Politics

Britain’s three main political parties are in crisis. That isn’t meant to happen. If only by a process of elimination, one of the three UK-wide political parties should be doing well at any given moment. These simultaneous crises are one of the things that is making politics so volatile. Let’s start with the Liberal Democrats. The political circumstances seem almost perfect for them but their failure to even break into the teens in the polls when the two main parties are both in crisis does makes one question whether they can ever return to the levels of popularity they enjoyed before the ill-fated coalition with the Conservatives. What compounds their

Most reporting on Jeremy Hunt’s visit to China this week went little further than his slip of the tongue in describing his wife as Japanese rather than Chinese. Preoccupied by that trivial matter and any offence it might have given the new foreign secretary’s hosts (which seemed to be none), commentators missed the somewhat more substantial issue of why China is so keen to oblige Britain’s requests for a trade deal. A ground-breaking free-trade agreement between Britain and the world’s ascendant superpower would be the great boon the UK government so desperately needs, especially after Brussels’ rebuffing of May’s Chequers plan for Britain’s future relationship with the EU and the

A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no longer come up to London. Boris jumped at the idea and I remember our lunch as the last time I saw Bill exuberantly happy. Boris knew instinctively what a 93-year-old journalist who was struggling to write his weekly column needed, and filled him in hilariously on the London political and media gossip. The only slight

With Theresa May’s Chequers proposal unpopular across the board, there are many politicians and would-be politicians now asking themselves: could I do a better job? For quite a lot of these people, the answer is ‘yes’. However, this afternoon Leave.EU’s Arron Banks offered a reminder that sometimes the basics are harder than they look. The Brexit campaigner took to social media to correct Chuka Umunna for sharing a graph detailing growth in G7 countries. Banks’s complaint? Canada, the USA and Japan aren’t in the G7. The problem? They are. Canada , the USA & Japan aren’t in the G7, dopey https://t.co/7cgHisXAgs — Arron Banks (@Arron_banks) July 31, 2018 Probably for

CCHQ’s attempt to latch onto ITV2’s Love Island fanbase by releasing a number of Love Island-themed water bottles with Conservative attack lines hit a bump in the road after it transpired that they had not been given permission to use the reality show trademark. Nevertheless, Mr S suspects that one Cabinet Minister is particularly thrilled to learn that the non-branded water bottles are in abundance in a cupboard at headquarters. Step forward Chris Grayling. Earlier this month PopBitch reported a visitor to the offices of the Secretary of State for Transport noting that all the staff there were trying to beat the heatwave with snazzy new Love Island water bottles. Everyone, that

The latest challenge, to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad, is one that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t very funny just at the moment’. That may well be true, but your entries still raised a chuckle, and as usual those with a ring of plausibility worked best. There was a fair amount of repetition: popular tips included the desirability of introducing Brexit into conversation at the earliest opportunity, the inadvisability of tipping black cab drivers and the National Gallery’s