Politics

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

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MP suggests Nigel Farage takes Nick Clegg’s place in 2015 debates

Today’s results for UKIP have re-opened the question of whether Nigel Farage should join the three political leaders in the live TV election debates in 2015. David Cameron’s allies are clear they don’t want that, and Nick Clegg was very dismissive when asked about this on the BBC. He said: ‘I’m not going to start making up the minds of the broadcasters. I think the next general election will be all about who are the parties who can actually govern this country in Westminster. We’ve been here before where UKIP has done well and then not done well in subsequent general elections.’ If Clegg doesn’t fancy being savaged live on

Guy Lodge

English patriotism is one of the overlooked reasons for UKIP’s rise

What can account for UKIP’s remarkable surge in support in these elections? The conventional wisdom is that UKIP is now the ‘go to’ party for protest voters. Angry over Europe and immigration? Vote UKIP. Fear for your job and the future of the economy? Vote UKIP. Feel the main parties are ‘all the same’, run by metropolitan elites who don’t know how ordinary people live? Vote UKIP. There is doubtless something in all of the above, but there is perhaps another explanation – overlooked until now – for UKIP’s rise: the growing tide of English patriotism. Earlier in the year, figures from the 2011 census showed there had been a dramatic

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron: ‘It’s no good insulting a political party that people have chosen to vote for’

As we revealed on Coffee House earlier, David Cameron has now distanced himself from the ‘fruitcake’ characterisation of UKIP that he’s employed in the past. Here’s what he said: Cameron: Well I think there are major lessons for the major political parties, for the Conservatives, I understand why some people who’ve supported us before didn’t support us again, they want us to do even more to work for hardworking people to sort out the issues they care about, more to help with the cost of living, more to turn the economy round, more to get immigration down, to sort out the welfare system. They will be our focus, they are

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Sources tell Coffee House Cameron will mark an end to ‘fruitcakes’ name-calling

We could see a further tightening of the reconciliatory line that the Tories seem to be adopting on UKIP when the PM gives his response to the local elections later today. I hear from very well-placed sources in the Tory party that David Cameron plans to mark an end to the name-calling, acknowledging that it is time to take seriously the concerns of those who decided to vote UKIP yesterday. The Tory lines to take – reported by Guido – include this quote: ‘Of course we understand why some people didn’t vote for us – we need to focus even more on the things that matter to hardworking people: turning

Steerpike Steerpike

Was it The Spectator wot won it? Nigel Farage seems to think so

Ukip is the big story of the day, clearing out councils across the country in yesterday’s local elections. Mr Steerpike was interested to see the above picture on the wires as Nigel Farage took his victory lap around Westminster this morning. Behind every election victory is a copy of the Spectator. To find out more about why Ukip are winning subscribe from just £1 a week here.

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Lib Dems try to avoid their own local election jitters

The dominant narrative in the build-up to these local elections has been all about UKIp vs the Tories, with a bit of angst about Labour’s southern mission thrown in. The Lib Dems didn’t really get a look in. They had moved to a reasonably stable position after romping home in the Eastleigh by-election, but today’s results could change that. Their awful showing in South Shields – coming 7th – will shake the party, but so will any surprise big losses. The party has already failed to take control of Somerset County Council, which was one local authority it had focused a great deal of effort on. Sending out Tim Farron

Sebastian Payne

Welcome to Ukipland: where Nigel Farage’s dreams come true

‘Where do you expect to do well in these local elections?’ I asked the Ukip spokesman. ‘England!’ he boomed down the phone. On Wednesday afternoon, this seemed typical of Ukip’s bullish exuberance but judging by their predicted ‘phenomenal performance’ parts of Britain (like Boston) have become Ukipland overnight. Yesterday, I went to find some real Ukip voters in the Home Counties and discover why they have abandoned the three main parties. Nigel Farage stood in Buckingham at the 2010 general election and received just 17 per cent of the vote against Commons speaker John Bercow. The county of Buckinghamshire was once solid blue territory, but this green and pleasant corner of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tories now see ‘fruitcakes’ and ‘clowns’ as serious voters impatient for change

We’ve only had a few results through in the local elections, but already the parties are giving their verdict on the way last night worked for them. One thing to watch today is the development of a Tory line on UKIP. There hasn’t been one in the run-up to polling day, but will there be a concerted effort from the Conservative leadership to produce a clear message about what Nigel Farage’s success means for the Tories? Grant Shapps certainly managed to stick to the Tinkerbell strategy of trying not to say ‘UKIP’ or ‘Nigel Farage’ in his Today programme interview. But he also stuck to the sympathetic portrayal of those

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Nigel Farage, the anti-politician

Nigel Farage was in full anti-politics mode this morning on the Today programme. He railed against ‘three frontbenches that look and sound the same’ and ‘haven’t done a proper day’s work in their lives.’ Farage is determined that Ukip be can both a protest party and a party with policies. He wants to offer himself to anyone who is fed up with the established order and wants to stick two fingers up at the main political parties. But he also wants to advance a radical policy prospectus. Interestingly, he said he wasn’t a Tory but he had been a supporter of eighties radicalism. So far, the Farage approach appears to

Douglas Murray

Why has Abdul Hakim Murad not been sacked by Cambridge University?

