Politics

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

Thursday

27 Apr 2017

Aspirations of a Mugwump, by Evelyn Waugh

‘Mugwumps‘ are in the news today, after Boris Johnson used the term to describe Jeremy Corbyn. In the 2 October 1959 issue of The Spectator, Evelyn Waugh also used the term, when he wrote a piece entitled ‘Aspirations of a Mugwump’: I hope to see the Conservative Party return with a substantial majority. I have bitter memories of the Attlee-Cripps regime when the kingdom seemed to be under enemy occupation. I recognise that individually some of the Liberal candidates are more worthy than many of the Conservatives, but any advantage to them can only produce deplorable instability. I have met, seen or heard very few leading politicians; of those I know the Conservatives

Isabel Hardman

The baffling world of Labour’s election strategy

Why is it so striking that Tony Blair has said that Theresa May will be Prime Minister ‘if the polls are right’? On the surface, this appears to be a statement of the bleeding obvious, given the Tory party national poll lead isn’t exactly within the margin of error. Of course, around election time, politicians do develop the amazing ability to argue that the earth can in fact be flat, and in a normal election Blair might be focusing on talking about how Jeremy Corbyn can in fact become Prime Minister. His refusal to do that may have mildly surprised people. Of course, what the former Prime Minister is really up

Steerpike

Boris Johnson’s sister joins the Lib Dems

Well, this is a bit awkward. The Johnson family has a long history of Conservatism. This holds true today, with Boris Johnson is the Foreign Secretary and his brother Jo is a Conservative MP. Up until now, their sister Rachel was broadly supportive of the party — voting ‘nothing but Tory’ in general elections as ‘a matter of family duty’. So, it’s slightly embarrassing for Boris that his sister has now jumped ship. Despite her brother’s big role in shaping the country’s future, the Mail on Sunday columnist has joined the Liberal Democrats. As a Remain campaigner during the referendum, Johnson is thought to have made the decision over concerns about Brexit.

Tom Goodenough

Ukip leader Paul Nuttall confirms he will stand for Parliament

Paul Nuttall has just confirmed he will be standing in the upcoming election. The Ukip leader promised to be ‘leading the party into battle’ on June 8th. Where he stands, we’ll have to wait and see. Nuttall said that he would announce in the next 48 hours which seat he planned to target. In a statement, Nuttall said: ‘As the leader of the party I will be, obviously, leading the party into battle as I have done many times in the past’ Nuttall might now be saying his decision was obvious, but it hasn’t always looked that way. Earlier this week, when journalists tried to pin him down on the question

Isabel Hardman

Corbyn’s ex-spinner exposes an irreconcilably divided Labour

One of the favourite tenets of Jeremy Corbyn supporters is that their movement is persecuted by the ‘mainstream media’ and that if only there were a fair, left-wing-friendly press in this country, then the public would be flocking to JC’s hugely popular policies. This debate has trudged its way through many acres of print already, but the insight into how Corbyn’s own team dealt with the media from former Labour spinner Matt Zarb-Cousin in an interview this week is very interesting indeed. Zarb-Cousin was, like his former colleague Kevin Slocombe, respected by many lobby journalists as someone who dealt with their queries as efficiently as possible. This is never a

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Europe’s new emperor

On this week’s episode of The Spectator Podcast, we discuss whether France is voting for the lesser of two evils in Emmanuel Macron, consider whether Tim Farron made a mistake by bringing God into politics, and look at how the spread of Mayism across Britain could alter the Conservative party. First, following Emmanuel Macron’s stunning victory in the first round of the French elections – taking a seemingly unassailable popularity into the run-off with Marine Le Pen – Jonathan Fenby considers, in this week’s magazine cover story, whether Macron is in fact headed for disaster. He joins the podcast along with Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, to discuss whether the 39-year-old sensation is all he seems.

