Politics

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

Friday

Isabel Hardman & Katy Balls

Has the Shapps plot changed anything for Theresa May?

The Tory party is in a furious mood following Theresa May’s conference speech. MPs are swearing, ranting, and muttering dire threats about the object of their anger. Helpfully for the Prime Minister, though, the bulk of the anger has little to do with her and everything to do with the two men MPs suspect are trying to destabilise her: Grant Shapps and Boris Johnson. After extensive conversations with MPs from across the intakes, senior backbenchers and Cabinet Ministers, the Spectator understands that these two men will find it far more difficult to walk back into Parliament when it returns on Monday than the Prime Minister will. She was the one

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Andrew Mitchell to speak at plotter Grant Shapps’ dinner tonight

Grant Shapps isn’t the most popular man in the Tory party at the moment, but at least he has a friend to keep him company this evening. By sheer coincidence, Andrew Mitchell has long been booked to speak at the Welwyn Hatfield MP’s Conservative Association annual dinner tonight. But Mitchell is very keen not to appear to be a fellow plotter, having given a speech at the Cambridge Union last night in which he praised the Prime Minister’s ‘courage of high order’ for completing ‘what was an important and interesting speech in impossible circumstances, and I think all of us in politics should recognise that’. Speaking to Coffee House, Mitchell

Philip Collins

Theresa May’s speech was a dud because Tories can’t do rhetoric

There are many ways to make a conference speech memorable and Theresa May managed most of them. A prankster with a P45, a constant cough and a set that fell to bits as she spoke, the speech was a riot of metaphors in waiting. It may yet be pointed to as a decisive moment in her premiership but it was certainly notable. The only forgettable aspect was the content. When Mrs May tries to inject passion into her voice it is not just the frog that catches in her throat. It is her conservatism. Conservative politician can ascend to the rhetorical heights at time of peril. Winston Churchill, was, as

William Cook

Is there an alternative to the AfD?

The German Embassy threw a lavish party in London’s Belgrave Square last night to toast the Bundesrepublik’s Day of German Unity, but although the Bier and Sekt flowed freely, and the Ambassador’s Residence was awash with chatter, disunity rather than unity was the main topic of the day. Germany’s Tag der Deutschen Einheit marks the Reunification of Germany in 1990, one of those rare events in German history of which all Germans can feel proud. The Embassy’s annual jamboree is always jolly, yet there’s a ghost at every feast. Last year’s Banquo was Brexit. This year, it’s AfD. As German politicians meet in smoke-free rooms to thrash out the formation

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Is Jeremy Corbyn following the Ian Paisley playbook?

By the simple expedients of being cheerful and attacking Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson scored a deserved hit at the Tory conference on Tuesday. It is right not to be shy about questioning Mr Corbyn’s record. But while it is true that Mr Corbyn has never wavered, over 40 years, in his extreme socialist views, it is also worth noting that he has recently changed his tone a lot. It reminds me of how Ian Paisley, without ever recanting his anti-Popery, dropped his noisy and lurid 1970s expressions of it, and adopted a more modern political voice. In his speech in Brighton last week, Mr Corbyn almost completely left out one

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Does the Tory party really want to decapitate itself?

It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve got my head around this now. Grant Shapps is proposing that the Conservative Party should hold a protracted contest to select a new chief, and thus render itself and the Government of Britain leaderless for several weeks, at a time when the UK economy and public finances are worsening and Brexit talks are going horribly.  And he’s doing this because he says the Conservatives need to demonstrate leadership. When you think of it that way, you start to understand the (really rather unkind) things Tory MPs are saying about Mr Shapps today. Not that anyone is saying he’s wrong about Theresa

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Full list: Which Tory MPs have backed May – and who wants her gone?

