Politics

Just minutes before the crunch Shadow Cabinet meeting about the Labour stance on air strikes in Syria, the party has released figures showing an overwhelming majority oppose UK bombing in Syria. This is the statement: 75 per cent of Labour Party members responding to weekend consultation oppose UK bombing in Syria A sample of this weekend’s consultation of Labour Party members, carried out in response to an email from Jeremy Corbyn, issued Friday 27th November, has shown that 75 per cent of Labour party members who have responded oppose UK bombing in Syria. 107,875 responses were received of which 64,771 were confirmed as full individual Labour Party members. The remainder

How did those accused of bullying in the Conservative party’s youth wing get away with it? The central party, which appears to be slowly waking up to the fact that it can’t mark its own homework with an internal investigation into the events preceding Elliott Johnson’s death, may have been so desperate for help ferrying its limited number of young activists around the country that it jumped at the offer from Mark Clarke (who denies all the allegations put to him over the past few weeks). But those unhappy at the state of affairs seem to have been held back from complaining by something else: the threat to their careers. Account

The murky story of Mark Clarke, Elliott Johnson and allegations of bullying in the ranks of Conservative Future is pointing towards another scalp: Lord Feldman. Following the resignation of Grant Shapps this weekend, MPs are now calling for the Conservative party’s current chairman to resign — given that he was at the top of Conservative HQ when Clarke was kicked off the candidates list and later brought back in. He was also chairman when Johnson died too. Shapps has been described as the ‘fall guy’ for this situation — he had already left CCHQ after May’s general election and has been serving as the international development minister. But he tweeted

By now, George Osborne had hoped to have completed his austerity programme. Instead, he finds himself making what is, still, the most ambitious round of cuts of any finance minister in the developed world. The Chancellor is paying the price for the leisurely pace that he decided to take in the last parliament – due to his habit of buying time by deferring pain. The Chancellor still doesn’t seem to be in too much of a rush. In his spending review statement this week, he decided to spend some £83 billion more over the parliament than he said he would at the general election.  Foreign aid is not just protected, but

Jeremy Corbyn didn’t show his Shadow Foreign Secretary a copy of what he was going to say in response to David Cameron’s statement on Syria, Coffee House understands. Sources have told me that Hilary Benn was spotted sitting outside Corbyn’s office this morning before the Prime Minister made his Commons statement. Benn appeared to be waiting for something. When I asked his spokesman whether Benn had been given advance sight of Corbyn’s planned response to the Prime Minister, the spokesman said ‘no’. Sources in Corbyn’s team insist that Benn was briefed beforehand, but the confusion goes some way to explaining why Benn and Corbyn appeared to take rather different views

Tonight Labour’s Shadow Cabinet is in uproar over what many of its members see as a fundamental breach of trust from Jeremy Corbyn in writing to the parliamentary party without telling them. ‘Why would you do that?’ asks one shadow minister in utter bafflement. They thought it odd that Corbyn had read from a printed statement about his position on strikes in the meeting, rather than addressing them directly, but odder still that he just hadn’t thought to tell them that he would be writing this letter. There is a suspicion that this evening’s letter is part of a co-ordinated effort with grassroots organisation Momentum to make MPs’ lives miserable