Politics

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

Wednesday

Andrew Roberts

Where will David Cameron end up in the history of Conservative Prime Ministers?

At a large Tory breakfast meeting that David Cameron spoke to recently, the tables were named after all of the Conservative premiers of the past: the good, the bad and Ted Heath. So there were the Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher tables, for example. (I was delighted to be on the Winston Churchill table; the people on the Neville Chamberlain one looked suitably ill-favoured.) As Cameron — who was sat at the David Cameron table, appropriately enough — looked around the huge room that morning, he could be forgiven for wondering where he will wind up in the pantheon of past premiers. For as Cameron nears his tenth

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sketch: David Cameron’s ‘greatest’ speech ever

This was Cameron’s ‘greatest’ speech ever if you count his uses of the g-word. Great Britain, great schools, great traditions, a great Conservative party, the greatest team a prime minister could have. Greater days. Greater Britain. Stepping stones to greatness. He mentioned the election with a gooey tinge of Gift Card Dave. ‘As dawn rose, a new light, a bluer light fell across these isles’. And he dispelled any lame-duck thoughts. On the contrary, he acted like an anxious boozer loading himself with trebles just before closing time. He’s going to fix everything. Poverty, discrimination, inequality, addiction, crime and the rental crisis. Large chunks of this speech would have been cheered

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: David Cameron’s conference speech

It’s been a good week for the Conservatives, topped off by one of the best speeches   David Cameron has ever given. James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the Prime Minister’s keynote address in this View from 22 podcast special — looking the new policies and themes he has laid out, the direction we can expect to see the Tories heading in and his strong attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. Can Steve Hilton’s influence be seen in the text? And does this mark a new era for Cameron’s leadership? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below:

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tories could delay telling tax credit claimants how much money they’ll lose from cuts

The Tory revolt on tax credits looks likely to dominate this autumn. Many Tories across the party now regard this as conforming to a similar pattern as the 10p tax row under Gordon Brown, and few expect the cuts, which lower the threshold for withdrawing tax credits from £6,420 to £3,850 and speed up the rate of withdrawal as pay rises, to come to fruition in their current form. There are three camps of Conservatives on tax credits. There’s the large group who think the cuts seriously undermine their claim to be the party of working people and are wrong because they take £1,300 off those on low incomes, and will

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron repositions the Tories as the party of ‘true equality’

This speech was authentic Cameron. It was the most modernising speech that he has given since becoming Prime Minister and an attempt to reposition the Tories as the party of ‘true equality’. It was a return to the approach that characterised his leadership before the financial crash of 2008. Traditional Tory thinking has always been that if you work hard you get on, that you can pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. But this speech argued that for some people in society this simply isn’t true, that they find their opportunities blocked at every turn. Cameron cited the example of a black girl who had to change her name to

Steerpike Steerpike

David Cameron’s Labour defector has supported the Tories since 1988

In David Cameron’s conference speech this lunchtime, the Prime Minister spoke about a voter who had reached out to him ahead of the election. He said that it was never too late to vote Tory given that an 82-year-old man by the name of Bernard Harris had written to him and said that despite being a traditional Labour voter he would be voting Conservative. Why? Well, he had realised that the Labour party does not serve the working class. While Cameron had hoped Harris’s letter would serve as proof that today’s Labour voters are abandoning their old party for his, he may need to think again. It has since transpired

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

David Cameron’s conference speech shows the essay crisis Prime Minister has finally planned ahead

Clearly, the best thing a Prime Minister can do is announce that he doesn’t want to be Prime Minister for much longer. David Cameron has just delivered the clearest, most passionate and most authentic speech of his premiership to the Tory party conference, and all of it was founded on him not standing again as party leader in 2020. Early on, he said: ‘We’re only halfway through. For me, that has a very literal meaning. I can say something today that perhaps no Prime Minister has ever really been able to say before. I’m starting the second half of my time in this job. As you know, I am not

Steerpike Steerpike

David Cameron goes off message with sex joke in conference speech

The Prime Minister was feeling in a rather fruity mood when he gave his conference speech today, managing to make not one, but two off-script sex jokes. The first involved his wife Samantha and Richard Murphy, the professor of Corbynomics. Discussing the dangers of a Corbyn-led Labour which believes in ‘renationalisation without compensation, jacking up taxes to 60 per cent and printing money’, Cameron brought up Murphy and his page turner The Joy of Tax: ‘His book is actually called The Joy of Tax. I’ve got it. I took it home to show Samantha. It’s got 64 positions – and none of them work.’ Samantha smiled on nervously as the audience laughed, before

Sebastian Payne

Ruth Davidson: the Tories need to be more than ‘decent technocrats’

Ruth Davidson has secured her place as one of the most interesting politicians in the Conservative party. In her speech to Tory conference this morning, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives had the crowd in the palm of her hand with strong attacks on the SNP and another independence referendum. She argued that the Tories are the only party representing unionists north of the border: ‘every cross in the Scottish Conservative box is a vote backing Britain and defending Scotland’s place in it’. But the most interesting part was her compelling vision for the future of the party. In a similar vein to her comments at the Good Right dinner, Davidson argued that the Tories need to

The Spectator

Full text: David Cameron’s 2015 Conservative conference speech

I am so proud to be standing here in front of you today – back in government…and not just any government – a majority Conservative Government. To the people in this hall, I want to say thank you. You are the greatest team a Prime Minister could ever have. And to the British people: When you put your cross in the Conservative box, you were putting your faith in us. To finish the job we started. To back working people. To deliver security for you and your family. And I’ll tell you now: we will not let you down. But just for a moment, think back to May 7th. I don’t know about you, but it

Charles Moore Charles Moore

David Cameron, take heed. This is the conference speech that you should learn from