Grant Shapps’ bid to stir up a rebellion against Theresa May has almost certainly failed. Instead, his decision to publicly call on the PM to go has shown that even after the Tories’ lacklustre conference May still retains a wide degree of support among the party’s MPs. Here is the full list of Conservative MPs, showing who has thrown their weight behind the PM, who hasn’t and who thinks it’s time for May to go: MPs who have publicly backed Theresa May: Michael Gove, Damian Green, Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Patrick McLoughlin, Priti Patel, David Gauke, Brandon Lewis, David Mundell, Chris Grayling, Elizabeth Truss, Andrea Leadsom, Damian Hinds, Justine Greening, David Lidington, Nigel Evans, Liam Fox, Greg Clark, Michael Fallon, Boris Johnson, Greg Hands, Vicky Ford, Jeremy Wright, Steve Baker, James

The Conservatives have lost the ability to defend freedom

The Conservatives now have a real fight on their hands. After 1979, as champions of  free-market capitalism, they seemed to embody the ruling ideology of the age. One best-selling book even called Labour leaders Blair and Brown the ‘sons of Thatcher’. Now the Labour party speaks openly of socialism and has a shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who lists his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. It’s no idle threat; in his conference speech he advocated a ‘strategic investment board’ comprising the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Business and the Governor of the Bank of England to ‘co-ordinate the promotion of investment, employment and real wages’.

Steerpike Steerpike

Grant Shapps left out in the cold on Tory WhatsApp

It’s safe to say that Grant Shapps’ plot to oust Theresa May is not going to plan. After being outed by The Times, the former party chairman has been turned on by many of his parliamentary colleagues. Now Mr S understands the ultimate humiliation has been handed to him. It turns out that Shapps was never added by his colleagues to the infamous Tory MP WhatsApp group due to a lack of – call it – demand for his presence. The good news is that he has been added this morning. The reason? ‘So he can read all the abuse we’re giving him,’ explains one miffed MP. Currently doing the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Who will join the Grant Shapps and Ed Vaizey rebellion?

A move against Theresa May led by someone with their career in front of them might be seen as a bold attempt to shake the Cabinet into action for the good of the party. But a plot led by Grant Shapps, party chairman under David Cameron, is a rather different proposition. He doesn’t seem to have much of a strategy – it looks like he’s readying the freezer bags and coming after the PM, as per George Osborne’s instructions. He blames the Tory whips for leaking his name to the press, and says it will only accelerate things. I’m not so sure.  Shapps claims that about 30 MPs are behind him, although

Ed West Ed West

The best way to learn about socialism is to experience it

I think it’s fair to say that Theresa May did not have a cracking conference, but the sympathy vote might even help her. I certainly felt sorry for the Prime Minister, and instinctively don’t like the nasty playground teasing from the Men of Twitter. (She does have diabetes, too, which can’t help.) But she has to go nonetheless, not because she’s unlucky but because she has a tin ear; why else would she choose to raise such issues as racial discrimination in mental health, sores that can’t be healed but which invariably paint the Tories as the ‘Nasty Party’ – a Ratnerism she coined. Ditto with tuition fees. As for

William Cook

Will banks really leave Britain after Brexit?

In the run-up to last year’s referendum, some grave-faced pundits predicted that Brexit would prompt a mass exodus of bankers from London to Frankfurt. Nonsense, said the Leavers. Everything will be fine. As with almost every aspect of the campaign, there was virtually no common ground. Depending on which side you listened to, either the Square Mile would become a wasteland or Brexit would make no difference whatsoever. So, fifteen months later, who should we believe? I’ve been talking to German bankers and it’s no surprise to find that the word on Threadneedle Street is a lot more nuanced. Project Fear wasn’t entirely fanciful, they tell me, but the timescale

Thursday

Peter Jones

Friends – or foes?

