Politics

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

Sunday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Dan Jarvis rules himself out of Labour leadership contest

Since Labour’s election defeat, there has been a lot of chat about how Dan Jarvis could be the man to revive the party. The argument went that Jarvis, a former officer in the Paras who commanded troops in Afghanistan, was just what the party needed to make voters take a second look at it. But in a piece in The Times today, he rules himself out of the contest on the grounds that he has to put his children first. He writes, ‘My eldest kids had a very tough time when they lost their mum and I don’t want them to lose their dad. I need some space for them,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Iain Duncan Smith to stay at Welfare

News has just broken that Iain Duncan Smith is to remain as Secretary for State for Work and Pensions. Now, normally a Cabinet Minister remaining in post would not be news but there had been repeated rumours that IDS would be shuffled out of this job. The fact that IDS is staying tells us, I think, two things. First, that even with £12 billion more of welfare cuts needed, Cameron wants the policy to be as much about saving lives as money. Second, the decision not to shuffle IDS shows a sensibly cautious approach to party management. Moving IDS, a former leader, from the job he loves doing would have

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Michael Gove, legal reformer

At first sight, it may seem odd to make Michael Gove the new Justice Secretary. But he has had experience – all too much of it. His job will be to clean up the mess of the Human Rights Act. In the Department for Education he saw for himself how the rule of law was degenerating into something different: the rule by lawyers. Any time civil servants don’t want to carry out a reform, they invoke the Human Rights Act – or the Equalities Act, a booby trap planted in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s government. The aim was to make it a lot easier to sue conservatives. Gove came up against the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Liz Kendall announces she’s running for Labour leader

In an interview with Andrew Neil, Liz Kendall has confirmed that she’s running for Labour leader. In a polished performance, Kendall set out why she believes education has to be at the centre of Labour’s message, arguing that is what enables people to get good jobs and earn decent wages. She also subtly reminded people of her doubts about the whole Miliband strategy and message by quoting her own warning—delivered back in January—that Labour couldn’t afford to just sound like the moaning man in the pub. Going by her performance today, Kendall is going to be a formidable candidate. She combines good media skills with detailed policy knowledge, she has

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How David Cameron will manage his Tory coalition

Up until Thursday night, everything that David Cameron and George Osborne had done in government had had to be agreed by the Liberal Democrats. Every policy had to go through the ‘Quad’, the coalition government’s decision making body made up of Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander. That doesn’t have to happen anymore. As one Downing Street figure says: ‘It is all completely different now, we can power forward with what we want to do. There’s no need for everything to be watered down. It’s invigorating’. Not having to manage a coalition, also frees up huge amounts of time for both Cameron and the Number 10 operation. It would be well

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Revenge of the Blairites

Lord Mandelson and his protégé Chuka Umunna ended up sitting next to one another on the Marr sofa at the end of the programme. Both had spent their interviews setting out what Labour had been doing wrong for the past five years, though Mandelson was markedly more savage than Umunna. The Labour peeer was particularly keen to make the point that New Labour had been too quickly discarded in favour of an ‘experiment’. He said that ‘the awful, shocking thing about this election is Labour could have won it’, adding: ‘The reason we lost it and lost it so badly is in 2010 we discarded New Labour, rather than revitalising

Saturday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starting gun fires on Labour leadership contest as candidates set out their stall

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master). He also says: – Labour didn’t engage effectively with fears that

Steerpike Steerpike

Laurie Penny defends war memorial vandalism at anti-Tory march

After David Cameron won a surprise Conservative majority in the general election, angry anti-austerity protesters gathered near Parliament Square today to let their outrage be known. During the demonstration, a war memorial, honouring the women of the Second World War, was vandalised with ‘F— tory scum’ graffiti. While the crime was greeted with outrage by both the left and right, Laurie Penny, the Guardian feminist, appears to have defended the vandalism on Twitter, saying she doesn’t ‘have a problem with this’: Although most users were quick to suggest that she ought to show more respect, Penny has at least managed to find one kindred spirit. Charlie Gilmour, who was jailed for his behaviour at the student riots during which he swang from the Union Jack on

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Justice for Michael Gove

Michael Gove is the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, Downing Street has just announced. Chris Grayling will move to become Leader of the House. Number 10 is also confirming that, as David Cameron promised during the election campaign, Nicky Morgan will continue as Education Secretary. Becoming Justice Secretary marks a return to Gove running a big department after his service as chief whip in the run up to the general election. I suspect that there will be two things that Gove concentrates on. First, sorting out Britain’s relationship with the ECHR. Grayling had already committed the Tories to withdrawing from the Convention if parliament and courts here could not

Sebastian Payne

There was one pollster who predicted a Conservative victory: Jim Messina

The shock election result has resulted in a lot of finger pointing. Why did the pollsters not see a Tory victory on the horizon? Was Labour deluded in thinking they had any chance of making it into government? Judging from conversations I’ve had with Conservatives, those inside the party weren’t particularly certain about getting the most seats either, never mind a majority. The leadership campaigns were even prepped for a contest soon after May 7. But there was one man who did see a Tory victory coming: Jim Messina. The Obama guru and former White House deputy chief of staff was hired by the Tories for his data nuance and his

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: a poem for the victorious Nicola Sturgeon

In a 1985 interview with the New Republic,  Mario Cuomo famously said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Last week, we asked competitors to put their own twist on Kipling’s rousing poem. The winners are below IF – For Nicola (by Brian Murdoch) If you can lose a referendum and still act       As if you’d won it, time and time again; If you can claim you’re going to make a pact       But never make your real conditions plain; If you can try to split from the UK       Then six months later make it clear to see That now you want to rule

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

With 56 SNPs and just one Ukip MP, how can the Commons reflect the UK’s political will?