Abdul Hakim Murad is the Islamic name of a convert to Islam called Tim Winters.  He is a lecturer and tutor and director of studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge University.  Over recent years he was the sort of fellow who was forever being produced as a ‘moderate’, enlightened Muslim scholar. I always had doubts about this claim. For instance, a couple of years back, on a BBC radio programme, I pressed him on the fact that all the main schools of Islamic law still mandate the death sentence as penalty for leaving Islam. Abdul tried to pick me up on this. ‘Are you sure of that’ he pressed. I said

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Local elections: UKIP’s ‘phenomenal performance’

What few results there have been so far suggest that UKIP has scored about a quarter of the vote and gained more seats than Labour.  A ‘phenomenal performance’ says Prof John Curtice. Nigel Farage now looks like the main winner, suggesting that his party is mutating from an EU protest party into a being broader party of the working class. The local elections have nothing to do with the European Union so there’s no rational reason that one-in-four voters would chose UKIP — unless they believed the party was addressing their concerns on wider issues. The reason that David Cameron’s referendum pledge did not shoot the UKIP fox is that

Thursday

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz’s diary: graffiti, Hiroshima and the next series of Foyle’s War

It was a perfect spring day in Hiroshima last week. I was there for my 25th wedding anniversary, which may sound odd, but my wife and I both work on Foyle’s War, which is now set in the atomic age, so it seemed appropriate. We strolled together around the A-Bomb Dome, the twisted, iconic ruin that is all that is left of the old city, then entered the Peace Memorial Museum, built in 1955, the year I was born. I found the whole experience incredibly moving: the child’s bike dug out of the ruins, the watch that had stopped at 8.15, the piece of wall that still carries the ‘ghost’

The Spectator

The hidden shame of Britain’s crime statistics

The press, declared Lord Leveson, must not be allowed to mark its own homework. There is one profession, however, which the government seems quite happy to allow to judge its own success. Every few months we are presented with the latest set of crime statistics and invited to believe that crime is falling, clear-up rates are improving and so on. It would be much more convincing if the figures for recorded crime were not themselves compiled by the police — a group with a rather obvious vested interest in presenting those figures in the best possible light. A set of figures teased out of the police this week presents a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour hold South Shields with Ukip 2nd and Lib Dems 7th

The result is now in from South Shields. As expected, Labour have held the seat. Ukip have come second, with the Tories third and the Liberal Democrats a spectacularly bad seventh. Ukip’s second is more impressive when you consider that they didn’t even stand in the constituency in 2010. It is a sign that they are fast becoming the default protest party across England. Only a handful of county councils are counting overnight, and they are all Tory controlled. But John Curtice, the elections expert, has already told the BBC that Ukip looks like doing as well as the polls suggested. At 12.15am, Ukip is averaging 26% in the BBC’s

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Tory Tumbrils Begin to Roll for David Cameron

As I type this, pundits in London are stiffening themselves for the tough task of over-interpreting local election results and projecting wildly unrealistic forecasts for the next general election on the back of a mid-term election in which the electorate is of an entirely different type to that which will vote in 2015. It’s a grim job but someone has to do it and it’s better that it be done with enthusiasm than with any sense of proportion. Mercifully, my friend and former boss Iain Martin is not one of those types. Be that as it may, however, he has written a column for Friday’s Telegraph that is both typically

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Nigel Farage’s tax flip-flop shows us where he’s trying to take his party

We might this week have seen some scrutiny of UKIP candidates, but so far we’ve seen little scrutiny of their policies. But the better the party does, the more policy scrutiny it will start to come under. This is what makes UKIP’s changing tax policy so interesting. It tells us a lot about where Nigel Farage is trying to take his party. At the last election, UKIP was committed to a flat tax. There is an intellectual purity to this idea – see Allister Heath’s book on the subject – but it is hard to sell to voters as it would result in ‘the rich’ paying a lower rate. After

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs think they’re psychic. But Cameron’s exciting them with false omens.

Even though there has been some reeling back today from the suggestion that David Cameron is on the brink of wowing his party with a bit of legislative red meat on an EU referendum, it won’t stop Tory backbenchers trying to force the leadership’s position on this matter. The problem is that Conservative MPs are starting to see themselves as psychic agents. They vote for something that their party doesn’t want to happen and get called a rebel. A few months later, that rebellion becomes official party policy. One rebel joked to me earlier this week that ‘I don’t rebel against my government, I just vote two or three weeks ahead

Steerpike Steerpike

Bob Diamond: family guy

Marilyn Monroe didn’t do it for the money, and neither did Bob Diamond. Seriously, the man dubbed the ‘unacceptable face of banking’ is just a regular family guy; Jimmy Stewart rather than Gordon Gekko. The recovering financier has told the New York Times: ‘This is going to sound arrogant as hell but I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result. And if you look at how Jennifer and I and our three kids have lived our lives, as soon as we had any money at all, we created a family foundation. The only car I own, honestly, is an 11-year-old Jeep

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Frank Field interview: Labour needs to do something dramatic to win back its lost working class voters

There’s one government adviser who still feels Steve Hilton’s absence very keenly indeed. ‘He was always thinking ahead, how do we set the debate rather than endlessly react to it, that was why he was such a delight to work for. All the time he was racing ahead. It was difficult to keep up with him. I just thought he was brilliant, he was just wonderful.’ But it’s not a Tory MP or spinner who is missing the Prime Minister’s ‘blue-sky’ guru: this adviser is Labour MP Frank Field, appointed by the government when it formed to work with David Cameron on how to tackle poverty. He suspects that it