Politics

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

Monday

11 Jul 2022

Steerpike

Jamie Wallis fled car crash in heels and leather mini skirt

Just because Boris Johnson has gone, don’t expect the legal fines for Tories to go away. Jamie Wallis, the Member of Parliament for Bridgend has been ordered to pay £2,500 and banned from driving for six months after he smashed into a lamp post in November, failed to report the collision and then left his vehicle in a dangerous position. Wallis told the judge that: ‘I am sorry that is appears I ran away but this is not how it happened in the moment.’ The court, it seems, saw matters differently. The MP was dressed in a leather mini skirt, tights and high heels at the time of the crash,

Brendan O’Neill

Of course Rishi Sunak doesn’t have any working-class friends

I see there’s much chortling over the fact that Rishi Sunak once said he had no working-class friends. It was in 2001, for a BBC series called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl. In a resurfaced clip, Sunak, who would have been 21 at the time, says: ‘I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are working class… well, not working class.’ It’s the way he swiftly corrects himself when he says he has working-class mates that has got people going. It’s the speediest of self-corrections. It’s like he suddenly thinks to himself: ‘Oh God, no — I don’t associate with

Debbie Hayton

Penny Mordaunt and the Tory transgender divide

As war rages in Europe and inflation rockets, the Tory party is tearing itself apart in its hunt for a new leader. Only days into the contest, the transgender debate is emerging as a key issue that divides the candidates. It’s a mistake to think of it as a niche issue: the question of women’s toilets and pronouns has the power to derail a leadership bid, as Penny Mordaunt may soon find out. Suella Braverman, the Attorney General and one of the leadership hopefuls, has been clear in her frustration about the impact this debate has had on her. Last year, Braverman made history as the first cabinet minister to take maternity leave. Legislation needed

Andrew Tettenborn

Suella Braverman’s human rights critics are missing the point

Yesterday Suella Braverman unequivocally stated that, as Prime Minister, she would work to withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The reaction she encountered on social media was, of course, predictable. To say she was portrayed as a right-wing nut-job, a kind of amalgam of Cruella de Vil and Josiah Bounderby, Dickens’s heartless capitalist in Hard Times, is probably an understatement. As usual in politics, however, there is a bit more to this than meets the eye. To begin with, Suella has only said directly what other politicians have hinted at before: think Theresa May’s tentative suggestion about exiting the ECHR in 2017, briefly floated and hurriedly

James Forsyth

Why the 1922 Committee vote matters

Looking at the candidates for the executive of the 1922 Committee, set to be contested in an election this afternoon, it is much easier to predict where they would stand on a rule change to allow a second no confidence vote – the issue at hand when nominations opened – than on the threshold question. For example, Boris loyalist Sheryll Murray, who would have opposed a rule change is going up against Will Wragg, who would have supported one. The officers of the 1922 Committee will stay neutral in the contest I expect, no one running for an officer position has endorsed anybody. Among those standing for the executive are a slew of

Katy Balls

Who will win over the Tory right?

16 min listen

Liz Truss has today announced her candidacy for the Tory leadership. With Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman already looking to win votes from MPs on the right of the Conservative party, and with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel also considering a run for the top job, who will become the candidate of the Tory right? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth. Produced by Max Jeffery.

Patrick O’Flynn

Could Sunak implode?

There are few positions so perilous as being the frontrunner in a party leadership contest. Just being the heir apparent when no contest is happening is dicey enough, with the incumbent leader usually highly susceptible to murmurings from courtiers about your alleged manoeuvrings against him. But once the race is actively underway things get even more dangerous. You become the contender everyone else needs to destroy before the decisive round of voting gets underway. Them’s the breaks right now for Rishi Sunak, the golden boy with the silver tongue who kept many people’s businesses afloat and the economy out of a long-term slump during the pandemic. He is easily the bookies’

Coffee House

Live blog: Leadership timeline announced, Truss declares, Gove for Kemi

The Tory leadership race is getting increasingly crowded: a dozen candidates are now bidding for the top job. Rishi Sunak remains the front runner, but can he hold off challenges from fellow favourites Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt? Around half of Tory MPs have nailed their colours to the mast; you can read the exhaustive list of who’s backing who here. Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the main developments: Liz Truss launched her leadership bid last night, promising to ‘start cutting taxes from day one’ in an article for the Daily Telegraph today. Michael Gove endorsed Kemi Badenoch. Her odds of winning went from 80/1 on Thursday to 10/1 this morning. The 1922 executive elections are to

Nick Tyrone

The problem with Penny

I’ve been thinking for the past couple of days about who can beat Penny Mordaunt in the contest to be the next Tory leader. Despite the shaky start to her campaign, I still think she’s the favourite. Rishi Sunak has too many people trying to stop him; most importantly, a lot of the membership. Truss has too many detractors within the parliamentary party (although she could possibly overcome this and win). Kemi Badenoch is a real possibility but has a lot of ground to make up during the course of the contest. The rest are either too underbaked, have too much baggage, or are beset by other issues. Mordaunt’s appeal

James Kirkup

The case for Tom Tugendhat

When the editor of The Spectator asked me to write about Tom Tugendhat, I initially declined, explaining that doing so would put me in a slightly difficult position. Tom and I have been friends for 20-something years since we met as young journalists via the Scotsman and then Bloomberg’s City of London newsroom. So I can’t claim much objectivity here. Nor can I position myself as an insider-savant of the Tory leadership race. I’m not a Conservative, though I have spent a lot of my professional life talking to and writing about Conservatives. I first started writing about the Tories when William Hague was leader; the first leadership contest I covered

Ed West

Boris Johnson’s classic fall

Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him. Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold MacMillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History podcast, this obsession with the classics guided his career. Classics, Holland said, had once been a ‘how to do politics’ course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and

Katy Balls

Are some Tory candidates about to be ruled out?

