Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

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Accuracy concerns grow over Anthony Seldon’s biography of David Cameron

Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon’s biography of David Cameron has not even been released yet but already it has managed to send ripples through Westminster. Revelations in the Mail on Sunday’s excerpt of the tome included George Osborne’s fears that an EU referendum could obstruct his path to Number 10, as well as a text David Cameron sent to Boris Johnson apparently telling him to ‘f—ing shut up‘. Only it may be best to take some of these stories with a pinch of salt for now, as concerns begin to grow regarding the accuracy of Seldon and Snowdon’s account. While Lord Ashcroft revealed earlier this year that Seldon was getting Number 10 aides to

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Andy and Yvette — a tale of two ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ strategies

Who has the best chance of beating Jeremy Corbyn: Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper? The Burnham and Cooper camps are vying to be the clear ‘Anyone But Corbyn’ candidate, and trying to grab as much of the low-hanging ‘soft’ Corbyn vote as possible before the ballot closes on 10 September. Burnham is most blatant in his adoption of the ABC strategy. For example, in an op-ed for the Independent today, he says ‘I believe it has come down to a straight choice between Jeremy Corbyn and myself’ and outlined five policy areas he will pursue if elected leader to build a ‘bolder, more principled Labour party’. On housing, Burnham said he will oppose the extension of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ukip wars: Party’s London MEP blasts ‘undemocratic’ Mayoral and GLA selections

Ukip’s selection procedure for its London Assembly and Mayoral candidates is ‘undemocratic’, the party’s own MEP for London has told Coffee House. Gerard Batten has refused to take part in the selection procedure because it is ‘undemocratic’, with the party’s London membership getting no vote on the candidates. He said: ‘If Ukip is a democratic party, then it should allow the London members to select the candidate. Ukip is nothing if not a grassroots party. Activists who are not allowed to vote for a candidate may not feel motivated to campaign for that candidate. Ukip talks a lot about the undemocratic nature of the European Union, so we should practise democracy in

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Yvette Cooper attacks ‘cowardly’ government and says Britain should take 10,000 refugees

Yvette Cooper has just given a rather fine, bold speech on the refugee crisis. Some reading will disagree with her plea for Britain to take 10,000 refugees, rather than 200. But that’s part of the point: the Labour leadership contender has decided to take a stand on something, even if it annoys some. To be fair, it is probably an issue that Labour members will applaud her taking a stand on, rather than something that makes the party feel uncomfortable with, but it is much less like the ‘on-the-one-hand-this-and-the-other-that’ style of campaigning that Cooper has been criticised for at times during this contest. The Shadow Home Secretary accused the government

Sebastian Payne

‘Remain’ or ‘leave’ — the new EU referendum wording

Forget ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ or ‘In’ and ‘Out’, the EU referendum question looks set to be a choice between ‘remain’ or ‘leave’. The Electoral Commission has recommended a change from the current question in the EU Referendum Bill: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?’ To which the response is either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. This wording could be judged to be helpful for those who want Britain to remain in the EU, as the question was posed in a particularly negative way as well as involving a change from the status quo. The Commission has assessed this wording and has recommended the question should be changed

Sebastian Payne

Nigel Farage shows why he shouldn’t lead the ‘No’ campaign

Nigel Farage is kickstarting Ukip’s ‘No’ campaign this week, having grown fed up with the lack of momentum from other corners. On the Today programme, the Ukip leader explained he is happy to work with either of the two groups vying to be the designated the Out campaign by the Electoral Commission — the Matthew Elliot Westminster-based campaign vs. the Arron Banks outside Westminster group: ‘Ukip is a political party and clearly whoever gets the designation as the official No campaign will have to be an umbrella of some kind and ‘The No’, n o, see that as being politicians from individual parties and ‘The Know’, k n o w, are looking to put together a

Douglas Murray

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t alone in thinking that Osama bin Laden’s death was ‘a tragedy’

