Politics

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

Saturday

10 Jun 2017

Nick Timothy: Why I’ve resigned

Yesterday, I resigned as the Prime Minister’s adviser. Clearly, the general election result was a huge disappointment. What lay behind the result will no doubt be the subject of detailed analysis for many months. My immediate reaction, however, is this. The Conservatives won more than 13.6 million votes, which is an historically high number, and more than Tony Blair won in all three of his election victories. The reason for the disappointing result was not the absence of support for Theresa May and the Conservatives but an unexpected surge in support for Labour. One can speculate about the reasons for this, but the simple truth is that Britain is a

Steerpike

Jeremy Corbyn’s growing ambitions

Jeremy Corbyn may have lost the election, but in many peoples’ eyes he’s still the big winner. After the Labour leader surprised pollsters and pundits alike by securing over 40pc of the vote, Corbyn’s position looks more secure than ever. Over the weekend, Mr S understands Corbyn took a well-deserved break from politics and headed to his allotment to tend his vegetables. While there, an excited Corbyn chatted to fellow gardeners about the election. Buoyed by the result, Steerpike understands Corbyn suggested he could have another go at winning power come September. Let’s see what the Tories make of that…

Stephen Daisley

Labour has surrendered to Corbynism

When I heard the Tories were cutting a deal with a party of bigots and terrorist-sympathisers, I thought, ‘would a national unity government really work?’ It turns out Theresa May is tapping up the DUP rather than the Labour Party. PMQs is accused of ‘yah-boo politics’ as it is; wait till the questions are asked and answered from behind balaclavas. Arlene Foster’s party doesn’t have the extensive paramilitary history of the Progressive Unionist Party, or Sinn Fein/IRA for that matter, but while Mrs Foster has forcefully rejected violence (she and her family were victims of terrorism during the Troubles) the DUP’s past is murky to say the least. Still, Labour

Steerpike

Theresa May finally does her bit for ousted Tory MPs

So farewell, Nick and Fi. As Theresa May’s once formidable co-chiefs of staff walk out of No 10 for good following the disastrous election result, the Prime Minister has appointed Gavin Barwell as their replacement. If Barwell sounds familiar, that’s because he is the former housing minister who lost his seat in Croydon Central on Thursday. The author of ‘how to win a seat in a marginal’, Barwell will have to shelve any plans for a sequel (suggested title: ‘how to lose a marginal seat’), as he moves into No 10. Barwell’s appointment will be seen as an attempt by May to finally show some contrition and reach out to those MPs

James Forsyth

May’s two chiefs of staff quit as she tries to placate the Cabinet

Theresa May’s two chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill have resigned. The pair have good claim to be the most powerful special advisers in British political history, their hold on Mrs May was even greater than that of Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell on Tony Blair. Yesterday, one Tory who knows the trio well wondered whether May would be able to function without them. But May will now have to. If Timothy and Hill had stayed, it would have prompted a leadership challenge. A growing number of Cabinet Ministers have been clear since Thursday night that the departure of her chiefs of staff was required if Mrs May

James Kirkup

In praise of Nick Timothy

First, some caveats. This article isn’t about Fiona Hill. That’s not a comment on her. It just reflects the fact that, for reasons set out here, I can’t claim to offer reasonable journalistic assessment of a friend. This is nothing to do with Nick Timothy’s personal conduct, management style or dealings with colleagues and others. It’s not my job to judge whether someone is nice or nasty. And too much is written about this stuff anyway. If we’d all paid less attention to office gossip and more to the country we live in, we might not have got the election so wrong. This isn’t about the justice or wisdom of

Philip Sime

‘From Cool Britannia to Poor Britannia’: Europe’s press ridicules Theresa May

The people with whom Theresa May will soon be negotiating over Brexit have been looking on in astonishment at her self-immolation. Here’s a selection of the media coverage on the continent. France Against all the odds, France’s new President, Emmanuel Macron, looks set to win an impressive majority in the upcoming parliamentary elections. So from chaos to stability – yet Britain has taken the reverse journey. This juxtaposition is detected by France’s press. Le Monde seeks to predict how the new formation of the House of Commons will impact the upcoming Brexit negotiations. The centre-left newspaper suggests that Theresa May’s government will be held hostage by the ‘ultra-conservative’ and ‘Europhobic’ DUP