Steerpike

Watch: Jeremy Corbyn forgets to face the camera

Boris Johnson has stolen the show this morning by calling Jeremy Corbyn a ‘mugwump’. But the Labour leader is making a pretty miserable attempt at trying to recapture the limelight. During a campaign speech in Essex, Corbyn had a golden moment to set out Labour’s pitch to voters. The Sky News camera was rolling, with hundreds of thousands of viewers watching at home to hear what Corbyn had to say. The only problem? Corbyn started his speech with his back to the camera. Thankfully, an aide stepped in to put Jezza right before people got bored of the sight of his back. His blunder might have slightly undermined his introduction to the

Helen Nugent

Scrapping the pension triple lock would be bad news for pensioners – and the Tories

The wrangling over key policy areas in the upcoming general election has begun in earnest. If you’re already tired of the political argy-bargy, don’t worry, there’s only, ahem, six weeks to go. Stay with me though, because there’s one topic in the personal finance arena that really, really matters. The triple lock state pension guarantee. With the Prime Minister understood to be considering replacing the triple lock with a less generous double lock, and the Labour Party on record saying it will keep the triple lock until 2025, this issue goes to the heart of the parties’ attitude to pensioners. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats said in their 2015 manifesto that it should

David Butterfield

Labour is full of mugwumps – but Corbyn is not one of them

Trust Boris to dominate the headlines by reopening that most famous of books, Johnson’s Dictionary. Writing in the Sun, our effortlessly provocative Foreign Secretary swiped at Jeremy Corbyn with this colourful barb: ‘He may be a mutton-headed old mugwump, but he is probably harmless.’ Couched rather incongruously as the reflections of ‘the people’, this comment has left many laughing, but more still scratching their heads. In fact, there’s more to being a ‘mugwump’ than a throw-away jibe. The word comes from the original New Englanders, the Algonquians, for whom mugquomp meant ‘great chief’. It was a term of respect laden with connotations of nobility. But that presumably wasn’t what Boris

Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron is wrong to think his election victory is a foregone conclusion

France is in a flap and Emmanuel Macron is to blame. On Sunday evening the En Marche! leader looked for all the world like a man who believed he’d already been crowned king. Bounding onto stage with a wink, a wave and a smile to his adoring supporters, after his first round victory, he then partied the night away at a Parisian bistro surrounded by the great and the good of France’s liberal elite. Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, after a brief speech to her supporters in the northern town of Henin-Beaumont, left to start plotting her second round campaign. On Monday evening she appeared on the main news programme to announce

Tom Goodenough

There’s more to Boris’s ‘mugwump’ insult than meets the eye

Boris Johnson has entered the election campaign with a bang. The Foreign Secretary was being squirrelled away, some were saying, after a number of ministers apparently suggested to Theresa May that she should sideline Boris to avoid alienating voters. It’s clear that’s not going to be happening. Today, Boris is front and centre calling the leader of the opposition a ‘mugwump’. In the Sun, Boris said that some may think Corbyn is harmless – a ‘mutton-headed old mugwump’ – but they’d be wrong to hold that view. The po-faced will say this is proof that Johnson is up to his old tricks and we shouldn’t fall for it; shadow foreign secretary

Steerpike

Corbynites left out in the cold in Hull

Oh dear. With Jeremy Corbyn’s future as Labour leader looking, at best, a challenge after the snap election, it ought to come as little surprise that some of his comrades are hoping to trade the struggle for a safe seat come June 8. Alas the Corbynistas have been thwarted once again. With a Labour safe seat now hard to find, both John Prescott’s son David — who helps Corbyn with speech writing — and Sam Tarry — Corbyn’s former leadership campaign director of ‘Traingate’ fame — had their sights set up on Alan Johnson’s old seat, Hull West and Hessle. Alas they have been left disappointed. Last night, Emma Hardy, a local former teacher, won the

Nick Cohen

J. K. Rowling and the curse of the left

How people who want a fairer society should vote at this election is causing agonies across the liberal-left. It is easy to mock the torn activists. Why do they bother? One vote is worth next to nothing under a PR system. Under first past the post there are hundreds of safe seats where there’s no point in voting, let alone worrying about how you vote. The number of safe Tory seats is likely to grow after this election. Indeed, if you believe the opinion polls, it is likely to rocket. The futility of casting a token anti-Tory vote is more apparent than ever. For all that, those who laugh at