The Tory leadership contest is a very crowded place – with Liz Truss overnight becoming the tenth candidate to declare (with Rehman Chishti becoming the eleventh a few minutes later). But it could be significantly slimmed down by this evening. Monday marks the day of the elections for the 1922 executive made up of Tory backbenchers. Once the new executive is in place this afternoon, they will meet to immediately decide the rules for the coming contest. To avoid the contest dragging on, the plan is to get the current field narrowed down to two by the summer recess on 21 July. The committee will discuss raising the threshold of

Sam Leith

The fatuous idea that politicians must be ‘in touch’

I was in Hyde Park on Friday watching an open-air Pixies show with very great delight when somewhere between ‘Vamos’ and ‘Debaser’ one of my companions bid fair to harsh my buzz by asking what I reckoned to the Tory leadership contest. Well, goodness. I mumbled something about not really having a dog in the fight but thinking that, whatever his other shortcomings (the visible self-love, mostly, and maybe that thing with his wife’s tax status), Rishi Sunak seems to more or less have his head screwed on. ‘But he’s a multi-millionaire,’ my friend said. ‘Isn’t he just going to be hopelessly out of touch?’ And there it was, the

Sunday

10 Jul 2022

Katy Balls

Liz Truss enters the leadership contest

Liz Truss has become the tenth candidate to enter the Tory leadership race. Announcing her intentions in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, the Foreign Secretary has promised if successful to ‘fight the election as a Conservative and govern as a Conservative’. As for her pitch to MPs and members, Truss joins the list of Tory leadership hopefuls promising tax cuts. She says she would take ‘immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living’ which would mean cutting taxes from ‘day one’. A supporter of Truss goes further: ‘Liz is the tax cutting candidate who can actually lead the country from day one, help ensure Putin loses

James Forsyth

Gove backs Kemi Badenoch for prime minister

Michael Gove has endorsed Kemi Badenoch for Tory leader. Badenoch, who was one of his junior ministers at the Department for Levelling Up, is described by Gove as ‘Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare’ and she has a ‘focus intellect and no-bulls**t drive’. Gove’s support is a coup for Badenoch. It is not every day that someone throws their weight behind someone who was their junior minister until a few days ago. Gove makes a typically eloquent case. But the jump for Badenoch from being a minister of state to being prime minister would be immense. The challenge for her is persuading 120 MPs – the final-two threshold – that she can make that

Katy Balls

Penny Mordaunt’s trans problem

The Tory leadership contest is yet to officially begin, but things are already turning nasty. As well as reports in the papers of dirty dossiers on candidates, Tory grandees have come out to call for a ceasefire in which Boris Johnson loyalists stop attacking Rishi Sunak. Now a row has broken out over Penny Mordaunt’s candidacy. The former defence secretary announced this weekend that she will be running for leader – storming into second place on MP support. On announcing the news, Mordaunt took to social media to try to address one of the biggest criticisms facing her when it comes to the contest: that she is too ‘woke’. The

Steerpike

Suella goes for Penny on gender row

Is the leadership race turning toxic already? Three days in and Rishi Sunak has been the target of a vicious private memo while Nadhim Zahawi is fighting off questions about his tax arrangements. Now it seems that Penny Mordaunt is the latest candidate in the firing line; namely over her past support for trans rights. The ‘PM4PM’ campaign has got off to a shaky start, having been forced to remove its campaign video after using footage of a British Paralympian without his permission. And now, despite releasing a midnight Twitter thread to try to rebut criticisms that Mordaunt is ‘woke’, Penny is facing flak from the Tory right. Mordaunt has

Suzanne Moore

The Tories are showing Labour how it’s done on diversity

The elephant isn’t just in the room. It is trumpeting loudly but it is greeted with bemusement, denial, or polite silence. I am talking about the Tory leadership race which is full of what the renowned fox-killer now apparently calls ‘brown’ people and those other odd chaps, called women. The Tories can always claim the first ethnic minority PM in Disraeli who was Jewish but they don’t make a song and dance about it. Jollyon Morn has now deleted his so-called anti-racist tweet perhaps because it was in fact a teensy bit racist, was it not, to suggest that all ‘brown’ people must cleave to the political position of his

Steerpike

Full text: leaked Tory memo attacking Sunak

The Telegraph has got hold of a zinger of a private memo currently doing the rounds on Tory MPs’ WhatsApp groups. The 421-word dossier, which sums up all of the ex-chancellor’s supposed errors during his two-year tenure, has been published by the paper’s associate editor Camilla Tominey. The document lays into Sunak, accusing the favourite to replace Boris Johnson of reckless overspending and a commitment to ‘big state’ economic policy. It also claims that he lied about his wife’s non-dom tax status and that he committed ‘schoolboy errors’ that led to widespread fraud of the Covid loan scheme. ‘There is nothing Conservative about the “big tax and big spend” agenda of Rishi Sunak’ Frontrunner

James Forsyth

Tory Grand National or demolition derby?

A cabinet minister yesterday observed to me that they would scream if they heard another person suggest the Tory leadership race was like the Grand National. Rather defensively, given it is one of my favourite analogies, I asked what they thought would work better. A little while later, they messaged back: demolition derby; a reference to the sport where cars drive into each other until only one is left standing. Today this analogy seems rather apt. The Sundays are full of quite extraordinary accusations of dirty tricks, which, if they were included in a TV drama would be thought of as OTT. The Telegraph has published an anti-Rishi Sunak briefing