Fraser Nelson

It’s a question of when, not if, Theresa May will resign as Prime Minister

Only one Cabinet member – Chris Grayling – had a good word to say about Theresa May and even he waited hours to say it. The silence of the others underlines the scale of trouble that the Prime Minister is in with her own party after blowing its majority in pursuit of a personal mandate. If she had won a landslide (which seemed to be there for the taking), she wanted to make it a very personal landslide, asking people to ‘vote for me’ rather than her party. As I say in my Daily Telegraph column today, the defeat must now be owned by her personally. And the silence of

James Forsyth

The Cabinet will now assert themselves

One upshot of May’s election fail is that the Cabinet will now be far more influential, as I say in The Sun this morning. They are determined to force her to listen to them more and not just rely on her two chiefs of staff. ‘She needs to realise she can’t do this all on her own’, complains one Secretary of State. ‘She needs a bit of help’. The Cabinet are brutally clear about how the Tories losing their majority is May’s fault. ‘Her limitations have been fully exposed in public’, one tells me. But May’s position is safe for now. Why? Because the Tories don’t want another election. They

Will Heaven

How the dementia tax – a ‘nasty party’ policy – lost Theresa May her majority

Pundits and pollsters have spent the last year trying to explain what the Brexit vote meant. Was it right-wing or left-wing? Was it about immigration or sovereignty? Was it a bit racist? They’ll do the same for this election – trying to pinpoint where it all went so humiliatingly wrong for Theresa May. But to me one answer, even so soon after shock result – and before we’ve been able fully to analyse the results – stands out by a mile: the dementia tax. There are five reasons, I’d argue, why it ruined Theresa May’s election campaign and may have been the key factor in destroying her parliamentary majority. 1. It was a ‘nasty

Friday

9 Jun 2017

Steerpike

Theresa May’s former spin chief takes aim at ‘destructive’ Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy

When the Prime Minister called the general election, Katie Perrior stood down as No. 10 communications chief. An odd decision: why walk away from such a prestigious job after only nine months? She has never really explained: until now. Writing in the Times, she reveals that her ‘painful’ time in No. 10 was made all the more painful by Lady Macbeth and Rasputin – aka Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, Mrs May’s joint chiefs of staff. The portrait she paints is extraordinary: a Prime Minister who is more captive than master, someone who has seemingly employed two lunatics and can’t rein them in. The team at No10 could have done great things

Rod Liddle

The Labour campaign in Middlesbrough South was a remarkable thing to see

One more quick observation on Labour. I was hanging around polling stations in my constituency on Thursday, somewhat in the manner of a wonk-nonce. The constituency is Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. The enthusiasm of the voters and of the Labour activists was genuinely startling (and in truth a little uplifting). They were absolutely avid to vote. Labour had a canvasser on every station and loads more handing out flyers. I’d had three leaflets from Labour through my door in the previous three days. None from the Tories. No Conservative placards anywhere – although a nice Labour activist told me she’d seen one on the road to Marske. But it

Brendan O’Neill

Jeremy Corbyn’s unlikely fans show he is no revolutionary

So now we know: Jeremy Corbyn is a counterrevolutionary. The man who fancies himself as the secret Red of British politics, surrounding himself with trustafarian Trotskyists and the kind of public-school radical who gets a hammer-and-sickle tattoo just to irritate his parents, is now being talked up as a potential saviour of the establishment from Brexit. From Guardian scribes to actual EU commissioners, the great and good want Corbyn to save their hides from that raucous revolt of last June. You couldn’t make it up: Jez the tamer of the agitating masses. No sooner had those exit polls revealed that May was struggling and Corbyn was rising than the EU-pining