The news that Jeremy Corbyn thought the death of Osama bin Laden ‘a tragedy‘ because he was never put on trial is not very surprising. Nor is it as far-out-there as most of his comments.I did a BBC Question Time immediately after bin Laden’s death where I got the impression I was the only person in Britain not to feel sad about the terrorist’s death. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paddy Ashdown and most of the audience seemed horrified by the terrorist’s early demise and were most exercised of all over whether or not he had been given an appropriately ‘Islamic’ burial.Fortunately there was a woman in the audience (in Hammersmith, London) who had

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Paul Mason comes to Alex Salmond’s defence over BBC bias

With Alex Salmond currently engaged in a war of words with Nick Robinson over the BBC’s ‘disgraceful’ coverage of the Scottish referendum, there is one former Beeb employee he can turn to in his time of need. Step forward Paul Mason. Mason — who worked as Newsnight‘s economics editor before defecting to Channel 4 — joined Salmond on stage at the Edinburgh book festival to plant a few blows in the direction of his ex-employer. Despite pleas from Nicola Sturgeon for the BBC to enhance its presence in Scotland with a BBC Scotland TV channel, the PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future author said the BBC’s unionist values were part and parcel of

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Protesters to serve up anti-Tory cake at party conference

The Great British Bake Off has been praised for getting the nation cooking. Now, it seems the fever has become political, as anti-austerity campaigners get baking ahead of this year’s party conference in Manchester. Activists have been tasked with baking their best anti-Tory cakes for a picnic due to be held as part of the action against the Tory conference. But rather than a poisoned creation for a Conservative politician of choice, the winning entry will be fed to the homeless. The lucky winner will be given a ticket to ‘Laugh Them Out Of Town’, a comedy event taking place during conference featuring Frankie Boyle and the Thick of It‘s Sara Pascoe, which hopes

Monday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

No wonder Osborne didn’t want the EU referendum – it may derail his journey to No10

Another disclosure from Anthony Seldon’s upcoming biography of David Cameron: he reveals that George Osborne tried to stop the referendum European Union membership. The below is from the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of Seldon’s book: Both men are profoundly irritated by their Eurosceptic MPs, but Osborne is even more pragmatic than Cameron. The Chancellor’s view is that it is simply not sensible to talk about disengaging from major international institutions in the 21st century – not worth considering it. Can this be true? Look at this non-denial denial from the Treasury: “This is nonsense. The Chancellor believes that the British people should be given the chance to decide whether or not we stay in a reformed

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Jeremy Corbyn is Britain’s Donald Trump (and vice versa)

The silly season is supposed to end tomorrow. September sidles in and normality replaces August’s frivolity. The reality of winter will be with us soon enough, too. That, at any rate, is the theory but it seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, that sillyness is likely to last for some time yet. There’s the twin risings of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, for instance. It might initially seem as though they have little in common but a more penetrating gaze at their improbable ascent to prominence discerns certain commonalities. Trump is the American Corbyn and Corbyn the British Trump. The difference, of course, is significant. Trump won’t win the Republican

Douglas Murray

Has Jeremy Corbyn ever bothered to speak to ‘the other side’?

I had a piece in the Sunday Times yesterday about Jeremy Corbyn and the dodgy excuse he and his spokespeople use whenever he is caught with another IRA terrorist, Holocaust-denier, Islamist or random anti-Semite. In general the claim is that he was only involved in the meeting as part of a ‘peace process.’ Occasionally he/they claim he was only there because of something he is even less qualified to speak about and that he only met the bigot in question because it was a meeting on ‘inter-faith issues’. In reality Jeremy and his people are clearly just trying to cover his tracks for decades of supporting terrible people with a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

If Tony Blair thought that Gaddafi wanted to cut a deal, why did no one follow up?

