looking for with May accusing him of light sexism: ‘This is just a thought. I just wondered when you asked me about Philip’s role, whether if I was a male prime minister,

Steerpike

Watch: Diane Abbott’s BBC bias gaffe

There’s a burning question being asked everywhere from Liverpool to London: is Diane Abbott capable of getting through a single interview without committing a massive blunder? After another stellar performance on Newsnight, the answer almost certainly appears to be no. When the shadow home secretary was asked by Emily Maitlis if Labour’s Brexit immigration stance risked painting them as the party of the metropolitan elite, Abbott thought she had the perfect combative response: ‘You seem to be reading from a Tory script. I’m telling you that migration is a complex issue and we need to start with the facts. I’m telling you the reason that some parts of the country

John McTernan

The fatal flaw in Labour’s politics

If we learned one thing from Labour Party Conference it’s that capitalism is bad. The union leaders said so, the delegates said so, Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Labour Party, said so – at length. And do you know what? They’re right. Capitalism is bad, very, very bad – at defending itself. As anti-business policy after anti-business policy was announced, despair at the poverty of the response of the business lobby was matched only by grudging admiration for the message discipline of Corbyn and his supporters. The bar is set low in UK politics, where the monstrous incompetence of Theresa May’s Conservative government is matched only by the appalling