Firm, but unfair – that’s the motto of Westminster’s first-past-the-post voting system and Conservatives will today be raising a glass to it. But the House of Commons is now a very poor reflection of Britain’s political sympathies. It took just 25,970 voters to return an SNP politican to parliament. This compares 34,240 for a Tory and 40,280 for Labour. In the circumstances, the Tories needn’t moan so much about the boundaries: the system paid out for them pretty well. But the other parties? For a Scottish Conservative, the vote-to-seat ratio is an almighty 434,000 to 1. And if you think that’s bad, consider Scottish Labour: 707,147 voters are now represented by

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why Ukip will descend into sectarian chaos

Yes, yes, I know it’s supposed to be ‘unfair’ that Ukip ended up with only one MP while securing 13 per cent of the popular vote. But that’s first-past-the-post for you. You have to win a seat to get into Parliament. The British electorate was offered the chance to to ditch FPTP back in 2011 and said, nope, we’ll keep the unfair system. As for Ukip coming second and third in all those Labour seats, it’s impressive but I suspect not terribly significant. White northern working-class voters were protesting against the fact that none of the major parties gave a toss about the destruction of their communities by the merciless progress of

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The reshuffle has begun – but the real excitement will happen on Monday

David Cameron has reappointed several of the most senior members of the government. George Osborne stays as Chancellor, Theresa May remains Home Secretary, Philip Hammond Foreign Secretary and Michael Fallon Defence Secretary. Indeed, the only change is Osborne taking over William Hague’s old First Secretary of State title. This is formal recognition that Osborne will, in effect, be the deputy Prime Minister of this Tory majority government. We are told to expect the rest of the reshuffle on Monday. There’ll be particular interest in who Cameron chooses to be his chief whip, a role that takes on particular importance with this small majority. There’s also the question of what Cameron

The Spectator

Cabinet reshuffle: George Osborne, Theresa May, Michael Fallon and Philip Hammond remain in their posts

David Cameron has ‘reshuffled’ his Cabinet. George Osborne has been re-appointed as Chancellor, and will also be First Secretary of State, as were William Hague and Peter Mandelson. The title implies that he is the most senior minister.  Theresa May will remain as Home Secretary. Philip Hammond will also remain in his role as Foreign Secretary, and Michael Fallon will keep his job as Defence Secretary.

Sebastian Payne

The final 2015 general election results

All of the results of the 2015 general election are in and we have a result: the Conservatives have a major of 12 seats. Here is a breakdown of the results for each of the parties: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/PifSa/index.html”] And a few other figures you might find interesting: Turnout was 66.1 per cent, up from 65.1 per cent in 2010 19.4 per cent of MPs in the new parliament will be female, up from 15.8 per cent in 2010 Counting will begin tomorrow for 9,000 council elections in England

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Today Britain has changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.

So this is what history feels like. Painful, frankly.  None of the usual meteorological metaphors – earthquake, hurricane, avalanche, landslide, tsunami – seem strong enough. Make no mistake, Theresa May was right. This is the biggest constitutional drama – even crisis – since the abdication. Actually, it’s bigger than that. It’s the greatest (internal) shock to the British state since the 1918 election. Sinn Fein won 47 percent of the vote in Ireland that year as it all but swept southern Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party lost 61 of its 67 seats, every one of them to Eamonn de Valera’s party who increased their representation from 6 to 67. As then, so

Sebastian Payne

Listen: The Spectator’s verdict on the 2015 general election

In our final podcast special of the 2015 general election, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the astonishing results and what we can expect from David Cameron’s new Conservative government. Are we finally going to see the unrestrained Cameron? Who is already limbering up to replace Ed Miliband as Labour leader? And what will the SNP and Liberal Democrats do next? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Channel 4’s The Vote reviewed: ‘complex, acute, very funny and oddly moving’

He’s back on top form. James Graham has taken the unlikeliest setting, a polling station during the last hour of a general election, and turned it into a beautifully crafted comedy drama. The Vote at the Donmar was broadcast on Channel 4 last night at 8.30 p.m. We’re in a knife-edge London marginal constituency where a polling blunder has been uncovered. A wizened pensioner voted twice by accident. Once in his brother’s name, once in his own. Panic stations. Democracy is threatened. Kirsty, an excitable teller, tries to even up the score by persuading a relative who hasn’t voted to cast his ballot under her discreet direction. This he does. But he votes for the wrong

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC mistake SNP MP for Nicola Sturgeon’s husband

Given that staff at the BBC have been providing rolling election coverage, it’s understandable that they may be rather tired. Even so, Mr S was surprised to see that BBC veteran Huw Edwards described an SNP MP and Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s power couple. Speaking over footage of Sturgeon walking alongside Patrick Grady, the recently appointed SNP MP for Glasgow North, Edwards mistook Grady for Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell. While both may be lacking in the hair department, there are a few years’ difference between the two: Happily, Edwards realised his mistake while on air and performed a swift u-turn, apologising for the mix-up. Surely it’s time for the BBC to give Edwards an election recess?