Just a few months ago, almost everyone thought that David Cameron was a goner. That he was about to go down in history as a one-term Prime Minister who failed to win against a bad Labour leader in 2010 then lost to a worse one in 2015. During this period, Anthony Seldon spoke to a long line of well-placed people for his biography of David Cameron; people who would have imagined they could talk freely because his book would be an autopsy. As a result, the former Master of Wellington College seems to have drawn plenty information from people who perhaps regret their candour now. David Richards, the former head

Sunday

Freddie Sayers

Why a politician-free House of Lords is the only democratic solution

In my business, there’s a lot of fretting about the idea of representativeness. Pollsters put questions to, say, a thousand people – and take them as a sample of the country. How to be sure that you have the right sample? You need the right number of men, women, northerners, middle class, Lib Dem voters etc – but that’s the easy part. Your method of selection matters hugely, and it can skew the sample in other, less tangible ways. Every pollster is vulnerable to this so-called ‘selection bias’ . If you survey people on high streets, for example, you’ll get people tend to be out-and-about – rather than at home. If you survey

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tony Blair has given up on Labour’s leadership election

It’s not entirely surprising that Tony Blair fancied one last chance to plead with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. And it’s not particularly surprising that his piece in today’s Observer is attracting exactly the sort of reaction he expected. But what is surprising is not just the former Prime Minister’s rather sarcastic tone – he says that ‘someone else said to me: “If you’re writing something again, don’t blah on about winning elections; it really offends them.” It would actually be quite funny if it weren’t tragic.’ – but that he’s not really pleading with his party not to elect Jeremy Corbyn at all. Of course,

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When David told Boris to ‘f—ing shut up’

Oh dear. Although Lord Ashcroft said he would be pleasantly surprised if Anthony Seldon’s biography of David Cameron offered anything more than ‘a sanitised account’ of his time in Number 10, an excerpt in today’s Mail on Sunday should make interesting reading for Boris Johnson. In Cameron at 10, Seldon writes of tensions between the leadership hopeful and the Cameron camp, which culminated in the Prime Minister telling Johnson to ‘f—ing shut up’ ahead of the election after he listed all the Old Etonians who had gone on to make it into Number 10: ‘One Number 10 insider says: ‘There was a sense in this building that the PM and Chancellor were getting on taking the

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Who are the rising Tory stars?

In this week’s Spectator, I profile the 2015 intake of Tory MPs: a bright, pragmatic bunch who don’t like to call themselves Thatcherite. Ministers who have sat in the Commons Chamber and heard maiden speeches from this new bunch have been seriously impressed, with some remarking that they’ve wondered what they’ve done with their own lives after hearing the extraordinary experiences that the new intake have brought with them into the Chamber. Those extraordinary experiences include working as postmen, teachers, doctors, rural auctioneers, and nurses. There are very few political animals who’ve slaved as special advisers before becoming MPs, or whose families are political dynasties. But the bulk of these

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All hail Lord Livermore, king of Labour campaigning

It’s fair to say that the appointment of Ed Miliband’s ex-campaign director Spencer Livermore to the House of Lords hasn’t gone down well in Labour circles. Harriet Harman was said to be in a battle to get a similar honour for her own press chief Ayesha Hazarika if Livermore got one, but her name was absent from yesterday’s Dissolution Peerages. Now word reaches Steerpike that party members are questioning what exactly Livermore — who also worked on Gordon Brown’s election-that-never-was back in 2007 — is being rewarded for. While Mr S is yet to learn the answer, it is fair to rule out his election judgment. On polling day, Livermore wrote a

Gareth Evans

It is un-socialist to support Jeremy Corbyn

A quick disclaimer: I am a socialist and I share much of Jeremy Corbyn’s politics. I believe that austerity is unjustifiable ideological warfare; I believe in renationalising the railways, I believe in Clause IV, I believe in strong trade unions, and I believe in nuclear disarmament. I also believe that Corbyn should be commended for his unwavering parliamentary record, and that the media’s sniping attacks on the man are often facetious and usually motivated by clandestine political agendas. I clarify all of this to appease the claws of ‘Camp Corbyn’. In fact I am willing to admit that when this drawn-out election begun I initially supported the MP for Islington

John Mills

Labour needs to up its game on the EU renegotiation

Most people in the Labour Party may want to stay in the EU, but few think there is no scope to improve the way the EU operates or our terms of membership. Why, then, does Labour appear to have no policy towards the renegotiation that is taking place? What would Labour like to change – given the opportunity to do so? Actually, there is quite a long agenda. Are we happy with net annual payments to the EU now running at about £15bn a year? Is it sensible to turn away Indian programmers and Chinese students while we acquiesce in having over 40,000 extra Bulgarians and Romanians moving to the