Steerpike

Tory MP: Theresa May will be gone in six months

There’s not a cabinet minister in sight to fight Theresa May’s corner following a disastrous election result. However, Tory backbenchers are proving more forthcoming. The only issue is they don’t seem to have much nice to say about their leader. After Anna Soubry called on May to consider her position, Heidi Allen has gone one step further and predicted — in an interview with LBC — that May will be gone within six months: ‘I don’t believe that Theresa May will stay as our Prime Minister indefinitely. In my view, it may well just be a period of transition. We do need to get some stability. But I just don’t

Ross Clark

George Osborne must bitterly regret quitting politics

I am no psychologist but I don’t think you have to be one to appreciate that there is some turmoil going on in the mind of the man who wrote the Evening Standard’s four front page headlines today. ‘May Hung Out to Dry’, ‘May’s Right Royal Mess’, ‘May’s Irish Bailout’, ‘Queen of Denial’ – these headlines have been presented by many today as a sign of a man enjoying himself, of revelling in schadenfreude. True, none of these headlines is exactly unfair, but the obsessive search for ever more painful ways of twisting the knife into the Prime Minister is surely indicative of something going on deep in the soul

Stephen Daisley

By loving independence so much, the SNP may have killed it

When Alex Salmond lost the Scottish independence referendum, he sought to console himself and the ranks of the vanquished by declaring ‘the dream shall never die’. It was the salve that soothed the disappointment of a nationalist movement. But today that dream appears to lie in ruins. Two years ago, the SNP swept all before it, claiming 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies at Westminster; on last night, they lost almost 40 per cent of those same seats. The reversal cannot be overstated. Salmond, the SNP’s former leader, lost in Gordon. Angus Robertson, their leader in the Commons, lost in Moray. The party was thrown out in East Dunbartonshire after a

Philip Sime

Britain’s ‘wobbly lady’: Europe’s press reacts to May’s bungled election gamble

Theresa May’s election gamble hasn’t paid off. Yet in spite of the PM blowing her majority, May has vowed to carry on and offer ‘certainty’ to Britain. Overnight, May’s miscalculation has transformed her from an ‘iron lady’ into a ‘wobbly’ political figure in the eyes of the European press. Here’s how the general election has been covered on the continent: Germany: Germany’s largest daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung rounds on Theresa May, branding her a ‘terrible election campaigner’ and contrasts the ‘strong and stable’ image that she sought to present with what was perceived as a very weak campaign. The newspaper explores her behaviour as Home Secretary and suggests that her key tactic of

The Spectator

Theresa May’s Downing Street statement – ‘I will now form a government’

Theresa May has just appeared on the steps of Downing Street to give a statement following her meeting with the Queen. Here is the full text. I have just been to see Her Majesty the Queen, and I will now form a government – a government that can provide certainty and lead Britain forward at this critical time for our country. This Government will guide the country through the crucial Brexit talks that begin in just 10 days and deliver on the will of the British people by taking the United Kingdom out of the European Union. It will work to keep our nation safe and secure by delivering the

James Forsyth

It would have been wiser of Theresa May to show some contrition and humility

Theresa May was determined to suggest that nothing had really changed in her statement outside Downing Street after seeing the Queen. She talked about her plans for the next five years, which is—to put it mildly—ambitious. She emphasised the mandate that came from the Brexit referendum, but made no real reference to last night’s events. She emphasised certainty and indicated it was all business as usual. Tonally, May’s approach was a mistake. It would have been better to level with voters about what had happened, to tell the country that she would work to regain its trust. It is jarring to talk about how the country needs certainty, when the

The Spectator

Election barometer: the debacle in figures

How the seats have changed: And how did the pollsters do? There will have been champagne corks popping at Survation last night – and sorrows being drowned at BMG and ICM: Labour recorded their biggest increase in the share of the vote since 1945: Turnout was up, with a widespread belief that young voters turned out en masse. But actually, turnout was the 5th lowest of any general election since 1945: Highest turnouts 1950 83.9% 1951 82.9% February 1974 78.8% 1959 78.7% 1992 77.7% Lowest turnouts 2001 59.4% 2005 61.4% 2010 65.1% 2015 66.1% 2017 68.7% In spite of failing to secure a majority Theresa May won a higher share of