Politics

When the Conservatives aren’t busy plotting against one another over a warm glass of prosecco, they are taking the struggle public in the select committee chairmanship elections. While young MPs Johnny Mercer and Tom Tugendhat attempt to usurp the older generation in the defence and foreign select committees, the two frontrunners for chair of the Treasury select committee are Jacob Rees Mogg and Nicky Morgan. Although it’s been perceived as a battle of Brexit vs Remain (with pro-Remainers expected to collude in order to stop a Leave campaigner taking the plum role), Mr S thinks it would be wrong to write Rees-Mogg off just yet. According to the Brexiteer’s nomination papers, he

Theresa May has withdrawn the whip from the Tory MP Anne Marie Morris after Morris talked about ‘the n—– in the woodpile’ at a think tank meeting. May has made the right decision. Morris claims that her use of the phrase was unintentional, but it is hard to see how that could be the case. There are certain phrases—such as call a spade, spade—that have racist connotations that most people are unaware of. But this phrase is not one of them; the first word in it rather gives the game away. Morris’ behaviour feels far short of what we should expect from our MPs, so the withdrawal of the whip

What a difference three months can make. In April, Theresa May stood on the steps of Downing Street and announced that she was calling a snap election to increase her majority and stop opposition parties from ‘political game-playing’ during the Brexit process. Having lost that majority in the subsequent election, the Prime Minister will this week mark her one-year anniversary in No 10 with a plea to said parties asking them to ‘contribute, not just criticise’. May will ask the other parties to ‘come forward’ with their views and ideas on everything from domestic policies to Brexit ‘at this critical time in our history’: ‘So I say to the other parties in the

Thursday marks the first anniversary of Theresa May becoming Prime Minister. As I say in The Sun this morning, several of her closest allies regard this as an opportunity to start trying to win back voters’ trust and respect. May has, by necessity, got rather good at apologising post-election. Her it’s my mess and I’ll get us out of it line to the 1922 Committee staved off an immediate leadership challenge. While her humility at the Tory donors ball at the Hurlingham Club went down well with the party’s money men. But what May hasn’t had is a moment of contrition with the public. She hasn’t yet come up with a

We host a lot of events at The Spectator but we’ve just held our favourite: the readers’ tea party. About 200 subscribers come to the back garden for tea and cakes to meet our writers, our editors and each other. T-Sticks supplied the tea, H. Forman & Son the food and Taki brought along a bottle of Lagavulin for those in the mood for something stronger. The thrill, for us in 22 Old Queen St, is meeting the people that we spend our working lives thinking about. It’s difficult to imagine a typical Spectator reader because they don’t really exist: this afternoon, for example, I met a policeman, a mathematician, a specialist in Chinese antiquities, a joiner and