As the breeze of popular opinion — popularis aura — blows sweetly over the much-loved Corbyn-McDonnell Old Labour tribute act, the Tory party is faced with a dilemma: how to counteract it. This dilemma seems to centre on Mrs May’s leadership, and if that is the case, those ambitious to displace her need to consider what leadership entails. The word for ambition in ancient Greek was philotimia, ‘love of high esteem in the eyes of others’. This was considered a virtue in a society in which competition was endemic and winning meant everything. The problem was the tension between the desire to win and the desire to be liked at

Andrew Marr

Diary – 5 October 2017

The best reason for visiting party conferences is to sniff the air. It’s fragments of conversation drifting through a bar, expressions on faces, tones of voice, that tell you the most. What I picked up in Manchester is first, that Theresa May is really fighting to stay; second, that Boris Johnson is overplaying his hand; but third, that this is over a profound issue of policy and not just ‘blond ambition’ . I gave Mrs May a relatively tough interview and I think she was pretty cross. But my impressions were that the ‘burning injustices’ leader of the Downing Street steps is the real one; she’s frustrated she went off-message;

The Spectator

Tory blues

Theresa May’s conference speech — interrupted by coughing fits and with part of the set falling apart behind her — served as an unfortunate metaphor for her premiership and party. She is carrying on and in doing so, she demonstrates her resilience, but also her frailty. The horrified faces of cabinet members watching as her voice dried up on stage seemed to sum up their wider concerns about whether their party is in a fit state to see off Labour, so recently dismissed by them as a joke. Now, they are left wondering if their party is falling apart. The Prime Minister spoke about taking the fight to Jeremy Corbyn,

Steerpike Steerpike

Tory MP: May could be PM for another 25 years

Talk of an imminent coup against Theresa May might be somewhat overblown, but most Tories generally accept the Prime Minister won’t be around to fight another election. Not so James Gray. The Tory MP for North Wiltshire thinks May could stick it out for the next five. In an interview with the BBC, Gray said May could go on as Prime Minister for another 25 years: ‘She’s currently 62, some Prime Ministers have lasted until at least 84 so that gives her 22, 25 years to go…so I very much hope she will continue for many years to come.’ If Gray’s prediction is correct, it would also make May the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Whether Theresa May survives depends on two things

Is Theresa May now doomed after her conference speech went so badly wrong? Tory MPs were yesterday so shocked by all the mishaps that it took them a few hours to realise that underneath all the things that weren’t May’s fault – such as the P45 stunt and the set falling apart – were a lot of things that the Prime Minister really was responsible for. The speech was not the bold, re-energising address that May needed to give. It contained pale policies which seemed pale red, not true blue. There are ministers who see this as an opportunity to move against their leader. There are Boris allies who have

Will Heaven

Theresa May’s staff broke all of Machiavelli’s rules

Theresa May must have woken up this morning wondering, for a split second, if yesterday was all just a very bad dream. The front pages will hammer home the reality of her situation – she was ‘luckless’, says one of the kinder headlines. But I wonder: how much did yesterday’s shambolic performance have to do with bad luck, and how much to do with woeful preparation? May’s ordeal, and especially her excruciating coughing fits, reminded me of a passage in Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli, a sort-of memoir about his time as Tony Blair’s chief of staff. The book is also a reworking of The Prince and other texts by Machiavelli:

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Tories had an election-winning conference – for Jeremy Corbyn

If Labour’s party conference in Brighton suggested the party was in a celebratory mood, that sense of triumphalism has been vindicated by the shambolic gathering of Conservatives in Manchester. The comparison between the two parties has been starker than ever: the buoyant Corbynistas laying out Marxism to unwavering applause, whilst bickering Conservatives can’t even sell their policies to a paying audience. If the Labour party looked in rude health last Wednesday, they look an even more attractive proposition after the Maybot suffered an all too human malfunction during her headline address yesterday. A circular that went out to Labour party members after the Prime Minister’s speech was clearly drafted before

Steerpike Steerpike

Listen: Ed Vaizey says ‘quite a few’ MPs want May to resign

Oh dear. After yesterday’s calamitous leader’s speech, Theresa May’s position looks a little less secure than it did prior to her party’s conference. Although Cabinet ministers are said to have called her to say she ought to stay in post, others take a different view. Ed Vaizey has just spoken to BBC Radio Oxford. Asked about May’s future, the Cameroon said that ‘quite a few want her to resign’. As for himself? EV: One of the things I would say is that I thought the Tory party conference was a great opportunity to reboot the party and therefore reboot the country and give it a clear sense of direction. That