Steerpike

Food bank charity complains over Momentum campaign methods

Oh dear. When Jeremy Corbyn announced this week that a Labour government would focus on the issue of food banks, Mr S is pretty sure he didn’t imagine what would follow. On Tuesday, Mr S revealed the curious tactics of Momentum activists in Hove. Kate Knight — the Hove Momentum and Hove CLP executive officer — took to Facebook to boast of her latest campaign tactic: sticking ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ stickers on all food bank donations. As Steerpike pointed out, the questionable method could also go against election ‘treating’ rules — which dictate that it is a ‘corrupt practice’ for any person to provide food, drink or entertainment to win votes. Now, following Mr

Rod Liddle

Tim’s a Christian, so he’s not allowed an opinion

Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t remember the BBC running a documentary 100 days into Barack Obama’s first presidency and kicking him from pillar to post. Interviewing almost exclusively people who hated him, pouring scorn on his every utterance. They did it this week to Donald Trump, though, and even wheeled out Jeremy Paxman to present this travesty of a documentary. Because Jeremy was interviewing exclusively people with whom he wholeheartedly agreed, he didn’t get the chance to put on that famous supercilious expression we all used to love, back when he was good. Shame. With Obama, as I remember, it was a very different approach. The studio

Jonathan Fenby

What’s the matter with Macron?

Coming out of a celebratory dinner at a Montparnasse brasserie after topping the poll in the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday, Emmanuel Macron had a brief brush with the press. A reporter asked: ‘Is this your Fouquet moment? This referred to a notoriously showy celebration by Nicolas Sarkozy at Fouquet’s restaurant after his own victory in 2007. The 39-year-old centrist was visibly cross. He simply wanted to thank his secretaries, security officers, politicians and writers, he said. Then came the dig. ‘If you don’t understand that,’ he said, ‘you understand nothing about life. I have no lessons to learn from the petit milieu Parisien.’ This dismissive

James Forsyth

Why Tories are talking up Labour

Considering that their party is expected to win by a landslide, the Tory spin doctors sound unusually panicked. They are keen to point out that the polls aren’t always right, and the pollsters are still trying to correct what they got wrong at the last general election. They insist that national voting tells you little about what will happen in the key marginal seats. These are normally the pleas of a party that is failing, and trying to persuade voters that it is still in the race. But Labour isn’t doing a good job of spinning its own prospects — so the Tories are doing it for them. This is

Martin Vander Weyer

Capping prices to win votes is no substitute for a serious energy strategy

Is capping domestic energy prices an equitable way to help the ‘just about managing’, or an electoral gimmick with a whiff of anti-free-market ideology? When it was Ed Miliband’s idea, it was certainly the latter. Now it’s likely to be included in Theresa May’s manifesto, offering a potential £100 saving for millions of homes on ‘standard variable tariffs’, it is defended by the ever-plausible Sir Michael Fallon as a matter of ‘intervening to make markets work better’. And that, after all, is what the Prime Minister said she would do, wherever necessary, in the interests of fairness. In a regulated market, within which the consumer’s ability to choose the most

Theo Hobson

Do do God

This election was won two days before it was announced, on Easter Sunday. Theresa May put out an Easter message in which she suggested that British values had a Christian basis. It was her version of David Cameron’s message two years before, in which he said that Britain is a Christian country. She was rather more convincing. I don’t know whether Cameron is sincerely religious, but he didn’t seem it. He didn’t even seem to try very hard to seem it, as if fearing that his metropolitan support might weaken, and perhaps that George Osborne would make a snarky jibe about it at cabinet. But it still did him good

Wednesday

26 Apr 2017

Steerpike

Liberal Democrats’ unlikely alliance: vote Tory, Ukip (or Lib Dem) to defeat Labour

Earlier this month, Tim Farron appeared to cast doubt on the idea of forming a ‘progressive alliance’ where the Greens, Labour and the Lib Dems work together to stop the Tories. The Liberal Democrat leader said that (while he held the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas in high regard) ‘the only plausible route of any kind towards the Conservatives not winning a majority is a Liberal Democrat group’. But was Farron’s issue simply that the suggested alliance was with the wrong parties? Mr S only asks after being passed Lib Dem campaign literature from the Tees Valley mayoral race. The Lib Dem candidate Chris Foote Wood has campaign material which — rather