Maybe it was because of the contrast with Theresa May’s chilly, disingenuous monotone minutes before, but I really think Boris Johnson’s speech to the Conservative party here in Manchester was brilliant. It is a constant puzzle that senior politicians, who spend such ages worrying about how to communicate, do not learn how to make platform speeches. They make basic errors — failing to read autocues, misjudging the timing of applause. They also do not trouble to think about what makes a speech — its combination of light and shade, the sense of an audience of actual human beings both in and outside the hall. In the current cabinet, Mrs May is

Douglas Murray

In defence of Theresa May’s immigration remarks

Some politicians and pundits are brewing a perfect storm across Europe. Migrants are heading into our continent illegally in record numbers, and at the same time many politicians and pundits are spending their time trying to deride and shut down anybody who might be concerned about this. Last week I mentioned Angela Merkel’s skewed priorities in spending even a nanosecond worrying about what Europeans are writing on Facebook about this mass migration rather than trying to get a grip on the influx itself. The combination of a historic change in our continent and a simultaneous push from the top to police what the rest of society is meant to say

Toby Young Toby Young

My mission: buy lunch for a protestor outside Conservative party conference

The mood at the Conservative party conference this week was a little subdued, and no wonder. As those who watched the television coverage will know, everyone entering the secure zone had to run a gauntlet of potty-mouthed protestors, their faces twisted into masks of hate. It’s not easy to celebrate after you’ve just been showered with spit and called a ‘Tory murderer’. Jeremy Corbyn made a point in his conference speech last week of asking his supporters to treat their opponents with respect and not descend to personal abuse, but I’m not sure how many of them got the message. If the atmosphere in Manchester was anything to go by,

Sebastian Payne

Michael Fallon: Russian air strikes in Syria are ‘extremely unhelpful and dangerous’

Michael Fallon has been touring the broadcast studios this morning to send Russia a warning about its bombing campaign in Syria. On the Today programme, the Defence Secretary said Putin’s actions are complicating an already difficult situation: ‘What it does do is complicate an already difficult situation and make it very much more dangerous because these planes are not being co-ordinated with the rest of the campaign and more importantly than that, the strikes don’t seem to be for the most part strikes against Isil. They are strike against other groups who’ve been fighting Assad and designed to prop up the Assad regime, the dictatorship in Syria, which of course has been the cause

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Philip Hammond: ending freedom of movement would be ‘political suicide’ for Eastern European countries

Philip Hammond this evening hinted he doesn’t think Britain is going to get any fundamental reforms on freedom of movement. The Foreign Secretary, appearing alongside Tory grandee and Peter Lilley at a Demos fringe event, argued that Eastern European countries have an ‘emotional ownership’ to their EU membership in a way Britain does not: ‘Because of the emotional linkage with their own freedom from Soviet slavery and the ability of people in Eastern Europe to travel for the first time in their lives, a deeply emotive thing, no political leader in Eastern Europe is going to support the end of freedom of movement. It would be domestic political suicide.’ Despite

Sebastian Payne

Nicky Morgan attacks Labour for lack of women in top jobs

Nicky Morgan delivered a speech to Tory conference that was lacking in new policies or announcements, but strong on equality. Wearing her other hat as Minister for Women and Equalities, Morgan went on the attack and lambasted Labour for its policies — in particular the lack of women in senior posts: ‘Equality for us isn’t about quotas, pink vans or separate train carriages. Instead, it’s about that core Conservative philosophy which says the fact that you happen to be a woman, to be gay, to be from an ethnic minority, should never be a barrier to you achieving your all. ‘And unlike the Labour Party we practise what we preach. Because women are

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Tory MPs grumpy about ‘arm candy’ photo rota

One of the fun jobs that new Tory MPs have to perform at conference is joining the special rota to follow David Cameron around. This isn’t a new rota, but it seems to have especially annoyed a number of the rather impressive 2015 intake, particularly some of the female MPs who think they are being used as arm candy. The rota involves walking with the Prime Minister between buildings so that when he is photographed, he has an entourage of supportive MPs with him, and so that they get their chance to have a picture of them walking with the PM in the national media. The photo above, of new

Sebastian Payne

George Osborne: Corbyn is not the cause of Labour’s problems

George Osborne was interviewed by Kath Viner, editor of The Guardian, this afternoon and offered some interesting thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn. The Tories have generally kept schtum about the rise of the new Labour leader, focusing instead on the message that he is a danger to Britain’s national/economic security. Echoing the thoughts of Labour’s Jon Cruddas, the Chancellor said Corbynmania is not about the man himself: ‘I don’t think it’s actually about personalities in this sense which is, you know, Jeremy Corbyn is not the cause of the Labour party’s problems, he is a symptom. He was elected by the great majority of Labour members — not just the new people who joined,

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Has Boris just set an impossible bar for Cameron’s EU renegotiation?

Boris Johnson’s speech today was the best that I have ever heard him give. It was a potent cocktail of political vision, humour and optimism. But the most significant line it was about Europe. He declared that: ‘It should be up to this parliament and this country – not to Jean-Claude Juncker – to decide if too many people are coming here’ It is impossible to read this as anything other than a demand that freedom of movement rules are fundamentally altered as part of the UK’s renegotiation with the EU. Now, Number 10 are clear that they aren’t seeking to challenge the principle of freedom of movement, they know

Sebastian Payne

Podcast special: Boris Johnson’s conference speech

Boris Johnson’s speech to the Conservative conference in Manchester has gone down a storm. Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the return of Boris in this View from 22 podcast special — looking at how the Mayor of London managed to articulate conservative themes through humour, his jibes at George Osborne and David Cameron and what his successful address means for his chances of becoming Tory leader. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer every week, or you can use the player below: